Magnetic poetry online: drag the words, write a poem
A fridge door without the fridge. Drag tiles from the pile into the lined strip at the top, then read your poem back as text.
How to play
- Drag a tile with the mouse, a finger or a stylus. Tiles above the dashed line belong to your poem; tiles below are the pile.
- Double-click a tile, or focus it with Tab and press Enter, to send it straight to the end of your poem, or back to the pile if it is already in the poem.
- Endings such as s, ed, ing and ly glue onto the word to their left when the poem is read, so whisper + ing becomes whispering.
- Shuffle the pile scatters the unused tiles without touching your poem. New tiles deals a fresh random hand of nouns, verbs, adjectives and small connecting words.
- Add your own words to bring in a name, a place or the one word the pile refuses to give you.
- Read the poem turns the tiles in the strip into text, line by line from top to bottom and left to right. Copy share link creates an address that rebuilds the poem on any device.
Why a limited pile helps
A blank page offers every word in the language, which is exactly why it can be paralysing. A pile of seventy tiles offers very few, and you cannot look anything up. You start noticing what is there rather than what you meant to say: salt next to morning, electric next to sparrow. Writers have used this kind of constraint deliberately for a century, from Tristan Tzara drawing words out of a hat to the cut-ups of the Beat writers; the history of magnetic poetry follows that line from Dada to the fridge door.
A few ways to use the board:
- Warm-up. Five minutes, one tile hand, three lines. Then close the tab and start the writing you actually need to do.
- Title generator. Deal, then make the most interesting two- or three-word phrase you can. Good for story titles, band names and chapter headings.
- Constraint games. Use no adjectives; use only one-syllable words; make every line start with the same tile. Our writing prompts for word tiles collect more of these.
- With children. Deal a hand and ask for the silliest true sentence. Adding a child's own name as a tile tends to help.
Make a paper version
You do not need magnets. Print a list of words in a large font, glue the sheet onto thin card, cut the words apart and keep them in an envelope. Mix roughly half nouns and verbs with plenty of small words (the, of, and, in, my) and a few endings, because those glue words are what turn a pile of nouns into sentences. Adhesive magnetic sheet from a craft shop turns the same cards into fridge tiles.
Privacy and sharing
Your poem stays in your browser. The share link stores it after the # in the address; that part of a URL is not sent to the web server, so the poem only travels where you paste the link.
The board was written for Letterbench from scratch in plain JavaScript. If you are curious how the dragging works, see building draggable word tiles with Pointer Events.