Combining senses

Try combining smell, taste and touch words with sound or speech words. See what kind of attention perking images you can come up with .... a gingery drawl, a raw sigh, crisp chatter ...

SMELL	TASTE	TOUCH	SOUND	SPEECH
sweet balmy earthy rotten fishy scented spicy piney reeking fragrant sharp tempting spoiled moldy perfumed fresh pungent sickly	oily bittersweet crisp fruity overripe buttery hearty ripe tangy burnt salty mellow bland raw gingery bitter sugary sour hot peppery	cool spongy mushy thick hot thin fuzzy crisp slippery satiny icy soft rubbery elastic feathery tough silky sandy oily waxy furry tender woolly wet gritty rough smooth warm dry prickly furry damp steamy velvety sharp fleshy dull hairy leathery sticky	sigh growl bump smash bark clink murmur crash thump rasp roar mute whisper thud boom clash blare still whir pitter-patter thunder jamble racket hush rustle thwap bang bawl bleat hubbub	stutter screech whisper stammer snort whimper giggle bellow talk laugh chatter speak sing murmur drawl

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From Rip the Page!: Adventures in Creative Writing by Karen Benke. A hundred ideas honed in workshops at schools for playing with words, with examples from kids. The exercises are nterspersed with pep talks from writers, many of them children's writers. You can tell she's a poet since her word lists are luscious :-D

Theatrical madness

Theatrical madness
Roads to madness
Can I play with madness?
Dancing in madness
Labyrinth of madness

What's a warm up?

Red rain

Red rain
Red horizon
Red moon
Red sky

What's a warm up?

Last time by moonlight

Last time by moonlight

Women in white

Screaming in the night

What's a warm up?

Moonlight and madness

Bought and sold

Moonlight and madness

Diamonds and rust

Mozart and memories

What's a warm up?

Madder red

Madder red

Burning blue

Mellow yellow

Bitter green

Bruised orange

Frenzied purple

What's a warm up?

Rough silk and Iron maiden

Rough silk

Iron maiden

What's a warm up?

Metaphorically speaking

A metaphor turns one thing into another. Start with the statement:

A road is a road for cars.

and see how many roads (and paths and byways) you can come up with that carry something from one place to another.

• An artery is a road for exhausted blood leading back to the heart.
  
• The internet is a superhighway for spam.
  
• School is a potholed dull path to college that they've been promising to pave for decades.
  
• A river is snowmelt's road from mountain to ocean.
  
• Pretend is a road to anywhere.
  
• A lecture is a pathway to sleep.
  

Coloring all over the lines

For this poetry warm up, put a color in each line. Try starting with just one color.

This will free you to see the color in not only objects but sounds and smells and numbers and feelings.

As the warm up to the warm up, Koch dropped some keys on the desk and slapped the desk with a ruler and asked the kids what color those were. He asked them what was the color of France, England and Spain; of Monday and Wednesday and the number fourteen hundred.

From Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching children to write poetry by Kenneth Koch.

Egg moon

This is an idea from Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching children to write poetry by Kenneth Koch.

A bit pressed for time, here's my explanation from 2007 when I introduced them:

"In his book he has a whole series of what he calls poetry warm ups. It's a way of getting some thoughts down on paper that might with some rearranging, cutting and editing, become a poem or the seed of a poem.

Some are templates, so each line begins the same. Some are the seed to write a series of related ideas. Most have some repetition in them to help get things flowing. Don't be discouraged if your first dozen lines or more are trite. That's just the clogs coming out of your creative pathways :-) But that stuff needs to get out onto paper so the path can be freed for better ideas to flow more freely."

In addition to the regular writing prompts, I'll post one of these warm ups too.

Today's warm up is comparisons.

Include "like" or "as" in each line. The lines can be all about the same thing, or about one subject, or all different.

Some examples of templates:

______ is like ______.

______ is as ______ as ______.

Here are some examples from kids in Kenneth Koch's class:

A butterfly is like a flying rainbow.
Clouds are like flying ice cream.
Hair is like spaghetti.
The sun is as red as a fire.
The moon is like an egg.
Slow is like vanilla ice cream.
A moon is like a banana.
Thunder is like bowling.
Black ink is dark as m idnight.
Snow is as white as the sun shines.
A rose is as red as a beating of drums.

Be the ball

For today's poetry prompt imagine you're a creature or thing. What's it like to be a television or your cat or a cloud or a record album or a fish in a tank ...

The children took the idea in many different directions: interviews, imagining what the answers would be, taking on the persona and revealing the answers ... Don't limit yourself to what you think the approach "must" be :-)

Examples:

I would like to be a pen because every day I would dance and whenever I'm out of ink they would put me away until I got ink. And I would go any place people go.

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Questions to Ask Snow Person

Do you like to be what you are?
Do you like when people step on you and make snow balls with you?
Do you like your color white?
Do you like to be mixed with now?
Do you like to stand all day out in the snow with nothing to do?
Do you like when people fall on you?
Snow
The answer is
NO!!!

---

How does it feel to be a blackboard?
I think it would feel funny,
Always being written on.
Always having examples erased off.
What do you see?
You see many many kids.

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From Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching children to write poetry by Kenneth Koch.

Quiet as a rooster at sunrise

To warm up your poetry muscles today, have fun with false comparisons.

Use the form

As ____ as a ____.

and make comparisons that aren't true.

As always, you can use that format for every line. You can use it at the beginning and then explore the comparison in subsequent lines. Or make a few of the same comparisons and move onto others.

For some reason, it's a lot more fun and freeing than trying to come up with comparisons that are true. Maybe it ties into the psychology of wanting to do whatever we're told not to do ;-)

Here's some examples off the top of my head since this didn't come from Koch's book:

As quiet as a wolf in a hen house.
As quiet as a broken muffler.

As alone as Santa at Christmas.
As alone as a Brittany Spears.

As busy as a beach in winter.
As busy as a full bellied kitten.

A swan of bees

For this warm up, in each line write an fanciful combination. Keep going for 10-15 minutes.

The following examples were all done by children who didn't feel constrained only to combinations that make sense. :-)

swan of bees
sailboat of water
pajamas of oranges
book of stripes
kiss of babies
skeleton of discovery
blackboard of moons
swimming pool of doorknobs
hat of laughs

If you want, you can use templates like:

"I once saw ..."

or

"I wish I had ..."

From Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching children to write poetry by Kenneth Koch.

Same difference

Compare opposites for today's poetry warm up.

Begin with a comparison that is opposite: a big thing and a little thing "An elephant is like a mouse" or two things that seem not alike "Rain is like a cemetery" and then explore how they're alike. You can use one comparison or many comparisons in the poem.

Here's something quick as an example:

An elephant is like a mouse.
Both are gray with long dangling attachments and papery ears and dark button eyes
Rain is like a cemetery.
They're gray and dreary and make the grass grow.
A peach is like a snake.
They bulge when they are full of food.
A ghost is like a pencil.
You find them in the most unexpected places.

Hey, that was fun! :-)

---

As I should have explained at the beginning of the month about warm ups, but didn't have my notes from last year:

Warm ups: These are chances to be wild and creative and get the words and ideas flowing. Generate lines based on a template. The point isn't to create a whole poem but to generate lines for the poem. The ones at the beginning will probably be trite, cliche and stiff. Let them out onto the paper. Allow them to clear a path that will allow the creative ideas to flow out. :-)

The "I" writing the poem doesn't need to be you! It can be anyone or any*thing* you want.

If you get stuck before your 15 minutes is up, read back over what you've written to see if it inspires some more ideas.

When you're done, you can toss out the ones you don't like and collect the lines you like into a poem :-)

Fiddling

For today's poetry warm up begin with:

If I were ______ I would ______.

Then either continue that pattern with different speculations or start each line with "I would" to expand on the original speculation.

Here's an example from the book that was prompted by the more specific "If I were snow ..." (so you don't need to begin with the same object for yours, but can if you want!)

If I were snow I would fill up the streets.
If I were snow I would also freeze my brother.
If I were snow I would be mean and nice.
If I were snow and I saw somebody eating something very hot I would cool it for him.

From Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching children to write poetry by Kenneth Koch.

Not happening

For today's poetry warm up, make a statement about something ordinary. Then think of strange, impossible or maybe beautiful things that you might wish were there but aren't. For example:

The stars twinkle in the night sky.
None are falling to earth.
None spell my name in the sky.

From Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching children to write poetry by Kenneth Koch.

Sound of noise

Warm ups: These are chances to be wild and creative and get the words and ideas flowing. Generate lines based on a template. The point isn't to create a whole poem but to generate lines for the poem. The ones at the beginning will probably be trite, cliche and stiff. Let them out onto the paper. Let them to clear a path that will allow the creative ideas to flow out. :-)

Write a noisy warm up poem. :-)

As a template for each line you can use one of the following (or come up with your own):

______ sounds like ______.

or

The noise of/made by ______ is like ______.

or

The sound of ______ is like _____.

You can use the same template line for each line. You can mix them up. Use the template as an aid rather than a straight jacket!

From Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching children to write poetry by Kenneth Koch.

Top 10 Tabloid Headlines for April 2008

April is National Play with Words Month!

Actually it's National Poetry Month but to keep the prompts relatively short and encourage people who cringe at the word poetry, it's a whole lot more about playing with words.

Last year I introduced Kenneth Koch's poetry warm up exercises. (You can see them all here by clicking on Poetry Warm Ups over on the right.) They're a way of playing with words to get stuff flowing :-)

No actual poetry will be produced, though you may come up with an intriguing line that leads to a poem or a story.

For today, use the structure of the first tabloid headline and generate similar lines of the form:

Food -- Noun -- -ed verb

Cucumber Killer Captured
Bean Bomber Bamboozled
Anchovy Anarchist Annihilated

Top 10 Tabloid Headlines from APRIL 1998

1. CUCUMBER KILLER CAPTURED! -- WWN
   
2. BEN FRANKLIN SHOCKER!He was a Founding Father, a signer of the Declaration of Independence -- AND A SERIAL KILLER! -- WWN
   
3. Teens ordered to clean toilets after peeing on theater seats! -- WWN
   
4. 10 GIRAFFES HAVE HEADS TORN OFF -- when zoo truck passes under low bridge -- WWN
   
5. Kitten drowned by a giant goldfish!  Cat dips paw in tank & fish pulls him in! -- WWN
   
6. Exploding grapefruits kill hundreds in Argentina! -- WWN
   
7. DEAD HUBBY BURIED WITH WINNING LOTTO TICKET IN HIS POCKET Anxious wife digs up 103 corpses looking for him! -- WWN
   
8. FARMER DEVELOPS THE ELVIS CHICKEN! New birds sport slick hairdos & swivel their hips when they walk! -- WWN
   
9. Gun-totin' Texan shoots baby kitten. . .   THEN CLAIMS SELF-DEFENSE! -- WWN
   
10. VENGEFUL OLDSTER SUES DAUGHTER FOR DEAD WIFE'S ASHES . . . SO HE CAN FLUSH THEM DOWN THE TOILET! -- WWN

The third eye

For the poetry warm up today, use the template: "The third eye can see ..."

The third eye can see what regular eyes can't or is only open when the regular eyes are closed.

Here are some examples of children's poems from the book:

The third eye can see inside me
The third eye can see my voice
The third eye can see my bones
The third eye can see the wind

From Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching children to write poetry by Kenneth Koch.

Onomatopoetry

For today's poetry warm up play with onomatopoetic sounds. Begin with a sound and then follow with words that sound like it (but don't necessarily rhyme). You can explore one word for several lines or a different word on each line.

Here's some examples from Kenneth Koch's class:

The buzz of the bees was as fuzzy as my cousin's dozen muzzled puzzles.

clink --- pink, drink
tap --- hat, snap, black, cat

From Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching children to write poetry by Kenneth Koch.