Staying creative: Poetry Exercises

One thing that's always been really important to me is staying creative! My favorite way to exercise my creativity is through writing poetry. Sometimes I go through periods of writers block where I don't feel inspired by anything, and when that happens I've found some exercises that help get me through it.

Exercise Number 1: Blackout Poetry

Most of you have probably already seen some of these on the internet. Blackout poetry is taking a page of a book and picking out words from it to turn into a poem, once you have those words you black the rest of the page out.

This is one of the first ones I did, I took a page from The Great Gatsby. Some people blackout the actual book pages but I don't (and I don't really recommend it). I pick a page and then I make a copy of it, so that way I'm not damaging the book.

Exercise Number 2: Collage Poetry

This exercise is especially good if you have a lot of old magazines laying around! I like to flip through one and cut out a bunch of random words, then I lay them out and try to make a poem out of them!

I like these two exercises a lot because instead of forming your thoughts into words (which can sometimes be hard for a scatterbrained person like me) you're taking these words that are already laid out in front of you and turning them into a thought.

Exercise Number 3: Code Poetry

This is a little bit harder but still really fun! I first saw one of these poems on tumblr. These are harder for me to explain, but you basically take your code phrase and then make a word out of each letter in the phrase.

"They all fall no one stays" was my code phrase in this one. These really make you think, plus it's like you're TALKING IN CODE. SO COOL.

I'm no expert at writing poetry, but I do really enjoy it and so I thought I would share these tips with you for the next time you're feeling like you need a little inspiration!

XO,
Elizabeth <3