Call for collaborators:
Readings
an interpretive dance of the spoken word
We invite you to join us on this journey as a poet, a reader, or both. To sign up:
- as a reader, respond to this story
- as a contributing poet, enter your details (including a link to your poem) in this Google Form.
We also welcome creative responses in other forms, So if you’d rather express yourself through visual art or musical composition, please do!
Keep reading for submission details!
Poems are meant to be read out loud — but by whom?
Introduction, by Tamyka Bell
The writer of any text is just one of many possible readers, and each reader brings to their reading a unique set of life experiences that dramatically affect how they interpret the text. The same text can mean two completely different things to two people, and both those meanings can be the opposite of what the writer intended.
On the weight of evidence, who is right: the writer, or one reader, or several, or their entire audience?
While it can be tempting to say that the writer is right — after all, they wrote the thing — most writers could, if pressed, come up with several examples of times when they wrote something and everyone discussed it as if they’d read something else. Take, for example, “Every Breath You Take”, which a lot of people seem to think is a love song, but which Sting will tell you is about stalking. Or the Fifty Shades series, which is a risqué romance for many readers, and a story of an emotionally abusive relationship for others. (In case you were wondering, I side with the latter in both cases.)
If you’ve ever had the good fortune to receive critical feedback on your work, you may have been startled by some of the alternative readings. I suspect this is even more true for poetry than for prose, because poetry is more likely to contain symbols that mean something different to each reader, wrapped up in a veil of ambiguity that — intentionally or otherwise — allows the reader space for interpretation.
I once asked a Medium poet for more information after identifying multiple possible readings of her poem. She responded that both readings seemed to fit with her words, and added that her writing had been driven by a third meaning — one which I could immediately recognise, but only once she’d drawn my attention to it. So it seemed that I had changed the poet’s understanding of her own work by telling her what it meant to me.
Now what would’ve happened if, instead of telling her how I’d read her poem, I’d shown her? What if I’d read it out loud for her, the way I felt it.
What discoveries might we have made if several of us read the poem aloud in a way that reflected our interpretation, our meaning? Would it have changed her interpretation of her poem?
Would it have changed the way she read it aloud?
Come join me; let’s find out.
How this project works
We always try to keep these instructions as simple as possible, but this project has a fair few moving parts, so please let us know if any of the following instructions are unclear.
Before we start: why all the secrecy?
As you read through this section, you’ll notice we’re being a bit secretive, specifically asking participants to keep everything hush-hush until it’s time to publish. The reason we do this is to ensure that
- the poet’s original reading — what we might consider the authorial voice — can’t influence the other readers’ interpretations
- each reader and contributing artist responds only to the written poem, not to others’ readings or responses
- spectators see the whole story at once.
So it’s super important to us that you pay attention to our requests for particular privacy settings on your files — otherwise the whole project could break!
Contributing a poem
When you sign up to contribute a poem, you’ll be asked to supply a link to your poem. This can be to a Medium draft, or a text file in your Dropbox, or a page on your website, or whatever you like — it’s just so we can determine if the poem will be appropriate reading material.
If you are accepted as a contributing poet, we will contact you by email and ask you to submit a Medium draft of your original poem to Chalkboard for publication. Your draft’s subtitle should include [TK: readings] (which we’ll remove before we publish) and a suitably attributed image. Your poem must be your original work and you must:
- grant us irrevocable, non-exclusive rights to publish your poem with attribution in our publication, and
- grant our readers irrevocable, non-exclusive rights to record their reading of your poem and publish that recording online, with attribution.
That is, if you have granted anyone else the exclusive rights to publish your poem online or to publish recordings of your poem (subsidiary rights), or if you intend to do so, we can’t accept your poem for this project. But if you’ve granted non-exclusive licences and/or retained all rights, we can still accept your poem.
We also can’t accept poems for which critical reviews have been published, which may affect readers’ interpretations. But we’re open to poems you’ve posted on your blog without analysis.
Recording, uploading, and submitting your reading or other creative response
You’re welcome to record either an audio or video file of your reading; we specifically request that your recording
- begins with the poem’s title and the author’s name
- is trimmed, so that it contains no extraneous recordings.
Ideally, we’d like you to host the file on one of the sites that embeds with Medium, such as SoundCloud or YouTube, but you can use other platforms if you prefer.
As with the poetry readings, we ask that those submitting other creative responses to the poem upload their files in a way that restricts access to only those with the link.
Once you’re happy with the file upload, please submit your link to the Readings project host using this Google Form.
IMPORTANT: When you upload your audio, video, or image file, please check your privacy settings will restrict access to only those with the link, so no one can stumble across it.
What happens next?
After a poem is selected for the project:
- Chalkboard publishes the poem and promotes it on social media.
- Chalkboard publishes a call for readers and invites other creative artists to respond to the original poem.
- The poet records, uploads, and submits their poetry reading.
- Chalkboard selects five respondents to read the poem. Selection is at the discretion of the host, who will consider each applicant’s history of interaction with the poet and with Chalkboard in general. (We welcome new writers to join this project, but if you’ve picked a fight with one of our writers in the past, there’s a good chance you won’t be reading that poet’s work!)
- Each reader records, uploads, and submits their poetry reading; other creative contributors upload and submit their files.
- The host creates a draft that compiles the poet’s first reading, all the other readers’ recordings, and creative responses. This draft is shared only with the poet — and we won’t even add it to Chalkboard yet, just to make sure none of the editors sneak a peek! (If this approach doesn’t seem to be working, we might just revert to email.)
- After taking some time to absorb the different readings, the poet records another reading, and uploads and submits it as before.
- The host adds this file to the draft.
- Chalkboard publishes the compiled story and promotes it on social media.
- Once the readings are all published, you’re welcome to make your video or audio file public and/or promote it as you like, remembering to always include a fair attribution. Please don’t lock down the file, remove it, or change the link without letting the Chalkboard editors know — to do so would break the project, spoiling the fun for everyone.
A quick reminder:
- Interested in joining Readings? Respond to this post.
- Want to sign up as a contributing poet? Here: https://goo.gl/forms/GeWAM9svy7RlHQKh2
- Ready to submit a link to your reading or other creative response? Here: https://goo.gl/forms/hxUaKLXTC6B1eE7R2
If you’ve got any questions, reply to this post and let us know!
