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

This is an exhilarating anthology remedying the clear lack of collaborative poetry collections. Collaborative poetry grew out of word games played by Surrealists in the 1920s and taken up 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 WWII, the Beats' 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. Yet, for all its rich history, virtually no collections of collaborative poetry exist. This exhilarating anthology remedies this stark omission. Featured are poems by as many as 18 people in a dizzying array of forms: villanelles to ghazals, sonnets to somonkas, pantoums to haiku, even quizzes, questionnaires and other nonliterary forms. Collaborators' notes accompany many of the poems, giving a fascinating glimpse into the creative process.