Word Games & Online Poetry Collaboration

From the seed of a title (William Carlos Williams' “The Red Wheelbarrow” or Muso Soseki's “Magnificent Peak”) & first line (“So much depends” or “By its own nature”), a new poem will evolve, each poet adding one & only one line. Check back & see what grows here!

“Where poets and performers have fun.” Now hear this text. Write now! A self-guided wordshop. Hie thee, Birdcage!

An experiment at David Rea’s CodeAsArt site in which readers choose from among pairs of poems made of randomly combined phrases “to see if non-negotiated collaboration can evolve interesting poetry using (un)natural selection.”

Suite Add-A-Line: Need some cushions to prop up your muse? Feeling communal? Ticket in hatband? There's no reason to try -- just do! go to the Buffalo Poetics Collaborative Poem and get syndromic!

John Dobbins & Mary Ochs at Cornell have put together a game that challenges you to name the book given the first line.

In Ann Cantelow’s collaborative poetry salon, wander through rooms devoted to free-form, high critique, rhyming poetry, haiku, gothic-surreal, song lyrics & teen concerns. You can start a new poem, add a line or comment on the poems in progress, or end a poem if it seems finished to you.

Brought to you by A.Word.A.Day's Anu Garg (“Raga Gun?”), I, Rearrangement Servant, or Internet Anagram Server (“formerly known as: Inert Net Grave Near Mars”) will anagram any word or phrase you choose.

This “interwriting” by miekal and & Maria Damon is a poem that weaves your mind in. Plenty of gifs & sound -- pick hit for finding the cyberpoem of your dream, really!

Reiner Strasser’s The Virtual Affair site has this “themed guestbook,” where poets are invited to “...write with others and me / another virtual story or poem / ...or something else / i do not know / what it will become ...we will see / ...each writer is a figure / the Net is the stage.”

AHA! Poetry’s online version of the Japanese game of linked, collaborative senryu -- a maekuzuki contest transplanted from the barroom to the Net. Post your poem & see what linking poem-responses you get back, or take a look at the posted beginning-poems & write an answering link.

A poem that both tests and teaches (in its end-rhymes) the vagaries of English pronunciation, one of many spoken-English resources from About.com ESL Guide Kenneth Beare.

Ann Cantelow designed this interactive poetry-writing page for Pyrowords -- as at her own collaborative salons, you can start a new poem, add a line or comment on the poems in progress, or end a poem if it seems finished to you.

Scroll down past the art gallery & you'll find random poetry, words at play -- be quick & click on 300 “poems@random.”

D.Paul/Small's Colabart site invited contributions to an interactive poem which became part of the Elements multimedia exhibition at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery November 1998 to January 1999.

Face the challenge of using all 20 consonants and push your poetry envelope.

If you need to jog something loose in your mind but don't know quite what, take a break & play this multiple-choice game of word origins, from the folks at Intuitive Systems.

Mike Barker's MIT-based subscription listserv has several group-written stories going on at once in different genres. Lots of etiquette about respecting other contributors' plot lines & reserved characters, because the focus is on fiction here, but nothing says you can't start your own interactive piece & make it a poem!