Blog Post Five

I think that poetry workshop is a beneficial form of collaborative writing. I share poems with other poets in the workshop and they comment on my work, letting me know how the poems succeed or don't succeed. They provide suggestions as to how I can improve my poems. I use my classmates' suggestions to revise my poems. So, taking their feedback into account, I suppose poetry workshop is, indeed, a form of collaborative writing. Although I retain credit for my poems. In the blog post, "Examples of Collaborative Digital Humanties Projects," William Brockman asserts that "at times, the dependence of humanities scholars upon their colleagues can approach joint authorship of a publication." I wonder if at any point in poetry workshop I will feel as if I'm participating in such joint authorship. There are some poetic forms that, by definition, are collaborative. The renga is an example of a collaborative form. Soraya points out that peer input is a valuable asset to the art creation process. Another way that I "collaborate" with other writers is by reading books of poetry. For example, when I was reading Tomas Tranströmer's poem, "The Bookcase," I got an idea for a poem. "The Bookcase" begins: "It was brought from the dead woman's apartment. It stood empty a few days, empty until I filled it with books" and I had the idea to write about my receiving a dryer from my neighbor after she died. When I used the dryer I wondered if some part of her clung to it. I wondered if some part of her came off on my laundry. I think that my "collaboration" with Transtromer helped me to open a memory. I often find that I will read poetry and be inspired to write a poem. Today, for example, I read a poem by James Tate, "Recipe for Sleep," in which he writes: "knit the mosquitoes together / beneath your pajamas / let a stranger suck on your foot / reach inside yourself / and pull out a candle / clutch the giant shrimp tighter". When reading "Recipe for Sleep," I thought about how one of my cats has stopped sleeping on top of the bed with me and has started sleeping under the bed. So I wrote about that, although instead of a cat, I wrote that a human partner had stopped sleeping with the speaker and had started sleeping under the bed. And I describe the shape the partner takes under the bed as a "shrimp shape." So I believe that whether with people in a room or with words on a page, collaboration happens in many different ways.