The idea of interactive participation on the part of the audience is not exactly new, and does not necessarily come upon the wings of new forms of technologically-innovative poetic transmission (such as blogs). In fact, it is in theatre that we find a curiously parallel notion of titrating the audience into the production and dissemination of the poetic event, that of the "fourth wall" where the line between voyeur and viewed are blurred. The open space that merges the performer and the audience is akin to various experiments in the neo-Baroque where the audience equally become an essential installation of the work.

In participatory poetics, we find a murky line drawn from Aristotle's Rhetoric...In oratory, Aristotle speaks of the use of the enthymeme--or, the hidden premise in the argument that goes unspoken--as a means of eliciting this premise in the minds of the audience. It therefore emboldens the audience to believe that they are active participants, and that their reason is what gives solidity and substance to the oration. The unspoken is indeed the dark precursor to a different style of sense that the audience constructs alongside the poet or orator. In more "modern" sense, the Baroque innovation of the exquisite corpse survives as a late medieval tavern game where each participant adds a line to a poem that circulates, at the end of which it is read aloud to either the amusement or awe of all involved in having built a kind of collective poetic machine, a poetic plane of consistency composed of conceptual blocs.

Poetry slams are partially participatory, but perhaps frames the poetic event in terms of a combative contest, a kind of polite gladiatorial game of metred and unmetred conquest. A less combative gesture would be more akin to the sort of spontaneous poetics among the slaves of the South in the early 19th century which was based on a singing call and response. Could we construct a call and response poetry? Could we do so by simultaneously installing and dismantling the notion of a chorus?

-Kane X. Faucher