Is there a "writer's room" for poetry?
Is poetry always a solo endeavor?
TV scriptwriting is classically done in a Writer's Room, where the show-runner outlines the main plot/character beats for a season, they and senior writers break out those elements into individual shows, then one or two writers create the draft, then collaboratively more jokes are added or the pacing is adjusted, etc.
Movie scriptwriting (from what I understand) is a little more solitary, but often it's layers of re-writes upon rewrites, with different writers/teams brought in every few drafts (or with new producers) to tear it down and start over.)
Book and short stories are often done alone, but there's also a fair tradition of collaboration: see Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman for a popular example.
What about poetry? Is there a way that it can be done, and done well, collaboratively? "I've got imagery, you've got vocabulary?"
Is it the same as technical-writing's editing:
(My editor -- "ok, you've got all the things the user needs to do, but this could really be 5 separate sentences in 2 steps.")
Cowriter to potential Poet: I like your rant on facebook this morning -- let's play around with the words to see if we can distill that anger?
Just a thought. Any examples of poetic collaboration I can look at?
1 answer
It happens rarely but it does happen. I remember a few years ago at a writers' conference (Conversations & Connections, organized by Barrelhouse Press) attending a session where two women who co-wrote a book of poetry discussed what they did. I can't remember their names or the name of the book, unfortunately. I do remember that they were not co-located and so did their sharing via email. If I'm remembering correctly, they each wrote parts and then passed those to the other person for review, and back and forth as needed. They had an overall plan for what they wanted to do with the book before they started. The result was good enough to be published by a reputable press, so it is possible to make "real" poetry this way.
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