Prompt: Letters Never Received

I was teaching Melville's story, "Bartleby, the Scrivener," which concludes with the revelation that Bartleby used to be a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington DC. Melville uses this setting as a metaphor for mortal hopelessness, misdirected communication, and loneliness.

I thought I knew of a poem about a dead letter office, but I could not find it. What I stumbled upon was the brief anonymous text here.

I found the letter I never gave you
and wondered if anything
would have changed if I did.
The paper felt lighter than I remember,
like time had taken some of its weight away.
I read it again
and so who I was back then
ready to be honest,
just not brave enough to follow through.

I don't know if it was intended as poetry, but it seemed to be a poem the way it appeared online. And that got me thinking about letters that are never received or never sent.

I thought of Emily Dickinson's letter to the world.

This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,--
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!

There are a variety of epistolary poems in the form of letters but the ones that interest us this month are ones that never were sent or received. The reasons why vary. Here are a few examples

"Letter to N.Y" by Elizabeth Bishop is a letter you couldn't send.

In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you are pursuing:..

Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz by Matthew Olzmann:
You whom I could not save,
Listen to me.

Can we agree Kevlar
backpacks shouldn’t be needed
for children walking to school?

It is about gun violence and school shootings, and the title and opening lines invoke Miłosz’s poem “Dedication”, both poems attempting to bridge historical atrocities with modern, senseless acts. Who is it addressed to? All of us.

A famous letter poem is Sylvia Plath's "Daddy." This confessional work is about a daughter breaking free from the painful, controlling memory of her dead father (and her husband). Plath uses nursery rhyme rhythms alongside Holocaust and vampire metaphors in her rejection of male control.

Looking at her poem led me to her poet husband, Ted Hughes. His poem about a letter and his correspondence with Sylvia is contained in "The Last Letter." (More about that here)

For our September issue, we are looking for poems that are letters never sent or never received, or poems about letters never sent or received. They might be in the form of a letter, but that is not a requirement.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: AUGUST 31 

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Prompt: Travel

Odysseus on the road

Our June issue will be about travel. It seems appropriate for that time when school ends, and travel and vacations usually increase.

Travel is a very old theme for poets. Ancient writers like Homer didn’t treat travel as leisure or self-improvement in the modern sense. In works like The Odyssey, travel is fate-driven, dangerous, and morally revealing. It is something that happens to you as much as something you choose. Travel was not leisure but an ordeal. Odysseus journeys and longs to return home, facing storms, monsters, and the wrath of Poseidon. It is a test of survival rather than comfort.

Each stop becomes a moral trial because Homer's travel reveals character under pressure. Central to his journey is nostos — the drive to return home. Travel also means entering the unknown. Travel shapes identity, and Odysseus defines himself by recounting his adventures and turning experience into reputation.

In modern poetry, the best travel poems don’t just describe travel but interrogate it from different angles. "Ithaka" by C. P. Cavafy interrogates Odysseus' travels.

"As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery...."

The poem makes me think of a well-worn adage about travel of all kinds: "The journey matters more than the destination."

Perhaps your personal journeys are not as mythic. Perhaps your travel doesn't ead to wisdom. In "Questions of Travel by Elizabeth Bishop, she seems to be asking, "Why do we travel at all?" It is a poem that debates itself.

"...Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there... No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"

"The Journey of the Magi" by T. S. Eliot takes a very famous journey and is somewhere between Cavafy and Bishop. Travel transforms you, but at a cost. It is more about the aftermath than the actual experience of traveling.

"...We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death."

I chose as the main model for this call for submissions "Traveling Through the Dark" by William Stafford, from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems, because our poetic travel does not require going very far from home or for very long. Here, travel forces moral confrontation. In this concrete situation, there is ethical weight. His focus is on a single moment rather than the whole trip. This travel is grounded in a specific, dramatic action, not abstraction.

You might begin by selecting one trip and asking: Why did I go? What did it do to me? What did I face there? Was it worth it?

Your travel poem can contain the breadth of an Odyssey or be as specific as a stop on a drive not far from home.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: May 31, 2026

William Stafford (1914–1993) was an American poet known for his quiet, contemplative voice and his belief that writing should be a daily, attentive practice.

Born in Hutchinson, Kansas, he grew up during the Great Depression, an experience that shaped his sensitivity to ordinary lives and moral choices. A committed pacifist, he declared himself a conscientious objector during World War II, working in civilian public service camps. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and spent most of his career teaching at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon.

He published his first major collection, Traveling Through the Dark (1962), at age 48. The book won the National Book Award and established his reputation for spare, plainspoken poems that carry ethical weight. The title poem, one of his most anthologized, reflects his characteristic blend of narrative clarity and moral tension. His essays on writing are collected in Writing the Australian Crawl (1978). He was appointed U.S. Poet Laureate (then titled Consultant in Poetry) in 1970.

Stafford continued publishing until his death in 1993, famously writing a poem the morning he passed away.

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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: Epistles to the Poets

It is National Poetry Month 2015 in America. The Academy of American Poets has many special features on its website for this month. One is called "Dear Poet." It is a multimedia education project that invites young people in grades five through twelve to write letters in response to poems written and read by some of the award-winning poets who serve on their Board of Chancellors.

Poets Online asks you this month to join the students. You can read and watch a group of poets reading and discussing their poems. The students are being asked to write letters to the poets to express their thoughts, ideas, or ask any questions they may have about the poems. I wonder why they didn't ask students to write poems to the poets - which is what we we will do.

Epistles, or epistolary poems, comes from the Latin “epistula” for “letter," are poems that read as letters. As poems of direct address, they can be intimate and colloquial or formal and measured.

On our main site, the prompt includes two of the poems and poets from Dear Poets. One is Naomi Shihab Nye's "How Do I Know When A Poem Is Finished?" which itself is addressed to someone - perhaps a student who has asked the poet that question, though all poets ask that question to themselves.

The second example and video is for Edward Hirsch's poem "Cotton Candy" which looks back to the candy and a grandfather.

What would you write to Nye or Hirsch about their poems?

Our prompt is much wider. You can choose any poem on the Academy site or any poem at all. The only requirement is that you address the poet by name and that you include the title of the poem you are responding to in the poem.

Your poem might be titled "Dear Mr. Hirsch" or Dear Elizabeth" for a poem to Elizabeth Bishop, whose own epistle "Letter to N.Y." begins:

In your next letter I wish you’d say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you’re pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl

I might write to W. B. Yeats during this Easter week 2015 about his poem "Easter 1916" to let him know that this year:

I am sitting at the start of day
looking out the window
at my desk at a sky gray
above twenty-first century homes

that I have passed on my way,
like you, nodding and saying
polite meaningless words...

How Long Will You Revise a Poem?

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was an extremely methodical  and downright slow writer. I was surprised to read that she only published 101 poems in her lifetime.

She worked on her poem “The Moose” on and off for more than 25 years. I have poems from 25 years ago that I still look at and revise, but I can't say that I have been "working on them" for all that time. For "The Moose," she had it tacked up on her wall so that she could rearrange the lines.

We all have our distractions. For Bishop, writing letters was one. (Perhaps today, she would be online and in email.) She once wrote 40 letters in a single day and said, “I sometimes wish that I had nothing, or little more, to do but write letters to the people who are not here.” A collection of her letters, One Art: Letters, was published in 1994.

I don't classify coming back to a poem written years ago and making changes as the same kind of revision as when I sit down every day for a week trying to get a poem to a place where I feel comfortable reading it to an audience or sending it out to the world.

I also have notebooks of typed and printed poems that feel unfinished that I rarely look at and even more rarely work on any more.

What is your revision process?


Here is the opening of "The Moose."

The Moose
For Grace Bulmer Bowers

From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,

where if the river
enters or retreats
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;

where, silted red,
sometimes the sun sets
facing a red sea,
and others, veins the flats’
lavender, rich mud
in burning rivulets;

on red, gravelly roads,
down rows of sugar maples,
past clapboard farmhouses
and neat, clapboard churches,
bleached, ridged as clamshells,
past twin silver birches...

read the rest of the poem

Elizabeth Bishop at 100

The poet Elizabeth Bishop was born 100 years ago on Feb. 8. Her father died months later, and her mother was institutionalized early in her childhood, so she was raised by relatives in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts.

She became one of the most beloved and important American poets of the 20th century, although her greatest fame came after her death in 1979.

To celebrate her centennial, Farrar Straus & Giroux, her publisher for most of her career, is bringing out three new editions of her writing :

• Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence - her letters to and from The New Yorker
• and a pair of companion volumes called simply Poems and
• Prose

These books make clear that Bishop was as much a prose writer as she was a poet.  Prose is in fact considerably fatter than Poems, which contains all of the The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 plus a selection from the posthumous collections of drafts and fragments.