31st March refer to a specific writer or artist (or work of literature/art) and make a declarative statement about want or desire. Set the poem in a particular, people-filled place, like a restaurant, bus station, museum, school, etc.

1st April The tanka is an ancient Japanese poetic form. In contemporary English versions, it often takes the shape of a five-line poem with a 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 7 syllable-count – kind of like a haiku that decided to keep going. 

2nd April a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.

3rd April  Today, we challenge you to write a poem in which a profession or vocation is described differently than it typically is considered to be.

4th April craft your own short poem that involves a weather phenomenon and some aspect of the season. Try using rhyme and keeping your lines of roughly even length.

5th April write a poem in which you talk about disliking something – particularly something utterly innocuous, like clover. Be over the top! Be a bit silly and overdramatic.

April 6th In your poem today, try writing with a breezy, conversational tone, while including at least one thing that could only happen in a dream.

April 7th write a skippng rhyme

April 8th I did on 10th use a simple phrase repeatedly, and then make statements that invert or contradict that phrase.

April 9th try writing your own poem in the voice of an animal or plant, or a poem that describes a specific animal or plant with references to historical events or scientific facts. I didnt do this as I had a massive bang on my head and needed medical attention

April 10th In his poem, “Goodbye,” Geoffrey Brock describes grief in three short stanzas, the second of which is entirely made up of a rhetorical dialogue. Today, write your own meditation on grief. Try using Brock’s form as the “container” for your poem: a few short stanzas, with a middle section in which a question is repeated with different answers given.

April 11th Erasure poetry — also known as blackout poetry — is written by taking an existing text and erasing or blacking out individual words. Here’s a great explainer with examples, and you’ll find another here. Some folks have written whole books of erasures/blackouts, including Chase Berggrun’s R E D (which is based on Dracula), Jen Bervin’s Nets (which is based on Shakespeare’s sonnets), and what is one of the grand-daddies of erasures as a form, Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os (which is based on Paradise Lost). Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own erasure/blackout poem. You could use a page from a favorite book, a magazine, what have you. It can be especially fun to play with a book you don’t know, particularly one that deals with an unfamiliar topic. If you’d like to go that route, maybe you’ll find something of interest in the thousands of scanned books at the Internet Archive? Feel free to maintain the whitespace of the original text (as is traditional for erasures/blackouts . . . if anything can be called traditional about them) or to pluck words/phrases from your chosen source material and rearrange them.

April 12th Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that recounts a memory of a beloved relative, and something they did that echoes through your thoughts today.

April 13th Try your hand today at writing your own poem about a remembered, cherished landscape. It could be your grandmother’s backyard, your schoolyard basketball court, or a tiny strip of woods near the railroad tracks. At some point in the poem, include language or phrasing that would be unusual in normal, spoken speech – like a rhyme, or syntax that feels old-fashioned or high-toned

April 14th write a poem that similarly bridges (whether smoothly or not) the seeming divide between poetry and technological advances.

April 15th  write your own poem that muses on love, but isn’t a traditional love poem in the sense of expressing love between romantic partners.

April 16th Today, try writing a poem in which you describe something that cannot speak, and what it has taught or told you.

April 17th And now for our (optional) prompt! Sergio Raimondi’s poem, “Today Matsuo Basho Cooks,” plays on the following haiku by (you guessed it), Matsuo Basho:

Crimson pepper pod!
Add two pairs of wings, and look—
darting dragonfly.

For today’s challenge, write a poem in which you respond to a favorite poem by another poet.

April 18th Today, we don’t challenge you to write all of a long, dramatic, narrative poem, but we invite you to try your hand at writing a poem that could be a section or piece of one. Include rhyme, include unlikely and dramatic scenes (maybe a poem about a bank robbery! Or an avalanche! Or Roman gladiators! Or an enormous ball held by mermaids, where there is an undercurrent (hee) of palace intrigue!) Basically, a poem with the plot of an opera (evil twins! Egyptian tombs! Star-crossed lovers! Tigers for no apparent reason!)

April 19th If you’re so inclined, you could even do some outside research into your flowers, and incorporate facts that you learn into your work.

April 20th For today, try writing your own poem that uses an animal that shows up in myths and legends as a metaphor for some aspect of a contemporary person’s life. Include one spoken phrase.