Poetry Exercise

I love to invent poetry exercises, and I hope to post many here. Feel free to use and change this however you wish – the original content on this site is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 2.5 license. Also, if you try this exercise yourself and want to share your results, I would love to read your poem. If you email it to me and send your snail-mail address, I will send you a postcard.

Have you seen Amazon’s new Concordance feature? Find a book that interests you and has the Search Inside capability. If you scroll down to the Inside This Book section, you can click on Concordance and get a list of the 100 most prevalent words in that book.

-Write down the 25 words you like best from that list.
-Write a poem with 5 stanzas of 5 lines each and use one of those words in each line.
-Each line should have 10, 11, or 12 syllables.