Writing Collaborative Poetry

In this post Howard Stein explains the creative process through which he and Seth Allcorn developed the collaborative poetry in their forthcoming book – Whiteboardings: Creating Collaborative Poetry in a Third Space.

He begins by describing “proto-poems”, which are largely unconsciously-driven, mental associations evoked by memories of events that have emotional significance. They consist of narrative sentences, phrases, fragments of ideas, line breaks, stanza breaks, that at first sight appear to take the form of a poem. Proto-poems are not first drafts. They exist somewhere in the aesthetic space between fantasy, imagination, free association, narrative, and poem.

The collaborative poems in Whiteboardings: Creating Collaborative Poetry in a Third Space, began with proto-poems generated by Seth Allcorn – emerging from his “lived experience” - and transformed into poems by Howard Stein.

According to Stein, "Some of Seth’s proto-poems immediately resonated with me, my life experiences, my emotions, even my bodily sensations. I could practically walk into the scene the proto-poem conjured."

This post will introduce you to the process of collaborative poetry with three examples from the forthcoming book. You will be able to hear Howard Stein read these poems as you read along with the included text.

Allcorn describes these poems as coming from his "lived experience, “sticky” memories that he has "revisited throughout his life". According to Allcorn, "The poems hold meaning for me, some I am aware of and undoubtedly some that I am not although the poems suggest that there is yet another path, a third way to awareness."

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Whiteboardings

Whiteboardings is a unique collection of poetry co-authored by Howard F. Stein and Seth Allcorn.

As described by the authors, "We co-create poems on an imaginary whiteboard between us as we visit weekly on Skype. We have coined the term 'whiteboarding' as a verb that distills our method, how we work. Its prime values are tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty, emergence rather than directional planning. We imagine the surface of a whiteboard in the transitional, open space between us (a notion derived from Donald Winnicott) and write on it our shared “free associations.” Spatially, this process can be visualized to be located between us rather than entirely within each of us. It feels as if the emerging poem has a life of its own, what Thomas Ogden calls a “third,” ours, neither yours nor mine. From the outside, our way of working appears formless and directionless, disorganized and messy! A poem eventually emerges from not needing to know at the outset where we are going – or even that we are going somewhere. Only along the journey through the unknown do we find the path. Yet the resulting poem feels like an amalgam, unitary, seamless, whole, perhaps even inevitable. The poems we have assembled here are the result of this unique experiment in writing poetry".

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