I recently discovered a fantastic creative activity – book title poetry.

The idea is fairly simple – take some books and arrange them into piles using their titles to make up the lines of a poem. I thoroughly recommend giving it a go if you haven’t already.

I came across the idea while at work casually browsing instagram on my lunch break and decided that I would make my own the second I got home. As soon as I walked through the door that evening I started taking books from their shelves. I’m normally quite a neat person, but I threw caution to the wind, not even bothering to remember which shelf had housed which book.

I didn’t choose books for any one reason in particular, some titles just stood out to me, or were phrases I thought would be useful. I don’t think particularly matters, I just went with what felt right. Once I had a good selection of books I started to arrange them, trying to make lines fit together and when I was happy with my ‘poem’ I took a picture.

My attempts:

At a time like this,
Hard times,
The sands of time.
A cold unhurried hand.
A small part of me,
The man who would be King

Farewell, my lovely.
The boy who kicked pigs
Going solo,
Where angels fear to tread.
The love of a good woman.

When I’d made a couple I decided to try a constructing a political poem using a selection of my old text books, and a few stolen from my boyfriend’s study:

Political thinkers,
Lords of poverty,
Syndromes of corruption,
The white man’s burden.
Karl Marx,
Rebel with a cause,
Banker to the poor.

I had such a great time trying this out that I passed the idea on to a friend who’s currently working overseas in Canada and feeling a little bored. She loves trying out new ways of stretching her creativity, so I gave her the task of taking titles from the public library and sending me the pictures to use alongside my own.

I absolutely love what she came up with – here are the pictures, and translations from french:

The last week of May,
A taste of paradise,
A heart full of hope.
Not bad.

Loving eyes,
The colour of lies,
Nothing more than one night,
The little bastard.

It can be quite therapeutic to try out, and if you have a lot of book titles you will be surprised what you can find. Sometimes the poems will just come together on their own – as was the case with last poem here, which uses a few titles by the same author.

This little activity got me thinking about the process of writing a poem. We didn’t really ‘write’ these poems, they already existed, and just needed putting together. So I started to wonder, how else can poetry be created from ‘found’ words? And, what other unusual methods of creating poetry are there? With this in mind I’ve decided to do some research into interesting techniques for constructing poetry, rather than writing it, and I’ve set up the ‘obscure poetry’ section of my blog in which to do this.

If any of you have any suggestions feel free to comment or drop me an email, ideas are always welcome 🙂