The Lockdown Spring Renga Project
March - June 2020 :
During the early months of the UK lockdown, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic - I've been organising and running an online community writing project through various Facebook community boards, but in two different communities: Fakenham, in north Norfolk, where I live & work, and the Isles of Scilly, which I've known and loved for over twenty-five years. The two poems produced are in effect two halves of one creative challenge, but which each stand on their own terms.
It was conceived as a way to give people in those communties - writers and non-writers alike - the chance to share their experiences of the Covid-19 "spring under lockdown", and how they've coped with it. The project was in the form of an ongoing "chain-poem" in which each verse is a haiku written in response to the poem before, but which also carries the poem (renga) forward into different territory. The poem ideally has a cyclical structure, with opening and closing poems echoing each other and composed by the same author (in this case me). The haiku for both poems were posted & resposted every few days over the months of March - June on the appropriate FB boards, so that readers could follow their progress as they grew.
Copyright remains with the writers of each individual haiku, and the group credit for the finished piece to "The Lockdown Spring Renga Project".
This has been an extraordinary, emotional and probably unrepeatable creative project for me and the other writers who stepped up to the challenge, and I hope you enjoy reading the poems as much as we enjoyed making them.
________
You can view the YouTube video settings of both completed renga through the following links:
The Lockdown Spring Renga Project - in Fakenham, ed. by David Redfield
www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTZ7rMWY0Kw
The Lockdown Spring Renga Project - in Scilly, ed. by David Redfield
www.youtube.com/watch?v=REz08Y2Qa-g
Greg Freeman
Fri 10th Jul 2020 14:21
Really enjoyed watching both of these, David. I see you're on the Scilly map on the Places of Poetry website, too. (And elsewhere, no doubt).