Happy National Poetry Month to all who celebrate!
National Poetry Month is indeed a celebration, a big ol’ shindig, a tribute, a series of tributes, a stalwart pillar of all that has come before and that which we continue to keep alive, and a nationwide block party.
Many of us stack our calendars in ungodly ways to squeeze in all the readings, all the events, all the workshops, and huddle away at odd hours reading and writing poems, sometimes literally by candlelight (alas, raising my hand to all of these).
“There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground; there are a thousand ways to go home again” (Rumi tr. Coleman B). There are a thousand ways to celebrate poetry.
And—if you so choose—one way is this:
Keep the hum alive in your hands and heart by joining in on 30 days of poetry prompts! There’s a thoughtfully, lovingly crafted and curated prompt for each day of the month, and a crew of people departing on the journey of a daily practice (some have been following prompts and writing poems since December!).
I hope you’ll join us, and I really hope you find that these prompts are nourishing, interesting, and supportive to you.
Think of one of your accomplishments. Not “I got the promotion at work!”. More like “I finally did a cartwheel!” or “I actually baked grandma’s bread the way she used to make it!”. Write a poem about what it would have been like if you hadn’t succeeded. Try not to lean into the negative here, though. Get curious and stay curious throughout the poem. Knowing that you did in fact succeed, what would it have been like if you had failed? How would you have felt in your body? What would failure have been, anyway? Explore it gently and with an open palm.
This prompt comes from a workshop with poet Tomás Q. Morín inspired by the work of his teacher, Philip Levine (from Emily Sernaker’s Your Favorite Poet’s Favorite Poet series): “Write down 1) your favorite name, 2) a place you've always wanted to visit, and 3) a job you would not like to have. Write a poem in which you imagine a new life for yourself, an alternate history, one that has already been lived thus narrated in retrospect. The poem should be a single stanza and contain roughly 4 beats per line.” Beats per line refers to meter, which I hope you will challenge yourself with if thinking about beats in a line is a new concept for you to be playing with. Build yourself a new life in this poem. Let it sound true but be untrue.
Write a poem abandoning all capitalization. Bonus points if it’s a love poem (think Chen Chen’s “i love you to the moon &”). Extra bonus points if you use parentheses at least once.
Write a litany. Poets.org characterizes a litany as “a poetic form that typically uses repetition to catalog a resonant series of invocations or supplications in resemblance to or actually serving as a type of prayer”. Some examples include “Litany” by Dorsía Smith Silva, “a litany for the possessed” by Jaki Shelton Green, and this monster, Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish”. Your litany can be short, or it can be very long. It can go straight through in one long stanza, or it can have sections, numbers, whatever you want. Pick a direction and then let the spirit take you.
Write a pantoum. Think of it kind of like you’re braiding and kind of like you’re dancing. “As Mark Strand and Eavan Boland explained in The Making of a Poem, ‘the reader takes four steps forward, then two back,’ making the pantoum a ‘perfect form for the evocation of a past time.’” Here are two examples, both by Marilyn Hacker: “Pantoum” and “Iva’s Pantoum”. If you’re in the mood to feel a little ick, here’s “Lawless Pantoum” by Denise Duhamel. Fun fact: there’s no rule that says you need to include the word “pantoum” in your title.
Write a poem that utilizes epistrophe as a device. Think of a word or short phrase and repeat it at the end of several lines—or all of them!
Read “[Wilt thou play with him as with a bird]” by Leslie Harrison. Work your litany muscle here. Write a poem that feels like a demanding prayer to someone else’s god. Do not include any punctuation. Separate each line from the next as Harrison does. Add the epigraph, “after Leslie Harrison”.
Read “Invitation” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Write a poem in four-line stanzas with the third and fourth line in each stanza bumped forward the way Nezhukumatathil does in her poem.
Read “Tommy” by Diana Marie Delgado. Think of someone from your childhood. Write a short prose poem (a poem with no line breaks/in a block text) with a title that is both the name of that person and the first word of your poem. Be sure to add the epigraph, “after Diana Marie Delgado”.
Write a poem that includes these words: windmill, wanting, clever, trickle, found, and flicker.
Write a poem about a landscape that particularly moved you. It could be a sunset in a special place, a view while traveling, the first or last time you sat on specific porch and watched the rain (or snow or…) with a loved one, a lookout on a hike you’d never done before or that you’ve done a hundred times—anything, anywhere. Just write.
Write a poem about the color red. Make “Red” your title. Never mention the word “red”.
Write a poem about water. Make “Water” your title. Never mention the word “water”.
Read “Three Things to Remember” by Mary Oliver. Write a short list of things you think are important to remember. They can be about anything. Each thing can connect to the thing in the next line, as in Oliver’s poem, but it doesn’t have to. If it’s helpful, cap the list at three items.
Read “It is Not Enough” by David Whyte. Sit in silence for a couple of minutes. Read it again. Sit in silence for a couple of minutes. Read it one more time. Write.
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 “I was standing outside of the…”.
Ask yourself, “am I important, too?” Write a poem in which each line is a reason why the answer is yes.
Read “Mythology” by Richard Wollman. Choose a constellation in your hemisphere and write a poem for or about it. Consider its story, its season, etc.
Write a poem that begins with the line, “I wish more teeth…”. Get creative about how literally or nonliterally you want to move forward from that line and challenge yourself to be abstract and untethered with your language. Get weird.
Write a poem that includes or centers the image of your body as a brick house with vines growing on, in, or through it.
Read three poems. Read them again. Write. This is a prompt taught to me by the poet Fran Quinn (if this isn’t your first time following along with me, you’ll know this prompt). He says to allow the thing that comes alive between all three poems to be channeled into your own poem, which becomes the fourth poem. Here are three poems for your consideration: “Mockingbirds” by Mary Oliver, “We Are Surprised” by Ada Limón, and “Invocation” by Ally Ang.
Read “Invocation” by Ally Ang again. Write an invocation that employs surprising language (using nouns as verbs, etc.). Give it a title with five words in it.
Go to thesaurus.com. Type in the first word that comes to your mind. Choose a synonym for that word. Do the same for another word. Type in “frame”. Choose a synonym. Type in “wrought”. Choose a synonym. Write a short poem incorporating those four words.
Read “Occult” by Joyce Carol Oates. Write a poem that contains dialogue.
Read “When I Tell My Husband I Miss the Sun, He Knows” by Paige Lewis. Write a love poem with a title that leads into the first line of the poem. Bonus points if it’s a long title. Extra bonus points if the poem is quirky and surprising.
Write a poem that includes these words: miraculous, wither, tick, flame, fortunate, and kind.
Read “a-ver-y” by avery r. young. Write a prose poem that functions as a dictionary definition of your name. Don’t leave out the hard stuff.
Read “We remain foolishly hopeful (or, obituary for the top soil)” by Kayleb Rae Candrilli. Write a poem with a dual title (an alternate half of the title in parentheses).
Read “Muchness” by Tony Hoagland. Think about the way he uses color and description, stacking it one after another after another. Write a poem over-using color and description. Put a name to every color, every texture. Lean into the muchness of it and see what happens. See if it propels the poem forward to be so heavily laden with scene and visuals and details.
Write a detailed poem that doesn’t use the word “and” a single time. You might consider fragmenting your language so that your sentences aren’t typical sentences, or some other creative ways to make it work. For example, you might want to write a line like: She was tender and kind and smelled like fresh roses. So, you might instead write it like this: She was tender, kind—she smelled like fresh roses (using punctuation to find your way) or She was tender kind she smelled like fresh roses (abandoning punctuation altogether). If the poem starts to get ugly or clunky, run with it! It’s okay.
To the White Girl Who Scolded Me That Not Everything Is about Race by Janice N. Harrington
After Iraq Sweidan by Hala Alyan
Meditations in an Emergency by Cameron Awkward-Rich
On the Good Ship Elijah McClain by Nikky Finney
A Brief for the Defense by Jack Gilbert
Becoming Moss by Ella Frears
Only the Faintest Blue by Ada Limón
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
I’ve also very recently turned on paid subscriptions because you people with your sweet, generous hearts were pledging paid memberships even though there is no paywall! So, a recurring $5 donation is also an option.
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