Love language? These poetry prompts are for you.

Poets have a unique relationship with language. For a poet, language is more than a tool for communication; it’s a set of paints and paintbrushes that can be used to create scenes and images that resonate with readers.

A poet must then foster a loving relationship with language, learning its secrets, understanding its idiosyncrasies, and mastering its structure, then bending it to the poet’s will.

Today’s poetry prompts pay credence to language and encourage a more thorough mastery of grammar, sentence structure, and all things wordy.


Poetry Prompts

Select at least five words or phrases from the list below. Use them to write a poem about language and poetry. If you want to challenge yourself, choose more than five; go for ten or fifteen, or see how many you can squeeze into one poem.

You can also challenge yourself by writing a poem that is not strictly about language, writing, or poetry. Use these words as symbols or metaphors, or personify them to give them new meaning.

You’ll find that some of these words lend themselves quite well to alternative meanings. For example, dash could mean running quickly rather than a punctuation mark that looks like a hyphen. Give yourself room to be creative with these poetry prompts.

Words
Dash
Preposition
Modifier
Etymology
Possessive
Run-on
Oxymoron
Lexicon
Period
Palindrome
Homophones
Conjunction
Tense
Phrase
Definition
Homophones
Possessive
Simile
Apostrophe
Ampersand

Feel free to come back and tell us how you liked these poetry prompts. And keep writing!

Got any poetry prompts or writing exercises to share? Leave a comment!

Creative Writing Prompts

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