Forty Poetry Prompts
Here are 40 ideas for writing a poem, or as a prompt for a personal essay. If you want to make it a funny poem, try using rhyme. If you get stuck on a rhyming word use the following link as your on line rhyming dictionary: http://www.rhymezone.com/
Write about...
1.
being underwater
2.
a person whose life you're curious
about
3.
your mother's perfume
4.
trouble sleeping or waking up
5.
growing older
6.
the feeling of getting lost in a
book
7.
telling someone, like a grandchild, how
to know when you're in love
8.
a bad dream
9.
tell a ghost story or something
about the occult. Even if you don’t
believe in that stuff
it can be fiction.
10.
your mother’s whistling.
11. an important life choice you've made
12. spring, summer, fall, or winter
13. something most people see as ugly but which you see as
beautiful
14. a n emotion that you have struggled with, such as jealousy,
or worry
15. becoming a parent, or a grandparent, or a great
grandparent
16. an event that changed you
17. a place you visited -- how you imagined it beforehand, and what it was
actually like
18. the ocean, or huge storm from your childhood
19. forgetting [i.e. does it get scary when you first notice
you are forgetting stuff a lot?]
20. the speed of light
21. someone with a skill: doll maker, weaver, painter, et
cetera.
22. reflections in a window
23. a newspaper headline recently or one important one from
you past
24. holding your breath
25. a specific color
26. your greatest fear
27. time travel and how or why you would travel to a
particular time and place
28. a particular toy you had as a child
29. being invisible, maybe it is just people not seeing you
for some reason when you are clearly
right there in front of them.
30. a time you felt homesick
31. telling someone about something that is hard to tell
32. about birthdays [i.e. birthday candles: how they matter to
children who get few of them, and they don’t matter at
all old people who get a whole bunch of them.
33. a favorite food and a specific memory of eating it
34. an imaginary city
35. losing your ability to sing, or giving up driving
36. imagine life in an aquarium
37. pick a Bible verse and tell how it give insight into
something that happened to you.
38. write about falling two ways: a physical fall, and something that was a
downfall
39. what a computer might daydream about
40. your grandmother's hands
