Open Poetry Exercises

Open Poetry Exercises

Linkinbrick 07 Sep 2026 15:41

So, as Stygian Blue recently suggested, it may be pretty neat to have a place to learn/train poetry in this community. Whether a forum thread, a discord channel, or a discord thread is best for this; a forum thread is easy to make, so here it is.

Rough idea for how this should work is that any given exercise starts out as a post here that explains the idea/the rules that make up the exercise and a start of the chain if the exercise works as a chain (i.e. I do this with a setup that has been given to me and set up the same step for the next person and so on), or an example if it doesn't chain. And then whoever wants to participate can just reply to that post. Easy.

Re: Open Poetry Exercises

Linkinbrick 07 Sep 2026 15:44

So this is neat and simple exercise/game. Usually played between two people, but there shouldn't be an issue having more people chiming in. The nice thing about it is that you will actually end up with a somewhat neat poem that, depending on how much the different writers differ in opinion about the theme, can be arguing with itself in a funny way.

Each turn a participant writes two lines, one finishing a rhyme begun in the last turn and one starting a rhyme for the next turn.

To fix ourselves on a meter: iambic pentameter: Five feet, so ten or eleven syllables, depending on if the last syllable is stressed or not; made up of iambs, so unstressed-stressed.

Let's start with the single most ubiquitous theme in all of poetry:

I know the autumn leaves are kind of nice
And cooler air is neat, but still, the price
I mourn, the summer gone, and far too soon
- your line here, rhyming on soon-
- your line here, setting a new rhyme-

Last edited on 07 Sep 2026 15:46 by Linkinbrick Show more