The Mag/pie

A Dozen Tiny Poems

Recipe by Joe Hall, poems by Joe Hall & Cheryl Quimba

This is a relatively simple way to collaborate.

1. To begin, a list of 6 words is needed. I suggest that each person take a turn adding a word to the list. This way, the creative push and pull is present from the get-go. These words should be, ostensibly, unrelated.

2. Independently, each collaborator then writes six 3-word poems. Each of these poems must use a word from the list. (With articles and prepositions sprinkled in to taste, these poems can also be 4 words).

3. The 12 poems are then compiled in whatever order seems most compelling. Again, this process can be turn-based, with Collaborator A choosing the first poem, Collaborator B choosing the second poem, and so on.

The end result is something that reflects the play between two intelligences on an almost poetically microscopic scale.

Here's one result--

Wednesday -- Joe Hall & Cheryl Quimba

paraffin
coat
evenly

tallow tremble and paraffin

daffodil treble to husk

downpour
lest unhappy
treble

insouciant digital growth

sweet stroke
insouciant
slumber

flock here,
princely
diviner

flock unfolding in catalytic

cavalier gospel:
such outcry

converter hive gospel

wife shopper madcap

swing madcap
until dawn

Collage Recipe: Firsts and Lasts, Ones and Threes

Here's a collage recipe that results in a poem comprised of couplets (their number determined only by how many books you use).

It's a two-part process that will have you 1) opening every book to the same page and extracting two lines to create a couplet, and 2) imposing some kind of order on the lines that are subsequently, arbitrarily, collected. Here's how:

- Put together a pile books. (More than you'll end out using so that you can discard some once you begin. For ex: if you plan on 8, start with 12.)
- Pick a book (*more on this below).
- Turn to page 15 of the book.
- Extract the last line of the first paragraph on the page. This is the couplet's first line.
- Extract the first line of the third paragraph on the page. This is the couplet's second line.
- Repeat for each book in your pile, until you have extracted couplets from every book. Retain the order of the lines, first to last.
- (Optional: if you'd like, return to the first book and extract a single line from anywhere on that same page. Use this as the concluding line of your poem.)

There is such a high degree of arbitrariness to the above process that I try to balance it next with an imposition of my will on the raw material. To my tastes, collage works best when it strikes a balance between chaos and order, between random and reasoned. Here's how I find the balance, or force some order, in this method:

- Don't start randomly. Browse through the books looking for a strong opening line. Constrain yourself to page #15 and to extracting specific lines, but allow the freedom to read lines before choosing the first book.
- Try to weave a mosaic of books, somehow. The meaning is broad, but the general rule of thumb is: compile a set of books that somehow connect to each other (for ex., different sides of the same subject), or balance each other (different genres), or somehow -- anyhow -- weave a mosaic in the field of possibilities.
- Allow yourself the freedom to switch pronouns ("he" to "she" or vice versa, etc.) in order to establish some kind of narrative thread through the lines.
- Allow freedom with line breaks. In order words, feel free to sculpt the raw product of 8 or so couplets by choosing where, exactly, it might make more sense to use line breaks.
- Allow freedom to delete one or two words, if their absence improves things.
- Similarly, if it makes more sense, when extracting lines from your book, allow the freedom to take phrases instead of whole sentences. One couplet can run into the other. (The result is a series of couplets that are not self-contained, ghazal-like, but blend one into the other. A sentence begun in one book is ended in another.)
- If the lines you're using (last of first para, first of third para) are truly horrendous, don't use the book. Or, if a line nearby is amazing, use that instead. (Try not to do this for every book -- but if it must, let it happen).
- If you only have short lines, use as many of them as necessary to match the line length of the other couplets.

Example:

I wrote a series of these poems recently using "Africa" is a broad motif to guide the work. I found the most success when deciding carefully which collection of books to put together - what universe of possibilities to create. In one example, I had at least four books to do with the genocide in Rwanda - all different. One was a novel, another a collection of testimonials by survivors, another was Philip Gourevitch's moving book on the subject. I balanced this with a randomly chosen novel from a distinctly different region in Africa, as well as Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and a collection of Lawrence Weschler essays ("Vermeer in Bosnia") -- the eponymous essay to do in part with art and war crimes tribunals in the Hague. To me, so much of this work is about Representation, and the collection seemed to capture that. I switched a pronoun from "he" to "she" to connect an earlier image with a later couplet. And I took liberties with phrases and line breaks so that, for example, two distinct fragments from separate books came together as:

The dead/ looked like pictures of the dead and even then// under a continual threat of being overwhelmed once again."

(The result of this example will appear in Five Fingers Review 24 "Foreign Lands and Alternate Universes"...)

-Adrian

Page Numbers, Titles, National Anthems, Abecedarium

Here's a wrinkle to the idea of using geographic constraint to generate page numbers for a collage. The recipe combines elements of abecedarium and location to generate page numbers and titles of poems in a series. How it works:

(Africa will be our example -- we regularly "use" Africa to find the way through our collaborations -- but you can establish any place you'd like.)

Abecederium:

- start by picking the name of a country beginning with the letter A (for example, Angola).
- obtain a copy of that country's national anthem (most found online).
- scan for a phrase that begins with the same letter you're currently using (in Angola's anthem we found: "As by our work we build the New Man").
- that phrase becomes the title of your first poem.
- for each poem in the series, repeat the process, using the next letter in the series (for us: b- Benin, c - Congo; d - Djibouti; e - Eritrea).

Page numbers:

- determine the capital city of the country (for ex., Angola = Luanda).
- establish the city's GPS coordinates. Those numbers are the page numbers you'll use for this particular poem in the series.
- repeat as above for the next poem: a new letter, the next country, its capital city, the relevant GPS coordinates.

This method of weaving geographic constraint through two elements of the collage - title and page number - is particularly satisfying for someone exploring, however obliquely, a sense of place.

Tip: Generating Page Numbers via GPS

Jumping right in, here's a method of using geographic constraint to generate page numbers for a collage project:

GPS coordinates.

Simple as that. Derive your page numbers from the lines of latitude and longitude that pinpoint your exact location on the earth. The information is available for free online - for example, via Google Earth (which requires you to download a small application).

Using GPS - or zip code, or area codes - or any number derived from physical location feels the opposite of arbitrary. You start a project feeling grounded, no pun intended, or perhaps even guided by some overshadowing sense of place - as vague as that might be.

And there can be happy surprises: In a recent collaboration - with Adrian in Northern California and Susan first in a Colorado ghost town then Northern Virginia - we learned that all three locations are roughly 38 degrees north of the equator.

This first recipe written from 37 54 10.16 North 122 32 22.78 West (there'd be little degree symbols after the first numbers if we knew how to include them in the blog).