Renku.earth: a Collaborative Poetry Party in Elixir

Renku.earth: a Collaborative Poetry Party in Phoenix Elixir with Bonnie Wailee Kwong

In coding, we sometimes refer to brevity as poetic, as in the omission of brackets around arguments. Beyond programming syntax, we are going to look at a Phoenix Elixir application which provides a platform for writing poetry collaboratively.

We will explore the construction of renku.earth with minimal custom code on top of Chris McCord's Todo Trek. The application received generous support from Chris in its deployment and hosting on Fly.io during ElixirConf 2023.

Play the game. Share your thoughts about this application and your own games-in-progress.

Participants can write poetry together on a video call or send one another e-mail invitations, where the recipient only sees the most recently composed line, and none of the preceding lines, as in the 1920s surrealist game exquisite corpse. Finished poems can be published on the front page of the site.

Bonnie Wailee Kwong is an Elixir engineer and multidisciplinary artist. She has published two books of poetry, with a third forthcoming with Sixteen Rivers Press. Her plays Liriope and There's No Stopping to My Thoughts were staged at Stanford University and The Oakland Asian Cultural Center respectively.