30 Poetry Writing Exercises for New Poems

Poetry requires a careful attention to language, and poetry writing exercises can help sharpen that attention. The 30 poetry exercises in this article help you attend to poetry’s forms, needs, and possibilities—all while generating new poetic drafts.

Have you struggled with craft devices like line breaks or metaphors? Do you want to try your hand at rhyme or meter? Read on to find new and fun poetry exercises for your poetic practice.

30 Poetry Writing Exercises

The following poetry exercises are broken down into some of poetry’s essential skills, including:

• Word play
• Sound play
• Form play
• Literary devices
• Finding inspiration in poetry
• Other forms of play

Let’s start with the basic unit of poetry, the word.

5 Word Play Poetry Exercises

Successful poems often use wordplay to generate tension, surprise, and insight. These writing exercises for poetry will help you discover new ways of toying with language.

1. Compound Wordplay

A compound word is any word formed by two (or more) independent words smushed together. So a bedspread is the spread of blankets on a bed. A bookkeeper keeps the accounting books of a business. The afternoon comes after noon.

Lately, I’ve just been compounding words myself and seeing what happens. Some recent examples in my work include godmachine, dreamsheep, triggertaut, and shiverworn.

Or, I love it when James Joyce uses the word “slimesilvered” in his poem “On the Beach at Fontana.”

Here’s what you can do:

• The poetry exercise: Spend 5-10 minutes just mashing words together.
• Advice: Don’t think too critically about the words you form. Go wild and just see what happens. Try to make your list long, and try to pull from different vocabularies, and even parts of speech.
• What next: Look through your wordlist. Do any words seem particularly evocative? Do any words demand definitions, or ask to be used in sentences? If so, use that word as a doorway into a poem draft.

You might, incidentally, end up writing some kennings as well. A kenning is a two-word phrase that acts as a metaphor or metaphorical description of something. They’re especially common in Old English, such as the kenning “whale-road,” which refers to the ocean in Beowulf.

2. Nonce Words

A nonce word is a word invented one time for a very specific context and purpose. (If that word remains nonce in an old language, it becomes a hapax legomenon.)

Shakespeare, the eternal wordsmith, gives us a lot of great examples. We can credit him with words like “inauspicious,” “lonely,” and “suspicious.” These words are no longer nonce, of course, since they’ve become so integrated into the language. At this point, they become what’s called a neologism.

The above exercise in compound words is one way to get you generating nonce words. But there are plenty of other ways to do this.

Here’s what you can do:

• The poetry exercise: What is a feeling or experience you don’t have language for? Try to invent a word that encompasses that experience, either through the sounds of the word, or through scaffolding meaning from existing language.
• Advice: Although this prompt encourages you to find the “perfect” word, don’t reach for perfection—you’ll drive yourself mad.
• What next: If anything, try writing a poem that reaches for the right word, and does not end until that word is discovered.

3. Anthimerias

This is one of my favorite wordplay devices. An anthimeria occurs when you use a word with a different part of speech than it’s typically used for.

For example, the word “purple” is an adjective. It represents a color. But if I said a bruise “purples across his skin,” I’m now using “purple” as a verb, giving it motion and action. It also yields an interesting image, as purple rhymes with burble or gurgle, and I see purple moving in a similar movement.

That aforementioned Shakespeare invented a lot of words using anthimeria. “Lonely” is one such example: before him, we had the word “lone” to describe something on its own, but not “lonely” to convey that isolating experience of aloneness.

Here’s what you can do:

• The poetry exercise: Make a list of 10 words. Don’t think too much about them, as you can use this device with pretty much anything. Identify the part of speech for each word and how it is typically used in a sentence. Then, write a sentence for each word, 10 in total, that each uses anthimeria.
• Advice: Just have fun with this! Let your creative mind take control.
• What next: You might end up using some of these sentences as doorways into new poems. See what happens!

4. Paraprosdokians

Every night, I like to keep a daily diary entry in which I journal about my day, do a little drawing of some sort, and then sign the entry in my own blood.

That’s a lie. But it’s also an example of paraprosdokian: a device in which a sentence ends somewhere unexpected. By contradicting the reader’s expectations, the writer makes the reader pay closer attention to what’s written.

Don’t worry, no blood is involved in this poetry writing exercise. But here’s what you can do:

• The poetry exercise: Write down 5 sentences that end in unexpected places. The more you surprise yourself, the better. If you need some creative inspiration, use these sentence starters:

• • 1. When I was a child, I liked to…
    2. I feel most like myself when…
    3. The world would be a much better place if…
    4. In my kitchen cabinet, you’ll find…
    5. A poem is only good if it includes…

• Advice: Lie! Improvise! Don’t worry about reproducing factual reality. The point is to have fun and let your imagination take the reins.

• What next: Even if you end up with paraprosdokians that are fundamentally untrue, you might stumble into an emotional truth of sorts. In any case, use paraprosdokians to generate surprise in your work, with line breaks and other poetic elements to help heighten that surprise and tension.

5. Tone / Irony Play

Irony is a rather prominent feature of contemporary writing. Sometimes, it’s annoying how frequently I encounter it. But it does offer us an interesting doorway into language.

Irony occurs when there is a break between expectation and reality. To put this in measurable terms, irony happens when there’s a wide gulf between “what seems to be” happening in the text, and “what is” in the text.

For example, you might expect a poem in which the speaker is upset about their parents to also be tonally upset. If the poem seems laughing, joking, or funny, that would be ironic, right?

Louise Glück gives us just that in her short poem “Telemachus’ Detachment“:

Here’s what you can do:

• The poetry exercise: Choose a topic that you would like to write a poem about. Do a free write of this topic using the opposite tone that a reader might expect. So, if you want to write about something that angers you, write in a tone that’s calm and accepting; if your topic makes you excited, write in a tone that’s unimpressed or unimpacted. You get the idea.
• Advice: Word choice is key here, and you will likely end up choosing words that go against your own particular feeling on the subject, but that’s the point: you are trying to get across your feelings without naming them, or using a tone that contradicts your feelings in a startling way.
• What next: Maybe you write an entire poem in this ironic tone, or maybe you stumble into a useful line to use in a future poem. The point is to contradict yourself and see what poetic material you might generate.

5 Sound Play Poetry Exercises

Poetry is a musical artform. Its history with rhyme and meter, as well as its history as a form of oral storytelling, cement it as a literary art that demands attention to sound. But even contemporary poetry relies on musicality, even if contemporary poems often eschew rhyme, meter, and narrative.

As such, the following poetry writing exercises get you playing with the sounds of words—and possibly stumbling into new poems as a result.

6. Homophonic Translations

A homophone is a word or phrase that sounds like another word or phrase, even though the two have distinct meanings. “Hear” and “here” are one example of this. So is the pair “laid him on the green” and “Lady Mondegreen”—the phrase which coined the term Mondegreen.

Homophonic translations involve using homophony as the device by which a new poem is written. What you’ll do is either write a poem or pay homage to an existing text by translating it homophonically into something new. The goal is to replicate the sonic sensation of the original text, but impart it with new meaning, through words that (generally) make sense.

Reuben Gelley Newman gives us a fun homophonic translation of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Here are the first 12 lines of Eliot’s poem:

And here’s Reuben’s poem, published in Noir Sauna:

Here’s what you can do:

• The poetry exercise: Pick a poem or passage of prose you love, and write your own first draft that emulates the sound and musicality of the source text.
• Advice: Shoot for the feeling of the source text, not the exact sounds. This gives you some latitude so that you can still choose words that make sense together, while preserving, perhaps, the rhythm of the original text.
• What next: You might have a new poem draft, or you might just have a few phrases you’d like to store for future poems. In any case, this poetry writing exercise gets you thinking about sounds in new ways.

7. Sound Devices

Sound devices are central to poetry, which is an inherently musical artform. There are a few primary devices, which I will list briefly here:

Alliteration is one of the central sound devices in poetry. It occurs any time similar sounds are repeated in quick succession in a passage of text.

It encompasses a few related terms, including:

• Alliteration: A series of words that begin with the same letter or sound.
  • Example: A feral phantom freaked my father out.
• Assonance: The repetition of the same or similar vowel sounds in closely placed words.
  • Example: Our ouroboros was out for many hours.
• Consonance: The repetition of the same or similar consonant sounds in closely placed words. (Alliteration is a form of this, but consonance can happen anywhere in the word.)
  • Example: I nabbed my baby brother’s bib at the box office.
• Sibilance: Consonance specifically with s and sh sounds.
  • Example: She sells seashells by the seashore.

Here’s what you can do:

• The poetry exercise: Try your hand writing lines or sentences with these sound devices. Specifically, write 1 sentence that uses consonance / assonance with the following sound pairs:

• • 1. B & P
    2. S & SH
    3. E, EE, & EY
    4. C, K, & CH
    5. O, OO, & OU
    6. G, J, & ZH
    7. F & V

• Advice: Don’t try to write sentences that make sense—just shoot for musicality. The goal, as always, is to have fun with language.

• What next: Maybe you stumble into a phrase you want to explore in a poem, or maybe you just have fun with it! Either way, honing your ear for music in language is important to any poetic practice.

8. Euphony / Cacophony

When a passage of text is particularly musical, lyrical, or enjoyable, it might be described as euphonious. Conversely, a text that is expressly unpleasant, harsh, or otherwise disagreeable is cacophonous.

Euphony often happens when the text has vowel harmony, pleasant assonance and consonance, and sometimes rhyme or meter. Cacophony, conversely, mixes together harsher consonant sounds.

Here’s an example of each:

Both euphony and cacophony have their utility in poetry. Bear in mind that, even though cacophony emphasizes discordance, it often has a sort of rhythm or musicality to it—a kind of “it feels good to hurt” in the language.

Here’s what you can do:

• The poetry exercise: Go back to our sound devices exercises and combine the sentences you wrote. Don’t aim for euphony or cacophony, but try to combine consonant and vowel sounds.

• • 1. For example, let’s say you wrote the following two sentences:

• F & V: My favorite vice is flinging flavored fava beans frivolously.

• E, EE, & EY: The bee creeps invisibly between the evergreens.

• • 1. Combining the two could look like this: My favorite bee flings fava beans frivolously between evergreens.

• Advice: Does the sentence make sense? No! But you can picture it, at least. And combining them yielded some euphony this go-around; it might yield cacophony the next. The point here is to further attune your ear to the kinds of sounds and words that go together.

• What next: Again, you may have some phrases or sentences worth storing for later, or you might just treat this as a fun poetry exercise.

9. Lines in Rhyme

Rhyme defines much of the poetic canon. While contemporary poetry often eschews this device, it remains a defining feature of the poetic craft, and many poets might use internal rhyme or incidental rhyme even if they don’t use rhyming poetry forms.

This poetry exercise gets you using rhyme as a doorway into a new poem draft. Here’s what you can do:

• The poetry exercise:

• • 1. Write down 7 pairs of rhyming words/phrases. 14 words/phrases in total. Each pair of words/phrases should have a distinct rhyme—in other words, do not use the “EE” sound for two distinct pairs.
    2. Each pair of words MUST be unrelated to one another. Shoot for words with distinct categories of meaning. “Bear” and “hair,” for example, have an obvious relationship—bears have fur. But “sun bear” and “software” feel unrelated.
    3. Arrange your words in the following format, where matching letters are the corresponding rhyming words:
       • A
       • B
       • A
       • B
       • C
       • D
       • C
       • D
       • E
       • F
       • E
       • F
       • G
       • G
    4. Those words are the ends of each line of poetry. Now, write a poem in which those end words make sense.

• Advice: Rhymes are useful for giving structure and meaning to words that may otherwise be arbitrary. By using rhyming pairs that don’t seem to make sense, you are forcing yourself to think laterally and discover hidden connections between rhymes that can surprise and delight the reader.

• What next: The above rhyme scheme is used in a Shakespearean sonnet. If you want to challenge yourself to fit the form, you can revise your poem to be in iambic pentameter. More on meter in the next poetry exercise!

10. Lines in Meter

I’ll be honest. Meter is not the easiest skill for me. I think it was a lot easier 200 years ago, because most poems were written in iambic pentameter anyway, so poets had internalized the singsongy quality of iambic poetry to the point where they could reproduce it on their own.

Nonetheless, meter is a useful skill. Formal poets will benefit greatly from reading and writing in meter, as a lot of formal poems require it, or else are improved by using it. And every poet, regardless of form, will benefit from attuning their ear to this feature of language and musicality.

What is meter? In short, meter describes two things:

1. The “rhythm” of a poem, or the cadence of stressed and unstressed syllables.
2. The length of a poem’s line, or the number of stressed and unstressed syllables in each line.

The most common meter in English language poetry is iambic. An iamb is an unstressed syllable, followed by a stressed syllable. A line of iambic pentameter is a line of 5 (“penta”) iambs.

Some iambic words include:

• Beseech
• Pervade
• Complete
• Expense
• Today
• Beget
• Invade

Speak these words out loud. Where do you place the most emphasis in the word? For most English dialects, that emphasis is on the second syllable, making it the “stressed” syllable.

Of course, iambic poetry doesn’t need to use iambic words, it just needs to follow an iambic pattern. Here are some lines of Shakespeare 18 to demonstrate that:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

Here’s what you can do:

• The poetry exercise: If you’re anything like me, you don’t often think or write in meter. So:

• • 1. Head over to this useful wordlist, which catalogs over 1,000 words that are naturally iambic.
    2. Try to write 14 lines of iambic pentameter. Go easy on yourself: you do not need 5 iambs in each line, but shoot for 3, using the wordlist to help you select and arrange words in each line. Each line should be 10 syllables long.

• Advice: The more you engage with meter, the easier it gets to build phrases and arrange stresses. The goal here, for now, is to simply practice this device.

• What next: You may end up writing lines that can be arranged into a sonnet, or you may try your hand at iambic forms down the line. As always, pay attention, for now, to what seems to be arising in the language you discover.

Learn more about rhythm and meter here:

https://writers.com/rhythm-and-meter-in-poetry

5 Formal Poetry Exercises

A poem is both its words and the form those words are arranged in. Form is essential to play with, and the following poetry writing exercises help you think about the shapes that language can take.

11. Sonnet Play

The previous two exercises in rhyme and meter had you drafting lines that could combine into a sonnet. But we’ve only scratched the surface of the sonnet’s history.

14-line poems called sonnets have been written for upwards of 800 years. But the form has changed considerably since the time of Petrarch. Up through the 20th century, sonnets were highly formal, written in iambic pentameter with a strict rhyme scheme, as well as a “volta” in which the poem pivots in an unexpected direction after line 8.

Contemporary sonnets have eschewed the form’s rhyme and meter. The American Sonnet, in particular, only demands a 14-line poem with a volta.

Is this still a sonnet? Formalists say no; anti-formalists say yes. It is, perhaps, a moot debate—but, if a sonnet doesn’t have rhyme and meter, it should still do something interesting and unexpected with the form.

Here’s what you can do:

• The poetry exercise: Write a sonnet! You can take one of two approaches:

• • 1. Use the prior exercises in rhyme and meter to produce a first draft sonnet that follows a traditional form.
    2. Write a 14-line poem with a twist in the middle, and at least one unexpected formal innovation that challenges the sonnet form.

• Advice: If you go the “formal innovation” route, I encourage you to be as out there and wild as possible. I’ve seen: sonnets written as footnotes to a text; a “sonnet sentence” (14 words long); a sonnet that begins metered and ends unmetered; a sonnet with many speakers; a sonnet with only images, etc.

• What next: Surprise yourself. Then see how that surprise can be in conversation with the poem’s language and meaning, and revise from there.

Learn more about sonnets here:

https://writers.com/how-to-write-a-sonnet

12. Catalog Poetry

I love lists. I especially love lateral lists, or lists that require lateral thinking in order to see a connection between random things.

A poem can be like that. Successful poetry often sees connections that others might miss. Metaphor is one way of discovering that connection, but another is the simple juxtaposition of catalogued items.

A list poem (or catalog poem) is a poem that explicitly takes this form of cataloguing, either through numbered segments or through a title that reveals this element of poetic structure.

Here’s what you can do:

• The poetry exercise:

• • Ask yourself: What is something you notice often, either in your life or the world around you? How does that thing manifest itself in different ways? Is it a concept that recurs, or a physical presence in different settings?

• • 1. Spend some time figuring out your answer to this question. Then…
    2. Write a catalog of that thing for 8-10 minutes. List where it recurs in your life. Interpret that how you like.
    3. Once you’ve made your catalog, arrange as many elements as you can into a poem.

• Advice: Try not to interpret the cataloguing itself for the reader: juxtaposition will help you more than naming the relationship between catalogued things. You can always use your title, too, to help frame the poem.

• What next: The skills here—lateral thinking, juxtaposition, and close attention—will help you with every poem you write. If you like the poem you just wrote, try your hand at more lists!

13. Blackout / Erasure Poems

Poetry demands close attention to language. Luckily, we can also pay that attention to someone else’s words.

For this poetry writing exercise, you’re going to write a poem using an existing text.

First, find a marker, and find a page of text that you don’t mind marking up and writing on. Newspapers are great for this. So is spam mail. Feel free to print a page of text from an open source book at Gutenberg. You can even do this exercise on a computer.

Then, here’s what you can do:

• The poetry exercise: Compose a poem by circling words you would like to keep on the page of text, and then blacking out every other word you don’t want to use.
• Advice: Start by identifying your favorite words on the page. You may end up blacking them out later, but it doesn’t hurt to gravitate towards good language. Your goal is to discover the poem waiting in the text. Sometimes, blackout poems are metatextual: they comment on the source text. But your goal, as usual, is to have fun with words.
• What next: Once you have a string of words that forms a poem in your mind, black out everything else, and watch your poem emerge on the page.

For examples of blackout poems and more advice, check out our article here:

https://writers.com/what-is-blackout-poetry-examples-and-inspiration

14. Repetition as Insight

Repetition is another underrated tool in a poet’s toolbox. It is central to some poetry forms, like the villanelle or pantoum. It is also, sometimes, a way of reaching towards something holier or bigger than us.

As such, repetition offers its own support to a poem’s structure, and this poetry exercise intends to help with that.

Here’s what you can do:

• The poetry exercise:

• First, write down a brief line of poetry.

• To make this easier, write down a line that describes an action you took or observed recently. I sat down at my desk. Finches fly past the bedroom window. Sunlight strikes the pavement. Any of these sentences work as possible individual lines.

• • 1. Then, imagine at least 5 different contexts for this line. Each context must offer a new meaning, interpretation, or world for the line.
       • For example, here are five contexts that make “sitting down at a desk” a unique action:
         • To write my will.
         • As a cleansing ritual each evening.
         • Because I can no longer stand up after an intense game of basketball.
         • Because I have just been elected governor and am about to pass my first executive order.
         • To watch the birds.
       • These examples are lies: I haven’t written a will or been elected governor. You can lie, too. But now I’ve got different contexts that make a return to the same action compelling and unique.
    2. Now, write a poem in which a line is repeated at least 3 times. Each repetition must introduce a new context or interpretation of the line, forcing the poem, also, to cohere around different and unexpected possibilities.

• Advice: Stretch the truth! Write in a persona other than yours! Be silly or chaotic! Tell a story! The goal is not factual reality—it’s lateral thinking and sudden insight.

• What next: You might keep your poem free verse, or try sculpting it into a form that requires repetition.

Learn more about repetition here:

https://writers.com/repetition-definition

15. Invent a Form

Because a poem requires the interplay of form and language, poets are always inventing and tinkering with forms. The good news is: it’s actually really easy to invent a new form.

An invented (or “nonce”) form does not have to be as intensive or intricate as a sestina or contrapuntal. You are just giving yourself a restraint you have to follow as you write and revise a poem.

Nonetheless, to make this easier, here are some categories of formal restriction you can use:

• Line lengths: Each line has to be the same number of words and/or syllables. Alternately, the line lengths follow a specific pattern of change or progression.
• Stanza lengths: Each stanza has to be the same number of lines, words, and/or syllables. Alternately, the stanza lengths follow a specific pattern of change or progression.
• Poem shape: The poem is not strictly left-flush, but plays with page space in an intentional way.
• Repetition: Words, phrases, or lines are repeated in a strict pattern.
• Rhyme and meter: The poem has a rhyme scheme and metrical constraint.
• Prohibited language: The poem does not use an element of language, such as a certain letter of the alphabet or part of speech.
• Purity of language: The poem only utilizes a specific element of language. For example, every word must contain the same letter, or every sentence is a question, or every word is a concrete image, etc.
• Existing patterns: The poem emulates the form or shape of an existing pattern, such as the numbers of pi or the Fibonacci sequence.
• Innovations on form: Pick an existing poetry form and modify it, or even combine it with another existing poetry form.
• Beginning / End: Set a restriction on the words you can start and/or end each line with.

Here’s what you can do:

• The poetry exercise: Come up with a formal restraint for your poem. The above categories of restriction can help you determine this restraint, but please innovate as you see fit: combine restrictions or do something else entirely. Then write a poem with the restraints you have set.
• Advice: You probably won’t whip out a perfect first draft, but don’t shoot for perfection. Just see what the form prompts in your language.
• What next: You might end up finding a relationship between your formal restriction(s) and the topic of the poem itself. You can always revise in that direction. You can also invent a new form, or, if you don’t like this exercise, you can always stick to free verse.

5 Literary Device Poetry Exercises

Poetry is known for its figurative qualities, particularly its use of metaphors and similes. While you don’t need to use any literary device for a poem to be poetic, these 5 poetry writing exercises are oriented towards the figurative possibilities of language.

16. Metaphor Lists

The following exercise is borrowed from our article on metaphors.

A metaphor is a statement of comparison between two unalike things, following the structure “X is Y.” Metaphors come in many shapes and sentence structures, but within metaphor, there is always an act of transformation occurring.

This device is at the heart of many successful poems. Here’s what you can do:

• The poetry exercise:

• • 1. On a piece of paper, make two lists.
    2. One list should include only concrete nouns. Things that can be perceived through the five senses. Write down six concrete nouns.
    3. The other list should be only abstract nouns: ideas, concepts, or things otherwise intuited but not felt with the senses. Any word that ends with -ism, for example, will do. So will feelings, political and economic ideologies, deities, etc. Write down six abstract nouns.
    4. Now, randomly draw a line between an item on each list. You should have six lines, each connecting one item on each list.
    5. How can the concrete noun express the abstract noun? How does an orange become utilitarianism, or how does hatred become a brand new stereo system? Push your creative mind to make metaphors out of the connections you’ve developed on your list.

• Advice: Let the lines you’ve drawn reveal hidden qualities in the items on your list. Metaphor’s transformative power rests in its ability to reveal something otherwise unseen.

• What next: Do any of your metaphors strike you as unexpected? Perhaps it becomes the heart of a new poem draft.

17. Incongruous Juxtapositions

The following exercise is borrowed from the Writers.com Poetry Newsletter.

Juxtaposition is the fancy name for putting things next to one another in writing. Specifically, it is the art of creating implied relationships between images or ideas.

An incongruous juxtaposition occurs when those juxtaposed items really do not make sense next to one another. At the very least, the juxtaposition is wildly unexpected.

You can pick anything here. Orange juice and toothpaste; a Beethoven sonata at a boxing match; wearing a belt on your waist without pants; pigs in a sty wearing floral perfumes, etc. Notice how these sets of juxtapositions never quite sit comfortably with one another.

Here’s what you can do:

• The poetry exercise: Generate a list, like the one above, of incongruous juxtapositions. Then arrange that list into a draft of a poem, in which the poem unfolds through the tension generated by the unfolding of the list itself.
• Advice: Be zany, campy, or overdescriptive if you need to be—you can always pare back your images and ideas later. The goal here is to see what happens when you resist the urge for aesthetic unity and simply see what happens when things that don’t go together are forced together anyway.
• What next: Maybe you like your poem draft, or maybe you like the tension of specific juxtapositions. If it’s the latter, store those for a later poem, or use that juxtaposition as a prompt for a new draft where their juxtaposition is explored.

18. Repurposing Clichés

Successful poetry relies on fresh, original language. It might seem paradoxical, then, to find freshness in stale words, especially clichés.

A cliché is any phrase that has lost its novelty because of how often it is used. The phrase “roses are red, violets are blue” must have felt original at some point in history, but I can’t help but groan any time I hear it. Clichés are the stuff of Hallmark cards, as well as everyday conversations.

It’s not that clichés are bad, they just hardly serve a purpose in the work of successful writing. But poetry can play with anything, and when a cliché phrase or idea is imbued with new language and meaning, it can move the reader in sudden, unexpected ways.

Here’s what you can do:

• The poetry exercise:

• • 1. Head to this list of clichés, or pick a cliché phrase you find yourself using or hearing often.
    2. Spend some time tinkering just with the phrase. What is it supposed to mean? What else could it mean if you tweaked the phrasing? Is there a pun you can make? A rhyme? Can you investigate the logical extreme of the phrase?
    3. Once you’ve spent some time meditating on new meanings for old words, write a poem towards this meditation or investigation.

• Advice: Treat this as an opportunity for play, and feel free to investigate more than one cliché. At the risk of being annoying, I’ll link a poem that I wrote to this prompt in which I mashed together as many horse clichés as I could and turned it into this stroke-of-insanity horse poem.

• What next: Often, investigating the logic of words and phrases offers doorways into new poems. Did you discover a contrary in a coal mine? Does a stopped Glock still trigger twice a day? Now investigate the world of your repurposed cliché.

19. Image-Only Poetry

Vivid, impactful imagery is a defining feature of contemporary poetry. Which is not to say that imagery wasn’t useful before the 20th century, but that the poetic canon of the past 100 years has really privileged images.

Whether you intend to publish poetry, share it with your friends, or simply keep it in a journal, honing your images will help push your practice in new directions. Here’s a poetry writing exercise to that effect:

• The poetry exercise: Think about the past 12 months of your life. What memories arise? What sights, scents, sounds, textures, and tastes? Write down a list of images that represent the past year of your life. Do not explain or interpret those images for the reader: only let the images express themselves. Additionally, eschew any impulse to use metaphor, simile, or other literary devices.
• Advice: The goal is to let your images speak for themselves. You can do this by making them vivid and descriptive, as well as by arranging them so that their movement and progression tells a story. But don’t explain the images, don’t overwrite them, and don’t use figurative language—chances are, sparseness and concision will reveal much more for the reader.
• What next: Arrange your images into a poem, or use the most vibrant, evocative images as doorways into other work.

20. Personification

The following exercise is borrowed from our article on personification.

Personification is when nonhuman things are imbued with human qualities. Father Time and his long gray beard; Mother Nature with her flower crown; Poseidon, deity of the sea, with his trident and merman’s tail—these are all human representations of otherwise nonhuman entities.

This device offers great utility to poets, as it lends human imagination and empathy to ideas and thus makes those ideas act in new ways.

Here’s what you can do:

• The poetry exercise: First, choose an idea or concept that you want to explore in your writing. It can be an -ism, a philosophy, an identity, a geography, a possibility, a god, a dream, a fear—really, anything that is either intangible or conceptual. You can even do this with something like a country or a city: yes, New York is a physical city, but Father Knickerbocker is still a personification of it, just as Uncle Sam is for America.
  • Then, ask yourself, if my concept was a person:
    • What gender would it have?
    • What would its physical appearance be—hair color, skin color, height, body type, etc.?
    • How does this concept move its body?
    • How does this concept dress? What is its sense of fashion?
    • Where does this concept live?
    • What personality does this concept have? How does it speak, and what words does it speak with?
    • How does this concept navigate conflict?
    • What does this concept most want? What does it most fear?
    • How does this concept behave in social settings?
    • What relationship do you have with the concept? What relationship does it have with you?

1. • The point is to choose traits that conform to your conception of the concept. But be creative and willing to make surprising decisions. For example, we would all expect Death to have dark hair and a brooding personality; if Death were a bald, unserious jokester with a childlike demeanor, that’s unexpected, and also quite interesting.
   • Once you’ve completed this character sketch, write a poem that expands upon your conception or tells a story about your personified idea.

• Advice: In the same way that your personification might reveal something new about the idea you’re exploring, let your poem further reveal the identity or character of this idea.
• What next: Maybe you have a poem, or maybe you have the seed for a short story instead. You might even have the foundation for a persona poem, which we explore later in this article.

5 Poetry Writing Exercises With Existing Poems

Reading poetry is essential to writing poetry. The more poems and poets you study, the greater your capacity for poetic production will be. I encourage you to read as widely as you can and to read both classic and contemporary poets. Everything you read will help you write—even the poems you read and end up disliking.

The following 5 poetry exercises are oriented towards existing poems as a platform for writing new ones. Because these all ask you to generate new poems from existing ones, be sure to always cite that your poem is “after” the source poet if you go on to publish these drafts.

21. A Borrowed Line

What is a line from a poem that resonates for you? Alternately, what is a poem you simply enjoyed recently?

This poetry exercise asks you to repurpose one or more lines from an existing poem and use that line, with credit, in a poem of your own. The goal, of course, is to give that line a new meaning and context—differentiating it significantly from the source poem.

Here’s what you can do:

• The poetry exercise: Take a line from a poem that you love, that you read recently, or that you remember having a strong reaction to. Use this line as the first line of a new poem. Then, write a poem that repurposes that line, giving it a new context and meaning to your own situation or perspective.
• Advice: Your poem may be in conversation with the source text, but honor your voice and perspective, and be willing to take your poem in a radically different direction.
• What next: Once you have a first draft, you may decide to remove the borrowed line and either find a new entry point, or make Line 2 become Line 1. Or, you might keep the line. If you do, italicize it or else make clear that the line comes from the poem and poet you borrowed.

22. A Borrowed Question

This exercise is similar to the one above, but offers a different outcome.

Poets are great at asking questions. A good question can both propel a poem forward and arise from what a poem seeks and cannot answer. Here are some examples from poems I recently read:

• Oh / all that loose, blue rink of sky, where does / it go to, and why?
  • “The Real Prayers Are Not the Words, But the Attention that Comes First” by Mary Oliver
• And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
  • “The Second Coming” by W. B. Yeats
• Do you know what color the light has been / in my life, generally?
  • “In My Natural Habitat” by Hedgie Choi

These questions, of course, ask something particular in their respective poetic contexts. Nonetheless, they also invite answers outside of those contexts—answers, perhaps, in the form of poems.

Here’s what you can do:

• The poetry exercise: Find a provocative question from a poem you enjoy or read recently, and write a poem in response to that question. You can honor the original context of the question, but you should also try to explore what that question reveals from your own life and perspective.
• Advice: Find a question that prompts something creative and unexpected, as well as open to interpretation. Shoot for emotional truth, rather than literal truth. For example, the answer to Mary Olvier’s question has to do with sunlight refracted against nitrogen in a layered atmosphere—but her question might draw our attention to something more divine.
• What next: As always, note the poet whom your poem is “after’—the poet that asked the question that prompted your poem. You might even include that question as an epigraph for your own poem.

23. A Borrowed Voice

Often, when I read a lot of poems by the same poet, I’ll find that that poet’s relationship to language starts creeping into my own drafts, whether I ask it to or not.

What I’m describing is rather intangible and ineffable. It’s not that I’m plagiarizing anyone’s words. It’s just that my syntax, maybe even my attention, moves towards the voice of the poet I’m currently reading.

This has resulted in some of my strangest first drafts, and also some of my strongest. It’s not that my voice is no longer my own, but rather that it has been expanded by the voice of the poet I’m reading.

This poetry writing exercise is not something you can do in one sitting. But here’s what I encourage you to do:

• The poetry exercise: Identify a poet whose work you would like to study, or whose voice you would like to learn from. Then, retrieve 1 or more titles of poetry books this poet has written, either from a bookstore or your local library. Read the poems of this poet slowly and at least for 3 days. After this, or whenever you feel you understand this poet’s voice better, write a poem of your own.
• Advice: Don’t try to sound like the poet you’re reading. Try to sound like yourself and write a poem based on whatever is arising in you from the poet you’re studying—but don’t be afraid to take the kinds of risks or decisions that your poet takes, too. For more advice on this, check out our article on reading poetry like a poet.
• What next: If you decide to publish this poem, a credit you can give is “after reading the work of [poet].”

24. Poetry as Song

In ancient times, poetry was always set to music. Hence the “lyre” in “lyric poem.”

Nowadays, you don’t always find lyricism on the page, but plenty of songwriters—like Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, or Tupac—are poets in their own right.

No, I’m not going to prompt you to write a song. But I do think songs are rich sources for poetic material.

Here’s what you can do:

• The poetry exercise: Consider a song that resonates with you, either because of its sound, its lyricism, its importance to your life, or all of the above. Then, write a song that attempts to replicate the musicality and feeling of this song. When the string section crescendoes, so might your language; a section with a lot of drums might have a lot of drumming consonants, like d, b, m, or p; a song with short verses may demand a poem with short lines; etc.
• Advice: This is very open to interpretation, and there is really no wrong way to answer this prompt. The goal here is to generate musicality in your writing through music that you love. You might uncover why a song is so important to you, or you might just write a poem that’s also, in its own right, a banger.
• What next: Be sure to credit the musician that inspired your poem, e.g., “after Stevie Nicks.”

25. “After” Poems

All of the above poetry writing exercises get you writing “after” poems—poems that are explicitly inspired by the work of another poet. I’ve named four entrypoints into this idea:

1. Borrowing a line
2. Answering a question
3. Writing from an expanded voice
4. Writing with music

Now, I want you to think of your own way of taking inspiration from an existing poem, separate from the above four.

One of the more famous “after” poems on record is Terrance Hayes’ poem “The Golden Shovel,” a poem written in response to Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “We Real Cool.” Hayes invented the Golden Shovel form here, which uses Brooks’ poem as the end words of each successive line. (Read the final word of each line in Hayes’ poem and you’ll see what I mean.)

What are some other forms of inspiration you can take? The answer is probably endless.

5 More Fun Poetry Exercises

These poetry writing exercises are a bit more miscellaneous, but nonetheless fun and engaging for your practice.

26. Persona Poetry

A persona poem is a poem in which the speaker is explicitly not the poet.

Briefly: in poetry analysis, it is important not to equate the “speaker” of the poem with the poet. A speaker might be a facet, extension, or hyperbolization of the poet, but the poet’s full self is never 1 to 1 with the self of a poem. Besides, poets can lie about themselves to get towards a bigger truth, as Louise Glück reminds us.

As a result, the speaker of a poem can be anyone, or anything. Frank Bidart plays with this well in his poems from the persona of Vaslav Nijinsky and Ellen West. Fatimah Asghar gives us a much different take on the persona form with her delightfully vulgar poem “Pluto Shits on the Universe.”

Here’s what you can do:

• The poetry exercise:

• Choose a perspective you want to understand better. It might be a historical figure, a family member, a celebrity, an inanimate object, a meme, a protagonist, a cartoon character, etc. The entire universe of things is at your disposal here—just don’t choose yourself.

• • 1. Study this person or thing. What world do they live in? What words do they use, and how do they use them? This exercise requires no small amount of attention and empathy, especially if the perspective you choose is more abstract.
    2. Make a list of words this speaker might use, as well as images and objects that might populate the speaker’s day to day world. Also, keep a list of questions you have about this speaker’s worldview and perspective.
    3. Now, use the list of words and images as a guide for drafting your poem. Use your poem to explore at least one of the questions you have about this speaker’s perspective.

• Advice: Maintain, throughout your draft, the sense that someone other than you is speaking. The speaker may, at times, have your word choice, but they should not necessarily have your voice.

• What next: Persona poems take time! You are writing, after all, from a vantage that is not yours. You may have to put your draft down and come back to it with fresh eyes from time to time.

27. Self-Generated Word Lists

In my opinion, all poetry is an attempt to expand the possibilities of language. One way of doing this is by writing a poem with words that do not typically go together. For this poetry writing exercise, you’re going to write a poem using a predetermined wordlist.

Here’s the thing. Some poetry prompts exist that ask you to use word generators to generate a wordlist. I don’t like this approach. These word generators operate with limited vocabularies. Besides, we can already do the work of searching for language on our own, and we can do a much better job of it.

So, here’s what you can do:

• The poetry exercise:

• • Generate a list of 10 words. Each word must fulfill at least one of the following categories, and every category must be fulfilled:

• • • • A compound word.
      • A word that is not found in the dictionary.
      • A verb that human beings cannot do—for example, humans cannot photosynthesize.
      • A word from a non-English language.
      • A word that was invented in the past 30 years.
      • A word that you do not expect a poem to use. (Curse words are a good example.)
      • A word you find yourself using regularly in conversation.
      • A word you never use in conversation.
      • An onomatopoeia.
      • A word that calls attention to itself. (Open to interpretation, but SAT vocab words sometimes have this quality.)
  • Now, write a poem that uses all 10 of the words you generated.

• Advice: If you find yourself struggling to fit all of your words into a poem that makes sense: 1) worry about making sense later; 2) wordplay devices like anthimeria and paraprosdokian (covered elsewhere in this article) can help you repurpose language.

• What next: As always, review your draft and see if it merits further revising, or if certain lines or phrases feel worthy of future poems.

28. Found Poetry

A found poem is a poem generated from sourcing, collaging, and/or arranging different existing texts into a poem. Examples of this include:

• Blackout poetry: poems crafted by blacking out or erasing the words on a source page of text.
• Centos: poems composed entirely of lines borrowed from other poems or works of writing.
• Found poetry: a broader genre of poetry production that involves sourcing texts or discovering poems “in the wild.”

For this poetry exercise, head to our article on found poetry, which includes examples of the form and 5 different prompts to choose from:

https://writers.com/found-poetry

29. Poem as Essay

A poem can also make an argument, though poets can use different tools than the typical essayist uses. There is no “thesis statement,” necessarily, but there is the broader set of craft tools to impart an idea or argument that conventional prose maybe cannot hold.

I really like Natasha Sajé’s poem “Essay on Touch” as a model poem for this. I retrieved it from the anthology Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry, but you can find that poem (and the same prompt I’m sharing here) at my craft essay on the essay poem.

What you can do is pick a topic that you have strong opinions on. For 8-10 minutes, write down everything you think about and associate with that topic. Then, write a poem that tries to explore every side of this topic or issue, with the goal of deepening the reader’s understanding of the topic and your own particular perspective on it.

Try to use both the toolkits of poets and essayists. Poets have line breaks, juxtaposition, and the broader world of poetic license. Essayists, meanwhile, often have the tools of rhetoric.

30. Invent Your Own Restrictions!

What did I miss? What is an approach to poetry you want to take, or have taken in the past?

My hope is that readers here will comment on this article with their own exercises and restrictions that have prompted successful poetry. Share what you’ve done to work out your own poetry muscles, and I’ll try my hand at your poetry exercise, too.

For More Poetry Writing Exercises and Inspiration…

Check out the following links:

• 100 Poetry Prompts for New Poem Ideas
• NaPoWriMo Prompts for National Poetry Month
• Poetry Inspiration: How to Find Inspiration for Poetry
• The World as Writing Prompt: 9 Ways to Invent Inspiration
• How to Write a Poem
• Resources for Learning to Write Poetry
• How to Start a Poem
• 36 Creative Writing Exercises
• Poemancer: A Card Game for Writing Poetry

Find Even More Poetry Exercises at Writers.com

Want more fun poetry exercises, or feedback on what you write? Check out the online poetry writing courses at Writers.com, where you’ll find more prompts and possibilities for your poetic practice.