Poetry. Everyone loves to hate it. (Unless you’re my old advanced poetry professor who openly, genuinely loved poetry and hated her students.) But it’s a bizarre thing. Somehow random jumbles of words say things more clearly, and with more weight, than if the message was directly laid out for us. Why is that?

And what IS a poem? They don’t have to rhyme. They don’t have to be long (hypothetically, a poem could just be a title and a single word or a line of numbers. A different old poetry professor argued that poetry has limits—for example, poetry was not the commercialized text inside of greeting cards. It seems there are limits to what counts as poetry, and one of the determinants of a poem is the emotional meaning.

Okay. So how to we craft a poem with a stronger emotional meaning than a Hallmark card? Poems are puzzles of words. It feels impossible to jump right into poetry and expel the same complex magic as Mary Oliver (I finished Devotions recently, and it was definitely magical). But writing poetry that you’re proud of, like anything else, doesn’t have to be complicated, scary, and out-of-reach! Here’s the best poem inspiration exercise I’ve ever learned (from a different professor, this one with hands in fiction and photography).

First, find a text that you like. It can be song lyrics, someone else’s poem (because yours hasn’t been written yet, remember?), a TED Talk that motivates you, a monologue from your favorite movie…you get it. For my example, I’m going to use this line Marcellus says near the beginning of Hamlet:

Horatio says ’tis but our fantasy,
And will not let belief take hold of him
Touching this dreaded sight, twice seen of us:
Therefore I have entreated him along
With us to watch the minutes of this night;
That if again this apparition come,
He may approve our eyes and speak to it.

Now, rewrite it with opposites! Up is down, left is right, and yes is no are obvious ones, but think of how creative you can get! Here’s my reverse-write of the lines I included above:

I told Horatio it was all his fantasy
but I will let belief let go of me.
Recoiling from that beautiful sound,
one that he’d never heard before.
He told me to stay behind
away from each other to listen to the hours of the day.

If never again the human leaves,
we will disapprove his ears and ignore it.

It’s goofy, but it’s something! Let’s polish it up. Here’s the final product:

I told Horatio he was imagining things,

but I didn’t even believe myself.

Together recoiling from a beautiful sound

that we’d never heard before,

he told me to stay behind him.

Still, under that beautiful newness,

we listened to the hours of the day.

If never again humanity leaves,

we will disapprove of the rumble of traffic hitting our ears

and ignore it.

Congratulations! We have a poem! Not only do we have a poem, but we have taken seven lines that I found after Googling the phrase “Hamlet first monologue” (there is no such thing) and made something halfway-decent that paints an image of Horatio and the speaker striving to hear nature under the sounds of industrialism. The preexisting theme from the original work (seeing a ghost) helps set the scene for a new theme in the reverse poem (nature being drowned out by traffic). Two totally unrelated concepts!

Give this a try sometime! It’s one of my favorite word games, and the result is almost guaranteed to be weirdly profound!