innominate

Posted bywordsandcoffee1Posted inPoetry, Teaching, WritingTags:, , , , 
intensify steel volume
under roaring echoes
memories still cradled there
buried in the snowdrifts

This week’s prompt for Wea’ve Written Weekly was really intriguing! You can check it out in more detail here, but Denise was our Poet of the Week (selected by yours truly for her beautiful poem “Generation Gap”). She wanted us to incorporate a computer tool like a poem generator or random word generator into our writing.

I haven’t used a tool like this before, so I tried out the Random Word Generator and ended up with this list: intensify, deposit, reporter, steel, volume, twitch. I selected a few to create the first line of my mysterious train trestle poem. I also returned to the generator and selected the “weird words” options to find my poem’s title.

I’m not sure I will try this again, but it was certainly something different and fun! I can also see these tools as something I might incorporate into a classroom lesson; it seems like just the right amount of weirdness to lure my college students into a spontaneous writing activity. Spring semester is about to begin, so I need all the unique lesson planning ideas I can gather. I’m teaching a few composition courses and an interpersonal communication course, and I like to keep things fresh and maybe a little weird. If you have any random intriguing writing-related (or conversation-related!) lesson prompts, feel free to drop them (or any other thoughts) in the comments. 🙂

22 thoughts on “innominate”

    1. Thanks, David! Sometimes I find teaching inspiration in the most unusual places, though this one was a smooth connection. I actually have 9 classes this semester! It’s the same I had last semester. I had already agreed to adjunct for a local university before I was hired at my full time gig at a technical college, so I accidentally ended up with a ridiculous amount of courses this school year as a result. Fortunately, I love teaching and many of the courses are similar or different sections of the same course, but it’s a LOT of students to keep track of! 😀

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      2. Oh, yes, I’ve got about 200 students! It’s all good fun, though. Thanks for letting me know about the W3; I’ll have a chance to look at it closer to the weekend. 🙂

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  4. I like this a lot, especially the roaring echoes.
    Here’s a prompt I liked, via Robert Pinsky–each member of the class contributes a line from one of their poems. Then each student makes their own poem from those lines–they don’t have to use all of them, but at least 12. They can change genders and tenses and punctuation and line breaks, but must leave the word sequences intact. It’s like a cento poem, but has a much stranger feeling because of the random nature of it. Of course I didn’t have a classroom of students to draw from, so I just took random lines from an anthology of poetry. I really enjoyed the challenge, and it makes you think about how you could reconstruct your own writing more creatively by combining thoughts from different places and times. (K)

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  6. Hi Sarah at Words and Coffee,

    I enjoyed reading your poem.

    Trying things, for the first time, of a different nature, isn’t easy.

    But our creativity wins in the struggle.

    I congratulate you for this poem 🎉🎉

    Also, thank you so much for adding your important comments on my blog. Love this!

    Liked by 1 person

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