Writing Prompts & Exercises

In an interview published in Poetry Northwest, C. E. Janecek speaks with Asa Drake, author of Maybe the Body (Tin House, 2026), about language and its imprecision, and when it’s best to leave things unsaid. “In customer service one avoids negation because it often points to a conflict,” says Drake. “For example I might say ‘walk please’ instead of ‘no running’ and replace a rule with a directive. I’m really interested in why the command is less offensive than the rule.” Write a poem in which the speaker gives instructions to prohibit an act or behavior. Begin each stanza with an imperative verb and try avoiding negative words such as “don’t,” “no,” “never,” or “not.” How can you portray what is forbidden to a reader without explicitly naming the rules?

“Summer grass aches and whispers. // It wants something; it calls and sings; it pours / out wishes to the overhead stars.” In Carl Sandburg’s three-stanza poem “Summer Grass,” originally published in his 1928 collection Good Morning, America, the poet explores sentiments of longing and transition, capturing the spiky heat and dryness of summer through a personification of grass straining for cool, nourishing hydration, and then the deliverance of rain. As summer slowly transitions into autumn, compose a series of short poems that manifest both the physical sensations and the emotional elements you might associate with two consecutive seasons, moving from one to the other. How can you play with rhythm and line breaks, sound and space, to express movement and energy?

Stine An’s debut collection, B-Dragon Suite, forthcoming from Nightboat Books in September, is a multidisciplinary, hybrid work that revolves around Korean pop music’s sounds and culture. The verses spring from an invented universe inhabited by a fictional boy band and girl group while also meditating on themes of colonial history and diaspora. Pieces range from prose poems and concrete poetry to song lyrics and dramatic scripts. The poem “B-Dragon Solo” begins: “B is for benighted. / Use banger in a sentence. The Korean War was is such a club banger. / B is for bang. / B is for banger.” The lines continue, incorporating emojis and Korean characters and romanizations. Create a poem that grows out of an imagined universe of your own, perhaps one that exists at the confluence of pop-music aesthetics and digital forms of communication, such as emojis and graphics. Try your own experiments with language and translations.

“Down valley a smoke haze / Three days heat, after five days rain,” writes Gary Snyder in his poem “Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout,” first published in his 1959 collection Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, as the speaker looks out from a mountaintop to describe the scene below before briefly moving on. In the second stanza, more interiority is revealed: “I cannot remember things I once read / A few friends, but they are in cities….” Inspired by Snyder’s verse, write a short poem consisting of two five-line stanzas about a memorable mid-August from your life. Start with a few evocative details that paint a picture of the scene, including what this particular moment looks, feels, sounds, and smells like. In your second stanza, allow your mind to wander toward more philosophical or existential musings.

“I am waiting / for the meek to be blessed / and inherit the earth / without taxes / and I am waiting / for forests and animals / to reclaim the earth as theirs,” writes the late Lawrence Ferlinghetti in his poem “I Am Waiting,” which appears in his 1958 collection A Coney Island of the Mind. The speaker presents a long, meandering list of things they are waiting for, many of which are related to social, cultural, and political change and reveal a snapshot of activist concerns of the time. “I am waiting / for a way to be devised / to destroy all nationalisms / without killing anybody.” Write a poem that lists what you are awaiting, perhaps reflecting on current issues, both national and international. You may even want to reference characters from your favorite works of literature, as Ferlinghetti does with Tom Sawyer, Aphrodite, and others.

“The mosquito knows full well, small as he is / he’s a beast of prey,” writes D. H. Lawrence in his 1929 poem “The Mosquito Knows,” recently published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. “But after all / he only takes his bellyful, / he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.” In this five-line verse, Lawrence presents a pithy portrait of an insect and then points the mirror at human behavior, the mosquito becoming a more sympathetic figure when pitted against human greed. Compose a series of miniscule poems that each revolve around an insect. Explore different facets of the bug, including how they might be irritating or harmful to people, and the ways in which their lives contrast surprisingly with human tendencies.

In an interview for the Poetry Society of America, Diane Seuss talks to Jennifer Franklin about how she writes with a keen awareness of the body as a site of both immense precarity and radical agency. When considering the role of structure in poetry, Seuss draws a parallel between the literary form and human form, how language can be compressed and lead through the formal constraints of a poetic form in the same way the human body can act as an impediment and a guide. “We write with all of ourselves,” she says, “at our best.” Write a poem that uses the structure of a poetic form to reflect on the nature of the body. Explore how the lyrical imagination pushes against structure, like the body “compresses the soul,” as Seuss describes. How does the inclusion of the body anchor your writing, and how might you play within these confines?

In a recent New York Times Magazine article, Nitsuh Adebe speaks with a linguist about the ways in which words evolve over time, noting recent shifts in the use of terms like “POV” and “aesthetic,” especially in social media posts. “How people use a language is what the language is, and most everything we do in an effort to steer one another’s usage—teaching grammar, mocking errors, writing columns—is just an exercise of social power,” writes Abebe. Compose a poem that incorporates a word or phrase that has gained a new meaning in contemporary use, possibly through the rapidly changing landscape of language mediated, distorted, or abbreviated in texting and social media. What sorts of ingenuity, misinterpretation, and customization propelled your selection from its original definition to a new one? How might using it in a new poetic context subject it to an additional layer of meaning?

Write a poem that begins with directions you cannot give, whether it’s returning to a childhood home that no longer exists, finding someone you’ve lost, or reaching a place that has only ever appeared to you in dreams. Let the poem move between the literal and the imagined, charting not only streets and landscapes, but also memories, misdirections, and silences. What landmarks have shifted? What details remain sharp? Allow the act of mapping to reveal both presence and absence, and bring the reader in on what it feels like to be in the place you want to bring them.

Fady Joudah, winner of the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize, writes that he thought about how animals process trauma without speaking and how “intifada deserves a good rhyme” when composing his poem “Pink Panther,” recently published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. The poem concludes with the stanza: “See cicada or when home is a howling / intifada. Your heart, utterly flexible, / a wind like water, / the stubborn wind.” This week, begin by creating a short list of words or phrases that you find yourself circling around in your work, perhaps indicative of themes at the forefront of your thoughts. Then, select one term that is particularly difficult to rhyme. Challenge yourself to think of rhyming words and ways to connect the terms, even if far-fetched. Build your poem around this innovative and unexpected rhyme pairing.

“I love the hour before takeoff, / that stretch of no time, no home / but the gray vinyl seats linked like / unfolding paper dolls,” begins Rita Dove’s poem “Vacation,” which appears in her 2021 collection, Playlist for the Apocalypse. The poem follows the speaker’s thoughts and observations of others in the airport waiting at the flight gate, from the “ragtag nuclear families” to “the heeled bachelorette” to “the lone executive.” Taking inspiration from Dove’s poem, write a poem that takes place in an airport, infusing the piece with the dynamic energy of different people on the move, traveling and waiting, perhaps impatiently with nervous energy or exhaustion. How might the sounds and textures of the airport play a role in how the poem conveys the atmosphere?

In an essay recently published in the Evergreen Review, Eric Dean Wilson writes about discovering the playful use of metaphors in Robert Glück’s 1985 debut novel, Jack the Modernist. While considering what makes one work, Wilson recalls another writer teaching him about metaphor with a metaphor. “A metaphor, the writer said, is like a spark plug,” he says. “At just the right distance, the electrodes cause a spark to arc across the open air, igniting an explosion. The distance between the electrodes matters.” This week compose a poem that cycles through the process of creating an effective metaphor. You might start with the words, “A metaphor is like….” Allow yourself the freedom to play with language that might feel too convoluted as you gradually move toward the right combination to ignite a spark.