It might seem silly to just write what you’re thinking of. Like, right now I’m thinking about what I’m going to eat for dinner and whether I should clean my bedroom—how will I turn that into a poem or short story?

In reality, freewriting helps get the mind thinking in language, and while you might be thinking about dinner now, you’d be surprised what leaps and connections the brain makes into interesting writing material. Let’s take a close look at the process of freewriting and how it will benefit your work. We also provide freewriting prompts to help get the juices flowing.

First, what is freewriting?

What is Freewriting?

Freewriting (sometimes written as one word: freewriting) is a writing technique in which the writer journals their thoughts onto the page without letting their pen rest.

Freewriting is a writing technique in which the writer journals their thoughts onto the page without letting their pen rest.

The idea is simply to keep the pen moving, and that every word and idea that arises in the mind is important to jot down, regardless of matters like grammar, meaning, and usability. In other words, you aren’t trying to write capital-A Art, you are simply putting words onto paper.

In freewriting, the writer:

• Focuses on simply generating raw material.
• Keeps the pen moving with whatever thoughts arise, including (and especially) thoughts that seem irrelevant or unrelated to the previous thought.
• Does not worry about the “value,” “merit,” or “publishability” of anything written down.
• Does not worry about spelling, grammar, syntax, or readability.
• Writes for typically no longer than 15 minutes.
• Creates a daily freewriting practice, as the process gets easier and more rewarding when done regularly.

You aren’t trying to write capital-A Art, you are simply putting words onto paper.

A freewrite can be done with a prompt or simply with the writer’s mind in its most neutral state. Later in this article we provide some freewriting prompts, but first, let’s examine the benefits of this writing technique.

Benefits of Freewriting

If you’re not writing anything worth reading, what’s the point of freewriting in the first place?

It might seem counterintuitive, but freewriting can seriously improve your craft and help you write better poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction. The benefits of this technique include:

• Getting the words flowing: it’s much easier to write towards a project if you’ve loosened up the “writing muscles.”
• Freeing the mind from self-consciousness: freewriting helps train the mind not to care about “is this good?”—a question that can be debilitating for any first draft.
• Experimentation and ideation: Because the goal is to write what arises in the mind, you might inadvertently write new ideas or come up with interesting uses of language that can then be employed in future writing. To put it a different way: language first; ideas follow.
• Stumbling into greatness: Similar to the above bullet, you might accidentally write something really good or useful, or have an epiphany that you might otherwise never have had.
• Setting down your thoughts, quieting your mind: By putting your freeform thoughts onto the page, you can quiet your mind into focusing on writing projects after you’ve finished your freewrite.

Language first; ideas follow.

Some critics argue that this technique emphasizes writing over revising, or that it encourages writers not to engage with the broader literary canon. However, both critiques miss the point of freewriting. Writers should still revise and edit their work, as well as read other writers: to do a freewrite is simply to get the words flowing, making it easier to tackle the projects a writer is working on.

How to Freewrite

The freewriting process has been honed over time. Early advocates of the process include writers Dorothea Brande and Peter Elbow, but the process was really popularized by Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.

Here’s our recommendation for how to freewrite:

• Set aside 10-15 minutes.
• Write with pen and paper. If you have a strong preference towards typing, you can do so, but we find that handwriting is better for waking the writing mind up.
• Keep your pen moving. Don’t let it rest.
  • If you’re stuck on what to write, have some transitional phrases on hand. “How I feel about that is…” “What I’m trying to say is…” “And then…” or even just “I don’t know what to say.”
• Allow yourself to write nonsense. Write without the expectation of being “good.”
• Do not reread what you have written until after the writing session is over.
• Do not worry about spelling, grammar, writing style, “literary merit,” or legibility. You are not performing on the page, and the intent is not to be James Joyce or Virginia Woolf—there is no “good freewriting” or “bad freewriting,” it is simply writing.
• Do this once a day, preferably every morning, but certainly before you start work on a writing project.

Once you have finished your freewrite, you can reread your pages, or simply let them rest. Upon a reread, you might find sentences, phrases, or accidents of language that could be useful for future poems, stories, or essays.

Upon a reread, you might find sentences, phrases, or accidents of language that could be useful for future poems, stories, or essays.

Freewriting is also a valuable way to get your thoughts down about a particular topic. Let’s say you want to write a braided essay about an event in your childhood. If you do a freewrite about that event, you will generate a lot of raw material that you can sculpt into that essay, and you might even stumble into feelings and recollections you wouldn’t have otherwise had.

Finally, if you want to practice freewriting in a class setting, you may be interested in the Writing Circle Workshops offered by our instructor Susan Vespoli.

32 Freewriting Prompts

If you want to do a freewrite, but need some motivation, these freewriting prompts will help get your pen moving.

General Daily Freewriting Prompts

• What have you been thinking about lately?
• What questions are you trying to answer in your life?
• Write down every sensation you notice, both inside your body and in the world around you.
• Do a freewrite in which you talk to God, the Universe, or a higher power.
• What feelings are you trying to avoid feeling?
• What do you want to manifest for the near future?
• Write down the first word that comes to mind. Then, follow whatever associations arise in your brain.
• What are you grateful for?
• What do you desire most right now?
• Write about a memory that is visually or emotionally intense.
• Confess something.
• In your head, place yourself somewhere you know very well, such as your childhood home or a street you visit often. Write down as many details about that place as possible.
• What has saved you?
• What is an important realization you have had recently?
• Where do you wish you were?
• Write about and interpret a dream you’ve had.

Creative Freewriting Prompts

• Get ekphrastic and write about a film, song, or work of art that inspires you.
• What is your heart a museum of?
• Where does your mythology begin?
• Write in the voice and persona of someone or something other than yourself.
• What is the song your body sings, and who can hear it?
• Whose name does your heart whisper in its sleep?
• What is the shape of your grief?
• Write a self-portrait.
• What gets brighter the darker it gets?
• Whose voices do you hear echoing underneath your own?
• Write what you see on the horizon of your life.
• What is the root of your evil?
• What does your healing look like?
• Fill in the blanks of a memory you only partially remember.
• Write from the summit of life itself.
• Your heart is a garden. What’s in bloom?

Here are some more writing prompts we’ve written. They’re for poets, but prose writers can certainly use most of them as well. These poetry prompts might also enhance your creativity. 

What to Do With Your Freewrite

You don’t necessarily need to “do” anything with a freewrite. The point is to get your mind in a writing space so that you can better tackle whatever projects you’re working on.

However, some writers find freewriting to be helpful for generating new work. If you wanted to, you could take what you’ve written and turn it into a poem, prose poem, essay, short story, etc.

If you’d like to put your stream-of-consciousness to use, here are a few tips on revising and editing your work.

1. Highlight Epiphanies

A byproduct of freewriting is that the writer often taps into their unconscious and finds unexpected epiphanies. By epiphany, we mean a sudden realization, whether material or spiritual, that shifts the writer’s own perspective. Epiphanies can make the unfamiliar, familiar; the familiar, strange; the nonsensical or chaotic, suddenly ordered.

A byproduct of freewriting is that the writer often taps into their unconscious and finds unexpected epiphanies.

An epiphany is often central to a good work of writing. Any sorts of realizations that occur within your freewrite, highlight them—and, in editing and revising, try not to divorce the epiphany from the context it’s written in.

2. Underline Interesting Word Choice and Syntax

Another interesting byproduct of freewriting is the happy accidents that happen within language. By eschewing the rules of grammar, syntax, and linear writing, freewriters might end up juxtaposing words, phrases, and ideas that you wouldn’t normally put together, you might come across good word choice that you can use or store for later writing.

Another interesting byproduct of freewriting is the happy accidents that happen within language.

Many writers keep a journal of words, phrases, and ideas that they might use for later writing. So, don’t expect to use everything from one freewrite towards the same piece, but notice what’s interesting and unexpected in your writing, and save it for when you need inspiration or have a different epiphany about what to do with those words.

3. Identify Unnecessary Repetitions or Irrelevant Passages

As you begin to sculpt your freewrite towards a piece of writing, it will help to remove language that you don’t see as central to the freewrite itself. Here are some tips on omitting needless words:

• First, before you cut anything, save the full freewrite somewhere. You never know what you might lose if you permanently delete your writing from the face of the Earth. Make a copy or transcribe your writing, then work off of that copy or transcript.
• Identify the main topics and themes of the writing, including images or symbols that seem related to the central ideas within the writing. Many freewrites have multiple themes, so you can even make a list of those themes and consider how one writing session might yield multiple pieces of creative work.
• Look for writing that doesn’t seem related to any of the themes you identified. The goal isn’t to identify “bad” writing, just writing that doesn’t seem relevant to those themes.
• Remove writing that isn’t artfully repetitive. Repetition can be a powerful literary device, but it’s best used when it enhances and underscores the most important ideas within the text.
• Start to remove words that are clearly redundant or unnecessary. Our article on omitting needless words has more tips to help with this.

4. Decide on Form

Will your freewrite turn into a poem, prose poem, short story, essay, article, or the seeds of a novel or memoir? The possibilities are clearly endless, but once your writing has been cleaned up a little, the forms it could take should start to emerge.

What those forms could be depend on what you like to write, so rather than go in-depth about the possibilities within poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, here are a few guides we’ve put together on different forms of creative writing:

• How to Write a Poem
• What is Form in Poetry?
• The Elements of Fiction
• The Art of Storytelling
• Literary and Genre Fiction
• How to Write a Personal Essay
• 10 Types of Creative Nonfiction

5. Revise and Edit Towards Your Vision

Once you have a sense of your themes, form, and vision for the work, let your creative instincts take the reins, and use your freewrite as a base for sculpting your next great piece of writing.

Hone Your Freewriting at Writers.com!

Freewriting opens the writer up to happy accidents and exciting possibilities in language. Whether you want to freewrite with other writers or get feedback on the work you produce, take a look at the upcoming online writing courses at Writers.com, where you’ll receive the expert attention and workshopping you’re looking for.

The post What is Freewriting? + Prompts to Elevate Your Writing Process appeared first on Writers.com.

This article helps you find the best online writing community for your own writing needs. We’ll walk you through what good communities include, how to show up in the communities you join, and what we’ve learned from running the Writers.com online writing community. 

But first: what are the best online writing communities? Here’s an overview of what we’ve found on the internet. 

The Best Online Writing Communities in 2025

Here are the best online writing communities we’ve discovered around the internet. We define these communities as being spaces where writers can congregate, share their work, learn from one another, and forge the kinds of friendships and connections that sustain a writing life. 

Writers.com 

We started the Writers.com community with one mission: to share and celebrate our writing with one another. Our members meet several times a week to learn from one another and improve their writing together. In addition to Zoom writing sessions, we also have weekly and monthly instructor-led workshops and an online community space to explore our writing journeys together. 

• Includes:
  • Regular writing prompts
  • Biweekly Zoom writing sessions
  • Instructor-led workshops 
  • Free on-demand craft lectures 
  • An online meeting space to share and celebrate your work 
• Best For: Writers of all genres, in any stage of your writing journey.
• Learn More: Membership is only $47/month. Sign up for a one-week free trial here.

The Community has been everything I hoped it would be. I thoroughly enjoy the Write-Ins and craft explorations. I have enjoyed getting to know the staff and other community members and their writing—it brings a personal touch to my writing journey that wasn’t there before. Thank you so much!

—Lola Willis, Writers.com Community member

Sustenance 

Sustenance is the brainchild of poet Joy Sullivan. Members get access to a full library of previous Zoom workshops, plus attendance in regularly scheduled workshops with working, professional writers. Members also get opportunities to workshop their writing with each other in an encouraging community space. 

• Includes: 
  • Access to a library of recorded workshops
  • Attendance to regularly scheduled workshops with professional writers
  • An online community space to share and workshop writing
• Best For: Poets and lyric essayists looking to write and publish new work. 
• Learn More: Annual subscriptions currently run for $1600. Sustenance is currently on a waiting list. You can join the waiting list here. 

Paragraph

Based in NYC but with writers all around the world, Paragraph is an online writing community for serious working writers. It was founded by MFA graduates who were lacking for community spaces outside of the university, and it has since grown into a robust online platform with regular workshops and critique groups. 

• Includes: 
  • Free access to craft talks, roundtables, and query pitch workshops, including recordings of past events. . 
  • Discounts on creative writing classes
  • Access to online discussion boards. 
  • Monthly critique groups in all genres (except poetry). 
• Best For: Writers serious about improving their craft and working towards publication. 
• Learn More: Membership is currently only $25/month. You can join here. 

Scribophile

Scribophile is an online writing community primarily for fiction writers. The site hosts many different opportunities for writers to connect, get feedback, and learn from each other, and their community is both free to join and offers paid subscriber perks. 

• Includes: 
  • A forum to share work and receive feedback on novels-in-progress. 
  • Access to community writing contests.
  • Access to a directory of beta readers (paid). 
  • Detailed reader statistics for all work uploaded to the community (paid).  
• Best For: Novelists of all genres and backgrounds. 
• Learn More: Learn more about membership options here: the paid option costs $15/month. 

Shut Up & Write!

Shut Up & Write! is an international, decentralized writing community that hosts events both online and in cities around the world. Writers congregate in timed writing sessions to focus on their work, and sometimes hang out afterwards to connect and build community with one another. 

If you don’t have a Shut Up & Write! community where you live, they have resources for helping you start one yourself!

• Includes: 
  • Regularly scheduled sessions to focus on your writing. 
  • An online archive of tips and resources for writing craft.
  • Help in starting your own community if it doesn’t already exist. 
• Best For: Writers of all genres looking to build local community, including local online writing community.
• Learn More: Membership is free! Learn more here. 

Pen Parentis

Pen Parentis is an online writing community designed specifically for writers who are raising families. The community offers tailored benefits to help writers juggle their writing projects with the daily tasks that childcare requires. 

• Includes: 
  • Regular newsletters, lifestyle tips, and resources for writers balancing many obligations. 
  • An online writing community to connect with other writer-parents. 
  • Accountability groups and other opportunities to focus on your work. 
• Best For: Writers of all genres who are trying to balance childcare with the demands of their writing projects. 
• Learn More: Membership is free, with paid options. NYC-based writers also occasionally have access to in-person events. Learn more here!

London Writers’ Salon

Don’t be fooled by the name—London Writers’ Salon is an international online writing community that regularly congregates to get words on the page. In addition to daily Zoom calls, LWS offers classes, options for editorial feedback, and ongoing writing opportunities. 

• Includes: 
  • Daily Zoom-based writing sessions to focus exclusively on your writing projects. 
  • Ongoing learning opportunities, including classes and paid editorial feedback. 
  • Options to connect with agents, experts, and professional writers. 
  • Paid access to accountability groups, expert Zoom recordings, and e-books on writing craft. 
• Best For: Writers of all genres looking to focus on their work, especially fiction and nonfiction writers. 
• Learn More: Get details on free and paid membership opportunities here. 

Your Local Library

We’ll make an honorable mention of your local library. Many libraries have online and in-person writing groups; they’re often the best community spaces to host communities like this. If you find that your library doesn’t offer this, consider starting a writing group yourself!

Social Media

Social media is also a place where writers sometimes congregate. It doesn’t offer the same level of accountability as Zoom-based writing workshops, and since social media is often unmoderated, you run the risk of encountering writers who aren’t kind or supportive. 

That said, different sites offer different text-based platforms that are useful for meeting writers, especially if you live in a part of the world that doesn’t have much in the way of community. Reddit offers different forums, like r/writers, where folks can post about their writing anxieties or learn more about the craft. Tumblr (yes, it’s still around!) is also a place where writers congregate, post their work, and celebrate the craft. 

There are also websites like Archive of Our Own (great for fanfiction writers) and Wattpad that are designed for sharing work, getting feedback, and building community. 

Find More Online Writing Communities at the Poets & Writers Database

Lastly, Poets & Writers has a great directory of in-person and online writing communities that you can explore. The directory is occasionally out-of-date, but it includes groups for writers of all genres, abilities, and identities. 

Learn more here!

Features of the Best Online Writing Communities

The best online writing communities have these features in common:

• Supportive: Writing comes with its own anxieties and difficulties. The best online writing communities meet you at your needs, inspire confidence, and help you rise to the occasion of your own work. 
• Generative: Some online writing communities include prompted writing sessions; others simply carve out time for you to work on your own projects. Regardless, finding time and space to focus on your own writing is hard, and communities help create that time and space for you. 
• Educational: Every writer has something to offer. Yes, even complete newbies. In constructive writing spaces, writers learn from one another, offer feedback, and educate each other to become better authors. 
• Inspiring: You should come away from any writing space you join feeling inspired—whether that means inspiration for new goals, or inspiration to continue writing your own long-term projects. 
• Accessible and Inclusive: The creative writing world sometimes has a reputation for being closed off or elitist—and it’s true that some communities are exclusionary. We’ve found that the best online writing communities do not arbitrarily exclude any writers from their ranks, so long as all writers are willing to show up, be kind, and support one another in their work. 
• Connected: Writers also have a reputation for being introverted. But, even in the most introspective spaces, good online writing communities foster connection and friendship. Even if those are only friends you connect with over Zoom and email, you should still feel excited to write alongside other community members, and feel as though you know other writers whom you can mutually support.  

We recommend the above online writing communities for meeting all of these qualities. Whatever your writing needs are, you are sure to come away connected, engaged, and inspired to complete your own writing projects. 

How You Should Show Up in Online Writing Communities

While the best online writing communities exist to support your writing, learning, and community needs, it’s important that you also show up to any space with the right mindset and attitude. The more you invest into a community, the more you will get out of it—and we have a few tips on this based on our own experiences both building and participating in communities around the internet. 

1. Be Open Minded

One beautiful opportunity in any thriving community is the chance to learn about new and different lived experiences. Writers transcend all backgrounds, ideologies, and walks of life, and our task is to both understand ourselves and the world around us. Online writing communities are the perfect places for this—but only if you enter into one with an open mind. 

Online writing communities are the perfect places to understand ourselves and the world around us. 

Be willing to engage with people whose perspectives and experiences you don’t understand or initially disagree with. Disagreement and discomfort is not inherently a sign of danger. If anything, a community that operates as an echo chamber is far more dangerous, as it quells dissent and closes opportunities for growth and engagement. 

The vast majority of communities contain little to no friction, but the human experience is wide and diverse; if this happens, see this as an opportunity for connection and understanding, and you might find yourself forging deeper connections you would have otherwise foregone. 

2. Listen More Than You Speak

All writers want to be heard, and many writers join communities so others can hear them. You may very well join for the same reason. So this advice may be counterintuitive, but hear us out: you should try to listen more than you speak. 

Great communities are fostered when its members closely engage with one another’s thoughts, feelings, and writings.

Great communities are fostered when its members closely engage with one another’s thoughts, feelings, and writings. Community building is a two-way street: it requires both hearing and being heard. If you are 1 person in a room of 10 people, you shouldn’t speak much more than 1/10 of the time; otherwise, you might start losing opportunities to learn from other members, and for them to hear you, too. 

Don’t think about this advice too deeply—certainly, do not time yourself every time you open your mouth. But, great communities are fostered when everyone takes turns sharing their work, and it can often be more rewarding to hear someone name their own experiences: it creates new doorways for connection, and allows you to share yourself more freely as well. 

3. Know That Every Writer Has a Different Journey

Some of us write poetry; others, fiction, nonfiction, drama, etc. 

Some of us have been writing for 40+ years and have Ph.Ds. Others are relatively new to writing. 

Some of us write in the Modernist vein; others are Postmodern. 

Some writers want to publish their sixth novel; others want to self-publish their first poetry collection; still others don’t plan on publishing at all.

The best online writing communities accommodate for the beautiful diversity of the writer’s path.

Every writer is on a different journey. The best online writing communities accommodate for the beautiful diversity of the writer’s path. Do not assume anything about anyone else’s journey, and don’t expect others to automatically get yours, either. The more you learn about other peoples’ writing lives, the more you might learn about your own, and what you want to achieve in your work. 

4. Celebrate All Successes

Writing is a lonely business. We come to community to lessen that loneliness. And one of the easiest ways to do this is to share and celebrate all successes. Keep this mindset in mind with both your own successes and others’. 

When other people share successes, engage with them and congratulate them on what they’ve accomplished. This is true whether the success is a publication, a breakthrough in their work, or even just making the time to sit down and write for 5 minutes. If someone shares a win they’re celebrating, celebrate it with them. And, if you ever find yourself feeling jealous or insecure about your own accomplishments, remember that writing is not a zero sum game: we are not competing against each other, and a high tide rises all boats.

When other people share successes, engage with them and congratulate them on what they’ve accomplished. Be in the habit of sharing your own successes as well, however small they may seem.

Be in the habit of sharing your own successes as well, however small they may seem. Don’t pooh-pooh what you accomplish. The more you share about your own journey and success, the more others will encourage you to keep going, and the better it feels to write and be writing with a supportive community. 

5. See Yourself as a Member, Not a Participant

You do not need permission to be a part of an online writing community.

Read that again.

You do not need permission. Don’t wait for someone to tell you that it’s okay to join, to participate, to be with other writers. 

It can be so easy to exclude yourself from a writing space. The excuses never end. Everyone is already friends with everyone, why do they need me? You might ask. Or, I don’t have anything of value to contribute, why should I join?

Everyone has something of value to contribute, including you.

You should join because those moments of hesitation are simply untrue. Everyone has something of value to contribute, including you. Even if you are new to writing, or haven’t read as many books, or don’t feel like you belong. You are a writer, you do contribute (just by being present!), and you deserve to have a community that supports and encourages you.

Any writing space that doesn’t make you feel seen or accepted is not worth your time. If someone tells you to ask for permission, run—successful writing communities do not demand any proof of worthiness, as you are already worthy. 

You do not need permission to be a part of an online writing community.

What We’ve Learned from Being Part of Online Writing Communities

Here are some thoughts from the Writers.com administrative team about how online writing communities have transformed our writing. 

Frederick Meyer: Online Writing Communities Transform Your Learning

Running the Writers.com community has exposed me to things that I wouldn’t have run into otherwise. 

For example, I got really into doing erasure poems because of a community member’s suggestion, and I wrote a couple of the poems that I’m happiest with that way. I wouldn’t even be writing poetry at all if I wasn’t part of this space. 

I wouldn’t even be writing poetry at all if I wasn’t part of this space.

When I look at a piece of published writing in the community, I really get a much deeper sense of it. I see a lot of perspectives. We looked at this poem set in a mid-20th century house that had a mother and a few children and then the father was always traveling and he was kind of like this distant presence, and they were talking about what it was like doing chores all day and waiting for any news from the outside world. And you know, the poem hit me however it hit me. And then people were talking about what their experience was like, you know, growing up in parts of the world that were similar, parts that were different. And by the end of it, I just felt like I understood the poem so much better and it really resonated with me in a different way. 

It’s very much this mind meld when reading poems. And you get like this entire kaleidoscope of perspectives on it.

I feel like people’s comments on my writing have always been constructive and also have pointed to the parts of the writing that aren’t satisfying with a lot of accuracy. I’ve really appreciated that, and it causes you to engage with the writing that other people like or, in my case, since I’m helping organize it, it’s something on my calendar where I’m going to be really prioritizing writing and literature with a group of people that I really trust and that I really like. 

it’s something on my calendar where I’m going to be really prioritizing writing and literature with a group of people that I really trust and that I really like.

So it’s been really rewarding and a lot of the time it’s oddly therapeutic. It’s been quite therapeutic on a number of occasions and some people have been very, very kind to me in various ways. That is one of those things that I don’t really know that I need in a way. So it’s been a really rich experience. I’m really glad to be doing it and I recommend it to anybody. 

It’s one of those things that I don’t really know that I need in a way.

—Frederick Meyer, Writers.com Director

Elle LaMarca: Online Writing Communities Transform Your Writing Life

I met my critique partner of 15 years in my first online creative writing course. So although that’s not specifically about a community, I think the idea of taking an online writing course as a way to start building your community is so beneficial. If you find people that you really connect with, how you read each other’s work, that can be the foundation of your own community. I still work with this person on a weekly basis, and it’s now been 15 years.

I always feel more motivated and more inspired to write my own work when I’m inside a community.

In my experience, as someone who’s been a part of several different writing communities, writing can often feel so lonely because you have to do the work and that doesn’t change. Like, you have to write the words yourself, but I always feel more motivated and more inspired to write my own work when I’m inside a community and I’m reading other people’s work, and I’m hearing about their experiences and their journeys as writers. That’s true whether I’m leading the community or just an active participant. Being around other writers physically or even online is motivating and I always write more. 

—Elle LaMarca, Writers.com Curriculum Specialist

Join the Writers.com Online Writing Community!

Your voice is a gift. Share it in the online writing community at Writers.com. All voices, perspectives, and ideas are respected and valued in our community of writers around the globe, and your presence will only make us stronger. 

Learn more here!

The post Best Online Writing Communities: How to Find Your Writers Group appeared first on Writers.com.

When I was first asked to write an article on the rules of poetry, I briefly short-circuited. There are no rules of poetry, I was about to say, that’s the whole point of writing it. 

Many of my fellow poets will tell you the same thing. It’s not that there aren’t principles of successful poetry, but to say there are rules implies a strict set of dos and don’ts—and any poem that doesn’t conform is, ultimately, not a poem.

I don’t believe that to be true, and I actually love poems that break the rules of poetry. Nonetheless, there are definitely worthwhile guidelines to know about, whether poets choose to follow them or break them intentionally.

Here, then, are the rules of poetry for contemporary poets, with examples of poems that follow the rules—and poems that break them. 

The Rules of Poetry for Contemporary Poets

Here are some rules you may have heard with regard to writing successful contemporary poetry: 

Rules of Poetry: Show, Don’t Tell

Alternately, to quote William Carlos Williams: “No ideas but in things.”

Poems ought to convey tangible experience.

What this means is that poems ought to convey tangible experience; they should uphold the primacy of imagery over abstraction. Images alone should convey a poem’s ideas, feelings, and attitudes. If the poem, or the speaker of the poem, names abstractions or tells you how it feels, then the poem is doing the work of interpretation for the reader, or else reducing the poem’s capacity for complexity by limiting its imagination.

Here’s a vivid short poem that does a great job of showing instead of telling, retrieved here: 

“In the Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound

Pound here combines a haiku-inspired approach to poetry with a sharp, surprising comparison. In two lines, the whole of Modernism feels present here: its cacophonies and discordances, and the melange of faces populating a subway station in the strange new urban world. 

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Break the Line on Verbs, Images, Breaths

Because line breaks differentiate poetry from prose, they are a primary tool for us to consider in our work. Line breaks introduce tensions, multiplicities, and complexities. The line break makes the line its own unit which, in coordination with the poem’s clauses and sentences, results in a kind of forward-moving tension that strings the work along to its conclusion. This is true for both free verse and formal work.

Line breaks introduce tensions, multiplicities, and complexities.

The conventional wisdom—one that was hammered into me in undergrad—was to end lines on important words, usually verbs or concrete images. This is an easy guide to follow, as it allows those important words to operate on two registers, both the line it sits in and the line that follows it. It also emphasizes those words to the reader. 

One professor once told me that you should be able to read the end words of a poem alone and grasp what the poem is getting at. (Of all the rules of poetry I’ve been taught, I might disagree with this one the most.)

An alternate way of approaching line breaks is to read the words out loud, and break the line wherever you take a natural breath—an idea present especially in the world of the Beats and of mindful poetry. This allows the poem to mimic human speech and thought, following your own intuition and relationship with language.

Here’s an example of a poem with concrete, intentional line breaks, retrieved here:

“Weather” by Linda Pastan

These line breaks are so good! I love the complicated syntax of a menace “opening” over the speaker’s childhood, that stanza break at “seems” (a subtle nod at the gulf of perception and reality), and that one-word line “dazzling”, which really, truly dazzles. 

Do Not Be Cloying, Mawkish, Maudlin, Schmaltzy; Avoid Sentimentality

Pardon the SAT words, but they all point towards the same idea: do not indulge too deeply in your feelings and emotions.

Do not indulge too deeply in your feelings and emotions.

It’s not that poetry doesn’t have capacity for intense emotion. But, when a poem magnifies emotions past a certain point, the work itself feels unserious or uninteresting. Big feelings aren’t quite so interesting as the contexts and conclusions that may come from them, but the poet, as an artist, knows how to select only the most relevant and interesting feelings so that they don’t engulf the point of the poem.

Here’s a poem that certainly has big feelings, but explores them in a way that feels genuine and real, retrieved here:

“We Have Not Long to Love” by Tennessee Williams

He’s more well known for his fiction and playwriting, but Williams here delivers an admirable poem, both for its lyricism and its soft yearning. He toes the line well: it would be far too schmaltzy to say “we’re all going to die and I’ll never love you the way I should”—but that’s not the sentiment here at all. What we get, really, is a brief and gorgeous rumination on the urgency of love, and how difficult it is to love despite its urgency. 

Avoid Redundancy and Redundant Amplification

This is pretty straightforward. Every word in a poem should be essential. If you can remove a word or a sentence, and the poem’s meaning and effect doesn’t change, remove it. Omit needless words.

Every word in a poem should be essential.

Repetition for the sake of amplification is sometimes useful, but if that repetition doesn’t contribute to the poem’s impact (or even distracts from it) then, again, remove it. Simplify the poem as much as possible—keeping in mind that to simplify is not, necessarily, to reduce complexity; we are simply searching for the simplest ways to express the most complex ideas.

Here’s a poem whose concision is felt deeply, yet whose repetition is essential, amplifying all the more its ideas, retrieved here:

“Poem” by Langston Hughes

This heartwrenching little poem doesn’t need many words to convey the depth and intensity of its feeling. Despite the fact that it largely dabbles in abstraction, it still has motion and movement to it: the friend goes away (dies), the poem returns to its starting point; the cycle of love and loss feels both brief and endless. 

Do Not Rhyme for the Sake of Rhyming

Contemporary poetry has a rather tortured relationship with rhyme and meter.

Now, it’s not as tortured as it used to be. The Beats, The New York School, and The Confessional Poets of mid-century steered English-language poetry further away from its highly architected past. Then, New Formalism came onto the American poetry scene and argued for a return to rhyming, metrical poems.

A period of the 1970s and 1980s are now called The Poetry Wars, in which New Formalists fought with everyone else to say that formal poetry deserves more space in the world of poetry and publishing. Those “wars” are too detailed to summarize, but the point I’m making is, it used to be even worse for formalist poets.

Nowadays, formal poetry is certainly more accepted in the poetry world. The canon has also expanded to include forms that don’t hail from the West, like the South Asian/Persian/Arabic Ghazal form or the Malaysian Pantoum. And I do see iambic pentameter in contemporary poetry journals from time to time, in poems that are really accomplished and exceptional.

The prevailing sentiment would be to not rhyme for the sake of rhyming. Sometimes, a poem that rhymes ends up with tortured language, language whose purpose is simply to rhyme and make grammatical sense—but not to reveal, illuminate, expound, complicate, or expand the poem’s possibilities.

The prevailing sentiment would be to not rhyme for the sake of rhyming.

In the formal poetry of yesteryear, every rhyming word accomplishes something essential and artistic; so, too, in the non-rhyming poetry of today. So when a poem rhymes just so that it can rhyme, the poem loses so many opportunities to push the boundaries of language, or to reveal something about the words that are rhymed. 

Of course, rhyme can also accentuate a poem’s movements, contribute to an interesting story, or even be dismantled for poetic effect. The point, again, is to rhyme with intention, whether it’s to highlight tensions and contrasts between ideas, to tell a great story in verse, or to reveal something through the poem’s own architecture.

Here’s an example of a New Formalist poem, so you can get a sense of contemporary rhythm and meter, retrieved here: 

“Sonnet On a Line From Vénus Khoury-Ghata” by Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker is a brilliant contemporary voice in formal poetry, able to write within virtually every type of form poem. What might differentiate this sonnet from classical variations of the form is its syntax: those hard stops and punctuations that occur mid-line feel distinctly modern, interrupting the flow of the language with intention. A successful poem will negotiate the tension between the sentence and the line to produce more complex meanings. And, of course, these 10- and 11-syllable lines scan beautifully, with end-rhymes that do not impede the flow of the work, but rather fit within the poem’s aesthetic whole (even when the rhymes themselves start to slant).

Learn more about forms of poetry here:

https://writers.com/what-is-form-in-poetry 

Seek Aesthetic Unity

Lastly, and briefly, a successful poem in the contemporary sense will have some form of aesthetic unity. By this, I mean that all aspects of the poem correspond to something central. There’s a gestalt that forms only when every element is present and placed intentionally in the work. 

All aspects of the poem correspond to something central.

This might look like a poem relying on the same categories of image. Conversely, a poem whose subject matter is fragmented or disjointed might also include fragmentation in its word choice and line breaks.

However the poem strives for this unity, contemporary poetry often strives for it.

Here’s a poem that has this unity of effect in action, retrieved here:

“Keeping Things Whole” by Mark Strand

Is absence an aesthetic? Certainly it is in this poem, whose negotiations with self and place move swiftly through sharp, bright line breaks. The movement of the speaker reflects the movement of this poem, whose repetitions feel like ways of filling the empty space of the speaker’s own body, of the poem’s own brevity. 

Other Contemporary Rules of Poetry

The list of dos and don’ts can be rather tedious, perhaps even nonexhaustive. Nonetheless, here’s an unfinished assemblage of guidelines I’ve been given over the years.

• Avoid lofty, abstract words like “soul”. If everyone interprets the meaning of a word in dramatically different ways, it has no useful effect in the poem. 
• Words that ring of yesteryear are best avoided. These include, but are not limited to: Oer, eterne, alas, hark, heretofore, afar, ere, forswear, forsooth, prithee, anon, nought, perchance, and aye. 
• Poems should always be written left-flush, unless there is an artistic reason for using indentation or right-flush lines, but never write an entire poem in which the line is centered on the center of the page.
• Starting a poem or an aside with “once” to tell a story from the past is convenient, but rather overdone.
• Metaphors can lend themselves to effective poetry, but a metaphor is not inherently poetic, and poetry overloaded with metaphors and similes will likely falter under the weight of comparison. 
• “Untitled” is, in fact, a title, and not a very effective one. Unless  you have intention behind “Untitled,” give your poem a more intentional title. 
• Do not write in a poem what is best expressed in prose. 
• Do not preach, proselytize, or try to be didactic in poetry. 
• Although poetry requires skill and intellect, do not write poems with the intent of being praised for your genius, or with the intent of becoming famous online. 

Against the Rules of Poetry Craft

Despite the fact that I’m a workshop organizer and educator—or, perhaps, because I am those things—I have an ambivalent relationship to these rules of poetry in the 21st century.

This isn’t to say that the rules of poetry are wrong (though there are some that I dislike), or that contemporary poetry is worse than older poetic movements (though individual poems fail to live up to my standards). I just hate prescriptivism in general; I dislike formulaic art, and I think there is a difference between writing within constraints and writing constrained poetry. The rules that ought to inform the former so often produce the latter.

There is a difference between writing within constraints and writing constrained poetry. The rules that ought to inform the former so often produce the latter.

It’s not that these rules are wrong. It’s that they’re rules. And it’s not that rules are always bad; it’s that, especially in art, they should not be treated with such absolute power as they’re given.

My favorite poems—the ones that challenge me, delight me, and show me new possibilities in language—break rules. They are daring, stubborn, perhaps even iconoclastic. These poems know what the rules are and know when to follow their own internal logic instead.

I like it when a poem has ungainly line breaks, or lines that are way too long for the page. I like it when a poem is a bit over-indulgent, because, really, why should the poem moderate itself? And I like it when poems are highly conceptual, or when poems begin in iambic pentameter and end unmetered, and I LOVE when a poem cannot be easily categorized.

A Poem That Breaks the Rules

I’m going to share with you now a poem that breaks some rules. You are welcome to hate it—several of my friends did—but let me at least tell you why I love it, too.

“Glove Money” by Sophia Dahlin

Retrieved from The Yale Review.

The Broken Rules of Poetry

Let me acknowledge the rules that this poem is breaking:

1. Effective line breaks and end-words—that first stanza uses some form of the word “hand” as the end-word 4 times. The second stanza has more variations on hands, palms, gloves, etc. as its end-words.
2. No Ideas But In Things—There are a few times when I feel like the speaker is interpreting images for me, like in the line “I mean when I despised my own thin / smallboned chest”.
3. Avoid redundancy—that first stanza in particular expresses the same idea in a number of ways, but the idea itself doesn’t evolve much. Nor is the amplifying effect all that significant, except maybe to highlight some sort of absurd feeling around money.
4. Seek aesthetic unity—What is with this poem’s weird diversions? First the fun fact about “cashier”, then Lance Armstrong (????), and then that third stanza, which has, on a first read, zero relationship to the first two stanzas.

It’s this last rule that, I think, is the most divisive in this poem. I run a poetry writing group and recently used this as a model poem for one of our prompts. About half of the group appreciated the poem’s zaniness; the other half said, among other things, that The Yale Review “must be going downhill.”

I, for one, love this poem. It is basically two poems in a trench coat, with that break between the second and third stanza being comically, cosmically large. The poem leaps across that break on wobbly footing, and what we end up with is a poem that, to use Dahlin’s own words, “would drive a workshop insane.”

What that giant leap did for me is make me pay really close attention to how these two seemingly unrelated sections are connected. A fun exercise you could even do is reread the poem without the first two stanzas, so that it is just “Glove Money // Once, before I knew I was a kind of / lesbian…”

What I notice, then, is a number of really interesting binaries. For example:

The poem is also, I think, linked by a fear of touch. In the first two stanzas, the speaker desires gloves because they do not want to touch money, but the speaker also mentions not wanting to touch other peoples’ hands if those hands have touched money, resulting in a kind of fear-by-proxy—that we are stained and tarnished by money, and our touch, thus, is tainted. 

But then the third stanza contains a different fear, the kind of sublime fear that informs erotic desire: to touch the object of our wanting and thus be irrevocably transformed by touching that object. (Or, by being unable to touch it.)

As for the other rules this poem breaks, I think the poem maintains its unique voice and perspective because it eschews those rules. I much prefer a poem whose voice adds texture to the contemporary canon—rather than a poem who blends in so seamlessly with contemporary aesthetics that it is, ultimately, forgettable.

Other Poems That Break the Rules of Poetry

Here are links to some other poems that, I think, break some 21st century rules of poetry—and are all the more better for them.

• “Tomorrow, No, Tomorrower” by Bradley Trumpfheller 
  • A poem that could be described as excessively sentimental. 
• “Death, Yes, Life” by Lily Greenberg
  • There’s no explicit rule that you can’t mention the craft elements of poetry within a poem itself, but I find it daring that this poem tells the reader that its images are not metaphors or symbols—a controversial act of interpreting itself to the reader.
• “Prayer” by Galway Kinnell 
  • Poems that try to be universal usually falter—it’s much easier to find the universal in the particular. But this poem’s vast, abstract appreciation for what is does, indeed, feel like a prayer. 
• “The Problem of Writing Poems in the Shape of Deciduous Trees” by Brian Bilston
  • Shape-based poems are usually kind of gauche—overly constricting language and relying on geometry to convey thought. And this one is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek pun… and yet, I’m charmed somehow. 
• “Poem” by Alice Notley
  • Poem, in general, makes for a horrible title for a poem. We know it’s a poem. We see the poem on the page. What a waste of language space! And yet… the “anonymity” of this Poem poem somehow makes Poem a fitting poem title. 

Tips For Breaking The Rules of Poetry

If you write poems that follow the rules, great! If you want to break those rules, that’s great, too. Here are a few pieces of advice:

Break the Rules of Poetry With Intention

If you laugh at a funeral, people will notice. Similarly, if you do something in a poem that goes against convention, it will draw the reader’s attention towards that broken convention. You don’t want to commit a faux pas. 

What this means is, if you plan to do something against-the-grain in a poem, it should be done with artistic intent. Disliking the rule is perfectly fine, but breaking it must come with some sort of creative purpose.

For example, if all of your lines end on weak words, don’t do it just because you hate concrete language. Do it because it contributes to the poem’s meaning. A great example of this exact broken rule is Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool”, whose weak end words signify a weakness of selfhood and identity in the poem’s hooky subjects:

We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks

Follow the Logic of Your Voice

When a poem breaks a rule successfully, its success is found in the uniqueness of the poet’s own voice. 

This advice is a lot easier said than done. How do you measure voice? How do you know when to follow it, and how do you follow it? 

What “voice” is is the inimitable quality of your work, which can only be honed through your own unique relationship to language. It means avoiding cliché, figuring out your own perspective on the world, and finding the best language to transmit that perspective. These things can’t really be taught—they are honed simply through the poet’s practice—but the more you know your voice, the easier it will be to break the rules in favor of your own art. 

Read Rule Breaking Poetry 

My favorite poems are the ones that make me think, you can do that in a poem? 

The more poetry you read and encounter, the more likely you are to encounter this same reaction, and the more you will want to write poems that challenge the limits of language.

Here’s a poem I read recently that gave me the above response—I love it for its speaker-as-observer lens and its wandering, universal humanity. Retrieved here.

Everything All at Once by Oliver Baez Bendorf

Interrogate the Rules As You’re Using Them

Why does this line need to be broken on the verb? What’s wrong with using the word “soul” in this stanza? Why can’t I cry in my own poem about death? 

Oftentimes, these questions have obvious answers, but sometimes they don’t. And it’s those moments when the reason for the rule isn’t apparent that are windows into further possibility. The rules exist to help you write successful poetry, but when the poem feels more successful without the constraint of those rules, opt to break them instead. 

One Last Thing…

I really like this article from LitHub about the capital-C Craft of literature, and when to ignore Craft rules. It’s written for a fiction writing audience, but I think a lot of the notes and ideas presented here are equally applicable to poets: 

https://lithub.com/25-essential-notes-on-craft-from-matthew-salesses/

More Advice on Writing Poetry

Here are more articles, guides, and resources for writing successful poetry:

• How to Write a Poem
• What is Poetry?
• How to Start a Poem 
• Finding Poetry Inspiration
• Becoming a Poet

Break the Rules of Poetry at Writers.com 

At Writers.com, we teach the rules just as often as we break them. Take a look at our upcoming online poetry writing courses, where you’ll receive expert feedback and instruction on every poem you write.

The post The Rules of Poetry for Contemporary Poets appeared first on Writers.com.

This article guides you through the current state of literary journals and poetry websites. In addition to our recommendations for the best places to submit poetry online, we break down and categorize different types of poetry journals based on what and how they publish.

Want to get your poetry published? Check out these great poetry magazines and journals.

40 of the Best Places to Submit Poetry Online

There are a lot of poets writing a lot of poetry right now. As such, different literary journals cater towards different movements and lineages happening in the realm of contemporary poetry. The following categories are not authoritative, as they’re largely subjective and based on our own views of the modern poetry world. But, we break down the best places to submit poetry online into these groupings:

• Journals for new and emerging poets
• Off-beat and anti-literary poetry journals
• Journals focused on poets of marginalized experiences
• Prestigious journals founded in the 2000s
• Elite journals—academic and otherwise

There’s no set advice about where to submit your work—really, it has to do with your goals for publishing, the kind of work you’re interested in publishing, and how you see yourself in lineage with contemporary poetry. But, we recommend that you always read a journal before submitting to it, and that you do not take rejection personally. It happens to all poets, all the time.

Now, here are some of the best places to submit poetry online.

8 Great Poetry Journals for New and Emerging Poets

If you consider yourself a “new” or “emerging” poet—meaning that you have not been writing and publishing for a long time, but want to build a portfolio—the following poetry journals are great homes to consider for your work.

Egg+Frog

Egg+Frog is a literary journal based out of the United Kingdom, posting eclectic fiction and poetry with a wide range of genres and influences. The journal happily publishes new and emerging writers, and occasionally runs writing contests as well. Most submitters receive responses on their submissions in 2-3 weeks, and the journal often makes editorial suggestions before publication.

Ghost City Review

Ghost City Review, an offshoot of Ghost City Press, is regularly accepting poetry submissions from new and established writers. Their tastes are eclectic and embrace both the contemporary and the experimental. Ghost City also sponsors the literary community and remains active in uplifting other publications and keeping money inside the publishing world, so be sure to check out their online poetry submissions process as well as their free e-book series!

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New Millennium Writings

New Millennium Writings is a literary journal headquartered in Tennessee. It has published many famous poets and writers, yet prides itself on being the first home for many new and emerging writers, too. New Millennium Writings emphasizes a blind submission process, so only the work itself is appraised.

Chestnut Review

Chestnut Review publishes poetry and prose online quarterly, as well as a yearly anthology of their past year’s work. All submissions are responded to within 30 days, and submitters also have the option to pay for feedback on the work itself. Chestnut Review pays $120 for all accepted works of poetry and prose.

Eunoia Review

Eunoia Review is one of the fastest poetry journals on the internet, as it responds to all submissions within 24 hours. Their poetry tastes range from the eclectic to the storytelling, and they are always open for online poetry submissions.

Sky Island Journal

Headquartered in New Mexico, Sky Island Journal takes its name from isolated mountains that jut unexpectedly out from desert land. The journal does not boast specific tastes but is simply interested in publishing well-crafted poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Submissions are open year-round, and the journal publishes quarterly.

Stirring: A Literary Collection

Stirring: A Literary Collection is one of the oldest continuously publishing literary journals on the internet. What they publish is in the name: Works of poetry and prose that stir the reader’s emotions. The journal publishes quarterly and is a great home for emerging and established poets.

3Elements Literary Review

3Elements Literary Review posts a call for submissions each quarter. All poems have to involve the three elements that the journal chooses. For example, the Winter 2025 elements are “Compass, Rocking Horse, Underpass.” 3Elements publishes poems that combine these elements in effective and unusual ways, and this publication provides a great and challenging prompt.

6 Off-Beat and “Anti-Literary” Poetry Journals

If what you write doesn’t conform to contemporary literary standards, the following journals are some of the best places to submit poetry online. We make no judgment about what those standards are—but these journals appreciate poetry that is alternative, resists conformity, and eschews convention.

HAD

Most literary journals publish on a regular cadence. HAD does its own thing: the site randomly puts out calls for submissions that are capped at a low number. For example, it recently had a call for list poems: submissions opened at 11am Eastern on August 3rd, with a cap of 150 submissions.

As such, HAD is always publishing poetry and prose to different themes, with decisions made by different guest editors. Get on their mailing list or follow their social media to hear when their next call for submissions will open. Be sure to put the date and time in your calendar, and have your submission ready before the window opens: it typically closes within the first 3 minutes.

Rejection Letters

Rejection Letters began as a site to publish fictional rejection letters from other literary journals. With this ethos in mind, the journal has expanded into publishing poetry and prose that is “absurd, heartbreaking, hysterical”—and might be likely to receive rejection elsewhere. The journal is periodically open for submissions and typically responds in 2-8 weeks.

JAKE

JAKE literally bills itself as “The Anti-Literary Magazine”. The journal often describes itself in the third-person masculine: “He plans to read every piece that comes in within 1 month.” JAKE publishes poetry and prose with broken rules, bad taste, and nonconformity as his guiding principles.

Taco Bell Quarterly

Taco Bell Quarterly is an infrequent literary journal about Taco Bell. Every published poem and story on the site has at least some reference to the fast food chain. The journal’s online presence can be strange and offputting—they really don’t like The Paris Review, and their Venmo handle is @ParisReview—but TBQ pays all published poets $100, and it offers feedback to all submissions regardless of acceptance.

hex literary

hex literary (stylized undercase) publishes speculative prose poetry and flash fiction with an emphasis on the weird, uncanny, and uncategorizable. The journal is based out of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and puts out semi-regular calls for submissions. If you write poetry with speculative, magical, sci-fi, or horror elements, or else love to bend genres, check them out!

Does It Have Pockets?

Does It Have Pockets? emphasizes uncategorizable poetry and literature: pieces of writing that synthesize unexpected things or carry unexpected baggage. Submissions are always open, with fee-free submission periods available in February and August.

6 Poetry Journals for Poets of Marginalized or Unique Experiences

The following poetry journals are the best places to submit poetry online for poets that have traditionally been excluded from the poetic canon. These include journals for LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and disabled poets.

Foglifter

Based out of San Francisco, Foglifter publishes poetry and literature by and for LGBTQ+ writers. In addition to both print and digital publications, Foglifters also puts out anthologies and chapbooks, themed calls for submissions, and it frequently uplifts new exceptional writing in the queer and trans communities.

Bellevue Literary Review

Few literary journals can say they’re run out of hospitals. But Bellevue Literary Review publishes work about our experiences of illness and health—including the perspectives of both patients and caregivers alike. Bellevue itself is one of the oldest public hospitals in the United States, based in New York City, and offers care and treatment to both physical and mental illness. As such, they’re a fantastic journal for exploring all types of illness, both within and outside of the medical system.

Black Warrior Review

Published out of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Black Warrior Review (BWR) centers the work of marginalized poets and writers. Much of the poetry they publish is experimental and genre non-conforming—a reflection of the necessity of work that comes from the margins of society. BWR also publishes an online-only journal, Boyfriend Village, which supplements their bi-annual print issues.

Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature

Wordgathering is a literary journal interested in poetry and prose from writers with disabilities. The journal undertakes a broad definition of disability; it actively encourages submissions from “D/deaf, D/disabled, Crip, Mad, Chronically Ill, Spoonie, Sick, and Neurodivergent (including Autistic) writers.” The journal is bi-annual and open access, seeking to expand the canon of disabled voices and bring new awareness to disability perspectives.

Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art and Thought

Headquartered in Southwest Minnesota, Yellow Medicine Review published poetry and literature by Native American writers. The journal is solely interested in indigenous perspectives, and defines indigenous “universally as representative of all pre-colonial peoples.” The journal publishes interesting and valuable poetry every Spring and Fall, often around a certain theme or guiding principle.

Anti-Heroin Chic

Anti-Heroin Chic publishes poets of all identities and experiences, but has a certain preference for poetry about addiction and recovery. As such, they are interested in poetry about the pain that drives people to addiction, and about the path out from there. They also want poetry from anyone who feels rejected by the mainstream, and they publish new poetry daily.

8 Prestigious Digital Poetry Journals

The following literary journals were established in the Internet Age, but make no mistake—they publish groundbreaking and innovative work. These are some of the best places to submit poetry online to. As such, these journals are more prestigious and harder to get published in, but are also great sources of inspiration.

The Adroit Journal

The Adroit Journal’s mission is to sponsor the next generation of poets, so their resources are often dedicated to youth poets and college-age writers. They seek works that are bold, eclectic, obscure, and daring. In addition to their poetry publications, The Adroit Journal also offers scholarships and awards for young and emerging writers.

Frontier Poetry

As the name suggests, Frontier Poetry publishes poetry on the frontiers of craft and language. The journal admires poetry that’s both contemporary and classical, as long as the poem advances the craft of poetry itself. Frontier is especially friendly toward new and emerging poets, and it hosts several contests every year with awards ranging from $100-$300, making them a great poetry magazine that pays.

Only Poems

To use their own words, Only Poems features poets, not poems. The site regularly features both emerging and established poets and frequently offers new contests, themes, and opportunities for poetry publication. Be sure to also check out their fellowships and learning programs!

Palette Poetry

Palette Poetry publishes great poetry from emerging and established poets alike. They are well known for their high-paying contests and well-read features, so the journal itself is rather selective. Be sure to also check out their craft resources, which offers great advice for writing and publishing poetry.

ONE ART: a journal of poetry

ONE ART: a journal of poetry borrows its name from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem by the same name. They publish excellent work with a preference for free verse poetry, and they do a great job of publishing both emerging and established poets. Several of Writers.com’s instructors and administrators have published poetry with them, and all of us have great things to say about their kind and generous editors.

Poetry Online

Poetry Online publishes poetry online. This journal is a nonprofit dedicated to uplifting smart and experimental poetry, including visual poetry and cine-poetry. Every month, the journal opens up fee-free submissions for one day only, capped at the first 40 submissions.

The Rumpus

The Rumpus publishes poetry, fiction, cultural critique, interviews, book reviews, comics, and any other form of buzzy writing happening in contemporary literature. As a result, they are a great home for contemporary poets looking for a wide audience. They frequently open and close for submissions depending on their backlog, as they receive many submissions from poets year-round. (Our own instructor, Elissa Bassist, edits their Funny Women column!)

Strange Horizons

Although it is known for its fiction, Strange Horizons also publishes what’s called speculative poetry—a broadly defined type of poetry that introduces speculative or unreal elements. They are regularly open for submissions and love poetry that pushes form and language to invite the surreal, fantastic, and speculative into it.

The 12 Best Places to Submit Poetry Online

This final section of poetry journals names publications that are elite and highly sought after. These reputable spaces have been publishing poetry for decades and can list some of the most famous poets in their archives.

As you might expect, these journals are also very exclusive and hard to gain publication from. Many of them are affiliated with elite universities and periodicals. These publications consistently set the tone for contemporary poetry: its aesthetics, interests, and ideals of poetic craft.

These are the best places to submit poetry online. We hope to see your name here someday!

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is not a poetry journal, it is a weekly magazine published through Condé Nast. Nonetheless, it publishes highly reputable poetry, making it a poetry space with large circulation. The New Yorker has been publishing since 1925, and it receives a huge number of online poetry submissions annually, which is why poets often wait 23 months before hearing back. Publication here is a high achievement.

POETRY

Published through the Poetry Foundation, Poetry Magazine is the oldest monthly poetry journal in the English-speaking world. Poetry Magazine receives over 150,000 submissions each year, making them a prized jewel of publication credits. The journal has a leaning toward traditional craft and academic styles, though more recent publications have sponsored more eclectic and experimental styles, too.

The Threepenny Review

The Threepenny Review opens for submissions January through April. They are notorious for being both highly selective and extremely quick on responding to submissions: most poets hear back within a few days. They publish astounding and top-notch work, so be sure to send them your best poems.

American Poetry Review

Take a look at the American Poetry Review, and you’ll see it’s filled with well-known contemporary poets. The journal publishes exceptional poetry every other month, and has been doing so since 1972. APR also publishes essays on poetry, as well as poetry collections from new and established poets alike.

The Kenyon Review

The Kenyon Review, a print and online poetry journal out of Kenyon College, publishes craft-focused, language-advancing poetry. On top of its well-respected journal, The Kenyon Review is an active participant in the literary community, regularly hosting workshops, fellowships, internships, and other programs designed to educate the next generation of literary citizens.

Ploughshares

Ploughshares, produced out of Emerson College, puts out quarterly publications of highly literary poetry. Submissions to Ploughshares should engage in the contemporary literary conversation and be submitted between June 1st and January 15th.

The Paris Review

The Paris Review has been publishing exceptional poetry and prose since 1953. They’re known for being prestigious, literary, and occasionally experimental, often oscillating between conventional and experimental forms. Like many of the journals in this list, The Paris Review can celebrate that many of today’s famous English-language writers have published in their ranks.

Boulevard

Although it’s only been around since 1985, Boulevard also has a storied history among the literary elite: many well-known poets and writers tout it as one of the best journals publishing in the U.S. today. The journal often publishes well-known poets over emerging ones, but seeks to champion any poetry that is formally inventive. Boulevard opens for submissions November through May.

The Yale Review

The Yale Review (TYR) isn’t prestigious just because of its Ivy League name, though that certainly helps. Actually, TYR is the oldest literary journal in the United States, having been in circulation since 1819, though its current name dates back to 1892. The journal publishes a wide range of poetry, and is typically only open for submissions at the end of summer—it reads and selects poems throughout the academic year.

Virginia Quarterly Review

Established in 1925, Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR) has been publishing excellent poetry for over a century. The magazine has published some of the most celebrated poets in the 20th and 21st centuries, but also expresses interest in poetry from emerging voices. The journal receives a high number of submissions each year when it is open between August 1st and 15th.

AGNI

AGNI, the official literary journal of Boston University, loves poetry that doesn’t care about “what poems should do.” They publish works that are innovative and evolving, yet still cogent in both craft and language. AGNI’s reading period opens up on September 1st and runs until May 31st.

Ninth Letter

Based out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Ninth Letter publishes poetry and prose both online and in print. The journal is frequently ranked at the top of sites reviewing contemporary literary journals and is known for work that is fresh, engaging, and breaks convention. Check out their submissions page for both print and online publishing opportunities, some of which are themed!

Other Resources for Finding the Best Places to Submit Poetry Online

The world of poetry publishing is rather vast. Luckily, there a number of online resources that help you sort through the noise and find great homes for your work. We recommend you check out the following:

• Chill Subs—An incredible database of contemporary publishing. Chill Subs allows you to sort through poetry journals based on details like their following, the nature of their submissions (Themed? Open? Limited?), and what their overall vibe is.
• Duotrope—A site built on user-reported data that offers insights into a literary journal’s publishing opportunities, selectiveness, and guidelines. Some literary journals also accept submissions via Duotrope.
• Submittable—Many literary journals accept submissions via this comprehensive submission manager, which also lets you search for upcoming deadlines and publishing opportunities.
• Bookfox—which has a ranking of poetry journals based on how many poems have been published in The Best American Poetry.
• Clifford Garstand—which also ranks poetry journals, but through a more comprehensive mix of anthologized and award-winning published poems.

Resources for Poetry Submissions

If you want to learn more about preparing and submitting poetry for publication, check out these guides:

• How to Get Poetry Published
• How to Submit to Literary Journals
• How to Publish a Poetry Book

Resources For Writing Successful Poetry

Lastly, here are some resources for writing and revising publication-ready poetry:

• What is Poetry?
• How to Write a Poem
• What is Form in Poetry?
• How to Write a Free Verse Poem
• The Art of Revising Poetry

Write Submission-Ready Poetry at Writers.com

Looking to put your work into the world? The classes at Writers.com are designed to help you write, revise, and submit poetry for publication. Check out our online poetry writing courses and write your best poetry yet!

The post 40 of the Best Places to Submit Poetry Online appeared first on Writers.com.

Our selves are collages of the people that impact us; we are products of every person we have met. To put this in familiar terms, no man is an island.

No woman, either. Barbara Henning’s recently published poetic memoir Girlfriend is a gorgeous homage to the women that have shaped, influenced, and informed Henning’s life. The subjects of these poems range from teachers and family members to friends, authors, and fictional characters. Through the stories of these women, Henning’s story emerges: an eldest daughter in working-class Detroit; a Bohemian, a yogi, an artist, a mother, and a lifelong lover of literature. Throughout Girlfriend, the death of Henning’s mother, which happens during her childhood, haunts many of the relationships and connections explored throughout the work.

Accompanying the prose poems that compose this collection are photos of the women, many of which were taken by Henning herself, and all of which act as windows into the times and places of Henning’s subjects. 

I loved reading Girlfriend. Despite knowing Barbara for several years as a phenomenal instructor at Writers.com, I learned a lot about her life and felt like I had actually just lived it myself—if only for a moment. I’m grateful for the chance to have read it, and for her willingness to do an interview about Girlfriend with Writers.com.

Below the interview is a recording of the Zoom reading we hosted with Barbara, as well as links to her books and other writing.

Interview: Girlfriend by Barbara Henning

Sean Glatch: Girlfriend is a poetic memoir, or a memoir written in poetry. This feels like a relatively contemporary approach to memoir, where the work is written in essays / vignettes / snippets, rather than attempting a longer, more coherent narrative (as in a novel). What did the format of this collection allow you to do as you approached this memoir project?

Barbara Henning: One of the ideas behind the book is that our stories are not just about us but about our relationships with others. I didn’t start with a form or genre in mind other than loosely planning at first to write prose poems about my childhood friends. Years ago, I wrote a few sketches and then a few years back I decided to pick it up again. For many years I had been writing poetry using collage, disjunctive breaks and interruptions in poetic prose/prose poems. These techniques eventually became almost second nature. So after a while I could fluidly think and/or construct the poem or prose with collage and interruptions, while still seeming like a stream of consciousness. I had these ideas in mind as I remembered my relationships with girl and women friends, as well as characters and authors.

Our stories are not just about us but about our relationships with others.

SG: Girlfriend is comprised of prose poems. I’ve taken your Poetic Prose: The Prose Poem course, and I remember in the epiphany section, I think you talked about accessing the unconscious to generate sudden epiphany. What did writing these poems in prose allow you to access?

BH: In that course, in one assignment we experimented with epiphanies that are so subtle you might call them “anti-epiphanies,” like James Joyce’s. We also worked with dreams and the unconscious in another unit on surrealism. I hope most of my endings are subtle, more like anti- epiphanies. I think you are asking why I wrote these particular prose poems in prose rather than using lines. I didn’t want the flow of words, images, ideas to be interrupted by line ends. I didn’t want to highlight the phrases and words. I wanted the reader to be swept up in the continuity from one thought to the next, and then notice the rhythm or repetition or disjunction. I intended each piece to be like a mind reminiscing about a particular friend.

SG: Girlfriend explores the women who have influenced you throughout your life, from childhood to present. What did you learn about your own life after having written the prose poems in this collection?

BH: Through my friend’s lives, I saw myself and who I was and how I related to others. I think I may have become more forgiving of myself and of others. I learned that often I have been attracted to friends who experienced similar losses or difficulties, especially in my youth—even in the books I was reading. When I gathered together the memories about a particular friend, I often realized how much we need each other, and I often felt a surge of gratitude. I was reaffirmed in something I had witnessed and learned as a child with my grandmother and aunts; it is usually, but not always, women who support each other during difficulties. Also, I learned that I could access memory through my imagination in the same way a dream revises memory but might catch the truth of it. It might not be identical to what happened, but still there is a truth revealed. Throughout my life, and even now, it is my women friends or my sisters who I can call up and talk through a difficulty, or just to ask for a recipe.

I learned that I could access memory through my imagination in the same way a dream revises memory but might catch the truth of it.

SG: A few ending lines in Girlfriend really stuck with me. For example, in “Virginia”, you end with: “…who now, without realizing it, carry along the stream of their familial consciousness.” And, in “Martine”: “I lost the child, or he lost me, but if you had not said these words, I might never have loved in the way I loved.” There is something here, the blending I think of the individual and collective, the conscious and unconscious, the personal and political.

BH: I think the blending you are speaking of is very present in “Virginia.” In the line you quote, I’m referring to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and I’m thinking about the way we pass along our language with each other through dialogue, from mother to child, friend to friend, ancestor to the next generation. Our consciousness is composed of our dialogue with others. The minds and lives of the characters in Woolf’s novel (based on her family) are forever shaped by her family’s way of talking. And my consciousness is shaped by the language exchange with my family and friends and the books I’ve read. We are all related. And maybe the link from one friend to another in Girlfriend is one way of charting that. With the last line in “Martine”, I’m dwelling on something Martine Bellen said to me that I took into my thinking, and it then influenced a decision I made. Her language and thought became intertwined with my language, and mine with the language of my mother and so forth and so on.

I tried not to dominate the poems with too much about myself.

SG: One thing that intrigues me about Girlfriend is that the “I” feels incidental to the work. Certainly, the “I” is present, but in all of these prose poems, you’re more the lens than the subject, and so a portrait of who you are emerges almost like an aperture. How did you situate yourself in this collection, and what did you learn about yourself through this approach?

BH: I tried not to dominate the poems with too much about myself. Some are more focused on me and some less, but I tried to stay mostly focused on the girl/woman friend and on our relationship, inserting something now and again about me—something we shared or something that drew me toward the friendship. I guess you’re right, part of remembering in this project involves seeing myself with the other, so maybe I’m kind of functioning as a writer-witness. In a way these are also like letters to the person I’m remembering. Maybe they are also a little like what Frank O’Hara referred to in his playful essay “Personism”: “one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself).” I hadn’t thought about that before. I’ve always been attracted to the New York School poetics: personal, intimate, and experimental.

SG: A somewhat obvious observation about the work is that the prose poems become much longer as the collection goes on—of course, because as you age, your stories grow more complex, and because you probably remember more about the women you knew as an adult, not as a child. Do you find that the speaker in these poems evolves in other ways as the work progresses?

BH: Well, as I got older, I read more books, became better educated and more situated in my life as a poet which entailed more complex friendships. I raised children and maneuvered my way through ordinary and extraordinary difficulties. That must come through in the length and complexity of the poems. Some of my friendships began when I was in my early twenties and have continued until today. So that’s a lot of time. But maybe the poems are longer because I have always been very talkative, and my mind is full of thoughts. The older I get, the more words I have . . .

SG: What role does memory play in this collection? Did you find yourself having to speculate or guess at details in any of these poems, especially the poems set in your childhood?

BH: My goal has been to tell truth, but if possible, not to cause harm to others. Therefore, I shared many of these stories with my friends. And there was always something, some minor error in memory pointed out. If my reaction was – Oh yeah, I remember that – then I made a change. If I felt it was more important to stay true to memory, I stayed with the error. When I couldn’t remember something and I didn’t know how to find the person or I didn’t want to find the person, I imagined what I couldn’t remember. As I explain above, I believe imagination holds a truth of its own. Possibly when we dream or imagine, we might even be more accurate. I encourage my students to use their imagination combined with memory to write their memoirs.

Imagination holds a truth of its own. Possibly when we dream or imagine, we might even be more accurate

SG: Most of Girlfriend is chronological, but you reserve the end of the collection to talk about your family, including your mother and daughter. Why did you situate family at the very end, rather than embedded in the work’s chronology as with the rest of the poems?

BH: My sisters have been with me most of my life. If I had put their stories (our stories) in the beginning section, I would have given away what happens later. The book wouldn’t be as engaging for readers. I wanted the conflict and difficulties to open up a little at a time. My mother stays present with me throughout—even though she died when I was eleven—so it also felt right to have her at the end. Also, there’s a way that the narrator (the author, me) is learning about herself as she writes. Maybe having family at the end is a little climactic.

SG: You are currently at work on a companion poetic memoir, tentatively titled Boys & Men. Does your approach to this collection differ from your approach to Girlfriend?

BH: The shape is the same, prose and photos. The collage-like structure of a mind reminiscing is similar. The point of view is the same, a first person speaking to the subject. I have had some very close friendships with men as well as women, and these poems may be similar to those in Girlfriend. One thing I realized today while working on “Boys and Men” is that many of them are less homage-like than those in Girlfriend. Maybe the reader will see something I don’t. One thing—when I’m writing about men with whom I’ve had passionate and intimate sexual relations, the tension and tone is different. In 2001, my teacher in India warned me away from further sexual relations except in marriage. If you want to meditate, you don’t want to be chasing along after your desires. I didn’t listen to him, however. I continued along that bumpy here-and-now path. When I’m finished with this book, perhaps I’ll have learned something about myself and men, something that I don’t yet know because I haven’t yet finished the book.

SG: What advice do you have for Writers.com students interested in the project of a poetic memoir?

Make lists of events/people/places, memories that return and return, moments that were important to your life.

BH: There are many ways to write memoir. An interesting book to read is Joe Brainard’s I Remember published by Granary Books. It’s poetry and its prose and it’s easy to read. It’s a beautiful book. He writes lists of memories, all starting with “I remember…” One sentence or one paragraph each and the catalogue builds, not chronologically, but following memory. I just remembered it today and I’m going use it in the memoir class I’m teaching in the spring.

Advice for students? Off the top of my head. Make lists of events/people/places, memories that return and return, moments that were important to your life. One by one, write the story. Write the sketch. Write the flash. Write the poem. Write the image. Write the analysis. Let them accumulate. You will have a draft.

Recording: Barbara Henning Reading from Girlfriend

We had the pleasure of hosting Barbara for a poetry reading with Writers.com. Watch the full recording here:

More About Girlfriend

Buy Girlfriend here, from Hanging Loose Press.

Read selections of Girlfriend from MER here.

Read MER‘s review of Girlfriend here.

Read The Arts Fuse‘s review of Girlfriend here.

Learn more about Barbara’s writing and teaching.

The post Interview: Barbara Henning on “Girlfriend” and the Craft of Poetic Memoir appeared first on Writers.com.

When a poem dwells on loss or lamentation, it is known as an elegy.

Elegiac poetry is a millennia-old tradition, and examples of elegy poems predate Ancient Greece, when the term first came into use. Poets looking to explore loss, death, or serious topics in their work may want to learn how to write an elegy poem.

In the same way that poetry has changed greatly since Ancient Greece, elegies, too, have evolved since their Classical days. Let’s look at the form then, both historical and present, with contemporary elegy poem examples and tips for crafting new work.

But first, what is an elegy poem?

What is an Elegy Poem?

The definition of an elegy poem has changed through history. Nowadays, elegy poetry is defined by a rumination or lamentation on loss, death, grief, or any other serious topic.

Nowadays, elegy poetry is defined by a rumination or lamentation on loss, death, grief, or any other serious topic.

If that strikes you as being a bit broadly defined, you’re not wrong. There’s debate within the realm of literary scholars as to what the term “elegy poem” properly refers to: are they poems on any serious topic, or only poems for the dead?

The Academy of American Poets defines the elegy as a poem strictly responding to the loss of a person or group. They note that the form is typically written in three stages of grief: lament, praise, and consolation or solace. Thus, elegies are not merely about the dead, but about consoling the reader about the subject’s death.

Conversely, contemporary elegies seem to eschew the consolatory aspect of the form’s history. Adele Bardazzi notes in “Maybe nothing is an elegy” that, since grief is both a collective force and a singular expression of one’s own deepest feeling, contemporary elegies resist genre categorization, electing instead to express the poet’s own unique grieving.

In other words, contemporary poems, by way of their resistance to easy categorization, have fractured how we might define elegiac poetry. So, instead of defining elegies by their preoccupation with death, it is better to define them as such:

Elegy poems are poems that explore the complexities of human grief.

The subject of that grief, and how the poet deals with it, are less important than the poem’s own contending with grief’s movements, textures, and singularity to the poet’s own emotional landscape.

Elegy poems are poems that explore the complexities of human grief.

A Brief History of Elegy Poems

Elegy in the Ancient World

Elegies are first recorded as involving death or grief, but what defined an elegy in antiquity was not its subject matter. The poems labeled as such in Ancient Greece were called elegies because they utilized one key defining feature: elegiac couplets.

Elegiac couplets follow this rhythm and meter: one line of dactylic hexameter, followed by one line of dactylic pentameter.

To break this down: a dactyl is a foot of poetry in which one stressed syllable is followed by two unstressed syllables. An English-language word that follows this is “freshener.”

A hexameter means there are 6 dactyls; a pentameter means there are 5. So Each couplet is composed of 11 dactyls: 6 in the first line, 5 in the next.

“Elegy” itself comes from the Greek, meaning “woe, cry.” Initially, they were funeral songs written in that elegiac verse. Around the 7th century BC, those elegiac couplets were then used to explore other themes, typically serious in nature, or else with strong emotional resonance: war, heartbreak, the meaning of life, etc.

Elegy in Europe

Like so much of European culture, the Romans eventually co-opted the form from Ancient Greece; then the Roman Empire ended, the form was lost, the form found resurgence in the Renaissance, and the rest, pun intended, is history.

As such, you may be familiar with one of the more famous elegy poem examples, written in the late-Neoclassical period: “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray. By this point, elegies were not written in elegiac verse—this one, as is common for the day, was written in iambic pentameter. Here are the first three quatrains:

Elegy Vs Eulogy

Elegies and eulogies are sometimes mistaken, due to their similarity in both spelling and setting.

A eulogy (Greek: “good word”) is a speech or passage of prose that honors someone recently deceased. You will hear these at funerals and, occasionally, read them as part of an obituary.

Elegies are poems on serious topics, including, but not limited to, death. While perhaps an elegy might be written as part of a eulogy (meaning: it is read at that person’s funeral), the two are different both in terms of form and intent.

The 3-Part Structure of Traditional Elegy Poems

Traditionally, elegies followed a three-part structure, in which the poet explored:

• Lament: The poet’s expression of sadness, sorrow, grief, or pain, typically regarding the recent death of a person.
• Praise: The poet’s admiration of the deceased, including the life they lived, their legacy, and/or their overall character.
• Consolation: The poet’s invocation of solace—that the deceased lives on in another world, that their impact will reverberate throughout this world, etc.

You can kind of see this structure at play in Walt Whitman’s famous poem “O Captain! My Captain!” The poem’s moment of consolation is perhaps halfhearted, but still the poem reaches catharsis through this classic elegy structure, partitioned into three corresponding stanzas.

Contemporary Elegy Poem Examples

Contemporary elegy poems do not require elegiac couplets, nor do they have to follow a three-part structure. Contemporary poets are challenging both the subject and form of elegiac poetry, wielding poetry’s formal qualities to explore the singular intensities of grief and loss.

Here are a few good contemporary elegy poem examples from living poets.

“OBIT” by Victoria Chang

Retrieved here.

This prose poem excavates the weirdness of grief: its textures and imagery, its uncanny revelations.

Much of the poem’s power comes from what it doesn’t state. For example, the second death of the mother’s teeth implies, but doesn’t state, that it’s the mother herself who has died. Somehow, looking at death through the periphery like this makes it even more gutting.

This poem comes out of Chang’s collection OBIT, which is certainly a collection of elegies, but is also a rumination on the role language plays in elegy. Chang observes that grief is a verb, and revelations like this are scattered throughout the work. You can find another example of Chang’s elegy poems at this poetry prompt on accidents of language.

“Elegy” by Aracelis Girmay

Retrieved here.

This poem comes from Girmay’s collection Kingdom Animalia. I love this take on the elegy, because it mourns future loss, or perhaps is an elegy of mortality itself: the duality of our impermanence and the permanent effect we may leave on the world.

There’s certainly a mystery to this work. Why, specifically, “strangers & parrots”? What do parrots have to do with this piece, other than that they might live in those shady trees? I experience this poem as a sort of mystic insight, drawing upon a world not quite seen, to grasp that this world is “the kingdom of touching”—that we all, in some way, leave our eternal mark.

“Notes Toward an Elegy, or What the Books Were For” by Hannah Aizenman

Retrieved from the Internet Archive, originally published at BOAAT.

This approach to an elegy poem is interesting, in that the subject of elegy is peripheral; the speaker writes a poem collecting material towards that elegy, but not the elegy itself.

This is certainly a modern take on the genre, but no less interesting. What does it mean when the topic of lament occurs at the edges? When the reader doesn’t know what the topic is, but still feels its presence haunting the language? I can’t say—I only know that, when a source of grief cannot be looked at directly, what emerges from the peripheries is no less gutting.

“Elegy for a Walnut Tree” by W.S. Merwin

Retrieved here.

In some ways, this piece is in lineage with the pastoral elegy poem. Pastoral elegies are poems that lament the loss of the pastoral or rural lifestyle. They can be found throughout the Renaissance and beyond in the English-speaking world, and like both pastorals and elegies, pastoral elegies have their own set of traditional requirements.

Merwin here isn’t invoking those same requirements, but there’s still a sense of loss reflected in a natural landscape. That loss is more a loss of innocence than anything else: Merwin’s speaker reflects on his own life through the tree’s, and the elegy really is for the time that has passed itself.

How to Write an Elegy Poem

Poetry’s capacity for nuance, complexity, and multiplicity often makes it best suited to tackle the strangeness of grief. Although these experiences often evade easy language, and grief feels singular to the individual, the craft of successful poetry writing can help you put words to these odd emotions.

As such, here are some tips on how to write an elegy poem.

Stare Peripherally At Your Grief

You might find yourself staring directly at the source of your grieving, but lacking the language to write about it. How do you enter into a poem whose topic is the totality of your loss?

Sometimes, the topic of your lament is better explored at the margins and peripheries. You can see that in the latter two elegy poem examples we shared: Aizenman’s poem anticipates the need for an elegy before its unnamed subject happens; Merwin’s walnut tree is a doorway into exploring his own life.

To put it a different way, the poem’s initiating subject is different than its generated subject, a topic we explain here.

Try to enter into lamentation through backdoors and hidden alleyways. What images, ideas, and senses are evoked in relation to the topic of your grief? How can you synthesize those items into a portrait of your loss?

Root Lamentation in Concrete Imagery

A poem does not need to be entirely concrete and imagistic. But it’s important that the emotions and experiences explored in your poem are demonstrated concretely.

Because the topic of an elegy poem is loss, grief, or lamentation, you likely don’t need to tell the reader “I’m sad” or “this experience is painful.” (Certainly, you can use those phrases in a first draft, but reconsider them in revision.) Readers probably won’t feel the poem’s pain just by having it named; it takes the craft tools of poetry, imagery included, to transmit an embodied experience of that pain.

This goes for any emotion in poetry—positive, negative, or neutral. Chang’s poem “OBIT” is a great example—Chang does name grief as such, but also demonstrates that grief in the poem’s symbolism, word choice, and interior exploration.

You Can Employ Topics of Elegy, Like Death, Metaphorically

Because of the elegy poem’s history and heightened sense of loss, it’s a topic perfectly suited for death. But, don’t feel like your poem has to be about something large, existential, or easily identified: poetry makes space for both the sublime and miniscule.

The topics of elegy can be employed metaphorically. What I mean is, you don’t need to write about the death of someone you love. It could be the death of something intangible: an elegy for third places, perhaps, or the era before internet and cellular.

Girmay does something like this in her “Elegy.” The poem’s lamentation is of our own ephemerality: that our selves, our touch, disappears (yet still changes the world forever). This is not an elegy in the traditional sense: the loss is anticipated, zoomed out, and somewhat abstracted. Death becomes both real and metaphorical, oriented towards something metaphysical.

Consider Form and Lineage

Poetry’s formal qualities allow a poem its complexity. Poetry often has to push language to say new things—a fact that is particularly useful in the face of grief, which so often evades and challenges language itself.

As such, give some thought to what form can accomplish for your poem, either in a first draft or as you revise. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Aizenman’s piece is in 3 sections, even if it doesn’t follow the traditional 3-part structure of classical elegy poems.

A different example that I love to teach comes from our instructor Ollie Schminkey. Check out their poem “My Father”, which wields the contrapuntal form to great effect.

You can also read different elegy poems and write a poem in lineage with it. “After” poems are a great way to take inspiration and turn it into your own successful poems.

Learn more about poetry forms here:

https://writers.com/what-is-form-in-poetry

Write Towards Insight or Epiphany

Poetry, and writing in general, offer solace by organizing our experiences into language and helping us better understand them. As such, you will find your elegy accomplishes what it wants to if you don’t just explore the contours of your sadness, but find the meaning of it—the surprise wisdom that suddenly happens from writing.

There’s no rulebook for finding epiphany. But if you reread the elegy poem examples we shared, you’ll find epiphany in all of them: discoveries that could only have occurred through the process of the poem itself.

The advice here, then, is to allow yourself to name what you don’t know, to write into complexity, and to write from a place of negative capability—inviting mystery into your work and the insight that comes from it.

Further Resources on Writing Poetry

If you’re interested in honing the craft of successful poetry writing, here are some resources to further your exploration:

• What is Poetry?
• Finding Poetry Inspiration
• How to Start a Poem
• How to Write a Poem
• How to Write a Free Verse Poem
• Line Breaks in Poetry

Write Elegy Poems at Writers.com

The classes at Writers.com will help you explore the topic of your elegy and refine it into successful poetry. Take a look at our upcoming online poetry writing courses and find the course that’s right for you.

The post What is an Elegy Poem? appeared first on Writers.com.

But if you’re here, you’re either struggling to write new poetry, or else looking for the right thing to write about. This article explores different avenues for poetry inspiration: how poets synthesize their worlds and expertise into successful poetry.

Along the way, I’ll offer bits of craft advice that help unlock new poetic possibilities for you. But first, let’s get into the raw ideas that inform smart, effective poems. Where do poets find poetry inspiration?

Where do poets find poetry inspiration?

The truth is this: every aspect of life—language, literature, nature, politics, our selves, our lived experiences, the physical world around us, etc.—makes for good poetry inspiration. But, if you’re overwhelmed by this, don’t worry. Let’s explore some of the different ways poets find inspiration for poetry, with examples of great poems to showcase the poet’s mind. Namely, we’ll explore poetry inspiration in:

• Language
• Imagery, beauty, and the natural world
• Current events
• Unresolved questions
• Poetry itself
• The classroom

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Poetry Inspiration Courses We Think You'll Love

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Get Inspired!: Poems and Poets to Light Up Your Writing

Write new poetry inspired by US historical poets and poets laureate, while immersing yourself in poetry to transform your writing...

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Toward Your Poetic Vision: A Guide Through the Poetic Life, from Craft to Publication

Write your most powerful poetry in this in-depth guidebook to the poet's craft and life.

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Poetry Inspiration in Language

Poetry is, of course, an effort of language. Successful poetry strives to find new language for ideas and experience that are otherwise hard to name. As such, it only makes sense that language itself is a source of inspiration for the practicing poet.

By this, I mean any component or feature of language, including:

• Definitions
• Etymologies and histories
• Sounds
• Linguistics and theories of language

In poetry, a word is a window into understanding. Here’s a poem that, to my mind, is incessantly curious about language and its poetic possibilities:

“Picking Blackberries with a Friend Who Has Been Reading Jacques Lacan” by Robert Hass

Retrieved here.

I go into detail about the meaning of this poem here. In short, this is a poem interested in pushing the boundaries of language, and doing so via Lacanian theories of language and psychology. Hass isn’t just interested in beauty, he’s interested in how language captures (or cannot capture) beauty. How can a beard be stained by a word? The pot that Charlie fetches, also, is likely a symbol for expanding language’s possibilities, because the gap between language and what it represents is always asymptotic.

Poetry Inspiration in Imagery, Beauty, and the Natural World

Keats put it best in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” when he said “beauty is truth, truth beauty.” I’m also partial to Toni Morrison, who said “I think of beauty as an absolute necessity. I don’t think it’s a privilege or an indulgence, it’s not even a quest. I think it’s almost like knowledge, which is to say, it’s what we were born for.”

Poets are drawn to beauty and to imagery. It is often a source of inspiration, and successful poetry attempts not only to replicate beauty through language, but to understand the world through showcasing that beauty.

Here’s an example:

“Rain” by Raymond Carver

Retrieved here.

This little poem gives in to beauty, and results in a short but gorgeous meditation on life and the beauty of slowness. I love its surprising epiphany, its willingness to slow down and listen to the mind. The poem doesn’t do much to describe the rain itself, but captures its mood and essence, transcribing it into a moment of delight and wisdom.

Poetry Inspiration in Current Events

Modern affairs create much poetic fodder. While politics and the news aren’t the preferred focus of all poets, there’s a large contingent of contemporary poetry focused on analyzing and reacting to current events.

How poets approach the topic of politics is a site of contest. Should poetry be prescriptive in its politics? Can poetry be activism? Does poetry even have a place in politics—can it actually move the needle? These questions are beyond the scope of this article, but do themselves create interesting doorways into what political poetry can be.

To avoid entering the crossfires of today’s discourse, here’s an example poem reacting to the stock market crash of ‘08:

“Villanelle with a Refrain from the Wall Street Journal” by Andrew Hudgins.

Retrieved from The Atlantic.

This poem, a villanelle, captures the anger and irony in the U.S. zeitgeist after the stock market crash. It borrows from the language of business and finance to satirize its logic, its way of reducing humanity to numbers, statistics, inputs and outputs. Even now, I can feel some of that anger from well over a decade ago, seeping through its offputting-yet-delightful lyricism.

For more poetry interested in current affairs, you might be interested in the below journals:

• New Verse News
• Only Poems (which is launching its Poets Howl series)
• Rattle (Specifically the Poets Respond series)

Poetry Inspiration in Other Poems

Poets, of course, inspire each other. The more you read poetry, the more ideas you will collect for your own work.

One explicit form of this is the “after poem”, a poem directly inspired by another. After poetry acknowledges its source of inspiration underneath the title, and this inspiration can include both specific lines in the source poem or the idea of the source poem itself.

A rather famous example of this is the Golden Shovel, a poetry form that Terrance Hayes invented after taking inspiration from Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “We Real Cool.” Both poems are below. Pay attention to the end words in Terrance Hayes’ poem—they are the same as the words in Brooks’.

For more on finding inspiration in poetry itself, read our article on reading poetry like a poet.

Poetry Inspiration in Ekphrasis

Ekphrastic poetry refers to any poem that takes its inspiration from other forms of art. The vast majority of ekphrastic poetry find inspiration in visual art, like paintings or movies, but ekphrastic poems have also been written about music, dance, and even dreams.

Perhaps the most well known ekphrastic poem is Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, but here’s a less antiquated example that showcases how art inspires other art:

“Sculptor” by Sylvia Plath

Retrieved here.

For more on the possibilities of ekphrastic work, check out our article on how to write an ekphrastic poem.

Poetry Inspiration in the Classroom

Lastly, poets make a point of continuing their education—even if they already have MFA or PhDs. Many schools, both online and in person, offers classes with different ways of approaching new poetry, and the best classes both introduce you to great work and offer generative prompts and exercises to get you writing more poems.

We’re partial to the online poetry writing courses we host at Writers.com. But you can also get our review on some of the biggest creative writing organizations here:

https://writers.com/creative-writing-programs

You might also be interested in our self-guided course Get Inspired!, which offers prompts and readings from the canon of great American poets. Learn more here:

https://writers.com/course/get-inspired-poems-and-poets-to-light-up-your-writing

Finding Inspiration for Poems: Keep a Journal

Many poets keep journals as ways of stumbling into inspiration. A journal is a low-pressure way to write without trying to “be poetic”—the journaling writer simply documents their life, thoughts, feelings, and experiences, which can later be used for poetic fodder.

I highly encourage you to keep a journal. You don’t have to be religious about it: it’s fine if you miss days, weeks, or even months, though a regular schedule will make it all the more useful for your practice.

What you can do is go back through your journal and find insights you wouldn’t normally have had if you weren’t processing your life on the page. You might also stumble into insights in the moment, which themselves become doorways into new poetry inspiration.

Here are some resources we’ve published on the topic of keeping a journal:

• How to Start Journaling
• Keeping a Spiritual Journal
• Wellness Journaling
• How to Free Write

Finding Inspiration for Poems: Use Poetry Prompts

Another way to inspire your own poetry is to use prompts. There’s no shortage of prompts and ideas to spur ideas for new poems. Prompts aren’t for everyone, but there are also different ways of prompting new poetry, and it’s worth trying your hand at some when you’re not sure what to write about.

Here are a few different sites, resources, and archives of prompts for poetry inspiration:

• Our article of NaPoWriMo Prompts
• Poemancer
• Poets & Writers
• Nosebleed Club’s monthly short prompts
• Poetry Foundation’s Learning Prompts

I also sometimes look for literary journals with themed submission calls, as those themes might give me prompts to inspire new work. You can find literary journals with upcoming themed submission calls at Chill Subs.

Finding Inspiration for Poems: Learn Widely

Poetry is informed by more than just its craft. Poets find inspiration in their everyday lives, their preoccupations and obsessions, and by what new knowledge they acquire as they go.

All knowledge presents its own form of inspiration for poetry, often acting as the poem’s initiating subject. Here are a few examples:

• “Pavlov Was the Son of a Priest” by Paige Lewis—which begins with that fact as the poem’s title.
• “Poem Number Two on Bell’s Theorem, or The New Physicality of Long Distance Love” by June Jordan—which takes, as its inspiration, quantum mechanics.
• “Everything” by Mary Oliver—whose subject matter requires knowledge of the life of Vincent Van Gogh.
• “Telemachus’ Detachment” by Louise Glück—inspired by Greek mythology.
• “The Imaginal Stage” by D. A. Powell—which requires knowledge of insect maturation.

This is just a small assortment of poetry that uses knowledge—of art, literature, the sciences, etc.—as doorways into new work. Of course, the poet’s own life offers plenty of fodder for poetry, too, but poetry inspiration is easier to find the more knowledge you acquire. 

What are topics you know deeply? What are you currently obsessing over or studying? Incorporate your learning into your poetic practice, and you might surprise yourself with what you discover. 

More Resources for Writing Poetry

Here are some more tips, prompts, and resources on the craft of successful poetry:

• How to Write a Poem
• How to Write a Free Verse Poem
• Writing Short Poetry
• What is Poetry?

Finding Inspiration for Poems: Take a Writers.com Course

The courses at Writers.com are designed to help you find poetry inspiration and generate new work. Take a look at our upcoming online poetry courses!

The post Poetry Inspiration: How to Find Inspiration for Poetry appeared first on Writers.com.

The art of ekphrasis populates both classic and contemporary poetry. You may be familiar with William Carlos Williams’ “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (inspired by Bruegel’s painting), or the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats, one of the more popular works of ekphrastic poetry. While classical poems find inspiration solely in visual art, this article includes a contemporary twist, as we’ll examine poetry inspired by film, dreams, and the many other ways that humans express themselves.

Before we look at different ekphrastic poem examples, let’s dive a little deeper into the form. What is ekphrastic poetry, and what is ekphrasis?

Ekphrasis Definition

The word ekphrasis comes from the Ancient Greek—its literal translation is to “speak out.” Ekphrasis was originally a rhetorical exercise in which students wrote descriptions of visual art. Over time, the word has come to describe any form of literature that finds inspiration in other forms of artwork.

As you might expect, some of the earliest examples of ekphrastic poetry come from Ancient Greece. The Iliad, for example, includes about 150 lines describing the shield of Achilles.

What is Ekphrastic Poetry?

If ekphrasis is the art of writing about art, then ekphrastic poetry is poetry inspired by other creative works. Art, sculpture, architecture, film, television, and even dreams are all fertile material for the ekphrastic poem.

What is ekphrastic poetry?: Poetry inspired by other creative works, such as art, sculpture, architecture, film, television, and even dreams.

Note: a poem inspired by other writing does not count as ekphrastic poetry. Ekphrasis only refers to work inspired by other forms of media—art outside of the written word.

Why should a writer employ ekphrasis, or try to write ekphrastic poetry? While it might seem counterintuitive to make art about existing art—it already exists, after all—don’t discount the importance of interpretation and description. Ekphrasis provides a challenging exercise for the writer trying to hone imagery, and it also lets writers explore the power and complexity of the artwork that moves them. We’ll see this in action through the ekphrastic poem examples in this article.

Ekphrastic Poem Examples

Ekphrasis is a prominent feature of classical works of literature. It shows up frequently in epic poems like The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and The Metamorphoses, and the Romantic poets also frequently wrote ekphrastic poetry, in part because they were so inspired by classical art.

Nonetheless, the ekphrastic poem examples we’re including all come from contemporary poetry, to showcase the modern possibilities of this literary device. Additionally, we’ve sectioned these examples based on the form of art each poem was inspired by. Pay attention to how these poems resonate with you. We’ll offer advice on how to write an ekphrastic poem next!

Note that ekphrasis is a device, not a form, so an ekphrastic poem can take a wide variety of poetry forms, and contemporary examples are often free verse.

Ekphrastic Poetry About Art

“Her Vanity” by Marc Alan Di Martino

Retrieved from Rattle.

You can find the painting this was written about here.

This poem’s effortless beauty hinges, ironically, off the word “vanity”. Not only is the speaker’s mother sitting in front of a mirror, she is also sitting in front of the concept of vanity—“poisoning herself for love” with talc. The poem’s topic and language reflects the airy, ethereal quality of the painting, forcing the reader to consider the value of beauty.

Other ekphrastic poem examples about art include:

• “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by William Carlos Williams (Academy of American Poets)
• “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus: Oil on Canvas: Pieter Bruegel the Elder: 1560” by Paul Tran (New England Review)
• “Star Map With Action Figures” by Carl Philips (VQR)

Ekphrastic Poetry About Movies and TV

“Laura Palmer Graduates” by Amy Woolard

Retrieved from Poetry Foundation.

If you’ve watched Twin Peaks, you’ll understand some of the references in this poem, namely the last line “It’s happening again.” This poem pulls a lot from the Twin Peaks aesthetic: torn up hands and cigarettes and ambulances and porchlights and blood. But, even if you haven’t seen the TV show, you can still feel the loneliness and determination coursing through the poem, captured succinctly in the line “Alive is a little present I / Give myself once a day.”

Other ekphrastic poem examples about movies and TV include:

• “Rude Girl is Lonely Girl!: Five Poems Inspired by Jessica Jones” by Melissa Lozada-Oliva (FreezeRay)
• “Asami Writes to Korra for Three Years” by Natalie Wee (Wildness)
• “The Blue Angel” by Allen Ginsberg, retrieved here.

Also, this isn’t a poem, but it is a work of ekphrastic literature about TV and movies, and also is one of my favorite short stories of all time. If you’re interested in ekphrastic prose, read “Especially Heinous” by Carmen Maria Machado in The American Reader.

Ekphrastic Poetry About Photography

“This Room” by Devon Balwit

Retrieved here, from Rattle. 

You can find the photo that this poem was written about here.

This poem captures the complexity of love at a certain stage, when the relationship has settled into a familiar cadence and passion has tempered to wisdom. The photo itself captures a seemingly ordinary moment—wind blowing through a window curtain. This is a great piece of ekphrasis, as the poet has turned this image into a symbol of domestic love, examining the ways that relationships evolve with age.

Other ekphrastic poem examples about photography include:

• “Panic at John Baldessari’s Kiss” by Elena Karina Byrne (Poetry Foundation)
• “An Ekphrastic Sonnet based off the To Pimp A Butterfly album cover where Kendrick speaks to the baby he is holding” by Myles Yates (FreezeRay)
• “Postcard I almost send to an almost lover” by Emily Wilson (The Bohemyth)

Ekphrastic Poetry About Music

Technically, ekphrasis only describes writing inspired by visual art. But, this article is all about finding inspiration in other forms of media, so let’s look at how music has inspired contemporary poetry.

“J. S. Bach: F# Minor Toccata” by Bill Holm

Retrieved here, from Academy of American Poets. 

You can listen to Bach’s Toccata in F# Minor here.

This is, certainly, a morbid interpretation of Bach’s toccata, but close attention to the music’s minor key and melancholy reveals the sense of anguish and panic resonating through the poem. The speaker hones in on the frenetic dance of keys seeking salvation all over the piano, finding our own shared mortality reflected in F sharp.

Other ekphrastic poem examples about music include:

• “Hammond B3 Organ Cistern” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi (The New Yorker)
• “Cardi B Tells Me about Myself” by Eboni Hogan (Poetry Foundation)
• “When I Die Bury Me In The 2am Music From Animal Crossing: New Horizons for Nintendo Switch” by Erich Haygun (FreezeRay)

To learn more about poetry inspired by music, start with this article on the history of jazz poetry.

Ekphrastic Poetry About Dance

How can a dance be transcribed to verse? This persona poem about the ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky demonstrates the potential for poetry to dance across the page, moving as limbs do on the stage.

“The War of Vaslav Nijinsky” by Frank Bidart

Excerpted from The Paris Review.

This excerpt comes from a much longer piece inspired by the life of Vaslav Nijinsky. Notice how this poem moves like a dance, lilting and crescendoing, speeding and slowing down, whirling around the page. There is almost a sense of phanopoeia—of the poem feeling like the dance it tries to describe.

Ekphrastic Poetry About Sculpture

Sculpture is one of the oldest art forms in human history. It’s no wonder, then, that there is so much ekphrastic poetry on the topic!

“Reflection on the Vietnam War Memorial” by Jeffrey Harrison

Retrieved here.

Ekphrastic Poetry About Dreams

Wait a minute, dreams aren’t art. Are they?

While a dream is not a published work of visual media, a poem written about a dream can be considered a work of “notional ekphrasis.” Notional ekphrasis refers to writing about art that doesn’t yet exist. Some scholars extend the idea of notional ekphrasis to include dreams, since they are intangible, creative efforts of the brain, and our interpretation of our own dreams is itself a form of art.

Some scholars extend the idea of notional ekphrasis to include dreams, since they are intangible, creative efforts of the brain, and our interpretation of our own dreams is itself a form of art.

As such, here are a few examples of writing inspired by dreams. While we don’t have access to the dreams themselves, pay attention to how these poems lean into the mystery of our dream worlds.

“Birds Appearing in a Dream” by Michael Collier

Retrieved from Academy of American Poets. 

This poem accepts the mystery of dreams with ease. It doesn’t attempt to explain the birds, just follows their flights in crystalline language. The words both clarify and obfuscate, much like dreams do, and turns of phrase like “orchid wings” and “bright things from shadows” both delight and mystify the reader. When the poem turns toward “you,” we see how the speaker is interpreting the dream, yet the poem continues to describe the dream without explanation.

Other ekphrastic poem examples about dreams include:

• “The Song in the Dream” by Saskia Hamilton (Academy of American Poets)
• “I Had a Dream About You” by Richard Siken (retrieved here)
• “The Dream” by David Solway (The Atlantic)

Additionally, at the beginning of the pandemic, many people reported having strange dreams. For more inspiration, a small archive of those dreams are recorded at the website I Dream of Covid.

How to Write an Ekphrastic Poem

The following steps will help you generate successful, immersive ekphrastic poetry.

1. How to Write an Ekphrastic Poem: Find Inspiration

If you already have a work of art you know you want to write about, skip this step.

If you want to write about a piece of media, but don’t know what to write about or where to begin, finding poetry inspiration is the first step. But where can you find it? We’ll skip the normal advice—going to museums or listing your favorite works of art—and head straight to sites where you can jumpstart your ekphrasis.

First, you might be inspired by certain literary journals. FreezeRay publishes poetry on pop culture, with an emphasis on what’s nerdy and niche. Additionally, Rattle runs a monthly ekphrastic poetry competition that’s free to enter, using art and photography made by contemporary artists. Only Poems just launched an ekphrastic section of their site, too.

Here are some sites you can navigate to find visual media that will inspire your ekphrastic poetry:

• The Met Museum hosts an online archive of their collection.
• So does The Frick, The Whitney, The MoMA, Getty, and The Guggenheim. Chances are, your local museum also has an online archive. Better yet, search for museums in random cities and see what they have online!
• The National Archives keeps this photography collection.
• Do you think space is cool? NASA’s photography collection thinks so too!
• Issuu is a publishing platform for independent journals and magazines. Much of the work on the site is free, and you might find inspiration from indie pubs and zines. Note the sections on art, architecture, music, and movies.

Lastly, you never know what archives your local library has access to. Check to see what you might be able to find: some libraries offer free JSTOR access or have digital archives of their own.

2. How to Write an Ekphrastic Poem: Start With Imagery

Once you feel inspired by a work of art, start immersing yourself in the artwork. The key is to feel the artwork so strongly that you can relay it to the reader, and they, too, can experience the art (or movie, song, picture, etc.) the way you do.

Then, spend some time writing about your experience sitting with this artwork. It doesn’t have to be poetic: it can be a journal entry, a list, even just words jotted on the back of a napkin. Take your time with this, as it will help you stay immersed.

Hone in on imagery. Be specific about what aspects of the artwork are contributing to your experience with the art.

As you write, hone in on imagery. Be specific about what aspects of the artwork are contributing to your experience with the art.

For example, let’s say you feel moved by the swirling patterns in Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” Move away from simple descriptions like “swirling patterns.” Instead, choose specificity: “moonlight roils the dark night, stars like bright fish eddying the sky.” Show, don’t tell, and when in doubt, try similes and metaphors.

And remember: imagery is not just visual—there is also olfactory, tactile, auditory, gustatory, kinesthetic, and organic imagery. If you’re at a loss for details, try being synesthetic. How does your painting smell? What does your song taste like?

3. How to Write an Ekphrastic Poem: Find Threads, Themes, Core Ideas

Take a look back at what you wrote. What images stand out the most intensely? What patterns do you notice? Are there ideas, themes, threads you can draw through the notes you jotted down?

Examine what you wrote and what details seem best at immersing the reader in the artwork. These notes, of course, are not the final poem, or even the final set of images and ideas you’re working with; they’re simply a place to begin.

After you’ve taken note of what seems like the central ideas and images of the work, you can begin constructing an ekphrastic poem around those notes.

4. How to Write an Ekphrastic Poem: Stitch Imagery Together, Find Insight

Start juxtaposing your notes, list items, and images. Arrange ideas together so that, in their gestalt, you recreate both the artwork you’re describing and your experience of the art itself.

Spend time on this process, and write different drafts where you rearrange, recombine, and rewrite your ideas and images. The goal is to convey to the reader what it was really like for you to experience the art.

Throughout this process, you may come to deeper insights about your relationship to the art. Lean into those insights, and write them into the poem. Try to braid your insights with the imagery: too much of one or the other might overwhelm the reader, but walking them through your experience, moment by moment, of the artwork will help relay your experiences.

5. How to Write an Ekphrastic Poem: Compare Your Draft With the Artwork

No ekphrastic poem can fully capture the details of the art it’s inspired by. After all, ekphrastic poetry is itself an exercise in interpretation, which inevitably means certain details get excised in the writing.

Nonetheless, you want your poem to convey your experiences and reflect the beauty of the artwork itself. Compare your poem with the art. Have you captured those experiences?

This is not an easy skill to hone, which is why any of the above ekphrastic poem examples are great places to begin. How does the poem compare with the artwork it’s describing? If the artwork is elegant, the poem should be, too. If the artwork is searing, transformative, painful, lyrical, brilliant, etc., do you see that reflected in the poem? How so? Read like a poet, then apply this skill to your own writing.

6. How to Write an Ekphrastic Poem: Edit Towards Your Vision

The goal is not for the reader to imagine the precise details of the art.

Keep tinkering with language until your poem feels true to the artwork. Again, the goal is not for the reader to imagine the precise details of the art; poetry has nothing to do with hyperrealism here. The goal is to transmit experiences and insights, relating to the reader how you, the poet, have been moved and inspired by the art.

Our Class on How to Write an Ekphrastic Poem

Want to find more artistic inspiration for your poetry? Check out our course on the topic with ekphrasis expert Janée Baugher:

Ekphrastic Poetry: Because the World is Beautiful

Get Inspired at Writers.com

Want to get feedback on your ekphrastic poetry? Writers.com can help. Take a look at our upcoming online poetry courses, where you will receive expert feedback on all the work you submit. In the meantime, the world is filled with art and inspiration, you just have to look and listen.

The post How to Write an Ekphrastic Poem appeared first on Writers.com.

What is a sonnet? From the Italian for “little song,” a sonnet is a poem whose forms and restrictions have evolved with contemporary poetry. This article discusses the different popular forms of sonnet poems, with examples and analysis, and insights on how to write a sonnet on any topic.

From the Italian sonnet to the contemporary, let’s explore the long and beautiful history of sonnet poetry, ending with advice for how to write a sonnet yourself.

How to Write a Sonnet: Defining the Form

There are many different forms of the sonnet throughout history, including the Elizabethan, Spenserian, and Petrarchan sonnet, among others. Before we delve into what makes each form distinct, let’s analyze what they have in common.

A sonnet is, in brief, a 14 line poem with a “twist,” or volta, occurring in the middle. The volta is essential to the poem, because it reverses or complicates the narrative of the first half of the poem. (More on this below.)

Sonnet definition: a 14 line poem with a “twist,” or volta, occurring in the middle.

Traditionally, sonnet poems have ruminated on love and heartbreak. While many contemporary sonneteers continue to use the form in this way, there are also plenty of contemporary sonnets that explore the political, the metaphysical, and everything else.

To thoroughly answer What is a sonnet?, we need to examine the different restrictions and complexities of the form throughout history. Let’s take a look at this history now, with several sonnet examples.

How to Write a Sonnet: The 4 Primary Sonnet Forms

The sonnet form hails from 13th century Italy and, from its conception through the Romantic Era, was used to express various forms of love. Since then, contemporary notions of the sonnet have been vastly less restrictive in both form and content: a modern sonnet can be about any topic, and does not have to follow the meter or rhyme schemes prescribed in classical forms.

Throughout history, poets have written under four primary sonnet forms. These include:

1. Petrarchan sonnet / Italian sonnet
2. Shakespearean sonnet / English sonnet
3. Spenserian sonnet
4. Contemporary sonnet

How to Write a Sonnet: Studying Sonnet Examples Through History

Although strict rhyme and meter schemes aren’t as popular as they used to be, there are still plenty of modern sonneteers who attempt the classical forms. So, let’s explore each type of sonnet. We’ll break down the rhyme and meter schemes and give several examples of each form, alongside a history of the form itself.

If you’re not familiar with rhyme and meter, take a look first at our article on poetry forms: What is Form in Poetry? 15 Poetic Forms to Try

1. How to Write the Petrarchan Sonnet / Italian Sonnet

Sonnet rhyme scheme: ABBAABBA CDECDE (Note: the rhyme scheme of the sestet varies.)

Sonnet structure: An octet and a sestet.

Meter: iambic pentameter, though sonnets written in Italian often use hendecasyllabic (11 syllable) lines.

Strangely enough, Petrarch didn’t invent the Petrarchan sonnet, he just popularized it, and the term itself actually comes from the Renaissance, several centuries after Petrarch’s death. Also known as an Italian sonnet, this form consists of two stanzas: an octet and a sestet.

The octet should introduce the “problem” in the poem—the romantic conflict as viewed in the eyes of the speaker. This problem is introduced in the first four lines, with the second four lines giving additional exposition and explanation. The sestet then resolves the conflict.

All Petrarchan sonnets have an octet written in ABBAABBA structure. However, there are a lot of variations in the rhyme scheme of the sestet. A few variations include:

• CDCDCD
• CDCCDC (Sicilian)
• CDDCDD
• CDDECE
• CDCDEE

You might see any of the above variations utilized in 19th century English Petrarchan sonnets, as the Romantics adored this format but often toyed with the sestet.

Petrarchan Sonnet Examples

Petrarch’s poem has several interesting features, which are typical of poetry from the 13th century. He personifies Love as a concept which brings the speaker “sweet havoc,” and he also represents his love as a Siren, who swoops in and resolves the sonnet’s conflict in the last line. The conflict, here, is that the speaker contemplates his own death in the face of Love, but comes to accept it because of the joy that Love has brought him.

If you’re interested in reading more of Petrarch’s poems in translation, you can find 15 sonnets here.

You may recognize this poem as being at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Lazarus wrote this poem to raise money for the statue’s pedestal, where it now sits as a bronze plaque. Notice how the poem uses dialogue as the volta, marking a surprising and sudden shift in the poem’s tone, answering the dilemma (who does the statue welcome?) presented in the octet.

2. How to Write the Shakespearean Sonnet / English Sonnet

Sonnet rhyme scheme: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG

Sonnet structure: Three quatrains and a couplet, often presented isometrically.

Meter: Iambic pentameter.

Like Petrarch, Shakespeare did not invent the sonnet form named after him—he merely popularized it.

In this format, the Shakespearean sonnet uses 3 quatrains to build the conflict of the poem, with the volta offering some sort of twist or dilemma in the problem itself. Usually, only the couplet is reserved for resolving this dilemma.

This format is also known as the English sonnet, as poets like Henry Howard and Sir Thomas Wyatt preceded Shakespeare and also wrote in this form. However, the examples we include are all written by Shakespeare, as he was, indeed, a master of the form.

Shakespearean Sonnet Examples

Sonnet 18 is the most famous of Shakespeare’s poems. The “problem” of the first 12 lines is simply whether the speaker should compare his love to a summer day. The volta in line 9 shifts to how this love differs from a summer day, concluding that her beauty is eternal.

Another popular poem from Shakespeare, sonnet 116 dwells on the nature of love itself. The speaker argues that love does not try to change others or fight against time; rather, true love is eternal, and accepts the object of the lover’s affection wholly and sincerely.

Other Shakespeare Sonnets

Here are links to some of Shakespeare’s most beloved sonnets:

• 29
• 73
• 104
• 130
• 138

3. How to Write the Spenserian Sonnet

Sonnet rhyme scheme: ABAB BCBC CDCD EE

Sonnet structure: Three quatrains and a couplet, often presented isometrically (without stanza breaks).

Meter: Iambic pentameter.

Edmund Spenser was an English poet writing around the same time as Shakespeare. Naturally, there are many similarities between his and Shakespeare’s sonnets—namely, the exploration of a “problem,” a volta that twists the problem, and a two line resolution.

Unlike Shakespeare, the Spenserian sonnet uses an interlocking rhyme scheme that’s sort of like terza rima: ABAB BCBC CDCD EE . This form is sometimes referred to as a Scottish sonnet, as it became very popular in 17th century Scotland.

Spenserian Sonnet Examples

Since Spenser popularized the form, we’ll include two poems written by him, both retrieved from his sonnet cycle Amoretti.

Spenser’s sonnet 75 contemplates the immortality of love in poetry. The poem’s “conflict” is that the speaker’s lover will one day die, her name washing away in the sands of time. The speaker replies that he will immortalize her in his poetry, letting eternity know of his love’s eternal virtues.

This sonnet was retrieved from Gutenberg, which preserves the original spellings of words.

In Spenser’s sonnet 3, the speaker struggles to put his love’s beauty into words. Every time he looks at her, he’s blinded and awe-struck, incapable of verbalizing her beauty or his love for her. It’s only when he turns inward and writes from his heart that he can speak and write about her, which emphasizes both her beauty and his genuine love for her.

4. How to Write the Contemporary Sonnet

Sonnet rhyme scheme: Variable, often nonexistent.

Sonnet structure: Variable. Many contemporary sonnets are isometric.

Sonnet meter: Variable, often nonexistent.

The sonnet form waxed and waned in popularity throughout Western history. Practically no one wrote sonnets by the end of the Restoration period in England. However, it was revived by the 19th century Romantics, who used the sonnet to teach poets about variations and experimentations in form.

Sonnets in the 20th and 21st centuries have become decisively less formulaic. They generally have 14 lines and a volta, but they generally eschew restrictions of meter, rhyme, and topic.

Contemporary Sonnet Examples

Terrance Hayes repurposes the terminology of the sonnet form in this visceral and imaginative poem. The speaker transforms “you” (his future assassin / the reader) through a series of metaphors that force us to reckon with the realities of race in America. By locking the reader inside the poem and making a pun on the name Jim Crow, Hayes urges us to consider the enduring legacies of racism—especially readers who aren’t intimate with the experience.

Marilyn Nelson’s poem exposes the Alzheimer’s experience in heart-wrenching, beautiful imagery. Interestingly enough, it’s written in decasyllabic lines, though it isn’t perfectly iambic pentameter. Regardless, that constriction is less common in contemporary poetry, yet it enhances the poem’s painful beauty.

How to Write a Sonnet Poem

The above sonnet examples and analysis show you the mechanics of how to write a sonnet—14 lines, a volta, and ruminations on love or other topics. So, we’ve covered the basics, but how do you write a sonnet?

The following tips will help you turn your 14 line poem into a dazzling, arresting sonnet.

Tips:

1. Explore “conflict”
2. Sharpen your volta
3. Surprise the reader
4. Play with form
5. Use precise language

1. Explore “Conflict”

A central feature of the sonnet form is a core “conflict” or “problem” which the poet hopes to explore and resolve. If you’re unsure of where to begin, start with a central question.

How to write a sonnet: If you’re unsure of where to begin, start with a central question.

This conflict doesn’t need to be like the conflict in fiction or in movies. Rather, it should be a complex question that needs to be answered in poetry, rather than in prose.

The conflicts from the above sonnet examples include:

• How is my love like and not like a summer’s day?
• Can I immortalize my love in poetry?
• Who does the Statue of Liberty welcome?
• What is it like remembering the people you love when you have Alzheimer’s?

With a conflict or question in mind, use the language of poetry to explore what cannot be simply answered.

2. Sharpen Your Volta

A key element of writing sonnets is the volta. This twist in the language and topic of the poem has the power to surprise, delight, and even transform the reader. Moreover, the volta is essential to presenting a complex problem and solution for the sonnet itself to resolve.

What makes for a good volta? Consider the following:

• Tone and diction: What can you write that changes the tone of the poem?
• Expanding the “conflict”: What is something you haven’t yet said about the poem’s topic?
• Opposing “argument”: What does the other side of the “conflict” look like?
• Getting to the core of the poem: What do you need to say before the poem finishes?

Take a look at any of the above sonnet examples to see these elements of voltas in action. Remember, the volta will occur somewhere in the middle, depending on the poem and when it was written (but typically in lines 7, 8, or 9).

3. Surprise the Reader

A sonnet’s constituent parts should inevitably surprise the reader. This presents the challenge—and payout—of writing short-form poetry.

With only 14 lines to develop a complex topic in verse, sonneteers inevitably turn to surprising language. Terrance Hayes uses pun and other forms of word play repeatedly in his poetry. Although it’s cliché now, Shakespeare’s poem describing his love as fairer than a summer’s day is a beautiful bit of hyperbole and comparison. Such use of good word choice and literary devices pulls these poems together.

Finally, contemporary sonnets are free to discuss and juxtapose themes outside of love. This is what makes a poem about the thoughts of a speaker with Alzheimer’s, for example, so potent: the reader is able to see the world from an alternate perspective in only 14 lines.

4. Play With Form

If you’ve paid attention to contemporary poetry, you know that rhyme and meter aren’t exactly in style. Modern poets tend to eschew these constraints, unless they’re requirements of the poetry form, such as in the villanelle or ghazal.

While the contemporary sonnet does not have many restrictions, don’t discount the possibilities of rhyme and meter. You might find that utilizing a Shakespearean or Spenserian rhyme scheme will force you to pay closer attention to language. In the classical sonnet examples we give, the reader hardly notices the rhyme and meter: so captivating is the language that the poem’s restrictions feel nonexistent. This could be a great challenge for you, as well: writing a poem with a meter and rhyme scheme without drawing attention to the meter or rhyme.

It is also worth noting, poets have challenged even the convention that a sonnet has 14 lines and a volta. As far back as the 15th century, poets have experimented with the form—the caudate sonnet, for example, is a 24 line poem which tacks on a 10 line coda after the initial 14 line poem.

More recently, Gerard Manley Hopkins invented a form called the curtal sonnet, which has 10 ½ lines, like in his poem “Pied Beauty.” Or, there’s the “word sonnet“, which is a title followed by 14 lines. 

Such experimentations pose the question: what is a sonnet, precisely? While the answer to that question is outside the scope of this article, feel free to ponder that question yourself as you pay attention to form.

5. Use Precise Language

With only 14 lines to work with, careful word choice is key. Marilyn Nelson’s “First Alzheimer’s Sonnet” is a great example of what word choice can do for the poem. Notice all of the intricate references to thought and speech:

• “Membrane labyrinth”—a kenning for a brain with Alzheimer’s.
• “thought disappears from sense / like the vapor trail of a skeptic’s awe”
• “cumulus lost on a breeze”
• “Each cloud is a face of the atmosphere”

These images add up to something ephemeral and intangible. We begin to view the speaker’s thoughts as fleeting clouds in a bright blue sky, trapped in a labyrinthine brain. Such powerful, evocative imagery uses exactly the words it needs to build this extended metaphor: anything less precise than the words in this poem would certainly dampen the poem’s effect.

This, of course, is a consideration for editing. Don’t get too hung up on finding the right word while you’re writing your sonnet. Let yourself freely explore ideas in verse, then edit when you’ve written everything you mean to say.

For more advice on writing poetry, check out our article How to Write a Poem, Step-by-Step.

A Final Note on How to Write a Sonnet

Contemporary sonnets often eschew conventional restrictions. However, that doesn’t mean a 14-line poem is automatically a sonnet. 

When poets work with formal poetry, they’re thinking about how the form can enhance, amplify, and expand meaning. Poetry forms aren’t just impressive tricks of literary capability: they are important structures that allow poets to transmit complexity and discover something new. 

As such, if you wish to write a sonnet without the challenges of rhyme and meter, you should still try to do something interesting with the form. 

Challenge yourself to make the form your own, whether that’s through fresh and unexpected language or formal innovation. 

Don’t just write 14 lines with a “twist” and call it a day. (Of course, you can do this in a first draft—we’re talking about revision here.) Interrogate the form’s concision and do something with it to replicate the central feeling or argument of your work. 

We’ve already mentioned the curtal sonnet and word sonnet as examples of formal play. Here’s a sonnet prompt I’ve written that analyzes a different experiment in the form. 

While formal poetry often feels like a restriction, it is actually an opening: a way forward into your ideas, a doorway into unexpected insight. However you approach the writing and revising of your work, challenge yourself to make the form your own, whether that’s through fresh and unexpected language or formal innovation. 

Further Readings and Collections

Here are some poetry collections by recent or contemporary poets that include or are comprised of sonnets:

• Frank: Sonnets by Diane Seuss
• American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassins by Terrance Hayes
• 100 Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda
• Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke
• The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan
• Collected Sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay
• The Sonnets by Jorge Louis Borges
• Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons by Marilyn Hacker

You can also find an archive of sonnet poems at The Formalist.

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Simply put, found poetry is the generation of poetry through the use of other texts. Rather than beginning with a blank page, the found poet works with existing texts to create new and interesting relationships within language. It is a different way of playing with words—and can yield some really fun surprises for the tinkering poet.

There are a few different types of found poetry, so let’s explore the hidden art of stealing and repurposing language.

What is Found Poetry?: Three Definitions

Found poetry is any form of poetry that is made from arranging or manipulating existing texts and turning them into a poem. There are three primary forms of found poetry, each of which demand their own processes and considerations.

Found poetry is any form of poetry that is made from arranging or manipulating existing texts and turning them into a poem.

Found Poetry

Any form of poetry created by arranging and manipulating “found texts.” A cento sits on the extreme end of found poetry, in that centos can only use lines from other poems. But you can make a found poetry out of anything: emails, billboards, newspapers, brochures, ingredients lists, the terms and conditions of your lease or cellphone, etc.

Blackout or Erasure Poetry

A poem created by erasing or blacking out the text of a source text. These poems are often in conversation with the source text.

For example, an anonymous poet once blacked out the front page of the New York Times headline announcing the stock market crash; it read “Because I could not stop for debt, he kindly stopped for me.” (A misquote of Emily Dickinson.)

You can learn more about blackout poetry at our article here:

https://writers.com/what-is-blackout-poetry-examples-and-inspiration

Cento Poem

A cento is a poem that only uses lines from other sources. Cento comes from a Greek word for “patchwork garment”, so centos are like patchwork poems, in which a new text forms from the texts stitched together.

Why Write Found Poetry?

Why would you write a found poem, instead of writing a poem with your own voice?

Indeed, while found poetry relies on other texts, the poet’s own voice and mind emerge from how they curate and arrange those texts.

Found poems, blackout poems, and centos can:

• Put different writers or texts in conversation with one another.
• Cut against the grain of source texts to reveal something new or interesting in those texts.
• Reveal hidden relationships between ideas and poets/writers.

Indeed, while found poetry relies on other texts, the poet’s own voice and mind emerge from how they curate and arrange those texts.

In all of these examples, the mind of the poet is revealed not in the words they use, but in the words they find and arrange. It is poetry by curation—a means of discovering what otherwise might have gone unsaid in the juxtaposition of words themselves.

Found Poetry Examples

The following examples of found poetry demonstrate different ways of collaging and curating texts. All examples come from contemporary poetry.

Found Poem: “Ritual against toxic masculinity” by Kenji C. Liu

Retrieved from Arc Poetry.

This poem comes from Liu’s book Monsters I Have Been, a collection of “frankenpo” poems. Frankenpo, a form invented by Liu, is a sort of “Frankensteins poem”—a poem whose various parts and organs are composed of disparate texts stitched into one another. Liu arranges these texts to cut against the grains of each other, revealing hidden meanings and ideas and creating a narrative through their arrangement.

This particular poem is a frankenpo of the screenplay of Justin Lin’s Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) + Confusian Analects 1.1 (475 BC-221 BC) + Chinese Exclusion Act (1882). It might be hard to read and understand, as the texts feel fragmented when arranged the way they are. That said, the title is a doorway into understanding the poem, as are the texts this poem pulls from: through image and metaphor, the poem offers a way of understanding and defining toxic masculinity, and what it takes for men to resist it.

Read this found poem a few times, paying close attention to the poem’s form, time stamps, and juxtapositions. And don’t worry if you don’t “get it”—some poems are better felt than intellected.

Erasure Poem: “6 Erasures of Yelp Reviews of the Taco Bell on Santa Rosa Street in San Luis Obispo, CA” by Caleb Nichols

Retrieved here.

Don’t get me wrong—the source material is absurd, ironic, Postmodern, etc. But that’s part of the point: Nichols here discovers both wisdom and wit in these taco bell reviews.

If you pay close attention, you can see how these erasures are repurposing the source material: “order” likely refers to ordering food, “dinning” may have been a misspell of “dining,” and “shredded pieces” is almost certainly referring to lettuce or cheese. So to take these reviews and discover insights like “you want like you need” or “this is honesty: order order order ruin”—that’s nothing short of genius.

Cento Poem: Cento Between the Ending and the End by Cameron Awkward Rich

Retrieved here.

Here’s a note from the poet on the composition of this cento:

“‘Cento Between the Ending and the End’ is composed of language scavenged from the works of Justin Phillip Reed, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Fatimah Asghar, Kaveh Akbar, sam sax, Ari Banias, C. Bain, Oliver Bendorf, Hanif Abdurraqib, Safia Elhillo, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, Franny Choi, Lucille Clifton, and Nate Marshall. All of whom have made for me a world and for whom I wish the world.”

Prompts for Writing Found Poetry

Write a poem that engages with and manipulates sources texts to create a wholly new text.

Cento poems, blackout poems, and found poetry are three ways of doing this. If you find yourself drawn to a new way of creating poetry, follow that instinct.

Ideas for tackling the prompt

Here are some doorways into the creation of your poem. If none of these work for you, again, follow and trust your own poetic instincts.

1. Who are some poets whose work you find to be similar? This could be aesthetically, formally, ideologically, etc. Write a cento that amplifies the ideas and images that are present across those similar poems.
2. What is a poet or poem that you disagree with? Write a poem that engages with that text to subvert or respond to the poem’s argument. You could do this in a cento, or write a found or blackout poem that creates a poem ideologically opposite to its source text.
3. What are some source texts you have strong feelings about? Maybe you really hate celebrity worship in People Magazine. Or maybe you really love the way that spam emails sound. Put those source texts in conversation with or inside of poetry, and do this in a way that amplifies your feelings about the source text. So, if you love spam, you could create a spam mail poem just by scrolling through your inbox.
4. Go through the poetry archives of your local library, and just read through random books. Find lines you like or hate, poems you agree with or don’t understand—anything that evokes emotions, even emotions you can’t name. Collect these lines and poems. When you have enough of them, think laterally: what connects all of this found language? Write a cento or found poem that makes those connections.
5. Take one poem that you have strong feelings about. Write a poem that uses every single word in the original poem, and only that poem’s words, but creates an entirely new poem by shuffling those words around.

More Poetry Writing Resources

If you’re interested more broadly in the craft of poetry, here are some resources for you:

• How to write a poem
• What is form in poetry?
• What is poetry?
• Becoming a poet

Write Found Poetry at Writers.com

Whether you want to write poetry in your own voice or stitch it from the voices of others, you’ll get exposed to great poetry and feedback at Writers.com. Take a look at our upcoming poetry writing classes, where you’ll receive expert advice on every poem you write.

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