A hands-on guide for poets who want to make work beyond the page.
How can a poem become an image, a soundscape, a performance, an erasure, a tactile object, or a digital encounter? A Writer's Guide to Multimodal Poetry brings together poets, visual artists, editors, publishers, and teachers working across the expanding field of multimodal poetics.
Pairing examples of artists' work with craft essays and writing exercises, this collection gives readers practical ways to combine poetry with visual art, sound, music, movement, archive, found materials, digital media, and performance. Contributors share the tools, choices, and compositional processes behind their work, from blending text and image to experimenting with rhythm, translating across media, using erasure and collage, and designing interactive or embodied reading experiences.
Rather than treating multimodal poetry as an add-on to traditional forms, this book shows how medium itself can become part of the poem's thinking. The essays explore audio-modality, image-text hybrids, musical influence, alphanumeric translation, lyrical improvisation, neo-concrete poetry, archival practice, found poetry, mythic reimagining, tactile experience, and more.
Designed for writers, artists, students, and teachers, A Writer's Guide to Multimodal Poetry offers both inspiration and instruction: a field-defining introduction to multimodal poetics and a practical invitation to make poems that move through sight, sound, touch, space, and screen.

Ben Gunsberg is a poet, scholar, sound artist, and educator. He is the author of Welcome, Dangerous Life, Rhapsodies with Portraits, and Passing Tones, a collaborative multimodal poetry chapbook. An Associate Professor of English at Utah State University, Gunsberg teaches creative writing and English education and serves as a Multimodal Poetry Editor for Sugar House Review. His scholarship focuses on creative writing pedagogy and the intersections of writing, sound, and digital media.

C. R. Grimmer is a poet, scholar, and educator whose work bridges poetry, public scholarship, literary criticism, and multimodal arts. They are the author of The Lyme Letters, winner of the Walt McDonald First Book Award, O–(ezekiel's wife), and Poets as Public Scholars: Contemporary Poetics in an Age of Social Media. Assistant professor of poetry writing at Utah State University, Grimmer teaches and advises multimodal poetry projects, building on prior teaching at Seattle University, UW Seattle and Bothell, and South Seattle College.