Hello all! Inspired by recent attempts at collaborative poetry in the haiku-verse, I am inviting anyone who is interested to participate in an exquisite corpse renga.

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#haiku
#renga
#exquisitecorpse
#WritingCommunity

Exquisite Corpse is a form of collective art in which people contribute to a piece without knowing the full context; renga is a collaborative form of haiku that alternates between 5-7-5 and 7-7 ku.

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I propose that the haiku community come together to create a chaotic beast of a renga. It would proceed as follows: one person will compose the initial hokku. The next person would receive only the last word of the hokku, and compose the 7-7 response.

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The next person would receive the last word of the response and respond to that. And so on. No one knows the shape of the renga until everyone has contributed. If you are interested, please respond to this tweet or DM me. I will give everyone until Wednesday 9/9 to decide.

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Once I have a list of participants, I will pick names out of a hat to decide the order of participation. Once you’re given a word, you’ll have 24 hours to compose your piece, which you will send to me so I can keep it under lock and key.

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If life interferes on your day, you can pass the baton to the next participant and I will pass it back to you the next day. Then I will send the last word of your piece to the next participant as inspiration.

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Things to note: modern English haiku isn’t strict with respect to the syllable constraints, so this exercise won’t be either. An alternation between 3 line pieces and 2 line pieces is adequate.

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Nor should you feel beholden to other unwritten rules—the point here is the beautiful chaos. When the piece is finished, I will spend the day tweeting it in a thread and tagging all participants, and offer a document to go with it.

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P.S. Feel free to ask questions in this thread, and if you like this idea please retweet so it gets some attention.