What do you get when you combine cut up pieces of paper with made-up thoughts from your mind? Poetry. Don’t buy it? Then you should line up to participate in yet another Santa Barbara happening in celebration of April’s National Poetry Month.

This one is hosted by Santa Barbara Poets in the Schools (SBPitS) and is an ongoing, month-long Community Poetry Game. In the game, based on a surrealist one called “the exquisite corpse,” everyone is invited to write a line on strips of paper. The strips are then randomly pulled out of a basket and arranged to make a poem.

“You might think you would end up with gobbledy-gook,” said Christine Kravetz, area coordinator for SBPitS, “but people really love seeing their random thoughts turned into works of art. One of the fun things about the game is that somehow we end up with these poems that do make a poetic kind of sense.”

Poet/teachers will collect lines for poems and offer the opportunity to edit them at events during April.

They will be at Paseo Nuevo tonight, April 5, from 5-8 p.m., during 1st Thursday; at Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s ¡Todo Tamayo! event on Monday, April 16 from 10 a.m.-noon; and at the Artist’s Field Day on Saturday, April 28 at the courthouse’s Sunken Gardens from 1-3 p.m. Community members are invited to participate and view the poems online at sbpoetteachers.blogspot.com.

So cut up some strips, put down your words, and watch your “gobbledy-gook” become “works of art.”

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