Poetry Prompts for Winter

Poetry prompts and writing exercises are great ways to get a little creative writing done when inspiration is absent. They’re also perfect for challenging yourself as a writer to incorporate new ideas and themes into your work.

You can use prompts and exercises on days when you’re not feeling especially inspired or as a way to work on something a little different from your usual writing fare. Write a long poem, a short poem, a haiku, or a pantoum.

As long as you get the creative writing flowing and have fun with it, you’re doing it right!

These poetry prompts can be used for other types of writing too. Try using them in a short story, a blog post, or a bit of creative prose.

Poetry Prompts

Use the lists of words below to write a poem. You can use all the prompts from any one list, including the list title, or you can mix and match words from different lists.

Want a super challenge? Try to write one poem using all the poetry prompts from the lists below.

Write any kind of poem you want: free verse or a form poem, like a haiku or a sonnet.

That’s it! Pretty simple, right?

Winter’s	Snowy	Season
burnt spacious metropolis pacing fiery cannon	hilarious elegantly hips fern listless twisting	green loudly tub swims sultry sharp

Create Poetry Prompts

You can also create your own poetry prompts by flipping through the dictionary and selecting words at random. For the poetry prompts here on Writing Forward, I usually try to find words that have nothing to do with each other, and I try to include a range of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs to make the poetry writing just a little more challenging.

If you try these poetry prompts, feel free to share your poems in the comments. And keep on writing!