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Poetry Workshop Free Writing Prompts

This activity will generally take about 3 hours (two classes for a class that meets two days, one for a class that meets once a week) but use it the way you feel it works best for your class.

Use the poem POETRY IS A TRESSEL by Nikki Giovanni that is in her voice to get students to write about what is important in their life and use their personal voice in a similar way that Giovanni does. It is also a poem about poetry.

Have copies of the poem and read it out loud with the class Have them create their own version of the poem based on their topic

Explain what a prose poem is to the class Have them write a prose poem Then have them put the poem away for the next class period and on another day have them re-cast the poem in a sonnet or some other form of poetry

For the second half or second class set up the room in poetry stations and have students go around to each station and write poems based on the prompt.

• Station one – cut up a short poem and have student use the words to create a new poem
• Station two – Working on Line breaks: is everything totally free in poetry—is the ultimate “I can do what I want” genre, with no rules or reason? Really it’s not –although the “rules” aren’t always what they used to be, poems should be written intentionally. You should know why you broke the line where you did.

Using one of your poems, try at least one of the following ways of breaking lines: (from Hewitt’s Today You are my Favorite Poet).

Syllable Patterns: Write out the syllables for each line as it stands now. Look for any patterns. Revise the poem to make every line the same syllable count, or to alternate syllable counts to reflect a pattern.

Look for the rhythm of a line (think back to a limerick or think of a favorite song). Say the poem in “ba-da’s”—in nonsense words that show the rhythm. Work on how you could extend that rhythm throughout the poem, or how you could alternate a few rhythmic patterns. If you were going to set it to music, how would it work?

Humor or surprise in line endings Often lines end with a twist that pulls you to the next line, or that makes the next line a mild surprise

without him

Or, use line breaks to crate a moment of tension. Sometimes this means ending with a world that has several meanings, and the next line elaborate on that:

into winter

Physical Shape: Outline a shape of a poem—it could be highly patterned shape, or it could be the shape of line in a poem you like. (Look at the examples—some are long and skinny, some have text-dense lines, some alternate. And consider how the shape of these poems complements the subject of the poem.) Experiment with making one of you poems fit a shape that you think best expresses the subject of your poem.

• Station three – re-seeing thorough another form: Take one poem and try it in another form (one of those tried on another day, or something else.): Haiku, Loon, Limerick, Sonnet (show examples)
• Station four – picture poem: have students write a poem based on pictures that are at the station
• Station five – have copies of poetry books for students to look at and create their own poems based on a form or idea they find interesting to them.
• Station six – re-seeing through another perspective: Take a poem and try it from another point of view (another person in the poem, someone who’s not mentioned who also might have a perspective on the subject of the poem, etc) Just quickly sketch it out and see what happens.

When students are done with each station they can, if time, go back and work with something they did not get to do the first time around. Give a copy of each of the stations so students can work on these on their own.

You can use any of the above ideas or include ones of your own – the purpose is to get students thinking about what they think poetry is and can be. Many times students think poetry is for “those people” (they mean writers) and not them or they don’t “understand” what poetry is, but you want to encourage them to create poetry that is meaningful to them as well as help them to see that poems often have the most meaning for the writer.