Genre: Poetry (or microfiction, I like doing odd prose poetry/microfiction pieces in a similar process called Sentence Trades.)
Expectation/Commitment: This could be either:
a) Stanza Trades: actually writing poems together which will be co-authored by us in my collaborative poetry project Stanza Trades (Poet 1 writes a stanza and emails it, poet 2 takes that and writes a second stanza and sends it back poet 1 who writes a third stanza and so on until it feels complete. I've published like 20 poems from this project so far. The most recently published was at Trampoline, called "Juvenilia". Here are 3 more with a different collaborator published at Does it Have Pockets?. Some of these pieces will hopefully be published themselves, and included in the book/anthology for the project eventually. But that's long term, for now, we're just creating pieces that neither of us would have created on our own! That's the great thing about these exchanges, you don't know what the other person has in mind, and what direction you decide to go is often very different from where the other poet intended, so they are thrust into unexpected territory they get to navigate and discover in.
b) Accountablibuddy/Seed Crystal Exchange: we write our own poems just using the exchange to jumpstart a new piece every week or something like that (responses can be planned or fluid/whenever you get the time. Poet 1 writes a new poem, sends it to the other person, they read it, maybe give a few words of response (though not required) then takes one small thing from that poem (a phase, an image, an object, a structure, tone , level of diction, something that isn't the main point of the poem, and uses that as the jumping off point for their own new poem, it's sent to spark a new poem for the other poet. This is continued back and forth as a generative exercise. It's an excuse to write a new poem, really.
Experience Level: By experienced I don't necessarily mean you've published a ton, just, some perhaps, or at least you read literary magazines and are familiar with contemporary poetry. No degree or books or anything 'required' I've just found the trades work better with someone a bit experienced in writing the poetic line with enjambment and imagery and concrete details and parataxis and whatnot. Just standard poetry stuff.
Meeting Place: Email. Both of the options are a 'when you get the chance' type thing. I've had great pieces form in the course of an hour, but more often it's a week or two. Sometimes much longer, but that's usually just if something came up, not standard practice. But hey, sometimes things come up and it's totally chill, after a couple weeks I'll probably check up to see you're doing ok, just in general. I try to sneak lines in during the course of my day because we usually work in couplets, so in Stanza Trades, I'll read the in-progress piece, go back to what I was doing for a few, thinking on it, then knock out the new couplet. I'm good at finding direction in a poem as it's going because I've been doing this a long time, so don't worry about 'big picture' or what the poem is 'about' until we're like 6 stanzas in, by then it will emerge. Sometimes trades end up fizzling too, and that's also ok. We just start a new one with that experience under our belt. Sometimes revisiting a trade we can identify where it went off the rails and revert to there and start it again. More often than not though, we get a solid piece out of it without having to go back.
I look forward to writing with some of you! I can juggle many trades, so the more interested poets the merrier. I haven't done any three-poet trades yet but it would definitely be fun.