Poetry prompts for beginners

Why prompts stall

Most stalled poems are not short of feelings. They are short of a first object. “Write about sadness” is a fog. “Write about a locked door with a light under it” is a place to stand. The feeling can arrive later, and it will be more precise if it has to pass through the door. Beginners are often told to write what they know. What they know is usually an opinion. An object they can see is a stricter and kinder assignment.

A usable prompt has three parts, which is what the button above assembles. An image you could photograph. A situation with a person in it, even if the person never appears. A constraint that is technical rather than emotional: a number of lines, a repeated sentence, a ban on explaining. The constraint is what keeps the prompt from becoming a diary entry with line-breaks. If you hate the constraint, that is information. Write it anyway for twelve lines, then keep the three lines that survived the rule.

A week of prompts

If you would rather not press a button, use these. One a day is enough. Finish the draft before you judge it.

1. A poem of ten lines in which every line contains a colour, and the last line retracts one of them.
2. Address a tool you use for work. It may not answer. Do not say what your job means.
3. Write the same four lines twice. In the second version, change only the verb tenses.
4. A room after an argument, with no people in it. One object is still warm.
5. Eight lines of iambic pentameter about waiting. One substitution allowed.
6. A list poem that becomes a single sentence at the end. The sentence may not explain the list.
7. Someone else’s good news, reported by a person who is not the centre of it.

When a prompt produces a real draft, the next work is revision, not another prompt. The ten-step checklist is the door out of the exercise and back into the poem. If the draft wants a shape, look at traditional forms or the ode only after you know what is repeating.

What to do with a bad prompt

Some prompts are useless to you, and that is not a failure of character. A prompt about the sea is dead weight if you have never stood near one and do not intend to fake it. Discard it. The generator is a pack of cards, not a teacher you must obey. What you owe the exercise is one finished draft a week, not loyalty to a sentence a machine assembled from three lists.

When a prompt works, it usually works because of the constraint, not the image. “No adjective doing the work of a noun” will teach you more than “a locked door.” The door gets you into the chair. The ban on explaining gets you a poem. If you only have ten minutes, keep the constraint and choose your own object from the room you are sitting in. The revision checklist is the second half of any prompt. A prompted draft that is never cut is how a notebook fills and a book does not.

Beginners are often handed prompts that ask for a feeling first: write about joy, write about your grandmother, write about who you are. Those are invitations to summarise. Prefer prompts that ask for a position — where is the light, who is not in the room, what is still switched on. Then, if the feeling is real, it will have somewhere to stand. The pages on imagery and sadness are the same lesson at greater length. A prompt is that lesson, shrunk to a door.