Love Poems for
Ina Coolbrith Circle

Writing Prompts for Love Poems

Love is simple, complex, classic, eternal, and offers a myriad of entry points. There’s romantic love, hungry love, familial love, friendship, pet love, monster love, lost love, twisted love, unrequited love, self-love. There’s new love and seasoned love. Fleeting and forever love. Taking inspiration from today’s discussion and sample poems, write about love in a surprising way.

SOME IDEAS TO GET YOU STARTED

1.     Write one (or a series) of tiny love note poems. Think Post-It note, postcard, text message, tweet, or Instagram. 

• Write your idea in a single sentence

• Make a mini list

• Put your title at the end, like a signature

• Play with your line breaks; use enjambment and fragment to add or extend meaning

• Try to use personification and/or metaphor

2.     Write a poem about desire using metaphors about food, eating, or drinking. 

• You might list what you're hungry for (be specific) 

• Start with the food and work backwards. What foods are sexy or irresistible? What's your weakness? What do eat in bed? 

• Think of a time you had a romantic meal or invent your ideal date meal. 

• Compare an intimate moment with eating. 

3.     Write a poem about lost or unrequited love, about breaking up, missing or remembering someone. 

• You might want to choose a specific moment to narrate. 

• Try to locate the emotion inside of action, dialogue place, or the detritus of dailiness. 

• Perhaps let some humor into your poem.

4.     Write a poem that uses surprising metaphors to explore opposites, ironies, and/or reversals in love.

• Think: Love like this pink flower! Love like this rusty spike! 

• Find beauty in ugliness. “Velvet and shit.” (Stein)

• “Razor blade eyes make a good wife.” (Jane Reyes)

5.     Write a love poem from the point of view of a mythical creature.

6.     Write a love/hate poem to a part of your body or your lover's body.

7.     Write a letter poem to a lover or friend about the terribly urgent, wonderful things you must tell them. 

8.     Write a list poem repeating the word "because" or "reasons"

• because of my love for you____

• because I think of you____

• because you are mine____ 

• reasons I love you____

9.     Write a how-to poem about love

10.   Write a love letter to a specific group of people—women, democrats, Californians, Native Americans, protestors, voters, oppressed people of the Middle East, refugees, Gen X, poets who have felt jealousy or rejection, teachers, etc.

Or something else! Feel free to ignore or use any of these ideas as a launch point and follow whatever inspiration takes you!