Creative Writing Exercises - Leicestershire County Council

This exercise:
is a form of sound poetry, and reveals how artworks and objects can be interpreted through
verbal musicality and rhythms.
Encourage participants to not be overly concerned with making sense, but rather making
sound. This exercise could go well with the ‘Sound Links’ exercise (see Warm-up Exercises
section).
The final exercise sometimes produces sentences that make syntactical sense, but more often
the effect is predominantly musical.
Hints and tips:
The ‘Poetry-Percussion’ game can also be
a good warm-up for this exercise.
Some participants may feel somewhat
bamboozled by the lack of referential
meaning in what they are being asked
to produce – so do stress the sound and
musical qualities of this game.
You could perhaps play John Cage’s 4
Minutes and 30 Seconds (of silence!)
after the Schoenberg game. See what
comes out of framing the silence.
Who?
This would work very well as a part
of a cross-curricular collaboration
between music and poetry.
Kitchen Sink, Lucy Casson
Section C
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