My Favorite Poetry Prompts

Well first of all, disclaimer: anything that gets me writing a poem is my favorite thing. It is almost always a feeling that is felt in a line, a moment of “Ah! I have more to say!”

For example, I was packing lunch for my eight-year-old early one morning this week, and as I was pulling grapes from a stem and dropping them into a snack bag, I thought: who DOESN’T want a small container of grapes?! And I could start a poem this way. So here is one prompt: begin a poem with the first food or drink you touched today—be it toast or coffee or (here I am guilty) the peanut butter you licked off you finger while making a child’s sandwich. Just like any poem can, in reverse, suggest a prompt to its reader, so can any daily action. Everything you do or say is an occasion, isn’t it?

Another example: I was looking for something else online, and the search algorithms suggested nipple cream to me. Which is laughable, considering my youngest is eight and I am well past suffering nursing. But it is another prompt, isn’t it? Write a poem titled after a product the great capitalist internet suggested you buy.

My favorite prompt of all was gifted to me by the poet Robyn Schiff: draw the floor plan of the earliest house of your memory, and use it as inspiration for a memory-themed poem. I write this exercise with my students, and something new always occurs to me in the process.

Or a prompt from K-Ming Chang, which gets after our obsessions as well as our origins: What are you haunted by, or what haunts you? Then change the word haunt to hunt.

One of my real recommendations is that you invert a prompt, or disobey it. This is especially good if you are not someone who likes to take orders, or who writes as an act of disobedience (cough). That’s how I arrived at the first poem in my book What Pecan Light—I was responding to a writing prompt to write a poem where something is rescued or saved. So I wrote a poem where nothing was saved, which I will leave you with, along with the original prompt from The Daily Poet (Two Sylvias Press):

Thanks for reading. I hope a poem arrives for you today!

Han