National Poetry Month 2013: Writing Prompts at Poets Online

When I was first starting to send my poetry out, I needed a journal or e-zine that felt safe. Somewhere that I could submit work to without feeling too much pressure about being rejected or accepted.

Poet and educator Ken Ronkowitz, who I knew through the Dodge Poetry Program in New Jersey, had the perfect place. He was starting up a poetry website called Poets Online. The site had a new writing prompt based on a model poem every two weeks. I used the site -- writing response poems, sending them in, and occasionally seeing my work posted alongside other poets and poems.

Fifteen years later, Ken is still managing Poets Online. It's my go-to TechnoVerse site for great poetry prompts.

POETS ONLINE is a website that offers monthly writing prompts and offers you the opportunity to submit your resulting poem for online publication.

The site started in 1998 as an e-mail exchange amongst four poets. At a writing workshop that summer, I asked three other poets if they wanted to continue exchanging poems by email beyond the workshop. After a few weeks, we decided to take turns suggesting a writing prompt idea. In that first iteration, we gave ourselves a week and then e-mailed our poems to each other.

As more poet friends of the group wanted to join in, it became awkward using email. So, I created a website where the poems could be posted and I became the person who received the poems from participants. I titled the site Poets Online.

The idea of poets being online in 1998 was very new. The site grew in number only by word-of-mouth and poets who stumbled upon it in a web search.

The one week deadline proved to be too short for most people and too much compiling for me, so we moved to once a month.

In early 1999, I added a mailing list to remind people to check on the latest prompt and poems. The list still exists and now has over 500 "subscribers."
The site was originally located on a free web server service (Geocities), but when I was told in 2001 that "Your web pages have exceeded your account's total data transferred quota," I knew that popularity was forcing me to rebuild the site elsewhere.


I bought the domain poetsonline.org and redid the site and it has continued to grow for these fifteen years.

The intent has always been to provide inspiration through a writing prompt that remains open for about a month. Poets can try the prompt and submit that poem for possible online publication. I've had emails from lots of people who try the prompts but don't want their poems online.  A number of teachers from elementary level through college have told me they use the archive of prompts (more than 200) with their students and use the poems archived online as models.

The site has remained pretty much a one-man operation with me doing all the web work and just asking a few poet friends to read through the submissions.
We try to accept as many poems that respond to the current prompt in a serious way as space allows. We realize that we receive poems from poets of varying ages and experience. We receive poems every month that "appear" to be written by young people, but if they address the prompt in an interesting way, they have a good chance of being posted.

It has been very encouraging to receive mail from poets around the world saying that this was their first publication or letting me know that their poem in is a print journal or even that their first book has been published. I know of at least a dozen poets who submitted in years past that now have more than one book out in the world.

This, like many poetry efforts, is certainly a non-profit operation. We include Amazon links to books and poets featured and if in a year the referral fees from that cancel out the cost of the domain and online hosting, it has been a good year.


For anyone submitting poems to Poets Online or any other publication on or offline, a few rules apply. First, read some of the poems they have published recently and see if your poem fits the selections. This especially applies to most print journals. Haiku have a much better chance in a haiku journal (or for one of our haiku prompts).

Second, read the submission guidelines. Every publication has something like our submissions page which gives you information about formatting, deadlines and genre preferences. We only want to receive one poem in response to the current prompt. When a group of 8 arrive, none will be read. 

Third, know your rights. Some journals purchase the first rights to your work and some retain further rights for republication. Can your work appear in other places simultaneously? How long do they retain those rights? Our page on copyright is a good start in your author education. PoetsOnline.org  retains first electronic rights at time of publication, after which all rights revert back to the author.

A fourth rule applies very much to Poets Online. In the fifteen years of offering prompts and reading poems, we have rejected more poems than we have accepted for one reason. They don't address the prompt.  No matter what the prompt says, there are always submissions that have nothing to do with it.
Many of the poems that are off-prompt are ones I would consider for publication if we just accepted poems on any topic or in any form. Love poems, religious and political poetry comes in every month even if the prompt was for poems about opposition or a call for odes or for poems about where we find our inspiration. 

Unfortunately, we can not respond personally to every poem submitted, acknowledge every submission except for an auto-response, or offer critiques of your work. Subscribing to our mailing list will notify you of when new poems appear.

Which doesn't mean that I never correspond with poets who submit. You have the option to have your name linked to an email address or your own website and a number of poets have connected via the site. Occasionally, I will email poets with some encouraging rejection note. (Yes, there is a such a thing. I have received them myself.) Sometimes we suspect that it is a young poet in age or experience. Rejection is tough on poets.

We added a blog in 2005 so that we could continue the poetic conversations all month and expand upon the prompts. It also allowed poets to comment on the poems and prompts.

And Poets Online went social early on when Facebook first allowed groups to have pages. We have an official page on Facebook and also a group page where anyone can post and comment on poems, prompts or things poetic.
We also have a Twitter feed @poetsonline for daily bursts of poetry news, a Pinterest site for things visual, a GoodReads page to share what we are reading and we publish a Poet & Writer Evening News online daily.

You still have time to submit to our April prompt on the prose poem which features poems by Louis Jenkins and Jim Harrison.  The current prompt is always the one open for your submissions, but there are plenty in the archive to keep you busy.

Want more Ken? Check out his website on poetry, education and technology. Ken once featured a poem of mine, "Tomorrow is Going to Be Normal," as a Poets Online model for inspiration. You can read that prompt and the response poems here.


We are having a rough week at the Shovan house. Miss J has been out of school all week with the stomach flu. The teen left this morning at 4 AM (meaning, I got up at 3 to drive him to school). He is on his way to California for a Robotics competition. All the drama has put me behind on our TechnoVerse schedule. I hope to be caught up before this week's Poetry Friday. 

Our next tour guide in the TechnoVerse will be poet Moira Egan of Rome. Moira, co-editor of the anthology Hot Sonnets, is taking the classic form high tech in her post.

Poetry Friday: California's Poet Laureate

Happy Poetry Friday, everyone!

I know National Poetry Month is over, but I'm still finishing up my project. Today's stop on my 50 State Tour of poets laureate is California (state #31, 9/8/1850). There's a writing prompt at the end of the post.

The Golden State has had a poet laureate program since 1915. Current P.L  Carol Muske-Dukes' most recent book of poetry, Sparrow was a National Book Award finalist. It's about the her relationship with her late husband, David Dukes.

Through Muske-Dukes' website, you can access information on The Magic Poetry Bus. It's her P.L. project. Teachers, you'll want to check out the "techniques for learning and loving poems."

I love how her poem, "Twin Cities," begins with place and shifts into a portrait poem of a "wild funny girl" remembered from childhood.

Twin Cities
by Carol Muske-Dukes

It was the river that made them two—
The mills on one side,
The cathedral on the other.

We watched its swift currents:
If we stared long enough, maybe
It would stop cold and let us


Skate across to the other side.
It never froze in place—though
I once knew a kid, a wild funny

Girl who built a raft from branches
(Which promptly sank a few feet out
From the elbow bend off Dayton’s Bluff)

Who made it seem easy to believe.
We’d tried to break into Carver’s Cave,
Where bootleggers hid their hot stash

Years after the Dakota drew their snakes
And bears on the rock walls and canoed
Inside the caverns. We knew there were

Other openings in the cliffs, mirroring
Those same rock faces on the other shore—
And below them the caves, the subterranean

Pathways underlying the talk and commerce,
The big shot churches, undermining the false
Maidenliness of the convent school from which

My friend was eventually expelled for being
Too smart and standing up for her own smartness.
Too late, I salute you, Katy McNally. I think

That the river returned then to two-sidedness—
An overhung history of bottle-flash and hopelessness.
I see you still—laughing

Read the poem's conclusion at the New Yorker.

Writing exercise -- recommended for middle school and up.

Carol Muske-Dukes' poem "Twin Cities" begins by describing a specific place. The poets' feelings about this place are wrapped up in memories of a person, Katy McNally. Let's use Muske-Dukes form to write a portrait poem.

1. Begin with a visual description of a place.
2. Who do you associate with that place? Show what that person is doing there. (An action that reveals his/her character.)
3. Return to describing the place and its history
4. but end the poem with a reflection about the person.

Can't get enough poetry prompts? Poets Online is a poem from my book with a related prompt!

Our Poetry Friday host is Diane at Random Noodling. So heat up some ramen noodles and dig into today's poetry posts!

Poe-etry Writing Exercise

"From childhood's hour" what has been the demon in your view?

Okay, maybe you're a convert to "The Secret," or you were always a glass-half-full type of person. But I agree with Edgar Allan Poe. In childhood, we establish a point of view that's basically positive, negative or neutral, generally happy or sad.

In response to Poe's poem, "Alone," tell about the person or event that shaped your childhood point of view. Or, like Poe, create a metaphor that describes what haunted or encouraged you as a child.

Here is a triolet I wrote several years ago. In my mind, it touches on this subject -- even though the poem doesn't reveal the "demon."

Triolet: A Visit to the Doctor of Herbal Medicine She says, “You have the sadness in you.” She can see it in my dry, cracked hands. My skin is raw with sorrow, it is true what she says. “You have the sadness in you.” How can I hide it? Absence dries me through -- heart to knuckle-bones, I’m marked by its brands. She says, “You have the sadness in you.” She can see it in my dry, cracked hands. Published at Poets Online, Winter 2000

Want to know more about the triolet form? There's a good article here: http://www.webexhibits.org/poetry/explore_obscure_triolet_make.html