Dances With Poets

The Carolina Wren Press http://carolinawrenpress.org/index.html is working in conjunction with a Durham dance group, Choreo Collective http://choreo.devel.rainsdance.org/ to produce a collaborative work between dancers and poets. There are 4 poets working with the dance group. Jaki Shelton Greene is working one on one with a dancer to produce a piece (it's very hush-hush. They are meeting in secret and no one knows what they are up to.), Andrea Selch is reading a previously written poem and 4 different groups of dancers are choreographing a piece to the poem. One poem, 4 dance results. Shirlette Ammons http://www.stumphole.com/index.html is getting ready to meet with dancers and may work as the choreographer to her piece, and I am working in conjunction with a group of dancers.

This blog is a place to track the process I am going through in the production of this piece. I went to AWP a few weeks back and heard a group of poets talk about using appropriated texts and the in the presentation I liked best, Mairead Byrne http://maireadbyrne.blogspot.com/ talked about the process she went through when writing a particular piece. It helped me a great deal appreciate both the poem and understand my own process as a writer. (If you haven't read Mairead Byrne do so quickly- she's my new favorite poet, but really, why wasn't I paying attention earlier? Let's hope my intervention here will help you avoid the same mistake.)

I do this all the time when teaching composition- talk the students through what I do when approaching a similar kind of assignment. I often show them my notebooks that I keep for different projects and I often describe both my thinking and the steps I take and the order I take them in. No reason poets shouldn't do this for each other as well. I hope this blog will work in a kind of similar way. I'll be posting drafts of work, descriptions of the process, and any useful visuals along the way, as well as a recap after the performance. Questions or comments? Let me know.

Tanya