Final Collaborations - Banners - You may like these images

hollow men

Danielle Hopper-Sanchez (text based visual artist) & Mindy Song (visual artist)

But these things are...

   Lt. -  Vicky MacMillan (visual artist)  & Allison Castellano (poet)                                         

   Rt. - Grace Mears (visual artist) & Jolene Nolte (poet)

       

messages of radness...

Ariel Okamoto (poet) & Colin Snow (visual artist) & Shirly Tagayuna (poet)

...under while street...

Monica Tzeng (visual artist) & Pablo Guerrero (visual artist)

...but the windows hum

Rachel Zeleke (visual artist) & Erin Arendse (poet)

...enter with intention

Michelle Kohout (poet) & Ashley Voelker (visual artist)

...and words are meat

Melissa Gutierrez (poet) & Julian Francolino (visual artist)

solid seen from California ...

Matt Gundlach (poet) & Greg Lookerse (visual artist)

Collaboration!

We've had some fun this semester collaborating, as the images on the right side of this page attest. Erin sent me a link to this utterly enjoyable web project, which shares a spirit of fun that recalled to me the Flaming Lips' parking lot experiments from the late '90s. The hope projects like these carry in them!

student work

rooms with no windows

couples old and young alike and even the single will glide through
model homes and other reselling dwellings and whisper
about the quality of the view. oh, that the fate of a real estate agent
lies just outside double-panes and other shuttered frames.

what hope for his career without lakeside or skyline?
as the mole thrives underground while the eagle
                                                               perches high on mountain pine,
the nearsighted and blind are the real estate agent's Godsent blessings,
the only hearts in which unlovely lots find admiring spots.

- Melissa Gutierrez

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.]