Unlike haiku, or most other familiar forms of poetry, it's written by two or more poets who take turns writing verses. This makes renga interactive poetry, highly appropriate for the New Media Centers as a group. Renga is singular and plural. Even numbered verses consist of two 7 syllable lines. Traditional renga also includes obligatory reference to seasons, to the moon, to love, in particular verses.
Renga poets try to link the meanings between verses subtly, without repetition of exact words.
A link might be, for example, digital in one verse and electronic in the next. The pair or group of poets may take several weeks or even months to create the full 36 verses. The result of the interaction is a constantly changing mosaic, which discourages development of a logical, sequential narrative. While we have omitted seasonal words from our New Media set, we primed the poetry pump with terms related to digital technology. In the few days we had together at University of Virginia, we tried for linked pairs of verses - or for the really ambitious, linked triplets of alternating verses of 3 and 2 lines.