Monday 2 November Game Night!
Worku Game Night — Monday, November 2! Join us for another evening of words, poetry, laughter, and a little creative head-scratching! ...
Game Night 3: More Experience Than Game
Four players, 45 poems, and a whole lot of finger-snapping applause! Our third Worku Game Night at the Crooked Goat in Petaluma was a fun and remarkably productive evening ...
Four Players, 44 Poems, and Tater Tots!
Fun night! Four players, 44 poems, tater tots, and about 2 hours of head scratching, game fiddling, and appreciation among friends ❤️ ...
Worku Retrospectives – Debbie Wilson
One pleasure of revisiting Worku’s first year is seeing the shape of a poet’s work emerge across hundreds of small poems. I really enjoy Debbie Wilson’s poetry ...
Worku Retrospectives – Mark
Over time, Worku becomes more than a collection of daily poems. Each writer leaves behind a body of work: recurring images, humor, tenderness, surprises, and distinctive ways of handling constraint ...
Zappai Mode!
One of the things I’m noticing more and more with Worku is that zappai may be the form the game produces most naturally ...
Guerrilla Worku!
Another Worku Game Night at Crooked Goat—this time with Robo, beers, pizza, four rounds of poems, and the beginnings of Guerrilla Worku ...
Game Night Is a Thing!
I finally got over my jitters, hesitation, and general nervousness about taking the Worku game out into the wild and brought it to Crooked Goat, my local watering hole here in Petaluma ...
When the constraint comes before the meaning
One of the interesting things about Worku is what happens when a constraint arrives before meaning does ...
Maybe you’d like to host a game night?
Hey there! Below is an image you can use to invite some friends over for a Worku test game night. The best group size for playing is 3–6 people. You don't need to know anything about the game ahead of time—we're testing it! Play, write some Worku, have some fun, ...
Final theme: reflection
You don't have to write “Reflection.” Let something be reconsidered, mirrored, or seen again. Ok, this project has been testing an element of a Worku board game. I'm not quite ready to reveal but have been testing and some of you have been part of that and thanks very much! ...
Update to navigation
I've tried to make the navigation easier by separating pages and having all available in the upper navigation bar. Lemme know if you see anything wierd ...
Solo Renga anyone?
We’ve been having fun with Linked Worku — taking the day’s constraint words and writing a series of 5–7–5 poems, with one constraint word in each poem (check out auntie jj's six part epic from 26 September!). That got me reading about Japanese linked poetry.Traditionally, renga and later renku were ...
Wordle in 6! Now What Do I Do?
You know the feeling. Wordle in six. Yay, but for the worki this is a challenge. Now you have six constraint words to squeeze into one little 5–7–5 Worku. I always suffer when that happens. Then I thought: Wait. What if I don't put them all in one poem? Introducing ...
This week’s theme: presence
Notice what is here, right now—a person, an object, a sensation, a creature, a moment. Don't use the word presence. Put us there ...
This week’s theme: movement
This week we add movement. Bodies. Water. Wind. Travel. Leaving. Arriving. Falling. Rising. Staying still while everything else moves ...
This week’s theme: season
Evoke a season, weather, or change in the natural world. You don't have to write “season.” Put us inside one ...
Something new for Worku: Theme of the Week
Something new for Worku: Theme of the Week For the next few weeks, we're going to try a little experiment ...
How the AI Scores Worku Poems
The AI scoring rubric is not meant to declare which poem is “best.” It is a way to look at each Worku from several angles and ask a simple question: how well did the poem turn a set of required words into an actual haiku? Each poem is scored out ...
The Worku Archive Project
As worku approaches its first anniversary (23 September 2026!), I’ve begun going back through every poem from the past year, month by month. I’m looking at more than statistics. I want to understand how the form has developed, which poems and experiments have helped define it, how individual worki have ...
One Puzzle, Many Poems: Introducing Freestyle Worku
One Puzzle, Many Poems: Introducing Freestyle Worku ...