Besides being challenging and fun to do, these activities can produce some strong some strong poems.

For best results, paste the activity into your word processor, or print out a hard copy. Then write quickly and freely, trusting your imagination, hunches, gut feelings. When you finish, read the poem. When you're ready, share the poem with a partner or in a small group.

As you work with these approaches and techniques, you'll begin to sense how you can slice, dice, and blend them together in poems you make from scratch.

Write a poem addressed to some animal, object, place, or maybe even to a person, whom you don't know or don't expect to read this. You could write to your cat, to a lemon, to a cutthroat trout, to Madonna, to Martha Stewart, to the Empire State Building, or . . ..

Write a poem of 4 to 9 lines containing the words "mustard," "piano," "elastic," "moat," "notorious."

Or, if you prefer, use the words "dimple," "horseradish," "wipeout," "organic," "cell."

Write a companion poem to the apostrophe you wrote for Poem 1, this time writing from the perspective of whomever or whatever you addressed the first time.

You may choose not to reveal the speaker's identity. That is, if you wrote #1 to an eagle, you would now write from an eagle's point of view, but might not let on that an eagle is the poem's speaker.