Poetry Games

Last week we made, as an on-the-spot collaboration, versions of renga. Haiku derived from this form of collaborative poetry, which, in a drastically reductive definition, goes likes this: Person A makes a three-line, haiku-like poem. Person B "completes" the poem with a two-line envoy. Person C uses that envoy as the first two lines of a new poem, which she completes by writing another haiku-like poem. And so on. Part of the fun is how the poems keep transforming, and could, endlessly, as long as the energy of the participants holds up. The class was broken into three groups, and here is the result of one group's play:

I ripped the fringe
off of the red silk tablecloth
the plates fell

and the ringmaster's elephant
gave a big trumpet

~

And the ringmaster's elephant
gave a big trumpet

like a saxophone man,
the triangular brass post
shines for pennies

~

Like a saxophone man,
the triangular brass post
shines for pennies

round and round,
falling into the looking pool

~

Round and round,
falling into the looking pool

I grab the neck
of a black swan
who shrinks and sinks

~

I grab the neck
of a black swan
who shrinks and sinks

into dusky night
to sleep, to rest

~

Into dusky night
to sleep, to rest

her hair smelled of vodka and weed
her dress ripped in three places
her mind clouded



[The implied violence in this example was not unusal. Each of the group's poems had something--a cougar grabbing a zoo spectator; a kid getting hit--like this, indicating, perhaps unconsciously, the stress of the end of the semester. Better in a poem than on the streets.]