Prompt: The Color of a Poem

 

"The Japanese have this idea of the color of a poem. Bashō talks often about the colors of poems. I think what he means by that is the moods and the tones, the sort of aesthetic principles of them. And I think that you can’t just sit down and write that, you have to really embody it. That’s the hardest part: figuring out what tone or what mood you’re writing towards. A lot of this has to do with the themes you’re working with, or the mode that you want to present. That takes sometimes weeks, months — years, really — to develop before language comes to fruition. Language has its own register, like music, and depending on the “octave” or the tone that you’re using, there are connotations, there are meanings, implicit in tone."  -  Ocean Vuong

The idea of a poem's color can be interpreted in several ways. The most direct meaning refers to the literal or suggested colors within the poem's descriptions. It can use descriptive words (e.g., crimson, slate, golden, shadowed) that map out a vivid visual scene.

But when people speak of the "color" of a poem, they are usually referring to its overall tone, atmosphere, imagery, and emotional resonance. A painting uses a palette of colors to set a mood; a poem uses language, sound, and visual imagery to paint a specific feeling or atmosphere in the reader's mind.

Sensory details that evoke a visual tone. A poem filled with descriptions of rain, wet cobblestones, and fog carries a "cool gray" or "blue" color profile, whereas a poem describing dried wheat, baking sun, and dust carries a "warm ochre" or "golden" color profile.

In the short poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost, he plays with expectation. He opens by describing nature's earliest spring shoots not as green, but as gold. Gold represents early promise, preciousness, and beauty, which quickly fades as leaves mature into ordinary green. Color here acts as a clock, measuring the fleeting nature of perfection.

"The Nomenclature of Color" by Richard Jones contains a palette of Nile blue, absinthe green, dragon's-blood red, iron gray, and Venetian pink and functions almost like a painter's color card. Jones pairs specific historical pigment names with personal imagery, such as connecting "dragon's-blood red: My mother's ark sighs,"and "absinthe green: Laura’s eyes." Exact color labels here carry emotional histories and sensory associations.

Color is deeply tied to human emotion and psychology. The "color" of a poem often serves as shorthand for its mood. Dark, somber colors (Black, Charcoal, Dark Violet) can evoke grief, mystery, melancholy, or solitude. Bright, warm colors (Yellow, Orange, Gold) can evoke joy, vitality, nostalgia, or illumination. Cool, calm colors (Soft Blue, Sage, White) can evoke serenity, distance, stillness, or contemplation. Of course, a poet may also use these in unexpected, even contrary ways, as Frost did.

The symbolic use of color in poetry is as old as recorded poetry. Green for youth and rebirth and rust or brown for aging and decay are so common that they may even feel clichéd.

Our model poem this month is "Instructions on Not Giving Up" by Ada Limón, which has a palette of deep greens, pale spring hues, and dark chartreuse. Limón focuses on the arrival of green leaves in early spring. Rather than using green as a cliché for rebirth, the poem treats the heavy green foliage as a physical weight—a thick, unapologetic presence of life returning after winter. The shifting shades of green track an internal emotional movement from winter weariness to relentless persistence.

For our December issue, we are looking for poems that use colors not only as content but to create a tone for the poem. 

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: November 30

Ada Limón was born on March 28, 1976, in Sonoma, California. In 2001, she earned an MFA from New York University's Creative Writing Program. Her first poetry collection, Lucky Wreck was the winner of the 2005 Autumn House Poetry Prize, selected by Jean Valentine. The Carrying won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her 2015 collection Bright Dead Things was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Limón is also the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. In 2022, Limón was appointed United States poet laureate and, in 2023, was appointed to serve a second two-year term. Limón is currently Distinguished Professor of Poetry at Texas State University. 

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Best of the Net 2026 Nominations

Poets Online nominates poems for the Best of the Net Anthology. This annual, awards-based literary anthology hopes to acknowledge and promote exceptional work (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and art) that has been originally published online. 

The Best of the Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize Anthology are two of the most prestigious and distinct literary awards for small presses, and they primarily differ in the medium they honor. Best of the Net is exclusively for work first published on the web or in an e-zine/digital format.

This year we had 5 judges, one being Ken Ronkowitz, our editor. Although there were 11 poems that were noted by the judges, we are only allowed to nominate up to 6 poems.

Below are our 5 nominations that received the most mentions, and also a list of other poems — our own honorable mentions — for poems that were also noted by judges.  

1. Do Not Put Out The Welcome Mat by Robert Miller
2. Always Take a Banana With You (My Wife Said) by John Botterill
3. Moonlight Reflections by Norma Ketzis Bernstock
4. Bipolar by Jackie Chou
5. Awakening by Leslayann Schecterson

Honorable Mentions

Before Dawn, For Dogs I've Lost by Taylor Graham

The Bridge by Pamela Milne

This Tongue of Flame by Katie Milburn

Poem For The Apocalypse by Paul Hostovsky

Petey in Paradise by Rob Friedman

The Perfect Man by Susan Spaeth Cherry

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

I was looking through some books on poetic forms for a new form to use here. I noticed four forms that not only begin with "R" but also have similarities.

The Rondeau is a lyric poem from the 13th century which is characterized by repeating lines or "rounds". It has 15 lines written as a quintet, quatrain, and sestet, with two rhyme schemes.

The Rondel is a 14th-century French lyrical poem that is a variation of the Roundeau. It consists of two quatrains followed by a quintet (13 lines total) or a sestet (14 lines total). The first two lines are refrains which repeat at the end of the second and third stanzas. The rhyming pattern is ABba, abAB, abbaA.

Then we have the Rondolet, another French form consisting of a single septet with two rhymes and one refrain. The refrain is written in tetra-syllabic or dimeter, and the other lines are twice as long - octasyllabic or tetrameter.

And finally, the Roundel, a form created by Algernon Charles Swinburne as a variation of the rondeau form.

DON'T PANIC. We are not asking for any of those four. They are all examples of forms that get so specific that they can trap the poet.

What I see as the central structural element shared across all four forms is the recurring refrain derived from the poem's opening phrase and an organization of three distinct movements or stanzas. So, here is our new poetic form designed around those shared mechanics without any constraints on rhyme or syllable counts. Let's just call it simply a "round."

While "round" is rarely used as a modern standalone name for a text-only poem, it is the literal English translation and ancestor of all these French forms. You probably know rounds as songs like "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," "Frère Jacques," "Three Blind Mice," and"Sumer Is Icumen In" which is the oldest known English round, dating back to around 1250 AD.

As you can see in our example poem, the title is also the refrain repeated in the first line and in the last line, making a kind of circle, a round.

In summary, the poem is 12 lines in 3 stanzas. It's free verse (no forced syllable counts or rhyme schemes required). The form also suggests that the poem in some way is itself thematically circular.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: October 31, 2026

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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Jisei: Japanese Death Poems and Haiku

Like a lotus leaf’s evaporating dew

I, too 

vanish.

— Senryu

Here are some English translations of jisei, or Japanese death poems. Not all the poems are haiku. Some are tanka or waka. Sme are Buddhist in nature, but some are poets seeking enlightenment. A few may have found it, while others seem more doubtful of the possibility.

Oh, fallen camellias,

if I were you,

I'd leap into the torrent!

― Takaha Shugyo

Although the consciousness of death is, in most cultures, very much a part of life, this is perhaps nowhere more true than in Japan, where the approach of death has given rise to a centuries-old tradition of writing jisei, or the "death poem." 

Such a poem is often written in the very last moments of the poet's life., though some of the poems are written in the contemplation of death. A good number of these poems are widely considered to be the final statements on life and death by poets facing their final days here on earth. 

The first soft snow:

leaves of the awed jonquil

bow low

― Matsuo Basho

Grasses wilt:

the braking locomotive

grinds to a halt.

― Yamaguchi Seishi

Farewell! I pass

as all things do:

dew drying on grass.

— Banzan

Many, but not all, of these poems are haiku. The influence of haiku on modern English poetry is clear. Certain precepts of Imagism relate more or less directly to haiku, such as the use of concrete imagery and "direct treatment of the thing (object/subject)." Ezra Pound translated Oriental poetry and wrote similar original poems himself, such as "In a Station of the Metro."

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

You can also see this influence in poems such as "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens. Other English-language poets who either wrote, translated, or were influenced by haiku include Richard Wright, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Amy Lowell, Kenneth Rexroth, Margaret Atwood, and Robert Hass. Oriental influences have also been noted in the writings of early modernists like Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau.

The calm,

Cool face of the river

Asked me for a kiss.

— Langston Hughes, "Suicide’s Note"

The spring lingers on

In the scent of a damp log

Rotting in the sun.

— Richard Wright

Elderly sunflowers:

bees trimming their beards.

— Michael R. Burch

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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