Some Super Easy Poetry Exercises

A gift for you to do, and for others too in a pinch

It’s nearly Christmas and everyone’s tired and you know what, maybe your best mate doesn’t need a bath set and maybe you don’t need to go to the shops. Giving is great, I wrote a gift list, it is lovely. BUT. Sometimes it is more nourishing for everyone if you just sit in front of the tree with your hot chocolate and your songs and you make someone a gift instead. 

Here are three ideas of beautiful things to make, using just a pen, a source text, and your poor tired mind. 

Blackout Poetry

This is a simple and incredibly fun poetry exercise. What you do is you take a page of text - any text, printed out or pulled from a book from the charity shop - and you colour all of it in, opaque black, ALMOST all of it, just leaving a few choice words to form a kind of fragmented poem. Look at this example taken from The Great Gadsby and shared by Chris Lott -