I’ve referred to the Poetry Bingo creative writing activity before, and I’ve published some poems that resulted from it, but I wanted here to post the directions I’ve been using lately, along with a couple filled-in examples (Day 1 empty form here; Days 2-3 empty form here; Day 1 filled in here; Days 2-3 here — I space this activity out over 3 class days, but that wouldn’t be necessary. Before I assign students the Step 3 part, I model it by leading a class through the process by asking several students what is their least favorite line of the current poem, and then replacing that line’s words by using other words from the original poems or chart, randomly looking up new words in books, finding synonyms or antonyms, or sometimes just writing a new line from my mind). What I love about this method is that it allows writers to put together essentially random words so that we can write things beyond the ideas we already have. Readers’ brains (and writers’, too) can’t help but find meanings out of even randomly associated words, and I love thinking things that I’ve never thought before.
Here’s the poem I wrote (as copied from Days 2-3 above):
Notice lies of disgraced iodine that carpet the memory of a cardboard lament. The soaring harvest of tall bells includes image expense. Sinuous buds want convincing tells.
MonkeyMoonMachine 