Collaboration as a Framework for Poetry
By: Ben Gallagher
As practicing poets as well as members of the Addressing Injustices research team, Ashleigh Allen and I have often brought our approaches to teaching poetry into our research work. We have also been facilitating creative writing workshops for teachers through the Toronto Writing Project for the past three years. While poetry month is typically focused on encouraging students to write poetry, and helping teachers to find new ways to bring poetry into classrooms, both Ashleigh and I believe strongly in the importance of teachers of writing also having their own writing practices. By developing and sustaining our own creative writing as teachers, we're able to tap into the transformative and restorative potential of writing that has been freed from goals and assessment, and then bring that energy to students in classrooms.
Ashleigh and I have recently written a handbook chapter on the structure of our workshop, and in it we detail the many ways in which collaboration has influenced our approach to both teaching and writing poetry. Collaboration is not just something that happens between the two of us as teachers. Instead, we see the ways in which we creatively collaborate with the poems we read in classrooms, through the medium of text. As the American poet Matthew Rohrer writes, “After writing a lot of poems, and doing a lot of collaborations, I have come to believe that the writing of all poems is a form of collaboration. A poet collaborates with another voice, or other voices. Those voices can take many forms, and are always there, if the poet is listening.”
Organizing the teaching of poetry around a framework of collaboration also helps to push against the individualizing structures within schools, and the punishment of “plagiarism” divorced from contemporary approaches to playing with text. For Ashleigh and me, writing alongside others spurs us on and supports us in our mutual dedication to the process of writing. For many educators who emphasize a collaborative approach, the collective work of groups of students shifts our attention from a vision of individual deficits to one of rich knowledge.
A large part of the struggle within a personal writing practice is simply showing up to creativity and to language, and setting aside the judgements and critiques that we carrying around inside ourselves. As poet Muriel Rukeyser states, “There is no such thing as bad art… to call an achieved art ‘good art’ and an unachieved work ‘bad art’ is like calling one color ‘good red’ and another ‘bad red’ when the second one is green.” When we see ourselves in collaboration with other poets, with the medium of language itself, with our peers and our students as we write alongside each other, the impulse towards assessment is diminished in favour of a dedication to the creative process itself.
In her essay on the creative power of collaboration “Going on our Nerve,” Anne Waldman writes, “collaborations reinforce ritual, the importance of making something together as an act of generosity or homage.” Regarding ritual, the poet CA Conrad asserts:
Rituals can reconnect us to one
another and the natural cycles of
life and help put an end to our
alienation from the planet.
I completely believe in the
strength of poetry.
And I have experienced how the
rituals for creating poems has
the power to change us in ways we have yet to fully explore.
For Ashleigh and myself, treating language as a material substance akin to clay, a ground of possibility for creative expression, invites us into a set of relationships focused on emergence and uncertainty, and connected to larger forces that leap across space and time. Importantly, adopting a collaborative approach to teaching creative writing and poetry doesn't require expertise, previous knowledge, or even a creative practice of your own. Instead, it emphasizes our willingness to be present with others, and a belief in the vivid and significant inner lives and experiences of ourselves and others, which make writing possible. Literacy scholar Richard Yagelski emphasizes that “the experience of writing is an experience of our being as inherently social; it is the experience of the interconnectedness.” As teachers of writing, we have the opportunity to share that intimacy and sociality with our classrooms as we collaborate together creatively.
Upcoming workshops with the Toronto Writing Project