Collaborative Writing and Poetic Form

This workshop is usually the second phase of a broader project where participants have already written individual poems as a result of a common stimulus - often a journey or environmental experience - which are supported by a notebook containing observational notes. But it can also be deliberately designed as a collaborative strategy from the outset.

For the purposes of this workshop all work would be in free verse and the poems will often focus on metaphor and visual awareness as key components of poetic structure and expression, whilst emphasising the fluidity of speech rhythms as a form of poetic adhesive for language.

Participants are grouped into 'cells' of up to five. They are asked to take five key, self-contained 'images' from their notebook or from their finished poem. Those phrases or lines of poetry will usually be longer than one word, but no longer than twelve. They are then asked to focus on each one, burnishing it into a line of poetry that is self-contained in the sense impression or idea it conveys. All five phrases are then transferred to strips of paper.

Each group then shuffles and pools its strips of paper and, working on a table top, constructs a new poem from the available components. Working from serendipity towards rigorous editing, they have to unify grammar, tense, rhythm and narrative form. Some phrases have to be discarded, others altered, many moved about to an appropriate place in the new text. Lines may be replicated to create refrains and the new poem, because of its genesis, can often be represented as a continuous narrative which the reader can enter and leave at any point. So instead of linear form, circular or three-dimensional form is created.

This process involves collaboration and the inclusion of each group member; it breaks the isolation of the individual writer by placing language problems and solutions in a social context where they can be shared and resolved in a collective way.

The collaborative nature of the exercise also lends the poem the implication of multiple voices and the use of refrains supports this. When a final form has been reached, we can think of the group as a whole as having produced (if we have 25 participants) five collaborative poems, or a much larger poem in five sections or movements. Whatever the decision the finished poem or poems can be the basis for installation in a three-dimensional matrix - a mobile, a sculpture or an environmental 'poetry trail' - which challenges the idea of linear poetic form.

On many occasions I've used the poem as the basis for a performance poem, inviting the participants to regard it as a music score from which a choral performance involving numerous voices can be derived. This has the effect of lifting the poem from the page and making it move the air in a performance space. This, again, can be seen as a form of installation: the audience are centrally seated and the performers surround them with the dynamic soundscape of the poem.

See also the Interview with Graham Mort elsewhere on this site.

key stage 2	· poetry lesson
Graham Mort