The traditional Japanese poetry form, the renga, involved a group of poets who each contributed stanzas to a chained poem. This form has been adapted recently to produce poems of community by groups of modern poets. Bob Holman and Carol Muske-Dukes enlisted 52 other poets from across the country in the book Crossing State Lines: An American Renga (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). Kansas Poet Laureate Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg produced a book celebrating the Kansas sesquicentennial by involving poets from across state (To the Stars Through Difficulties: A Kansas Renga in 150 Voices, Mammoth Press, 2012). I was fortunate to be one of the contributors to the Kansas Renga project and thought the process could be adapted for use in classroom settings.
I used the renga in a workshop in which seniors met once a week for eight weeks. The process could be used as a portion of a semester-long course as well. I lifted the stanza form used in the two laureate books, stanzas of ten lines, and allowed the individual poets freedom to write free verse, a prose poem, a set of five couplets, or whatever they wanted within the ten line limit. I decided we would do seven-stanza rengas, with each participant writing stanzas one and seven of their renga, and contributing a stanza to each of five other rengas in the intermediate weeks.
Since I never know exactly how many folks will sign up, I worked out sequences for class sizes of anywhere from six to 12 poets. One appealing aspect of the renga is that even the people who would ordinarily beg off and not write anything for one or more of the classes felt a real obligation to write every week rather than let any of the other participants down.
I posted a set of matrices online (renga-sequence.pdf) that you can use for doing this project. There is a column for each participant. If there are 10 people in class, write the numbers one through 10 on slips of paper and let everyone draw from a hat. Suppose you drew number seven. The seventh column in the matrix for 10 poets lists your renga sequence. You would write the first stanza. The next week, you handed your stanza to poet number nine who would write the second stanza. The poem would be passed to poets eight, four, three, and 10 in that order, leaving you to write the final stanza.
I had made a list of “subjects” from which each participant could choose a theme for his/her renga (e.g., “Zero Hour”, “Music Lessons,” “Our Town,” “Symphony of the Universe,” etc.). This helped to provide focus for the contributors, although each poet was to find something in the preceding stanzas as their main source of inspiration.
This proved to be an exercise that everyone contributed to and enjoyed; it also provided us all with some interesting and memorable poem sequences. Participants found it particularly gratifying to see how others responded to their work.
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Roy Beckemeyer, from Wichita, Kansas, has had poems published in The Midwest Quarterly, Kansas City Voices, The North Dakota Review, Dappled Things, and I-70 Review. His debut collection of poetry, Music I Once Could Dance To (Coal City Review and Press, 2014), was selected as a 2015 Kansas Notable Book. He won the 2016 Kansas Voices Poetry Award.