This article shares an experimental poem created by three poet-researchers using an online word processor to collaborate within a single document. We attempt to blur the line between creative and academic writing, focusing on the possibilities for writing as a method of inquiry and the opportunities for different perceptions of being that it suggests. Our project unfolds as we also produce a brief diffractive reading that does not mirror or deconstruct the poem, but thinks it in an alternative way, as a broader collaboration, or intra-action between entities, both human and non-human. We avoid determining how our purported individual voices merge to form any united voice. Rather, we are alert to agencies and flows that complicate understandings of us as three rational, discrete, fully formed human figures articulating coherent narratives. We therefore offer a response to theoretical calls to explore collaborative writing as inquiry, through sharing our practice.
Three poet-researchers conduct three different readings of Tishani Doshi’s poem A Fable for the 21st Century. We ask how as creative practitioners and critics we can negotiate the desire for mastery of a text, and the dangers a semiotic reading presents, allowing for difference, indecision, and complexity. We present our initial readings of the poem and summarize our discussions of them grounded in the transactional reading theory of Louise Rosenblatt and nuanced by assemblage theory. A final section includes three original poems written in response to Doshi, together with a brief discussion of them, and forms part of our conclusion.
Characteristics of the prose poem emphasised by Stephen Fredman include a focus on language for its own sake, openness and the employment of the long poem. These facets are strongly present in Alan Loney's prose poem sequences 'The erasure tapes ' (1994) and 'Gifts' (2005). The paper argues that these concepts are intimately connected. It evaluates the link between prose poetry and postmodernism and between language and the idea of open writing as it relates to postmodernism and its appropriation of the long poem. The erasure in question in Loney's masterwork could be that of memory, meaning, or connection; yet meaning and connectivity are handled differently in the long poem form, and build sense and connection in different ways, through juxtaposition, accumulation and the questioning of perspective in the individual's response to language and its unavoidable wedding with memory. The prose poem offers a diversity of tools and structures, via the sentence and sentence fragment, supremely useful for practitioners of poetry who wish to extend their range.
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