Category: Poetry Prompts

The deadline for submitting poems written in response to prompts 1-6 posted during this year’s Poem-a-Day challenge is Sunday, August 31.

PROMPT 1: Journal Splunking – Skim entries from old journals and diaries from a year or more ago jotting down interesting words, lines, phrases, sentences or images as you do so. The goal is to compile a page (or more) of fragments that still resonate emotionally but resist nostalgia and thwart typical associations or your own predictable writing patterns.

PROMPT 2: Protection – What are you protecting yourself from? What are you protecting your loved ones from? Make a short list of items, people, parts of self, or conditions you feel you need to protect or to be protected from. Next, select one or two items from your list, perhaps related, to write about. Describe why protection is needed an how to protect persons, places, items, or condition you listed.

PROMPT 3: Beginnings – There are several websites who post poems by well-regarded literary poets on a daily basis, including Poets.Org, Poetry Foundation, and Verse Daily. For this prompt, read poems posted for today on one or all three of these websites. Select a first line of your choice to begin a poem of your own. Once your poem draft is more or less complete, remove the first line and give your poem a new and unique title. Alternatively, if you decide to keep the first line, just credit the poem and poet from which the line is borrowed using an epigraph. Something like “after Emily Dickinson.”

PROMPT 4: Whispers of Work – Write a poem about a profession which does not exist anymore or which is phasing out. If you like, you can aim for an ode, a lament, a diatribe, a docu-poem, narrative poem, or found poem with your chosen profession as the central image, setting, or source. Examples of extinct professions: ice cutter, elevator operator, milkman, lamplighter, switchboard operator; Examples of professions phasing away: farmer, travel agent, mason, tailor, literary translator: Professions at serious risk: writer, teacher, librarian, journalist.

PROMPT 5: Absence Unfolding – Freewrite about absence, absenteeism, or absent things. Start with real, ordinary absences, both abstract and concrete, then progressively write about larger absences, each growing in size and scope, even to the point of hyperbole, until you find an absence that feels larger than all other absences, larger than the world, larger than the universe. Make one of them the subject of your poem.

Prompt 6: Transformation – Make a list things in life that you find ugly, shameful, or repulsive–things like foot odor, rudeness, cockroaches, road kill, belching in public, etc. Choose one or more items from your list to include in a poem. For an extra challenge, see if you can transform something usually deemed ugly into something desirable, beautiful, and worthy of admiration.

GUIDELINES

Please send 1-2 poems inspired by any prompt posted during National Poetry Month April, 2025 in the body of an email to ZingaraPoet(at)gmail.com.

Include NAME OF THE PROMPT in the subject line of your email.

Include a few sentences about your writing process (how you got from prompt to final draft) in your email. It’s not necessary to explain what your poem is about, rather I am interested in why you made the choices that you made. For instance, why did you chose couplets (or other stanza length)? How did you discover the imagery or metaphors used in your poem? How many revisions did you make? Not these exact questions, but questions like these can serve as your guide.

For a great example of a poet writing about their process, take a look at the most recent guest blog post at Marsh Hawk Press in which Ellen Bass explicates some of her work. You do not have to be anywhere as involved or detailed as this example, but it does exemplify the kind of approach I am looking for.

Poems may be overtly related to any of the prompts, or have only a thread of connection. If you wrote a poem in response to a prompt and threw out all but one line during revision, that counts. Surprising is preferred to the predictable.

Be sure to also mention if you happened to use any of the revision prompts posted during May and June in the process.

Include a brief professional biography of 50 words or fewer, also in the body of your email.

Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please let ZPR know immediately if submitted work is accepted elsewhere.