A simple poetry-writing game

This is a game that my sister-in-law Jill came up with a few years ago when my niece was studying poetry in her 5th or 6th grade English class. My niece and I still occasionally play it:

• Take turns putting words into a common pool (2 words each for a 3-player game, 3 each for 2 players)
• For each of the words in the common pool create your own rhyme for those words
• Write a poem using all twelve of those elements as the line-ending rhymes, using whatever rhyme-scheme you want

Here's an example of one I wrote when we played yesterday:

It came to him both slow and sudden
That all this seeking, hunting, shopping
Was leaving him with spirit dropping.
With plastic, glass, or even wooden
Surfaces caging all these apes,
Distracted by a useless need
to move along at breakneck speed,
Fast forward on the video tape.
Going back through the history
It wasn't clear the hour or minute
Life changed. If he had to pin it
Down, life became transistor-y.

I've never much engaged with poetry as an art-form (nothing against it, it's just not something that I tend to connect with emotionally), but invoking elements of structured poetry, like this game does, tends to get the puzzle-solving and word-game parts of my brain working. Plus, since it's being done in the context of playing a game it really takes the pressure off because you have the double benefit of 1) knowing there will at least be an audience of the other players, and 2) that there's no expectation that it has to be good since you're working with a bunch of silly constraints and getting something that works at all is an accomplishment.

I think it works reasonably well as a game, although it has a few downsides. One is that it is a bit energy-draining, since have to do the work of actually crafting the poem (I tend to agonize a bit over syllables so I can get things to scan the way I want). The other is that there's a temptation to “strategically” choose the words you put into the common pool based on what you think you can write a good poem about, but that sort of undermines the theoretical benefit of “creativity games” like this because you start engaging your blank-sheet creative writing process rather than letting the constraints be something that can carry the load with you just reacting to them. Even so, it's fun and you get a poem when you're finished.