2024 NaPoMo Prompts

Happy National Poetry Month, everyone!
I'll be posting a month of poetry prompts (will do so in weekly batches) — ˆI hope you enjoy writing to them!

Please check back often.

30 April
Pick 5 words that are concrete images, from one of your favorite poets/favorite books (including words that may be in other languages). Think about how that writer uses these words. Do you use them differently? Similarly? Think of 5 concrete words that float to the top of your mind today and use them to build a poem.

29 April
Sometimes the body knows before we do, or before the mind registers it. Intuition? Sixth sense? Luck? Write about the moment before and/or the moment after you experienced that kind of flash of knowledge. What happened?

28 April
What did sunlight look like in the kitchen of your childhood?
​What did rain sound like on the roof of that place?

27 April
Who is your favorite villain (in fairy tales, pop culture, literature at large)?
Write a poem-letter to this character; what would you say?

26 April
Write a poem in which you take something back.

25 April
Find a fun or intriguing fact about something in the natural world. Do some more light research on it to find out other facts or contexts in which it appears. Make these paths lead to a poem.

24 April
My trainer is always telling me to pin my shoulders back (I typically slouch), in order to free the muscles there for better movement. What is your poem muscle that sometimes slouches? Write about that.

23 April
What are the words that stick to your mouth and will not be dislodged?
What are the words that go to bed with you?
Write a poem about these.

22 April
What is your favorite number? Write a poem about it.

21 April
In the new translation by Stephanie McCarter of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the opening lines are 

     My spirit moves to tell of shapes transformed
into new bodies. Gods, inspire my work
(for you've transformed it too) and from creation
to my own time spin out unceasing song.

These speak of change as a process wrought not only on the forms or shapes transformed, but also on the one/s who are moved to create or effect such change.

Write a poem about a change that has had this effect on you.

20 April
Write a poem about the question/s that you still carry with you to this day.

19 April
Jane Hirshfield wrote about Ono no Komachi, a legendary ninth-century Japanese poet who had lived in the busy capital but who in her old age "came to dwell at the periphery in a number of different ways—[but who carried] within her story a wisdom still essential to the writing life.” Write a poem about that kind of necessity, of inhabiting in-between, marginal, or nearly invisible spaces ; and what it might teach us as poets and as humans.
​
18 April
Write a poem of prophecy.

17 April
I first saw the "Infinite Zoom" technique at work in a children's picture book (but heck, I bought it for myself!) called Zoom, by Istvan Banyai https://youtu.be/Kgi-RCEjOLw - it's a delightful and magical exercise in zooming out and out (or in and out), to show how a single detail is related to much bigger universes, in turn. Write a poem that uses it as a technique for development and focus.

16 April
Write a poem that is an extended definition of something, by developing it through related/extended metaphors (for example, Jane Hirshfield’s “Today, My Hope is Vertical”
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/08/today-my-hope-is-vertical-jane-hirshfield-poem )

15 April
Write a poem of instruction on how to do something that might seem harder than what it looks, or vice versa - that might seem easier than it looks

14 April
Write a poem in which you consider the marvelous in the ordinary.

13 April
Write a poem about your favorite underdog or dark horse.

12 April
What goes on in the periphery of vision, on the edges of a scene? There are such moments in Breughel's famous painting that W.H. Auden captures in the poem "Musee des Beaux Arts"— while an important thing is happening, "the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse/ Scratches its innocent behind on a tree."  Write a poem about a significant moment, by focusing on the "peripheral" things surrounding it. How could this perspective allow you to say more about your subject?

11 April
A week ago, we pruned the branches of our fig tree. Regular, annual pruning is supposed to help encourage a concentration of growth, leading to more prolific fruiting. Use a pruning analogy or metaphor in a poem—it doesn't have to be about a fig tree, or any kind of tree. Rather, what is it that you want to shear away in order for something to grow better?

10 April
In dreams, who comes to visit you? Write this visitation in a poem.

09 April
Complex emotions are shaded in a multitude of ways, and they are best expressed not as abstractions but rather, when the writer is able to find a concrete embodiment (in image, metaphor, language) for them. For instance, we know sadness, misery, or envy because we know what their opposite states are, and vice versa.  Write a poem that explores these kinds of connection in what we feel, through a specific instance or memory. 
 
08 April
Trivia is often a fun poem starter. What kind of poem could (or would) you write, after learning that a platypus sweats milk? or that the circulatory system is more than 60,000 feet long? or that in a lifetime, an average human produces enough saliva to fill two swimming pools? 

07 April
Today is the birthday of my first-born daughter. Do you know anyone whose birthday it is today? Write a gift poem.

06 April
What's something (or things) whose absence makes it feel like everything would fall apart? Write a poem about that. 

05 April
Have you ever received a note or a letter (it doesn't matter how long ago) that you didn't know how to respond to at the time? or that you simply forgot? Write a poem which both recounts some of the occasion for previous correspondence, and which attempts to make that (re)connection now. 

04 April
Write a question poem—one in which you pose a question that interests and intrigues you, and that comes out of the attention you pay to some riveting detail you've (just) discovered, or a specific incident in contemporary life. You don't have to provide any answer/s.

03 April
Sometimes, a poem is made of lines that read like quiet observations, even if the poem does not lead to any grand conclusion. In a way, this feels reassuring in a world which is full of cross-talk and chaos. I find that such poems allow me to just rest in what they say. What are some things you know at this moment? What are some things you don't know? Write a list poem about either of these (or write two poems). 

02 April
What is dissonance? It could be the sound or music of language that moves in ways we couldn't have expected in a poem. Or it could be an idea or event that might make its presence felt in that kind of way. Think of a "dissonant" sound, word, idea, or event. Write a poem that explores what it makes us feel more sharply attuned to. For instance—a ship hit a bridge pillar and the bridge collapsed. Imagine that sound, impossible to unhear, cleaving an otherwise ordinary, early morning. What does it make you think of and/or feel? Write a poem about that. 

01 April 
Take a proverb, wise saying, or memorable quotation, and write a poem that makes it concrete and specific. Use any poetic approach, but make the poem a lived, vivid, credible experience in itself. Do not use the words of the proverb or quotation in the actual poem itself, though you could use some or part of it in the title or as an epigraph to the poem after you are done.