Today’s prompt: pick a form from the glossary, and write about the strange juxtaposition of springtime (and all it’s blooming happy glory), and living in lockdown during a pandemic. This might lend itself well to an Asian form, as many of them as a rule are, content-wise, about nature and natural imagery and happenings.  ...Read More

Here are two versions of a simple prompt that unfolds into an experiment with one of the basic elements of poetic form: repetition. Johnny’s original prompt was deceptively straightforward sounding: take 5 words (in this case, chosen by Johnny and assigned to J.N.) and write a poem in which each word is repeated 3 times. ...Read More

Writing prompt by Poetics Online member Jimmy Fishhawk. If you’d like to share your results, or submit a prompt for us to post (with credit or without), let us know. =================== This is a time-sensitive prompt—that is to say, it requires that you be sensitive to the time of day. Ideally, early morning, although dusk/early...Read More

So, lately I’ve become interested in three iterations of a word (one of them being a slight variation): Colon: a punctuation mark Colon: part of your large intestine Colonist/Colony: member of a colonizing expedition (i.e. imperialist, but I digress…) It happens that they are not etymologically connected. Now, brief context: I was thisclose to switching...Read More

We are now on instagram! User name is Poetics Online, although as soon as I’m not working from solely an iphone we’ll connect it to here as well as automatically sharing the instagram posts here as well. For now, here are the last couple of days prompts. Enjoy. And as always, share the results in...Read More

Hello Everyone! Let’s start this week with a line prompt.   “The silence makes room in the rubble left from the day before…”Read More

This prompt has been kicking around facebook this month around the circles doing NaPoWriMo (national poetry writing month, which most people use as an excuse to do some version of 30 poems in 30 days.) Although I saw it on my Atlanta poet friend Karen G’s page, who got it from Liv Mammone: “Reinventing the...Read More

So, this form birthed a few years ago from an admittedly overly geeky, slightly masochistic brain, when I was attempting to think of the most ridiculous form I could think of. There are variations, and I’ll talk about those later, but the basic idea is that you write a double sestina where those 12 repeated...Read More

Time for another prompt! This one a favorite of my hometown poetry family at the CMC Poetry Jam. Or, as we affectionally call it, The First Church of the Word. This one is very simple, and requires two or more people. Simply put, ring up or text a writer friend, and ask them for a...Read More