It was fun flirting with Shakespeare.
I’ve often enjoyed cutting up all the words in a great poem and playing with them to assemble a new one. My ‘Soul Jigsaw’ does this with Wislawa Szymborska’s ‘A few words on the Soul’.
https://www.mindfulnessassociation.net/words-of-wonder/a-few-words-on-the-soul-wislawa-szymborska/
The exercise may not always make for a great poem, but it can help to jolt a novice writer out of their familiar grooves. Another one my group really enjoyed was Miroslav Holub’s ‘The door’.
The group I lead had a lot of fun recently responding to various poems by writing from a different point of view. Here’s what I wrote to Shakespeare (Sonnet 116).
Let me be frank about impediments:
you’re more in love with writing than with me.
Your love may falter when my youth is spent
and my mind wanders like a storm-tossed tree;
my rosy lips have turned as pale as stone;
and I can’t cook and all my joints are creaking;
the sickle’s blade has cut me to the bone;
my spine is bending and my height is taken.
But when the nursing home looms, cold and bleak,
will you carry me outside to see the stars,
and still be keen to kiss my withered cheeks?
And when the flooding tempest round us roars,
I wonder if you’ll be the sort of feller
who’ll leap to shelter me with his umbrella.