I’m interested in working on a series of collaborative, long-form poems using Twitter as a writing platform. As a constraint-based system (140 characters, one line at a time), Twitter lends itself to exquisite corpse-like compositions, and for this project I would like to extend that work to include appropriated language, chance operations, overwriting of each other’s texts, defacements, collages, erasures, etc., however, the way in which the collaboration unfolds is ultimately up to each participant.
The project takes as inspiration Louis Armand and John Kinsella’s Synopticon: a collaborative poetics, a collaborative project written via email exchange between the authors over the course of a 10-year period. In an investigation of authorship and authenticity, Armand and Kinsella engaged in a number of experimental practices when writing the poems, from exquisite corpse-like additive games to radical revisions of each other’s texts.
The current poem is #pxc002. To participate in this poem, tweet your line to me at @_levato using the hashtags #pxc002 #poetry (no need to DM me first). Please note: if you build on another participant’s lines, tag them in your tweet (if there’s enough space).
The original poem is #pxc001 and the first line was based on my ethnographic notebook from a recent stay in Bolivia.
A live feed of both poems can be viewed in full on Twitter at: #pxc002 and #pxc001.