prompt 198 Child’s Play

For the final ten years of my employment, I worked as a free-lance Writing Instructor, teaching classes at area colleges (including the University from which I graduated), and in several Fine Arts Schools. My students were adults.

My classes were writing based and often included poetry.  I facilitated one-day workshops and seminars, many of which were exclusively about writing poetry.  I never told my adult students that the exercises I asked them to do were based in ideas I had found in books written about helping children learn how to write poetry.  It was my personal practice to do those exercises right along with my students and those brief exercises sometimes found their way into my own writing. An example of that may be found here:

At Fifty

The second to last stanza is the complete response to an exercise in using an element of weather to define some aspect of ones own person. I had done the exercise in class two days before I wrote the above poem and it seemed to fall naturally into that space.

Recently, I found an online site that offers children (or anyone else) the experience of writing a poem by a fill in the blank type of method. The site is called Instant Poetry. click on their name to visit the site

In the left hand sidebar of the site, you will find numerous types of poems to choose from. Please try at least one or two of them. Then using one of them for a base, rework, revise, and rewrite it until you are satisfied with the results. Although this is essentially child’s play, you bring to it your own wealth of poetic experience and that can make for some very fine poetry. You might want to cite Instant Poetry somewhere in your post.

Thanks for joining me over the past month, and have fun as you continue to write,

Elizabeth