Poetry- Writing and Reading

Before You Begin

Before you begin writing, there are a few simple ways to get your creative juices flowing. Poetry is not just about finding a word that rhymes to end a line with. It is about the connotations of words, the connections between them, and the images and feelings they conjure up.

Exercise 1: Word Association

This is a very basic exercise that involves thinking of any word, writing it down, and then thinking of a word you associate with it, and so on, forming a chain of associations. For example, I could think of the word pig. My chain might go like this;

Pig, pink, fat, round, balloon, party, cake, birthday, present…

Or, say, shirt;

Shirt, check, chess, board, boring, ironing, clothes, shopping, Saturday, holidays, sunshine, yellow, banana, andy warhol…

Its simply an exercise like practicing scales in music, and is good to use even if youve already begun writing, to limber up and break writers block.