You know that some days you just can’t get the words to flow, day to day events are playing on your mind or else you just can’t get motivated to put pen to paper. Here is a good task to help you overcome your writer’s block.
Take a newspaper or magazine and flick through it tearing out any headlines or short bodies of text that catch your eye. It can be anything from ‘Recipe for Lemon Drizzle Cake’ to ‘Queen Looks Fresh’.
Pile all of the clippings together and then try to arrange them into a poem or a short piece of prose. For this example you might have come up with ‘Queen looks for fresh cake recipe.’ If you come up with a themed poem brilliant! If it’s poetic nonsense it doesn’t matter. Edward Lear was a great nonsense poet.
Here is a poem which I wrote composed entirely of words from Matalan catalogue. It was a challenge at first but it just goes to show that ideas for poetry are everywhere.
Beau
Smart weekender, skinny brown dog,
Hiker boots, bobble beanie.
‘Autumn looks made to last’
Gold season.
Two cream fringed woven trunks,
ruby lace butterfly, feather bowed.
