Feeling Poetically Stale? Try These Ways to Provoke Your Imagination Into New Ideas
Different forms and different approaches can jump-start all kinds of poems
When you have been writing poetry for a while, you can start feeling like your poetry is becoming stale. You’re writing the same old kind of poem (perhaps free verse of a certain length), or writing about the same old subjects. It can be hard to break free, but it’s worth pushing yourself to do so.
One way is to simply read more widely. Rather than keep going back to your old favorites, try new poets you might never have heard of. Do some googling of who has won awards recently or had books published, specifically targeting new names. I read a lot of American poets, so I started searching out UK poets instead.
When you google them, you will often find samples of their work online, due to the number of journals and magazines that now publish digitally. You can also look for new anthologies of poems and make sure you read ones that you might normally skip over. Our brains do tend to go for the familiar first, which is not good for stimulating our imagination.
When you find a new poem that intrigues you, write a poem in response. If it’s in a new style or form you aren’t familiar with, have a go at writing…
