Image: © Kirsten Stirling.
Authors: collective
Students in Kirsten Stirling’s MA seminar “Poetry and Public Life in Scotland” were discussing the Scottish national poet Kathleen Jamie’s outreach projects of crowd-sourced poetry. Jamie asked the people of Scotland to submit one line on a particular theme (the first theme was the environment) and then she “curated” the lines into poems. In the last 20 minutes of the seminar we experimented with crowd-sourced poetry on a smaller scale. Everyone in the class wrote one line (or in some cases two…). The theme was what we could see from the window in the classroom. Then the class split into two groups to “curate” the same lines, and the result was the two poems (two versions of one poem?) below.
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1.
Ten glasses full of hopeful colours;
Squared, bright, one eye can settle on the night.
Morbid branches and dancing green
Like octopuses and jellyfish waltzing in a grey, grey ocean.
The parking lot, buried in trees, covered in leaves
Shade the cars with their new summer gowns.
A trickle of shattered harmonies
Gentle movements, arise
The silent song of these sweet green fans
The windows filter out the sound.
Smells like rain, the prettiest green, fades to grey
I long for coffee, let me join that tall tree
Where are the birds, I said. Gone on a trip, they said.
Two windows for them to see.
2.
Ten glasses full of hopeful colours;
Squared, bright, one eye can settle on the night
A trickle of shattered harmonies
Gentle movements, arise
Two windows for them to see
The silent song of these sweet green fans.
Morbid branches and dancing green
Like octopuses and jellyfish waltzing in a grey, grey ocean.
The parking lot, buried in trees, covered in leaves
Shade the cars with their new summer gowns.
Where are the birds, I said. Gone on a trip, they said.
The windows filter out the sound
Smells like rain, the prettiest green, fades to grey
I long for coffee, let me join that tall tree
