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A model will happily tell you your poem is beautiful. That is useless. These prompts are written for the part of the work that actually takes time: finding the near-rhyme that does not sound forced, counting stresses in a line that reads wrong, hunting the one cliché you stopped noticing, and cutting forty lines down to twelve. Several of them explicitly forbid praise, ask for the weakest line by name, or demand a recommendation instead of a list of options. Use them on a draft you are stuck inside, not on a blank page.
36 prompts in 5 groups
Rhymes, scansion, and the read-aloud passes that tell you why a line trips in the mouth.
Forms, constraints, and raw material for when there is no poem on the page yet.
The line that is dead, the lineation that feels arbitrary, the verb that is doing nothing.
Reads that name the weakest line, the stale image, and what the poem is actually about.
Cutting, ending, titling, and the last decisions before you call a draft done.
Send a prompt you keep coming back to. A person reads every one.
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