Carol Dorf and Athena Kildegaard
Over the years we have collaborated on a number of projects including writing daily lines back and forth, editing a literary magazine, and sharing poems. One of us lives in rural west-central Minnesota, and one in Berkeley, California.
We invented what we called a “magic square” of six-by-six and chose “In the garden” as a theme. Then, randomly, we filled in the top row and the left-hand column with words, phrases, and questions to serve as prompts for filling in the remaining spaces. We randomly filled in the 25 remaining squares. Then we did two things: we converted the text in all the squares except those in the top row and those in the left-hand column into one poem and gave it a title that did not come from the magic square; we made individual smaller poems of the text in each row and column, using the text in the top row and the text in the left-hand column as titles. For both parts of the collaboration we originally gave ourselves rules: punctuation could change in any way; no entire square-text could be cut; small changes could be made for reasons of flow or clarity.
Editors’ note: We did not include the completed poems here to leave room for our readers’ imagination. We hope you’ll try this delightful collaborative exercise at home.
Carol Dorf has received fellowships from the Hawthornden Foundation, Zoeglossia, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, as well as “Best of the Net” and “Best Microfiction” nominations. Their writing appears on the Poetry Foundation website, in several chapbooks, and in journals that include Pleiades, Ilanot Review, Cutthroat, Five South, and Scientific American. Founding poetry editor of Talking Writing, they taught math in Berkeley USD. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/carol-dorf
Athena Kildegaard is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Prairie Midden, winner of the 2023 WILLA Literary Award for poetry. Her poems have been published in Ilanot Review as well as Ecotone, Beloit Poetry Journal, Colorado Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, december, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Minnesota Morris. https://www.athenakildegaard.com/