How to Write a Poem Every Day

"Let us suppose that everyone in the world wakes up today and tries to write a poem. It is impossible to know what will happen next but certainly we may be assured that the world will not be made worse. I believe in the divinity of profligacy. The creation of art, okay, just the attempt at the creation of art, as well as the appreciation of it, is both an enlarging of the world and an expanding of consciousness. To write a poem is to explore the unknown capacities of the mind and the heart; it is emotive, empathetic exercise and, like being struck by lightning, it will probably leave you stunned, singed, but also a bit brighter, and too your odds of being struck again then go much higher."

-from The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction by Dean Young

I have come to believe that writing a poem every day is easy. I would like to help you get there too.

This online course will cover a variety of compositional strategies that you can turn to whenever you aren’t sure what to write about. You’ll get 21 writing prompts (usually a new prompt, but in one case a chance to revisit a previous prompt with what you’ve learned) that will help you write a poem, often in an hour or less. If you do one each day, the course will take three weeks.

The true challenge, of course, is writing a good poem. I can’t promise that what you’ll write in this course will be any good (in fact, I encourage you to temporarily let go of the idea of “good” while you take it). But in order to revise, you first need a draft. I think it’s better to err on the side of writing too many poems than too few. You can always take a break from writing anything new if you feel you have too much, but you can never get lost writing time back.

Sometimes writing prompts can be very specific, meaning that poems created from them will inevitably be very similar. Not in this course: most prompts will be a technique you can use over and over to create an infinite number of infinitely varied poems. Unless you have an experimental bent, not all prompts may seem equally viable to you, but they will help you find phrases and lines that you’re unlikely to have created otherwise.

A group version of this class is running from January 3 - 25, 2026, with a private discussion forum at https://ahthesea.com where you can share your work, and weekly Zoom calls where you can interact with others in real time. (Note that at the website, there's a $10 version of this course that is completely self-led with no community, if you prefer that option.)

The instructor for this course is Meg Hartmann, who has almost ten years of experience as a writing teacher and holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A longer bio is here or you can also see my LinkedIn profile.

Are you up for it? What might it mean for you to have 21 new poems? Or to know that, even if you feel uninspired, you can sit down for a little while and come up with a poem? An imperfect poem, but a poem.

Comments from Past Participants

“I can hardly express how much I’ve enjoyed and benefited from these three weeks. Every day has been a challenge and a joyful experience of discovering all these new relationships with words! You have been so thorough in explanations and links and examples and every lesson was met with so much anticipation…There are so many directions I can take with each and every lesson and combinations thereof, that I will not want for inspiration. So many lessons had so many options that I will be revisiting these pages for a long time to come.”
– Melinda K. Hall

[In response to the question, what would you say if a friend told you they were going to take this course?] Go for it
– Katharine B