If you’re looking for a way to keep the creative juices flowing with a little bit of an anchor and a little bit of guidance, you’ve come to a pretty good place for it, I think.
If you’re looking for a place to put some of this grief, well, maybe this is a good place, too. I don’t know. But writing some poems this month won’t hurt, right? We need to be filling our little cups.
I’ve done the work of gathering all these seeds and offering one up to you each day. Now you do the work of planting.
For additional writing prompts and ideas, you can check out the December list and the January list, or you can just be where your feet are and follow along here day by day.
Set a tone for your creative practice. Build some routine. Nourish. Explore.
And don’t forget to check out the despair, you cannot have me chat and connect with others who are doing the daily prompts, too!
Note: for days 15 and 16 you’re going to need a craft book on hand. This can be a cheap copy of an old romance novel from the thrift store. You just need pages you’re willing to be a little playful and explorational and debaucherous with. By which I mean: if you’re afraid to deface a book like I used to be, go find a book that feels a little less sacred.
Write a gratitude letter to the person you might be tomorrow.
Write a gratitude letter to the person you are today.
Write a poem after “Speculations about ‘I’” by Toi Derricotte. Note how, in order to separate self from self, “I” is in quotations. What is that doing for the poem? It creates distance, and what else? (I deny “I,”/& the closer/I get, the more/“I” keeps receding.) Two selves. A weird tension—why? Trauma? Fractured memory? Note, too, the many short sections. A certain quick spaciousness is achieved by this. Try to write a poem with two selves and incorporate short stanzas broken into numbered sections. Allow the poem to be imperfect. Be sure to include an epigraph “after Toi Derricotte”.
Write a villanelle. You’ll need two rhyming lines that you like enough to repeat a few times throughout a poem. Two famous examples: “Do not go gentle into that good night” by Dylan Thomas and “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop. Pay attention to what they’re doing and try to mimic it. Here is a helpful visual aid for the form as well as a handful of other great examples.
The poet Billy Collins created the paradelle form as a joke (a parody of the villanelle, get it?), only admitting it was a joke after he had introduced it in an interview as an old French form. But it took off and became part of the poetry lexicon, for better or for worse. I challenge you to write a paradelle. It’s tricky, so read the instructions in the link carefully. A note from Collins about the form here and some further examples of it here.
Write a poem using these words: bewildered, thin, unbroken, birch, tulle, and winding.
Write a poem with the title “Grief”. You might use “Grief” by Stephen Dobyns as inspiration, or you might not.
Choose a place you have frequented in your life—a stream, a park, a building, a mountain, a town. Write a poem as though that place was giving you advice of some kind. Consider Stephanie Burt’s “Advice from Rock Creek Park”.
Write a poem about the earliest time you can remember going underwater. What do you remember about it? What did you learn? Were you afraid? Were you unafraid? What did it feel like?
Read “Bluebird” by Charles Bukowski. He describes the thing in his heart as a bluebird and lists all of the ways he beats it back inside of himself and keeps it hidden. Write a poem about the thing hidden inside your heart and what you do to keep it there.
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 becomes alive between all three poems to be channeled into your own poem, which becomes the fourth poem. Here are three poems for your consideration: “Clouds” by Carolyn Forché, “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart” by Jack Gilbert, and “There You Are” by Victoria Adukwei Bulley.
Write a poem about yourself from the perspective of your vehicle. What do you keep in it? Where do you go? Have you ever slept in it? Have you taken road trips? How long have you and the vehicle been together? Consider what the vehicle has been witness to and write through its “eyes”.
Think of something you want to say! Loudly and with exuberance and certainty! Write a poem containing only lines ending with an exclamation point! (A prompt from a workshop with Naomi Shihab Nye!)
Write a poem in which you are not who you thought you were—in a good way.
Get yourself a craft book. It could be an old chapter book or magazine you’ve had kicking around for a while. Danielle Steel novels from Goodwill were my jumping off point in the beginning because I had to learn how to “destroy” a book—I was vehemently against damaging and defacing books for a long time (Wreck This Journal helped, too). Your prompt for today is this: pick a page in a “damageable” book or magazine and write an erasure poem (also known as a blackout poem). There are many shapes erasure poetry can take, so I encourage you to start with these pages from “The Kafka Erasures” by as your primary example, though there are a handful of poems linked in the Poetry Foundation article that you can check out, too.
Flex the craft book muscle again today, but this time with an exact-o knife or a pair of scissors. Write a found poem using Kylie Gellatly’s “an old metal hope” and “July with me” as examples. You might write something much shorter, and you might not pull out all the stops with paint and glue and markers but try to make something visual on the page for yourself. It could be as small as cutting out three or four words and fastening them to a postcard with a piece of scotch tape or gluing a sentence to a notecard but try to push yourself out of your comfort zone a bit here.
The poet Dan Albergotti created a form that landed the affectionate name “Albergonnet”. The form is 14 lines like a sonnet and made up of rhyming couplets (AA BB CC etc.). The first line is just two syllables and then each line after it grows incrementally by two syllables up until lines 7 and 8 (which each contain 14 syllables), and then the lines decrease again by twos until we’re syllabically right where we started. He describes it himself in a note published beneath his poem “December 25, 2005”. Write an Albergonnet. Add the epigraph “after Dan Albergotti”. If your interest is peaked, you can learn a little more from this interview with Albergotti in Ploughshares.
Write a poem in which you, somehow, are a meteor.
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 “The day might have ended in…”.
Write a poem using these words: clock, dwindle, dazzle, frame, collide, and singing.
Write a poem that does not contain any pronouns. This prompt comes from a Poem-a-Day challenge from 2023 curated by Robert Lee Brewer (the original post contains a short poem Brewer wrote as an example).
Write a poem for someone as a gift. Ed Rayher of Swamp Press says a book ought to be treated as a temple built for the poems within it to live in. He makes beautiful letterpress books with that intention in mind (a prime example is my own book which was designed and bound with such care and attention to detail). I invite you to consider this idea. The prompt is less about the poem itself and more about the poem as an offering. Once it’s written, dress it up nicely—use a good pen, get a card, wrap it up and/or put a bow on it; make it glitter somehow (literally or figuratively) and give it to somebody. You might give it to a loved one or you might leave it in a public place for someone to find. Make sure you save a copy for yourself if you want to.
Thich Nhat Hanh said, “The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.” Consider this quote. Consider yesterday’s experience writing a poem as an offering and giving it away. Write a poem about what blooms.
Write a poem with each new line beginning with the words “I think”. Make a list of things you think are true, or a list of things you think are untrue. See where it takes you.
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 “just”. Choose a synonym. Type in “building”. Choose a synonym. Write a short poem incorporating those four words.
Think of something you love to do. An activity of any kind—a sport, a certain food you like to cook, a hobby. Create a word bank for that activity. Write down as many words as you can think of that involve it somehow. Descriptors, verbs, proper nouns. Draw from the word bank to write a poem.
Think of a secret. Write a poem about the secret without ever actually saying what the secret is. You can write about a pretend secret if you can’t think of one. Try to evoke what the secret feels like without giving it away. It’s okay if the poem isn’t a success, it’s less about that and more about working the muscle. Things are left unsaid in poems, and those things are received by the body. Figuring out how to talk about what is left unsaid is a practice, much like working a muscle. We’re on day 27 (unless you’ve been with me since December or January). Your muscles ought to be nice and warm.
Read this interview with poet Steve Scafidi in 32 Poems and use it as fodder for a poem. Scafidi says some really gorgeous, juicy stuff in here. Let it take you somewhere.
Poems I’m thinking about right now
The Colonel by Carolyn Forché
We Lived Happily During the War by Ilya Kaminsky
Enough Music by Dorianne Laux
mulberry fields by Lucille Clifton
Of The Empire by Mary Oliver
On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs by Renee Nicole (Macklin) Good
Tomatoes by Katrina Vandenberg
A low stakes way to support my time
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.
Subscribe to despair, you cannot have me <3
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