Collaborative Poetry in the New Century : Designing the Experiment

Recent years have seen an ever-increasing preoccupation with the ownership of literary texts, a desire to claim everything from lived experience to pieces of language and literary forms. Kristina Marie Darling delves into this highly individualistic approach and its prevalence within contemporary literary circles, arguing that said approach fosters a culture that values the articulation of one’s own ideas over simply listening, a single voice over dialogue and conversation, and ownership over rewarding artistic exchange.
Ranging from performance pieces like Matthew Rohrer and Joshua Beckman’s Nice Hat. Thanks. to Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade’s efforts to cultivate a shared feminist consciousness through poetry, the works considered in this critical study are unified by their investment in collaboration as a means toward challenge prevailing ideas about the self in a postmodern literary landscape. Each offer a lyric “I” that is at once plural and singular, that proactively blurs the boundaries between self and other, subject and object, viewer and viewed. As a result, readers may seek to understand collaborative texts like these as a microcosm, a metaphor for what Mikhail Bakhtin so aptly described as a “dialogic consciousness.”