Sunday found us sitting outside the Barbican Centre in the early spring sunshine, catching up on life and our individual poetry adventures. And what about our shared poetry project London Undercurrents? Happily, we’re both keen to get back to researching and writing about more of London’s unsung heroines.
Over the past couple of years, we’ve dipped toes into east and west London histories and discussed different kinds of collaborative writing. We’d applied for an Arts Council Developing your Creative Practice grant some time ago, the money would have given us time and space to try all sorts of collaborative writing together, something we haven’t tried before. All the poems in London Undercurrents part one were written individually by each poet, away from each other and only shared with the other poet when the writer felt happy with it. Which made sense – we were each writing about the part of London where we’ve lived for years, and the connection to that part of the city was each poet’s ‘territory’. Now, east and west London both hold different meanings for us that we can explore together. On Sunday, we reviewed a couple of rough drafts from previous online catch-ups, wrote out different lines from each poet’s drafts, then shared them with each other and wove together lines into two collaborative drafts. It felt great to be trying something new! Play time.
There’s a long way to go, and more fun to be had, but it definitely feels like we’ve started writing together, and that there’s new London Undercurrents poems yet to come.
London Undercurrents 