A chilled evening in August seemed as good a time as any to raise the dead, and thus we catapulted the special “exquisite corpse” Issue 9 of Minarets into the world on National Poetry Day 2018. Hosted with extreme generosity at the Objectspace Gallery in Ponsonby, Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland, we were lucky enough to assemble not only local contributing writers, but also a number of guests from Kirikiriroa / Hamilton and Te Whanganui-a-Tara / Wellington, true to the spirit of collaboration.
Editor / ringmaster Craig Foltz describes the issue’s experiment as follows:
Twenty-eight writers were invited to participate and told they would be given one line of text as a prompt, a form to work with and 7 days with which to create their piece. The last line of their writing would then serve as the prompt for the next writer.
Contributors able to attend in body were invited to select any section of the issue to read on the night, and those geographically challenged were given the opportunity to create a voice recording doing the same. Editorial staff left proceedings to the four winds, only checking that audio files worked, not which words they contained.
In truth we had hoped for a little chaos, where some readers / recorders would inadvertently overlap a bit, but perhaps we should have read the tea leaves a little closer, as one section in particular proved all too popular, and haunted the room 4 times. Ah well, all in the spirit of chance operations!
Complete photo set on Facebook
