Alison McAlpine’s fifteen-minute-long documentary, perfectly a strangeness, follows a posse of three donkeys as they traverse the barren landscape of the Atacama Desert in Chile and happen upon an astronomical observatory on top of a mountain. While there is no dialogue, the movements of the donkeys, their expressive ears, and the mechanized motions of the observatory satellites, combined with the setting sun giving way to a night sky, offer an expansive range of interpretations and discovery. McAlpine, who was a poet before she was a filmmaker, says in an interview for Deadline, “Seeing these donkeys grazing besides these billion-dollar beasts, these metallic domes, I asked a question, how do they see this world?” Write a narrative poem without human presence that attempts to convey the perspective of an animal, or other living thing, discovering the universe for the first time. What diction seems most effective at producing the wonder you wish to evoke?
Writing Prompts & Exercises
The Time Is Now
The Time Is Now offers three new and original writing prompts each week to help you stay committed to your writing practice throughout the year. We also curate a list of essential books on writing—both the newly published and the classics—that we recommend for guidance and inspiration. Whether you’re struggling with writer’s block, looking for a fresh topic, or just starting to write, our archive of writing prompts has what you need. Need a starter pack? Check out our Writing Prompts for Beginners.
Tuesdays: Poetry prompts
Wednesdays: Fiction prompts
Thursdays: Creative nonfiction prompts
Get immediate access to more than 2,000 writing prompts with the tool below:
Published in n+1, Jynne Dilling writes a tribute piece to Michael Silverblatt, who died earlier this month and was the host of NPR’s Bookworm radio program for over three decades. Reflecting on his many insights, Dilling writes about an episode of the program in which Silverblatt talks to author David Mitchell about how stammering is a form of learning what to say. “Stammering is the language of the inner self,” says Silverblatt. “Before a writer does a final draft, the first draft is a form of stammering, trying to gum one’s way through the thing one doesn’t yet know how to say.” Compose a poem that begins as a stammer of sorts, in which you are learning how to say something that feels difficult or even impossible to articulate in language. How might holding on to parts of the stammering imbue your poem with valuable insights into your inner self?
Susan Stewart’s seventh poetry collection, Bramble, forthcoming in April from the University of Chicago Press, traverses a wide range of poetic forms and subjects—including progressions throughout nature, illness and grief, and Biblical allusions—striking tones that are elegiac, invocatory, conversational, and observational at various points. The collection’s title might be one way to connect interpretations of the pieces through their depictions of entanglement and struggle, the presence of thorny destruction, but also of protection and blossoming. Taking inspiration from Stewart’s Bramble, write a series of poems that uses the structure of a poetic form to reflect on a complicated aspect of your own life, whether related to family, romance, spirituality, your job, or your creative practice. Where in other works of literature has your metaphorical subject been used, and how has it functioned?
“I love snow and briefly. / I love the first minutes in a warm room after stepping out of the cold. / I love my twenties and want them back every day. / I love time. / I love people. / I love people and my time away from them the most.” In his poem “Love,” published in the American Poetry Review, Alex Dimitrov lists dozens of beloved things, each line beginning simply with, “I love.” The items listed often play off of each other and seem to meander associatively, in a stream-of-consciousness manner. Compose a poem that uses a list format to meditate on things you love. You might begin each line with a repeated phrase, or allow the entire poem to encompass one long list. Try experimenting with associative thinking, fluctuations of line length, and playful tones.
X. J. Kennedy, prolific and award-winning poet who died at the age of ninety-six on February 1, was known for verses which often incorporated rhyming couplets and light humor. The title poem from his debut 1961 collection, Nude Descending a Staircase, is based on Marcel Duchamp’s painting of the same name and is made up of three short stanzas, beginning with: “Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh, / a gold of lemon, root and rind, / she sifts in sunlight down the stairs / with nothing on. Nor on her mind.” Taking inspiration from this style, select a few works by a favorite artist—whether paintings, sculptures, films, or music—and compose a series of short poems that make use of end rhymes, and perhaps traditional forms of an ode, ballad, elegy, or sonnet. How might deploying a surprising twist of humor inject the poems with a sense of playful energy?
In “Object Loss,” which appears in her Pulitzer Prize–winning poetry collection, Stag’s Leap (Knopf, 2012), Sharon Olds touches upon the emotions brought up from objects that were formerly tied to a romantic partner—a clock, a chair, a table. These physical items exemplify the metaphysicality of human connection. “As I add to the stash which will go to him,” writes Olds, “I feel as if I’m falling away / from family—as of each ponderous / object had been keeping me afloat. No, they were / the scenery of the play now closing, / lengthy run it had.” Jot down a list of objects that you’ve held on to from people you’ve loved in the past. Compose a poem that incorporates several of those items, taking care to describe their physical attributes. What sentiments did they evoke while in the act of parting, and after?
Ilya Kaminsky begins his poem “Psalm for the Slightly Tilted,” which was published this week in the New Yorker, with the lines: “This is not / a good year. / But it has / witnesses.” In this first month of the new year, compose a poem that begins with “This is a ____ year,” or perhaps “This is not a ____ year.” In Kaminsky’s poem, he explores protest, revolution, and resistance, deploying imagery of things that are slightly askew: a question mark, bent spoons, off-rhythm chants, and people leaning and lopsided. Think of how you would characterize the year based on these first weeks, considering what’s happening in your own life, and in political and global events. What sort of imagery might characterize the sentiments or mood of this month?
“i repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can’t point to / anymore, maybe my gut— // maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.” In “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” by Renée Nicole Good, a poet and mother who was fatally shot by an ICE agent earlier this month, the speaker contemplates a struggle between science and faith. Good won a 2020 prize from the Academy of American Poets for the poem, and guest judge Rajiv Mohabir spoke about what resonates with him in a recent Newsweek article: “What does it mean to define something until there is no wonder left? The poem asks me. The speaker in the poem has no answers, just experiences that illuminate the tensions that arise when trying to reconcile wonder against brutality.” Write a poem that is situated between the opposing tensions of wonder and brutality. Is there a point at which definition and description are overwhelming?
Catchy lyrics are often the reason popular songs get stuck in our heads, although sometimes the lyrics take on a life of their own. John Cougar Mellencamp’s 1982 hit song “Jack & Diane,” a “little ditty” about a young American couple, includes the line, “Suckin’ on a chili dog outside the Tastee-Freez,” a striking description of a scene that has inspired multiple comedic covers of the song in which the chili dog phrase is repeated over and over. Jot down a list of phrases from songs that have gotten stuck in your head, perhaps because of a certain oddness or seemingly nonsensical nature paired with evocative imagery. Write a poem that begins with the lyric, allowing associations and context from the song to mingle with what your personal memories bring to the words.
Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999, currently on view at Dia Beacon in New York’s Hudson Valley, is the first U.S. retrospective covering the Taiwanese conceptual artist’s performance works. Each of his projects, which last an entire year, pushes at the boundaries between life and art: 365 days spent locked in a wooden cage, or living on the streets of New York City, or punching in on a time clock every hour on the hour in his studio, or tethering himself with a rope to another artist. “My art is doing time, so it’s not different from doing life or doing art, or doing time. No matter whether I stay in ‘art-time’ or ‘life-time,’ I am passing time,” Hsieh said in a 2019 interview for the Believer. How is the passing of time connected to your sense of observation as a poet? Write a poem that reflects the distinctions or similarities between your “art-time” and “life-time.”
“Lichens in the armpits of marble statues / differentiated from lichens on the thighs, / eaten by snails on moonless nights.” Talvikki Ansel describes her poem “The Lichens,” published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, as growing from an imagining of “the stories of far-flung lichen family members” and “inspired by the presence and tenacity of lichens on trees and rocks and the roof-racks and side mirrors of my car.” Taking a cue from Ansel’s muse, spend some time jotting down notes and observations from any type of natural growth in your surroundings and conduct a bit of research about the biological processes involved. Compose a poem that mixes your personal imaginings with scientific findings and striking imagery.
Clunky metaphors, the use of em dashes and the verb “delve,” and the rule of threes. These are some telltale signs that you’re reading prose created by artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT, according to a recent New York Times Magazine article titled “Why Does A.I. Write Like . . . That?” by Sam Kriss. AI creates a certain supposedly distinctive voice that is markedly strange, yet one which is foundationally based on how humans articulate themselves in language. This week write a poem from the persona of an AI bot that is commenting on its own algorithm and how it mines language from novels and textbooks to create what humans request through their prompts. Play with vocabulary, punctuation, and style to mimic the voice of AI. How does your AI persona’s own “consciousness” push it to create hallucinations?
“It was happily free of theoretical ambitions, such as being avant-garde or radical or even funny,” writes Ron Padgett in the foreword to The Complete C Comics (New York Review Books, 2025), which collects the two issues of comic books created by Joe Brainard in collaboration with New York School poets in the 1960s. Brainard created the drawings and poets, such as Padgett, John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and Peter Schjeldahl, provided text for speech balloons and captions. This week experiment with the energy and humor of this illustrative format. Take inspiration from classic comic book icons and characters and write a poem that channels the childlike playfulness of comics, giving them your own “adult” spin, perhaps incorporating elements of surrealism or parody, or even accompanying your own doodles and sketches.
In a tribute published in the Yale Review to Ellen Bryant Voigt, who passed away in October, executive editor Meghan O’Rourke writes: “Through her, I learned to read like a poet. Not to identify themes, as I’d been trained to do as an undergraduate at Yale, but to attend to effects.” This type of close examination included describing poems by how many medium-length lines and periods were in a poem, and how many lines a sentence takes up. “Her rigor taught me how to read my own work as I’d learned to read others’: closely enough to see what it was resisting,” writes O’Rourke. Revisit a poem you’ve written and consider what the work may want to be, and what it might be resisting. What about its syntax or grammar might lead you to these conclusions? Explore reworking the poem a little or a lot to shape how it arrives at its desired effects, or resists them.
Write a poem that begins with the image of an animal arriving where it should not be, such as a whale in an office space or a Zebra in a suburban backyard. Allow this surreal scene to take you to unexpected places and metaphors. Is the animal an omen or is it concealing a secret? Focus on the literal and symbolic dimensions of the encounter, drawing out the scene to illuminate overlooked truths, inner stirrings, and the quiet absurdities of the world around you.
In “Man Ray: When Objects Dream,” a new survey exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among the many works on display are over fifty of the artist’s “rayographs,” photograms made in the early twentieth century by placing objects on or near light-sensitive photo paper that is then exposed to create dramatically silhouetted images with high contrast. In these works, everyday objects—a comb, bottle, lightbulb, eggbeater, key, and wrench—become defamiliarized through Man Ray’s manipulation of placement and movement, capturing what poet Tristan Tzara described as the moment “when objects dream.” Browse through some of the rayographs and select one image that particularly resonates with you. Compose a poem that imagines the dreams in your chosen image. In your deciphering of the objects, ask yourself what do they dream?
“Avoid movement on roofs, between buildings, and near windows. / Do not stand where you will stand out.” In Carolyn Forché’s poem “On Being Watched From Above,” published in the New Yorker and forthcoming in the anthology I Witness: An Anthology of Documentary Poetry (Wesleyan University Press, 2026) edited by Kwoya Fagin Maples and Erin Murphy, she draws from official Territorial Defense text to write a documentary poem that, void of specific names and places, reflects the horrors of contemporary warfare and surveillance technology. Taking a cue from the imperative and direct language in Forché’s poem, write your own poem that expresses sentiments around society’s increasing use of surveillance and monitoring. In an era in which these modes are oftentimes presented as serving a greater good, what might be overlooked about the costs to our ways of life?
“When does the box of a story—a painting, a sonnet, a name—limit, and when does it free? Can it do both? What do I tell, and what do I obscure?” asks Anne Marie Rooney in a brief description of her poem “Abstraction,” published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. This week, consider the parameters of a poem—the space on the page and the length of the line, the language, the type of poetic form—and write a poem whose subject matter interrogates the limitations of your chosen form. How can you play with freedom within the confines of this “box of a story?”
According to a recent article in Psychology Today, while most people’s earliest memories are remembered like silent films—rich with imagery but largely void of sound—for a select few who have an auditory first memory, they may also have a “sound-minded” orientation in life, in which the “sensory modality of hearing is inseparable from their way of being.” This week, taking inspiration from these two possibilities, compose a pair of poems with contrasting takes on sound. Choose one childhood memory and write one sound-filled version and one silent version. Take some time to think about the various ways in which sound can be conveyed through stylistic decisions involving alliteration and consonance, typography and punctuation, and rhythm. How might line breaks and spacing on the page contribute to a sense of silence?
In the introduction to John Berryman’s Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, forthcoming in December from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, editor Shane McCrae makes the case that Berryman’s The Dream Songs—a compilation of two books, 77 Dream Songs (FSG, 1964) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (FSG, 1968)—is an epic poem, pointing to its stylistic concision. “The language of an epic poem must be, in its way, as compressed as the language of a lyric poem,” he writes, “and in those moments when it is not compressed, the language must strike the reader as relaxed from compression, and loaded with the certainty of future compression.” Another feature of epic poems is the presence of a hero, although McCrae notes that Berryman’s Henry is an “unheroic hero,” variably charming, gloomy, facetious, and colloquial. Begin composing a series of poems that contain these two elements of traditional epic poetry. How does your hero or antihero function to create a binding narrative?
“Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot?” In Samuel Beckett’s 1952 play Waiting for Godot, which has a new production on Broadway starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, Vladimir and Estragon spend their days waiting for the arrival of someone named Godot, who never shows up. They pass the time with repetitious exchanges of banter, arguments, and musings. The ambiguity of their exact circumstances, as well as who Godot is and what would happen with Godot’s arrival, creates a tragicomic exploration of the nature and purpose of existence, and the significance of friendship and faith. Write a poem that uses the idea of an eternal waiting—for someone, or something—as an entry point to reflect on larger themes of life’s big questions.
For the Poetry Society of America’s “In Their Own Words” series, Suzanne Buffam writes about her poem “Trying,” which circles around the effort to conceive a child. “The poem became, in a sense, a meditation on effort, in which the suspension of effort was the aim of my efforts,” writes Buffam. “I gave myself one constraint. Each paragraph I wrote would have to contain some form of the verb ‘to try.’” Taking inspiration from Buffam’s constraint for her piece, compose a poem that explores your process trying to reach a goal, whether big or small, tangible or more abstract. Play around with different forms of the verb “to try,” or another verb that gestures at effort, paying careful consideration to how the word conveys a sensation of persistence over the course of time and through various obstacles and setbacks.
“Forget about apples and oranges—nothing rhymes with orange anyway. Never mind those plums that William Carlos Williams sneaked from the icebox. The most poetic fruit of all is the blackberry,” writes A. O. Scott, critic at large for the New York Times Book Review, citing blackberry-inclusive works by poets such as Margaret Atwood, Emily Dickinson, Robert Hass, Seamus Heaney, Galway Kinnell, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Sylvia Plath. Compose a poem inspired by what you consider the most poetic fruit, describing the textures and tastes of your selection, and its associations in the world and in other works of art. Spend some time thinking about the name of the fruit itself, its sounds and component parts and etymological roots. Does conjuring words and phrases that recall the qualities of the fruit take your poem in a surprising or unexpected direction?
“This is how the text exchange ends. / Not with an explicit farewell but with a two-day pause followed by a thumbs-up-emoji reaction,” writes Reuven Perlman in “How Other Things End” recently published in the New Yorker with an epigraph of T. S. Eliot’s famed last lines from “The Hollow Men.” “This is how the career ends. / Not with a retirement party and a gold watch but with a second career in the gig economy.” Taking inspiration from Perlman’s comedic perspective of dark times, write a humorous poem that consists of your own inventions of anticlimactic contemporary situations in which the outcome is a letdown, with more of a fizzle than a gratifying conclusion. What modern references would you include to put your own stamp on this concluding episode?
“We live in such a fast-paced world: Poetry helps us slow down, deepen our attention, connect and live more fully,” says Arthur Sze in our online exclusive announcing his appointment as the twenty-fifth poet laureate of the United States. Taking inspiration from Sze’s insights on poetry’s ability to help us appreciate each moment, compile a cluster of words and phrases that come to mind when you recall the soundscape of a recent observation. As you jot down the grouping of words, allow the sounds of what’s already on the page to contribute to associative rhythms and any consonance or assonance in your brainstorm. Then, compose your poem using the full range of the page’s space, deprioritizing any urgency for ease of meaning-making for a piece that is first and foremost inextricable from its sound.