1)  Write a poem in which all the lines are radically different lengths.

2)  Write another poem in which all the lines are exactly the same length.
 

And Now These Messages

Select at random a number of magazine advertisements and study the sound patterns you find there:  rhyme, near-rhyme, alliteration, assonance.  How do the sounds of the ad's language mimic or suggest its subject matter?  How do they earn your attention?   How do they make you feel?

Now scan the ad's metrics:  do you find any regular or near-regular pattern of stresses?

Try to analyze each caption thoroughly, with an ear to intended effects, as well as to connotative and associational meanings.  Finally, how do the sounds help you remember the ad--even though you may not want to?
 

A Dumb Poem Lobbing Crumbs and Cream (like Bombs, Only Numb; like Combs, only Bored) at a Tomb

Write a poem as full of rhyme as possible.  Use true rhyme, identical rhyme, light rhyme, slant rhyme, sight rhyme, masculine rhyme, feminine rhyme, linked rhyme, analyzed rhyme, echo rhyme, and rhyme riche.

Do not, however, use end rhyme.
 
 

Found Poem

Write a "found" poem. Click here for an article that may help.

Also, check out the "Found and Insane" stuff at UBU Web.

Charles Bernstein's Writing Exercises

A lot of interesting and sometimes wacky idea.

Go to: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/experiments.html

Google Poem

Put together a poem using Leevi Lehto's engine.

Go here: http://www.leevilehto.net/google/google.asp

Googlism.com

More play with Google.

Go here: http://googlism.com/

The Dialectizer

Convert any web page text into a different dialect ("Redneck," "Jive," "Swedish Chef," "Cockney," "Moron," etc.

Frequently lame, silly, or just plain idiotic, but good for an occasional giggle. Go here: http://rinkworks.com/dialect/

Hint: try typing in (or copying and pasting) the URL for our Course Information page!

Course Info URL: http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/instruct/cinichol/CreativeWriting/CourseInfo.htm

Speaking Terms

Choose a poem from our course readings which confuses you, then respond to the following:

1)  Read through the poem again.  Spend five to ten minutes freewriting about it--your immediate thoughts and feelings.  Don't stop, don't reread what you've written, don't edit.  Just write.

2)  Write down a single word representing the poem.

3)  Who seems to be the speaker of the poem?  Where is it set?

4)  Pretend you are the poet.  Explain why you wrote this poem.

5)  Talk to the writer.  Ask him or her whatever questions you have.  Try general as well as very specific questions, and consider anything and everything about the poem.

6)  Again pretend that you are the poet:  answer the questions you asked in number 5.

7)  Look at the poem's title.  How might it help you understand the poem?  Invent two or three alternative titles.

8)  Read the poem aloud, and have someone read it aloud to you.

9)  What line or phrase seems to you most striking and memorable?

10)  Put the poem away and return to it in two weeks.  Read it again carefully.  Put it away again for another couple months, and then read it again.  Stash it for a year, and then pull it out and read it.  Stick it in a drawer until 2009; take it out and read it.  Put in under your mattress until the day you lose your hearing; pull the poem out and read it again.  While lying in your grave, recite it to the angels.
 
 

A Long Poem About Something Really Little

Write a long poem about something really little.
 
 

Jambalya Poem  (A Version of "The Exquisite Corpse")

Join three or more people and pass around four slips of paper for each person.  Everyone should then write a noun on his or her first slip of paper, a verb or verb phrase on the second slip, a simile on the third, and a prepositional or participle phrase on the fourth--anything that comes immediately to mind.

Examples:

Concrete or abstract nouns:  "Truck," "Tiger," "Grief," "Shoelace," "Euphoria," "Sandwich," "Honor"

Verbs:  "remember," "circumnavigate," "chatter," "criss-cross," "fumble," "boil," "swelter"

Participle phrases:  "shoveling the manure," "rumpling the sheet," "slicing a peach," "riding a wave"

Prepositional phrases:  "in the pocket," "around the corner," "about a war," "for a cause," "under the earth"

Similes:  "like sorrow," "like a cat," "like footsteps," "like dust"

Someone should next put all of the slips in a hat, mix them up, and draw them out one by one, arranging them into complete sentences (and perhaps then into stanzas) as they are removed.  You can make slight grammatical changes to help the sentences cohere, adding conjunctions and articles, changing verb forms etc.--but do NOT force the content of the sentences to be logical or pat.  Look for unusual connections, fresh comparisons, imaginative possibilities, obsessions held in common as well as those uniquely yours.
 

Love Poem

Write a love poem.
 

Prose Poem

Write a prose poem.
 

Elegy

Write an elegy.
 

 
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