Experimental Poetry 14: Speak out loud

Poetry is not only textual. It is also spoken word. The oral tradition of story telling through verse has a long history.

Most of my early poetry experiences were either listening to the spoken word, or on stage performing the spoken word of my own poetry. So poetry has a natural affinity with the voice - whether spoken out loud - or the inner voice, inside the mind. All of our poetry derives from our voice. Some of the best poetry I have ever experienced was heard rather than read. Here in the UK there are some awesome living poets, including John Cooper Clarke, Mike Garry and Harry Baker. The spoken word creates ambience, emotion, cadence and inflection way beyond what you might expect to encounter in a printed text. The spoken word takes poetry to the next level.

It would be only natural then, to also create poetry without using a pen, pencil, laptop, quill etc. All of these are human inventions that enable us to make writing more or less permanent. But what if we would instead create our poetry from only the speaking out loud method?

Method 25: Speaking out loud. Here's how it might work: You think of a topic (give it a title), and then begin speaking. It doesn't need to necessarily make sense, rhyme or have any specific direction. Remember my post on stream of consciousness poetry? Simply speak and the words come out. There are some excellent freestyle rappers who can do this at the drop of the hat, but they have had a lot of practice. Don't expect yours to be perfect first time. It won't be. But somewhere in the jumble of utterings and mutterings that emerge, you might find a few lines or phrases that you can develop later into a fully fledged poem. Don't forget to record it as you speak! 

Now that's experimental poetry!

Steve Wheeler

Previous posts in this series

Experimental Poetry 1: Found Poetry
Experimental Poetry 2: Stream of Consciousness
Experimental Poetry 3: Fake Translations
Experimental Poetry 4: Overlapping Voices
Experimental Poetry 5: Random Prompts
Experimental Poetry 6: The Movie Method
Experimental Poetry 7: Unexpected End Rhymes
Experimental Poetry 8: Calligrams
Experimental Poetry 9: Anarchic Poetry
Experimental Poetry 10: Timed Writing
Experimental Poetry 11: Paraphrasing
Experimental Poetry 12: Deliberate Malapropism
Experimental Poetry 13: Breaking Structure

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