100 Poetry Prompts for New Poem Ideas

A poem can be about anything, which makes discovering new poem ideas both very easy and very overwhelming. Which poetry prompts are worth writing towards, and which should I avoid?

The truth is, ideas are everywhere—it’s the execution that matters. Nonetheless, some poetry prompts are better than others, and we’ve curated the best of the best for you.

Read below to find a sorted list of ideas for poems. These poetry ideas can be used again and again, so come back any time you need a fresh dose of inspiration!

100 Poetry Prompts for New Poem Ideas

The below poetry prompts are categorized either by their topics, inspirations, or approaches to generating new poems. The best thing about ideas is that you can combine them, so feel free to mix and match with whatever inspires you!

28 Poetry Prompts on Creative Topics

These poetry prompts are for when you don’t know what to write “about.”

Write a poem about…

1. An object that has a lot of nostalgic value for you. As a bonus challenge, try to write about this object without directly stating what it is in your poem.
2. Your hometown: how you feel about it, the connection you have to it, how it has shaped you (for better or worse).
3. Coming out of a long hibernation—either literal or metaphorical.
4. A time when a seemingly mundane event created a stroke of inspiration. Flash of lightning. Crack of the baseball bat. Stoplight turns green. That sort of thing.
5. An event that you might interpret as a sign from a higher power. This higher power could be a god, aliens, the universe, etc.
6. Two opposing yet co-existing realities.
7. An important realization you had, at a time when you felt particularly alone.
8. Something you’ve seen hundreds, even thousands of times, but has never lost its beauty. Write an ode to this thing’s beauty.
9. Patterns that seem to be connected, even if they’re completely random. (This is called “apophenia”—the human tendency to see patterns in random information. For example, the man on the moon.)
10. A mundane task that (secretly) doubles as a magical ritual.
11. Family traditions: keeping them, breaking them, or anything else you can do with them.
12. A topic that always evokes strong emotions from you. Lean into those emotions: give into them, and let them choose your language for you.
13. Random associations you make in your mind—symbols that exist only for you. Maybe a lightning strike reminds you of the seventh grade, or a tangelo reminds you of your mother. Write a poem that explores those individual associations.
14. Something you know that most people don’t. What insight can you generate from this random bit of knowledge?
15. What it is like to inhabit your own body, and what you want other people to understand about it.
16. An everyday decision that seems brave to you, but common to someone else.
17. An event that you, and only you, interpret as a sign from a higher power. This higher power could be a god, aliens, the universe, etc.
18. A Resolution to do something worse instead of better.
19. Costumes—what they mean to you, who you are inside of one, or what you’re willing to do behind a body suit or mask.
20. An important realization you had, at a time when you felt particularly alone.
21. A monster, but don’t use the word “monster.” What makes it a monster? How do you represent monstrosity without naming it?
22. An ending that is also a beginning.
23. Something that is incapable of “fitting in.”
24. Something you are trying to heal from.
25. What you see on the horizon of your own life.
26. A time that you felt blessed.
27. A dream whose imagery and events you do not yet understand.
28. Everything—a poem that tries to comprehend gigantic topics, such as fate, history, God, the universe, where we come from, where we are going.

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12 Formal Poetry Prompts

These poetry prompts ask you to use, interrogate, deconstruct, or else play with poetry forms. You might be intimidated by form, but there is something for everyone in these poetry prompts—and many of them include links to help explain the forms themselves.

Write a poem in the form of…

1. A sonnet—with the requirement that your poem does something interesting with the form. It does not need to be metrical or rhyming, but it should do more than just have 14 lines and a volta.
2. A free verse poem. As above, try to do something innovative with the form. How can your poem emulate the feeling, experience, or shape of its subject matter? (A poem I always turn to for this topic is “The Heaven” by Franz Wright.)
3. A letter, addressed to a specific person. (Also known as an epistolary poem.)
4. A prose poem. Use the prose poem form as an opportunity to explore and excavate your unconscious mind: play with word associations and explore random connections until the poem arrives at a moment of epiphany.
5. A list in which you document different ideas, facets, or possibilities of a given topic. Take the list poem “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens for inspiration.
6. A litany, which is a poem in which a repeated phrase serves as an invocation or incantation. Take “A Litany for Survival” by Audre Lorde for inspiration.
7. An abecedarian, which is a 26-lined poem in which the first letter of each line goes down the alphabet, alphabetically.
8. A blackout poem.
9. An extended narrative.
10. A single long sentence. The tools of poetry are at your disposal, including line breaks, stanza breaks, semicolons, em-dashes, commas, etc.—but do not end your sentence until the very end of your poem.
11. A litany, in which a repeated line takes on the qualities of an incantation, ritual, prayer, or reminder.
12. An essay—in other words, a poem that uses poetry’s craft tools to advance an argument about something.

To learn more about poetry forms (and to find more forms to write into), check out our article here:

https://writers.com/what-is-form-in-poetry

10 Poetry Ideas For Playing With Perspective

In poetry, the “speaker” is not necessarily the poet. Even autobiographical poems might change the details, because, as Louise Glück tells us in “Against Sincerity,” sometimes the poet needs to lie to get closer to the truth of things.

Moreover, even when the speaker of the poem is the poet, the speaker is never the full poet’s self. A poem always projects facets of the poet’s selfhood, but no poem can contain the totality of any person—though Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” was certainly an attempt.

As such, here are some poetry ideas for playing with speaker, persona, and perspective.

Write…

1. A persona poem in which the speaker of the poem is someone other than the poet themselves.
2. A persona poem in which the speaker is a nonhuman entity (animal, object, concept, etc.). How would this entity speak? What can you reveal through different personalities? (A great example is Fatimah Asghar’s poem “Pluto Shits on the Universe.”)
3. A poem from the eyes of a child. How do they experience the world differently? What about the world is surprising, unfamiliar, or larger than life?
4. A poem in which you project the dark sides of your psyche–your petty longings, your unethical beliefs and actions, your envy, your sin, your moral failings—into the speaker of a poem. What does this side of you need to say? What does it reveal?
5. A poem in the persona of someone famous.
6. A poem from the perspective of someone who witnessed or took part in an important historical event.
7. A poem that switches perspectives—creating a dialogue between two or more voices.
8. A poem in the perspective of someone you knew and loved. How can your poem preserve their voice, based on what you know and remember about them?
9. A poem in the perspective of someone you dislike or disagree with. How can you extend empathy towards their situation? What can you learn about the world from their perspective? (Patricia Smith’s poem “Skinhead” is an excellent example.)
10. A self-portrait poem in which the speaker is someone else witnessing you.

10 Poetry Prompts Inspired By Poetic Movements and Lineages

Poetry has a rich poetic history, and its various movements and lineages are a rich source of inspiration and experimentation. This set of poetry prompts is informed by some of these movements and lineages. Use this as an opportunity to both deepen your knowledge of poetic history and discover new doorways into poetic production.

Write a poem…

1. About a moment in which you felt or encountered The Sublime—a Romanticist notion of an intense, unspeakable, extraordinary moment of emotionality and experience. (Encountering God, finding beauty in a hurricane, and the view from the top of a mountain are all possible examples.)
2. In line with the Imagist philosophy “no ideas but in things”—an idea espoused by William Carlos Williams that privileges sparse, vibrant imagery and symbolism over abstraction and conceptual language.
3. That is a product of stream-of-consciousness: keep your pen moving through your internal monologue, privileging word associations and unconscious decisions, with the intent of discovering something about your mind and its relation to the world around you. (Some Modernist poetry attempted to do this, which you can read about here.)
4. That attempts to represent the fragmented, fractured nature of reality through fragmented, fractured syntax. Cubist poetry did this alongside inspiration in Cubist artwork; a major voice in this approach was Gertrude Stein.
5. That responds to or rejects contemporary pop culture. Or, write a poem that intends to be explicitly countercultural. A lot of the poetry from the Beat Era was like this.
6. With a conversational ethos and diction. Do not affect a breezy manner, or try to write a poem that “sounds like a poem”; rather, write a poem that sounds like a conversation with a friend, much like poets in the New York School did.
7. Whose mode of poetic production is algorithmic. The 1960s OuLiPo poets used mathematical language games to generate (often nonsensical or absurd) poetry. Some restrictions include: writing a Pilish poem whose word lengths correspond with the numbers of Pi (3 letters, 1 letter, 4 letters, etc.) or writing a Univocal poem in which only one vowel can be used.
8. That excavates some sort of secret, deep feeling, taboo, or personal history—a poetry prompt inspired by the Confessional Movement. (What is something difficult for you to write, but needs to be written?)
9. That intends to be a blueprint for meaning, rather than a poem whose meanings are readily accessible and easily conveyed. Such is the ethos of Language Poetry, a movement inspired by poststructuralist literary criticism that sees poems as spaces where the poet and reader meet to construct meaning together.
10. In the vein of New Sincerity, whose ethos is poetry that is sincere, earnest, and honest about the truth of things—a reaction to Postmodernism’s emphasis on irony and cynicism.

15 Poetry Ideas In The World

We live in a messy, chaotic, richly complicated world. As such, these poetry ideas help you look outwardly and focus your poetic lens.

Write a poem…

1. That reacts to or engages with emerging technologies.
2. About your experience of being alive in the present historical moment.
3. That seeks to answer how to live a good life.
4. In which the past echoes in the present. (Perhaps write a pantoum?)
5. After going out to a public space and observing strangers. What did you notice? What commonalities exist between everyone? Who stands out? Who blends in? What did you learn by witnessing?
6. That seeks to topple an empire.
7. Inspired by a work of art—a genre known as ekphrastic poetry.
8. That is an ode to something uncelebrated in society.
9. Incorporating objects and images that exist in your immediate environment.
10. In which you believe in a better tomorrow.
11. That engages with an important moment in history.
12. As though you were an alien visiting Earth for the first time. What would you see from this alien perspective?
13. That imagines a better world.
14. About how the modern world creates a barrier between you and your spiritual beliefs. Write a poem interrogating modernity and spirituality.
15. Involving uncanny juxtapositions. Pigeons and squirrels fighting in a bush; day laborers partying outside a gas station casino. Write a poem about an unexpected juxtaposition that real life filters through.

15 Other Poetry Prompts

Here are some more poetry prompts!

Write a poem that…

1. Only uses concrete images. You can use articles and conjunctions, of course, and other parts of speech, but every noun and verb you use must relate to at least one of the five senses.
2. Engages with the aesthetics of camp: overwroughtness, hyperbole, and excess.
3. Seeks to test a hypothesis about something in life.
4. Finds wisdom in the mundane and everyday.
5. Is, among other things, a conceit or extended metaphor.
6. Speaks from a place of embodiment, or testifies to the experience of having a particular body.
7. Is primarily in dialogue between two or more speakers.
8. Tries to find insight through juxtaposing your own personal interests. Maybe, for example, you know a lot about architecture and about the solar system. What insight can you derive by combining the two topics?
9. Deconstructs a common myth in your culture.
10. Asks a series of questions with no answers or resolutions. What questions do you keep asking, or perhaps even keep struggling to ask?
11. Finds God (or some form of divinity) in nature. Make nature the focus of your poem, as God is what the poem is trying to generate through nature.
12. Offers a prayer to something that has saved you.
13. Is, among other things, an ars poetica.
14. Is very short: no longer than 9 lines, with no more than 30 words.
15. Departs from realism and factual life, in the vein of speculative poetry.
16. Has a quirky, imaginative title.
17. Offers an elegy to something loved and lost.
18. Repurposes a cliche to express something new and unexpected.
19. Examines or unpacks a seeming binary.
20. Is intentionally uncategorizeable. (Interpret this how you like.)
21. Is also a museum. Curate images in your poem to make it a museum of something abstract.
22. Mythologizes your life. What is the origin of your myth?
23. Begins with a fun fact you know and are excited by. What wisdom can you learn from this fact?
24. Tells the truth about your childhood.
25. Emulates the musicality of a song or genre of music you love.

Other Sources for Poetry Prompts

Looking for more poetry ideas? Check out these sites and resources for inspiration:

• NaPoWriMo Prompts for National Poetry Month
• Poetry Inspiration: How to Find Inspiration for Poetry
• Poemancer: A Card Game for Writing Poetry
• Writer’s Digest
• Poets & Writers
• Nosebleed Club’s monthly short prompts
• Poetry Foundation’s Learning Prompts

How to Turn Ideas for Poems Into Poems

Once you find a poetry prompt that resonates with you, what do you do with it? Here are some guides on crafting successful poetry:

• How to Start a Poem
• How to Write a Poem
• Understanding Rhythm and Meter in Poetry
• What is Poetry?
• How to End a Poem

Find More Poetry Prompts at Writers.com

Looking for more poetry ideas, or maybe feedback on your work? The classes at Writers.com help you write your most inspired poetry yet. Take a look at our upcoming online poetry writing courses!