Third Night

Outside the chapel waiting. I often found myself outside waiting as I was usually the first to arrive. I was often tired on these evenings, but I always left the writing group feeling completely rejuvenated. By the second week I realized that this particular writing group was one of the best I had facilitated. I think in part that was due to the commitment that was already there among the neighborhood residents. For one thing, they have a relationship that transcends this writing together. Although I believe that writing can provide a connection for people who don't have one, the relationship isn't the same as working with people who have other commitments to one another. Penny arrived and the lights went on. It was another very cold night. We shivered in the chapel on the hard little pews. It was a comfort.

After sharing the revisions, which took a while because there were lots of questions about poetry- was this a poem? Why or why not? We moved to a collaborative brainstorm of chapel details and descriptions and then I asked everyone to write as many haiku as possible. After fifteen minutes we stopped. All of us had produced a number of haiku, but Bill Plapp got the prize for excelling as he produced 12. There was more discussion of the dimensions of haiku-17 syllables, 3 lines, mostly focused on subjects of nature-the third line a kind of surprise.

This exercise provided us with hours and even weeks of writing. We worked on collaborative haiku, ryenga -- a combination of haiku and tanks, and individual pieces that worked in "stolen" material from group members. As we wrote a group haiku on the board, we found ourselves fascinated by the process. There was something meditative about it for us that kept us returning to this form of writing. There was also much laughter and fun as we explored this form to its limits.

This section begins with our collaborative interlocking Haiku that we developed ourselves. I have included individual haiku and as well as experiments with ryenga and tanks that some participants completed. Acknowledgments are sometimes included and other times not. But because the poem itself was constructed together entirely out of individual work we were not as careful about illustrating the individual pieces.

Excerpts: The pieces that follow became almost interchangeable as we worked and reworked one another's lines and images into the haiku. I believe we succeeded in creating a new form-"interlocking Haiku."