In 1950, Alan Turing devised a test that could assess the intelligence of computers and determine if they were capable of sentient thought—an uncertainty that lingers as artificial intelligence (AI) continues to develop. Franny Choi’s poem “Turing Test,” published in the Summer 2016 issue of the Poetry Review, plays with this subject of identity and consciousness. The poem responds to objective questions posed by an AI entity, including, “How old are you?” with elaborate answers that reveal more about the speaker. “My memory goes back 26 years / 23 if you don’t count the first few / though by all accounts i was there / i ate & moved & even spoke,” writes Choi. Write a poem in which your speaker, whether AI or not, answers unassuming questions, such as, “Where did you come from?” and “Do you believe you have consciousness?”
Writing Prompts & Exercises
The Time Is Now
The Time Is Now offers three new and original writing prompts each week to help you stay committed to your writing practice throughout the year. We also curate a list of essential books on writing—both the newly published and the classics—that we recommend for guidance and inspiration. Whether you’re struggling with writer’s block, looking for a fresh topic, or just starting to write, our archive of writing prompts has what you need. Need a starter pack? Check out our Writing Prompts for Beginners.
Tuesdays: Poetry prompts
Wednesdays: Fiction prompts
Thursdays: Creative nonfiction prompts
Get immediate access to more than 2,000 writing prompts with the tool below:
Earlier this month, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, announced its list of winners for their astronomy photographers of the year awards. The photographs, which were published in the Guardian, show various perspectives of observing the cosmos. In the overall winning photograph created by a team of amateur astronomers, a huge plasma arc shines next to the swirling Andromeda galaxy. In the young astronomy photographer category, the Running Chicken Nebula is captured, a diffused glow of crimson, violet, and black gases shining amidst a cluster of white stars. The photographs taken from Earth show the unexpected manifestations of space seen in our sky, as one features rare cloud formations in Hungary and another captures the orbital rotation of stars forming an infinite circle in Lancashire, England. This week write a poem inspired by these photographs that meditates on your place in the universe. For inspiration, read Tracy K. Smith’s poem “My God, It’s Full of Stars.”
Sometimes the simplest repetition in a poem can bear enormous results. In Aracelis Girmay’s poem “You Are Who I Love,” many of the stanzas start with the word “you,” creating a tapestry of observations. “You, in the park, feeding the pigeons / You cheering for the bees // You with cats in your voice in the morning, feeding cats,” she writes. The poem begins with simple, charming observations and then the lines bloom with strangeness and urgency in both language and subject matter. “You cactus, water, sparrow, crow You, my elder / You are who I love, / summoning the courage, making the cobbler, // getting the blood drawn, sharing the difficult news,” writes Girmay. This week visit a public space and make a list of image-driven observations of people. Use this list to create a poem that serves as a portrait of this place and its visitors.
In “Tenants,” the opening poem of Hannah Sullivan’s hybrid collection Was It for This (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), the British poet contends with nursing a new baby a mile away from the Grenfell Tower in West London, a high-rise public housing building that tragically caught fire. The poem combines various viewpoints to address how local, public tragedies can affect private lives, such as accounts from firefighters, research from news reports, and descriptions of the building’s “crinkled, corrugated, lacy” façade. This week, research the local news of your city and write a poem centered around a recent headline. How does this news story affect your personal life? Does this exercise help you feel more connected to your community?
“Everybody looks at him playing / the machine hour after hour, / but he hardly raises his gold lashes,” writes Thom Gunn in his poem “Bally Power Play,” which appears in his collection The Passages of Joy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982). In the poem, an unnamed speaker describes the movements of a pinball player in a bar with a sense of close watchfulness and adoration. “He is / the cool source of all that hurry / and desperate activity, in control, / legs apart, braced arms apart, / seeming alive only at the ends,” writes Gunn. This week, write a poem that captures a scene in which your speaker is observing someone closely. Consider, as in Gunn’s poem, how descriptive language can create and match the rhythm of a subject’s movements. For more inspiration, read C. K. Williams’s poem “From My Window.”
“Erasure poetry is a reconsideration of an existing text. There was something very satisfying about “reconsidering” The Ferguson Report—striking through whole sections of it, as if undoing the harm that had been done,” says Nicole Sealey in our online exclusive interview about her new book, The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, published by Knopf in August. In the interview, the poet discusses both the difficulty of “prying lyric from a lyric-less document” and how erasure provided access to the words she may not have found on her own. This week, find a seemingly lyric-less document and consider the words that lure you in. Try writing your own erasure poem, rubbing out words for your response to the text. For further inspiration, see this poem from Sealey’s new book.
The epithalamium, a lyric written and performed for a couple at their wedding ceremony, originated in ancient Greece with the earliest evidence of the form found in the fragments from Sappho’s seventh book in 600 BC. The form remains popular in contemporary poetry with traditional and nontraditional examples such as Jason Schneiderman’s “Stories About Love / Wedding Poem for Ada & Lucas” and poems by Alexandria Hall and Phillip B. Williams. This week, write your own version of an epithalamium. Whether it be for the future wedding of a loving couple you know or one that reflects on the institution of marriage, share your take on the ancient form.
“For $200: When inheritance begins // What is: in the womb / What is: decades before I announced my father dead / to me,” writes Taylor Byas in the poem “Jeopardy! (The Category Is Birthright),” which appears in her debut collection, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times (Soft Skull Press, 2023). In this emotional poem, which follows the familiar format of the classic trivia game show referenced in the title, each stanza is framed with a dollar amount and clue in the form of an answer, followed by a list of potential responses in the form of questions. Try writing a poem that turns the format of your favorite game show into a poetic form. Whether you experiment with Wheel of Fortune, Pyramid, or Lingo, what limits of language can you reach when pushing your use of form?
In Natasha Trethewey’s “Flounder,” which appears in her debut collection, Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000), the speaker of the poem recalls a scene from her memories as a young girl fishing with her aunt. The aunt explains how to spot a flounder, “A flounder, she said, and you can tell / ’cause one of its sides is black. // The other side is white, she said.” The poem ends with a strong image that subtly casts an emotional parallel with the speaker seeing a connection between her mixed-race identity and the flounder: “I stood there watching that fish flip-flop, / switch sides with every jump,” writes Trethewey. Inspired by Trethewey’s precise use of an extended metaphor, write a poem in which you cast a parallel between an animal in the wild and yourself. What characteristics will you draw out?
The house in which Nobel Prize–winning poet Tomas Tranströmer lived with his wife was located on the island of Runmarö in Sweden and built in the late nineteenth century by his maternal grandfather, a ship captain who needed a place to rest upon reaching landfall. In Tranströmer’s poem “The Blue House,” he describes the historic house’s exterior as well as its storied past. “It has stood for more than eighty summers. Its timber has been impregnated, four times with joy and three times with sorrow,” he writes. Write a poem that serves as a portrait of a place you have lived in. Consider its past tenants, the details of its exterior and interior, and its relationship to your life.
In his poem “Self-Portrait at Twenty,” Gregory Orr demonstrates the short, personal lyric he’s known for and captures a moment in time in his life. Rather than include details about what occurred when he was twenty, Orr presents a series of stark, detailed images that create a sense of foreboding for what the year had in store for him. The poem begins with the lines: “I stood inside myself / like a dead tree or a tower.” Then, later in the poem, he writes: “Because my tongue / spoke harshly, I said: / Make it dust.” Take inspiration from Orr’s poem and write a self-portrait poem that captures what you felt at a specific age. Try to avoid revealing narrative details and instead, use your sense of imagery to allow the reader in to your state of mind.
In a recent installment of our Craft Capsules series, Megan Fernandes describes a writing exercise centered around breath that she assigns to her students. “I tell my students to take out their phones and record themselves saying ‘I love you’ over and over again in a single breath, noting the time,” she writes. By counting the number of times this phrase is said in one breath, the students can calculate how long their lines are and how many stanzas their poems will contain. This week try Fernandes’s writing exercise to find the natural line length of your own breath and write a poem guided by the capacity of your lungs.
This week marks the birthday of the iconic Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who would have turned 119 on July 12. Known for his historical epics, political manifestos, and love poems, Neruda’s incisive and joyful odes were often dedicated to ordinary objects making them approachable yet surreal. In “Ode to My Socks,” translated from the Spanish by Robert Bly, Neruda describes his covered feet as “two fish made / of wool, / two long sharks / sea-blue.” In “Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market,” translated from the Spanish by Robert Robinson, Neruda describes a dead tuna fish as “a dark bullet / barreled / from the depths.” Inspired by Neruda’s electric, surreal images, write an ode to an ordinary object in your life. Whether it be a bookshelf, a desk, or a coat, think expansively about how to honor and describe this praiseworthy item.
Independence Day, colloquially known as the Fourth of July in the United States, is the annual celebration of nationhood commemorating the passage of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. For centuries, poets have offered deeply personal perspectives on what it means to celebrate their country, including Alicia Ostriker in her poem “The History of America,” in which she writes: “Murdering the buffalo, driving the laggard regiments, / The caring was a necessary myth…” and Naomi Shihab Nye in her poem “No Explosions,” in which she writes: “To enjoy / fireworks / you would have / to have lived / a different kind / of life.” This week write a poem reflecting on your relationship to nationhood. What contradictory feelings surface when you consider your citizenship? For further inspiration, check out the Poetry Foundation’s selection of poems for the Fourth of July.
In his fourth poetry collection, Chariot (Wave Books, 2023), Timothy Donnelly uses form to contain the expansiveness of philosophical and artistic inquiry. Each poem is confined to twenty lines and uses long, syntactically complex sentences to connect seemingly disparate things: from the Milky Way to the polluted green color of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, New York, and the blue of periwinkles and rainclouds to the ordinariness of a Staples office supply store. Inspired by Donnelly’s use of form and connection, flip through a few books from your shelves and write down all the nouns you encounter. Then write a twenty-line poem that attempts to connect these words as seamlessly as possible using your unique perspective.
“If you haven’t taken the Amtrak in Florida, you haven’t lived,” writes Megan Fernandes in her poem “Letter to a Young Poet,” which appears in her third collection, I Do Everything I’m Told, published by Tin House this week. The poem’s title borrows from Rainer Maria Rilke’s renowned collection of letters to a young poet seeking his guidance, published in 1929. Fernandes’s poem addresses a nameless “you” while simultaneously revealing details about the speaker, producing a sense of intimacy that presents two sides of a correspondence, its lines swerving associatively, as the pieces of advice turn increasingly lyrical. “It’s better to be illegible, sometimes. Then they can’t govern you,” writes Fernandes. “Sleep upward in a forest so the animal sees your gaze.” Taking inspiration from the lyrical techniques evident in this poem, write a poem of your own that offers advice to a younger version of yourself. Instead of simply giving your younger self practical advice, how can you propose a new way to see?
“The poem is an opportunity to turn from memoiristic transcription of information towards a kind of ultimate artifact, charged and changed by the imagination,” says Ocean Vuong about his approach to storytelling in this interview by Kadish Morris for the Guardian. Vuong offers his poem “American Legend” as an example in which the speaker drives his father to put down their dog and crashes the car, which becomes “a kind of parable for American failure.” In actuality, Vuong does not drive but uses the story to consider relationships between fathers and sons. Inspired by this concept of imaginative writing, write a poem that deliberately alters an event in your life. How can your expansion of this event make for a deeper parable?
In January Gill O’Neil’s poem “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” published in the Fall 2022 issue of Rattle, the poet writes about watching the late Tina Turner sing her iconic song in a music video on MTV. “And when Tina sings I’ve been taking on / a new direction directly to the camera, / defiant, her lips glazed a tumultuous red, / she takes her hand and adjusts her / honey brown bangs out of her eyes,” writes O’Neil. This “sweeping gesture” makes a lasting impression on O’Neil as she connects the song’s message to her own experiences with love, recalling the struggles in her parents’ marriage and her own. Consider the lasting impact music has had on your life and title a poem with lyrics from your favorite song. Use these words as a jumping-off point to the memories that come with it.
In Monica Youn’s essay “Generative Revision: Beyond the Zero-Sum Game,” published in the Spring 2023 issue of the Sewanee Review, the poet argues for a revision practice that offers “expansions, alternatives, subversions, and offspring that enrich the original work” rather than replacing or subtracting parts of a first draft. In this generative revision practice, a detail can be expanded in a different version or new poem altogether as Youn explains with two poems by C. D. Wright, “What No One Could Have Told Them” and “Detail from What No One Could Have Told Them.” Youn writes how in the latter poem Wright is “expanding the scope slightly, offering a bit more context, a glimpse of the setting.” Inspired by this technique, write a new poem that focuses on a single detail from an older poem of yours. How can you expand the scope?
First published in the October 1999 issue of Poetry magazine, Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Seven Deadly Sins” is a series of seven poems, each one named after the deadly sins of medieval Christian theology. Each poem is a distinct lyric portrait with its own sentiment, style, and approach to the topic. In “Sloth,” Komunyakaa writes with an open-ended musicality: “In this / Upside-down haven, you’re reincarnated / As a fallen angel trying to go home.” In “Gluttony,” the poet sets the scene concretely in the first stanza: “In a country of splendor & high / Ritual, in a fat land of zeros, / Sits a man with string & bone / For stylus, hunched over his easel.” Inspired by this series, write a poem dedicated to one of the seven deadly sins: pride, avarice, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. What approach will you take?
“This where all the roadside memorials are, / pink wreaths and dirty teddy bears. // This where a man walked when he wanted to fly,” writes Tyree Daye in his poem “Ode to Small Towns,” which appears in his collection Cardinal (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). Daye uses the repetition of “this where” to fold in various threads of distinct stories, making it feel as if the poem was written while driving through a series of towns and telling the tales as they surfaced. Inspired by Daye’s poem, write an ode to the small towns you’ve encountered while on the road. What kinds of stories do you picture when you pass through?
In the iconic poem “My Mother Would Be a Falconress,” Robert Duncan uses the metaphor of a falcon and a falconer to characterize the relationship between a son and his overbearing mother. As the falcon, the speaker of the poem is sent by his mother “as far as her will goes.” Throughout the poem, Duncan provides detailed imagery associated with falconry—such as the hood placed on birds of prey, often sewn round with bells—to give the complex metaphor a realistic weight. Think of a metaphor that captures the relationship between a mother and her child. Write a poem that uses this metaphor to characterize this relationship, whether nurturing, overbearing, or otherwise.
In her Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, The Wild Iris, Louise Glück gives voice to a multitude of flowers: violets, snowdrops, trillium, lamium, scilla, and more. Glück uses floral imagery and personification, as well as the relationship between garden and gardener, to explore themes of resurrection, existence, loss, and suffering. In the poem “Lamium,” she writes: “This is how you live when you have a cold heart. / As I do: in shadows, trailing over cool rock, / under the great maple trees.” This week, inspired by this season’s super blooms, write a poem in the voice of your favorite flower.
In “Blooming How She Must: A Profile of Camille T. Dungy,” published in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, Renée H. Shea writes about how the poet “scrutinizes the tradition of the loner, the solitary individual, in nature writing and as part of the artistic life in general” in her new book, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023). Write a poem that reflects on your relationship to being alone. Do you find the idea of a solitary life as an artist inviting or does it feel restricting?
“The American experiment will end in 2030 she said / looking into the cards, / the charts, the stars, the mathematics of it,” writes Jorie Graham in “Time Frame,” a poem in her latest collection, To 2040, out today from Copper Canyon Press. The book’s title suggests both a dedication and an urgent address, casting the poems therein as reflections on the age of the Anthropocene and calls to action to protect the earth’s natural wonders. Write a poem that illustrates and reflects on your vision of the future, whether hopeful or woeful. Use the open-endedness of this prompt to fold in as many aspects of the future as possible, including your personal journey and what you foresee for the natural world.