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Poetry Writing Prompts

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Often, authors encounter writers block.  I am fortunate that I rarely encounter this when writing poetry.  The reason for that is because I have some go to writing prompts to help me out.  I used to volunteer to teach poetry classes and the following prompts are what I used when I needed to come up with ideas quickly.
I would have people write about colors, things that happen in the calendar year, music, teach a specific form of poem, and use published poems and authors as inspiration.  Writing about color is a little self-explanatory, so I will only go in depth on the other prompts I have listed.

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Calendar Year

I often had my students write about things that happened in the calendar year.  Things like seasons, the weather, holidays, and the specific months.  It was easy to look outside and prompt my students to write about what the weather was doing, or to have them write about the specific season we were experiencing at the time of the class.  Writing about the month we were in was also effortless.  I always felt holidays were especially inspirational.  I wrote so many of these types of poems that I am working on making a book out of them.  I currently have 42 poems typed up, and I am not even finished!

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Music

I have written a little bit about this in previous blog posts.  In my classes, sometimes I would simply have the students write a poem about their favorite song.  Sometimes I played the same song for everyone and had them all write a poem about that song.  You might think that you would get very similar poems doing this, but actually, they came out very diverse.  I always did want to be careful with this prompt because I did not want to infringe on any copywrites.  If you are simply writing this for yourself, that doesn't matter.  Done carefully, poems written inspired by music can still be published.  I found a call for submissions for poems that are inspired by the Rolling Stones.  Sometimes I would play music on glass bottles.  You could also play your own instrument, if you have one, for inspiration.  In this case, you do not have to worry about plagiarism.  I am of the belief that music is poetry.  I've seen some lyrics of various artists printed out and they look like wonderful poetry.

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Forms of Poems

I really like to write sonnets, haikus, and acrostic poems.  I like them, therefor I teach them.  Haikus are pretty straight forward.  Write a poem with 3 lines.  The first line being 5 syllables, the second line being 7 syllables, and the third line being 5 syllables again.  I know that some people argue that Haikus should be about certain things like nature, or that it should be conveyed in a different way, but I don't think that has to be the case.  I was teaching poetry to beginners, so simply saying to write a 5-7-5 syllable poem was good enough for me.  I also love to do Acrostic Poems.  These poems are poems where the first letter of each line spells out a word.

For example:

Next

Akin

To

Amazing

She

Happily

Ascends

 

I actually made money at some craft fairs charging people to have me write out an acrostic poem of their name.  I did not charge much, and yet, a surprising amount of people wanted to have this done.

 

Sonnets are a little harder.  I must admit that I still don't understand iambic pentameter very well, so I don't bother with it.  The great thing about poetry is that you don't Have To follow the rules.  There is a lot I can say about sonnets, so I will write about them in a future blog post.

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Using Published Authors and Poems

Most of the time in my poetry class, I would choose 3 poets and their published poetry for inspiration.  I went to a poetry website, printed the author's bio, and a poem they had published.  We would read these bios and poems out loud and use them as inspiration to write our own poems.  This exercise took a little preparation, but I learned how to do it so well, it did not take much time to prepare at all.  Now when I am working on poetry, for fun, or to try to publish, I often read poetry ezines.  I have learned a lot from doing this.  For example, I knew about acrostic poetry, but I did not know there was a form of poetry where you start each line with a letter of the alphabet.  Finally, if none of these prompts work for you, you can find other prompts all over the internet.  There are many tweeted prompts every day, and Writer's Digest sends out writing prompts.  Writer's Block can be overcome!