The first definitive collection of American collaborative poetry, ranging through the New York School, the Beats, Language poetry, to the present, with 140 poems by more than 200 authors culled from various magazines, out-of-print collections, and previously unpublished material, plus insightful process notes and author biographies.

From the introduction:

The joys of collaborative poetry, the surprise and mayhem, the experiments in wickedness, can be adapted to many philosophies and temperaments. While Anne Waldman and Andrew Schelling question the very notion of �schools� of poetry in their poem �Riparian,� they do acknowledge the collaborative spirit:

�I am not a poet of Edo
�Not a New York School poet
�We are not poets with any name exactly though half of us is a New York School poet
�I am not a New York School poet
�You are when you collaborate that half
�Collaboration was not invented in New York nor in Edo
�I missed a beat O yes & proud of it

Poems that bicker and blend, poems with dialogue, poems in which two or more poets merge into a single narrator: all work in the collaborative impulse. Many poets in this anthology choose to write in free verse and prose blocks, while others collaborate in fixed forms. Here you will find a villanelle, a ghazal, a pantoum, sonnets, sestinas, abecedarians, somonkas, haiku, renga, and a haiku/renga hybrid called a renku. Methods, too, vary from collaboration to collaboration. Some poets alternate words, others alternate lines or stanzas, still others alternate whole sections. Some poets collaborate in person, while others exchange lines via the telephone, mail, or the Internet.

Our Madness's Method:

Because collaborative poetry is primarily published in journals or small press chapbooks, it has previously been available mainly for those who truly seek it out. Many collaborations of the 60s and 70s were published in small literary magazines like Diane DiPrima�s Floating Bear or Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh�s Angel Hair, both long out of print. Contemporary small magazines and literary journals, off and on the web, which have included collaborations in their pages are the World, Two Girls Review, Crab Orchard Review, Chain, Indiana Review, Massachusetts Review, Boston Review, Poet Lore, Hanging Loose, Prairie Schooner, Gargoyle, 5 a.m., membrane, Web del Sol, 3rd bed, Big Bridge, Hotel Amerika, MiPoesias, Nerve, Artful Dodge, and Painted Bride Quarterly, among other venues. Presses such as Pearl Editions, Verse Press, Erudite Fang, Edge Books, the Owl Press, Tia Chucha Press, and Copper Canyon have published collaborative books and chapbooks. As recently as the summer of 2005, Indiana Review devoted an entire issue to collaboration and collage. Until now, no one has published a substantial collection in more permanent, more readily accessible anthology form.
We couldn�t resist. Saints of Hysteria gathers some of these harder-to-find collaborative poems of the last fifty or so years. We have scoured libraries, the web, and all the literary magazines we could locate. Like many anthologists, we dread going to press having skipped over some vital practitioner of the art of collaboration. But our focus had to be narrow by design: we included only poets who collaborate directly with other living poets, and we limited the collaborations to poetry, text only. We have arranged the poems in Saints of Hysteria in a loose chronological order to allow for "chains" of poems by poets who collaborate with more than one partner. We have included process notes by collaborators when available and hope that these notes will serve as a springboard for future collaborators.

Denise Duhamel's poetry titles include Two and Two (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), Mille et un Sentiments (Firewheel, 2005), Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001), The Star-Spangled Banner (Southern Illinois University Press, 1999) and Kinky (Orchises, 1997). She also edited, with Nick Carb�, Sweet Jesus: Poems about the Ultimate Icon (Anthology Press, 2002). She is an associate professor, teaching poetry at Florida International University in Miami.

Maureen Seaton's fifth collection of poems Venus Examines Her Breast(Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2004) won the Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award. The recipient of an NEA fellowship, the Pushcart, and both the Lambda Literary Award and the Iowa Prize for Furious Cooking, she teaches poetry and literary collage at the University of Miami.

David Trinidad's last two books, Plasticville (2000) and Phoebe 2002: An Essay in Verse (2003), were published by Turtle Point Press. He is also editor of Powerless, the selected poems of Tim Dlugos (High Risk Books/Serpent's Tail, 1996), and with Maxine Scates, Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford (Copper Canyon Press, 2001). He currently teaches poetry at Columbia College Chicago, where he coedits the journal Court Green.