‘Between Clean Sheets’: Twenga #8

Abstract

‘Between Clean Sheets’ is a 100-verse #Twenga written by twelve ‘poets’ over a 63-day period on Twitter. It is the eighth #Twenga led by Paul Conneally and Gavin Wade hosted by Eastside Projects (@eprjcts). #Twenga is a Renga (linked verse) – a 1000-year-old Japanese form of extended haiku written by multiple authors – written live on Twitter. It is an incredibly successful shared artform displaying complex and sophisticated ways of collaborating and organizing space, time and thinking. The 100 verses are written to a hyakuin schema, adapted by Wade from the schema suggested by Conneally for their seventh #Twenga, originally used by the poet Sōgi in his ‘Solo Sequence of 1492’. The schema provides a theme for each verse such as Autumn, moon, love, equality and urgent actions. The themes provide an underpinning position and combine with a ‘link and shift’ reflection upon context, memory and imagination always written in the present.