The Practice of Co-Making

A guide to collaborative drafts—routines, roles, and tips

#Field Notes

Dear Writers,

Why collaborate?
Because another mind makes surprise inevitable, widens your voice, and gives the poem a third space you can’t reach alone.

Collaborative poetry isn’t new; it’s a return. Linked-verse traditions like renga/renku built whole poems from alternating voices, and the Surrealists’ “exquisite corpse” turned surprise into a method. What’s different now is the ease of the exchange: a shared doc, a chat thread, a phone shared between two people at a kitchen table. Collaboration lowers the stakes and lifts the play; it nudges us out of our default diction and invites the poem to move in ways a single writer might not anticipate. I’m drawn to it because it widens the field of attention. You listen harder, you leave room, and the line learns to turn where another mind is already looking.

photo by Cottonbro

At its best, co-writing is both craft and care. Simple structures—call-and-response couplets, renga-style chains, exquisite-corpse reveals, brief live-doc duets—give partners just enough scaffolding to take risks. A few ground rules help: echo one element from your partner (image, sound, or syntax) and add one new element; keep turns short; decide how you’ll credit and revise; name any “no-go” topics. The benefits are immediate: momentum, fresh language, a stronger revision muscle, and the pleasure of surprise. You don’t have to share temperament or style to make a lively draft—you just have to share attention. The poem becomes a conversation, and the conversation becomes the poem.

Collaborative poetry is resurging because the conditions for it—technological, social, and creative—have aligned. Shared docs, chat threads, and real-time editors make passing the line effortless, while post-pandemic communities crave co-making as a way to rebuild kinship and momentum. The practice gives writers accountability, and refreshes voice by exposing it to another lexicon and cadence. It also suits today’s hybrid spaces, workshops, zines, Substack, classrooms, where process is visible and participation matters. In a moment saturated with solitary screens, collaboration offers what many of us miss: surprise born from another human mind.

What’s the Advantage?

Collaborative poetry refreshes the page. With a partner, you write past habit and into surprise: short turns keep the draft moving, another ear sharpens music and meaning, and shared attention makes risk feel safer. The result is momentum, range, and a freedom you didn’t expect.