Have you heard of “book spine poetry?” It’s a kind of poetry that you “find” by arranging book titles to make a poem. This type of poem can be serious or funny, just like in regular poetry.

Here’s the basic idea. Imagine that you’re sitting at a table with all of these books in front of you:

• Green Eggs and Ham
• Goodnight Moon
• The Very Hungry Caterpillar
• Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!
• Oh, The Places You’ll Go
• Where the Wild Things Are
• Good Night, Gorilla
• Stone Soup

To make a book spine poem, you would start by moving these books around into stacks with the spines together so that the titles are like the lines of a poem. You would keep moving the book titles around into different stacks until you find the “lines” that go best together to make a poem. For example, one set of titles might describe a story:

Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!
Oh, The Places You’ll Go
Where the Wild Things Are

In this story, if you let the pigeon drive the bus, you might end up going a lot of unexpected places.

Here is a different kind of story:

Green Eggs and Ham
Stone Soup
The Very Hungry Caterpillar

In this story, the caterpillar is hungry because the only food to eat is stuff that doesn’t taste very good.

Another way that you can use book titles to make a poem is to create an imaginary conversation, as in this very short example:

Good Night, Gorilla
Goodnight Moon

Here’s one that I did:

In this story, the pigeon went outside into the woods on a windy day and then needs a bath when he gets home.

Here’s one more:

In this story, a family comes together.

Okay, ready to make your own book spine poetry? All you need is a stack of book with interesting titles from around the house. Place a few books on top of each other. Play around with the titles to create a short poem, words that create an image or feeling.  Try and notice some that seem to go together to tell a funny or interesting story.  Try to include 4 or more book titles in your poem.

When you have several finished book spine poems, you can document your favorite by taking a picture. If you come up with one that you would like to share, you can email it to your teacher.

You can look at some Book Spine Poetry galleries by clicking here

And here