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Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 750

Robert Lee Brewer — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 11:50:34 +0000

For this week’s prompt, write a “something hidden” poem. The hidden thing could be a physical object, like treasure, a passport, or a letter (from a friend or enemy). Of course, not everything hidden has to be physical; people frequently hide their feelings, intentions, and real thoughts on situations. So consider what could be hidden and bring it into the light with a poem.

Remember: These prompts are springboards to creativity. Use them to expand your possibilities, not limit them.

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Write a poem every single day of the year with Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day: 365 Poetry Writing Prompts for a Year of Poeming. After sharing more than a thousand prompts and prompting thousands of poems for more than a decade, Brewer picked 365 of his favorite poetry prompts here.

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Here’s my attempt at a Something Hidden Poem:

“The Poet,” by Robert Lee Brewer

From an early age, I was taught
heroes hide their true identities:
Bruce Wayne as Batman, Clark Kent as
Superman, and Barry Allen as The Flash.
In one world, they saved the day;
in the other, they played make believe
that they were just ordinary people
as if fitting in was more challenging
than solving crimes and fighting evil,
and so, from an early age, I carefully
cultivated this alter ego, waiting
for my chance to save the day.

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Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 749

Robert Lee Brewer — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 07:00:00 +0000

For this week’s prompt, take the phrase “Group (blank),” replace the blank with a new word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write your poem. Possible titles include: “Group Think,” “Group Project,” “Groupies for Yacht Rock Cover Bands,” and/or “Grouped Together Against Our Will.”

Remember: These prompts are springboards to creativity. Use them to expand your possibilities, not limit them.

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Here’s my attempt at a Group Blank Poem:

“Grouping Pieces,” by Robert Lee Brewer

When I start a puzzle, of course, I look
for the edge pieces first, searching for straight
lines, and then, assembling it like a book
with a border that’s firmed up like it’s fate.

After that, it’s about looking for shapes
and colors, finding common ground for one
area after another like grapes
growing on a cardboard vine until done.

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Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 748

Robert Lee Brewer — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 07:00:00 +0000

For this week’s prompt, write a vacation poem. Maybe you’ve been on a vacation this summer; maybe you’ve been on a vacation some other time; or maybe you’ve never been on a vacation. Regardless, the idea of going on vacation is one that can seem amazing to some and stressful to others. And well, vacation could also refer to vacating as well…so, as always, have fun exploring the space.

Remember: These prompts are springboards to creativity. Use them to expand your possibilities, not limit them.

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Here’s my attempt at a Vacation Poem:

“Staycation,” by Robert Lee Brewer

No need for a ticket
on a plane or a train;
no rental car needed
to drive us all insane.
We can deliver thrills
from the comfort of home
and order a pizza
by website or by phone,
and if we start stirring
until we feel crazy,
we can leave for a bit
until we feel lazy.

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Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 747

Robert Lee Brewer — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 04:21:41 +0000

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems at times that I’m bombarded with all the darker parts of the world. It can be overwhelming and tempting to forget that there is still beauty to be found every day all around us. Sooooo…

For this week’s prompt, write a beauty poem. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so I won’t belabor the point or give too many of my own examples. Think about what concerns you most about beauty, whether it’s positive or negative, and explore your thoughts in poetry.

Remember: These prompts are springboards to creativity. Use them to expand your possibilities, not limit them.

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Here’s my attempt at a Beauty Poem:

“Saint Simons Island,” by Robert Lee Brewer

Each morning on the dock, I listen
to the birds hunting in tall grass,
watch them flying across the marsh,
hear the splash of fish enjoying the sun,
witness a manatee floating on its back
or a flamingo spreading its pink wings wide,
and I almost forget there’s another world
(many worlds) burning the midnight oil
with worry and wonder and whatever
else matters more than this beauty.

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Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 746

Robert Lee Brewer — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 07:00:00 +0000

For this week’s prompt, write an abandoned poem. I’ve abandoned many poems over the years, but I’ve also written many poems with abandon. Some people abandon ideas, interests, hope, and despair. Other people have abandoned relationships, hometowns, and so many other people, places, and things. Many people abandon their homes throughout the year to take vacations (so don’t forget that it’s sometimes possible to return to the things we briefly abandon).

Remember: These prompts are springboards to creativity. Use them to expand your possibilities, not limit them.

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Here’s my attempt at an Abandoned Poem:

“perfect,” by Robert Lee Brewer

each evening, i admit i can’t
be perfect; i find that i must
abandon that ideal; but then,

i abandon my sound logic
each morning, imagining i
can be something impossible.

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Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 745

Robert Lee Brewer — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Not sure how we’ve made it to July already, but here we are.

For this week’s prompt, write a better poem. Better than what? Better than other poems maybe, but I’m just thinking of all the ways better is used, whether it’s better late than never or better than that. For better or worse, there better or worse ways to explore better luck next time. So you better watch out, better not cry, and so on. Or you better just write a poem.

Remember: These prompts are springboards to creativity. Use them to expand your possibilities, not limit them.

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Here’s my attempt at a Better Poem:

“better yet,” by Robert Lee Brewer

let’s start each day anew
with a certain sort of amnesia
that resets each evening
with abandoned reason & resentment
& a certified commitment
to those things we once meant
in those hours we once spent
so seductively & productively
burning the midnight oil
spoiling for each & every word
like they were a blessing from god.

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Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 744

Robert Lee Brewer — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Sometimes I feel like I have to mention that I create these prompts ahead of time. That is, I didn’t create this prompt in relation to anything that’s currently in the news. Any similarities or deeper interpretations are just coincidence. Do with that what you will.

For this week’s prompt, write an intelligence poem. You could write a persona poem from the perspective of an intelligent person, or perhaps you yourself are very intelligent. Many governments have intelligence services, and many writers (and other human beings) are (rightfully) concerned with artificial intelligence. So write an intelligence poem this week.

Remember: These prompts are springboards to creativity. Use them to expand your possibilities, not limit them.

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Here’s my attempt at an Intelligence Poem:

“AI Did Not Write This Poem,” by Robert Lee Brewer

I’d like to believe it is true
that my brain is not a machine
reacting to the reactions
of others, that I have free will
and original thoughts, but who
decides what is real or a dream
when tabulating our actions
until we all find our thoughts stilled
by chemical combinations
and varied interpretations
as if a program moves us all
along an invisible wall
against which everyone must fight
by writing deep into the night.

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Laughing Through the Tears: Toward a Poetics of Humor

Jen DeGregorio — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 16:00:00 +0000

I am a poet with zero interest in athletics. Yet it is a sports columnist—Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith, who died a couple weeks before I was born—who reportedly said something about writing that resonates with me more than other aphorisms on the subject: “Writing is easy. All you do is sit down and open a vein.”

(How and Why to Put Hope in Writing.)

Vulnerability is part of the job: To produce artful prose and verse, we must be radically honest with both ourselves and the audience, then steel ourselves against public judgment. This is especially hard when the work plumbs the shadier corners of the psyche: our fears, untold desires, and regrets. I’m not sure how personal Smith’s sports columns got. But for us poets, the writing tends to cut close to the bone. The poems I’m drawn to—and often produce myself—explore heavy subjects. Their speakers behave badly, are treated with disregard or violence, mourn devastating losses, twist themselves into psychic knots.

Humor is one line of defense against the anxiety of confronting such difficult material—a very fine line. A creative writing professor once told me my poems seemed too much like stand-up routines, that I was using humor to avoid what needed to be said. At the time, I arrogantly (and privately) dismissed her concerns. Then a few months passed, and I looked back at the poems in question. I was mortified by how flippant they seemed. I talked about the problem with a writer friend, and she assured me that wit was part of what she loved about my poems. But she conceded there were times when the laughter masked the tears. My better work managed to balance the two.

Many of the poems I most cherish master this balancing act. Take Tracy K. Smith’s “The Museum of Obsolescence” from her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Life on Mars. The lyric conjures a post-apocalyptic tourist attraction: a gallery filled with money, oil, and even “a living man” on display. In the future-world of the poem, these “naïve tools,” as Smith puts it, have become artifacts of a bygone era. I smiled the first time I read the poem, tickled by the inventiveness of Smith’s conceit, the deft way her lines lampoon human short-sightedness and narcissism. Soon, though, my smile faded. I realized that the face reflected in the “mirror” on view in Smith’s museum was, in fact, my own. The poem forced me to consider my own mortality, the certain disappearance of everything I love and hold dear. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” has a similar effect on a reader. In the canonical Romantic poem, a traveler reads the bombastic words of a once-powerful king, whose realm has become a ruin: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Both Smith’s and Shelley’s poems hinge on irony, revealing how contemporary concerns are rendered meaningless by the vastness of time. Irony is a classic comedic device, yet “Ozymandias” does not provoke any grins. Why does “The Museum of Obsolescence”? Smith utilizes sarcasm and absurdity, too; her imagery is rooted in pop culture rather than classicism. She offers us a vendor hawking t-shirts outside a building where visitors are dumbfounded by the basic elements of life as we live it now; even “Love”—that poetic ideal—is peculiar in Smith’s future. The reader is so charmed by Smith’s cleverness that she hardly notices being prompted to contemplate death and the meaning of life. Shelley sort of beats the reader over the head with his Important Message.

Absurdity and sarcasm are at the heart of another poem I love: Matthew Olzmann’s “My Invisible Horse and the Speed of Human Decency.” The poem is more concerned with linguistics than Smith’s poem, interrogating the strangeness of the English idiom “Don’t put the cart before the horse.” The poem begins sarcastically, pointing out the absurdity of the phrase:

If ever, I happen to obtain a Clydesdale,
then I’ll align, absolutely, it to its proper position
in relation to the cart, but I can’t
do that because all I have is the cart.

Calling the cart “a little grief wagon,” the speaker proceeds to explain what grieves him: the unrealized desire for “[a] more tender world / with less hatred strutting the streets. / Perhaps a downtick in state-sanctioned violence.” The speaker understands how Pollyannish his wish may seem: “LOL, says the world.” Yet he clings to it. The “invisible horse,” maybe a metaphor for hope, becomes ever more real to him over the course of the poem. By the final lines, the speaker’s sarcasm has fallen away, and he is “speaking softly” into the horse’s “missing ear.” The poem offers some metacommentary on the way humor can function as a defense mechanism, hardening us against the pain of loss and turning us cynical in the process. Olzmann blends this self-aware comedy with open-hearted lyricism to touching effect.

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Both Smith and Olzmann use wit to bring unwieldy existential ideas down to size for the reader. Maybe the ultimate witty poem is Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse.” Unlike Smith and Olzmann, though, Larkin’s wit suffuses both the content and form of his poem; his lines are also much sharper, more cutting. His sing-songy lines have the sound of a nursery rhyme. Yet the poem is decidedly not child-friendly, laced with profanity and an anti-authoritarian attitude: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” the poem begins. The humor lies in this scalding juxtaposition of juvenile music and mature, taboo speech. What saves the poem from merely registering as a sick joke, however, is the shift that occurs in the poem’s third and final stanza. The chirpy tone falls off a cliff as Larkin drops his broader thesis: “Man hands on misery to man. / It deepens like a coastal shelf.”

The bleak proclamation about humanity’s doomed condition, paired with the archetypal image of oceanic depths, pulls the rug out from under the amused reader, forcing them to confront the reality of intergenerational trauma. Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”—not exactly a knee-slapper—exploits a similar tension between form and content, deploying nursery-like rhymes to dramatize the horror of a daughter’s collision with patriarchal monstrosity.

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson famously advised. Truth’s profundity, she contends, is too powerful for human vision to perceive head on. It is “Too bright,” like “Lightning,” threatening to “blind” all who look upon it directly. This feels particularly apt when navigating life’s most shameful corners—its inevitable transgressions, betrayals, and disillusionments. Humor, when wielded carefully, can offer a filter through which we might survive a glance.

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Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 743

Robert Lee Brewer — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 07:00:00 +0000

For this week’s prompt, write a summer poem. The summer solstice is on Saturday, but it’s felt like summer in the Atlanta area for a while now. So let’s write about swimming pools, sunburns, baseball, AC, lawn maintenance, road trips, and more.

Remember: These prompts are springboards to creativity. Use them to expand your possibilities, not limit them.

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Here’s my attempt at a Summer Poem:

“In the South,” by Robert Lee Brewer

In the South
in summer,
the early birds
wander out
a little later
each morning,
because the worms
take their sweet tea time
measuring days
by each early
afternoon
thunderstorm
blowing up
and out
and anyway
there will always
be another.

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Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 742

Robert Lee Brewer — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 07:00:00 +0000

For this week’s prompt, take the phrase “I’m (blank),” replace the blank with a new word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write your poem. Possible titles could include: “I’m Ready to Start,” “I’m Not Sure What to Write,” “I’m All Alone,” and/or “I’m the Best There Ever Was.”

Remember: These prompts are springboards to creativity. Use them to expand your possibilities, not limit them.

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Here’s my attempt at an “I’m Blank” Poem:

“I’m Pretty Sure,” by Robert Lee Brewer

I’m pretty sure
I don’t know what
is coming next
or thereafter,
but that’s OK
when you’re content
to just follow
the road you’re on,
and we’re all on
the same highway
to wherever
it is that we’re
all traveling
like there’s any
where else to go.

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