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Directions: Open the poem with the first project and close it with the last. Otherwise use the projects in whatever order you like, giving each project at least one line. Try to use all twenty projects. Feel free to repeat those you like. Fool around. Enjoy.  


If you click the above, you'll see where I found this online.  However, I feel  compelled to say that this was created by one of my favorite teachers, Jim Simmerman.

1. Begin the poem with a metaphor.
2. Say something specific but utterly preposterous. 
3. Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.
4. Use one example of synesthesia (mixing the senses).
5. Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
6. Contradict something you said earlier in the poem. 
7. Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
8. Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem. 
9. Use an example of false cause-effect logic
10. Use a piece of “talk” you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don’t understand).
11. Create a metaphor using the following construction: ‘The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun)…”
12. Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities. 
13. Make the persona or character in the poem do something he/she could not do in “real life.”
14. Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
15. Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
16. Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective 
17. Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense. 
18. Use a phrase from a language other than English. 
19. Make a nonhuman object say or do something human (personification).
20. Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that “echoes” an image from earlier in the poem. 

Here is an example poem, written by Jim Simmerman:

Quote

Moon Go Away I Don’t Love You No More

1. Morning comes on like a wink in the dark.
2. It’s me it’s winking at.
3. Mock light lolls in the boughs of the pines.   Dead air numbs my hands. A bluejay jabbers like nobody’s business. Woodsmoke comes spelunking my nostrils. and tastes like burned toast where it rests on my tongue. 
4. Morning tastes the way a rock felt kissing me one the eye:
5. a kiss thrown by Randy Shellhourse on the Jacksonville, Arkansas, Little  League field because we were that bored in 1965.
6. We weren’t that bored in 1965
7. Dogs ran amuck in the years of the poor, and music spilled out of every window though none of us could dance.
8. None of us could do the Frug, the Dirty Dog 
9. because we were small and wore small hats. 
10. Moon go away, I don’t love you no more was the only song we knew by heart.
11. The dull crayons of sex and meanness scribbled all over our thoughts.
12. We were about as happy as headstones.
13. We fell through the sidewalk and changed color at night.
14. Little Darry was there to scuff through it all, 
15. so that today, tomorrow, the day after that he will walk backward among the orphaned trees
16. and toy rocks that lead him nowhere I  could ever track, till he’s so far away, so lost
17. I’ll have to forget him to know where he’s gone.
18. La grave poullet du soir est toujours avec moi-
19. even as the sky opens for business; even as shadows kick off their shoes; 
20. even as this torrent of clean morning light comes flooding down and over it all.