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Young Writers Society


Poetree Games



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Tue May 13, 2014 6:55 pm
Rydia says...



A Chronology of Games

All games featured below have been created by Heather M. Warren. Feel free to use and distribute them any time.


Poetree

1. A game of word association is played to produce an even number of words. Somewhere in the region of 16 to 20 is a good amount.

Word association is where the first participant writes a word and then the next writes the first word which comes into their head and this continues around the group, not necessarily in order, until the desired amount of words has been achieved. The participants don't have to justify their word choice, but I have done so in the example to show how the words are associated:

Murder
Crows (a flock of crows is known as a murder)
Raven (A raven is a black bird, somewhat similar to a crow)
Chelsea (The name of a character from a show called 'That's so Raven')
Football (There is a Chelsea football team)

2. Those words are paired up at random either through the process of drawing from a hat or using a coin flip game.

3. Participants are either arbitrarily given 6 pairings or they are allowed to choose their own. Repeats don’t matter and not every pairing need be used but it’s good to have a variety.

4. Participants create six lines of poetry using their word pairings. The word itself does not always have to feature in the line - instead the meaning of one word may be applied to the other. For example repeat and train could become ‘the train of the train of the train’ or ‘My dog has learned how to bark twice’. You’re also welcome to use the words though: ‘The train is on repeat’. It is also the poet’s choice as to whether these six lines form a poem or are six individual, unconnected lines.

5. Each participant chooses one of their lines and one from each other poet taking part. These lines are then collected together ready for the final stage.

6. The poets now must make a poem by reordering the chosen lines. They may alter the language slightly by adding or taking away a word, changing a word, splitting lines etc. However, the lines should only be changed so far and it is to the poet to decide where their own boundary lies.

SMILE: Structure; Meaning; Interest; Language; Editing

Some of you may have read my poetry article which claims these are the five key components to a poem. Now we’re going to prove it.

1. Structure. Decide if your poem will be free-verse or structured.

2. Meaning. Choose the subject of your poem. This can be anything, either a single word like ‘dinosaurs’ or a short phrase like ‘the prevention of world hunger’.

3. Interest. Who is the audience for your poem, who will be interested in reading this? Children or adults, males or females? Christians, dancers, students?

4. Language. Write a metaphor or simile to use in your poem. This should relate in some way to your meaning.

5. Editing. Every poem should be edited so now you are going to trade components with each other. Did you really think there wouldn’t be an experimental twist on this? Maybe that should be the new E... So I want to see you keep just one of your original components, the rest you must swap with someone else and you must swap with at least two different people. So person A might have ‘ghosts’ for their meaning while person B has ‘chocolate’. Then they switch with each other and person A gets chocolate while person B gets ghosts.

6. Your list should look something like this:

1. Free Verse
2. Patchwork Quilts
3. Rock stars
4. His vampire heart breathed like living stone

7. Write that poem.

Acrostic I am

1. Choose a word. It must have six letters or more.

2. Invent a comparison. This could be anything from ‘The river is like a snake’ to ‘books are the soul of the author’.

3. Choose a colour.

4. Write down something you are. For example, I am a dreamer so I might write ‘dreamer’ or I may decide to go for something more concrete, like ‘always late’ or ‘in my room’. If you can place ‘I am’ in front of it then it’s allowed!

5. You guessed it! Trade with the other poets in the room. You may keep a maximum of one of your original components but may trade them all if you wish. You must trade with at least two different people.

6. You should have a list that looks something like this:

1. Summer
2. Diamonds sparkle like vampires
3. Cerulean blue
4. In my room

7. Write that poem. The word is your acrostic, so:

Something something something
Under a cerulean blue sky
More something something
My diamonds sparkle like vampires
Edward is lurking in my room; I am
Relieved that I’m outside
Writing Gooder

~Previously KittyKatSparklesExplosion15~

The light shines brightest in the darkest places.
  





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Tue Jun 03, 2014 6:05 pm
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LadySpark says...



Poetry Off

Invented by @SparkToFlame on the third of June, 2014.

>You split into groups of two (or three) and are given a category. (i.e. something like 'poetry written before 1900, or sonnets)
>From that category, you have 10 minutes to go in search of a poem written by a famous person that fits said category.
>Crowd chooses the best. After the groups all have one winner, there's an allstar round, with a ridiculously hard or silly category. (i.e. find the worst anne sexton poem you can, or find the oldest poem you can)
hush, my sweet
these tornadoes are for you


-Richard Siken


Formerly SparkToFlame
  








What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye