Writing in the morning, my brain is still blunted by sleep. I sit on my couch like an idiot, eating a muffin, my thoughts all in halves. We morning writers are supposed to be closer to our dreams, our minds still unwinding and better equipped for weird associative leaps like winter mad libs.

I remain unconvinced.

A couple weeks ago, grumpy and extra-idiotic, I sat down for a morning write. I dated the entry and found it was January 25. “January 25” just happens to be one of my very favorite poems.

I discovered the poem, written by Maxine Kumin, my senior year of high school. Pieces of it hung around my brain for years after. I returned to it in college, memorizing it and discovering, after all, that the poem rhymes. Rhymes! I was so fixated on the imagery—those window flowers still slay me—that I didn’t hear the music. But of course, I did hear it, if unconsciously. It’s what made the poem stick in my brain like a nursery rhyme or a commercial jingle. Kumin didn’t speak the images; she sang them.

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As for my writing exercise that morning, I Mad-Libbed “January 25.” 

I learned this prompt from poet Matthea Harvey, who once made Mad Libs from the work of Amy Leach and asked us to fill them in during class. It’s a pretty brilliant exercise for any writer, regardless of genre. Mad Libs teach you (and your bored kids on a road trip) about tone management and syntax. Your constraint is to work within the syntactic framework the writer built: its word order, sentence length, structure. Similar to writing in form. 

Isn’t it Robyn Schiff who said, “Syntax is character”?* Sentence structure can tell you a lot about the writer’s view of her reader, her subject, herself. Does she present important information plainly or hide it in the middle of a long sentence? How are her phrases building and breaking their own unique rhythm?

It’s worth dissecting one of your own paragraphs or stanzas if you’re so inclined. How much syntactic diversity will you find? Should you add more adverbial phrases or split a compound sentence? How many short sentences are there? And so on.

In Kumin’s poem I adore this bizarre pile of adjectives to describe a chipmunk: that brown and orange commonplace sign of thaw. A little Shakespearean, a touch Steinian. It would be like describing coffee as that black and steaming bitter cup of spite.

I stripped Kumin’s poem of most nouns, verbs, and describing words, then used the bones (syntax, lineation) to make it my own. 

Here’s what the first stanza looked like before I filled it in:

All night in the ___(noun)____, like a ___(adj.)___ ___(noun)____,
like a ___(adj.)___ ___(noun)____
the ___(noun)____ ___(verb)____ unanswered.
___(noun)____ ___(verb)____ down the ___(noun)____, making
the ___(adj.)___ ___(noun)____ ___(verb)____
___(noun)____ of ___(adj.)___ ___(noun)____.
By ____(time)_____, both ___(plural noun)____ were ___(adj.)___.
A ___(noun)____ of ___(noun)____
___(verb)____ to the ___(adj.)___ ___(noun)____,
while we ___(verb)____ back to back in ___(noun)____,

Even this simple exercise shows you how many specific nouns Kumin packs into a few lines. The ones I removed include flue, bird, sill, crickets, snow, wind. Those words alone evoke a wistful winter tone. They even sound good as a list (short i assonance).

Her adjectives deepen the sense of conflict and loss: trapped, broken, unanswered (which I kept in for color), forked, resurrected, dead. The outlier, resurrected, seems to me a gesture toward the hope that’s become more pronounced by the end of the poem.

Anyway, my version abandoned winter in favor of desert heat, centering on a father driving his two young children through Arizona. I’m not sure why. Having lived in New York for almost 6 years, I can finally write about winter with some authority. But maybe that’s why I took my imaginative ticket out. Now the broken stove is all too real. The week I wrote this, the temperature fell to 7 degrees in Brooklyn (“feels like -11,” said the Weather app). 

Anyway, get your winter madness on. Do Winter Mad-Libs, diagram sentences, and read some poetry for kicks. And remember: when you hear the peepers, it means spring is on the way.

*I just did a quick search of this phrase and found a handful of relevant hits, two of which locate it in the work of one Peter J. Leithart. I thought I heard a teacher attribute it to Robyn Schiff, though. So… multiple discovery theory, mayhaps??

Featured Download: For a quick tutorial on how to write your own poetry, click here.