Haunted

Have you tried making "found poetry"?  Excellent to do with your book club, or as a school assignment, choose a number of words you like from a book you are reading, and see if you can put them together in a new way as a poem. 

 You may find your poem still tends to reflect themes in the book, an interesting consideration for authors on word choice.  Alternatively your poem may turn out to say something other, deeper, darker.   You may also find as I did, to my utter surprise, that even in found poetry, not everyone gets it; there are poets out there even if supplied with others' words, and people who see the world, perhaps, in a more concrete or less verbal fashion, and may struggle a little with the concept.  An alternative assignment, rather than asking your poets to choose words, is to give a passage from which they redact words, black out words with a marker, and then read what words are left.  This also makes something visual to look at, with the black stripes, so has an appeal for the more visual art oriented.  

Please remember to attribute the original author.  I made mine with words from Allison Mills's The Ghost Collector, a juvenile chapter book.  I think a found poem is a nice review of, or plug for, a book.

Here's mine:

                                                                    Haunted 

                                                        River, shivering

                                                        plastered, soaked

                                                        Water, heavy, dirt.

                                                        Drizzling, gray, sad.

                                                        Young.

                                                        Focus--change--

                                                        I don't understand what happened--

                                                        Confusing

                                                        flickering

                                                        Ghost.

                                                        Do you know my name?