My own collaborative writing often relies on processes and forms. Whether writing in response to agreed themes and/or what has just been written by someone else, it involves trusting the other writer(s) but also trusting the work itself as it emerges – which is often not what is expected. Editing and shaping is of course a collaboration too, and collaborations which are simply about the juxtaposition of each other’s discrete texts are as collaborative as texts where each author has written a line and passed the work to another.

There is little written about poetic collaboration. Robert Sheppard’s essays about poetics (1999) are helpful because of his open and inclusive approach, as is his anthology of collaboratively-created imaginary authors,Twitters for a Lark(2017) and what he has written about it on hisPagesblog (and elsewhere). I have also found Dan Beachy-Quick’sOf Silence and Song(2017) and Dean…