PROMPTS & FEATURED POETS

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

the ideal reader / Ted Kooser

heaven / Mark Doty

unrequited / Michelle Cameron

interview / William Matthews

how memory works / Patricia Hampl

letting go / Kevin Goodan

poetry alternatives / Grace Paley

momentum / Catherine Doty

guilt shop / Mark Hillringhouse

revisited / Ted Kooser (January 2005)

unidentified / Anne Caston (December 2004)

foreign words / Thomas Lux

triads / J.D. McClatchy

deception / Richard Jones

preludes / T.S. Eliot

gladness / Percy Bysshe Shelley

ritual / Dana Gioia

cinquain / Adelaide Crapsey

risk, love, revelation / Dorianne Laux and William Stafford

math / Rita Dove

transformation / BJ Ward (January 2004)

a job done badly / Louis Jenkins (December 2003)

leaving / Linda Pastan

apology / Renee Ashley

advice to poets / Madeline Tiger

lists / Billy Collins

rondeau / John McCrae

war / Galway Kinnell and Katha Pollit

fruit / Diane Lockward

God / Carl Dennis

automatic writing / Andre Breton

lyrics / Suzanne Vega

social or political issues / Carl Sandburg (January 2003)

evocation / Tess Gallagher (December 2002)

the art of / Elizabeth Bishop

childhood Memory / Donald Justice

using Forms / Honor Moore

dreams / Saskia Hamilton

the way things work / Jorie Graham

in the style of / E.E. Cummings

fortune cookies / Han Shan 

Poetry 180 / Various Poets

flowers / Emily Dickinson & Donna Bamford

April / Edna Saint Vincent Millay & Mary Oliver (January 2001)




2001

characters / Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

revisionist history / Jennifer Michael Hecht

Tao / Arthur Tze

in the music / Karl Shapiro

wanting / Kim Addonizio & Jane Cooper

poem personified / Larry Levis

animals / James Laughlin

words confused / Li-Young Lee

age / Donald Justice

ars poetica /Robert Lowell

approaching / Stephen Dobyns

love defined / Yevgeny Yevtushenko

1998 - 2000  Prompts occurred more than once a month

sports / Joan Murray

forgetting / Pablo Neruda

rejection / Sylvia Plath

tanka / Carolyn Kizer

breath / Robin Becker

panties / Terri Ford

writing workshops / William Matthews

mother / Tony Hoagland

ancestry / Cornelius Eady

driving / Robert Bly

metaphor deferred / Larissa Szporluk

one recalled / Laura Boss

time / Patrick Martin

encounter / Stephen Crane

thief / Frieda Hughes

triolets / Frederick Morgan and Adelaide Crapsey

 Emily / X.J. Kennedy & Emily Dickinson

gifts / Li-Young Lee

first line generator

prose poems / Nin Andrews

family / Galway Kinnell

 a room / Linda Pastan

 imagined relationships / Denise Duhamel

history personal / Stanley Kunitz

death personified / Dorianne Laux

Zen mind / William Carlos Williams

portraits / E.A. Robinson

scary movies / Kim Addonizio & Jim Richardson

diners / William Dubie

lessons / Kurtis Lamkin

villanelles / Edward Hirsch

loss / Eavan Boland

wonder / Walt Whitman

homage / Lucille Clifton

numbers / Wislawa Szymborska

work / Gary Snyder

questions and answers / Naomi Shihab Nye

in ruin / Mark Doty

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

erotic / William Shakespeare

epistolary poems (letters) / BJ Ward

refrain / Jane Kenyon

diving / Stephen Dunn

the movies / Frank O'Hara

a renga / Wallace Stevens

poems from art / William Carlos Williams

starting with a quote / Jane Kenyon

preludes / T.S. Eliot

to a fellow poet / Gerald Stern

from a photograph / Sharon Olds

spring distractions / Robert Frost

phone sonnets / Robert Hass

mythological allusion / Countee Cullen

ghazals / Adrienne Rich

titles that invite us / Maria Mazziotti Gillan

personification / Charles Simic

marriage / Olena Kalytiak Davis

paradelles / Billy Collins

manmade / William Wordsworth

the extended metaphor / Cat Doty

seduction / Pattiann Rogers

daughters / Thomas Lux

in the classroom / Philip Levine

song on the radio / Bob Dylan

elegy / Marie Howe

bad habits / Billy Collins

my father's love letters / Yusef Komunyakaa