The Collaborative Poem

Perhaps the most recent and well-known collaborative poetry effort is Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison's book, Braided Creek: A conversation in poetry. The collection of poems, amounting to more than 300, were written back-and-forth between the two poets as an ongoing poetic conversation. I've always liked the exchange of ideas as poets share work, but I've rarely attempted to write poetry with another poet. Lately, my friend Kate and I have been writing a "braided" poem together. One of us writes a stanza, then sends it to the other for the next stanza.

The collaborative exercise quickly reveals the ways we make poems turn. As we exchange the poem, there is time in the drafting process for each of us when the poem is suspended, and we don't know where it will go: when it comes back to our desk, the new stanza sends the poem in unexpected directions. We must then go with the turn, and deepen the idea, or spin the direction again. For poets with the tendency to tightly control the poem from the first line on, like I do, this exercise forces me to practice a more automatic kind of creativity that has to respond instead of plan. It makes the question, "What now?" more fluid by eliminating an agenda. It's not that poetic control is dictatorial, but sometimes the poem can stutter-start with too much expectation of what it must articulate.

As Kate and I go back and forth, adding to the poem one passage at a time, I have no ability to foresee where it will ultimately go, so the discrete images, ideas and curves that shape the poem manifest very clearly as distinct, singular moments. Experiencing the creative drafting process as half of a collaborative team allows me to re-learn about the drivers of momentum in a poem, and they way they can happen at the level of the individual word, the line, and the stanza; ultimately the structure of a successful poem is held together with binding energy like that of a nuclear particle: the stability depends on the momentum and strong attraction between the various spinning elements. By working on the poem together, we can maintain a high level of curiosity: what is next, what is next? The momentum of this curiosity, interestingly, is easy to carry over into the poems I am simultaneously working on by myself.