Newest Poems
fruit / Carl Phillips, Tom Hansen (January 2010)
Previous Prompts / Featured Poets
winter haiku / Issa, Buson and Basho (December 2009)
sacred places / Stephen Dunn (November 2009)
sons and daughters / W.S. Merwin (October 2009)
40 Titles / Kim Addonizio (September 2009)
resolved / Edward Hirsch (August 2009)
this was once / Jane Hirshfield (July 2009)
confession / Shaindel Beers (June 2009)
not getting it / Renee Ashley (May 2009)
what sustains you / Thomas Lux (April 2009)
pantoums / Linda Pastan (March 2009)
facts / Dorianne Laux (February 2009)
sonnenizio / Kim Addonizio (January 2009)
laundry / Jane Kenyon & Robin Behn (December 2008)
prompt a day / 30 for November 2008
how not to write a poem / Lewis Carroll (October 2008)
language / Coral Bracho (September 2008)
it's not about you / Laura Kasischke and Richard Brautigan (August 2008)
a natural landscape / Lawrence Ferlinghetti (July 2008)
parenting / William Stafford (June 2008)
prose poem: mundane to erotic / Nin Andrews and Dorianne Laux (May 2008)
protest poems / various poets (April 2008)
what you can not be / Molly Peacock and Billy Collins (March 2008)
how to / Wendell Berry (February 2008)
the conversation of couples / Robert Hass & Brenda Hillman (January 2008)
two versions / Terrance Hayes (November 2007)
questions / William Blake (October 2007)
natural prayer / Mary Oliver (August 2007)
from Grimm / Peter Murphy (July 2007)
Rubaiyat / Rumi translated by Coleman Barks (May 2007)
didactic poems / Charles Harper Webb (March 2007)
unprompted poems (February 2007)
heroes / Ron Koertge (January 2007)
good advice gone bad / Diane Lockward (December 2006)
residual memory of place / Andrew Motion (November 2006)
after reading / Tony Hoagland (October 2006)
marginalia / Billy Collins (September 2006)
against / Dorianne Laux (August 2006)
rediscovering / Debra Spencer (July 2006)
signs / Cecilia Woloch (June 2006)
magical thinking / Naomi Shihab Nye (May 2006)
contentment / Wendell Berry (April 2006)
giving form to death / John Updike (March 2006)
in the moment / Jane Hirshfield (February 2006)
peace / C.K. Williams (published
January 2006)
Proustian memory / Billy Collins (December 2005)
calendar event / Günter Kunert
how memory works / Patricia Hampl
poetry alternatives / Grace Paley
guilt shop / Mark Hillringhouse
revisited
/ Ted Kooser (January 2005)
unidentified / Anne Caston (December 2004)
gladness / Percy Bysshe Shelley
risk, love, revelation / Dorianne Laux and William Stafford
transformation
/ BJ Ward (January 2004)
a job done badly / Louis Jenkins (December 2003)
advice to poets / Madeline Tiger
war / Galway Kinnell and Katha Pollit
erotic fruit / Diane Lockward (May 2003)
automatic writing / Andre Breton
social
or political issues / Carl Sandburg (January 2003)
evocation / Tess Gallagher (December 2002)
childhood Memory / Donald Justice
the way things work / Jorie Graham
in the style of / E.E. Cummings
flowers / Emily Dickinson & Donna Bamford
April
/ Edna Saint Vincent Millay & Mary Oliver (January 2002)
characters / Marilyn Chandler McEntyre (December 2001)
revisionist history / Jennifer Michael Hecht
wanting / Kim Addonizio & Jane Cooper
poem personified / Larry Levis
love defined / Yevgeny Yevtushenko (January 2001)
1998 - 2000 Prompts occurred more than once a month during this period.
sports / Joan Murray 2000
writing workshops / William Matthews
metaphor deferred / Larissa Szporluk
one recalled / Laura Boss 2000
triolets / Frederick Morgan and Adelaide Crapsey
Emily / X.J. Kennedy & Emily Dickinson
first line generator 1999
imagined relationships / Denise Duhamel
history personal / Stanley Kunitz
death personified / Dorianne Laux
Zen mind / William Carlos Williams
scary movies / Kim Addonizio & Jim Richardson
questions and answers / Naomi Shihab Nye
the writing prompt / Langston Hughes
best of the century / T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost
because... the writer's life / Robert Hass & Brenda Hillman
my life today / Jane Hirshfield
epistolary poems (letters) / BJ Ward
poems from art / William Carlos Williams
starting with a quote / Jane Kenyon
to a fellow poet / Gerald Stern
from a photograph / Sharon Olds 1999
spring distractions / Robert Frost
mythological allusion / Countee Cullen
titles that invite us / Maria Mazziotti Gillan 1999
personification / Charles Simic
marriage / Olena Kalytiak Davis
the extended metaphor / Cat Doty
in the classroom / Philip Levine
my father's love letters / Yusef Komunyakaa 1998
