English Asignment: Poetry Prompts
1. Utilize the photo album approach to write a poem about a party, your childhood or current neighborhood, or your current or childhood home.
2. Choose an emotion and offer a series of details and/or scenes that reveal the emotion. Consider including multiple realms of sensory experience in the poem.
3. Choose an individual, and write a poetic portrait of that individual. Present details that represent the ideology you associate with that individual.
4. What emerges from silence? Write a poem in which you explore the ideas or details that become more apparent within or after silence.
5. Think of a moment that changed your thinking about an idea or someone who was important to you. Write a poem about that moment.
6. If you usually write poems in rhyme, try writing a poem without using rhyme. You can even take a poem previously written in rhyme and write it without rhyme. Or you can write one poem about a subject using rhyme and write a second poem about the same subject not using rhyme.
7. Write a poem in response to another work of art-another poem, a song, a painting, a picture, a sculpture, or some other art form.
8. Write a poem from the perspective of a person who isn't you. The speaker can be someone you know well or someone historical.
9. Write a poem in which you focus specifically on the sounds that you are choosing and repeating throughout the lines.
10. Many poems rest comfortably within the parameters of a rectangular page making their journey from left to right and top to bottom. Other poems demand a different presentational format. Write a poem that rethinks the parameters of its presentation.
11. If you don't usually write in rhyme or form, try writing a poem in which you rely on rhyme or form.
12. Write a poem in which the presentation of the poem (the sound, the form, the order) misaligns with the content of the poem.
13. Generate a symbolic web within a poem or within your poetry set.
14. What is a door that you have chosen never to walk through? Write a poem about that door and why you choose to leave it closed.
15. Write a poem about methods of coping that ultimately failed to help you during a difficult time.
16. Write a poem about methods of coping that did help you weather a crisis.
17. If you could change one thing about your life, what would it be? Write a poem that presents the change and what you imagine would result from it.
18. Write a poem about betrayal.
19. Review the poems you've read for the poetry unit and write your own poem about one of the themes, scenarios, or images presented in a poem.
20. Is there a poem that you need that you haven't yet found? What would the poem be about? What would the poem offer? Write a poem that identifies what you need from a poem you haven't yet found and then write the poem that gives what you need.