It begins with the write-up of an online "competition" where people were asked to come up with the next line of a cumulative sonnet. The resulting crowd-sourced poem has an "anthology of lines" feel (rather like some of my poems) but it's interesting to see why Lehman chose the lines he did. The crowd-sourced sestina (growing verse by verse) seems less successful to me - the need to use the 6 given words imposes a compendium mood which is magnified by having multiple authors.
Some of the challenges are standard (go to a gallery and write about a painting), others are more novel ("here's the short-list of winning entries - send in your vote (judge's report) in the form of a poem".
On p.224 he writes that "Next line, please is, it seems to me, not only a pastime but an experiment in the creative mind and an investigation into the roots of poetic inspiration", which is how I came to view the book after a while. The challenges benefit some kinds of writers more than others. I don't think it's just inhibition that makes me bad at such exercises.
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