I think I may have made up that title: Wordpool Poem. But the practice of this playful prompt for starting a poem has been around a long time. Early in the days when I was beginning to call myself a poet, I read an exercise by Gwendolyn Brooks in which she gave six words and said to set a timer (was it for five minutes? Eight?) and write a poem using her wordpool.

Here is the edited and refined result of that exercise, as it appears in my 2013 book, The Song of the Toad and the Mockingbird:

Chasing Chickens
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

I’ve counted my chickens.
A dozen times or more they’ve dashed—
Dashed, I tell you—
Into blackberry canes,
Wings whirring.
White clouds of dust engulf me.
Their voices chuckle
from the cliff’s edge.
Don’t tell me about chickens.
I’m green, baby. Green.
And I don’t know how
I’m getting home from here.

I love how the imperative of fitting those random words into a poem set me off-kilter enough to write something that felt new and fresh, and held the angst and anxiety of my life at the time in a layer beneath the surreal “story.”

Here is my take on the Wordpool poem game: Scrolling for Words–

Open up one of your social media pages. If you aren’t on social media, find a book or magazine. Set a timer for one minute. Your goal is to harvest 8-10 at least mildly interesting words in one minute. Turn the timer on, and scroll (or skim, if you’re using printed text), copying down words that catch your eye. Pace yourself. You don’t want to end up with 30 words, and if you end up with fewer than 8, you might want to start over.

Once you have your wordpool (at least 8-10!), reset your timer for 8 minutes. Your challenge is: In that 8-minute time period, write a poem using your words. (You may change forms and parts of speech as you go.) Take a deep breath, unhitch the horse of your brain to go racing through the meadow, and GO!

Write, write, write, don’t think!

What a ride! What a rush! Can’t stop, can’t ponder, can’t let the brain take over! But now here’s the grace. Take whatever time you need to edit and revise. Shift line lengths. Listen for sounds that you can enhance or repeat, rhythms you can lean into. Just try to keep your wordpool words there in some form.

Here is my revised and tweaked poem, with the wordpool words in bold:

Chasing the Vision
by Beth Weaver-Kreider, July 2024

I believe in the fire of that vision, in the possibilities
you created when the other world trickled through,
its light sifting into the collection you’d made of saints’ icons
in glass canning jars, the blue of that other place shining in your eyes.

I believe in the small angel who crawled through your doorway,
sank into the feral dreams of your four-poster bed,
in the way you harbored those ghosts in your head,
how you’ve been feeding the schemes of the trickster
and learning a new way to exist in the between.

Behold! today you will see a new thing (no false vision this),
never seen by human eyes: a wing on a fawn, or
a cryptical creature of moss and fur, fangs, and scales, and dream.
Make the most of the message before it dissipates
like mist over the River on those impossible mornings in fall.

Amazingly, somehow–despite the fact that my brain was unhitched and frantically seeking to just get all the words in–this poem feels like an accurate and holy weaving of several conversations I have had in the past week about magic and mystical and cryptical experiences. I’ll come back to it another day to see if it is finished, if it needs more work.

As I tell my students: Break the Rules. The rules are there to give you a specific field in which to play, but you can discard or change the rules I’ve made up at any point that you feel life they’re holding you captive.

Variations:
1. Use a random word generator online. Ask it to give you a set of random words.
2. Eavesdrop. Collect a batch of words throughout your day to use as a wordpool.
3. Try using the same wordpool for two different poems.
4. Generate a wordpool with a friend, and write your own poems using the same pool.
5. For a little harder challenge, begin each line with one of the words in the wordpool.

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Gratitude List:
1. My amazing kids, who figured out what was wrong when the water stopped, and fixed the pump.
2. Mystical encounter with a fawn (mine did not have visible wings like the one in the poem)
3. A lovely group of folks in my magical doll-making class yesterday. Meeting online friends in person. Making new connections.
4. People who respond to crises with kindness, by unleashing more goodness into the world.
5. It’s okra season! And even if our heirloom tomatoes aren’t ready, Flinchbaugh’s sells them!
May we walk in Beauty!