Renga
is 1,000 year old Japanese form of shared writing. This
website is dedicated to contemporary renga and extensions
of the renga poetic form. It was conceived and is maintained
by Alec Finlay.
Renga is an art of time and space as well as words and
images. Many of the renga days we have presented took
place on the renga platform; a temporary wooden structure
conceived by Alec, so that people could sit, listen,
write and read renga together.
On this website you can read examples of the most popular
modern short renga form, the nijuuin (20 verses), which
we write over the course of a day; as well as examples
of hyakuin (100 verses), some of which were composed
at twenty four hour renga performances (BALTIC, Gateshead;
Tramway, Glasgow; and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West
Bretton).
The renga platform is now permanently based at Langley
(Northumbria). Alec has also constructed a permanent
woodland platform for the hidden gardens (tramway, Glasgow).
Recently Alec has developed the importance of the schema
in renga – the verse themes – composing
renga word maps. These describe a particular place and
community: a leadmine in the North Pennines, a housing
estate in Birmingham.
Among the renga masters who feature here are: Alec,
Linda France, Gerry Loose, Subhadassi, Ken Cockburn
and Paul Conneally and Andrew Schelling. The poems are
from the British Isles, Czech Republic and United States.
If you would like to take part a good way to start is
by buying a copy of our two guide books, Verse Chain
and Shared Writing. These will give you all the information
you need in order to organise your own renga day, as
well as many examples of nijuuin and hyakuin renga.
For more information contact alecfinlay@yahoo.com.
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