Poetry Prompts
- Staff Writer
- Jun 23
- 2 min read
A few basic prompts meant to encourage original work.
Write a poem about a memory from your childhood- about any memory you can recall. Play with it, distort it. Inject symbolism into a moment and see how it transforms the recollection.
Write a prose poem. The truth is that poems don't have to broken up or arranged into stanzas. Poetry can be a block of text, as well. I find that the best prose poems still retain an air of poetry in the sense that they keep some mystery for the reader, by using interesting turns of phrase and playing with structure and storytelling. Here are some great examples:
"3 poems" by Richard Siken
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2024/03/15/three-poems-richard-siken/
"Bath" by Amy Lowell
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42993/bath-56d221a8c0d0c
Write an anagram poem
Here at Stories Teens Love, we're a big fan of anagram poems. It's simple enough. Just take a poem you've written, and using words from that poem, create a second. Anagram poems are meant to subvert expectations, to create new frameworks of meaning. Similar to black-out poetry, in an anagram poem, the goal is to waste as little language as possible. Some examples that are listed are on our site:
"Sleepless" by Aubrie Cunningham.
https://www.storiesteenslove.com/post/anagram-poetry-aubrie-cunningham-s-sleepless
"Serenity" by Ella Miller
https://www.storiesteenslove.com/post/anagram-poetry-ella-miller-s-serenity
Write a golden shovel
Created by the inimitable Terrance Hayes, Golden Shovel poetry is poetry that takes a line from another poem, and writes a second poem, where the end word is borrowed from a consecutive word in the original line. It's easier to understand in motion, so here's a more thorough write-up from the Poetry Foundation and a few examples:
"Golden Shovel, Glossary of Poetic Terms" by Poetry Foundation
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/golden-shovel
"The Golden Shovel" by Terrance Hayes (the original!)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55678/the-golden-shovel
Focus on a physical sensation. Taste, sight, smell, hearing. Or, focus on the physicality of an emotional experience- the emotion of fear, love, nausea, tenderness, guilt.
There are many different emotions in the human canon. The English language distinguishes between "grief", "sorrow", "sadness", "misery", and "heartbreak". The Greeks, famously, had many different types of love- such as "eros", "agape", and "philia". Try to write poetry that explores the space in-between the different categorizations and nuances.
Untranslatable words exist in all languages. Some words require a certain intimacy with cultural experiences, a lived experience. This juxtaposition seems to contradict the foundational tenet of what art tries to do- which is express universal truths that can be understood by all humans. Write a poem that explores an untranslatable word. Can failing to understand a word also constitute some kind of understanding, however indirectly? Writing is just as much about what goes unsaid in the silence as the direct language itself. Linked below is an article that describes the process of translation, and what it means to translate one word to another, despite working in an imperfect medium:
"The Untranslatable" by The Paris Review
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/06/25/the-untranslatable/
