My "Write Bad Teen Poems" Formula Idea

As an English teacher, I allow kids to put poems in their writing portfolios for extra credit. The thing is, the vast majority of teenaged poems are kinda all the same. "My secret angst," "silent scream" and "no one knows my shattered pain" and so on. After a few years of teaching, you've seen hundreds of these and they kinda annoy you.

First, pass around two pieces of chalk and have them fill the board up with likely angst-poem words to use. Then encourage them to write rhyming poems that complain that no one understands their pain, and that they will never trust anyone again.  For extra credit, suggest writing an angt-ridden poem in the style of Dr. Seuss:

"I will not cut me, Sam I am, I will not cut me with a knife, I will not cut into my wife, go anguished blade go. Go deep, go deep, go deep now, into the screaming abyss of my heart, cut blue, cut red, release my fading sorrow 'till it's dead. Dead, dead, dead; cut cut cut, oh Mr. Brown, Mr. Brown will you sink your blade, deep into my forsaken gut?" and so on.

Actually depressed, "emo" kids tend to like this exercise a lot, as they feel their personal poetry isn't quite as bad as this, so they felt better about it, and take pride in purposely writing worse than they do.  Clean cut kids LOVE trying on the emo hat for this exercise and writing like that. I guess all teens are emo under the skin. (The fading, archangel skin, forsaken in the anguished moonlight, black tombs swallowing their torn, forgotten dreams, shattered, flaming tears and writhing, groaning doom.)