Using our Tic-Tac-Toe Story Generator [instructions and template here], we can translate the game on this student's back into a poem:

A wish for experimental kisses,

unknowable              surprises,

the sun mysterious, shadowing.

(Photo from West Georgia's 1941 yearbook.)

Here's a precursor to Jamiroquai's marvelous lyric, "I steal the moon on silver nights" ("Automaton," 2017).  Not only are silver nights and the moon mentioned in the first stanza, but in the second stanza there's "a little song."  From The Ballad of the Quest by Virginia Sheard, 1922.

From our 21st cousin, Emily Dickinson, quoted in Mansfield's 1969 yearbook.

"Some must take the good and some the evil / Dropped from either wing of this strange angel."  From "Al Hassan's Secret," in The Bird and the Bell by Christopher Pearse Cranch, 1890

Out of himself, so to speak, and soaring in that strange supersensible region whence forms and 'things of unearthly make' visited him with a thrilling and subduing power."  From The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry, Vol. 2, 1887.

The reader is here invited with asterisks to fill in a portrait of a water-nymph according to fancy.  From Some Welsh Legends and Other Poems by John Humphreys Davies, 1893.

Here we learn that the moon has but a single eye, and it's ghostly.  From "The Wind and the Moon" by George Macdonald, in One Thousand Poems for Children, 1920.

"Are you fond of poetry?"  From Andy's Adventures on Noah's Ark by Douglas Zabriskie Doty, 1902.

From Strange Prayers for Strange Times.

Pine/rhyme.  If a near-rhyme falls in a pine forest and there's no one to hear it, does it make an assonance of itself?  Needles of Pine: Lines Without Rhyme by Charles Wellington Stone, 1886.

"The Japanese poet" by Ethel Plummer for Cartoons Magazine, 1917.

Here's what a mermaid's curse feels like, in case you were wondering.  From A Legend of Mona by E. S. Craven, 1825.

You've seen Johan Deckmann's Smart Ways to Use Poetry in a Street Fight.  Though only the book's cover has survived, we speculated that (if the physicists are right about multiple universes) there's some world in which the book's pages exist.  Through the powers of several arcane tools at our disposal, we were able to purloin five fragments.  We present them here, exclusively.  The first is an advertisement from the book's front matter, for a Lord Byron-branded boxing glove "used in every important poetic convention."  (The ad notes that "unprotected figures" are "protected by hyperbole.")  The second fragment instructs on how to deal with "a cowardly poet of society" by throwing him on his face.  The third recommends grabbing the "pencil-hand" and using an enjambment to incapacitate any "poetaster" who has whipped out a synecdoche.  The fourth involves using a powerful blank verse to leave someone curled in a ball, or an epigram to slash a bone in two.  The final fragment addresses how difficult it is for an idle rhymer to train and offers a tip for the writing desk.  (The book was, of course, second-hand, and the red markings on the pages are as we found them.)

[For Gary Barwin.]