Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry

Collaborative poetry — poems written by one or more people — grew out of word games played by French surrealists in the 1920s. It was taken up a decade later by Japan’s Vou Club and then by Charles Henri Ford, who created the chainpoem, composed by poets who mailed their lines all over the world. After WW II, the Beat writers’ collaborative experiments resulted in the famous Pull My Daisy. The concept was embraced in the 1970s by feminist poets as a way to find a collective female voice. Ye...