A publication surprise

On the last day of 2018, a prompt came through in my writing community at the Poetry Barn, and I grabbed the chance to play the game of "exquisite corpse" with Judith Roney. We met as co-students during my first course at the Poetry Barn in 2015 (The Lyric Essay, with Molly Sutton-Kiefer). Later, Judith taught a course in contemporary love poems (February 2017), and I was her student. We even met briefly in person at the 2018 AWP* conference in Tampa. Such are online writing friendships!

I'd observed exquisite corpse games from the sidelines (and Judith is a prolific participant), but I'd never followed the bait before. Something about:

Last Day of 2018 

Unsettled and feeling strangely weepy, I may tattoo Per Aspera ad Astra to the inner wrist for “through hardship to the stars,”

called out to me, and I gave this reply:

a gift of tender wrist to inky needle. My starry tears

Click over to the published poem to see where we went from there (ours is the third of three poems Judith published with Burning House Press, selected by February 2019 guest editor Adrianna Robertson). The collaboration continues for a total of 11 turns, giving the instigator the final word.

I enjoyed the sense of finality when submitting my contributions to the poem. In the game, there's no chance to edit once you press send. Your turn is finished, and your partner has the next move. I felt myself planning differently, weighing options more fully, seeking less obvious moves to make. Doubling back to make references to words Judith used added texture to the poem, and I could feel her doing the same with my words. We both enjoyed leaving things hanging to see what the other would do next. After several turns, Judith suggested a slight reformatting of the opening, which set us on a trajectory of three-line stanzas. As we progressed, we maintained the tercet stanza. Sometimes we wrote a full stanza; sometimes we left the stanza open for the other to carry forward. (Tip for others playing the game: we maintained a ghost copy in the comments section to determine our desired formatting. For anyone who's not a member of the Poetry Barn community but wants to give this a try, all you have to do is take a poetry class, and you're in the community going forward.)

Fascinating process. I'm grateful to Judith for the experience and also for the publication. I hadn't thought of the work as more than an exercise (we finished about a week ago), and she took the chance of sending it in with some of her other poems. The acceptance of her collection was nearly instantaneous. In fact, she was only able to tell me about t it after it went live. Judith is right; Adrianna Robertson is right: it's a good poem.

Note to self: send more poems to editors.


*Associated Writers and Writing Programs (annual conference of 10,000+ writers, academics, publishing professionals)