• Home
  • Poetry Prompts
  • For Writers
  • Daily Poem-Subscribe! ✨
  • Teaching Tools
  • Free Stuff + BOOKS
  • Patron Love

Form It: A Box Poetry Prompt

By Heather Eure 5 Comments

form it box promptForm It is a prompt that focuses on exploring our topic through form poetry. This time, we’re going to “form” a box.

Prompt Guidelines and Options

1. Consider how you are feeling today, as you approach your topic. Are you sorrowful? Overflowing with joy or good humor? Maybe you’re in a snarky frame of mind. Or feeling perplexed. Perhaps you’re just in the mood to tell a story or express gratitude or awe. You could also consider the nature of the topic itself. Think on these things before you…

2. Choose a form that either matches or purposely works against how you feel as you approach your topic, or that matches or purposely works against the nature of the topic itself. Options:

Acrostic (good for creating puzzles and mystery or dedications)

Ballad (excellent way to tell a story)

Catalog Poem (useful for building intensity, praise, or a sense of magic)

Cinquain (a good form for creating a sense of focus on a single experience, possibly with a twist ending or a terse ending)

Ghazal (helpful for emphasizing “longing” or for exploring metaphysical questions)

Haiku (good for creating immediacy or focusing in on emotion)

Ode (excellent way to praise something or someone you love or admire)

Pantoum (useful for plumbing depressive or anxious themes)

Rondeau (helpful for giving form to extremes of either sadness or dark wit)

Sestina (good for exploring confusion, questions, worries, neuroses, fears in an oblique way)

Sonnet (excellent way to confine a bombastic theme or reign in a potentially sappy or overly-sentimental theme; also an excellent way to “work against” a topic humorously)

Villanelle (useful for themes that feel resistant to answers; also can be used to “work against” a topic, using mocking humor)

3. Be specific. Think nouns instead of adjectives.

4. Consider doing a little research about the topic you are covering: its history, associated words, music, art, sculpture, architecture, fashion, science, and so on. Look for unusual details, so you can speak convincingly and intriguingly.

That’s it! We look forward to hearing you form poetically, about a box.

poetry prompt mini series offer

Click to get FREE 5-Prompt Mini-Series

Featured Poem

From a recent poetry prompt, here is part of a poem from Kaiya we’d like to share:

Our songs pierce through the quiet dark
Our minds surrender to our hearts
A wolf, a wind, one in the same
And like the winds, we are not tame.

—by Kaiya Rose

Photo by Lee Coursey. Creative Commons via Flickr.

Browse more boxes & baskets
Browse more writing prompts
Browse poetry teaching resources

How to Write a Poem 283 highHow to Write a Poem uses images like the buzz, the switch, the wave—from the Billy Collins poem “Introduction to Poetry”—to guide writers into new ways of writing poems. Excellent teaching tool. Anthology and prompts included.

“How to Write a Poem is a classroom must-have.”
—Callie Feyen, English Teacher, Maryland

BUY HOW TO WRITE A POEM NOW!

  • Author
  • Recent Posts
Heather Eure
Heather Eure
Heather Eure has served as the Poetry Editor for the late Burnside Collective and Special Projects Editor for us at Tweetspeak Poetry. Her poems have appeared at Every Day Poems. Her wit has appeared just about everywhere she's ever showed up, and if you're lucky you were there to hear it.
Heather Eure
Latest posts by Heather Eure (see all)
  • Form It: Little Lamb Poetry Prompt - March 26, 2018
  • Poetry Prompt: Misunderstood Lion - March 19, 2018
  • Animate: Lions & Lambs Poetry Prompt - March 12, 2018

Related

❤️✨ Sharing is caring

Filed Under: Blog, Boxes & Baskets, Form It, poetry prompt, poetry teaching resources, writer's group resources, writing prompt

Comments

  1. Rick Maxson says

    November 21, 2017 at 4:36 am

    Made Things

    I have gone into the narrows
    of wet spruce and boxcar roofs,
    baked for miles of track. Poetry
    gleaned in the glide of stacked
    beams out the slightest portal, then
    set neat on lath, ten wide, five high.

    In the galloping sounds that raise
    a house, a cadence, and cesuras
    found in the reaching for a nail,
    the cantos of the carpenters,
    make walls and windows with each room.
    Hearts and poems live in such things.

    Reply
  2. Katie says

    November 22, 2017 at 8:44 pm

    Beautiful.

    Reply
  3. Katie says

    November 22, 2017 at 8:58 pm

    Ode to Apricots

    You smiled up at my appetite,
    from the cylinder
    in the salad bar.

    Small halves of sunshine,
    wet and shiny
    mouth-watering.

    Wooing me to spoon
    you onto my plate
    as I smile and drool.

    Gingerly I carry you
    back to my table
    where I dip into delight.

    Neither your color
    nor your texture
    not even your taste, disappoint.

    Reply
  4. Katie says

    November 24, 2017 at 9:47 pm

    What box
    Has chocolates
    In it?
    To sample
    Maybe try one
    And see if
    Nuts are hiding

    Swathed in caramel
    Another nougat
    Mallow or
    Peanut/walnut
    Leaving
    Every bit more
    Reason to leave the lid open.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Boxes & Baskets: Gift Box Poetry Prompt - says:
    November 27, 2017 at 8:01 am

    […] to everyone who participated in last week’s poetry prompt. Here is a poem from Rick we […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Take How to Read a Poem

Get the Introduction, the Billy Collins poem, and Chapter 1

get the sample now

Welcome to Tweetspeak

New to Tweetspeak Poetry? Start here, in The Mischief Café. You're a regular? Check out our January Menu.

Keep the World Poetic

❤️

Welcome a little patron love, when you help keep the world thoughtful and poetic.

5 FREE POETRY PROMPTS

Get 5 FREE inbox poetry prompts from the popular book How to Write a Poem

Join the Poetry Club

Join the poetry club, when you become a subscriber to Every Day Poems ✨

The classic—Now a Graphic Novel!

"Stunning, heartbreaking, and relevant illustrations"

Callie Feyen, teacher

read a summary of The Yellow Wallpaper

Recent Comments

  • Megan Willome on The Generativity of Wild Things: On Rethinking Our Relationship With Money
  • Rick Maxson on The Generativity of Wild Things: On Rethinking Our Relationship With Money
  • Bethany R. on Poets and Poems: Troy Cady and “Featherdusting the Moon”
  • Megan Willome on Children’s Book Club: ‘Katy and the Big Snow’

Featured In

We're happy to have been featured in...

The Huffington Post

The Paris Review

The New York Observer

Tumblr Book News

Join Tweetspeak Poetry

Categories

Explore Work From Black Poets

Learn to Write Form Poems

How to Write an Acrostic

How to Write a Ballad

How to Write a Catalog Poem

How to Write a Ghazal

How to Write a Haiku

How to Write an Ode

How to Write a Pantoum

How to Write a Rondeau

How to Write a Sestina

How to Write a Sonnet

How to Write a Villanelle

Free Printable Poet Bios

Browse all poet bios now

Shakespeare Resources

Poetry Classroom: Sonnet 18

Common Core Picture Poems: Sonnet 73

Sonnet 104 Annotated

Sonnet 116 Annotated

Character Analysis: Romeo and Juliet

Character Analysis: Was Hamlet Sane or Insane?

Why Does Hamlet Wait to Kill the King?

10 Fun Shakespeare Resources

About Shakespeare: Poet and Playwright

Top 10 Shakespeare Sonnets

See all 154 Shakespeare sonnets in our Shakespeare Library!

About Us

  • • Our Story
  • • Meet Our Team
  • • Literary Citizenship
  • • Poet Laura
  • • Poetry for Life: The 5 Vital Approaches
  • • T. S. Poetry Press – All Books
  • • Contact Us

Write With Us

  • • 5 FREE Poetry Prompts-Inbox Delivery
  • • 30 Days to Richer Writing Workshop
  • • How to Write Form Poems-Infographics
  • • Poetry Club Tea Date
  • • Poetry Prompts
  • • Submissions

Read With Us

  • • All Our Books
  • • A Ritual to Read to Each Other
  • • Best Love Poetry
  • • Book Club
  • • Children’s Book Club
  • • Every Day Poems
  • • Literacy Extras
  • • Literary Analysis
  • • Poems to Listen By: Audio Series
  • • Poets and Poems
  • • VerseWrights Journal
  • • William Blake Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Shakespeare Sonnet Library

Celebrate With Us

  • • Poem on Your Pillow Day
  • • Poetic Earth Month
  • • Poet in a Cupcake Day
  • • Poetry at Work Day
  • • Random Acts of Poetry Day
  • • Take Your Poet to School Week
  • • Take Your Poet to Work Day

Gift Ideas

  • • Give the Gift of Every Day Poems
  • • Our Shop
  • • Everybody Loves a Book!

Connect

  • • Donate
  • • Blog Buttons
  • • By Heart
  • • Shop for Tweetspeak Fun Stuff

Copyright © 2021 Tweetspeak Poetry · Site by The Willingham Enterprise · FAQ & Disclosure