Writing Exercises by Topic & Theme

60+ exercises designed to kickstart your writing this April

Dear Friends,

Kicking off National Poetry Month with every exercise I’ve ever offered here organized by theme/subject/style (can’t say much more about it as I need to save the newsletter word count for the exercises!).

I hope these inspire you throughout the month. Make sure to check out yesterday’s schedule for a full list of Poetry Today x National Poetry Month offerings.

xM

#1 — Eugène Ionesco wrote, “The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.”

Prompt: Free write until you land upon a memory that allows you to explore this duality. What is remembered clearly, and what is dreamed up to fill in the blanks? Allow the language of the poem to make no distinction between the two, remembered or dreamed, real or imagined. Explore what happens as you write with this quality in mind.

#2 — “Summer? My memory flutters — / had I — was there a summer?” writes Emily Dickinson.

Prompt: January is an excellent time to revisit summer. Write a poem set in summer that somehow nods at winter (either forthcoming or past).

#3— In Economy of the Unlost, Anne Carson asks: “What is remembering? Remembering brings the absent into the present, connects what is lost to what is here. Remembering draws attention to lostness and is made possible by emotions of space that open backward in a void. Memory depends upon void, as void depends upon memory, to think it.”

Prompt: Write about an experience that, as Carson writes, “connects what is lost to what is here.” This could be in the form of an object that links the two, or it might be figurative, drawing from memory to connect the present to the past.

#4 — “Memory is imagination, and imagination is memory. I don’t think we remember the past, we imagine it.” — John Banville

Prompt: Take a past memory and radically re-imagine it. If the memory has faded, start with whatever you remember and let imagination forge ahead. Then see if you can remove yourself from the memory entirely, giving yourself even greater liberty to invent what happens next.

#5 — In “Gray Eyes” by Sarah Teasdale, the poet writes:

Yet whenever I turn
To your gray eyes over me,
It is as though I looked
For the first time at the sea.

Prompt: Explore the effect a person’s gaze has upon you. This can begin from a past memory or a present fact, or it can be entirely imaginary. Try to come up with your own simile for the power of that gaze.

#1 — In “Eros the Bittersweet,” Anne Carson writes: “Lovers are always waiting. They hate to wait; they love to wait. Wedged between these two feelings, lovers come to think a great deal about time, and to understand it very well, in their perverse way.”

Prompt: Think about time with a beloved past, present, future (imaginary or otherwise). Try to tap into what Carson means by this paradox: “they hate to wait; they love to wait.” If you’d like a formal constraint, try writing in a loose sonnet structure (14 lines, rhymed or not).

#2 — In “Consider the Lilies of the Field,” Christina Rossetti writes:

The rose saith in the dewy morn,
I am most fair;
Yet all my loveliness is born
Upon a thorn.

Prompt: Beauty and difficulty often present together (the loveliness of the rose juxtaposed against the stem’s thorn). Write a poem that complicates the beautiful by focusing on less appealing or obvious aspects of its beauty.

#3 — In “September,” Linda Pastan writes:

Their summer romance
over, the lovers
still cling
to each other
the way the green
leaves cling
to their trees

Prompt: Write a poem that aims to capture the drama or emotion of a particular month and its corresponding season. Focus on crafting images that somehow mirror or reflect that underlying tension that the poem illustrates.

#4 — “What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight.” — Virginia Woolf from “The String Quartet”

Prompt: Write about these “woven reeds” of sorrow and joy, a moment that is otherwise bittersweet, joyful and mournful or sad. As always, don’t worry about what form this writing will take. Free write into the memory or subject first, then see what comes out of your exploration.

#5 — The speaker of Alice Oswald’s poem “Full Moon” dreams she is the moon:

Prompt: Write a poem that relies on a list of approximations or hesitations: “Almost frost but softer, almost ash but wholer…almost of water…a kind of counter-light…”

#1 — “Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, as without light, nothing flowers,” wrote May Sarton.

Prompt: Explore how this duality has proven true in your own life focusing on one or more moments or anecdotes. If you’d like a formal challenge, try compressing the poem into eight couplets (two line stanzas).

#3 — In “The Trial,” Kafka writes: “By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it.

Prompt: Try creating a new poetic form. You can begin by choosing a form you know well, then adapting it slightly to make it strange to you.

#4 — “Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (trans. from the French)

Prompt: Write an ode to night. Start by making a list of everything you love about it.

#5 — E.E. Cummings has one of the most visually distinctive styles in poetry:

Prompt: Borrow from E.E. Cummings’s untraditional use of syntax to write something that playfully uses parenthetical and lowercase. If this is completely foreign to how you write, even better! The point is to stretch an unfamiliar muscle.

#6— “Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.” — Audre Lorde

Prompt: Write about pain drawing from the structure this beautiful insight provides: how we evade, succumb, deal with, and transcend pain. Try to write a paragraph (or stanza) for each.

#1 — In “Praise the Rain,” Joy Harjo writes:

Praise crazy. Praise sad. Praise the path on which we’re led.
Praise the roads on earth and water.
Praise the eater and the eaten.
Praise beginnings; praise the end.
Praise the song and praise the singer.

Prompt: What in your own life would you like to praise? Write a praise song, filling it with your own particular and unexpected images and details.

#2 — George Morrison writes: “I believe in going back to the magic of the earth and the lake, the sky and the universe. That kind of magic. I believe in that kind of religion. A religion of the rocks, the lake, the water, the sky. Yes, that’s what I believe in.”

Prompt: What do you believe in? Write your own credo. Begin every line with “I believe.”

#1 — The Welsh word hiraeth means “A homesickness for a home you can't return to, or that never was. Formed from “hir,” meaning long, and “aeth” meaning sorrow or grief.

Prompt: Let the energy of this word be your inspiration. What does hiraeth bring up for you? Write a poem (or whichever form feels right today!) that seeks to evoke that feeling.

#2 — In “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman writes: “Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. / Missing me one place, search another. / I stop somewhere waiting for you.”

Prompt: Write a poem in which something is either searched for, found or not. Try to capture the feeling of “missing me one place, search another,” that energy of perseverance.

#3 — Nepenthe (Ancient Greek) is a medicine for sorrow, or a person/place/thing that aids in forgetting pain and suffering.

Prompt: Find an example of a nepenthe in your own life. Free write on this subject for 20 minutes, then read back what you wrote. Use this as the starting point for your poem (though this subject also lends itself particularly well to creative nonfiction).

#4 — “Sometimes absence can prove presence. That’s not exactly /
faith, I know. All day, everywhere, I feel you near at hand,” Patricia Traxler writes in “Last Hike Before Leaving Montana.”

Prompt: Write about someone, or something, whose absence is a form of presence.

#5 — “At what point is something gone completely?” Mary Szybist asks in “The Troubadours Etc.” “The last of the sunlight is disappearing even as it swells—”

Prompt: Write about something on the verge of vanishing or something that only appears to be on the brink of being “gone completely.”

#6 — In Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foers writes: “I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone.”

Prompt: Write about “the end of missing someone,” a reunion real or imagined.

#1 — In “How Far Away We Are,” Ada Limón writes:

I want to give you something, or I want to take
something from you. But I want to feel the exchange,
the warm hand on the shoulder, the song coming out
and the ear holding on to it.

Prompt: Write a poem that explores an exchange between two individuals. Focus on sensory experience (remember, you have five senses). Aim to include each sense at least once.

#2 — “The poet makes himself [or herself] a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses,” wrote Arthur Rimbaud.

Prompt: Write a poem that purposefully disorders the senses, or one that uses synesthesia (experiencing one sense through the lens of another—hearing a color, for example).

#3 — In This is Happiness, Niall Williams writes: “Maybe I didn’t know it then, I’m pretty sure I didn’t. Didn’t know that there are times in a life that pass but retain a gleaming, which means they never die, and the light of them is in you still.”

Prompt: Write about a moment in your life that “retains a gleaming.” Try to focus on the five senses—what does a gleaming feel like? Smell like? Taste like? This will help us avoid lapsing into abstractions or clichés as we try to talk about a moment that still casts a particular glow. Remember, show don’t tell is an adage for a reason—you want the reader to infer/feel that gleaming for themselves.

#4 — In “Fall Song,” Joy Harjo writes: “It is a dark fall day. The earth is slightly damp with rain. I hear a jay. The cry is blue.”

Prompt: This is a wonderful example of synesthesia. Begin by writing about a sound that appears to the speaker as a color. See if you can build on this by drawing from other senses.

#1 — In “The Bingo Palace,” Louise Erdrich writes: “We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.”

Prompt: Write about the heart of another (try someone familiar to you), focusing on description and imagery (the adage “show, don’t tell”). Focus on exploring what isn’t fully known or understood.

#2 — In Orlando, Virginia Woolf writes: “What she was like. Snow, cream, marble, cherries, alabaster, golden wire? None of these. She was like a fox, or an olive tree; like the waves of the sea when you look down upon them from a height; like an emerald; like the sun on a green hill which is yet clouded—”

Prompt: Inspired by Woolf’s glorious descriptors, describe a person using an unusual set of features or resemblances. Use this list as an opportunity to craft striking similes, “like the sun on a green hill which is yet clouded—”

#3 — In “Sonnet XL,” Pablo Neruda writes: “Green was the silence, wet was the light, / the month of June trembled like a butterfly.”

Prompt: Write a poem that begins with a line of synesthesia, (green silence, wet light) followed by a simile (trembled like a butterfly).

#4 — In “Ode to the Defense Mechanism,” Ira Sadoff writes: “Inside the hardness of the heart, the numbness of the heart, there lay a smaller heart, a splinter in your finger, throbbing and pulsing so you can see how alive you are.”

Prompt: Choose a different organ to infuse with a metaphorical significance and to illustrate in a surprising way. Remember, you want the reader to feel some connection to its function (“pulsing so you can see how alive you are”) while also being surprised by the unexpected simile or metaphor (“a splinter in your finger”).

#5 — Frederick Buechner writes: “I always stop and touch the coarse gray bark of one particular tree with my hand or cheek, which I suppose is a way of blessing it for being so strong and beautiful.”

Prompt: Go out in the world (or sit by your window if your prefer/this applies) and find a tree to connect with. Spend 10 minutes looking at this tree trying to see beyond the obvious as you catalogue its features and admire its strength. See where this leads on the page.

#6 — Here is Lisel Mueller’s short poem “How I Would Paint Happiness”:

Something sudden, a windfall,
a meteor shower. No —
a flowering tree releasing
all its blossoms at once,
and the one standing beneath it
unexpectedly robed in bloom,
transformed into a stranger
too beautiful to touch.

Prompt: Title your own piece “How I Would Paint Happiness” but make its details, images, motifs entirely your own. You can also choose to swap out “happiness” for a different abstract noun.

#1 — In a letter to Mrs. J.G. Holland, Emily Dickinson wrote: “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.”

Prompt: Approach the prompt figuratively. What does it mean to be out with a lantern, looking for oneself? What comes to mind? Write a poem that imagines what that search looks like.

#2 — “Anything that we think we’ve learned, / we’ve learned in the dark,” writes poet Charles Wright. The dark is associated with many feelings and states, though somewhat less often with learning.

Prompt: Write a poem that enacts Wright’s sentiment—what have you learned in the dark?

#3 — In “Change of Season,” Audre Lorde asks: “Am I to be cursed forever with becoming / somebody else on the way to myself?”

Prompt: Write a poem for your future self. Include details from today and find a way to weave in your hopes and anxieties in your address to this future version.

#4 — “You’re a story,” Eudora Welty writes in “A Visit of Charity.”

Prompt: You’re a story. Write that story in a free verse block poem.

#5 — In “Dead Stars,” Ada Limón writes:

"Look, we are not unspectacular things.
We’ve come this far, survived this much.
What would happen if we decided to survive more?
To love harder?"

Prompt: Write a poem about survival. Approach the topic as widely as you feel inspired to.

#6 — “Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: ‘I’m with you kid. Let’s go.’” — Maya Angelou

Prompt: Write about a time you took life by the lapel, whatever that means to you.

#7 — Behold this very brief, very powerful poem by Ilya Kaminsky:

Prompt: Challenge yourself by writing a poem called “Question” that is only two lines long. You may need to write a much longer poem whose power gets distilled or compressed to two lines, or you might write a series of questions before choosing the one that resonates most. Once you have your question, revise it over and over again until the language is as precise as it can be.

#8 — “But, just remember, love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don't panic now.” — James Baldwin

Prompt: Write against panic. Listen to what feels true when you slow down to find hope in this moment. Begin by making a list of things that you can trust, then see what else you might unexpectedly draw confidence and hope from (and maybe share it with all of us, please!).

#9 — In “Glad,” Coleman Barks writes “Good losers don’t laugh last; they laugh / continuously, all the way home so glad.”

Prompt: Explore a past failure, misstep, or loss that actually had a humorous or lighthearted conclusion.

#1 — In “Bird,” Danusha Laméris writes:

We were sitting on the couch in the dark
talking about first pets, when I told him how,
as a girl, I kept a blue and white parakeet I let
fly around the house and, sometimes, outside,
where he’d land on the branches of pine
and eucalyptus, balancing between seedpods
and spines.

Prompt: Write a poem that uses a pet as a metaphor or motif, or as the subject of a conversation between two people.

#2 — In “The Start of Something,” Stuart Dybek asks:

“Why not end here, without answers?
Aren’t there chance meetings in every life that don’t play out,
stories that seem meant to remain ghostly, as faint and fleeting
as the reflection of a face on the window of a bus?”

Prompt: Write about a chance meeting or encounter in your own life that has remained with you over time.

#3 — Erin Belieu’s wonderful poem “In Ecstasy” is written at the altarpiece of Saint Teresa. The poem’s speaker is at once direct, “No need to be coy— / you know what / she’s doing // And so did Bernini” while also raising a profound question, “Why // shouldn’t He come to us / as He did to Teresa?”

Prompt: Choose a statue or religious icon or altarpiece to investigate. Borrow from Belieu’s conversational tone to arrive at a deeper theological question. What timeless (or contemporary) question is implicit in or raised by this sacred work?

#4 — In a letter to Vera, Nabokov writes: “you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought.”

Prompt: Write a letter to the only person you can talk with about—insert whatever feels equivalently personal to you. Generate a list of images, topics, and ideas that might begin in reality but quickly deviate from it. The goal is for the piece to capture a sense of intimacy/a secret language you and this person share.

#1 — In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell writes: “But every land should be a holy land. One should find the symbol in the landscape itself of the energies of life there. That’s what all early traditions do. They sanctify their own landscape.”

Prompt: Write about a landscape that is sacred to you.

#2 — In “Postcolonial Love Poem,” Natalie Diaz writes: “There are wildflowers in my desert / which take up to twenty years to bloom.”

Prompt: Write about a real or figurative desert. Vividly imagine the space and don’t feel you need to stay too close to the usual associations with deserts. What is the history of your particular desert? How did it come to be a desert—and what blooms there?

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