The blogs I have linked to in this post contain adult material. The poems are in no way offensive but if you choose to explore the linked blogs further please exercise your discretion because they contain material some may find offensive.
My post yesterday sparked some great discussions. I focus here particularly on the discussion I had with Monocle who has been writing duets for a while.
Monocle drew my attention to a duet he wrote with Scarlett Greyson. Both are writers of erotica and will be familiar to many in Twitter as Monocle and Aislingweaver. The poem is called Castle Walls ~ A Senryu Story. Interestingly Scarlett says that she thought of Twitter as a social media to keep up with friends and “kill time”. She posted an exploratory senryu and unwittingly started a collaborative narrative poem using senryu as verses.
He also wrote a poem with @Your__Dreamer called Fallen Angel. Both authors posted the poem on their blobs. Dreamer’s is here. What I found fascinating is the different kind of layout each poet chose to lift the poem out of the twitter environment. What I found fascinating was the way Monocle distinguished the different points of view through his layout. I felt it really added another whole layer to the meanings a reader can take from the words.
In a duet, two voices each take a part. In a Fallen Angel, however, something different was happening. If you look at Dreamer’s version you can see a pattern of a dialogue, however Monocles reveals something quite different. The poem is polyphonic.
This got me thinking ~ I wonder how many forms are being brought in to dances with words? And how many points of view can entwine in a single poem?
January 9th, 2011 at 2:41 pm
I think there are as many points of view entwined in a poem as there are eyes that read it or ears that hear it or fingertips that braille or sign it.
January 9th, 2011 at 2:51 pm
Oh I agree that there many interpretations
But I wonder how many points of view or voices can be written into a poem before it begins to fall apart 
January 9th, 2011 at 4:37 pm
I think it depends on the poem. When Dreamer and I were going back and forth for these stories – certainly the first one, I had no idea what it was or where it was going until at least half way through. At first it was an exchange of imagery on a theme, but somewhere in there I realized we had character and plot – and were speaking with characters’ voices. She may have figured it out before I did – I can be pretty slow. But after the first, the other senryu stories were a bit more premeditated – usually one grabbed the seed from the other and ran with it. I think most of the time the seed poem was not intentionally set up to be the start of a story; they just got pounced upon.
As far as voices is concerned, If your poem is also a story, I think you’re not limited to the two (or however) many voices of the collaborators. The issue of voices – or characters, really – is identical to keeping voices distinct in any collaborative fiction. For Fallen Angel, I heard 5 distinct voices through the story as we developed it, and organized the stanzas accordingly.
I look back at these various collaborations and remember how enjoyable they were. I highly recommend the exercise for both poets and writers.
January 9th, 2011 at 3:01 pm
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