Playing Poetry Games

This week during MiNT Magazine’s weekly meeting we decided to host a creative writing workshop to get some ideas flowing. I was in charge of thinking of some different exercises to play with the group, and I was so delighted by the task at hand. “This will be so easy.” I thought. I’ll Google some games, present them to the group, and then be forever loved and adored by the masses.

Sadly I am not yet that admired, but the games we played were pretty darn fun. What I love about doing these exercises is that you never know what will actually help you or not! One fun poetry game we played was arranging groups of words in different ways to get all different types of meanings. Another game we played was shouting out themes and then trying to match obscure words to them. While they were entertaining and silly I truly do think they were helpful.

Sometimes it is just so hard to start a poem. Even if one has an idea in mind, what words should come first? What lines should be in the beginning, and which in the end? Every now and then simply just sitting at one’s computer with a blank page staring back will not produce work. Sometimes people really need to try different methods to at least dip their toes in the water.

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