After several months of talking, emailing, writing and walks in the park, Likestarlings goes live with a chain between David Hart and David Hawkins. Several other chains are in progress and will be posted over the coming weeks.

The Likestarlings idea occurred to us (Caleb Klaces and David Hawkins) last summer, thinking that it would be great to meet and correspond with other poets on something practical. We’d shared emails about writing poems, and shared poems, but we’d never tried sharing a poetry chain.

Poems have long been written round-robin. There is a strong tradition of Japanese communal poetry with the strict forms and processes, Renku and Renga. More recently in the West, those names have been used to apply more generally to poems in which several people have had a hand.

The worry with such experiments is that they can be more interesting for the writers than the readers. In Likestarlings, poets can respond to their partner’s poems however they like, as long as it doesn’t need too much scrolling down the screen, and they write relatively quickly. Over five poems, narratives, shared ticks, image sequences and voices can take shape, but there is little time for indulgence or for it to grow stale. The connection is very personal, while also being necessarily critical.

We hope that here the pleasure for writers and readers is shared.