Seven Poets, Four Days, One Book

By Dean Young, Christopher Merrill, Marvin Bell and 4 more

Lauded poet Christopher Merrill hatched a brilliant plan: invite six other poets to join him in four days of writing in Iowa City. The poets would write for 30 minutes, creating a poem of 15 lines, and then read it aloud to the group. As poets heard the poems, they noted memorable words, images, and lines, which they would borrow to insert in subsequent poems of their own. These rounds continued, until, in a process of call and response and unprecedented collaboration, 80 poems had been composed. Those 80 poems are collected in this book, penned by authors who represent some of the best and brightest the world of poetry has to offer. Transcending differences of generation, gender, language, and vision, these poets have invented an entirely new facet of the poet’s creative process.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trinity University Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781595340993

Dean Young

Dean Young was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, and received his MFA from Indiana University. His collections of poetry include Strike Anywhere (1995), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry; Skid (2002), finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Elegy on Toy Piano (2005), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Primitive Mentor (2008), shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. He has also written a book on poetics, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction (2010).

Book preview

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Introduction

union • noun

DAY 1 - egység

Union. Definitions

behind steamy windows everything’s a blur

Isn’t Being Upside Down the Real Game?

Re-entry

variations on silence

Beautiful Valley Rolls the Balls in the Barn

speech for the water-table-display attendant at the mississippi river museum

DAY 2 - għaqda

The Plow Goes Through the World

confession by the river

In the Beginning Was Broken

i’ll scribble you naked

Before the Attempt on My Life with Zarjica

crosswise

Happy Hour

DAY 3 - 085 086 087 088

Springtime for Snowman

violet

Atmospheric Pressure

Long Ago

this morning

After This Night

iowa

DAY 4 - zveva

All at Once

in the beginning

Half-Life

night

We’ll Calmly Swallow This

the falling trees are falling trees

What Would That Letter after Z Look Like

about the authors

Copyright Page

Special thanks to the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, which brought the poets together with the support of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, the Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Visiting Professorships Program, and the Arts and Humanities Initiative from the Office of the Vice President for Research, and to Kecia Lynn, who provided cookies, coffee, pens and paper, and good cheer for this creative endeavor.

introduction

In October 2007, in a sunlit room at the University of Iowa, six poets—István László Geher from Hungary, Simone Inguanez from Malta, Tomaž Šalamun from Slovenia, Ksenia Golubovich from Russia, Marvin Bell and Dean Young from the United States—and I joined in an experiment designed to strengthen the bonds of friendship—and to make something new on the page. For four days, we wrote together in a spirit of exploration, creating a conversation in poetry, which crossed linguistic borders, aesthetic boundaries, and generational divides. Seven Poets, Four Days, One Book is the result of our collaboration.

We gathered around a long table in the library of Shambaugh House, headquarters of the International Writing Program, which brings writers from all over the world for residencies in Iowa City, and set to work. Our springboard was the definition of the word union, about which we wrote for thirty minutes, with the loosest formal imperative—fifteen lines, in any meter. Then we took turns reading our rough drafts aloud, not without some trepidation, and soon we were borrowing from one another’s poems—words, phrases, images—to incorporate in our own poems in the next round of writing. By the end of the day we each had two poems to revise and notes for a third to be written overnight—the starting point for our next meeting. And so it went for three more days, building poem by poem, creating the polyphony of voices that resonates throughout these poems.

The French Surrealists provided models for our project. The poetic experiments that André Breton and his friends undertook between the two world wars yielded new ways of conceiving of literary value, predicated on chance operations. Automatic writing (writing in the absence of conscious control); exquisite corpse, wherein poets contribute lines to a group poem without knowing what their collaborators have written; collage and cut-up techniques—in these forms of serious play lay the seeds of our conversation. The Magnetic Fields, a book-length exercise in automatic writing by André Breton and Philippe Soupault, which was published in 1920; The Immaculate Conception (1930), a collection of prose poems by Breton and Paul Éluard, which they believed was written in a state of possession; Slow Under Construction, which Breton, Éluard, and René Char composed during a driving tour of southern France in 1930—these books inspired my decision to invite poets from around the world to dream up a sequence of poems