POPO Seriality

Penelope Moffet

Our Best POPO Practices Zoom webinar last Saturday (July 11 @ 11am) with J.I. Kleinberg and Ina Roy-Faderman was a hit with the POPO faithful and we’re editing it for Youtube. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, longtime POPO participant Penelope Moffet posted this about it on Facebook and granted permission to republish:

I came away from yesterday’s PoPo zoom with some ideas new to me. Here they are, for those who couldn’t make it to the meeting (had you been there, you might well have been struck by different concepts – a lot was said in that hour!):

Start each new poem with the last line of the previous poem, and see where it takes you. Keep doing this, day to day. You will end up in some unexpected places.

Response cards don’t necessarily have to be responses sent to the person whose card triggers your new poem – a card responding to something you received can be sent to someone else, so the conversation continues, in a way, in the collective mind.

When you want to send an art card, you can write the poem first on one side of the card, then let the art you create on the other side relate in some way to the poem. (I’ve always gone in the other direction when/if I make an art card.)

I was also very moved by what Sigrid Saradunn said about how all the postcards she received from PoPo people early this year, when she was going through a hard time, really helped her to get through that time. 💚

Regarding seriality, see: https://paulenelson.com/2015/11/21/gemini-gel-rouen-cathedral-seriality/

And this from Nate Mackey is quite helpful: https://paulenelson.com/2013/04/21/nate-mackey-amerarcana/

There are few art forms as open as seriality in literature. I see it as akin to Free Jazz and at its best, as practiced by a master such as the late Fred Anderson, Free Jazz is a transcendent experience. Seriality will be one thing covered in a six week workshop open to POPO2021 registrants coming this Fall. Details soon.

POPO2020 registration ends July 18, 2020. See: https://popo.submittable.com/submit

About Splabman

Poet & interviewer Paul E Nelson founded SPLAB (Seattle Poetics LAB) & the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Since 1993, SPLAB has produced hundreds of poetry events & 600 hours of interview programming with legendary poets & whole systems activists including Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, Robin Blaser, Diane di Prima, Daphne Marlatt, Nate Mackey, George Bowering, Barry McKinnon, José Kozer, Brenda Hillman & many others. Paul’s books include American Prophets (interviews 1994-2012) (2018) American Sentences (2015) A Time Before Slaughter (2009) and Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies (2013). Co-Editor of Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia (2015), 56 Days of August: Poetry Postcards (2017) and Samthology: A Tribute to Sam Hamill (2019) Make it True meets Medusario (2019), he’s presented poetry/poetics in London, Brussels, Nanaimo, Qinghai & Beijing, China, has had work translated into Spanish, Chinese & Portuguese & writes an American Sentence every day. Awarded a residency at The Lake, from the Morris Graves Foundation in Loleta, CA, he’s published work in Golden Handcuffs Review, Zen Monster, Hambone, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2014 Robin Blaser Award from The Capilano Review, he is engaged in a 20 year bioregional cultural investigation of Cascadia and lives in Rainier Beach, in the Cascadia bioregion’s Cedar River watershed.
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