Issue 9 / Spring 2018

Editor’s note

The concept for this issue was to create a forum for an absurdist, collaborative experiment, roughly based on the surrealist Exquisite Corpse experiments from the 1920s.

Twenty-eight writers were invited to participate and told they would be given one line of text as a prompt, a form to work with and 7 days with which to create their piece. The last line of their writing would then serve as the prompt for the next writer.

Once the four separate forms were decided upon names were drawn out of a hat to assign writers to each of the forms. This also determined the order. At that point, the first writer of each poem was given the line Among Clouds of Dust, Only Mountains—a Garden.

Most of the texts in the journal appear more or less as submitted, with only minor adjustments being made to ensure the form was consistent.

– Craig Foltz, July 2018

Reviews

Review by Paula Green on the NZ Poetry Shelf

Four distinctive poems like a game of whispers in the ear or the game where you draw a head, fold the paper over and let the next person continue with a modicum of clues. I was hungry to keep reading, motivated by the bridge between stanzas.
– Paula Green