31 Writing Prompts (a December Poetry Advent Calendar)

We must hone our attentiveness and our practice in the times leading up to and away from the winter solstice, dear hearts!

If you’re looking for something that is very much an actual writing advent, Two Sylvias Press is on year two of their poetry prompt advent calendar. There’s even clicking involved, if that’s more your speed.

But if you’re like me and you want a document that you can return to like a planet in orbit, maybe this list of prompts can be a wintertime touchstone for you.

I’ve designed the list with December in mind, but you’re in charge of your own fate and your own magic so do as you wish.

I hope these prompts are nourishing, inspiring, challenging, generative, and supportive for you. They were put together with a whole lot of love (for you, and for poetry).

1. Write an epistolary poem in the form of a love letter to yourself — a current self, a child self, a future self, a past version of yourself, a self you hope to grow into, or a self you owe an apology to.

2. Pick up the book or magazine closest to you. Flip to page 5. Write down the first word you see. Flip to page 11. Write down the first word you see. Flip to page 15, 18, 24, and 30. Repeat. Write a poem using all six words you found.

3. Read three poems. Read them again. Write. This is a prompt taught to me by the poet Fran Quinn. He says to allow the thing that becomes alive between all three poems to be channeled into your poem, the fourth poem. Here are three poems for your consideration: What Things Want by Robert Bly, The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings. by Donika Kelly, and A Blessing by James Wright.

4. Piecemeal a poem. Write down some one-liners on a sheet of paper or type them up and print them out. They can be brand new, or they can be from that ongoing collection of loose lines in your Notes app. Cut the sheet of paper, so the lines are standalone. Move them around on a flat surface (I personally like the floor best) until a poem reveals itself. Fill in the blanks.

5. Dismantle and rearrange an existing poem. Take a poem you’ve been working on for a while. Cut it into pieces. Rearrange the lines until you find a new way of seeing the poem. Fracture the narrative. Surprise yourself. Fill in the blanks — the poem might need to change now, and it’ll need your help.

6. Ask yourself “what’s wrong?”. Answer the question. (A prompt from Joan Kwon Glass, taught in a recent workshop I attended by Allison Blevins.)

7. Write a poem about your heart, your hands, frozen soil, a frozen lake, and your favorite gemstone.

8. Write a duplex. The duplex is a form created by Jericho Brown combining attributes of the ghazal, the sonnet, the pantoum, and the blues. There is an example linked in the article. He often offers the prompt for day 4, to piecemeal a poem, when teaching the form in workshops. You may find it helpful here.

9. Write a specular, or mirror, poem. This form asks you to write a poem forward and then mirror it identically moving backward. All of the lines must remain the same. Punctuation is flexible. Use “The Back Seat of My Mother’s Car” by Julia Copus, the creator of the form, as your guide. This form is really helpful for writing about an event or a memory that is stuck in your head and your heart and hasn’t otherwise been able to budge (just remember that you don’t need to tackle the Big Events today). Samaa Abdurraqib taught this prompt and poem in a recent workshop I attended.

10. Write a poem about the scent of your skin.

11. Write a poem with the title “How I Managed”.

12. Write a list poem after Alice Duer Miller’s “Why We Oppose Pockets for Women”. Notice how she uses numbers and a repeating structure and adds “why” into her title, so the poem functions as a list of answers. Notice, too, how there is a turn somewhere in the poem, that it ends in a place somehow different from where it started, even as the structure remains unchanged. Try to do that.

13. Try writing a prose poem (a poem without line breaks) as one long run-on sentence, incorporating an image from the natural world at the end, after “Throwing Children” by Ross Gay.

14. Write an ode (a celebration poem) to a part of your body. Your eyes, your skin, your ears, your hair — praise them. Consider “Ode to Black Skin” by Ashanti Anderson.

15. Think about someone you love. Think about the ways you and the person you love are deeply different from one another. Write a poem that compares, contrasts, and/or celebrates the differences between you and your loved one. Remember to remain kind and strong in your view of yourself in this poem.

16. Write a short grief poem using one centralized metaphor, like Jack Gilbert’s “Michiko Dead”. Choose one action (ex: carrying a box, wiping down the counter, cleaning out the fridge, braiding your hair) and write in a small circle around it, turning it into a metaphor for the thing you’re not saying out loud. Let your title, as Gilbert does, say what isn’t said, and let the metaphor show what it feels like.

17. Write a poem about a color without naming the color. You could do this so many ways. Let the spirit move you.

18. Where do you come from? This could be a place, a state, a country, a piece of land, mountains, the coast, the desert. This could be your lineage, your culture, your heritage, the place you or your family immigrated from, the place you are now. This could be foods, scents, spices, birds, bodies of water, sounds, instruments, certain fabrics or crafts, your grandfather’s vehicle, your childhood friend’s laugh, an animal you used to know. Write a poem about where you come from.

19. What are your morning rituals? Do you wake up at 4am and drink tea in silence? Do you roll out of bed 10 minutes before you need to be out the door? Is it frantic or rushed? Is it intentional? Do you have a favorite brand of coffee, a favorite mug? Do you care for little ones? Write a poem about your morning routine and see what emerges.

20. Write a poem using these words: easy, chickadee, bread, book, and laughing.

21. Recall a time you watched a sunrise or a sunset in winter. Was it a long time ago? Was it recent? Was it today? Describe it. Who were you with? Were you alone? What were the colors like? What sounds could you hear? What did your body feel? What do you remember?

22. Write a poem that plays with synesthesia. A scent that has a texture. A sound that tastes like something. A color that has a smell or a sound. You might incorporate just one image like this or go all the way in and let your imagination lead you on a sensory experience.

23. Write a poem with the title “I Waited”.

24. Write a poem after Wendell Berry’s “Like Snow” — word for word. Choose a subject: rain, a butterfly, granite, the ocean, anything. Berry’s poem is three lines long. Break down each line. In line one, replace the word “suppose” with something else: what if; in spite of; imagine etc., replace the pronoun and the verb, replace “snow” with your chosen subject. Do the same with the second and third lines. Be sure to write an epigraph that reads “after Wendell Berry”.

25. Write a poem in the form of a recipe. You can choose something simple, like a recipe for baking bread, and take creative liberties with the ingredients or the directions, or you can choose something more complex, abstract, or unconventional. Recipe for growing your hair long. Recipe for grieving. Recipe for joy.

26. Write a poem about mending. Some things we mend: socks, clothes, nets, rope. Other things we mend: relationships, hearts, stories, open wounds.

27. Write a poem with fragmented, over-punctuated language, like Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s “Miss you. Would like to take a walk with you.”. Note how the insertion of periods where they technically don’t belong adds a quality of stop-and-go movement to the poem, like it’s a little jerky and it doesn’t quite fit right. Note how Calvocoressi is chopping up the sentence structure and notice what’s missing. Grief is funny like that, and sometimes memory is funny like that. Toying with punctuation and syntax can support a poem in achieving felt sense when something is hard to put into words.

28. Set a timer for 8 minutes. Don’t lift your pen from the paper (or stop typing, whatever is most comfortable for you) until the timer goes off. Don’t think. Your starting phrase is “When I grow up, I…”.

29. Choose a word as the title of your poem. Write a new definition for that word as the poem. Format it as though it were in a dictionary. The definition doesn’t need to be totally oppositional to the word’s actual definition, but it can be. Some words you might consider if you can’t think of any: despair, luck, praise, winter.

30. Write a poem in which the emotion you are feeling is an animal. What emotion are you feeling right now? Write it down. If you could give this emotion the body of an animal, who would it be? Describe the animal. Describe the emotion. Describe what you see in your mind when you think of the two as one, as your emotion personified in a body. Follow the thread.

31. Mary Davis said, “A walk in nature walks the soul back home.” Write this quote on a slip of paper, tuck it in your pocket, and go for a walk. Come home and write a poem.

I don’t ever want to gatekeep what I share in my Substack, but these postings do take time to compile—sometimes quite a bit of time—so I decided that this may be a good alternative: if you would like to “tip” me for any of the time it took to write this, if you felt moved or supported by it, you can buy me a coffee <3

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