One thing I’ve always been unsure of is how someone goes about writing a poem (or any other work) with another person. So when Lucia suggested we try and do a collaboration, I was all for it. Our poems often end up being in conversation with each other (intentionally or unintentionally) and I thought it would be interesting seeing how two different styles can come together; what the challenges and thrilling parts of that might be. We got together earlier in the month and started talking about possible topics/themes we wanted to discuss in the poem and finally settled on perception vs. person, unsurprisingly coupled with a healthy dash of feminist perspective. Then the tricky part came: the actual writing.
We wrote remotely & separately for awhile and then loaded what we had so far into a Google Doc. Watching something get written/deleted/re-written/moved around in real time is crazy. Both of our sections ended up getting merged and entangled with the other (after some confused messaging about perspective back and forth). Instead of having two separate sections, it was clear that both of our words and styles were combining into one collaborative work, which was awesome to see!
Do you think you would try a collab? Who would you want to collab with? What are challenges you foresee? What might be awesome about getting to collaborate with someone?
When I got your poem I remember having a moment of confusion before realizing that this was a collab piece! I was like, “Wait I thought this was Lucia’s? But wait, no Amy’s?” Then, “Ohhhhh I’m dumb!”
I think collabing is such a cool and fun thing to do. It must be so awesome to play around with a poem with another person, and then see the results. I loved that you guys did a Google doc, that was such a great idea!
My friend and I actually want to collab and write a short screenplay together, but I had never up until now considering collabing do to a poem. However, I really want to try now and see the result!