four games for poets

1. Poetic Whispers/Selected Works

Start a blog. Find a poem by a living poet who also has a blog and select it. Put it on your blog. Ask that poet to select someone else's and put it on his but only if he will select someone else's and keep the chain going. Link the blogs. The selected poems make an expanding book which can be analysed by blocked academics to find the real state of poetry.


2. Ultimatum

A game especially interesting for critics and observers of Popular Culture. Can be played with above.

This is a variation on economic gaming theory which will model the degree of elitism, corruption and denial of access involved in hierarchies of poets and academics chained to the wheel of diminishing grants, occupation of chairs by cronies and so on where a thousand poets fight over every three available footnotes like rats in a sack over shit. This is where short term memory of friendship and comradeship is so dysfunctional as not to take them back to the beginning of their own sentences -- all this while the consciousness of the nation rots.

Anyway. Form two teams of poets. Those published a lot and those who aren't. The first is team x, the second is team 'why'.

Accumulate enough money (called 'GrantCant') so everyone in x can have $20 (or pieces of silver). Design a book so that everyone in x has two publishing spots (called 'Patron Places') to decide on as to who will fill them. The book can be called 'Critical Community'. Tell each person in team 'why' they can award one 'GrantCant' and one 'Patron Place' to a person in team x. That person can share them or not. Then watch what happens. Can be played at the same time as below. If this game took place with Ugandan poets they would share the silver and the places.


3. Prismers of Parochialism

Find someone around who speaks say arabic or farsi, maybe welsh gaelic or mandarin. Or write to someone who does.

Then, if you don't know anything about that language look it up. See how it goes.What it does. It may even be something like Nigerian English.

After that, find a poem or a something you did that you think might sound good in that language as it is described as being like and which might become animated with that cultural charge ( maybe one yours doesn't have, like national weeping). Get it translated and try it out on the person you have picked. Or get the person you have picked to do it. I found that didactic things come out very lyrical in arabic when translated by Palestinians, or so I'm told. Imagistic things in mandarin of mine are minimalist.

But they are coherent. I was afraid to try Polish but I'm doing a fat chapbook in Albanian. That'll show them. Anyway, after that get a poem back. Change it around. The one you get back is their choice. Don't push for poems about the war. And so on.

There you go, the beginning of world peace. Reverse Babylon. If the other guy wants and needs and if you are linguistically dysfunctional help them with one in English (one thing I found out doing this is that I translate ok into American, better than in Oakville Ontario. Except in West Virginia.)

This game can be played alone or as part of

POETS without BOUNDARIES projects.

These projects are designed to help capacity building of groups of writers in developing countries so that they have their own support organisations to promote access and copyright right and freedom of speech and so on. They do income exchange, joint work, events in-country. The traditional epic writers of West Africa for example or the poor guys who used to be corralled in Stalinist associations but now have nothing. Ask me if you are interested. I have the project description and grant application.


4. The rules and objectives of game four can be found in the Blue Orange novel called The Borderline: Casebook Translations.