Response writing is an wonderful way to get yourself writing, and can have an immediacy about it that other types of writing do not. However the most common way to do this form of writing has historically been to read the newspaper or look at news headlines and write from them. This style of writing goes back to literary greats like Jules Vern but some people might struggle with this style of information and inspiration gathering as news stories can be a little harrowing and even triggering for some. So what to do?
The answer can lay in special interest groups and mailing lists. Many specalist publications like Nature have mailing lists that were orginally designed for journalists but now are often news drops for the interested general public. You can often sign up to these for free and though the free versions do not give you the whole articles to read they do give you summaries and titles which can be used to do further research and to write from. Also if it is a subject you are interested in you might want to get that paid subscription anyway. I personally prefer reading the whole article and then doing research around that but it’s fine to just look at headline or article title and think “what else could that mean?” and start writing from there.
Within education this is known as Magpying and is not considered stealing or a copyright issue in most instances but laws, especially around digital stuff, are often changed and also vary wildly from country to country so checking up on your current local laws can be a good idea.
Another good source are special interest groups like fungi, brutalist archecture, football cards etc… these are often found on platforms like Facebook or specialist blogs and are full of photos and little stories about local history aspects which can often lead you on a research adventure of your very own – do not take peoples photos to publish next to your poems without getting the correct permissions, and as these are not professional publications it is considered nice to ask if people are happy for you to write from the images, but in many countries it is not a legal requirement. Be mindful not to be a creep and only go with publically shared non-personal photos ie trees, fancy cars, landscapes. Camera clubs are normally happy to work with writers if you talk to them first.
There is also the rise of positive news mailing lists and sites that often use platforms such as substack and mastodon.
Of course we here at WoPo also endeavour to supply images and snippets to do response writing exercises with on a regular basis which can be found here.
The artist Some Wasted Poetential produces etheral electronic music and backroom style videos that are poignant and intriguing. They have also told us here at WoPo that they would be more than happy for people to use their work to inspire the poetic process. So why not have a look at the videos and see if any of them resonate with you.
You can write from the music alone or try and tell the “story” of the music video, or maybe even do a random pause and write from the still image you generate in the process.
We will be doing a series where we highlight some of their videos individually and also hope that this is the beginning of some bigger collabs with them and other cross media artists.
Here in the UK we have National Story Telling Week coming up from the 31st of Jan to 8th of Feb 2026, as run by the Society for Storytellers. There are lots of local events around the UK and little snippets being posted to their youtube and it is not too late to be involved.
The theme itself makes for a wonderful writing prompt: Speaking Story Into The Darkness
But more than that there is an intrinsic connection between storytelling and poetry – rhyme and rhythm are memory aids as well as a way to help give performance of a narrative a kind of energy and movement it can sometimes be lacking.
At the turn of the millenia there was a tug of war between those who felt poetry should rhyme and those who thought that was childish and rhyme was shunted to the side, seen as only for comedy or poetry for children. By the end of the first decade of the 2000’s the narrative poem, whether rhyming or not, was struggling to find a home especially if they were not comedic. The more serious stuff hit the slam scene in the US and UK differently with it taking off in the US and being viewed as perhaps not quite the thing in many slams. This trend has slowely reversed itself with the help of hiphop spoken word artists and the organisers of slams opening it back up.
Occassionally during this period the narrative poems would find themselves at storytelling events instead, where the rich imagery and borrowing from Folk lore and tales was understood and appreciated (most of the time). Often storytellers will have some song or poetic element to their tellings and the ancient epic stories such as Beowulf and The Oddessy seen as they are, as the beginnings of literature were spoken poems first.
The rest of the world seems to have carried on quite happily with their narrative poems, both rhymed and story telling in general.
How is all of this relevant to the current poetry composer? Well Folk traditions, myths, legends and related areas contain so much material that can spark a poem. Also it can be nice to go back to roots and create a story in poetic form.
Why not listen to some stories, flood your mind with folk tales or watch the newer more contempory story tellers – what styles are they using? Would it work in a poem? Sometimes open mics or storytelling circles can develop an emergent theme – onn that was not there initially but becomes apparent as the event draws on. Take that theme and carry it with you, jot it down in a note book and gather other tales and imagery to do with it.
To Do’s to Try:
Write an original narrative poem – these are poems that tell a story, they can be rhyming or non rhyming. This is your story from your imagination.
Find a folk tale that resonates with you and write it in poetic form.
Look at themes and imagery across stories and write about the specific theme. Again the theme for this year’s Story Telling Week would be a lovely one to write from.
Writing can be lonely, and that isn’t always a bad thing; in fact the peace and quiet can give you the space to think and to form ideas that would be lost if you tried to explain them first. However, sometimes working with others can be a tremendous help, especially if you are struggling with writers block. Collaborations are not for everyone – the work is never fully yours and you do not have complete control of it, and for some people that is a no go; but for others it can give them a freedom to make something not perfect, not exact and just different to what they might already be known for. Equally, there are different types of collaboration so some experimenting might be needed to find what works for you.
Types of Collaboration:
Anthologies
Anthologies are the simplet and most commonform of poetry collaboration, a theme or themes is put out and everyone writes something or scrabbles through their back catalogue/note books until they have something that matches and together a collection is created. Rarely do groups meet up to work on the anthology though some writing retreats and festivals as well some creative writing courses or even community projects do have this as part of the process. In that case you will find there will generally be physical meet ups, maybe walks and then sitting around together being given writing prompts.
Recently we went on a story telling equivalent and looked around an old church and ancient grounds in Wales and then we all sat wrote where we wanted on the site. Some people worked in pairs or groups and others sat alone. I personally took photos of things that I found interesting to create a mood board later and then sat and composed two poems. If people felt confident enough they shared their writing and feedback was offered and some works paired together.
There are also online video chat anthology and collaborative groups using platforms such as Zoom, Teams, Google Meet and Discord. We took part in a lovely project with refugee women last year run by the She Spoke collective that was absolutely amazing, and was an international collaboration across borders and in some cases into active war zones.
And that brings us to the second most common type of collaboration:
Collectives
Collectives are not just glorified workshop groups, they actively exist for a reason; a “shared vision” may be too grandiose a term but there will be some thread that connects them. Art collectives often pool resources and expertise. They take part in group activities and work on shows and other creative endevours together.
Collectives come about generally in two ways: people just find they have organically grouped together and need to become a little more official to, say, apply for funding to go on group outings or screen print themselves very special book versions of their group works… or someone has an idea and sets up the collective and starts recruiting. These groups tend to have stricter pathways and clearer visions and run on the “Build it and they will come” ideology – generally. Sometimes collectives are very closed and are not looking for new members so it is important when looking around to bear that in mind; and some, especially if there is a shop or premises to maintain, may have membership fees so don’t get caught short with that one as many will assume that is how all groups work and will not necessarily think to state the fee outright when you are intially finding out about them.
Internal structure and how you collaborate will be varied and differernt even within one collective let alone across the different collectives. Again it is important to find one (or several) that work for you and not to stay were you do not feel productive or happy.
Partnerships
Next is Partnerships, this is where you team up with one other person, often via email and send each other prompts or edit each others’ poems or write a stanza and send it to them to add their stanza or possibly even just a line at a time or sometimes even just a word!
These are mostly fun exercises and involves you being not “precious” about your writing because it will be screwed up and altered beyond recognition.
Another technique with this kind of set up is merging poems; each of you brings your work and you sit in a cafe or on a video call and you combine your works into one new whole. Again there are endless ways to make this work and the other writer siting there waiting for you is the drive some poets need to actually produce work.
These above options are the most common types of collaborative work but they are not the only type and that leads us on to the next few which to me are the more interesting and personally have helped me produce the works I have then performed at places and events such as literature festivals.
Public Prompts
This is where the general public give you prompts to write from or sometimes even lines or snippets of writing about how they feel or their experience of something. Performance Poets like Spoz use this method to create poems on the spot at music festivals or during school visits but it can also be used as a slower form of writing. Two such memorable such poems are about “pussies”: the first one, by AF Harold, was created when back in the early days of twitter he asked everyone for their pet cat names and created a fabulously whimsical piece with some swearing that he later unleashed on audiences; and the other was by Holly McNish who did a similar concept but asked for the slang terms for genitalia and came out with a darkly saterical hard hitting piece. Both of these poems were created using the same public prompt concept but are so vastly different in how they hit.
But twitter doesn’t exist anymore and social media is a bit of a mess these days so unless you have an established platform you may feel this form of collaborative writing can not work, but that is not true. For one of our projects around the Moon Landing Anniversary a few years ago we went along to events and physically asked people there and then to write down their feelings or memories about space travel and things like the moon landings. We collected some amazing pieces from people ranging from the son of one of the people in mission control to the conspiracy theorist who rode their bike into the stand we had during an amazing space-art installation at a local historical site.
Another project that has used this style of collaboration was a local history project that again asked for memories and stories of a specific street in a near by city. The final piece involved lion tamers eaten by their own lion!
And another was an allotment project where spoken word and rap artists came and worked with young people as they learnt to take care of their allotment space.
The scope for this sort of collaboration is huge! And sometimes local authorities are happy to fund such works.
There is also this in kind of a reverse… you can get prompts from sites like us here at WoPo or various Facebook Groups or from a writing tutor and just write. In many ways this is a loose form of collaboration and one that is so pervasive that most will not even think about it. Some of us at team WoPo work as writing tutors and create prompt and exercise sheets that we give out, and it is always a pleasure when someone comes back to you with a poem they’ve written from the prompts and sometimes even waving a poetry book containing their works. It is always amazing to find that the prompts have helped people.
And lastly I have seen poets with type writers at busy events and markets creating poems for queues of people – this I feel is more of a commission type situation but it could also be used as the foundation of these types of collaborative works.
Art from Art
This is my favourite form of collaboration.
A group in Oxford used to run an event were we would go through the special art exhibitions and write from the art works. Museums and Art galleries will sometimes have events for specific art exhibitions, one we were involved in was the Enduring Eye which was photography of the Arctic Exploration missions and things like the ships manifests with the names of the dogs and everything. The poetry that came out of this was amazing and ended up with a performance night and many of poems went on to be published in various publications and collections.
This is the most common version of Art from Art but can feel a little impersonal, there are more active collabrative versions such being sent other participants’ art – either their writing or visuals – and writing your own pieces from them. A photographer friend loves giving their images to writers to see what they come out with!
These visuals and words work really well for putting poetry collections and exhibitions together.
The art can also be things like listening to someones music, and poetry films.
An even more interesting version of this leads us to out final section:
Events
This may seem an odd one but can produce some wonderful works and are nearly always an interesting experience. At the very edge of it you can take a note pad to an event and sketch and write, just on your own, as you are inspired by your surroundings, considering the envirnment to be shaping your thoughts. But a more active collaborative version is to work with festivals being an “artist in residence” or just on a one off and working with dancers and musicians and even light engineers to become the centre of the art piece – penning or forming your words as these very different artforms unfold around you. Some may want you to share your words as they are happening, giving a strong improvisational element – whilst others will expect you to be writing away. It is important to make sure everyone is expecting approximately the same thing from the experience – you do not want to trip up a ballet dancer and you might not feel comfortable being plunged into a sudden rap battle.
This does not just go for art either – I have been invited to be the visiting poet for tech events where duties were opening and closing with a poem but also walking around observing and writing and in some instances live blogging which is not so much of a concept anymore but you would sit and update your blog or website as the event was happening.
All of these are wonderful things to try and there will be even more we have not thought about or have forgotten to include. Why not have a think about collaboration and put some feelers out for people to work with?
It is that time of year again when we all start to think about what is on the writery horizon! Here at team WoPo we have been thinking about pacing and how that can be difficult for writers in general and often even worse for poets. Now you are probably thinking: what do we mean by pacing in poems? Go and read a few from different styles of poetry, did you notice the beat and rhythm? Was it the same through out? If it was a long poem did that start to make it seem like a run away train or to drag on for eternity? Whilst these effects themselves can be what is sought after to emphasise the feel of the poem, they often are not and have occured by accident.
Try playing around with the lengths of lines and where the rhymes fall, and even the font sizing. What effect does this have on the poem? What makes the pace fast? What makes it slow?
This is a good exercise in general but can, as a concept, also be applied to our general writing habits, but in a slightly different way – what is your annual writing pace? Do you start with good intentions and then fizzle out? Do you get enthused by workshops and only write around them? Does it slowly ramp up through out the year and then stop when the kids are out of school… or some other pattern? Once you know what your general year-long writing pattern is you can work on getting a little bit more writing in, or in some cases less writing but more content and quality for time spent.
So maybe it now is the time to think about these overarching patterns rather than rushing off to do new year writing challenges – and then sinking when it all seems a little too much.
If you can’t do pubs or just don’t want to you can substitute a cafe or some other outing for this exercise.
Go to a pub and get settled in, now look around and write down a list of 50 words that occur to you from the surroundings – some of these words will be longer than others – find the three longest.
Now you can do several different things with these words, the first is to hurt place each word down the side of a page so that there is one at the top, one at the bottom and one in the middle. Now write from one word to the next incorporating them into the poem.
Secondly you can make a spider diagram or cloud diagram of each word with the word in the middle and words associated with them around the outside. For one word do words that seem related to the middle word, for the second write memories or ideas you associate with the word and the third one write down concepts or story titles that are to do with the word. Now you can do a longer version of the first exercise with these word clusters or you can pick the longest word and make an acrostic poem. If you want to be really fancy you can do a double acrostic where the ends of the lines make a word on both sides of the poem. We used to call these Word Poems at school and they can be fun to make.
If you face something a little more difficult you can take the words and create a kind of cross word poem with the words going down the page as well as across or fit the words into a scrap landscape you can create from old paper.
If you have Post Traumatic Stress or similar it is recommended that you write from the image and we suggest you ignore the exercise below.
Have you ever had that feeling of not being able to focus or being so panicked that you can’t actually think of how to resolve the issue? Think about how that felt and write about it as if it were a tangible object for 20 minutes.
One of the reasons putting goggly eyes on things is so funny is because it turns the inanimate object into something we see as animate – it turns and object into a creature and a derpy creature at that! If they were actually alive you just know they would be the silliest of sausages!
Why not get some little stick on eyes of your own and put them on some everyday items, look at the characters you’ve created and construct a character sheet for them. If you’ve not made a character sheet before you can simply list characteristics both personality traits and physical aspects for each creature.
Now how would your creatures interact with each other, how would each of them react in certain circumstances such as having to take a bath?
Make another list of these scenarios and then do 2 mins of writing for each combination. You may find you have some silly little poems just from this or something that can be turned into a a set of linked stanzers, you might even have a narrative poem trying to form but don’t push that – if it wants to be a story then go with it but it might just want to be a set of small not quiet connected pieces.
Or you may find you want to just focus on one of the pieces and write more about that particular creature and its adventures.
Alternatively you can just write from the image above, if you are really stuck just start describing the scene in minute detail.
In recent years The Morris Dance and related activities have seen a huge surge in popularity across Europe with new forms appearing along side the more Traditional sides or groups. The Morris have some amazing costumes, sometimes use, sticks, swords or hankies and are sometimes accompanied by horned tattered creatures.
Do half an hours research on Morris Dancing and Mummers Plays, make a bullet point of interesting facts or information about them. With you list and this photo at hand write about celebration and marking the seasons for 30 mins.
If that all seems like too much work for you then simple write from the photo for 15 mins.
The Morris side depicted in the photo are Styx of Stroud.
This image shows the silhouette of a small plane flying on a bright blue sky. Write for 15 mins about what that must feel like or what can be seen from the plane.
