A well-known performance poet and writer has spent her lockdown period creating and sharing innovative workshop ideas on how people can create their own poetry.

Believing that poetry is a form of expression that anyone and everyone can have a go at, Jackie Morrey-Grace, a noted local writer and performer, began to put together a series of ideas, hints, tips and visual word games on her Facebook page, jmorreygracepoetry, to try to encourage others to have a go.

Among the activities suggested are ’black-out poetry’, where you take a page of any text and select words that come together to form a narrative, ’nonsense’ poetry or ’book title poems’, where you can arrange a stack of books and form a poem from the titles along the spines.

Another of Jackie’s favourite exercises is creating collage poetry, formed by cutting out words from magazines and forming them into a poem or narrative.

She began to create the exercises as a way of getting her daughter interested in writing and she realised they could help inspire others too.

’My experience taught me to believe that given the right circumstances, anyone can access their inner poet,’ said Jackie.

’These challenges really began because I wanted to do something literary with my youngest, Maeve, who is 11, whilst the schools were closed.

’Maeve is amazing at drawing. I wanted to introduce her to the world of poetry, but knew she’d prefer it to have a visual element.

’We therefore set about discovering innovative and therapeutic methods for creating poetry that are fun and more like solving a puzzle, but that also lead to an understanding of how words work together to build a poetic narrative.

’We’ve been sourcing the challenges from all kinds of places, such as Steemit, Instagram, Google, Pinterest and from my friends.

’We’ve then shared a different challenge each week on Facebook and have learned loads ourselves in the process!

’We really hope our challenges have encouraged lots of people to have fun exploring this wonderful creative medium.’

Jackie has been hosting her own results on her page, and also publishes poems sent in by her followers.