We collaborate on various experimental projects under the collective name Cathenka-Willitts.  We are particularly interested in digital technologies, science, beauty and play. Our respective poetic sensibilities and skills rub together productively. It helps that we make each other laugh and disagree about the general relevance of cats.

 

We met on the 2017/18 MA in Creative Writing Poetry at UEA and during our MA we collaborated on an experimental poetry project named ‘p0_EM Stein1’ which was shortlisted for the Ivan Juritz prize in 2018. It was an experiement in fractal poetics. We’d like to tell you how exciting it is as poets to create poetry from a scientific process. Having a theory and then devising a method against which to repeatedly test it is so...unpoetic! And yet the poetry that comes out of it is still beautiful, humorous, and peculiar. But more than that we are actually making some revealing discoveries about the nature of language and of writing poetry. The serious play is very liberating. We don’t know from one step to the next what will be produced, or if what the experiment produces will be viable poetry plasmid DNA. It’s with pure pleasure that we are now able to open this method up to other writers and keep on experimenting. So do contact us if you want to find out more about what we’re doing.

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