Think about them isolated from each other and then bring them together. What would each ask of the other? What is the question? Poetry Prompt from Rachel Eliza Griffiths Let’s do something with color. Select two paintings. Check out an artist’s standard color wheel. Pick one color and then its opposite. Let’s do Blue and…
Category: poetry prompt
An Ekphrastic Exercise
The relation of the verbal to the painted image has preoccupied thinkers since antiquity, and that kind of staying power suggests it is a worthwhile conundrum to wrestle with… A Poem Prompt from Robert B. Shaw, A Poem from Susan Tepper I have a longstanding interest in ekphrastic poetry, and although I’m sure it isn’t…
Odes to the Lost and Found
Write an ode to something that’s been lost, or recovered… A Poem Prompt from Sue D. Burton Write an ode to something that’s been lost. It could be silly, a lost sock, or it could be very serious. What comes up for me are the hundreds of wooden synagogues in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, burned to…
Word by Word, Moon by Moon
“I learned how to love, hate, tease, trick, and warp a word.” A Poem Prompt from Elizabeth Bradfield “Once, when I wanted to jump-start my writing life, I happened to go to a gallery opening. On display was an artist’s 52 paintings of the moon, one each week of the year. Although I didn’t particularly…
"Starters" from Ellen Doré Watson
Ellen Doré Watson offers a series of “starters” for generating the raw material for new poems. The following prompts are inspired by “Three Girls, One of Them a Coward Girl” (from Kingdom Animalia) by Aracelis Girmay. Once you’re launched, the aim is to ride those winds of originality. (As always, any remaining “borrowed” bits should…
Personal History and the Power of Repetition
A Poetry Prompt from Nathan McClain Using as a template Gregory Pardlo’s “Written by Himself” (from his book Digest), in which variations of “I was born” begin many of the lines, McClain asks his writing students to introduce themselves via the poetic method of repetition known as anaphora, with a repeated phrase of their own…
Walking Haiku
A Poetry Prompt from Lee Briccetti I like to walk around my neighborhood in the early mornings with a little notebook, writing a few haiku about what I notice. Like visual artists’ quick sketching, the challenge is to look, focus, wake up. To look at the material world, which is always surprising; to extrapolate to…