Ludic Poetry as Writing Exercise

Posted by Jennifer Baylor at The Writing Cocoon.  

Sunflower field: Provence

In my writing class this week, we started off with a little ludic poetry. This poetry is more like a word game, and it is great for getting you to think about word selection. 

I particularly liked this exercise as I've been writing a lot of flash fiction lately. With flash fiction, you are forced to distill your story to its core and choose your language carefully in order to maximize your story writing potential.

Are you ready?

The exercise I'm starting with is the univocalic poem. It is simply a poem in which you use only one vowel (let's begin with the letter 'o'). To start, I wrote a list of o-words, divided by noun/verb/adjective/conjunction/etc.  The exercise was much more difficult than I thought it would be. Now, for some really odd/bad poetry!


Only Sorrow 

No moon, no glow
Sorrow won't go
Tomorrow blows cold
Comfort grows old 


 Top Show

Stop to pop corn
Hot dogs, top notch
Won't borrow no flops 
Only mock crock plots     


Storm's Doom

Gloomy snows follow storms
Downtown grows cold
Comfort fools forlorn folks
Rooftops won't hold. 

Bloody socks do no good
Footsteps grow slow
Sorrow knocks sorry moods 
Only doom to sow. 
  

Poor Frogs

Horned frogs slowly hop, 
Onto stools or rocks.
Soon flocks boldly drop,
Down to scoop frogs off.  


Before you laugh at my efforts, give it a go yourself. Post your own poems and link back to them in the comments - I'd love to read someone else's poems. Someone has to be better at this than I. Anyone have some good two and three syllable words with only 'o' as its vowels?