Interactive Poetry

The Poetry Wiki has been reincarnated through Heraclitean Fire.

Here’s a bit of one of the ongoing projects, a familiar place for all of us to start:

This is The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock run through Google’s translator (English – Portuguese – English – German – French – English). Have at it! Some linebreaks might be a good start…

It leaves, if it suits it then,
and I am night, the meeting of the sky,
a quiescent sleeper at the upper table.

It leaves the final roads, becomes a marble
rolling along the craneboom of the night.

For me, it takes a lot of energy to try to meld into a group mind, to try to think (or intuit or speak) in the same mood/voice of the poem so that I would be actually trying to build it and not just edit it or change it to reflect my own way of writing. I’d rather save what little energy I have for projects of my own. Yes, projects I can put my name on and own – although there are some I’d like to disown. But also projects that reflect my material – the stuff I write out of.

On the other hand, I can see that it might not hurt me to be jostled out of my normal rut. Certainly I’d have to stretch some to participate in projects like Blue Whole:

Plunge bristling dark:
knife into sharp water,
sinking fresh where is expected brine.
Basalt steals each blue glint
and cups the cold.

But it is less than fair of me to choose that one. Others in the collection are more straightforward in the use of language. Take The Crystal Palace, for example. The problem for me here is more cultural than linguistic:

On Sydenham Hill the sphinxes sit
and stare at Kent.
Around them fly the feathery seeds,
willowherb blossoms.
Bees move amongst the buddleia.
A Crystal Palace stood here once;

If you want to have both your collaboration and your control, you might try Pom2

The editors seek work that directly engages and responds to poems published in Pom2. We encourage submissions from those who are willing to have their work altered, lifted, plagiarized or transformed in later issues. Contributors may respond to one poem, or several, from any issue. No previously published work will be considered.

Make the editors happy by including with your submission:
(1) title of “source” poem(s), (2) full contact information: phone, address, fax and e-mail, and (3) optional: a photograph of yourself.

Submit no more than 5 poems.

Electronically to:
pom2@pompompress.com
Subject line: jam
PC or Mac attachments welcome

Or mail to:
Allison Cobb, Pom2
720 5th Ave 2L
Brooklyn, NY 11215
SASE required

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