4Play: Rules For The Game
Start with four poets and a collaborative online document. Geographical and temporal boundaries are of no concern. Follow the following:
Rule #1 - Each poet must start 11 poems.
Rule #2 - Each of the four stanzas of each poem must contain one line from each poet. (Note: there should be no pre-defined order in an effort to keep the exchange within and between poems variable and engaging.)
Rule #3 - In an effort to further blur the lines of authorial control and ownership, each poet is entitled to four revisions per poem.
Rule #4 - All rules are meant to be bent and/or broken.
Round 25
Like the dormant magic of a parking lot carnival: lifted,
siftable. Torn
apart by love
– Sigh –
above the pavement’s mundane sentiments.
To place them in the hands –
hands are shards too, dear friend
please – hang onto the documentation.
Because I do not want to go back to that home, I much prefer this
one. A warning
to wait longer, longer and more quietly
behind the bearded lady’s dressing tent
for the sword swallower to emerge, thirsty and hoarse.
For the horse to swallow all of my sallow
and snore from the next door down.
Kafka would not know it even now.
Round 29
From courses to couriers
the intimacy of strangers pressed against
the dripping. Drop. After drop.
Don’t say “planet” out loud, please.
<a deprecating laugh>
The details are a face
with the features stuck upside down
and feathers protruding
out the guilt-lipped mouth
languid, slid.
Lucifer’s stance inverted thoroughly
and we forgot him there until
he turned up in the slip
as a way for our sleep to wear. Something
outside the self. Singular,
I read much of the night in its entrails.
Joseph Cooper is currently writing and teaching in Princeton, WV. He is the author of the full-length books TOUCH ME (BlazeVox 2009) and Autobiography of a Stutterer (BlazeVox 2007), as well as the chapbooks Here Come the Groovies co-authored with Andrew K. Peterson (Livestock Editions 2010), Memory/Incision (Dusie 2007), from Autobiography of a Stutterer (Big Game Books 2007), and Insuring the Wicker Man Shadow Created Delusion, co-authored with Jared Hayes (Hot Whiskey 2005).
j/j hastain is the author of several cross-genre books including long past the presence of common (Say it with Stones Press), trans-genre book libertine monk(Scrambler Press) and anti-memoir a vigorous (Black Coffee Press/ Eight Ball Press (forthcoming)). j/j has poetry, prose, reviews, articles, mini-essays and mixed genre work published in many places online and in print.
Travis Macdonald is a poet, copywriter and small press publisher. He is the author of two full-length collections: The O Mission Repo [vol. 1] (Fact-Simile) and N7ostradamus (BlazeVox) and several chapbooks, including: Basho's Phonebook (E-ratio), BAR/koans (Erg Arts), Title Bout (Shadow Mountain Press), Time (Stoked Press), Sight And Sigh (Beard of Bees) and Hoop Cores (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press). He currently lives, works, writes and co-edits Fact-Simile Editions in Philadelphia, PA.
Michelle Taransky is the author of Sorry Was In The Woods (Omnidawn 2013) and Barn Burned, Then (Omnidawn 2009), selected by Marjorie Welish for the 2008 Omnidawn Poetry Prize. Taransky teaches writing at Penn, works as reviews editor for Jacket2 and co-curates the reading series Whenever We Feel Like it.