Open-Source Poetry

06.12.2008 um 15:16

“Write in haste; edit in cold blood!” - I came across this tidy aphorism the other day and must say I really like it. As for the word blog - turns out it’s the contraction of the term “Web log”, a piece of newly acquired knowledge that didn’t pacify my pugnacious spirit at all, just made me hate the term even more. I mean how lazy have we now become that we must turn a two-syllable term into a monosyllabic blurb..? All the same, I do like the definition the AEOD offers (that’s the American Oxford English Dictionary - didn’t know it existed..): “blog: a Web site on which an individual or group of users produces an ongoing narrative.” Or, in other words, it’s the never-ending-story-of-the-narcissistic-self, published by that author universal: Web 2.0.

I could argue that I’m not talking about myself here as I write this particular narrative, but having recently become somewhat of an exponent of narrative identity theory, that (wow, a comma before ‘that’: try explaining that to your students after having spent so many hours adamantly insisting on its mandatory absence and ferociously crossing out all those commas in their essays...) would make me more of a hypocrite than ... Let me clarify, courtesy of Kath Woodward “We all tell stories about our lives. We tell ourselves stories and we relate them to others, as a means of making sense of ourselves” (Understanding Identity 2002, 28). But I’m not writing this blog to make sense of my self and all that, I’m writing it to make sense of what I have already written and what I will be writing in the future. I’m turning this whole concept upside down, am I not? The narcissistic part only comes in when somebody else actually reads it. Although I do have to say that reading your own stuff is pretty much like looking into the mirror: we all feel ashamed at what we see but secretly we like the act of seeing itself so much we can’t look away.

You don’t publish your own writing so that others can read it. You publish it so that you can read it. Honestly, if I was ever published, the first thing I’d do is walk into a book shop and buy a copy of my own book. Just to ensure a ROI, of sorts... Walt Whittman loved himself so much he wrote reviews of his own writing, though he didn’t have the guts to do it unanonymously (does that word even exist...). But then again maybe he did it because all the critics unanimously thought his stuff below par.

I do at the same time realise that it might increase my reader-base (which currently consists of me, my self and moi-même), if I were to tell you a little bit more about my story. Later perhaps. Right now I just want to ask you all a question: What do you think of open-source-poetry? The idea is simple. Someone sets down the formative and stylistic rules, e.g.: Shakespearean sonnet (14 lines, three quatrains and a final couplet composed in iambic pentameter), and gets things started by providing one of the lines (I would, for example, provide either the first line(s) or the last. Preferably the last. Readers then provide their ideas and sooner or later it all comes together to produce one fine work of (f)art. You could also just invite everyone to publish their own version of the entire poem itself, compare/contrast and discuss the various ideas that flowed (not flew?) into the process. Seems intriguing to me, so without further ado, here we go, my first contribution to open source poetry (the end result should be a Shakespearean sonnet). Here the final rhyming couplet:

“And as words go out of sight into mind
They go out of heart into thoughts unkind.”

With that said, get to work, you “others”, write your(selves)!

PS: I would nonetheless like to highlight one crucial difference between OSS and OSP: just because it's open-source poetry doesn't mean it's not protected by copyright laws etc. How American that sounds. Whatever...