The Poetry Collaborative site will no longer be active, but we are leaving it up as a record of the work we did here together from June 2008 through February 2009. We hope this site — which features prompts, works in progress, drafts and finished pieces — will inspire other poets to try their hand at collaboration.

Thank you to everyone who read the site and participated in the prompts. It’s been an incredible experience.

I’m posting the draft of this piece here so we can work in the comments on a group revision. Anyone want to start? Anyone? You can provide suggestions, discuss what seems to be working and what doesn’t seem to be working, or post a suggested revision.

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i have a cop car i want to crush between my thighs. sirens scream from sheer delight and sway to dance beats that promise no more drunken nights spent stumbling off toward the mall. i have a badge that blinds civilians, reduces the buzz-cut military louts to slivered almond men, sweetly smelling the silk flowers at their table, when plates of robust boysenberries are emptied into my uniform like gunfire. i have a prisoner who sweats and giggles when I speed into thrusting my bullets into the barrel and pressing against the regrets of last December. the smell of a thousand corpses clings to my nose hair and tells me the graveyard is full of silent gunslingers, positioned in yellow fog, staring entranced through iron sights that stand all too still to be called anything other than the holiest of grails rewritten to flow with something other than this river. It carries swollen debris, spits cement shoes onto its muddy banks. Whose feet could carry such a load?

Seems we’ve all gone missing here at The Poetry Collaborative. Maybe, just maybe, I can get us to come back if I throw a writing prompt out there. This one is open to anyone and everyone, so we’ll build the poem in the comments section to allow nonmembers to play along.

How are we going to build it, exactly? Fragment by fragment. That’s right. It’s all new. We’ve done word by word, phrase by phrase and line by line. But fragment by fragment promises to be the bestest collaborative writing method EVER.

We’ll each take turns writing incomplete thoughts, leaving off at an awkward place for someone else to complete the thought. And so on and so on. Doesn’t that sound yummier than fried worms?*

I’ll kick things off, using part of a search term someone entered that led them to my blog:

i have a cop car i want to

*Please don’t eat fried worms. It’s mean.

Here’s something that Jo and I haven’t tried before: the phrase by phrase. We’ve got no theme in mind. We’ll just throw some words out there and see where they land. Okay, I’ll start. — Nathan

* * *

Bent mattress curbside, split bags spill
a single shoe, a spoon, misshapen hat.
The couch leans, a fallen apostrophe.
All that’s me, hauled outside, dropped
near the stop sign. I search my pockets
but there’s no change. Inside she watches
me watch the sidewalk, weighs the empty
wallet in her fist. The alarm shrills, I wake
sweaty and exhausted, her arm a ballast.
What passed for sleep, flickering reels of
grainy shadowed fear played against
our day’s austere backdrop, dark rooms
we lit a little, the sky, its fractured light
sutured into masks we wear blind.
We were kinder to others, dressed words
in gauze like wounds. To you, I spoke,
broken sounds “These hours cut and hurt.
Minutes burn.” We cannot touch. This
adagio of motives mutes mouths and limbs.
Set the alarm again

We wrote a birthday poem for you, baby! Happy, happy birthday. We love you! The idea was to give you the keys to the sex shop.

The Keys to this Sex Shop (working title)

Naked as the day you were born, you receive these keys
with a delighted squeal and rattle the hole, squirming
in through a slit in the picture window.
You start the party by handing out tricks and furry
mementos of your trek here. To this day,
I enjoy nothing more than watching you move through
crowds on hands and knees, cooing words
through plastic phones, gurgling dolphin greetings
beneath your glittering mask of diamonds.
your smile knocks everyone over. To revive them,
you kiss them on their lips and eyelids. You raise
hell. You are its wheels. You spin and spin until
the lights go out and the party roars in darkness.
Around you, thigh-high desire in a black rubber suit.

“Sent” with lots of love from your PoCo pals, who invite you to poem on with us and it, or simply take it home with you and have a tumble. Your call, birthday girl!

Running to You

I’d run more, if I had longer
legs, knees that worked.
Knees that bend over
your torso often, abandoned.

Work at the lovemaking
that keeps us both keen.
I’d run to you and wonder
what kept you so long.

I’d long for days when we didn’t
have to leave this house.
Leave this house, or this room.
This bed, love mussed sheets.

Love must shed old habits,
but only worn ones, frayed.
Frayed edges are what bind
me to you, to your pretty feet.

I used to suck your toes,
massage your soles. I don’t bend.
I’m not as limber as I used to be,
head over heels in love.

This love is rock-solid, more
comfortable than it should be.
Gravel paths are easier on my knees,
my feet, than they are on concrete.

Yet I trip on small rocks.
I find stones in my shoes.
If I didn’t have rocks in my shoes
I’d run more. To you.

* * *

I’m not sure I pulled off writing like slynne, but what I was thinking about was not only her writing ability, but her athletic ability, which — while I know is not strictly poetry — still informs her. That physicality is also something that is dormant, or sluggish in me right now. Slynne seems to be very much in the moment. She writes whatever comes in her head. (She gave me a hint about that one. But her writing has an immediacy that is appealing.)

I wanted to get out of my head and into the physical world. I thought reading through some of her recent poems on her blog, and imitating her general style would stretch me a bit. It did.

This poem is a first, rough draft and feels completely different from how I usually write. But it did what I hoped it would do. Got me physical. Now if slynne could only help me exercise my muscles every day.

Well, we have some good news and some bad news. The bad news first. Our lovely Blythe is on hiatus. We all love her like crazy and hope she’ll be back to copo soon. In the meantime, we’ve taken her off the rolls just as she asked. Boo hoo.

The good news. Times two. We’ve asked both Rethabile and Michelle to stay on as permanent core team members with the collaborative. Yep. We gave them keys to the house and they are keeping them. Moving their stuff in, exchanging the overnight bag for boxes of goodies labeled and lidded, ready to be unpacked. We have new toothbrushes for them and fresh linens. We are so excited they want to keep hanging out with us, collaborating and creating crazy wonderful stuff. Poetry stuff.

Rethabile was our poet-in-residence for November and you can catch up on his bio here. Yay, Rethabile. We are so happy you gave us the long yes. Now you are married to us all.

Michelle’s last day with the poco was supposed to be today. Luckily for us, it is not the last day, for the honeymoon continues. If you missed her introduction, find it here.

Rethabile and Michelle bring incredible heart, energy, fun, excitement and craft to the collaborative. They put it all out there for each and every one of the poco, members and visitors alike.

Thank you for making us merry. Or married.

Albert Goldbarth has a poem titled “Library.” It’s a list poem in which he describes the books in a personal library. “Library” is a long poem, as you might imagine, since there tend to be lots of books in libraries. You can find the poem here.

I was thinking that we could write a gigantic collaborative imitation poem, and the first thing that came to mind was to catalog all the stuff you’d find at a sex shop. Doesn’t that sound like fun! I thought we could write it in this post one line at a time, and once we have lots of lines, we could open it up for others to add lines in the comments. That’s what Goldbarth did with his poem — when he was done, he asked people to contribute their own lines about books. The link to lines people added can be found here.

So who’s in? This prompt might help us get back into the swing of things with writing. Maybe it’s just the lubricant we need to get us going.

Oh, and of course trips to the sex shop for research are a requirement. O! The sacrifices we make for poetry.

* * *

Update: We have established the core writing team for this poem, and it consists of Carolee, Christine, Deb, Jill, Nathan, Rethabile, Slynne and me. Hooray to all who volunteered to be on the core team! Once we have our lines written, we will open the piece up to even more poets. We’ll publish a call for submissions for additional lines. We want the resulting poem to be huge, like a sex shop superstore on steroids. Don’t let anyone tell you size doesn’t matter, at least where poetry is concerned. Booya!

Here’s my idea for a writing prompt: We each pick another collaborative member and write a poem like him or her — in that person’s voice or style, or taking on a subject he or she would take on. You can think of this exercise as being like writing an imitation poem, only with one another’s work instead of using a famous poet or poem.

We all know one another’s writing well enough that I think we could pull this off.

Anyone game?

It all began with an onion skin
rolled in the palms after removal —
microscopic veil, shredded to sheer
vulnerability with a touch.

Rolled in the palms after removal,
the laundry sheds dead skin, dust to dust,
vulnerability with a touch
of misplaced affection. For what holds

the laundry’s shedding skin, dust to dust,
dissolving? My hands flip back and forth
with misplaced affection for what holds
fast inside them, admitting only

dissolving. The hands flip back and forth,
fingers work, creating compartments
fast inside them, admitting only
what moves through by force and persuasion;

fingers work, creating compartments,
viral spaces exploding with guile
what moves through by force and persuasion
can’t be named, only felt — a motion

(that viral space exploding with guile),
a microscope zeros in on what
can’t be named, only felt — a motion
like a benign tremor or stutter;

a microscope zeros in on that
stumbling heated communication.
Like a benign tremor or stutter
from movement into meaning teased out,

calipers stretch molecular strings —
microscopic veil, shredded to sheer
infinity. Between, space equals
space, that began with an onion skin.

* * *

Patricia F. Anderson and I wrote this piece together. You can see it in progress over at this post. — Dana