The Spoonbill Generator and the Wonders of Collaborative Poetry (Shawn)

If you've read my article on GPT-3, you know that I like exploring the impact of the digital world on writing and literature. One instance of this that I discovered a couple of months ago is the Spoonbill Generator (Spoonbill.org), a site for collaborative literary works. Contributors from all over the internet can add lines to various open poems and plays that are hosted on the site. Although there are no active works in progress, the site has produced two collections of poetry, The Rat Fathom and Schengasm, a play, and various texts that defy categorization. Some collections on the site have as many as twelve contributors, and there are individual poems with up to six authors. To enhance the collaborative aspect, no author can add two consecutive lines to a work.

 

The strange icon of the Spoonbill Generator. I'd say it reflects the contents of the works hosted on the site.

For this article, I'll be focusing on the poems, as they tend to have more authors than the prose works. The poems produced by the site are interesting but lacking in some aspects. The poems mostly relate the tales of outlandish characters and their adventures and muse on various absurdities. The first thing that impressed me about these poems was their prosody. Each poem has a well-defined meter and rhyme scheme, which is no small feat for collaborative poetry. The poems also made use of incredibly vivid vocabulary and description. The authors' use of archaic and rare words really transports you to the eldritch mood and setting the poems convey. My one issue with these collaborative poems is that they sometimes do not impart a coherent narrative, which is sometime I would expect from collaborative poetry. While the poems are humorous and compelling (Many of the limericks made me laugh out loud.), they often do not express a concrete feeling or idea. However, the humor, animation, and rhythm that these poems bring to the table more than makes up for this. They are of very high quality and the product of amazing cooperation. I would suggest you check out these poems yourself.

I think collaborative poetry is a great use of the form. When brainstorming for a poem, you often only come up with a couple phrases that have any meaning and have to work for a long time to develop them into a whole poem. With collaborative poetry, you can pool all of your fragments together to form a a type of patchwork poem. The ideas of your peers can add further meaning to what you were initially trying to convey.

The purpose of this article was just to introduce a site that hosts some interesting collaborative poetry and prose. Have you read or written any collaborative poetry or stories? What did you think of it? Answer in the comments below.