Poetry Tournament

so last night i was lying in bed, half asleep and i had this idea, but i'm not sure if it's lame or not, because my half-asleep ideas are sometimes not quite as interesting as they seem at the time. probably because i was half-asleep. anyways this is my idea for a party, say marina's or another one:

poetry tournament: say there's 16 people at the party. you divide into 4 groups of 4, preferably having people who don't know each other in each group. The first thing you do is build up your group's "poetry reserves." each group would have poetry marathons, or other activities, like everyone writing a poem from the same random topic, or picking a word/sentence out of a bag and writing something from that. when each group had a good reserve, you'd go on to the poetry tournament.

event one: who wrote that? all the groups get together. the first group gets up, and one of the members reads a poem written by one of the other 3 members of the group. the other groups try to guess who wrote it, with points awarded to the first group to guess correctly. then the next group would get up and do the same thing, and so on.

event two: poetry poker each person has the same number of poems, say 8. 4 poker games would be formed, with a member of each group in each game. instead of money, poems would be used. if anyone lost all their poems in the game, they would be allowed to write more and get back into the game again. after an allotted time, the group who's members have won the most poems gets a certain amount of points, and then the runner up, and so on.

that's all the events i've thought of. I suppose at the end of all this, the group with the most points would win some sort of prize, like a beautiful maiden or a golden pen. hehehe.

• one other problem with a poetry tournament is that not all the people at the party necessarily write poetry. maybe this should be a workshop at camp or something...

Oo, awesome idea! Marina starts plotting... I have to say, there'll probably be a ton of people at my party who are either writers or like words and thus would probably not mind writing (or co-writing!) some poems. Good stuff, Mel. (At least I think you're Mel, you forgot to sign. )

• Mel winks*

I like these ideas! Maybe we could have some other events like drawing a word out of a hat and then having to improvise a poem using that word on the spur of the moment, maybe with a time limit. I've done this before, and it's nerve wracking, but awfully fun. Maybe we could have another event for not taking your own poetry so seriously, where we could over dramatize it, or just have fun doing silly things with it in general. I think it also might be fun to do some writing workshops like the ones that happened at Lotus' Halloween party. Those were great fun, and helped give me some time away from the party to actively sort through what I was feeling and thinking, which helped me use my time at the party better, and also made me feel a wonderful bond with the people I was writing with, and inspired me endlessly. ~Becky~

• yes yes! lots of events! lots of writing! the idea is for everyone to go home with a zillion poems, their own, and other people's too