In my high school creative writing class, we write poems in the exquisite corpse fashion, this way:
In class: Each student gets a piece of ruled paper and a piece of scratch paper (for covering up the writing on the ruled sheet). On the ruled sheet, they write some random 4-word phrase, putting the 4th word on the following line, as such:
all the best
luck
And then they cover up the first line, revealing only “luck,” as they pass the sheets to the person next to them (while students are in a circle). The next student sees ONLY the last word – in this example, “luck” — and adds to it:
luck OF THE IRISH
WHO
and then covers up everything on the sheet except the word on the new line, “WHO,” and so on, around the room, for about 20 minutes. At the end, students remove the cover sheet and read the entire thing like a continuous poem, or maybe they just pull out some unique lines. It can lead to some interesting lines of potential poems.
We then use these Exquisite Corpse sheets to write additional poems:
Poems #1 & #2: Take words and phrases from your Exquisite Corpse sheet and combine these into a poem freewrite. Minimum 25 words. Do this twice.
Poem #3: Write down the words from a column of words on that sheet. Write 20 words as a poem.
Poem #4: Take the words from #3 and replace each word with a word that sounds like it. Write as a poem.
In this post, there are some samples taken from Exquisite Corpse poems created in my classes this semester.
MonkeyMoonMachine 