Ryan 1. Experiment With Yourself And Others

Mmm choc-avocado cake; sounds strangely delightful.

I think it is this strangeness Kat talks about that so interests people and is part of the reason why, over a year on, we are all still devouring as much Willow Pattern as we can get our hands on. Artists have always been a strange folk, that’s their appeal. I know I would rather have been a fly on the wall during the 24 hours the book was written in than sit in on the senate, thank you very much.

The collaboration of a group of artists, vagabonds and junkies the lot of them, is always an entertaining experiment: muses whispering, ideas flashing, egos crashing; the work of art at the end is just a bonus. Sure it follows a similar process as a single artist’s subjective chaos but here you see it acted out with more players, more variables. Think of Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, the film documenting a group of artists in the jungle undergoing the process of creating a masterpiece, one of the most celebrated documentaries in history. Can you imagine anyone wanting to watch an hour and a half film of Joseph Conrad sitting alone penning the inspiring novella.

It is the focus that collaboration throws upon the creative process, sometimes forgotten in awe of the product, which is so important. It was to investigate this connection that another group of writers and literary teachers from around the world began meeting in a digital space in order to better help their students with a focus on writing as a process, not a product.

And if collaboration, as it turns out, is good for the writing process then boy do we have some more in store for you because the pattern is growing. It was Simon Groth who mentioned the idea of making things “interactive”, more involving for everyone. COL-LAB-OR-ATE.

Natheless we took it on board. Kirsty’s interactive idea to get things rolling was to adopt another activity with as an impressionable time constraint as the Willow Pattern team underwent, like those Rubik’s Cubes, but no. Cooking a meal in just a few minutes, too reality TV. It would have to be something literary, and that had me thinking of another writing collective fond of puzzles and self-imposed constraints – the Oulipo, the French Workshop for Potential Literature. These guys loved to make things difficult for themselves. The traditional restrictions of the sonnet and rondeau were not enough, but perhaps if they had installed a time constraint too…

So the challenge is this: a haiku in one minute.

We all know the little Japanese gems but for a revision we have: in English, 3 lines of 5, 7, 5 syllables; a seasonal reference; and most importantly a juxtaposition of two images, generally marked by a cut or pause, a link between the two, at the end of one of the lines.

The sun blazes down
Into the sea the ice melts -
Life is born again.

Nothing special but I guess that’s why the Oulipo were more creative in restricting themselves to create a potentiality. If it’s too easy you can always try a haiku lipogram – omitting a single letter such as ‘e’, the most common, from your poem. Georges Perec was able to write a beautifully enigmatic novel under this constraint and he spent most of his last remaining days at UQ, so I’m sure you’ll do fine.