Prompt: Wasted Time

There are certain times when you self-assess how you have spent your time. Before you sleep, you might think about what you did that day. Have you wasted another day? Birthdays might prompt you to assess the past year. The deaths of friends and loved ones might have you consider your entire life.

Our two model poems for this call for submissions are "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" by James Wright, and "May Day" by Phillis Levin. Both poems consider the idea of a "wasted life." 

Wright's poem lures the reader into a serene, almost hypnotic pastoral scene. There are butterflies, cowbells, and late-afternoon light. Then it culminates in a jarring, introspective conclusion: “I have wasted my life.” That jump-cut shift forces reflection and probably some debate among readers. Is it a regretful lament? Perhaps it is a subtle existential epiphany.  

"May Day" is lyrical and metaphysical, and also filled with lush, sensory imagery. But Levin doesn't trip us up at the end. She tells us up front: “I’ve decided to waste my life.” Beneath its surface beauty is something profound and maybe daring. I've been told by others that this is "an assertion of intention wrapped in restraint" and that the motif suggests both surrender and renewal. She does close with a turn, like Wright, but a more hopeful one: "You must change your life."

I was discussing this prompt over coffee with my poet friend Susan Rothbard, and she remembered that in the poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” by Rainer Maria Rilke, the poet describes a ruined statue that still radiates vitality. His final imperative to the reader is “You must change your life.” Probably an inspiration for Wright’s and Levin’s poems, Rilke stages a sudden volta (turn) at the end, where description gives way to existential command.

For our October issue, we are seeking poems that explore the concept of time wasted. It could be a wasted hour, day, season, or life. Perhaps the idea causes someone to change their life. Perhaps it depresses them. Maybe the wasted time is not their own.

Deadline for the October issue is September 30, 2025. Don't waste time thinking about the poem and not writing it. 

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Prompt: Volta

It is said that a young Japanese poet once asked a Chinese poet how to compose a Chinese poem. “The usual Chinese poem is four lines," he was told. "The first line contains the initial phrase. The second line is the continuation of that phrase. The third line turns from this subject and begins a new one. But the fourth line brings the first three lines together."

A popular Japanese song illustrates this:

Two daughters of a silk merchant live in Kyoto.
The elder is twenty, the younger, eighteen.
A soldier may kill with his sword,
But these girls slay men with their eyes.

Many well-known four-line Chinese poems, particularly those in the jueju (or quatrain) form, masterfully incorporate a "turn" or a shift in perspective, mood, or subject matter in the third line, before the concluding fourth line brings the poem to a close.

Poems from all cultures often have a turn. That turn is known as the "volta" which comes from Italian, meaning “turn.” It traces back to the Latin verb volvere, which means “to roll” or “to turn." In poetry, it metaphorically represents a shift in thought, emotion, or argument. 

Petrarch, the 14th-century Italian poet, popularized the sonnet form that includes a volta between the octave (8 lines) and the sestet (6 lines). In his sonnets, the octave presents a problem or situation, and the sestet offers a resolution or counterpoint.  Later, Shakespearean sonnets adopted a different placement for the turn. It often appears before the final rhymed couplet.

Two examples of turns in longer English poems: In Shakespeare’s "Sonnet 18," the turn comes at line 9: “But thy eternal summer shall not fade…” —shifting from admiring nature to praising the beloved’s lasting beauty. In Elizabeth Bishop’s "The Moose," the turn moves from a mundane bus ride to a mystical encounter with a moose and transforms the poem’s tone and meaning.

"Question And Answer On The Mountain" by Li Po:

You ask for what reason I stay on the green mountain,
I smile, but do not answer, my heart is at leisure.
Peach blossom is carried far off by flowing water.
Apart, I have heaven and earth in the human world.

 For our September issue, we are interested in the shorter jueju form popular during the Tang Dynasty where the turn occurs in line 3 of the 4-line poem. Not unlike haiku, this structure allows for a "finale" and invites reflection. 

"On Returning Home," by He Zhizhang, is a double jueju, so there are two turns. 

When young, I left home, now old, I return.
My hometown accent is still the same.
Children don't know who I am.
Smiling, they point at the strange man.

I dismount my horse at the gate of my house.
I ask after the old friends I knew.
Where are the peach and plum trees, now gone with the spring wind?
The old man who lives there is no longer me.

A turn is a shift in a poem’s tone or mood. It could indicate a turn from sorrow to hope. It could also indicate a turn in perspective or speaker, or mark a turn in an argument, or imagery.

The turn (or turns, in poems of multiple stanzas) in a poem can add several things. It can add depth by introducing complexity and surprise. In a longer poem, it adds movement, keeping the poem dynamic. Near the end of a poem, it can present a resolution to earlier ideas, or even intensify rather than resolve them.

Your poem can be as short as those 4-line Chinese poems, or you can have multiple stanzas, BUT then each stanza must be 4 lines and each contain a turn. 

Submission Deadline: August 31, 2025, for our September issue.

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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Prompt: Midpoints

This past week, I was thinking about midpoints because July 1 was the midpoint of this year. That thought sent me to my bookshelf for a copy of John Updike's Midpoint and Other Poems. Updike published this book of poetry in 1969. “Midpoint” is the long poem that opens the book. Updike says that it was written “to take inventory of his life at the end of his thirty-fifth year – a midpoint.”

This may be the midpoint of the calendar year, but it is a lot harder to pick out the midpoint of your life. In fact, Updike was close, but he was a few years too early. Born in 1932, he was 35 when he wrote the poem and 37 when he was putting together the book, but he lived to 2009 and was almost 77.

Updike doesn't get as much attention for his poetry as he does for his prose, but I like a lot of his poetry. His humorous verse (not easier to write than serious stuff) and his more serious poetry often remind me of his poetic prose.

"Midpoint" (the poem) is ambitious and long (43 pages). He uses the meters of Dante, Spenser, Pope, Whitman, and Pound. He even uses some arrangements on the page that are more like concrete poetry. “Midpoint” has five "cantos" (sections, as in Dante), and each canto begins with an “argument” that sets forth the poet’s own summary of that section. (more about the book here)

For submissions this month, look more to the concept of Updike's poem and book than to the poem itself. Write about life midpoints. They are moments of transition, reflection, or redirection that often mark significant psychological or chronological turning points. They may not actually be the chronological halfway point in a life or set of experiences. For example, when children become independent, parents may be prompted to shift from active parenting to self-rediscovery. The term midpoint suggests a central marker, but in life it’s more symbolic than mathematical. It might occur early or late, depending on a person's experiences, choices, or circumstances. A pivotal moment—like a major insight, loss, or turning point—can feel like a “middle,” even if it’s not halfway through chronologically. In literature, the midpoint often refers to a narrative shift rather than a time-based measure. Life follows similar rhythms. 

 

John Updike (1932-2009) was a highly acclaimed American novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayist. He is best known for his detailed portrayals of American middle-class life, particularly in his "Rabbit" series of novels, which follow the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom through various social and personal upheavals. Updike was a prolific writer, publishing over 20 novels, numerous short story collections, poetry, and essays. He was also a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and received numerous other accolades for his work. He attended Harvard University, where he was editor of The Harvard Lampoon and graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English in 1954. He also studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford.

John Updike’s poetry is witty, observant, and grounded in the everyday. Known for its formal precision and playful language, his work often explores suburban life, aging, and sensuality. Though more famous as a novelist, Updike’s verse reveals a sharp eye for detail and a sly sense of humor rooted in tradition.

Updike also published Endpoint (2009), a collection of poems that he wrote during the last seven years of his life and put together only weeks before he died. It is his final book. Besides his individual poetry collections, Updike has a Selected Poems and Collected Poems 1953-1993.

 

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Prompt: Apocalypse

We title this call for submissions "Apocalypse," a word that for many people is synonymous with the end of the world. The two are related concepts, but they are not exactly the same. "Apocalypse" comes from the Greek apokalypsis, meaning "unveiling" or "revelation." In its original sense, it refers to a revelation of hidden truths, often divine or cosmic. In religious contexts, especially in Christianity, it often refers to the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, which includes visions of catastrophic events leading up to the final judgment.

"End of the world" typically refers to a literal or physical destruction of the Earth or human civilization, through war, natural disaster, climate collapse, or other catastrophic means. So while the apocalypse can include the end of the world, especially in modern usage, it originally referred more to that vision or revelation about ultimate things, which may or may not include destruction.

In our two model poems, Jane Hirshfield writes of a vision more apocalyptic in the classical sense than world-ending in the modern sense. "On the Fifth Day" was written in 2017, but it is just as appropriate in 2025. It was originally published not in a poetry journal but in The Washington Post. The silencing of people is in the news now. Is this the fifth day of the apocalypse? Does it lead to the end of the world? In her short poem, "Like Others," the end is here, and the voice of the poem admits - embarrassed, frightened, and perhaps guiltily - to being like the others who did nothing to stop the end. Both poems appear in her 2020 collection, Ledger.

For our July issue, we want to read poems that address "the end" as an apocalypse that is perhaps near, perhaps very distant, and may be destruction or revelation.

Model poems can be helpful, but can also be tempting to imitate. There are more than seventy poems on this theme linked on this website. Be inspired. Don't get trapped.

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Award-winning poet, essayist, and translator Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten poetry collections. She is known for her contemplative, deeply humane verse. Jane was born on February 24, 1953, in New York City. She graduated from Princeton University in 1973, among its first classes to include women. Deeply influenced by Zen Buddhism, which she formally studied at the San Francisco Zen Center. Her poetry collections include The Beauty and Ledger, both longlisted for the National Book Award. Jane is also the author of two collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, and she has translated classic Japanese poetry. She is also a committed environmental and social justice advocate, often weaving these concerns into her work.

The deadline for submissions for the next issue is June 30, 2025.
Please refer to our submission guidelines and look at our archive of 26 years of prompts and poems. Follow our blog about the prompts and topics in poetry.

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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Prompt: Floriography

Language of Flowers by Alphonse Mucha

The May Full Moon is often called the Flower Moon. William Shakespeare used the word "flower" more than 100 times in his plays and sonnets. In Hamlet, Ophelia mentions the symbolic meanings of flowers and herbs as she hands them to other characters in Act 4. Flowers have played a significant role in literature and are symbolic in many cultures. 

Whether depicted in a painting, given as a gift, used as commemorative decor, or worn as an accessory, a flower can symbolize gratitude, love, remembrance, trust, good health, or even danger. 

Sending someone a bouquet of roses can be symbolic. Red, white, pink, blue, black, or yellow roses all have different symbolic meanings in floriography.   

Floriography is known as the “language of flowers,” and it is a means of expressing emotion through the use of flowers. This was a discreet method of communication between people. It has existed for millennia but saw heightened popularity during the Victorian era. 

King Charles's choice of funeral wreath for his mother, the late Queen, was bound by a tradition steeped in keeping emotions concealed. His sense of loss was supposed to be expressed by the choice of blooms -  myrtle for love and prosperity, and English oak to represent strength. Yellow carnations are pretty, but they have a long history of being a symbol for disdain. It is also best to avoid the buttercup whose yellow petals are synonymous with childishness. Floriography also holds that placing red and white plants together makes a combination foretelling death.

Thinking of poetry using flowers, two that come to mind are Robert Frost's "A Tuft of Flowers"  and Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud."  

Famous poems but not floriography. For an example of that, we turn to a poem by Emily Dickinson, a poet who kept a garden, knew plants, and also had secret correspondences.

I hide myself within my flower,
That wearing on your breast,
You, unsuspecting, wear me too --
And angels know the rest.

I hide myself within my flower,
That, fading from your vase,
You, unsuspecting, feel for me
Almost a loneliness.

The poem explores themes of secrecy, vulnerability, and intimacy. The speaker, hiding within a flower, becomes a secret passenger on the recipient's breast, known only to the angels. "I hide myself within my flower" emphasizes the speaker's desire for concealment and connection. The poem might have been accompanied by a bouquet to her secret love, and by hiding within the flower, she can be close to the recipient without revealing her presence. The flower fading from the vase suggests the transience of life and the fragility of the speaker's position. The recipient is "unsuspecting," which heightens the sense of vulnerability and secrecy.

It is not a typical Dickinson poem, though it is characteristically short, with simple language, it doesn't play with capitalization and punctuation. It is also deceptively complex and fits into the Victorian era's fascination with floriography and repression. 

For the June issue, we are looking for poems that use flowers in a symbolic way and perhaps to express something you’ve kept secret until now. First, you might want to explore the symbolic history of some flowers. 

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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Poets are made, not born

If you're new to this blog, you might not know that it is an extension of the poetsonline.org website. We offer a monthly poetry writing prompt and the opportunity to submit your poetic response for online publication. All submissions that address the prompt will be read and considered for inclusion in the next issue, but we will only consider poems that are actually in response to the current writing prompt.

We receive many poems each month that have nothing to do with the prompt, and always a few poems that respond to one of the many prompts in our archive.

I know that many of our readers write using the prompt with no intention of submitting the poem, and that's a good thing. As much as we enjoy reading your poems and sharing them with he world, the original of this site was to inspire people to write. I don't believe that poets are born as poets. They are made poets.

In our October 2008 call for submissions, we addressed that idea directly with our featured poet, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. He is best known by the pen name Lewis Carroll. I find it sad that Lewis Carroll has often been relegated to the classrooms and bookshelves of younger students. I chose his poem "POETA FIT, NON NASCITUR" because it's not a poem for children or one that they should or would read by children.

The title is a play on the Latin proverb POETA NASCITUR, NON FIT, which means "A poet is born, not made." Carroll flips it over to mean a poet is made, not born, which I have used for many years as part of the masthead for Poets Online. We run on the premise that we can all learn to be better poets by writing poems with a bit of guidance, and by trying different forms and heading in new directions.

Carroll was an English author, mathematician, logician, and photographer. His most famous writings are the stories about Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass.

Carroll published his first major collection as Phantasmagoria in 1869. His epic nonsense poem “The Hunting of the Snark” was published in 1876. In 1871, the sequel to Alice appeared. Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There includes the poem “Jabberwocky.” All of them might be considered part of the genre of literary nonsense. He is known for his word play and fantasy that appeals to children and the literary elite.

Unlike some of Carroll's other famous poems, this one is not all nonsense. In fact, you may need a bit of help with some of the references. In his advice on becoming a poet, he says:

First learn to be spasmodic -
A very simple rule.

"For first you write a sentence,
And then you chop it small;
Then mix the bits, and sort them out

Spasmodic poetry was actually a form known in his time. It frequently took the form of verse drama, and the protagonist was often a poet. The poetry was choppy, and, from the few samples I could find, rather difficult to comprehend. Of course, we might also take his advice as a dig at poets who take prose and "chop it small" in lines and stanzas and call it a poem.

Carroll does use some of his word tricks when he splits "immature" to complete a rhyme:

Your reader, you should show him,
Must take what information he
Can get, and look for no im-
mature disclosure of the drift
And purpose of your poem.

In other words, the "mature" poet will make sure the arrangement of those chopped sentences doesn't give away too much about what the poem means.

And what better way to confuse things than to throw in some Latin - exempli gratia means "An example, if you please." Plus, the Adelphi is a London theatre, and The Colleen Bawn is a play by Boucicault, and duodecimo is a book made up of twelve-page gatherings cut from single sheets.

Carroll's poem about how to be a poet is a model of how not to write a poem. Our prompt for that 2008 issue was to write a poem either about how NOT to be a poet or how NOT to write a poem - and to use rhyme. That rhyme might be a lesson on how a poet should not use rhyme. Maybe the poem will be Carrollish in its humor, satire, word play or fantasy.  Read that issue

The Alice in Wonderland collection includes four books: Alice in Wonderland, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Hunting of the Snark, and Alice Underground.

Prompt: Ghost

I still remember reading when I was very young, the poem "Antigonish" by William Hughes Mearns. It was printed in some anthology, and it scared me.

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish he'd go away...

When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn't see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don't you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door...

That was an early encounter with a poetry ghost. Ghosts scared but also fascinated me, as they do for most kids, and many adults. They have also interested some poets. I found a group of poems about ghosts at poets.org. I wrote a ghost poem that grew into a piece of flash fiction.

"The Poor Ghost" by Christina Georgina Rossetti is a poem that depicts a dialogue between a man and the ghost of his lover. "The Haunted Oak" by Paul Laurence Dunbar has a tree that bears witness to and is haunted by the lynching of an innocent man.

Our model poem this month is "Unbidden" by Rae Armantrout which explores the idea of ghosts swarming and speaking as one, each leaving something undone.

Do you need to believe in ghosts to write about them? Emily Berry's ghost poem begins with this epigraph: "A statistician would say: of all the millions of ghost stories ever told, what percentage would have to be true for ghosts to exist? The answer is that only one story would have to be true."

Henrik Ibsen wrote in his play Ghosts: "I almost think we're all of us Ghosts ... It's not only what we have invited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light."

But before you start your own ghost poem, consider that not all ghosts are spectral visions. Some are not even nouns. It can be a trace or suggestion of something: "The ghost of a smile played on her lips". The ghost can be a persistent, unsettling presence or memory in the mind: "His past mistakes still ghosted him". Someone living can be a shadow or semblance of something -"He's just a ghost of his former self" now diminished in health, strength, or spirit. "He doesn't have a ghost of a chance" means only a faint chance or possibility: 

And our newest usage is ghost as a verb, where it typically means to suddenly cut off all communication with someone without warning or explanation. For example, if you're texting someone and they abruptly stop responding, they might be said to have "ghosted" you. It's often used in the context of dating or friendships, but it can apply to any situation where someone unexpectedly disappears, like a ghost.

Our May issue will be full of ghosts in various forms and visions. 

Submission Deadline: April 30, 2025

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Prompt: Island

"No man is an island" was originally "No man is an Iland" and is a famous line from John Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, a 1624 prose work. It was the 17th devotion, Meditation XVII. When you see this a s a poem, it is that Donne's punctuation becomes line breaks. The poem also includes the line "...for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."

That prose work as a whole is considered similar to 17th-century devotional writing generally, and particularly to Donne's Holy Sonnets. It might surprise you that Donne's early career was also notable for his erotic poetry, especially his elegies, in which he employed unconventional metaphor. In "The Flea," a flea biting two lovers is compared to sex.

Donne is considered to be a "Metaphysical poet" which was coined by the critic Samuel Johnson to describe a loose group of 17th-century English poets whose work was characterized by the inventive use of conceits, and by a greater emphasis on the spoken rather than lyrical quality of their verse. Modern critics often say that "baroque poets" may be more accurate as Donne and other don't fit our more common philosophical use of metaphysical as meaning the study of reality and existence.

If you read any of Donne in school, it was probably "No Man Is An Island" or "Death Be Not Proud," but not  "To His Mistress Going to Bed" or "The Flea." 

"No Man Is an Island" is a poem that explores the interconnectedness of humanity and the impact of loss. The speaker asserts that no individual is isolated, but rather an integral part of the broader human collective. The poem uses the metaphor of comparing humankind to a continent, with each person being a "piece" or "part" of the whole.

Loss appears as the erosion of land by the sea. Donne suggests that the death of even one person diminishes the entire human race. This idea is emphasized by the shift from the hypothetical ("If a clod be washed away") to the personal ("As well as if a manor of thy friend's/Or of thine own were").

The poem's concluding lines, "And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; / It tolls for thee," encapsulate the theme of shared mortality and emphasize the inevitability of death for all.

For this month's call for submissions, we invite poems that consider the island metaphor, our shared world, or the inevitability of death. Donne loved metaphors and that should be a starting place for you. Perhaps, an island suggests other metaphors to you. In Shakespeare's The Tempest, the island is a metaphor with multiple layers as it represents isolation, both physically and psychologically, away from the regular world where the characters are stranded. 

SUBMISSION DEADLINE March 31, 2025

Some Donne allusions trivia:

•  No Man Is an Island is also a 1955 book by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton.
• "For whom the bell tolls" was used by Ernest Hemingway as the title of his 1940 novel. Hemingway uses it as a metaphor for the Spanish Civil War, implying that people in America or other countries should care about what was happening there, and not ignore it because it was happening far away.    
• The band Jefferson Airplane inserts between the track "A Small Package Of Value Will Come To You Shortly" and the song "Young Girl Sunday Blues," this Donne joke "No man is an island! He's a peninsula."

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John Donne (1572-1631) was an English poet, scholar, and soldier who later became a cleric in the Church of England as Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London.

Despite his great education and poetic talents, Donne lived in poverty for several years, relying heavily on wealthy friends. He spent much of the money that he inherited during and after his education on womanizing, literature, pastimes and travel.

In 1601, Donne secretly married Anne More, with whom he had twelve children. In 1615 he was ordained Anglican deacon and then priest, although he did not want to take holy orders and only did so because the king ordered it. He served as a member of Parliament.

Donne died on 31 March 1631. He was buried in old St Paul's Cathedral.

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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Prompt: Cemetery

A cemetery seems to be a rather grim place and sad prompt, but I find cemeteries preferable to hospitals. I certainly don't spend very much time visiting cemeteries these days but as a youth I made pilgrimages to several poets grave sites in my New Jersey. I visited Stephen Crane buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Hillside, Allen Ginsberg at B'Nai Israel Cemetery in Newark, Walt Whitman at Harleigh Cemetery in Camden and William Carlos Williams buried at Hillside Cemetery in Lyndhurst,

What did I expect to find besides a headstone and grass or flowers?  I'm not sure. Perhaps a ghostly presence? Some inspiration? There were no supernatural presences, but I did write about the visits.

I looking for poems for this call for submissions and found many poems about cemeteries. The poet Billy Collins said, "Oh, you're majoring in English? So then you're majoring in death." There is some truth in that humorous line, but the range of approaches to the subject by poets is wide. Not all poems about cemeteries are about death.

 In "The Mountain Cemetery" by Edgar Bowers, we find this description:
With their harsh leaves old rhododendrons fill
The crevices in grave plots’ broken stones.
The bees renew the blossoms they destroy,
While in the burning air the pines rise still,
Commemorating long forgotten biers.
Their roots replace the semblance of these bones...

"Oak Grove Cemetery" by Don Thompson, opens with a bit of hope.
Just enough rain an hour ago
to give the wispy dry grass some hope,
turning it green instantly.

In Key West, the living surround the dead,
who are the best neighbors
silent and agreeable as well-swept porches...
writes Jacqueline Allen Trimble in "Walking Beside the Cemetery, Olivia Street, Key West"  

 
Madeline Tiger

While assembling this prompt, I received word that a poet friend, Madeline Tiger, had died in December. Madeline was the first Dodge Foundation poet I had as an instructor for their poetry workshops for teachers back in the 1980s. She was a gentle soul and a knowledgeable poet and we stayed in touch for decades when she lived nearby in New Jersey. I lost touch with her in this century as she had moved away, but I continued to read her poetry. 

A friend posted her poem, "The Mockingbird in May" from her book, The Atheist's Prayer, online with a notice about her passing and so I felt the universe was telling me to use it this month. Jim Haba, who started the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Program and created its biannual poetry festival (and who was my first literature professor at Rutgers) often said that reading a poet's work is a way we keep them alive.

Madi's poem made me think of "At a Jewish Cemetery in Pittsburgh" by Peter Oresick.
...I set down my son
and he crawls in the dimness,
pulling himself up on the headstone.
How delicately he fingers the marble.
Quickly he rounds its corner. Vanishes.
I’m thinking: grass, stone, quiet–
then babbling from another world.

Another poet, Thomas Lux, taught that what you see in your mind when you hear a word like "cemetery" is not what anyone else sees. We all have personal associations with words based on our experiences and knowledge.

What images does "cemetery" create in your mind? Negative, positive, sad, peaceful, nostalgic, or angry images? Is it a place of death or a peaceful, quiet, green parkland?

In general, people don't visit cemeteries as much as they did a century ago. Being buried in the ground isn't even as common as it once had been.  "Tree Cemetery" by Wu Sheng is a poem that addresses alternatives.  
Plant a tree in place of a grave
Plant a patch of trees in place of a cemetery
Put a flowerbed around each tree
Lay the ashes of the deceased to rest by the stump

For our March issue, we ask you to write a poem inspired by the word cemetery. Your poem does not have to be set in that location, but it might be a real place that is now only a memory.

Here is Madeline's poem:

The Mockingbird in May

A mockingbird sings near my son's grave
He is out of sight, one of many in the great oak trees,
but the song is intensely clear,

coming through the wind and the leaves.
The evening empties.  Nothing here
but rustle and song and gusty breeze.

Unseasonably cold after the hard
rain, Sunday ends with bright sky
to the east, over there where

a woodpecker rattles an undertow.
Another echoes it higher,
louder against a dark tree.

All I know are the sparrows,
the dove call, the mocking,
the low staccato roll, the caw of crows--

the descent, the pebbles placed in a
row on the tombstone to represent
the mourner who came
and those others who didn't come.

I like the way the poet has used birds throughout the poem to signal shifts - the mockingbird, unseen,  that is only known by its song, the woodpecker heard as an undertow and echo, and the others in the trees, until our gaze lands on the grave.

Madeline Tiger was born in New York City in 1934. Her family moved to Hewlett,NY on Long Island when she was 3 and then moved again to South Orange, New Jersey where she graduated from Columbia High School.

She graduated from Wellesley College, and received the Master of Arts in Teaching English from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1957. That summer, she began doctoral studies at Columbia University, but stopped when she began teaching high school English in the fall.

Madeline was the mother of five children. Her son Homer died in 1989, when he was 22, in a kayak accident in New Zealand.

"The Mockingbird in May" is from her book, The Atheist's Prayer. Her Birds of Sorrow and Joy: New and Selected Poems was published in 2003.

Madeline died on December 6, 2024 just weeks after her 90th birthday. 

 

Submission deadline: February 28, 2025

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Prompt: Burning the Year

A new year has begun. The end of the year is often a time of reflection on things done and undone, those new born and those lost, and lots of lists with opinions of the best things from the past year. Another page in the history book is finished.

In "The New Year" by Carrie Williams Clifford, the mood is optimistic.
The New Year comes —
fling wide,
fling wide the door
of Opportunity!

But for every person who views the new year optimistically with hope and opportunity, there is at least one other person who is glad to leave the old year behind.

In "Burning the Old Year" by Naomi Shihab Nye (from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems) we have a figurative fire that burns lists, notes and partial poems because "So much of any year is flammable... and so little is a stone." The burning is not in anger. I imagine the fire is not even intentional. Some things just burn themselves into the past and "only the things I didn’t do / crackle after the blazing dies."

I once loaded a pile of notebooks, letters, and poems into my fire pit on a snowy January day. They were things that after years I had never returned to, never revised or never really felt good about writing or keeping. There were letters from past girlfriends, unfinished stories and poems, ideas for projects, clippings that I thought would inspire me. They made a fast and furious fire. A friend was shocked that I did such a thing. I explained that some of those things were saved electronically and might be useful but most of it had to be left in the past and having them made them keep creeping into the present.

What would you put in your fire in this new year from the past year? What are you letting go of from the past year? Your fire might be figurative or literal, or not a fire at all.

Naomi Shihab Nye was born on March 12, 1952, in St. Louis to a Palestinian father and an American mother. During her high school years, she lived in Ramallah in Palestine, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she later received her BA in English and world religions from Trinity University and continues to live.

Nye is the author and/or editor of more than 30 volumes, including Grace Notes: Poems about Family, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East and Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. She is also the author of several books of poetry and fiction for children, including Habibi (Simon Pulse, 1997), for which she received the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award in 1998. Nye gives voice to her experience as an Arab American through poems about heritage and peace that overflow with a humanitarian spirit. She has traveled to the Middle East and Asia for the United States Information Agency (USIA) three times, promoting international goodwill through the arts.

Nye’s other honors include the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. She has been a Lannan Fellow, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow. In 1988, she received the Academy of American Poets’ Lavan Award, judged by W. S. Merwin. In 2024, the Academy presented her with its Wallace Stevens Award. Nye served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2009 to 2014, and was the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2021. 

Everything Comes Next: Collected & New Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye

 

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Prompt: Postcard Poems

Recently, I received a postcard from a friend I have not seen for five years. The poscard message was in the form of a short poem. A postcard has a perfect little square for a poem. You probably have read epistolary poems in the form of letters. Edward Hirsch defines the form: "The letter poem is addressed to a specific person and written from a specific place, which locates it in time and space. It imitates the colloquial familiarity of a letter, though sometimes in elaborate forms. A few well-known letter poems are Ezra Pound’s adaptation of Li Po, “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” (1915) and Auden’s “Letter to Lord Byron” (1937). These poems are not like actual letters because they are not addressed to just its recipient; but are always meant to be overheard by a future reader."

Although a postcard poem is similar to the letter form, it is both shorter and written in a different style.The poem "Postcard from the Heartbreak Hotel" by John Brehm opens with a play on a classic postcard meme: "Wish you were here instead of me."

Though not a poem, a postcard from the poet Seamus Heaney briefly and humorously rejects a request to be a judge for one of the Academy of American Poets poetry competitions. Though he did not use intentional line breaks, the margin of the card created breaks - much like a prose poem. I am taking the liberty of giving his message line breaks.

“Since Purgatory has disappeared
as a concept —
a place or state of temporal punishment  -
mankind has been attempting to replace it,
and judging poetry competitions
comes high on the list of substitutions.”

Since this month's call for submissions is not about a topic but about a form, I chose a poem that would fit a postcard, but it also seems like it would work as a postcard message. In "Solstice in Truro" by https://amzn.to/4fSW92I Joshua Weiner, my teacher-student mind connects solstices to school years and semesters. The summer solstice in June was sometimes the last day of school for me in my K-12 years. Summer vacation! The winter solstice was the end of a marking period or the end of a college semester. A short break and then into the new year and a new term.

Weiner says it is a June solstice, but it could easily be the December solstice starting winter. Truro is a Cape Cod town near where I had stayed for several week-long poetry workshops in Provincetown on the Cape's tip. I can imagine the tides and restless sand. A summer solstice is the longest day of the year when the Sun "pauses" for a moment before shifting direction. But then there is the sudden entry of his grandfather into the poem. Those two final lines in this 2023 poem, hit me when I read them with today's news reports from the war in Ukraine and the sad winter prospects for that country.

Your task this month is to write a poem that can fit on a postcard. It should address someone specific, living or dead. If we would recognize the person's name (a historical figure, a celebrity, maybe a famous poet), you might mention it, but it might also just suggest the recipient. Very often postcard messages also mention or suggest the place where the sender is writing. The shortness of the postcard as a form encourages us to write down only the most vivid and essential details of what we are trying to say -- which makes the writing of postcards rather akin to the writing of poems.

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Born in Boston in 1963, Josh Weiner grew up in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. He graduated from Northwestern University in 1985, and then entered UC Berkeley, and received a PhD in 1998. Along the way, he served as the Writing Coordinator for three years at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA.

Of this poem, he has said,"‘Solstice in Truro’ is one of those poems that just slips out and finds its final form very quickly, in an attempt to respond to my immediate world of sensation. One line led to another, pretty much in the order in which they appear. The emergence of my grandfather in the final lines, and the war in Ukraine, too, was a discovery I wasn’t looking for. I had been reading a lot of Sung and Tang Dynasty poems, classical poems, over the previous few years, mostly in Red Pine’s translations. I think you can hear the influences of line and image in what I wrote.”

Josh lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, the novelist Sarah Blake, and two sons, and teaches literature and poetry workshops at University of Maryland, College Park, where he is Professor of English.
His website is joshuaweiner.com

 

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Prompt: Line Breaks

I was reading an anthology of short poems and was paying attention not only to their brevity but to their line breaks.

In Rae Armantrout’s poem “Unbidden," her use of short lines in conjunction with enjambment contribute to a sense of disjointedness.

The ghosts swarm
They speak as one
person. Each
loves you. Each
has left something
undone

Line breaks are one of the main things that separate prose and poetry. They give poems their slim who-cares-about-margins appearance.(We will pass on talking about prose poems for the moment.)

Enjambment is where the poet deliberately breaks a sentence across multiple lines before its natural finishing point. End-stops are the opposite of enjambed lines in that an end-stopped line contains complete thoughts, phrases, or sentences.You can usually tell a poetic line is end-stopped if there is punctuation at the end. The punctuation could be internal (e.g. comma, semi-colon, colon, em dashes), or external (e.g. period, exclamation mark, question mark).These lines give the reader logical moments to pause at the line break. It is used in many traditional poems and it supports poetic forms using rhyme and meter.

William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" is a modernist poem orriginally published without a title. It was designated "XXII" in Williams' 1923 book Spring and All, a hybrid collection that incorporated alternating selections of free verse and prose

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Notice that to maintain his very short, two-line stanzas Williams breaks two words that could be together - wheelbarrow and rainwater.

Line breaks create white space in the text and are one way that poets can exercise a greater degree of control over the speed and rhythm that you read. It is unlike our everyday language and unlike prose literature.

Personally, I find it annoying when poems have breaks that seem to be used simply to keep line lengths the same - almost like a margin. It is possible a poet will do that in order to create a shape for the poem. There are good reasons to break a line. There is no rule book but consideration should be given to the first and last words: Avoid having weak words at the beginning or end of lines. For example, action verbs and nouns tend to be strong.

"Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost has strong end words: fire, ice, desire,twice, hate, great, suffice. (Although I find that breaking a line on "ice" - "To say that for destruction ice / Is also great" - seems more in service of the rhyme than the line break. Sorry, Robert).

"Dreams" by Langston Hughes is a good example of end-stopped lines that each contain a complete thoughts, phrases or sentences.

Our two model poems by two very different poets are both 9 lines / 8 line breaks. This month's call for submissions is for a 9-line poem on any topic of your choosing. Stanza breaks are another consideration - one stanza, 4X2, 3X3 or any combination. The key here is for you (and the editors) to pay special attention this month to line breaks. Whether enjambed or end-stopped, each of your 8 breaks should be logical and pushing us to read in a particular way with a particular attention. Sounds easy. It is not.

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Prompt: Ways of Looking

In the early-career Wallace Stevens poem, ''Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,'' the reader is presented with something seen from different perspectives. Perception is subjective, so these short stanzas shift and evolve but are not directly connected, other than by their subject. Each haiku-like stanza is its own way of looking at the blackbird.

Two selections from Jane Kenyon's poem "Three Songs at the End of Summer" illustrate how her poem also looks (in 12 small stanzas divided into 3 sections/songs) at something more abstract from different perspectives.

A white, indifferent morning sky,
and a crow, hectoring from its nest
high in the hemlock, a nest as big
as a laundry basket....

Crickets leap from the stubble,
parting before me like the Red Sea.
The garden sprawls and spoils.

Spruce, inadequate, and alien
I stood at the side of the road.
It was the only life I had.

Is Stevens' blackbird a symbol? Its color might suggest mystery. Its appearance in the poem shows a kind of interconnectedness as it separate from and also part of nature. If it is a symbol of the world itself, it can represent the complexity of our perception. Stevens gives us the bird in the natural world (a bird in the snow) to the psychological (a man mistaking a shadow for a blackbird).

What is the "correct" way to perceive the blackbird or reality? Of course, there isn't one way because our understanding of the world is shaped by our individual perspective.

In your poem, be attentive to the details of your subject and its surroundings. Present multiple interpretations without a need to select one as correct. You need not have 13 ways - though many 13 ways parodies of Stevens' poem have been written. You could have as few as two ways of seeing. Your subject can be a thing (a river, a painting), a person (a lover, a baby), a scene (a baseball game, a thunderstorm) or something we can't literally see (terror, jealousy, the end of summer).

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Prompt: The Last Time

George Bilgere opens his poem "Tar Pits" with the line "The last time I saw my father..."

He is not alone in using that phrase for a poem or perhaps as a prompt. It is a wide open line that could inspire a very sentimental poem like "The Last Time" by an author unknown, or the brutally powerful "The Last Time" by Rachel McKibbens.

Bilgere takes a day from a child's memory of a trip to the La Brea Tar Pits which is a still-active paleontological research site which is somewhat oddly located in urban Los Angeles. The tourist attraction surrounds a group of tar pits where natural asphalt has seeped up from the ground for tens of thousands of years, and over many centuries, the bones of trapped animals have been preserved. He not only remembers this day with his divorced father, but in adulthood he connects the preserved remains with his father and wishes that his father "could rise from that black pit and emerge into light."

This call for submissions for our September issue is for poems that begin with or use the phrase "the last time." Perhaps it is the last time you saw, or did, or said, or tried, or felt, or any one of a myriad of other possibilities.

George Bilgere came to my attention via the then U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins who chose his collection The Good Kiss for the University of Akron Poetry Prize, and via his appearances in Garrison Keillor's The Writer’s Almanac and on A Prairie Home Companion.
He has won the May Swenson Poetry Award, the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize, the Devins Award, the University of Akron Poetry Prize, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and the 2023 Rattle Chapbook Prize for Cheap Motels of My Youth which is the latest in his poetry books that now total nine.
In 2024, he launched a daily poem website, Poetry Town. He is Distinguished Professor of English at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he lives with his "lovely wife and two fine little boys." His website is georgebilgere.com

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Prompt: Parks

Our July Call for Submissions is about parks. It's summer here and I can often be found walking, sitting and reading, and taking photos in one of the local parks. Parks large and small are an escape to nature. It might be a small pocket park in a big city or a huge State or National Park.

For the August issue, we will be seeking poems about parks. There are many poems to consider as examples. I chose a rather obscure poet, Helen Hoyt, who is quite straightforward in her poem, "Park Going to Sleep," about a park entering the night.

I also considered using "Dog Park" by Brandon Brown which begins:
I told Alli I really wanted
to write a poem called “Dog Park.”
In bed she’s like you could make it
a New Yorker poem, where you
go to a dog park and then have some
huge epiphany...

For contrast, consider some of these park poems:
The Park by David St. John
A Walk Round the Park by Sandra Lim
In the Park by Maxine Kumin
Central Park, Carousel by Meena Alexander

There is a collection of 50 poems by 50 different poets writing about a National Park in each of the United States that was part of an NEA grant "Imagine Our Parks with Poems."

Time for you to imagine a park within a poem. A simple summer prompt that might be as light as a cold glass of lemonade, or perhaps you will find there some huge New Yorker epiphany.

This prompt was inspired by browsing "Imagine Our Parks with Poems," part of Imagine Your Parks, a grant initiative from the National Endowment for the Arts created in partnership with the National Park Service to support projects that use the arts to engage people with the memorable places and landscapes of the National Park System. The Academy of American Poets commissioned fifty poets to write poems about a park in each of the fifty states.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: July 31, 2024

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Prompt: Animism

“In the British Museum” is a poem by Thomas Hardy. It is in the form of a dialogue between two museum-goers looking at the base of a pillar that comes from the hill of Areopagus, in Athens. The object seems to be more than what meets the eye. It is animated by the human souls that have lived near it, travelled through it.

The first visitor is skeptical and wonders what his companion sees, or rather hears, “in that time-touched stone”, where he himself sees only “ashen blankness.” And the companion, who knows “but little”, says he can hear the voice of Paul, the apostle, preaching to the crowds of Athens, echoing through the stone.

This idea of the echo is rendered through the repetition of the phrase “the voice of Paul” in the fourth and seventh quatrains, closing the poem.

Is there some life force passed on to the artifact? This can be called animism which is defined as as the attribution of a living soul or energy to inanimate objects. Without going too deeply into animism, we can say that this word from Latin anima meaning "breath, spirit, life" comes from an ancient belief that objects can possess a distinct spiritual essence. This is a metaphysical belief which focuses on the supernatural universe. But it still exists to some degree today.

A friend shows me her grandmother’s ring that she wears and that she feels connects her to her grandmother. A woman shows me the ceramic bowls she created in her pottery classes and tells me about preparing and centering the clay. She explains how this process requires "becoming one with the clay." New age, pseudoscience or can materials be infused with energy during the creative process?

For our July issue, we are seeking poems that explore the idea of inanimate objects and places having (or appearing to have to someone) an energy, soul, spirit or life from the people who came in contact with it during their lives. You don't have to be a "believer." Think of how Hardy uses two voices to express two points of view about this inanimate animus.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: June 30, 2024

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Thomas Hardy's first love was always poetry. But it was not until he was 58 years old, having already established his reputation with 14 novels, including Far from the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure, that his first book of poetry, Wessex Poems was published. For the final 30 years of his life, he abandoned fiction and devoted himself entirely to poetry. Hardy's poetry was acclaimed by younger poets (particularly the Georgians) who viewed him as a mentor.

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Prompt: Dramatic Monologue

Robert Browning, a prominent Victorian poet, was known for his innovative use of dramatic monologue as a poetry technique. Dramatic monologue involves a speaker addressing a silent listener or audience, revealing their thoughts, emotions, and often providing insights into their character or situation. Browning's dramatic monologues are psychological and, ironic, and explore complex human motivations and behavior. But Browning is not read much today other than some of the anthologized poems such as "My Last Duchess," and "Fra Lippo Lippi."

I remember a college class about dramatic monologues that used T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." It was a poem I loved and I went deep into the Eliot poems.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit...

These days I find Eliot less accessible than I prefer in poetry. For examples of the dramatic monologues, from more contemporary poets, I will point to a few poems.

In Judith Wright's "Eve To Her Daughters," she talks to her daughters about Adam's fall .Eve, talks to her daughters of her and Adam’s fall from Eden and his quest to become god-like, outlining his arrogance, but Eve stays submissive and loyal to him despite his flaws.

Eurydice, the mythological wife of Orpheus, speaks in the poem by H.D. with that name.

And Carol Ann Duffy's collection, The World’s Wife, presents stories, myths, fairy tales and characters in Western culture from the point of view of women, very often giving voice to the hitherto unsung women close to famous men. One of those poems is "Medusa."

A suspicion, a doubt, a jealousy
grew in my mind,
which turned the hairs on my head to filthy snakes
as though my thoughts
hissed and spat on my scalp.

"The Angel with the Broken Wing" by Dana Gioia is the our model this month. It is a poem that I tore out of a copy of POETRY magazine 14 years ago and came across in a file folder this month. This dramatic monologue is spoken by a wooden statue carved by a Mexican folk artist. The poem is about the statue's history and its fate as a museum piece. The poem uses irony to convey that the angel with the broken wing is not actually an angel, but a statue of an angel. There is also irony in that its wing was broken by soldiers during the Revolution who were, perhaps, sparing the rest of the angel out of fear of God. "They hit me once—almost apologetically. / For even the godless feel something in a church."

For our next issue, we are looking for dramatic monologues. Your speaker - famous, mythological or even from your life, but not "you" - addresses a silent listener or audience. In the classic sense, the poem reveals their thoughts and emotions in a psychological, often ironic, way to give the reader some insight into human motivations and behavior.

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Prompt: Double Meanings

On my first reading of Seamus Heaney's poem "Scaffolding," the meaning that came to me with the title was not that of those structures used on buildings. Instead, I thought of how it was used in teaching and lesson design. That usage of scaffolding is a teaching method where teachers provide support to students as they learn new concepts or skills. One version is known as "I do. We do. You do," where the teacher demonstrates, lets the class try, and then the students practice on their own.

Heaney starts with the most common meaning of scaffolding as it is used on buildings during construction. By the end of this short poem, he has moved to a more figurative scaffolding - one that holds up a relationship until it can stand on its own.

For this month's call for submissions, we look at words that have double meanings. I say "double" but clearly there are many words with multiple meanings. Your poem should have as its title a single word. The poem should move from one meaning to at least one other meaning. The key is to have the multiple meanings connected. You might use Heaney's model of the commonly accepted meaning moving to another more abstract or figurative one.

The deadline for submissions for the next issue is April 30, 2024.
Please refer to our submission guidelines and look at our archive of 25 years of prompts and poems.

Seamus Heaney was born on April 13, 1939, in Castledawson, County Derry, Northern Ireland. In 1965, he married Marie Devlin, and the following year he published Death of a Naturalist (Oxford University Press, 1966). Heaney produced numerous collections of poetry, including Opened Ground (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and more. He also wrote several volumes of criticism, and translation, including Beowulf (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), which won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. Heaney was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry. In 1995, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Seamus Heaney passed away in Dublin on August 30, 2013. He was 74.

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