Poetry Prompts

Choose a short poem and replace every word in it with its opposite.

 

I do mean every word - even little ones like "the" and "of." I'm funny about words, and puzzling over ridiculous questions like, "what's the opposite of 'the'?" is right up my alley.  Thanks to Jericho Brown for this one - it helps me to loosen up when I'm feeling stuck.

Find a poem in a foreign language and translate it without looking up any words.

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This exercise feels like permission to play. I enjoy leaning into what the sound of the words makes me feel, assuming I'm pronouncing them in a way that even approaches correctness (which, considering my disappointing history with the acquisition of languages beyond English, is wildly unlikely). It really doesn't matter - the goal here is to relax into imagination and let euphony lead the way.

Choose a book and use its title as the base for an acrostic poem.

 

In this exercise, the alphabet acts as a sort of code, with letters corresponding to numbers 1-26.  For each letter of the title, go to the corresponding page number in the book and find the first word that begins with that letter. Copy from that word until you feel like stopping, and use that copied text as the first line of your poem. Keep going until you have a line for every letter in the title. The results are usually pleasantly bizarre - the poems I've cobbled together remind me of dreaming.

Write a seven-line poem where each line embodies one day of the past week.

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I sometimes turn to this prompt when I don't know what to write about. It helps pull up what's been lurking beneath the surface of my life and expose it to the light. If I'm lucky, I can find the bones of a poem in the wreckage.

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Record what you can remember of your last dream, then read it backwards. Now, write. ​

This one started as a therapeutic exercise for me, trying to write my way out of some very dark dreamscapes, but it stuck around as an interesting way to interrogate the subconscious - kind of a gut check for metaphor, a peek at what my mind is working on without me. 

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Find a line in a poem that resonates with you. Use it as the first line of your poem.

 

This one always feels a little weird to me, but if you can get past the discomfort of starting your piece with a piece of someone else's, it can be really effective. You can always delete or attribute the purloined line later ;)

Choose a poem you love and write a piece that imitates it.

Take this in any direction you like. Mimic the tone, the structure, the subject - whatever the poem is singing to you, echo that sound.