Exquisite Collaboration Prompt for National Poetry Month
April is National Poetry Month, and you don't need to be a writer, poet, or artist to participate. Just share your sentence and we'll build a community poem together!
Happy National Poetry Month! I’m so glad you’re going to join us for this community creative experience!
The Exquisite Collaboration Project works like this: I provide a prompt and people from around the world respond. Their responses are then put together to form a collaborative ... poem, word collage, piece of creative prose, we never know until it's finished.... which is then posted on the Exquisite Collaboration Project page on this blog.
This process is meant to remind us that if we all contribute our part to a creative project, the end result will be something exquisitely beautiful - even if (especially if) it's nothing we would have thought to create on our own. With that in mind here is your prompt for National Poetry Month.
THE PROMPT FOR APRIL 2024
For this year's National Poetry Month we'll keep it really simple - there's no excuse not to participate! If you’re reading this, consider it your personal invitation to contribute. With winter fading and spring bursting into bloom everywhere, I've pulled one of my favorite prompts from the archives:
Write a sentence discarding what you don't need to make room for what you do.
Your sentence can be fill in the blanks style, like:
I am letting go of ______________ to make room for _______________.
or
I am releasing ___________ to embrace ____________.
or
you can a write your own sentence, musing however you want on what you need to release and welcome.
Don't worry about being profound or deep or clever. Just be honest, keep it relatively simple (one sentence/line), and the poem will build itself when all of the responses are compiled.
If you’d like to contribute more than once, you can do that by filling out the form a second time. This helps me with the logistics of putting everything together.
While contributions are sometimes slightly tweaked to adjust verb tense, spelling, punctuation, to remove identifying information, or to fit the flow of the poem I generally use the contributions as is, as much as possible.
You'll be notified by email when the poem is posted on my blog.
Submit your contribution here.
DEADLINE for contributions is Sunday, April 21, 2024 at midnight ET/US.
(deadline extended)
Any other questions? Visit me at http://joannebrokaw.com/contact.html or email me at joannebrokaw@gmail.com and put "Exquisite Collaboration Poem" in the subject line.
(Remember, submit your contribution here.)
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This Exquisite Collaboration Project is based on the Exquisite Corpse, a technique created by Surrealists in the early 1900s, in which participants add to a work with no one seeing what the other participants contributed. My goal is to encourage non-writers and artists to embrace their creative selves in a safe, supportive, “you can’t fail” environment. What began as a way to maintain some sort of connection with other people during the early days of the Covid lockdown has continued to unite strangers from around the world in creative collaboration.
Happy creating!
Joanne Brokaw
author, performer, teaching artist
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