Rigoberto, Very interesting, and fine ideas. Another way to combat writer's block is to listen listen listen to things overheard on the street, much easier, alas, now everyone is gabbing away on a cell phone. The genre of overheard-cell-conversation poems has been called by Rachel Wetzsteon the urban pastoral.

I like to spread postcards on the seminar table & have my students write write write about what comes into their heads while looking at these images...But the scissors & box are a great additional idea.

or, have students bring in small images or objects (a coin, an eaaring, a pebble, an onion, a snapshot, a cork...) and trade or combine and use that as a springboard....

What about reading the dictionary? From comparing all the different definitions of a single word (especially a really commonplace word) to studying the etymology to searching for cognates, it seems like one of the true secrets of our craft.

If your students know any foreign language at all, you can encourage them to try translating a poem from it. Their skills in the other language do not have to be strong, especially if there is a literal translation or two that they can consult. Once I discovered translation, I never had to spend another minute sitting around waiting for ideas to come, unless I wanted to. Translation can by done at any time, and the challenge of trying to recreate in your own language what is poetic in a foreign poem is excellent practice for writing your own poems. I up the ante by trying to translate metrical poems into rhyme and meter in English, which calls upon every skill I have, but for beginners, sticking with free verse poems can make the exercise seem less daunting.

Rigo & Co.,

As a guide for student writers, I appreciate your ideas and will pass them on. List, collecting, borrowing, all wonderful nudges and necessary pushes to the next sentence. One I use often is letter writing. While not always a fan of epistolary works, I do find that addressing a specific person (living or dead), a character (composite or imagined), and even an abstract concept (those awful cliches, like "soul") may push a speaker's voice in new directions. Dialogue often comes out of exchanges in letter form. And when the letters start coming back in an altar of voices, then your way. (Our dear friend, Denise Chavez, also encourages the power of letter writing.)

The logical extreme of the search for a cure may soon, arguably, be found at Litlab, which bills itself as "a highly informal online compendium of literary experiment and investigation, including limiting exercises, textual manipulations, historical curiosities, unusual poetic forms, comedic mimesis, metafiction, egrotic literature, neo-absurdism, lettristic hypergraphics, or whatever other nonsense its contributors happen to invent."

Susan beat me to it--I was also going to suggest translation. With a tranlsation project, you always have a way to warm up or to work or hone poetic skills, try on new voices, etc. I guess there can be a fear that it takes too much energy up from one's own work, but this is probably misplaced.

But I also wanted to throw in a vote for occasional silence. It is OK, I think, to go through fallow periods where one is absorbing rather than writing, and to give yourself permission to NOT write. A parent with a new baby, for instance, is going to be exhausted with the physical demands of caring for the infant--they shouldn't also feel they have to be writing. The writing will come back. (So we all hope!) Working on a poem, particularly what looks to be a good poem, is such a charge--almost erotic really. And it is addictive. Periods of silence can become terrifying, but surely it is a recentish idea that a poet must always be poeming. (And related too perhaps to the productivity that is encouraged in the professionalization of creative writing...)

I have been thinking recently of how little some of the poets I most admire published (Cavafy, Housman, Bishop, Larkin), but that is another topic.

On another tangent, my favorite poem ON writer's block:

Work Without Hope

Poetic silence is an intriguing subject - poets as Rilke and Oppen went for very long periods without writing poems; Empson knew precisely when to quit altogether!

Or... as Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell, "I've always felt that I've written poetry more by not writing it than writing it..."