POETS ONLINE

Now in our 26th year of inspiring poets and readers.
Established 1998.

hot off the presses





  Current Issue:  what you did not know / Jon Loomis






Browse our back Issues

  submission prompt / featured poet(s)

sleep / Twyla M. Hansen

personal holiday / Galway Kinnell    2024

self love / Louise Glück

surprise / James Wright

broken off / Jane Hirshfield

conversations / Marie Howe

what I learned / Julia Kasdorf

books / Linda Pastan

Quiet / Ada Limon

triversen / William Carlos Williams

erasure / Tracy K. Smith

breakups / Stevie Smith

place / Margaret Sáraco    2023

STEM / Albert Goldbarth

transitions / Maggie Smith

guidebooks / Joy Ladin

reunions / William Trowbridge

summer, beach and August / Stanley Moss and Seamus Heaney

in a dog's voice / Analicia Sotel (Issue #300)

bed sonnets / Carol Ann Duffy

lessons / Thylias Moss

quatrains / various poets

zuihitsu  / Sei Shonagon

year end / Naomi Shihab Nye    2022

history / Robert Pinsky

Shakespearean characters / William Shakespeare

menu / Michelle Menting

letter to the future / Matthew Olzmann

historical intimacy / Billy Collins

ideal day / Laura Boss

shared birthdays / Robert Pinsky and Arthur Rimbaud

anniversary of my death / W.S. Merwin

metonymy and synecdoche / Carl Sandburg and T.S. Eliot

toys / Denise Duhamel

the day after / Susan Rothbard

translation / Lily Hayashi

thanks / W.S. Merwin

future / Mary Jo Bang  

aubade / Dore Kiesselbach

history personal / Stanley Kunitz

myths retold / Rita Dove

undoing / Linda Hillringhouse

once upon a time / Kim Addonizio and Alicia Ostriker

haiku sequence / Basho

odes to common things / Pablo Neruda

lost and found / Jane Hirshfield

time passes / Joy Ladin

factoid prose poems / Renee Ashley

rereading and rewriting / Linda Pastan and Billy Collins 

poetry in the news / BJ Ward

seasonal / Elizabeth Alexander

lust / Louise Bogan

fictional characters / Danusha Laméris

the summer of / Geraldine Connolly

epistle / Jean Nordhaus

moon / Sylvia Plath

reverdie / William Carlos Williams

Seussical / Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss)

valentines / Naomi Shihab Nye

kissing / Dorianne Laux

walking / Mary Oliver and Frank O'Hara

translation / Richard Blanco, Joy Harjo and Kenneth Ronkowitz

acquainted with / Robert Frost

poetry in school / Naomi Shihab Nye

science and love / Sara Eliza Johnson

summer haiku

the dance / William Carlos Williams and Wendell Berry

Fibonacci / Athena Kildegaard

ekphrasis for Edward Hopper / Victoria Chang and Edward Hirsch

tools of the trade / George Starbuck

what we missed in school / Tom Wayman and Brad Aaron Modlin 

songs / E.A. Robinson 

pilgrimage / Natasha Trethewey

two voices / Richard Wilbur

found poems #2

running / Afaa Michael Weaver

self-portrait / Ellen Hagen

day and season / Robert Hayden

canzone / Marilyn Hacker

sonnet / Rita Dove

witness / Carolyn Forche and Philip Terman

punctuation / Thomas Lux

music and memory / Lucille Clifton 

angels / Rainer Maria Rilke

broken things, Yusef Komunyakaa and Pablo Neruda

fruits / Thomas Lux and Julie Kane

healing / Wendell Berry

triggering titles / Richard Hugo

roads not taken / Robert Frost

fairy tales / Galway Kinnell

never born / Thomas Lux

in your next letter / Carrie Shipers, Elizabeth Bishop and Langston Hughes

sound / Faith Shearin

dark places / Stanley Kunitz

eating poetry / Galway Kinnell

body / Jane Hirshfield 

light verse / Garrison Keillor

directions / Juan Felipe Herrera

haibun / Jeannine Hall Gailey

his or her master's voice / Mark Doty

Dear Poet / Edward Hirsch and Naomi Shihab Nye

out of place / Billy Collins

golden shovel / Terrance Hayes

slang / Taylor Mali

tweets / Patricia Lockwood

negative wishes / Carl Sandburg

questions asked of the poet / Aimee Nezhukumatathil

June / Richard Wilbur

gossip / Frank O'Hara

first lines from Emily Dickinson

ronka / Kenneth Ronkowitz

when / Yeats, Keats and others

in the cracks / Robert Sward

literary terms / Paul Hostovsky

first (poetic) love / W.B. Yeats

headlines / Ken Ronkowitz

traveling / Matthew Henriksen

factoid prose poems / Louis Jenkins

tenses / Chloe Yelena Miller

trees / Melanie McCabe and Dorothea Tanning

five / Robert Frost and others

lessons learned / Gary Snyder

monologues / Hal Sirowitz

seasons / Adele Kenny

teachers / Maria Mazziotti Gillan

stupid love / Thomas Lux

triggering town tour - Erica Wright

odes / John Keats

punctuation / Emily Dickinson & e.e.cummings

ars poetica 2 / Archibald MacLeish

in the music / Karl Shapiro

stars / Philip Levine

tanka / Gerard John Conforti

off topic / various authors 

finding Poems / Naomi Shihab Nye  

revenge / Taha Muhammad Ali

rooms / Philip Levine 

solstice / May Sarton and Mary Oliver 

caring / Burt Kimmelman 

redefining / Linda Hasselstrom  

jobs / Phillip Levine 

imagism / Ezra Pound

nude / Jan Beatty

creating form / Vera Pavlova 

opposing / Laura Shovan 

animal companions / Linda McCarriston 

birds / W.B. Yeats, Elizabeth Bishop and Edna St. Vincent Millay

found poems

fruit / Carl Phillips, Tom Hansen

winter haiku / Issa, Buson and Basho

sacred places / Stephen Dunn

sons and daughters / W.S. Merwin

36 titles / Kim Addonizio

resolved / Edward Hirsch

this was once / Jane Hirshfield

confession / Shaindel Beers

not getting it / Renee Ashley

what sustains you / Thomas Lux

pantoums / Linda Pastan

facts / Dorianne Laux

sonnenizio / Kim Addonizio

laundry / Jane Kenyon & Robin Behn

prompt a day / 30 for November 2008

how not to write a poem / Lewis Carroll

language / Coral Bracho

it's not about you / Laura Kasischke and Richard Brautigan

a natural landscape / Lawrence Ferlinghetti

parenting / William Stafford

prose poem: mundane to erotic / Nin Andrews and Dorianne Laux

protest poems / various poets

what you can not be / Molly Peacock and Billy Collins

how to / Wendell Berry

the conversation of couples / Robert Hass & Brenda Hillman

two versions / Terrance Hayes

questions / William Blake

natural prayer / Mary Oliver

from Grimm / Peter Murphy

Rubaiyat / Rumi translated by Coleman Barks

didactic poems / Charles Harper Webb

unprompted poems

heroes / Ron Koertge 

good advice gone bad / Diane Lockward

residual memory of place / Andrew Motion

after reading / Tony Hoagland

marginalia / Billy Collins

against / Dorianne Laux

rediscovering / Debra Spencer

signs / Cecilia Woloch

magical thinking / Naomi Shihab Nye

contentment / Wendell Berry

giving form to death / John Updike

in the moment / Jane Hirshfield

peace / C.K. Williams  

Proustian memory / Billy Collins

calendar event / Günter Kunert

the ideal reader / Ted Kooser

heaven / Mark Doty

unrequited / Michelle Cameron

interview / William Matthews

how memory works / Patricia Hampl

letting go / Kevin Goodan

poetry alternatives / Grace Paley

momentum / Catherine Doty

guilt shop / Mark Hillringhouse

revisited / Ted Kooser       

unidentified / Anne Caston

foreign words / Thomas Lux

triads / J.D. McClatchy

deception / Richard Jones

preludes / T.S. Eliot

gladness / Percy Bysshe Shelley

ritual / Dana Gioia

cinquain / Adelaide Crapsey

risk, love, revelation / Dorianne Laux and William Stafford

math / Rita Dove

transformation / BJ Ward  

a job done badly / Louis Jenkins

leaving / Linda Pastan

apology / Renee Ashley

advice to poets / Madeline Tiger

lists / Billy Collins

rondeau / John McCrae

war / Galway Kinnell and Katha Pollit

erotic fruit / Diane Lockward   

God / Carl Dennis

automatic writing / Andre Breton

lyrics / Suzanne Vega

social or political issues / Carl Sandburg 

evocation / Tess Gallagher

the art of / Elizabeth Bishop

childhood Memory / Donald Justice

using Forms / Honor Moore

dreams / Saskia Hamilton

the way things work / Jorie Graham

in the style of / e.e. cummings

fortune cookies / Han Shan 

Poetry 180 / Various Poets

flowers / Emily Dickinson & Donna Bamford

April / Edna Saint Vincent Millay & Mary Oliver    

characters / Marilyn Chandler McEntyre  

revisionist history / Jennifer Michael Hecht

Tao / Arthur Tze

wanting / Kim Addonizio & Jane Cooper

poem personified / Larry Levis

animals / James Laughlin

words confused / Li-Young Lee

age / Donald Justice

ars poetica /Robert Lowell

approaching / Stephen Dobyns

love defined / Yevgeny Yevtushenko  

sports / Joan Murray

forgetting / Pablo Neruda

rejection / Sylvia Plath

tanka / Carolyn Kizer

breath / Robin Becker

panties / Terri Ford

writing workshops / William Matthews

mother / Tony Hoagland

ancestry / Cornelius Eady

driving / Robert Bly

metaphor deferred / Larissa Szporluk

one recalled / Laura Boss 

time / Patrick Martin   

encounter / Stephen Crane

thief / Frieda Hughes

triolets / Frederick Morgan and Adelaide Crapsey

 Emily / X.J. Kennedy & Emily Dickinson

gifts / Li-Young Lee

first line generator  

prose poems / Nin Andrews

family / Galway Kinnell

 a room / Linda Pastan

imagined relationships / Denise Duhamel

death personified / Dorianne Laux

Zen mind / William Carlos Williams

portraits / E.A. Robinson

scary movies / Kim Addonizio & Jim Richardson

diners / William Dubie

passing it on / Kurtis Lamkin

villanelles / Edward Hirsch

loss / Eavan Boland

wonder / Walt Whitman

homage / Lucille Clifton

numbers / Wislawa Szymborska

work / Gary Snyder

questions and answers / Naomi Shihab Nye

in ruin / Mark Doty

the writing prompt / Langston Hughes

best of the century / T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost

because... the writer's life / Robert Hass & Brenda Hillman

my life today / Jane Hirshfield

erotic / William Shakespeare

letter to a poet / BJ Ward

refrain / Jane Kenyon

diving / Stephen Dunn

the movies / Frank O'Hara

a renga / Wallace Stevens

poems from art / William Carlos Williams

starting with a quote / Jane Kenyon

preludes / T.S. Eliot

to a fellow poet / Gerald Stern

from a photograph / Sharon Olds

spring distractions / Robert Frost

phone sonnets / Robert Hass

ghazals / Adrienne Rich

titles that invite us / Maria Mazziotti Gillan   

personification / Charles Simic

marriage / Olena Kalytiak Davis

paradelles / Billy Collins

manmade / William Wordsworth

the extended metaphor / Cat Doty

seduction / Pattiann Rogers

daughters / Thomas Lux   

in the classroom / Philip Levine

song on the radio / Bob Dylan

elegy / Marie Howe

bad habits / Billy Collins

my father's love letters / Yusef Komunyakaa