May Poetry Prompt Calendar

Writers and dreamers, welcome to May. We made it.

Here is this month’s collection of daily poetry writing prompts, curated for you with a whole lot of love and intention. As always, take what you need and leave the rest. Write every day or come back when you’re ready. There’s an archive of monthly prompt calendars going all the way back to December on my Substack, go check it out.

Poetry is for everybody. I hope these prompts reflect that.

1. Write a soloem. The poet avery r. young created a form called the soloem (so-lo-em), a Chicago soul poem. It’s a 9-line poem. Instructions are mapped out clearly for you in the link.

2. Read “Daughter of Bays and Hills” by Penny Wei. Write a poem about home. Let it be complicated.

3. Read “[as freedom is a breakfastfood]” by e.e. cummings. Read it again slowly. Let it not make sense. See if there are places it does make sense, even if you’re not quite sure how or why. Write a poem that feels like you’re writing it with your eyes closed. Let words go together that you wouldn’t normally combine or use. Don’t have an end goal. Use a noun in place of a verb. Maybe up a word. Make up another one. Who cares!

4. Write a poem in which each line is capitalized and there is no punctuation. It should feel like the lines blend together so it’s hard to distinguish sentences. Read “Who’s That” by Ana Božičević for inspiration. Bonus points if there is a recurring question that may or may not be answered by the end of the poem.

5. Write a poem that includes these words: hinder, fragrant, whisper, sink, myth, and change.

6. Write a poem that utilizes anaphora as a device. Consider Ada Limón’s “The Conditional” as an example.

7. An étude is a short “musical composition created for the purpose of practice or technical study.” It’s a “study”, or an exercise in technique. Read Marilyn Chin’s “Little Girl Études” and Ally Ang’s “Fruit Études”. See if you can figure out how to write a couple of them yourself. Focus on how they feel. Notice where and how Chin and Ang play with repetition.

8. Read and consider “Moon Grass Rain” by Fady Joudah. Try to write a poem with as many small, numbered sections as you can muster. Joudah’s poem has 18. See if you can aim for 10.

9. Read “Something Will Surely Grow” by Patrick Meeds. Write a poem full of statements. Make some of them bold and some of them simple. See if they can lead you to a surprise at the end of the poem.

10. Read “Land and Body” by Julia Bouwsma. Write a poem that’s all one sentence, coming up with clever, stacked, perhaps unwieldy ways to keep the sentence going when punctuation and grammar resist it. Use line breaks as a tool. If you choose a specific activity or lifeway—here Bouwsma has chosen homesteading—it may be easier to keep the thread going.

11. Write a tanka. The tanka is a Japanese shortform poem containing 31 syllables. In English, the poem is five lines long and the syllable sequence is 5/7/5/7/7 (first line is 5 syllables, second line is 7, and so on). The third line is where the magic happens—a turn takes place here and the poem transitions from description into reflection. It’s common to add a metaphor here, or something surprising. You might think of the third line like a bridge that joins the first two and the final two lines, wherein something separate is otherwise occurring. Some examples: “Person of the Playful Star: Tanka [there is a hole at]” and “A Spray of Water: Tanka [the hot water in]” by Tada Chimako, and “Tanka” by Sadakichi Hartmann.

12. Write a poem made up of a series of unused titles for something. Consider “Some titles for my childhood memoir” by Nina Mingya Powles as an example. Note how in Powles’s poem the lines are loose and disconnected. You might instead decide to capitalize or use punctuation. You might even abandon line breaks and make it a prose poem. But think about a list of titles for something—Powles chooses childhood memoir, what would you choose? An autobiography? A superhero persona? Renaming your hometown? Notice how the separate titles in Powles’ poem somehow lead up to something, creating a fragmented but still legible snapshot of a childhood. Try to do that with your poem.

13. 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 “My friend put…”.

14. In a workshop, I heard the poet Joseph Millar say, while discussing Adam Zagajewski’s “Mysticism for Beginners” (tr. Clare Cavanagh), “This is a perfectly good way to start a poem, you know… I was sitting here and I noticed this thing and I noticed this thing, and it made me realize…” Read the poem and use this formula to write a poem. Sit somewhere—at your desk, in your living room, a cafe like Zagajewski, a bus, anywhere—and write down what you notice until you realize something. You might choose to write from where you’re sitting now, or you might call up a memory. You might realize the blue object you’re looking at is the same shade as so-and-so’s eyes... Let it be a portal.

15. Write an ars poetica—a poem about poetry. An ars poetica is a kind of meditation on what poetry is, how it functions, what it feels like. You can’t really get it wrong. Some examples: “Ars Poetica” by Archibald MacLeish, “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe” by Elizabeth Alexander, “Don’t Allow the Lucid Moment to Dissolve” by Adam Zagajewski, and “Ars Poetica” by Ruth Irupé Sanabria.

16. Listen to poet Hanif Adburraqib read his poem “The Ghost of Marvin Gaye Plays the Dozens with the Pop Charts”. Ask a ghost some questions. Write a poem that’s just the answers. You might choose someone you never knew, maybe someone famous, or a family member you never met, or someone you love who is no longer here to ask questions.

17. 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. An example: “When It Is Over It Will Be Over” by Paisley Rekdal. There is a note at the end of the poem where Rekdal explains her work, which you may find interesting and/or helpful.

18. 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 “singular”. Choose a synonym. Type in “easy”. Choose a synonym. Write a short poem incorporating those four words.

19. Read “Nothing Major to Report” by Leila Chatti. Note how she uses a common turn of phrase and writes a poem that does in fact feel a little bit major, though there is much left unsaid. Use the title “Nothing Major to Report” and write a poem that does report, though downplaying, on some aspect of your life that feels complex and uneasy. Add the epigraph, “after Leila Chatti”.

20. Write a self-portrait poem. A self-portrait is a poem that reveals something personal about who you are, or who you think you are, by using an object, a place, a moment in time, another person etc. as the vehicle. There’s no wrong way to write one. This learning prompt by Maggie Queeney is an incredibly helpful guide. She provides four example poems.

21. Now that you’ve practiced, write another self-portrait poem. Give this one a very long title. “Self-portrait as/on/with… [insert the long proper name of something etc.].” Some examples: “SELF PORTRAIT as retratos de cosas locas y de locos (stolen)” by Patricia Spears, “Self-Portrait on the Street of an Unnamed Foreign City” by Jennifer Grotz, and “Self-Portrait as the Bootblack in Daguerre’s Boulevard du Temple” by Robin Coste Lewis.

22. One more self-portrait. This time, write a self-portrait in the plural. Read “Self-Portrait as a Group of Mondrians” by Nicky Beers. Choose something—a flock of gulls, a bouquet of lilacs, a group of stars, something specific—and try to identify with it, make it about you. Write the poem from the “we” as Beers does. Make the speaker “us”.

23. Write a poem that includes these words: clock, maybe, want, grape, delicate, and change.

24. Read “I Feel Horrible. She Doesn’t” by Richard Brautigan. Read this poem more than once. There’s a lot happening in such a short amount of time and space, and the reader can really clearly sense this feeling—the stir crazy, hollow, agitated feeling of rejection. See if you can do that, too—try to cultivate one image that evokes a really clear feeling. Write a weird little 5-line poem. Use your first line as your title and make sure there’s a period in it.

25. Read “2000000” by Mary Zhou. Read Zhou’s note at the bottom of the page because the information is essential: “In traditional Chinese medicine…’sss’ is the healing sound of Lung Imbalance/Grief.” Let the poem not make sense to you, let it startle you if you’ve never seen anything quite like it before. Notice how “sss” occupies the spaces between things, like white space on a page otherwise does, or like air does. Lung = air; the symbolism is multi-layered. Choose a letter (it could be “x” like a typewriter) or a symbol or icon (examples: “@”, “&”) and experiment with it as a way to occupy space in the poem. Bonus points if the letter or symbol you choose contributes to and expands and deepens the greater poem as Zhou’s does, but don’t stress yourself out trying to be brilliant. This is an experiment.

26. Read “Altars” by Austin Rodenbiker. Write an elegy or a tribute poem for someone who is no longer here that consists of a list of items. You don’t need to follow the format that Rodenbiker follows but try to make the series of items compound and move toward something that you never actually name.

27. Read “Sea Church” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Notice how she makes the sea holy, just for herself, just for this poem. Write a poem that turns something you love that might not on its own be considered “holy” into a church (or temple, synagogue, masque etc.—a sacred structure in your world).

28. Read “Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why)” by Nikki Giovanni. Write a poem comprised of a series of statements about yourself—good, bad, ugly, outlandish, all of it.

29. 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: “Postscript” by Seamus Heaney, “End of Winter” by Louise Glück, and “Archaeology” by Charles Wright.

30. Read “While my father was dying, I kept having dreams about my exes” by Lauren Eggert-Crowe. Read it again. Write a poem that includes a reference from pop culture.

31. Read “Poem in Thanks” by Thomas Lux. Write a poem to “Lord Whoever”, regardless of (in spite of, in reverence to etc.) your relationship to a higher power. If you actually use “Lord Whoever” in the poem, add the epigraph, “after Thomas Lux”. Otherwise, just challenge yourself to write a poem to a vague God figure in the same sort of tone that Lux evokes.

Poems I’m thinking about right now

• Weathering Hate by Harryette Mullen

• Questions by Pat Parker

• Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagajewski

• Wood Working at the End of the World by Ocean Vuong

• Clear Night by Charles Wright

• Spell for the End of Grief by Amie Whittemore

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