This past week, I and two friends that are aspiring poets decided to begin a collaborative poetry project inspired by John Gallaher, and G.C. Waldrep’s work together on Your Father on the Train of Ghosts. We decided, rather than writing whole poems back and forth to each other, that we would focus on creating whole pieces together. We would use Google documents to share the project. Each person would have full rights to edit, and the freedom to add, change, or delete whatever they felt necessary. This, we thought, would be most advantageous to us, because each of us have different poetic strengths and weaknesses. With our thoughts combined, we guessed, our writing would be much stronger
Since this is only week one, we haven’t made much progress. However, we are encountering a few, as the cliché goes, bumps in the road. The first poem, we determined, would be about imagination. We failed to specify, however, which aspect of imagination we wanted to capture, or any kind of idea about imagination in particular that we wanted to express. Now, each of the three of us have been adding, cutting, and rearranging pieces of this poem, with no clear idea as to what we’re going with it. Schedule discrepancies have made it difficult to meet together and discuss this issue. Meanwhile, a messy pile of words sit in cyberspace, taunting us with their not, as of yet, being a poem.
I’ve also been working on the staff of Sightlines, Malone University’s online art journal. It works to organize events for student artists, such as open Mic nights and writing workshops. The staff also puts together a publication each semester, made up of student submissions. My involvement thus far has been limited because I’m still trying to figure out how the system works. I’ve been able to help advertise for Open Mic Night, participate in a writing workshop, and help gather submissions for our next issue. Usually, though, my job is mostly to sit in our weekly meetings and feel a little bit useless.
Sightlines is a great project, but it is facing a few obstacles at the moment. As of right now, the staff is comprised of about ten English majors. This can cause several problems -the first being that we have a limited perspective with which to run our organization. Though we have some writers that are also musically or artistically minded, we lack the presence of other artists who can truly speak for other artists of their kind. This causes networking problems, which seems to be limiting our audience, and the kinds of art we receive for possible publication.
Also, too many of the same type of people in a group can often cause a regrettable kind of tension. A professor of mine often says: “You wouldn’t be an English major if you weren’t fragile.” Working together with other writers, I’m realizing even more as we have begun reviewing submissions, can be a bit of a challenge. Often, those with a writer’s sensibilities tend to have very analytical tendencies, which give cause for very distinct idea, and strong opinions. My other project, thus far, has been the same way (just today we had an argument over the effectiveness of Jorie Graham’s use of blanks in her work). Yet, in both situations, there is an incentive to keep pushing forward.
I remember talking to a professor about my frustrations, recently. She went on to tell me, in her own frazzled and personal way that my experience is a lot like being an English professor trying to work with other English professors. I realized that my experience is not entirely unique.
What a perfect lead-in to the collaborative writing we will do next in class. Perhaps you can share youe experiences with us.
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