Poetry Book Society

Many of us will remember doing poetry with a bad teacher at school. It felt like drawing a chalk line around the corpse of a text. I think those of us who continue to read poetry into adulthood do so in a way which is almost collaborative. The words, rhythms and gaps in a poem snag personal associations, memories, desires and aspirations. These interactive waves sing at a range of more or less orchestrated levels. The reading will be different each time. The experience is dynamic. The poem cannot be objectively paraphrased with any profit. That would be another chalk line on the ground where the poem no longer rests.

The more rich and open a poem is, the more fruitful such collaborative reading experiences can be. The great strength of writing in the Modernist and post-Modernist traditions is the scope it offers the reader to contribute to flows of meanings and experiences. Some poetry may become so fragmented, however, that its components fly free from the gravity of the poem altogether and may be experienced as disconnected particles randomly floating in a kind of entropy. The thresholds of tolerance for apparent disconnectedness vary from reader to reader.

So some writers and readers acknowledge that reading is collaborative. But some writers choose to write collaboratively in more literal ways. It is tempting to draw parallels with musicians riffing off each other, egging each other on, challenging what has gone before and nudging it in unexpected directions. You end up writing in ways you couldn?t have imagined alone. And this can affect your subsequent writing too.

The key insight of the great biologist Lynn Margulis, who died recently, was that complex cells evolved through the coming together of previously separate structures. Thus prokaryotes live on as organelles within eukaryotes, for example as mitochondria and chloroplasts. This symbiosis moves life onto a higher level and facilitates the evolution of more complex life-forms, such as us. Maybe collaborative writing can give a similar boost to the art of poetry!

I suppose most collaborations in the world of poetry involve two writers. Yet some involve poets working alongside painters, photographers, film-makers or musicians. Carol Watts is used to placing her words in the context of visual artworks. Recently she has been working with musicians too, and even dancers. I wonder how your body would respond to the suggestions and invitations implicit in a text such as the following. It comes from her ongoing project ?When blue light falls?.

where they sleep on the wing
accumulating

small stones at highest
altitude meeting daily ascension

feathered belt of meteors
gizzards slow beat

in search of years suspended
undisturbed by dreams

suppose you find this distribution
what cups it and you

spinning towards night
continuously

or by day


Peter Hughes' poetry publications include Paul Klee's Diary, Blueroads, Nistanimera, The Summer of Agios Dimitrios and The Pistol Tree Poems. Nathan Thompson writes of it as ‘flickering, intense, innovative and utterly mesmerising'.

Peter also runs Oystercatcher Press, based on the Norfolk coast, which has published more than 40 poetry pamphlets over the last three years.