Whether you’re just finding these prompts now, you’ve been here with me since December 2025, or somewhere in between, welcome to August’s poetry prompt calendar. These prompts are daily suggestions, invitations, and opportunities to step in a little bit deeper, more tenderly, with more curiosity and open heartedness. Chances to be with. An exploration and excavation of with.
The experience is different if you commit to a 31-day practice, but things happens and routines are tricky and life isn’t easy. This is an exploratory, perfection-free space. My invitation is for you to just be with what comes, one day and one poem and one practice at a time.
If you’re interested in studying poetry and/or writing more formally and/or writing with a group, Hugo House, The Writers Center, Brooklyn Poets, GrubStreet, Hudson Valley Writers Center, Writing Workshops, Writers.com, and McCormack Writing Center offer a lot of great workshops. If you’re wanting to learn about poets, I couldn’t recommend Emily Sernaker enough. She offers fabulous multi-week deep dive class studies.
As always, good luck, godspeed, and go with it. See you on the other side.
Read “After My Car Drowns in the Driveway During a 20-Inch Rainstorm,” by Jen Karetnik. Write a poem with a title that ends with a comma and functions as the poem’s first line.
This poem is long and beautiful, and I recommend reading it out loud to yourself: Joy Harjo’s “Becoming Seventy”. Choose an age you are now, have been before, or have yet to be, and write a poem about becoming that age. The poem can be long like Harjo’s, but it’s okay if it’s short.
Read “The Bean Eaters” by Gwendolyn Brooks. Write a poem about two people. Any two people, doing anything.
Read “Poem to Some of My Recent Poems” by James Tate. Try to write a poem to/for some of your other poems. Let it feel weird or silly or goofy or bizarre, or whatever else it might feel like. Validating, maybe. Follow Tate’s lead.
Read “I Am Not I” by Juan Ramon Jimenez (tr. Robert Bly). Write a short poem about/for the “I” who is not you but is walking beside you. A version of yourself, perhaps, or a separate self.
Read “Another Walt Whitman” by Dolapo Demuren. Choose a character who is no longer with us: a writer, an actor, a spiritual guide, some namely idol of yours. Write a poem that treats your chosen character like just another face on the train. Use their name.
Write a poem that begins with the line, “The wind didn’t sound like…”.
Read this conversation in Orion Magazine between Kasey Jueds and Éireann Lorsung. Write a poem about time.
Write a poem titled “Marionette”. After you write the poem, change the title.
Write a poem that includes these words: quilt, tipped, twinkle, chair, quench, and plover.
Read “Ten-Letter Word for a Lucky Man” by Steve Scafidi. Write a poem where each stanza (section) is shaped like Scafidi’s—five lines, formatted so the second line juts forward below the first line and the third line juts even further, and then the fourth and fifth lines mirror the second and first. (It makes sense when you’re looking at Scafidi’s poem.) Try three stanzas with this format, or more if you’re into it.
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 “It must have become that…”.
Write a poem with each new line beginning with the words “I thought”. Make a list of things you once thought were true, or a list of things you thought were untrue, or both. See where it takes you. See what changes between the beginning of the poem and the end.
Read “Well Water” by Randall Jarell. Write a poem that has a repeating phrase in both the first and final lines.
Read “The Flame Tree” by Evelyn Flores. Write a poem that has both long and short lines.
Read “Window Art” by Kwame Dawes. This poem holds grief, mourning, gratitude, sense of self, and perhaps a certain shamelessness or lack of guilt—a willingness to not shy from the complexity of feeling the truth of something with a curious, steady heart. Try to write a poem, perhaps with or for someone as Dawes does, or just with or for yourself, that holds grief and mourning and gratitude together in the same place.
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 “miss”. Choose a synonym. Type in “cater”. Choose a synonym. Write a short poem incorporating those four words.
Write a poem that references a certain tree, a certain flower, a certain river, a certain stone, a certain liquid, a certain kind of vehicle, and a certain person (all by their names). You may want to list them all out first to create a word bank for yourself.
Read “Something Else” by Christian Barter. Read it again. Write.
Write an abecedarian poem. Traditionally, each line of the poem begins with a letter of the alphabet, in order. There are always means of deviating from form but we’re not going to explore going rogue today. Some examples: “Bird” by Tomás Q. Morín and “Ars Poetica: Ambulthiyal Abecedarian” by Janiru Liyanage.
Write an ekphrastic poem. Choose a piece of artwork in your home—a photograph, a painting, a print, a postcard or greeting card—and interact with it. Some examples: “Archaic Torso of Apollo” by Rainer Maria Rilke (tr. Stephen Mitchell) and “Leaving the Psychologist: An Abecedarian Ekphrastic” by Grisel Y. Acosta.
Read “One Day” by Marie Howe. Write a poem that begins with the words “One day…”. Bonus points if you’re generous with your em dashes. Extra bonus points if you throw in a few proper nouns.
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: “The Forest for the Trees” by Rena Priest, “Ax Handles” by Gary Snyder, and “Mango hats stood out from the rest” by Shira Dentz.
Write a poem in the form of a letter you would like to have slipped under your own pillow as a teenager. This could be a prayer, a pep talk, an I-see-you, a list of reminders—anything you think would have been the right thing.
Read “Quiet” by Tony Hoagland. Write a poem made up of eight sentences and eight couplets. Try to vary the lengths of the sentences within the poem so that at least one is quite long and a couple of them are quite short.
Read “Flight” by Christian Wiman. Write a poem made up of four couplets, three of which rhyme. You can choose which one doesn’t rhyme, it doesn’t have to be the first one like Wiman’s. His poem has an epigraph at the bottom siting Anna Ahkmatova, but I don’t know what poem he’s referencing, so we’re all on our own!
Write a poem that includes these words: quail, blink, nudge, crank, riot, and budding.
Read “Bliss and Grief” by Marie Ponsot. Write a six-word poem that relies on its title. Your title can be as long or as short as you like but remember that the poem is counting on it like it’s a limb (because it is). Treat the title like the poem couldn’t survive on its own without it.
Read “Hunger” by Kelli Russell Agodon. Often, a poem will end with a singular line, statement, or image that ties it all up in some way, that shows us where we’ve landed, but here Agodon begins with such a line. Write a 15-line poem that begins with a sweeping statement. You may need to work backwards. You may need to ask questions, as Agodon does. She chooses anchors (in this particular poem, all living animals: ducks, dogs, coyotes, chickens) and returns to them in several lines, using the same animals, the same names, changing the scene or the image slightly and following the thread. Try to do this.
Ask yourself, “Is this still working?” Write a poem in which each line is an answer to that question, whether the answer is yes, no, maybe, not yet, or something else.
Read “Imaginary Conversation” by Linda Pastan. Write a poem that begins with a question someone has asked you or something someone has told you, real or imagined.
The Land Gave Birth by Ahmad Ibsais
Love Poem with Tumor and Petrified Dog by Kaveh Akbar
In Any Event by Dorianne Laux
Contemplations While Holding Sunchokes During a Blizzard by Yesenia Montilla
This Has Never Been My America by jason b. crawford
Of Memory and Distance by Russell Edson
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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