The latest brief, to submit up to 16 lines of verse that are the fruit of a collaboration between two poets (living or dead) was open to interpretation — which clearly drove Andrew Duncan-Jones potty:
They fuck you up, these blasted comps Whose rubrics make you scratch your head. So do they want poetic romps Penned by one living and one dead? Or should they be equivalent — Both buggers dead, or both alive? The spec. is so ambivalent, How can we struggling compers thrive?
Still, ambiguity produced a varied entry. Some of you submitted centos (poems comprised of lines from existing poems); others imagined a pair of poets co-writing a new work incorporating the styles and/or themes of both and elements of existing poems. And while some match-made poets with similar preoccupations; others saw the attraction in opposites. Here’s Warren Clements’s Poe putting the dampers on Wordsworth’s daffs:My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky — Or would, if this infernal cold Weren’t death for such as I.
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