Poetry prompts

Created by Joseph Coelho

Discover 10 unique ideas for writing your own poetry. Will you be inspired to write a rhyme about eating a cheese sandwich, or make up your own wacky limericks?

1. The History of an Apple Pie

Have a look at the wonderful History of an Apple Pie. This is a brilliant example of a form of poetry called an abercedarius (or an alphabet poem). Quite simply an alphabet poem is a 26-line poem with each line starting with each letter of the alphabet.

The genius of The History of an Apple Pie is that it focuses the whole poem on an apple pie and the various characters that interact with it. Notice also how every sentence ends with ‘it’, providing a sort of repetitive rhyme and expectation as we move through the poem.

My challenge to you is to write your own abercedarius based around a different item of food of your choosing. Maybe it’s a lamb chop! Or a cup cake, or perhaps a cup of tea.

Just like The History of an Apple Pie, think about who has interacted with this item of food. Will you start with its creation? If so, who made it? If it’s meat, where was it reared? If it’s a vegetable, where was it grown? Maybe you follow the food all the way through the process of being eaten and digested (I’ll leave it to you to decide where you stop! It could get messy!)

The important thing is to have fun and to be as imaginative or as zany as you like. Maybe you will follow the example of The History of an Apple Pie and simply show us the characters that come into contact with the food. Maybe you’ll end every sentence with the same word, or maybe you’ll make it rhyme with different words.

Take note of the lists of rhyming words further into ‘The History of an Apple Pie’: words like ‘bad’, ‘sad’ and ‘mad’. Could you use some of these words to make your abercedarius rhyme? Maybe you’ll make every other line rhyme like this…

‘The History of a Cheese Sandwich’
A ate a bit of it
B bawled for a crumb
C Cried for a tiny bit
D dented it with his thumb...

Remember there is no right or wrong way to do it, just have fun. Good luck.

2. A moment in time

Some of the best poems describe a single moment in time. Grace Nichols’s lovely ‘Granny Granny Please Comb My Hair’ takes the simple act of hair being brushed and creates a beautiful poem that many of us can relate to, especially when we think of someone brushing our hair and getting snagged on a knot.

Have a go at writing a poem about a single moment in time. Think of something you don’t like doing: it could be the washing up or brushing your teeth, or taking the rubbish out. See how much you can explore of this little moment. Will you address the poem to someone like Nichols does? Will you reveal how you feel about this moment?

3. Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense

I’ve long been a huge fan of Edward Lear’s wacky, crazy poems. The ones on offer here are brilliant examples of limericks.

A limerick is a five-line poem with a set rhyme scheme. The way they have been presented in Lear’s original book makes the form a bit harder to notice, so I shall recreate one of the poems here…

Line 1 There was an Old Person of Ewell,
Line 2 Who chiefly subsisted on gruel;
Line 3 But to make it more nice,
Line 4 He inserted some mice,
Line 5 Which refreshed that Old Person of Ewell.

Set out like this it’s much easier to see the ‘rules’ of a limerick…

Rule 1 – Line 1 introduces a person from a particular place.
Rule 2 – Line 1 rhymes with line 2 and line 5.
Rule 3 – Line 3 rhymes with Line 4 (these lines are also shorter than the rest)
Rule 4 – A limerick is often very funny.*
(*there are a few other rules too. If you really want to do a perfect limerick, check out my book How To Write Poems which will reveal the secrets of syllable counting!)

Writing your own limerick is easy. First of all decide where your character is from, try and make it a place which is easy to rhyme, try out a few place names and see how many rhymes you can find for each one that comes to mind. Here are some to get you started…

Chelsea – Bee, tea, sea, key, fee
Liverpool – tool, fool, wool, cool
Leeds – beads, seeds, reeds, needs, weeds
Aberdeen – bean, teen, seen, keen, lean, mean
New York – Pork, fork, talk, cork, stork.

Once you have chosen your place, you can start…

Line 1 – There was a young man from Chelsea

Ok, you have a great start. Now you have to tell us something strange about your character. Remember that Line 2 rhymes with Line 1.

Line 1 – There was a young man from Chelsea
Line 2 – who tried to swallow the North Sea!

Lines 3 and 4 have a new rhyme and give us more information about the funny predicament the character finds themselves in, and these lines are shorter than the rest…

Line 1 – There was a young man from Chelsea,
Line 2 – who tried to swallow the North Sea!
Line 3 – He gulped every last drip
Line 4 – and one cruising ship!

Notice how I included a crazy surprise… he drank a cruise ship! Now for the final line, Line 5, which has to rhyme with Lines 1 and 2. To make things easier for yourself you can do what Lear does and repeat the place name to get your rhyme…

Line 5 – That thirsty young man from Chelsea!

But you could also use a different end word, as long as it rhymes…

Line 1 – There was a young man from Chelsea,
Line 2 – who tried to swallow the North Sea!
Line 3 – He gulped every last drip
Line 4 – and one cruising ship!
Line 5 – From now on he’ll only drink hot tea!

Good luck writing your limerick, but be careful. They can get a little bit addictive and before you know it you’ll find yourself writing all sorts of hilarious poems, just like Edward Lear.

4. Sing A Song

Looking at Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book (a 276-year-old book of nursery rhymes), there is a description of ‘Naughty boys bak’d in a pye (pie)’.

Can you write a poem about what these naughty boys did to be punished so terribly? Is their punishment connected to their crime? Did they steal a pie? Did they ruin a pie recipe? Did they make their own disgusting pie and make others sick? Have fun with your poem, naughty characters are always the best to write!

5. Tiny poems for tiny books

Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book is tiny and so the poems have to be very short. My challenge to you is to write three tiny rhyming poems for the modern age.

Instead of clocks and mice, your poem should involve…

A mobile phone
A games console
A drone.

6. Sun-Gazer woman

Grace Nichols’s poem ‘Moon-Gazer’ tells us to ‘Beware! Beware! / of Moon-gazer man.’

But what about Sun-gazer woman? Can you write a poem about her? Do we need to beware her? How is she different from Moon-gazer man? What are her main features? Is there anything we must never do near her?

7. Cosmic dancing

In her brilliant poem ‘Cosmic Disco’ Grace Nichols describes the movement of the stars as a dance.

Can you borrow that idea and describe the movement of raindrops in a storm as a dance? Or the fall of snow as a dance? Or the sparkling of rainbow colours as a dance? Think of all your favourite dance moves and see if you can get those words into your poem.

8. Work that poem

‘A poem develops over stages. You will need to revise it, polish it, make it better. Make it into the shining spirit of your idea’.

This quote by James Berry brilliantly describes the process of writing. Writing is a process and your poem will get better and better the more you work it.

Take a poem you have already written (maybe from one of the exercises above), get hold of a different coloured pen and start to:

delete any words you don’t like,
try to swap three words for alternatives you have found in a thesaurus,
have a go at adding some more describing words,
see if you can change the order of any words.

Play with the words in your poem. Let it look messy. When you have played and are happy, write it out in neat and read it out loud!

9. Hey diddle, diddle

Look at the brilliant variations in the illustrations for ‘Hey diddle, diddle.’ Choose one of the illustrations and write your own poem that would work with that picture.

Looking at Randolph Caldecott’s illustration you might end up writing a poem about a cow talking to a fiddling cat at a party on a farm.

Looking at Satoshi Kitamura’s illustration might lead you to write a poem in the voice of the dish holding the spoon.

Look at what the illustration you have chosen focuses on and use that as your inspiration for your poem.

10. A Book of Practical DOGS!

T S Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats has a brilliant title that invites intrigue and wonder.

But! I wonder what poems would be inside a book of Practical DOGS!

Could you write some of those poems? What is a practical dog? Think of all the different breeds of dogs, think of all the ways dogs help us: from mountain rescue, to guide dogs for the blind, to just being great companions and family members. Give your dogs names and characters, give them flaws and personalities.