Many poems are written in the heat of falling in love with someone or something, with descriptions of desire, first touches, and breathless beginnings. But what happens after the crescendo when routine replaces urgency, when glances no longer surprise, and when love becomes less about being seen and more about staying? Write a poem about what it feels like to love someone or something after the rush. You could write about a partner, a city, a craft, or a version of yourself. Focus on the quiet gestures, the dailiness, and the things you no longer say out loud. How does love change when it no longer needs to perform?
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
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In their poem “In the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice so I don’t lose my fingernails. But I took a risk today to write this down.,” published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series in 2023, Andrea Gibson, who passed away on July 14, wrote about a newfound gratitude for life while being treated for terminal cancer. “Remind me / all my prayers were answered // the moment I started praying / for what I already have,” wrote Gibson. Write a poem that expresses gratitude through confronting the mortal nature of being human. What do you already have in your life that you might be taking for granted? Perhaps begin by listing some of the beautiful things you saw today.
In a recent interview for the Paris Review’s Art of Poetry series by Chloe Garcia Roberts, the late Fanny Howe, who passed away on July 9, spoke of a revelatory experience writing “with the environment” at Annaghmakerrig, an artists’ retreat where she wrote her 1995 collection, O’Clock. “It was complete solitude, and an actual attempt to write, for the first time, with the environment,” says Howe. “Instead of sitting and looking out of the window, I just sank into the weather and the trees, dancing around in the environment of Ireland, which I know by its smell.” This week, find a spot outside as close to nature as possible, perhaps simply a location with trees, and try to sink into the landscape. Write a poem that captures the feelings of your surroundings, meditating on minute sensory details and the emotions that the environment evokes.
In a 4Columns review of After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960–2025 (Granary Books, 2025) edited by Steve Clay and M. C. Kinniburgh, a catalog for the exhibition of the same name at the Grolier Club in New York, Albert Mobilio lists a few of the unconventional poetry forms from the show: “A cardboard box stuffed with crumpled slips of paper; a book in which each line of text appears on its own sliver of a page; a series of poems printed on what look like business cards; knotted lengths of wool stenciled with verse.” This week think beyond words on a page and conceptualize a new poetry project that makes use of different pictorial and material elements. How might you split up words, lines, or stanzas on a variety of surfaces?
Summer is often a season of extremes with scorching pavement and icy drinks, painful sunburns and soothing shade, chaotic activities and calming stillness. Write a poem that explores the tension or intimacy between extremes. Consider a specific, concrete pairing, such as a cold popsicle melting down your wrist in 100-degree heat or the boisterous laughter at a backyard barbecue countered by the silence of an abandoned porch swing. Focus on how contrast sharpens a sensation and can uncover deeper emotional truths. Try to avoid naming the opposites directly, instead, evoke them through details like textures, temperature, tone, and movement. You might also experiment with form to reflect duality by including couplets or mirrored stanzas.
In the essay collection Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and published by New Directions in June, Yoko Tawada explores various aspects of life, communication, and art through a lens of linguistic and cultural hybridity. In “Paris: This Language Which Is Not One,” Tawada writes about a poem by Paul Celan in which the German words for dwindling (Neige) and snow (Schnee) appear in adjacent lines, pointing out that Neige means snow in French. “To me, Celan’s poems have a multilingual structure akin to a magic net that even captures Japanese, a language he never knew,” Tawada notes. Write a poem in which you deploy a “magic net” that allows you the freedom to play with associative, expansive thinking, capturing any basic knowledge of words in other languages or dialects or registers. What unexpected connections can be made?
To write their latest book, People’s Choice Literature: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels (Columbia University Press, 2025), Tom Comitta used data compiled from a specially designed national public opinion poll on literary preference and composed two novels: a formulaic, fast-paced thriller and an experimental epistolary sci-fi romance with elderly aristocratic tennis players as protagonists. Responses to the poll included preferences and aversions to attributes such as characters’ identities, genre, verb tense, setting, and point of view. Taking a cue from this project, jot down a brief list of what you would guess to be the most and least desired attributes of poetry, including rhyme, length, diction, and imagery. Write a “Most Wanted Poem” and “Most Unwanted Poem” based on your list. How do your own idiosyncrasies and thoughts around literary taste infiltrate each piece?
The poems in Charity E. Yoro’s debut collection, Ten-cent Flower & Other Territories (First Matter Press, 2023), largely circle around the political history and her personal experience of the Hawaiʻian islands. Her poem “postcard from rome” takes on the feeling of a postcard that arrives unexpectedly in the mail—a surprising and sudden intrusion of an exotic locale. This week, write a poem titled “Postcard From…” and think back to your memories of visiting a new place. Try to reach far from what’s currently at the forefront of your mind, as well as the themes and topics you typically explore in your poetry. Allow this poem to drop in to your current body of writing like a short, evocative glimpse of another time and place—a gentle disruption to your usual flow.
Asked where great poems come from, Alice Notley, who passed away last month, responded in a 2024 interview for the Paris Review’s Art of Poetry series: “I think the real answer has to do with suffering, and how you perceive things after suffering. You might just freeze, but if you don’t, other worlds open to you.” In remembrance of Notley, write a poem that considers how your perceptions may have shifted in subtle or substantial ways after a time of loss or sorrow. Notley spoke of “hearing the dead” in dreams and receiving advice. What new worlds have opened up to you as a result of this difficult experience? How can you use lyric form to give voice to your emotions?
In storytelling, the narrative strategy of beginning in medias res is to launch into the middle of a plot. Frequently applied to the composition of contemporary novels and films, such as Fight Club, Forrest Gump, and Raging Bull, the storytelling device can be traced back to Homer’s Greek epic poem The Iliad, which opens at the tail end of the Trojan War. This week write a poem that begins in medias res. Think of a story you’d like to recount in narrative verse and then select a starting point that may be much later than the logical or conventional beginning of the action. Sprinkle in flashbacks and recollections of memory to fill in any necessary pieces of context that allude to earlier events.
On her website, The Marginalian, Maria Popova writes about her admiration for Marie Howe’s poem “The Maples,” which appears in her Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, New and Selected Poems (Norton, 2024), and describes it as “spare and stunning.” The poem begins by asking a question that has fueled philosophical discussions for centuries: “How should I live my life?” The speaker poses this question to nearby maple trees to which they respond, “shhh shhh shhh,” and their leaves “ripple and gleam.” Compose your own poem that attempts to ask and even embody this big life question, situating a speaker in a setting in which their connection to the surrounding environment is incorporated into the answer. Do you find yourself drawn toward nature or somewhere else?
Diane Seuss’s poem “Romantic Poet,” which appears in her collection Modern Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2024), is a reference to John Keats and his famous poem “Ode to a Nightingale.” Seuss writes: “You would not have loved him, / my friend the scholar / decried. He brushed his teeth, / if at all, with salt. He lied, / and rarely washed / his hair.” This week write a poem about someone or something you love that takes inspiration from Seuss’s poem and the ways in which her verse spans the universe of mundane actions and the sublime. Consider how to apportion the profane and the profound with alternations. How can the rhythm, pacing, and sound of your lines introduce a tension between what you love and the reality of what you love?
In the New York Times, a recent headline reads: “Universal Antivenom May Grow Out of Man Who Let Snakes Bite Him 200 Times.” Without reading the content of the article, where does this sensational statement take your mind? This could be an act of heroism, foolishness, a desperate cry for attention, or simply one of the many bizarre idiosyncrasies of human behavior. This week, scroll and scan through a range of headlines—whether seemingly legitimate or dubious—and pick a particularly strange one. Before reading the article, write a poem that follows your line of thinking upon seeing this striking bit of reportage. Think about where the story might go and what images are evoked. Are you able to draw a personal connection to aspects of your own behavior that might explain why the headline resonated with you?
In “Leaving the Psychologist: An Abecedarian Ekphrastic,” published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, Grisel Y. Acosta combines two poetic forms—the abecedarian, in which the first letter of each line follows alphabetical order, and the ekphrastic, which describes or responds to a work of visual art. In Acosta’s poem, she uses a 1960 painting by Spanish Mexican Surrealist artist Remedios Varo titled “Mujer saliendo del psicoanalista” as inspiration: “another face has sprouted in my chest / beastly, that’s me, a super freak / cavorting with your skull in my grasp….” Inspired by Acosta’s creation of combined forms, write your own abecedarian ekphrastic poem. Search for an image of a painting or other work of visual art that invokes a feeling of expansiveness or cyclicality. Allow this to buoy your path from A to Z.
From the wildflowers of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the white lilies of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, flowers have played a significant role in literature and are symbolic in many cultures. Floriography is known as the “language of flowers” and is a means of expressing emotion through the use of flowers—a method of discreet communication that has existed for millennia and saw heightened popularity during the Victorian era. Whether depicted in a painting, presented as a gift, used as commemorative decor, or worn as an accessory, a flower can symbolize gratitude, love, remembrance, trust, good health, or even danger. Spend some time looking into the language of flowers and write a poem that deploys floriography in some way, perhaps to express something you’ve kept secret until now.
What signals to you that spring has finally arrived? While there are signs of transformation throughout the year, the signs of spring often feel particularly special following on the heels of winter as many look forward to the tiniest indications of vernal revitalization. Buzzing bees, daffodils and tulips, pollen that makes you sneeze, the end of clanging heater pipes, wearing shorts, outdoor picnics, and opening windows—there are many associations with the freshness of the season. This week write a series of short poems that focus on the small, perhaps idiosyncratic changes that signify to you, personally, that a new season is upon us.
In Sean Baker’s film Anora, which won best picture at this year’s Academy Awards, the title character spends the majority of her time zigzagging around New York City with various characters and in one particularly indelible shot, she strides past the iconic Cyclone roller coaster at a deserted Coney Island boardwalk on a gray winter afternoon. This week write a poem that revolves around an iconic location with a depiction that is unconventional or atypical in juxtaposition. You might consider how this locale is usually thought of in the popular imagination, how it was designed to function, or how it looks in different seasons. Play around with diction and rhythm to amp up a sense of tension and upend conventional expectations of your subject.
April is National Humor Month, which means it’s the perfect time to be reminded that everyone has a funny bone. The annual observance was conceived to heighten public awareness of the therapeutic value of humor, laughter, and joy. This week, consider what others have said about your sense of humor over the years. Does it lean toward puns or dad jokes? Is it witty or dark, laconic or bizarre, goofy or lighthearted? Write a short series of poems that showcases your specific sensibility around amusement and how you value humor and joy in your life. You might find it helpful to recount recent experiences and images that made you chuckle or guffaw and try to manifest in your poem what specifically made you laugh out loud.
In a 2023 BOMB Magazine interview by Wendy Xu, she asks Emily Lee Luan about the cinematic, image-specific aesthetic of the poems in her collection 回 / Return (Nightboat Books, 2023). “I think my poems try to understand internal emotional change through the external world—that might be why image and scene are so central,” says Luan. “If you look at something for long enough, then you might be able to understand what’s happening within you.” Take inspiration from this juxtaposition between interiority and externality, and the notion of finding understanding and connection through prolonged observation, and write a poem that uses extensive imagery to reflect the speaker’s internal emotional state. In lieu of expository description, how does imagistic expression lend a different kind of dynamism to your work?
Over the course of Rita Dove’s three-stanza prose poem “Prose in a Small Space,” the speaker meanders through a sequence of questions, observations, and digressions, periodically returning to the functionality of the prose poem form itself. “Prose likes to hear itself talk; prose is development and denouement, anticipation hovering near the canapés, lust rampant in the antipasta,” writes Dove. This week, forgo the options of line breaks and nonstandard grammar of more conventional poetry, and compose a series of short prose poems that take greater advantage of other poetry elements—rhythm, prosody, diction, pacing, and sensory details. Allow your prose to “hear itself talk,” develop, and conclude.
Can a poem calm the nerves? Whether it’s reading, listening to music, meditating, taking a walk, or observing the natural environment, consider the activities and sensory experiences that bring you some peace of mind. Compose a poem with diction, rhythm, imagery, and sentiments that evoke a state of tranquility. You might prepare by initially jotting down a list of words, phrases, and tidbits of sensory details, including specific sounds and types of words that align with your serene tone. Be open and allow yourself to be honest—and even playful—about what calms you down.
Australian author Gerald Murnane talks about being drawn to the “bewildering and at the same time satisfying feeling” of getting lost in familiar places in an interview in the Winter 2024 issue of the Paris Review. “I can very readily get myself lost in strange country towns or on back roads,” Murnane says, “knowing all the time where I am, that there’s no threat to my safety, that I can navigate myself home eventually.” Write a poem that explores the state of being lost, whether from a memory of a childhood incident, visiting a town, walking a new route, or perhaps from simply feeling lost in a chaotic or difficult situation. Amidst the bewilderment, are you able to find something you enjoy about being lost?
According to the Oxford English Corpus, a text corpus of twenty-first-century English with over two billion words collected from online and print sources produced by Anglophone countries, time, person, year, way, and day are the top five most common nouns in the English language. Browse through lists of the most common words, whether nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, pronouns, or articles. Instead of making use of unusual language, write a poem that revolves around playing with the most common ones. Experiment with how you might be able to manipulate unconventional repetition, syntax, spacing, or grammar to express fresh and unexpected meanings.
In a recent video, Maggie Millner, Yale Review senior editor and author of Couplets: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), speaks about her favorite love poems, including June Jordan’s short poem “Resolution #1,003,” which she says “illustrates the way that love between two people can inspire a politics, a kind of political vision.” Spend some time thinking about the relationships in your life and who might inspire in you a sort of political vision. Write a poem that captures how to “love who loves me” and “stay indifferent to indifference,” as Jordan writes in her poem. How might the circumstances, breadth, and boundaries of your adoration for someone be political?
Did you know that the word robust comes from the Latin word robur meaning “oak tree?” Merriam-Webster’s “12 Words Whose History Will Surprise You” provides the fascinating etymological history of words such as boudoir, phlegm, amethyst, and assassin, essentially mini lessons demonstrating an English word’s linguistic origins from an assortment of languages, including Medieval Latin, Greek, Arabic, French, and Middle English. Jot down a list of some of your favorite nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and look up their origin stories. (Tip: Merriam-Webster often lists a word’s etymology in the “Word History” section.) Write a poem inspired by this newly discovered and intriguing story behind the language, incorporating past iterations of the word into your verse.
Edges of Ailey is an immersive exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art centered around the twentieth-century choreographer, dancer, and artist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. The show spotlights multimedia presentations of Ailey’s work, recorded footage, notebooks and drawings, as well as works that inspired Ailey and have been inspired by him in the forms of literature, music, and visual art. Write a poem centered on movements of the body, whether a creative motion like a dance move or the everyday, repetitive motion of carrying out a task. Allow yourself the freedom to experiment with page space—choosing different sizes or styles of script, incorporating small drawings or cutouts—to create a collage-like piece.
In a Sight and Sound magazine interview from last November, filmmaker David Lynch, who passed away earlier this month, was asked about the inspiration for his latest album with longtime collaborator Chrystabell. Publicity materials for the album described how Lynch experienced a mysterious, revelatory vision while out for a nighttime walk in the woods. In the interview, Lynch admits this revelation isn’t quite what happened, but that he does “walk in the woods in my mind.” Jot down notes about the type of atmosphere, shape, mystery, or emotions you associate with a walk in the woods, and how might you “walk in your mind.” Allow your imagination to wander freely into any shadowy corners. Then, compose a poem that results from this creative exercise.
Ariel Francisco’s poem “On the Shore of Lake Atitlán, Apparently I Ruined Breakfast,” published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poet-a-Day series, recounts a puckish remark which derails the upbeat mood of a meal with the speaker’s mother and aunt. Commenting about the poem, Francisco acknowledges his teenage immaturity returning to him as an adult on this trip to Guatemala, his mother’s homeland. “This poem tries to capture what I often do in real life: upend a beautiful moment with something flippant,” he says. This week write a poem that attempts to capture a tendency you have, perhaps one that you’ve been self-critical about in your life. Francisco’s poem strikes a lighthearted tone throughout, which you might decide to mirror, or you could magnify your behavior’s ultimate consequences for a dramatically darker note that turns unexpectedly bright.
“One must have a mind of winter,” begins Wallace Stevens’s 1921 poem “The Snow Man,” which moves from describing iconically icy and desolate imagery of winter—“the pine-trees crusted with snow,” “the junipers shagged with ice”—to pointing out the human beholder’s subjectivity as the agent who projects this wintry outlook. This week, write a poem that takes inspiration from Stevens’s first line and explore what it means to you to have “a mind of winter.” Does it entail nothingness, quietude, withholding, generosity, cheer, beauty, love? How does your selection of seasonal associations determine your poem’s tonal direction? You might even experiment with approaching this prompt more than once, when your mood about the season feels distinctively different.
Just last month, the bald eagle officially became the national bird of the United States, signed into law by President Biden. Though its official status is new, the bald eagle has long served as an emblem of the country, depicted on the Great Seal and on coins and bills for much of the twentieth century—a symbol of strength, courage, freedom, and independence. Many U.S. states use reptiles, amphibians, insects, fish, and even dinosaurs as their symbols. This week research and consider the various animal emblems and symbols in your midst and choose one to write a poem that draws a personal connection to the animal’s symbolic meaning, whether real or imagined. As you triangulate a relationship between yourself, an animal symbol, and a physical location in this way, explore any unexpected thematic directions within your poem.
In her 2022 New York Times essay “The Shape of the Void: Toward a Definition of Poetry,” Elisa Gabbert writes about what makes language poetic. “I think poetry leaves something out,” she writes. “The missingness of poetry slows readers down, making them search for what can’t be found.” Write a poem that revolves around this idea of missingness and leaving something out. To facilitate a mindset of absence, you might choose a subject—a childhood memory, a relationship dynamic, a strange occurrence—that feels inherently cryptic, incoherent, or mysterious. Consider playing with line breaks, spacing, syntax, and diction, to make what’s absent hyper-present. How do the words on the page gesture toward the shape of what can’t be found?
In Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, a septology whose first two books translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland were published in November by New Directions, the protagonist is an antiquarian bookseller residing with her husband in France, who suddenly begins reliving the same day over and over again—a mysterious and seemingly endless predicament that creates a spectrum of conflicts in her life. Write a poem that imagines this Groundhog Day premise. Choose a particular day in your life that’s significant to you, and then write into the possibilities and quandaries that arise as the same day, and same actions, recur endlessly. In your imagination, what transpires when you know exactly what will happen each day while everyone else around you repeats their steps? How can you play with replicating the repetition in verse form?
“I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- / dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding / Of the rolling level underneath him steady air,” begins Gerard Manley Hopkins’s 1877 poem “The Windhover,” a sonnet in which the poet wields the image of a kestrel in flight to explore his conflicted feelings about spirituality and art. The beginning lines of the poem are filled with repetition—of words, alliteration, consonance, and assonance—all of which place a weight onto the words, slowing the pace as one reads it aloud. Try your hand at weighing down the beginning of a new poem with repetition, using a variety of rhymes and sound. After a leisure beginning, does your poem suddenly break free and open, or is it more gradual?
For nearly three decades, from the early 1980s until 2013, Dr. Jonathan Zizmor’s skincare ads for his dermatology practice were a mainstay in New York City subway cars, touting treatments for various skin problems and displaying the doctor’s own slightly smiling visage. A 2016 New York Times article noting his retirement stated: “To know Dr. Zizmor is to know the city’s secret handshake, to appreciate its quirkier, more pedestrian pleasures that natives claim as their own.” What’s hyperlocal to where you live? Brainstorm some ideas of things that might qualify as local lore, your city’s secret handshake—perhaps some idiosyncratic window displays or advertisements, a distinctive element of the urban landscape, a quirk of the natural environment, or public street art. Write an ode to one of these items, to commemorate and share its pedestrian pleasures.
“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade,” wrote Italo Calvino on the first page of his 1979 novel, translated from the Italian by William Weaver. Calvino’s postmodern structure comprises twenty-two sections, with each odd-numbered passage narrated by a second-person “you” (you, the reader; you, a character). Each even-numbered passage, in turn, is the start of a new work, a fictional book that the “you” character discovers and reads, only to find that it ends abruptly and picks up in the next even-numbered passage as an entirely different work. Taking a cue from this puzzle of an approach, compose a poem that alternates between two narratives united by a winter’s night. How might a second-person “you” character be utilized in your poem? Is there an emotional progression connected to the accumulation of images and themes?
Anne Sexton’s 1962 ekphrastic poem “The Starry Night,” inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 painting of the same name, begins with a snippet from a letter written by the painter to his brother: “That does not keep me from having a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.” Choose a favorite work of visual art by an artist for whom you can find a bit of personal information, whether it’s something they’ve written or details about their daily life, philosophies, thematic interests, or relationships with close ones. How can you connect what you learn about the artist with the artwork itself? Write an ekphrastic poem exploring the emotions and thoughts that come to the surface when you look at the artwork, allowing yourself to incorporate a creative synthesis of their biographical details.
In the universe of the 2023 French film The Animal Kingdom (Le Règne animal), directed by Thomas Cailley, a wave of mutations have begun to transform some humans into animals. A woman who has begun mutating escapes into a forest while her husband and teenage son search for her. The unpredictable affliction causes chaos, as people adjust to seeing strangers and loved ones with fingers gradually turning into claws, fur growing on their skin, noses turning into beaks, and arms becoming feathered wings—all while fighting over conflicting perspectives of freedom and acceptance. Write a poem that explores your beliefs around these themes, perhaps pulling in fantastic metaphors or flights of fancy to assist you in your exploration.
“I changed the order of my books on the shelves. / Two days later, the war broke out. / Beware of changing the order of your books!” writes Mosab Abu Toha in his poem “Under the Rubble,” which appears in his new collection, Forest of Noise (Knopf, 2024). In the poem, Abu Toha combines moments of whimsy, with distressing references to violence, death, and loss to present a portrayal of the day-to-day existence during a time of catastrophic war. Write a poem that ruminates on a difficult issue in your life that incorporates elements of playfulness or wonder in your exploration of the subject. Consider experimenting with a series of variating short stanzas as Abu Toha does in his poem, changing the tone with each section. Abu Toha speaks about his book in an interview in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
The practice of cutting one’s hair can sometimes be an emotional process—the shedding of one’s layers much like the way a snake sheds its skin. For some, cutting hair might symbolize a spiritual rebirth, embracing new beginnings and letting go of the past. For others, it can be a traumatic experience. Haircuts can be well thought-out decisions, premediated and anticipated, or spur of the moment, an abrupt change to one’s appearance. Write a poem about your last haircut or the experience of observing a haircut. Include details of where you were, who was cutting the hair, the sounds of the clippers or scissors, and the emotions you experienced. Read “Haircut” by Elizabeth Alexander and “Hair” by Orlando Ricardo Menes for further inspiration.
In early September, mysterious white blobs began washing ashore on the beaches of Newfoundland in Canada, described as sticky, spongy, and doughy. Beachcombers and scientists alike were confounded—were the blobs of animal or plant origins? Were they toxic or innocuous, or created from industrial waste? As scientists continue to collect samples and run tests on these mysterious blobs, take this period of uncertainty to write a poem about a blob: these beach blobs, a blob inspired by science fiction, an explicitly frightening or comedic blob, or perhaps an experience that simply feels blob-like. How does the slipperiness of this concept lend itself to metaphors in your poem? Consider experimenting with the shape of your text, creating a concrete, yet blobby, poem.
In Rae Armantrout’s poem “Unbidden,” which appears in her collection Versed (Wesleyan University Press, 2009), the poet’s use of short lines in conjunction with enjambment contribute to a sense of disjointedness. “The ghosts swarm. / They speak as one / person. Each / loves you. Each / has left something / undone,” writes Armantrout. This week compose a poem that revolves around a feeling of inconclusiveness. For your subject matter, consider a situation or relationship from your past that feels unfinished, one that continues to haunt you with questions. Deploy enjambment strategically—splitting up specific phrases and ending lines with significantly weighted words—to create a sense of discontinuity and unknowability.
While scientists have long known that spiders can fly across entire oceans on their silk threads by ballooning through strong wind currents, it’s only more recently that research has demonstrated their ability to travel on Earth’s electric field. Unlike humans, spiders can detect the naturally-occurring global electric field known as the ionosphere with the tiny sensory hairs on their bodies and prepare to lift off and take flight. Write a poem that focuses on modes of movement, perhaps imagining the ways in which humans have moved through space and how this has changed over time with new inventions and technology. What might be possible in the future? Try experimenting with rhythm and spacing, and explore what type of diction feels most reflective of the pacing you seek.
“One by one, like leaves from a tree, / All my faiths have forsaken me; / But the stars above my head / Burn in white and delicate red, / And beneath my feet the earth / Brings the sturdy grass to birth,” begins Sara Teasdale’s 1915 poem “Leaves.” Write a poem that uses rhythm and meter to evoke the feeling of the autumn season and describes the sights and sounds of the natural environment drying and withering, beginning the descent to decomposition. You might use this as an opportunity to ruminate on the larger themes of slowing down, and cycles of renewal and decay. Pay particular attention to consonance, short and long vowel sounds, and the length of your words and lines to create the desired tone of your poem.
In a recent piece published on Literary Hub highlighting responses from writers and editors on their appreciation for The Chicago Manual of Style, book editor Barbara Clark muses on the poetry found within the guidebook. “When I looked up something in the manual, I saw poems in their purest form. Open to a page at random, and find a poem there,” says Clark. “Fused participles! Who can imagine such a thing?” Taking inspiration from grammar-related terms and phrases, compose a poem that plays with an open interpretation of the words involved, bringing these concepts beyond language usage and into a more personal or philosophical context. Can you locate a sort of soul or lyrical beauty within organization and categorization?
Wim Wenders’s 2023 Oscar-nominated film Perfect Days follows the life of a man named Hirayama, who cleans public toilets in Tokyo for work. Hirayama adheres to routines in his daily activities, waking to the sound of someone sweeping outside, brushing his teeth, misting his plants, buying a coffee from the vending machine outside of his apartment, playing cassette tapes on his commute, and taking photos with film cameras while on his lunch break. His work tasks are completed with integrity, even using a jerry-rigged mirror to check the undersides of the toilets he cleans. The character speaks very little and the focus remains on the simple beauty of his everyday experiences. Write a poem that chronicles one day in your life, encapsulating both mundane routine and beauty beheld. Consider playing with repetition, line breaks, and spacing, to reflect the regular and irregular rhythms of your day.
In the four lines of the poem “Quiet Night Thoughts” by Tang Dynasty poet Li Bai, the speaker expresses a sentiment of longing for home, brought on by the somber imagery of moonlight shining in through a bedroom window. In celebration of the Mid-Autumn Festival, an occasion for gatherings to gaze at the full moon that leads up to the autumnal equinox, write a poem that uses the moon as a symbol of unity to reflect on the desire to reunite with loved ones—whether they be relatives near or far, or your chosen family. As you gaze at the moon in all its luminosity, roundness, and fullness, what emotions arise surrounding social harmony or disharmony?
“The jacket doesn’t have many wears left. Its small fissures have become large ones. Its fading has become even more pronounced. And yet, I am putting it through the rigors of my living,” writes Hanif Abdurraqib, about a 1978 vintage Bruce Springsteen nylon jacket he procured, in a piece published for the Yale Review’s “Objects of Desire” series, in which writers “meditate on an everyday item that haunts them.” This week compose a poem about one such haunting object in your life. Abdurraqib describes being drawn to vintage clothing because it is a way of “extending the life of an item that someone else decided they were finished with” and “a bridge from one existence to another.” Is there a beloved item of yours with a history? Think about how you can play with diction, rhythm, and formatting to express why you hold on to this object.
The French expression, à la rentrée, literally means “at the return” and can be translated as “see you in the fall” to refer to the time of year when students return back to school after the summer break and vacationers return to the city and to work after out-of-town trips—a time to start anew feeling reenergized with a refreshed and rested perspective on everyday routines. Think about the projects, personal goals, or relationships that you’d like to approach with a fresh start this autumn season. To celebrate la rentrée, write a poem that revolves around a familiar relationship, duty, or obligation. How might it be approached from a different angle or seen in a new light?
Can what was once lost still be found? The Search for Lost Birds, a global partnership between the American Bird Conservancy, Re:wild, and BirdLife International, was founded in 2021 to shed a light on species of birds that are deemed “lost,” meaning that there has been no documented evidence of them in over a decade, but that they may still exist. Researchers from the organization recently published a paper in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment citing over one hundred “lost” bird species with the majority in danger of extinction. Jot down a list of items that have been lost to you over the years, perhaps including both physical objects and intangible things, and compose a poem that incorporates your list. How might you play with the order of items, punctuation, line breaks, sound, and rhythm to express the experience of loss?
In the 1960s, a string of songs about crying hit the air waves, from Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” to “Big Girls Don’t Cry” by The Four Seasons, to Lesley Gore’s song that begins with, “It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to.” Crying has carried on as a theme in popular songs throughout the decades with Prince’s 1984 ballad “When Doves Cry,” Aerosmith’s 1993 hit “Cryin’” and The Weeknd’s 2020 song “Save Your Tears.” This week, take a cue from tunes about shedding tears and write a poem that incorporates crying in some way, whether about sorrow or joy, letting the waterworks flow or attempting to hold them back. Consider using unique diction or imagery to put a fresh spin on conventional tropes. What can you say about crying that hasn’t been said before?