CLPP Renga Rules

by Mark Fairchild

| Note On Copyrights

A renga is a creative social and poetic interaction;  that is how it evolved in Japan over the centuries.  Today, however, matters are complicated by copyright law.  A renga is more like an anthology; no poet owns the entire anthology, yet they do own the rights to those parts of it they wrote. I, who began the Collaborative Linked Poetry Project (CLPP) and invited the poets to take part in it, retain the right to publish each full renga, with the poet's explicit consent, in one or more books; again to interest more people in the art form, and to achieve my personal goal of clarifying Nebraska culture as it is revealed and developed in the renga. I will always display the copyright information for each individual poet.

As concerns each poet's contribution to the renga,  I have taken the following approach. Each contribution (poem or "stanza" ) is also part of a larger creative work. As initiator and coordinator, however,  place a copyright symbol by each stanza with the poet's initials, and their name mentioned somewhere on the page, linking initials and name. This means that each participant has the legal right to re-write (or not) and publish any of their contributions wherever and however they wish.

Each poet retains complete legal rights to his or her creative work. For those poets that do this with me, I do request, especially given that these are short poetic works,  that I retain the right to print and share the full renga with other poets or portions of it with others, in my efforts to interest other poets in taking part in future rengas, and, I hope, in my desire to produce an academic work that uses the rengas to analyze Nebraska human cultural adaptation to the Great Plains environment.  

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

| Rules & Constraints

→ Rules  & Constraints For Participants

Here are sets of optional constraints and rules that must be selected and adopted by participants, by mutual consent, for each renga:

1.  Compose short 3 and 2 line stanzas, with 3 short lines in Free Verse, followed by  another poet responding to it with 2 short lines in Free Verse; these must be composed in an alternating fashion, in an effort to link the renga  "stanzas" together, making 5 line collaborative poems.
   
   This is the basic function of the collaborative linked poetry process in a CLPP Renga:
   
   It results in a series of linked poems created by 

   • combining a 3-line poem with a following 2-line poem (by another poet) 

   • AND a 3-line poem (by another poet)  with the previous a 2-line poem; 

   • the 2-line poem is shared then in two poems. 

   • In the next exchange, the 3-line poem is shared.
     
     

2.  Optionally,  Use  2 to 6 line stanza.
   
   

3.  Optionally, A compromise would be to use standard Japanese syllable counting, but with definite and indefinite articles allowed to change the syllable count, along with any other language-specific exceptions that would make it readable and scan well.
   
   

4. Optionally, Classic Japanese constraints (5-7-5 & 7-7, use of (Nebraska) Season Words (kigo), nature references, etc).
   
   

5. Optionally, use rengay rules. See Complete Collection of the Haiku Society of America Rengay Awards.

Try to take no more than 3 minutes to compose a stanza (sharing it with the group would make it a total of 4 minutes). The intent of this rule is to keep the duration of the renga under control. At 3 minutes per stanza, it would take 7 poets almost 7 hours to compose 100 stanzas. We found it difficult to keep the group together for 2 or 3 hours; we might have gone longer if we were samurai drinking saki!
 

Other constraints are open for discussion. Just try to agree on them at the start, as a group; but avoid officiousness (creative people tend to not like that).

| Process of Writing A CLPP Renga

 A coordinator needs to be assigned whose responsibility it is: 

1. to adjust or improvise rules as needed, and

2.  to collect the cards at the  end of the renga, 

3.  then give them to whoever is responsible for compiling them on paper for distribution among the participants at a later date.
   
   

At the end of the meeting, give all your stanzas (cards) to the coordinator, to assemble the full renga which will be sent to each participant at a later time.

Rengas should be done in-person, because, psychologically, there is much that takes place during group and in-person interactions (between people and the environment) that makes its way into the renga that would otherwise be lost. The "poet" in a renga is  a group if individuals in an environment; all interacting,

Anyone can be invited to take part, but if there are too many participants the group will be broken down into smaller groups; and depending  on the venue some group(s) moved to a different area.

→ Participant's Perspective

SO, each participant, then, does four things:

1. Receive the previous poet's stanza.    (This does not apply to the first poet.)

2. Compose a link to it on a 3x5 index card. (3 minutes composing, 4 minutes total)

   1. Initial (or sign) your stanza in the top right-hand corner of the card.

   2. Write and circle the sequence number after your initials. (For an example, see the image on the header of this web page.)

3. Read aloud both (linked) stanzas in sequence for the assembled group.  

4. Return the previous poet's stanza to the poet who composed it.

5. Pass your stanza on to the next poet.
   
   

→ Resources

See the CLPP Renga & Its History's section on Resources.