Origins—Prompts Inspired by Jenny George

What is the birthplace of forgiveness, the first breath of loneliness, the origin story of poverty? Write a poem or short story that describes the viscerally. For inspiration, read Jenny George’s “The Dream of Reason.” I’m grateful to Chelsea Dingham for posting it. Do credit Jenny George for your inspiration.

Bonus Prompt: Use the line “People will do anything” as a ghostline and create a list poem. For an added constraint, do not begin or end with an example of violence. Remember to give credit to erase the line and credit the poet.

Short Poem Challenge—A Prompt

I’ve always admired poets who could offer insight and power in just a few lines. Short poems can be the most difficult to write, as I will rediscover when I try to write one for next week’s workshop.

So to share the struggle, I am giving you the prompt to write a short poem—three lines or fewer—that encapsulates an event or a perspective or time period. You can choose to write a traditional haiku or borrow its syllable structure if you wish, but you can use any structure that works for you.

If you are stuck for inspiration, Twitter has once again provided some help:

Write a F-U-4Ever Poem to 2020–Let’s Break Up Hard With This F***-UP of a Year

Oh, 2020, you have been a colossal dumpsterfire. We aren’t just going to ghost you. No. We are going to burn your favorite jacket, mock your “O” face on TikTok, and chat up your younger sibling. We are going to do unto you what you deserve. I’ll bring the kerosene and you the shovel. If you’ve forgotten some of the truly bizarre and terrible events of the year, here’s a reminder of some of the weirder ones.

For the first prompt, write a breakup letter or a blackmail note to 2020, whichever is needed. Get it all out now. No holding back, no pulled punches, no “let’s be friends.” We aren’t getting back together with this year. Variation on the prompt: take a set of items that represent the year to you—the calendar, a ticket refund receipt, a picture of your empty couch, an expired restaurant coupon, a printout of a furlough notification, or other loss and cut, crumple and shred the items. Reassemble into a Frankenstein’s monster of a document and see if you can create a found poem from the text or ekphrastic from possible images.

For a bonus prompt, write a curse for the biggest bastard(s) of the year. Be petty—let every step taken be barefoot on a Lego—to truly vicious. Make it so.

You may need to write a series of poems about the last four years…

In the “I” of the Beholder—Prompts for Unreliable Narrators

When I first started writing, I often switched the “you” within the poem, or the “you” I was addressing was unclear. Now I am more concerned with the “I” in my poems. Not persona poems—that is a whole (or rather fragmented) other conversation—pun intended.

The “I” in my daily life is just as ambiguous: I continue to be an unreliable narrator, always learning that I again was wrong and then learning that my correction was an overreaction to the original error. Even caution can be an overcorrection, and second guessing a mental tic.

I never know when I am in the right or just am left guessing my way through the dark. The light keeps changing on me. So do my guesses.

For the first prompt, experiment with an unreliable narrator. Leave clues for the audience (and yourself) to discover but avoid the sudden epiphany, which is hard to pull off after its centuries of overuse. I will always love that lightning realization in Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever” and Jane Austen’s Emma, but I am wary of the puppet master allure.

For the second prompt, write about a time in which all you had believed about an event was merely a lie you had told yourself or a another’s lie that you believed about yourself. How did you realize you were wrong? Did someone tell you? Why did you believe that person?

Or for a slight variation, take an old poem about an event in your life and look at it through your current viewpoint. What changes; what does not? And more intriguingly do you expect that you will change stance on this same event in the future, in the next 10 minutes?

For the last prompt, write a conversation between “the poet” and the “speaker” in one of your poems. How do “you” and how you present yourself as a poet juxtapose in the poem? Is the poem a scene or a landscape?

The Interior World and Navigation—Prompts Inspired by Oliver de la Paz

I’ve joined a writing workshop under Eric Morago, and it’s pushing me to expand my focus from individual poems to collections—their structure, motifs and themes. Unless a poetry collection is clearly arranged for a specific purpose, I usually skip around and ignore the placement of individual poems, which of course doesn’t help me prepare my own manuscript. I am truly enjoying this broader perspective in looking at poetry.

As part of the class, each of us was assigned to choose a collection and discuss its organization and themes as well as create a writing prompt. I chose Oliver de la Paz’s The Boy in the Labyrinth, a book I had longed for after reading his poem “Autism Screening Questionnaire—Speech and Language Delay.” The beauty of the poem’s answers to the harsh clinical questions stunned me the elusive quality of metaphor and imagery slipping the pinning of categories seemed akin to both parenting and writing—or any creation.

The book itself uses the structure of the Greek ode with its strophe, antistrophe and epode further divided into episodes of the introductory “Chorus” word problem or fill-in-the-blank poem and subsequent Labyrinth prose poems. The movement and structure dramatize the Greek myth of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth. The inclusion of word problems and the three “Autism Screening Questionnaire” poems build upon themselves layer by layer, adding the outside world into an ever deeper interior. Sometimes the prose poems begin on the image from the previous as if we too are following the red string. Fascinating.

The poet discusses the structure here in an interview:

I almost always think of individual poems with respect to the poems adjacent to them—how a particular poem activates or negates the work surrounding it. I think in motif and pattern, and I love making bigger connections both in my own writing and in the work of writers whom I enjoy, either in individual poetry collections or a life’s work.

For the prompt, I want to use one of the Labyrinth prose poems for inspiration :

For the first prompt, create an interior world peopled by outside objects and internal responses. Let the objects move and fly and the senses intermingle within this self-constructed world.

For the second prompt, write a poem using the line “Pain is a layer” as a ghostline. Again, remember to erase that line but still credit the poet.

For a third prompt, write a poem using the following words from the poem: “torch,” “bird,” “surface,” “form,” “layer,” “tip,” “rock,” “stripes,” and “shadows” but use them as verbs instead of nouns.

For the final prompt, use the “Autism Screening Questionnaire — Speech and Language Delay” as inspiration in how to translate the clinical or the mundane into the specific and personal.

Sign and Tree—Another Twitter Ekphrastic

In life, we oscillate among the sign, the tree and the observer and sometimes embody all three at once. Write a poem or short story from the perspective of one of them. Is the observer a trespasser after the sign disappears? If it is illegible? Who belongs here? Who decides?

More pics here.

Now write about a time in which you observed yourself erasing a version of yourself.

A tree with a prediction or a paradox

Fun With Venn Diagrams—A Visual Ars Poetica

Ouch. Perfect detail that “Art i make” barely touches “Art i like” and completely misses “Art that makes money.” Use the diagram as inspiration to write a combination ekphrastic and ars poetica.

“Show, Don’t Tell”—Another “Borrowed” Twitter Prompt

Describe an emotion without naming it—similar to a previous prompt in which you describe images but of a color but never name it. I think this is a good strategy generally to use to help you push beyond the first phrase and image to explore new connections.

Choose One—A Twitter Prompt

For this prompt, choose one of the following: write a poem in which you ask your question and receive either your truth or your lie.

Second prompt: Write a poem about yourself telling all lies or all truths.

Bonus prompt: Choose one of these to worship as a minor deity. Write a poem of praise to your new god.

Unread Poems and Their Poets—Prompts Inspired by Wanda Coleman

I agree with Devin Gael Kelly: these three lines of Wanda Coleman’s “Obituary”—and the entire poem—did break me.

For the first prompt, skip those first three lines and use the next—“This sunset should trouble / the sky” as a ghostline. Remember to drop the line and give credit to the poet (such as “after Wanda Coleman”).

For the second prompt, write a poem using the following word list from the poem: “hard,” “trouble,” “fault,” “fall,” “felled,” “sound,” “empty,” “will,” “mean,” and “bare.”

For a third prompt, write a love poem that you will never show to anyone. Then take that poem and create an erasure poem out of it by deleting all the tenderness and joy from the lines. What is left?

For a final prompt, write a story or poem from the perspective of the minor deity of unnoticed loves. Let this god/goddess send small blessings—a convenient parking space, a slight breeze on a hot day, exact change found in the pocket—upon the lovers.

Mix-n-Match Halloween Prompts!

In honor of Halloween, let’s do a Steve Ramirez style prompt: make a list of five monsters or horror movie villains, then a list of five children’s toys, and finally a list of disappointments or tragedies.

Roll dice for each of the categories, or cut them up and put all of a categories options into a hat and draw. Ultimately, see what clicks for you.

For example, perhaps the dice chose Godzilla to explain divorce to the Easy-Bake Oven, but Freddy Krueger just seems more familiar with ovens and furnaces. Go with your gut. Write the poem or short story that calls to you.

For a second prompt, reverse predator and prey: mouse and cat, fly and spider, antelope and tiger, rabbit and hunter…

I took the photograph below in an attempt to capture the face I saw in the stone and moss. Do you see it, or the small figure with outstretched arms that seemed like a thick, misshapen cross from a distance? As a child, I would stare sleepless at the “faces” in the knotty pine walls of my bedroom.

Remember a time when you thought you saw a face in a pattern or shadow, and you had been right. Now write what that figure would have warned you if you had only believed your eyes.

For the final prompt, write a poem or story from the perspective of the “final girl” who makes it to the end of the slasher film but write about your life. You may have to omit 2020 because some storylines just aren’t realistic.

An Imprint of Flight, Wings and Beak—Prompts

A bird flew into our sliding glass door and left an imprint of itself—even of its beak on the glass. I sincerely hope it recovered—we found no body the next morning—but I am using its outline as an excuse not to wash the window and as inspiration.

I also could not help thinking of how ducklings imprint and how another’s touch can create a lasting sensation on the skin or how memory seems to imprint certain places.

Write a poem about the voice you still hear in your head or the memory of another arms wrapped around yourself that you recall to comfort yourself during moments of fear or pain. Or write about what imprint, if any, you hope to leave on the world. Write about what echo or outline remains.

Read the lovely imagery in Alice B. Fogel’s “Variation 3: Snapping Turtle,” Gina Franco’s “Refrain,” or Claudia Reder’s “Untranslatable Song” or read Alex Dimitrov’s mournful “Together and Ourselves” or Carolyn Forché’s haunting “Selective Service” for inspiration.

For a bonus prompt, choose the last line from one of the linked poems to use as a ghostline. Remember to credit the author.

Measure Your “Blueness”—A Prompt for Sad Poets

Hey, poets, finally a technological invention specifically for us: an instrument to measure our “blueness” or our current saturation of sorrow.

Write a poem using the number system below for your current emotional chroma.

Bonus prompt: Write a poem or short story about an instrument that can predict and ultimately modify emotional states.

Short Story Time or Ekphrastic Poem—Your Choice for a Stolen Prompt

Once again a week has slipped by without me doing anything other than doom scrolling and procrastinating…so here is a prompt I stole from Twitter

Bonus prompt: Reread William E. Stafford’s poem “Traveling through the Dark.” Assume that the deer looking into the camera is the fawn the narrator pushed over the edge but who lived. Write a poem or short story that explains what comes next.

Revision time, people! On your mark, set, go!!!!

Your prompt is to take a poem and revise it one more time. For longer poems move down four or five lines from the end and begin there. For shorter poems, take the last line of the poem to use as your first. What happens? Better?

Try to avoid the 8th revision results as so aptly demonstrated by the following tweet and pic:

Alas, I have many poems that I revised into the second bird.

Bonus prompt: Write a Standard Operating Procedure for the second bird.

Prompt by Eduardo C. Corral

If I were an RPG character in my life, I would call myself Lollianne the Lazy. Another week of not writing, reading (except Doomscrolling), or editing others’ manuscripts…but I did see this on Twitter.

Write a persona poem from the statue’s perspective of emerging from the earth after centuries. Extra points for references of Persephone, the failed rescue of Eurydice, or any other descent into Hades or ascent from.

Bonus prompt: Write a monologue from Antinous, the lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian. After Antinous drowned in the Nile, Hadrian deified him.

Labor—Prompts Inspired by Robert Hayden

Labor Day honors the work and sacrifice by giving a day of rest, but of course many still have to go to outside jobs and others never stop working at home. I never believe anyone who says they are self-made; instead, I think they simply overlook all the people who work around them and for them.

For the first prompt, make a list of five tasks someone does for you regularly. This task could be performed by a family member, a friend, a partner, a coworker or someone in the community (thank you, essential workers). Choose one to write about. For inspiration, read Robert Hayden’s lovely “Those Winter Sundays” or click on the link to hear the audio recording.

For the second prompt, write a poem using the following words from the poem: “cracked,” “weekday,” “blaze,” “splintering,” “call,” “chronic,” “driven,” “polished,” “well,” and “lonely.”

For the last prompt, use “What did I know” as a ghostline or as an anaphora and don’t forget to credit the poet.

For the Few, the Many, the One, or the Rest of Us: Prompts Inspired by Wanda Coleman

Some poets only need a few lines to astonish me.

For the first prompt, think about the poem’s title. What does this choice indicate about the poem itself [From Merriam-Webster, “exoteric” means “suitable to be imparted to the public”; “belonging to the outer or less initiate circle”; “relating to the outside”/“external”]? Write a poem that asks universal questions and provide your own answers.

As you write or edit, consider whom you are writing this poem for? Whom do you generally picture as your audience? When you imagine yourself performing your poems in front of a crowd, who is there? Everyone you know, faceless blobs, or just a few particular people? Do the people change for each poem? Who is the general public now? Silent or vocal, majority or not, who needs these questions asked and answered?

Again think about the title and how it so encapsulates the poem’s lines. How would the answers differ if the title had been its antonym, “esoteric”? For the second prompt, write a poem using the title “Esoteric” to discover what happens. What questions—or perhaps only the answers to these rather universal questions—are restricted to only the few? Who are the insiders or the experts in your inner world and of what do only they know?

For the next prompt, take one of the italicized lines and use as a ghostline. Be sure to credit the poet.

This is an old picture of my daughter with a strand of seaweed she named “Lemony” and dragged behind her for the entire day. Rotting and crawling with flies, the seaweed didn’t seem sweet scented to me, but to her Lemony was golden. (Btw, she was not allowed to bring Lemony home.)

Bonus prompt: write about an imaginary friend or some cherished childhood item that others didn’t understand or appreciate in the same way.

Father This—Prompts Inspired by W. Todd Kaneko

Today is my father’s birthday, so I wanted to focus on father prompts and also fangirl this brilliant poem.

For the first prompt, collect five pictures of your father taken at different points in time, or of a powerful mentor if you prefer. What does his expression tell you about the time and him? How has he aged? Has you relationship changed? If so, how? Describe the last time you saw him in person.

For the second prompt, write a poem using the following words from the poem: “twist,” “frozen,” “saved,” “animal,” “smoke,” “surprise,” “serene,” and “whisper” but use at least two of the words twice.

LucasFilm/Disney

For a third prompt, use the “We talked until” as a ghostline and be sure to give the poet credit. To read more poems by W. Todd Kaneko, check out the poet’s website.

Because We All Need Some Happiness—A Twitter Prompt

With all the stress and uncertainty, sometimes we need to harvest some small joy. Write a poem about a time you were utterly blissful. Perhaps it was during a relationship that didn’t last or maybe it was a time during childhood and that hopefulness is long gone; regardless, focus on that moment of elation.

Happy poems can be more difficult to write than sad ones. Pain and sorrow seem to translate across barriers and languages. We might worry that cheerful poems will come across as shallow or lazily sentimental—and they can—so practice writing joy so that your audience can experience it too. (This instruction is directed at myself more than anyone else.)

Bonus prompt: write a persona poem from the mouse. Be extravagant in your delight.