The poems described here don’t have to rhyme or follow a structure like a haiku, diamante, or acrostic. These list poems use sensory details or repetitions to give them cohesiveness. You can assign a length to the poems, five, ten, or twenty lines, or allow students to work to a length that is right for their thoughts.
Noise Poem
Select a location as the theme of this poem, such as the forest, the city, home, a soccer game, etc. The setting will be the title of the poem. Moving down the page, students list things associated with this place.
“Home” could include telephone, alarm clock, bed, television, table, chair, family, etc. Students complete this list poem by going back down their list and connecting a sound to each item, such as “Televisions chatter.” Some objects may require a bit of creative license, leading to “Beds snore.”
Color Poem
Each student selects a favorite color, which will be the title of her poem. Each line starts (Color) is a _______. For example,
Black is a crow.
Black is a bad mood.
Black is nighttime.
Senses and Similes
Students select an object that they will compare to other things. To encourage creative comparisons, students will work through the five senses, in no particular order.
_____ tastes like _____
_____ feels like _____
_____ sounds like _____
_____ looks like _____
_____ smells like _____
Alternating Lines
Each of these poems, from Kenneth Koch’s Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry [Vintage, 1971] follows a two-line format that the students continue alternating throughout the poem.
I Used To/But Now – Begin every odd line with “I used to” and every even line with “But now.”
I Seem To Be/But Really I Am
Lie Poems
Each line in the poem is an obvious lie.
In my world,
Cats bark
Grass is violet
My mother is three-years-old
I use hummingbird milk on my morning cereal
Wish Poem
In this poem from Koch’s Wishes, Lies, and Dreams, the class agrees upon three elements that will be common to each person’s poem, such as a color, an animal, a place. Each line of the poem begins with the phrase “I wish” and includes the three elements in the determined order. For example,
I wish I had a purple car in my garage
I wish I had a blue dog in my attic
I wish I had a green helicopter at the park
Form and Content Poem
Another poem starter from Koch’s Wishes, Lies, and Dreams, involves a repeating phrase such as “I once saw a _____ of _____.” To add a challenge to the poem, students fill in the blanks with a form followed by its content. For example, a form could be a chair, a desk, a book; while content is what creates the object.
Students can use obvious combinations, “a book of pages” as well as unexpected groupings, such as “a book of dreams.”
Because these poems do not require rhyming, counting syllables, or following a structure, they can take on a silly or game-like quality that allows children’s creativity to shine. The repetitive quality of the poems brings the child’s ideas together.
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