Collaborative poetry

Collaborative or collective poetry is an alternative and creative technique for writing poetry by more than one person. The principal aim of collaborative poetry is to create poems with multiple collaborations from various authors. In a common example of collaborative poetry, there may be numerous authors working in conjunction with one another to try to form a unified voice that can still maintain their individual voices.

Examples of collaborative poetry abound in Japanese poetry. Though the precise accounts and records of such events are either lost or missing, there are significant proofs that speak of poetry as a Japanese cultural phenomenon. Japanese poetry, particularly in the development of waka, was greatly influenced by the popular rituals of aristocrats, whose devotion to poetry helped increase the value and worth of poetry.

One of the most famous examples of collaborative poetry-writing in modern times was the poem collection Ralentir Travaux by Surrealist French poets André Breton, Paul Éluard and René Char. The poems were written collaboratively over the course of five days in 1930. The Surrealists had invented the art of Collage and collective creative 'games' such as the Exquisite corpse, where a collection of words or images are collectively assembled.

In the 1940s, American poet Charles Henri Ford invented what he called the "chain poem", where each poet writers a line and then forwards the poem to another person across the world by post. In his Process Note, Ford explained the method of the 'chain poem': "Thus, after the first line is written, the problem of each poet, in turn, is to provide a line which may both 'contradict' and carry forward the preceding line. The chain poet may attempt to include his unique style and make it intelligible to the poem as well; in which case the chain poem will have a logical and spontaneous growth." In the 1970s, some feminist poets adopted the concept to discover their "collective feminine voice".

More recent experiments of collaborative poetry include the collaborative works of American poets Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton, who have been writing poetry together for 15 years and have published three collaborative books: Exquisite Politics (1997), Oyl (2000) and Little Novels (2002). Duhamel described this collaboration saying, "Something magical happens when we write - we find this third voice, someone who is neither Maureen nor I, and our ego sort of fades into the background. The poem matters, not either one of us."

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