Poetry Writing Exercises Make a list of fifteen physical experiences that you’ve had, such as falling out of a tree, riding a roller coaster, or jumping on a trampoline. Choose one from your list and use images to create a lyric poem about the experience. Try to remember everything you can about a particular event that occurred when you were a child. In can be any type of experience, now matter how insignificant. Make a list of all the details you can remember. Once you’ve finished your list, build a narrative poem around it. Keep in mind that you don’t have to be faithful to the past. You can change details, descriptions, or actions if the change will make the poem work better. Write a short poem that begins and ends with the same line. The reader should feel differently about the line the second time around because of what has happened in the poem. Write a “confession” poem detailing an emotional crime and how you committed it. OR Write a poem in the voice of a murderer. Make the reader sympathetic to the murderer. Freewrite about the first experience with death you can remember, whether it involved a person or an animal. Then freewrite about your most recent experience with death. Combine the details, memories, and images from the two into a lyric or narrative poem. Many people have recurring dreams – of flying, of being chased, of being in a particular location or situation. Write a poem about such a dream that uses repetition to capture its obsessive nature. Try to repeat fragments rather than simply initial words or complete sentences; let the repetition interrupt the flow of the dream-story. Write a poem of about thirty lines that consists of a single sentence. Experiment with clauses and phrases and parallel structure. Try to keep the sentence moving forward, enjambing it across lines in different ways, while making sure it is grammatically correct. This type of exercise will help you develop flexibility as a writer, teaching you new ways to phrase things and new ways to play with the syntax of a line. The traditional imagery for good and evil is light and dark, white and black. Brainstorm a list of images called up by the two opposites. Then write a poem that reverses traditional expectations. In other words, write a poem about what is beautiful or inspiring about the dark, or a poem about what is awful or terrifying about the daylight. Write a lyric poem in which you adopt the persona of a character from a fairy tale. For example, you could describe the way Snow White feels while she sleeps inside her coffin, or how the Prince feels as he holds Cinderella’s glass slipper in his hand. Think of something you were afraid of as a child. Write a poem in which you describe what it was and how it made you feel. You can write from the point of view of an older person looking back on it, or you can write from the point of view of the child you once were. Take one line from a poem of your own that is unfinished or a poem by another poet. It does not matter where the line occurs in the poem, but you want to select the best line from the poem. Use this line as the first line of a new poem. Try to maintain the same quality of sound, language and thought that the first line presents. The poet James Merrill wrote “we understand history through the family around the table.” Think about ways your own family’s story overlaps with the story of others – a historical event, an ethnic group, a social issue. Write a poem about someone in your family and how his or her story is related to history. Choose one inanimate object in your room. Describe what it looks like, and describe the room around it. When you’ve finished your descriptions, write a poem in which you adopt the persona of the inanimate object: what does it think, what does it feel, what does it look out at day after day after day, etc. Write a poem in which you adopt the persona of someone famous (they can be dead or alive). Imagine this person sitting alone, looking out over the Grand Canyon at sunrise, reflecting on his or her life. Write a poem in which you convey this person’s character through his or her internal thoughts. Write a description pf one particular element of a set. For example, you can describe one book on a shelf, one face in a crowd, one bird on a telephone line, etc. Try to describe both the characteristics of the group/set, and to distinguish what makes the one member you’re focusing on different from the others. Turn your description into a lyric poem. Take something negative about yourself – an abstract concept, like fear, depression, hatred, loneliness, or cruelty – and find a concrete image for what it feels like. Maybe it feels like a weight pressing down on your, like walking down a dark street at night, or waking up in an abandoned house. Once you decide on a topic and an image, draw out the image in a lyric poem with the topic as your title. Below are the opening lines from some short stories and novels. Pick one that interests you and see what kind of poem it generates: Come into my cell. Make yourself at home. Night fell. The darkness was thin, like some sleazy dress that has been worn and worn. There is an evil moment on awakening when all things seem to pause. It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. “Notice the sensuous curve of the breast.” God help me. She lay in the dark and cried. The big house was still, almost empty. Write a persona poem in which you take on the personality of an older, single adult of the opposite gender. Write a poem in the form of a personals ad in which you describe yourself and your interests, and then describe the type of man or woman you would be interested in dating. Make a list of things you find repulsive – the smell of garbage, fast food employees, people who never shut up, etc. Choose one and write a poem in which you describe that person, place or thing in such a way that it becomes beautiful. Find a short lyric poem you really like and type it on your computer, leaving three blank lines between each line of the poem. Print it out. In the spaces between each line, fill in a new line of your own that seems like it would sound right following the line original line before it. Once you have filled in all the spaces with lines of your own, cross out all the typed lines from the original poem. Revise the poem using only the lines that you have written. Write a poem in which you take on the voice of one of the following: A used napkin A scalpel A turtle turned upside down by a group of children A washing machine A framed photograph A ceiling fan An unopened letter A remote control Write a poem in the voice of a widow whose husband has drowned. Invent any story you like about how this happened – he was a fisherman who was washed overboard in a storm or he was in a boat that capsized. Imagine that the widow, who now hates water, is forced to confront it due to circumstances beyond her control. Perhaps she goes to visit a friend who lives by a lake, or she must jump in a pool to save a child who has fallen in. Write a poem in which you adopt the persona of the widow. In her voice, describe what you see and feel as you look out at the water. Write a poem describing a scene outside your window. Do this even if your window faces a brick wall or a boring landscape; use your imagination to make it interesting. Make a list of twenty-five of the most beautiful/sensual/or poetic words you can think of. (For example, some of my favorite words are: obsidian, wisp, hollow, trickle, iridescent, and flicker.) If you can’t think of any off the top of your head, flip through the dictionary. Once you have your list of words, pick one to try to build a poem around. The word can be the title of your poem, part of an image, central to a narrative, or just a word in a line.