52 poetry prompts (& a list of angels).
Free-write whatever comes to mind after reading the above excerpt from Helene Cixous’s Stigmata: Escaping Texts.
“Any soul may distribute itself into a human, a toy poodle, bacteria, an etheric, or quartz crystal,” Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge writes in A Treatise on Stars. Write a 7-line poem that distributes a soul into an unusual object that needs it.
Write a poem that touches a corpse without flinching.
Use Robert Pinckney’s “Lifeboat” for an ekphrastic elegy or ode.
Charles Wright once said that "all landscape is autobiographical", and psychogeography inflects poetry, whether erotic (per Richard Siken) or identity-shaping (per regional poets). Forrest Gander's Lynchburg writes from landscape, which is to say, Gander creates a landscape of certain words, a wordscape of living textures. Write a poem centering landscape as biographical subject.
Write a poem from the perspective of the tea-cup in the hands of stranger who speaks a language you can’t understand.
“The sun, in winter, is an estranged event, almost strident, as it comes in slanting...” Ann Lauterbach gives this to us in "The Night Sky VI". I love her comparison of season's sums, what they give, what they take, what they deploy leaving a context--an existing heat, or light, or whatever else we use to describe what amounts to the thing that sustains us. Lauterbach prefers winter for its "episode, the event, the quick kiss in frosty air." Write a poem about what seasons give and take. Address it to a parent or a caregiver.
Catasterism, the practice of comparing individuals to stars in poetry or narrative, originated in ancient Alexandria, with the Catasterismi (Greek: Καταστερισμοί Katasterismoi, "placings among the stars"). It’s all very exciting and it led to a habit of addressing individuals as those particular stars in poems. Use catasterism in a poem about a person. Pick a constellation. Or pick several. Or invent a new one from existing constellations.
Pick a favorite poetry book. Now write an index poem that lists fascinating phrases or ideas or objects or places or people in this book. Structure the poem as an index which includes page numbers. No integument or explanation: just a list.
Pick up a literary magazine and sit with it for a few hours. Go through the poems (or prose) and make an inventory of lines that you love. Then go back and create a list mag cento from them. Of course you can craft a cento from lines in a review or an essay as well. You can do anything that presents itself to your mind with enthusiasm.
Pick a word. Broach. Gas lantern. Free associate around that word. Or choose a letter and make a list of associations--emotional, fictional, scientific, clinical, commercial, religious, social, prescriptive, etc. Use it as a starting point.
Write a poem for which an insect you have never seen is the interlocutor.
Alice Oswald said she came to poetry from childhood terror and being alone in a room at night. She was eight years old and had found herself alone and terrified through the night in “this scary room”. “I saw the dawn coming up and I realised I couldn’t describe it other than in a different language,” she recalls. “I still remember the white clouds in the blue sky and the fact that they weren’t saying anything about what I’d been through, though their actuality was very communicative.” Write your own poem of origin. Or write a poem about the memory of being a child in a room at night, knowing that something existed which you couldn’t explain to adults.
Write a poem about a playground. Invite an exterminator into it.
In Ancient Greece, worshippers left offerings to the gods on the temple floors in mangled heaps. Describe one of these mangled heaps, detailing the offerings, the person who left it, why they left it, what they want from the god.
Now write a poem about a single object in temple offering heap. This offering attempts to trick the gods by asking for something that seems appropriate in order to get something that seems inappropriate. Give us details.
Write a list poem or instructional map guiding us back to your childhood, through its secret routes and landmarks, to its hideout, the magnolia where you practiced your first kiss on the back of your hand.
Reflection, interruption, and expansion are techniques that help thicken the resonance. Aim for a bisque. You are writing a poem about visiting a graveyard, the endless parade of flowers, the rotting red carnation who reminds you of prom, of not having sex for the first time when you planned, of failing in a interior sense, of finding yourself alone near a trash dump leaving the fake satin wristband flower as a memento. His name was Jerry. Like the one that died in 1917 from the influenza pandemic.
Write a poem addressed to Kay Ryan, in response to her statement: “I think poets should take the lesson of the great aromatic eucalyptus tree and poison the soil beneath us.”
Write a poem from analogy. Read Samatar Elmi’s “The Snails” for an example or model.
Babies who die before they can speak will rule the world after it ends. Introduce us to one of these babies.
Write a self-elegy.
In “Of Things Gone Astray”, Janina Matthewson writes: If left unused, conversations can grow rusty over time. The opinions and feelings we’ve expressed before, when left to their own devices, can grow sluggish and curmudgeonly. They become too used to sitting alone and unconsidered, and if you ask them to move, their joints can ache, or parts of them can crumble away. Sometimes you can return to an opinion you’ve not visited in years and find it’s died and rotted away without you even noticing. Sometimes a feeling we assume we’ll have forever can abandon us and leave a gap we don’t notice until we suddenly feel the need to call upon that feeling. Write an elegy to an opinion you once held that has died. If the opinion is shameful or embarrassing, even better—subvert that shame by narrowing it into sonnet form.
Captive magpies are the only birds who remove a sticker placed on their feathers after seeing themselves in a mirror. Write a poem that grows from or includes this strange fact.
"Wrongness has its own color and it is not like anything else,” Anne Carson wrote in her essay, "Totality: The Color of Eclipse." Write a poem with fourteen lines, a vestigial sonnet, that describes the color of wrongness. Include an insect and turn at least one verb into a noun.
Mary Cappello calls the lecture "nonfiction's lost performative"; the lecture’s origin lies in "the note," that morsel allotted to space in a notebook. The good lecture "errs on the side of rapture rather than vehemence." And the notebook is "the lecture's tipping point;" it "combines the energy of containment with the velocity of scatter." Of course you should write a lecture poem. Haven’t you been wanting to do this since reading Anne Carson and Mary Ruefle?
Start with a title that does the work of framing. For example, here are a few titles inspired by Philip Metres' craft essay, "More Than Just A Pretty Hat": Title that cat calls the form of your poem. Title that whistles. Situating title. Title from 4th Dimension. Title of poem I wish I had written. Title with an American word in it. On luminous mystery Etc. Title that is a question. Title beginning with an ing verb. Title after song. Title made from two titles with or between them. Title with its finger on the trigger. Or write a list poem of possible titles that ends in a childhood memory.
An epitome (/ɪˈpɪtəmiː/; Greek: ἐπιτομή, from ἐπιτέμνειν epitemnein meaning "to cut short") is a summary or miniature form, or an instance that represents a larger reality; also used as a synonym for embodiment. An abridgment differs from an epitome in that an abridgment is made of selected quotations of a larger work; no new writing is composed, as opposed to the epitome, which is an original summation of a work, at least in part. Choose five books and write an epitome about each one. Limit yourself to a page of text, whether prose or lineated.
Write an abridgment of a book written by a neighbor who doesn’t exist. Play with how to list the quotations. The title will do a tremendous amount of work in creating context for this poem.
“Epitomacy” means "to the degree of." Write a poem that includes: an uncommon hue of blue, a mathematical formula or a paradox, a dead relative, water (in whatever form), and the word epitomacy. You can use it in the title and leave it out of the poem, or you can bring it into the poem.
Write a blazon. Then write a counter-blazon addressed to the lover’s pony.
Why not try the cameo form invented by Alice Spokes? Pick a small worthy of a cameo. Or keep a list of small things which deserve cameos and choose three of them to work on.
Write a poem of praise for an ordinary day that lists its beauties — anything from litany to inventory. See Afua Ansong's "Saturday, Like This" for inspiration.
A curio cabinet is a space of access to nostalgia, a jumping-off point towards strange juxtapositions. Spend some time exploring Geoffrey Nutter's compendium and then select a few pieces to combine in a poem that uses a second-person narrator.
Arthur Rimbaud fell in love with Paul Verlaine, and got shot in the wrist by him. Then saw him go to jail for it. What is love in poetry? It is blood. It is the blood of the words and their gauntlets. Write an ode to a particular gauntlet love has left in one’s path.
Write a list poem of love gauntlets. Include fine art paintings and pop-culture movies for referents.
Read “Anxiety” by Frank O’Hara, and write your own response to it.
Knowing how to bring the bend of a blue note into a line break is astonishing. The reader can't unhear it in Carolyn Oliver's "Listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams on a Tuesday Night." Edit an old poem with an eye to bending a blue note. Or write a poem while listening to a favorite blues song.
Read “Making Love To Myself” by James L. White, and write an epistolary poem to White’s speaker.
Read Beth Gordon’s “Elegy With Flying Tires” and use it as model or prompt.
Read Sylvia Plath’s “Sheep In Fog”. Select a line from this poem to begin your own poem. Use Plath’s stanza-lengths as a constraint.
After reading Yannis Ristos’ poem, “Broadening”, free-write ten images that the word "broadening” elicits. Then select a few of these images to build into a poem that includes a landscape altered by climate change. Don’t write images related to climate change landscapes—let tension emerge from the weird juxtapositions.
Tug-of-war is a time-honored American game that originated in England, where two captains were appointed for this game, and they took turns choosing partners and team members until all present were equally divided. We play division. A line is drawn or scratched on the dirt’s surface. The object is to draw the other over the line. The game isn’t over until the entire party has been pulled over. But one cannot let go of the line. To be a team player means to never let go of the line. Write an instructional poem on how to play tug-of-war in a corporate workplace. Use the grammar and syntax that speaks to a child audience. Evoke your own sensual memories of childhood tug-of-war to create tension in the voice and to dislocate the narration.
Dietrologia is the Italian word for the science of what is behind something, what is behind an event. Write one. Use neologisms.
Read Philip Metres’ essay, “In the Den of the Voice,” and write a persona poem from the perspective of Dimitri Psurtsev. Or pick a descriptive paragraph to create an erasure from it.
At the top of a blank sheet of paper, write the following title: “This is for me to say since the old times." Then add a note attributing this title to Diane Williams’ short story, "Tureen". Now write the poem.
“There is a man trying to remember his life / as a single incident and a few words.” Use these two lines from Mary Ruefle’s "The Blue of October" to recreate the man and the memory. Limit yourself to 7 lines, and the single incident should appear in the fifth line. See if the final line can consist of three words with commas between them and no prepositions.
Write a poem in response to Saidiya Hartman’s incredible "The Plot of Her Undoing." Borrow the first clause or just the conceit. Make sure to attribute it. “The undoing of the plot begins when everything has been taken…..”
The image of the seraph below is from medieval book of hours. Explore the iconography collection in The Morgan Library and Museum and see if any of them deserve a poem portrait. Or a litany. Or a ballade.
Using the ridiculously long list of angels [see below], write a poem that invokes a non-canonical angel. Note that many of these angels are also considered demons, which is why they live outside the canon of acceptable angels.
The poem encounters Harahel, the angel of archives, in a gym. Why?
The poem invokes Rochel, the angel of lost things, in a strip mall parking lot. What is missing?
List of Angels
Nadiel, the angel of migration
Poteh, also called Purah, angel of forgetting and oblivion
Artiya'il, remover of grief
Baraqiel, guardian of lightning
Cassiel, archangel of solitude and tears
Israfil, archangel of music
Kalka'il, who oversees the fifth heaven
Lailah, angel of night and conception
Nakir, angel of death and guardian of the faith of the dead
Pahaliah, throne of virtuosity
Radueriel, angel of song, leader of heavenly choirs who can create lesser angels with his mouth
Raziel, keeper of secrets
Sandalphon, protector of unborn children
Purson, fallen angel who rides a bear and carries a viper and knows the past and the future
Mach, who can make you invisible
Shateiel, angel of silence
Ridyah, angel of rain
Rochel, angel of lost objects
Satarel, guardian of hidden things
Abuioro who reveals rare books if requested
Aftiel who governs twilight
Almiras who teaches invisibility
Amaliel, angel of weakness
Andas, the angel of the air
Ardarel, the angel of fire
Barachiel, angel of the altitudes, guardian of lightning
Naamah, angel of prostitution
Harahel, angel of archives
Rahardon, angel of terror
Balberith who notarizes pacts made with the devil
Temeluch who cares for babies born from adultery
Radueril, angel of poetry
The Angel of Clouds who has no other name
Gazardiel who oversees the rising and setting of the sun
Azarel who writes the names of the born and the dead in a book named eternity
Belial, angel of darkness, angel of the earth, also known as Satan
Cerviel, angel of courage
Chosniel whose dominion is human memory and who assists in passing examinations
Dumah, angel of dreams
Ebuhuel, angel of impotence
Eirnilus, angel who rules all fruit
Sulphalatus, angel of the dust
Flaef who rules human sexuality
Fromezin, angel of the second hour of night
Gabuthelon who will govern at the end of the earth
Gagiel, angel of fish
Hamal who rules the waters
Harbonah, angel of destruction and confusion who drives a donkey around the cosmos
Israfel, angel of resurrection and music
Jazar, angel of the seventh hour of the day who can create love between two humans
Jeliel whose name is inscribed on the Tree of Life and who inspires passion among us
Lumiel, angel of the dawn, angel of the light, also known as a Lucifer, and misunderstood for centuries
Mahzian, angel of eyesight
Miniel whos name, when invoked, can induce love in a frozen maiden
Mumiah, angel of longevity and science
Nahaliel who rules creeks and streams
Narsinah, angel of heroes and heroism
Orifiel, angel of the apocalypse, among the angels of creation, ruler of wilderness and untarnished landscapes
Otheos, guardian of hidden treasures
Tablibik, angel of fascination
Tahariel, angel of purity
Tezalel, angel of fidelity
Theliel, angel of love
Tubiel, angel of small birds who heals broken nests.
Yurkemi, angel of hail.
Zachriel, angel of memory, angel of surrender.
Zahun, angel of scandal.
Zianor, angel who gives artistic talents.
Zikiel, angel of comets and meteors.
Zi'iel, angel of commotion.