Welcome, readers, to the inaugural post of the Love and Squalor blog. We are thrilled to begin this project as an opportunity to share weekly writings from our editorial staff, including personal essays, literary criticism and reviews, and any ideas we may encounter along the way. 

We wrote this renga during our first meeting as a team. It does not follow traditional renga structure, nor the syllabic rules of haiku. The purpose of this exercise was to capture the excitement we all feel for the year ahead.

To write a renga is much like playing the game Exquisite Corpse. It is a collaborative exercise, where the writer may only see and respond to the lines that directly precede their own. As poet Suzanne Gardinier once advised us, every individual verse was written with the previous line’s scent still lingering in the writer’s nose. And yet, each stanza is a poem that can stand on its own. This push and pull between influence and originality is what allows the renga to take an organic shape.

Love and Squalor Welcome Renga

Written on September 26, 2023

I

am 

so excited

For 

lovely 

Love + Squalor

Sometimes

rain 

is kind

But when it is not,

is it acrid, is it biting?

biting like new fall air

a stuffy nose

gift from the season’s change

how you made a rival 

of your own metallic taste

I came to love that 

separate being as you

love yourself

a love that was birthed 

from underneath a streetlight, summer haze, 5AM

An ewe lambs in the dark 

rain glistening on her woolen coat

very far from the highway

Bellows lost in the storm 

Storms lost in the valley

Like a dragon’s belly the sky 

nestles me against the ground

like my mother’s hand against my hair

The earth, the grass sinks

into my morning routine (fruits of)

Woke up to the cats rattling 

like windchimes

torn down from the storm, 

shattered in candy apple pools.