Poetry & Practice Writing Activities

Inspired by Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, this prompt invites thinking about the various ways we might attend to the ordinary around us through creative...

I was grateful to devise and facilitate a workshop called “Standing Outside Myself: The Black Ecstatic.” I began by drawing on ecstasy’s etymology as a framework for our thinking—the idea...

In 1954, on a small coral atoll in the Pacific Ocean, the United States detonated a weapon designed to annihilate every living thing in its path. That year, Frank O’Hara...

Whenever a guest drops by unexpectedly, my eye goes to the pile of mail on the counter, the tumbleweeds of dog hair roaming freely across the kitchen floor from our...

The poet Ruth Stone is known for sensing a poem thundering at her over the landscape and running like hell for home to write it down. Sometimes, she’d catch it...

As a visiting teaching artist for the Poetry Foundation, I facilitated a workshop titled “GLYPH-cation! Learn & Create Hybrid Poetry.” We created graphic poems and also explored how visual elements...

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” —James BaldwinWriting poems can be the articulation of a kind of listening. We listen to the poems we’ve dog-eared in...

In college, I would count the syllables in my sentences. Turns out, I run between 18 and 22 syllables per sentence unconsciously. Didn’t matter if the paper was about evolutionary...

Read Douglas Kearney’s poem “Every Hard Rapper’s Father Ever: Father of the Year.” Then, listen to the poet reading this poem out loud at least once. A few questions you...

Read or listen to Kimiko Hahn’s poem, “Likeness: A Self-Portrait,” several times. A few questions you might consider, either in writing or in conversation with others: The title instructs us to...

What I didn’t know before reading Ada Limón’s What I Didn’t Know Before is where research—scientific, philosophical, historical, or any other kind—belongs in the poetry writing process. What I learned after...

The roots of the word exhibition are instructive: from ex "out" + habere "to hold." An exhibition holds out a particular narrative, a thesis, and framing of a subject. A...