I worked with two Humanities teachers in my school district to design a writing workshop for students in our 9th Grade Academy with ways that they can create poetry from prose. Here is one form of writing we used in two variations: found poetry and blackout poetry. I was using my blog post from Tuesday to model how to let prose inspire poetry.
Found Poetry
Found poetry is poetry that is found in the words of existing poems or prose and created as a new original work. Some poets use pages of discarded books or those from Little Free Libraries as a supply of pages. Blackout poetry is a form of found poetry. In found poetry, you use any existing writing and swipe those words to go in your own poem. In blackout poetry, you draw black lines through the words you did not select for your poem.
A Silly Selfie
I thought it
was a
silly
selfie
this gift ~
one of the grandchildren
posing
playing
the look on his face
priceless
Here is what my blackout poem looked like in print form:
Common Threads 