Experimental Poetry 18: Interactive poetry

We explored installation poetry earlier in this series. One of the key features of a lot of installation art is that it's interactive. You don't necessarily stand there admiring the art as if you were in a gallery gazing at images. You delve in, and engage with the art using several senses. 

Installation art is not just visual. It can also be auditory, tactile, kinaesthetic, proprioceptive, and perhaps even olfactory or haptic. Interactive poetry also exploits these multiple senses to provide the reader with a participatory experience. 

In my own performance poetry I encourage my live audiences to become involved, shouting out repeated refrains, standing up or raising their hands. It brings the poetry alive and gives it deeper meaning through involvement. The audience get a work out too. We can do similarly with the written word... (even though this is a little more sedate than the ideas above).

In Gestalt psychology (the theory, not the therapy) there is something known as the law of closure. It plays on the human propensity to want to complete something that is otherwise unfinished. This can be exploited to benefit experimental poetry writing.

Method 35: Fill in the blanks. Write your poem to deliberately miss out key words. Place a blank where the word should be and ask your reader to complete the poem. The more surprising or unpredictable the word is, the better! 

Method 36: Complete the stanza. Do the same as above, but this time, an entire line is missing for the reader to complete. 

Method 37: Untitled.  Leave a blank where the title should be. Invite your reader to read the poem, and then create a title for it. Ask them to be particularly creative with this task.

Method 38; Switching words. Ask your reader to switch the position of two words in each line, or stanza of the poem. Again, the more outlandish the result, the better!

All of the above methods are great to promote collaborative writing, and are ideal for use in online poetry groups. Try some interactive poetry ideas today!

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
Experimental Poetry 14: Speak out Loud
Experimental Poetry 15: Quantum Elements
Experimental Poetry 16: Random Interactions
Experimental Poetry 17: Installation Poetry

Image from Wikimedia Commons