Note: this article first appeared in the Writers.com Poets Newsletter, and is adapted from an in-person workshop I ran. 

I have a confession to make. Most of the time, I dislike short poems.

I don’t mean short-form poetry. Cinquains and haiku can be quite enjoyable. I’m moreso put off by short-short free verse poetry: poems in under 9 lines or 40 words whose brevity is, for some reason, the “point.”

I won’t name any particular micropoems or poets I dislike, I’ll only say that I find a lot of the short stuff to be, at a craft level, lazy. The work has the veneer of poetry, but has not actually used poetry’s brevity, density, and line breaks to deliver something. Alternately, some micropoems strike me as being epiphanies without journeys: the work delivers some form of insight, but I read it having not enjoyed the journey towards that insight, and so come away less impacted than I want to be.

Nonetheless, some short poems strike a balance of craft and epiphany—and the most successful, in my opinion, contain some sort of mystery. They reach for something spiritual, greater-than-us, grasping towards the cosmos on little legs.

I ran a workshop on writing micropoetry last month, and, as usual, the members of my workshop offered plenty of great insights. Here are some of those insights, including prompts and inspiration for your 2026 poetic practice.

Qualities of Successful Short-Form Poetry

Not all micropoems have all of these qualities, but many micropoems share some of these qualities with one another.

• A startling comparison or juxtaposition.
• An invitation of mystery by way of concision.
• A single central literary device.
• A similar structure to that of a punchline (by way of epiphany).
• A notable aberration in form or language.
• Ephemerality of emotion, simplicity of diction.

These qualities are heightened or made more prominent due to the poem’s tiny stature. As such, they need to be especially sharp and self-reliant as devices.

Which is not to say that a good metaphor in a micropoem is better than a good metaphor in a long, narrative poem; rather, metaphors that occupy the whole of a micropoem lend themselves towards mystery or epiphany without needing to interact with other devices, ideas, and images. It’s more a question of relation than of excellence.

Examples of Short Shorts

I went a little overboard for my workshop. We studied 15 or so micropoems in the span of an hour, which, as one group member put it, felt a little bit like scrolling on Instagram. So, rather than bombard you with poems, here are some salient examples to draw inspiration from—with a nod towards the above qualities that make these poems work.

“May” by Tom Disch

Such beauty, you say
Let us stop & admire
A moment, a day
The fields & the fire

God the great spider
Has caught you again

I held my breath a whole minute after reading this poem. It’s so gorgeous and strange. It’s musical, though not exactly metrical. Moreover, the quatrain rhymes but the couplet doesn’t—a testament, perhaps, to being caught in God’s web of beauty. What a fantastic leap this poem takes! Such gorgeous imagination.

“Love Poem as Ars Poetica” by Erica McAlpine

Because I am the dog who thought
her pain was a location, shuffling in
and out of rooms, trying to escape it,
it forever following along,

you stick with me everywhere—not
you, but the idea. We begin
with something big, water, or the wind, thinking we can shape it
before it all goes wrong.

A little complicated for such a small poem, no? The syntax is intricate, and the title only adds complexity. Perhaps we try to escape our pain through love or through poetry… but how, exactly, is this an ars poetica—or, to be honest, a love poem?

Coincidentally, I’m reading Anne Carson’s essay collection Eros the Bittersweet, and I think it helps me unlock this poem. A lover reaches out to their beloved because the beloved is an idealized figure of romance; once we have the beloved, they are no longer ideal, but real. Thus, the lover aches again for an idea of someone; the lover wants, among other things, “to reach” towards perfection. In the same way, when a poet reaches out for ideal language to craft a poem, it is very much like trying to shape water or the wind: impossible; words are never perfect, and we seek to chase better ones. The love affair of the poet is a form of Eros, in the classical Greek sense: a desire shaped by lack.

(Also, notice how the seventh line is so much longer than the others. It gives the poem a sense of building momentum before it crashes at the end—a notable aberration in form.)

“Poem” by Langston Hughes

(To F. S.)

I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There’s nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
Soft as it began,—
I loved my friend.

Don’t let the poem’s simplicity, or even its seemingly unimaginative title, fool you. At a craft level, it is extremely elegant. “I loved my friend” is a line both tender and noteworthy for its use of the past tense. What happened to that love? The following line relies on euphemism: “went away” disguises the fact of the friend’s death. The third line is bittersweet, ironic: there is nothing more to say, and yet more is said.

The fourth line announces the poem’s end, but the poem does not end; it is the first enjambed line, ending in a comma. The next line gestures towards the poem’s own softness: its euphemism for death, its gentle diction. Then, we get not only a comma, but a comma with an em-dash,—and we return back to the poem’s beginning softness: love that has nowhere to go, now that the friend is dead.

What of the title? I think of it as a double meaning. Not just a “Poem” announcing the poem, but the speaker’s love and friendship is, itself, poetry. Here, the entirety of the poet’s friendship is encompassed in six lines, four of which are end-stopped, and a final sentence that slows, but cannot prevent, its own stopping.

“To Be Alive” by Gregory Orr

To be alive: not just the carcass
But the spark.
That’s crudely put, but…
If we’re not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?

This poem has both an elegant (if slightly disturbing) image (a sparked carcass), and an epiphanic question. What, then, of that third line? I go back and forth on this. In some ways, I dislike it. The speaker is commenting on his own metaphor in a way that feels apologetic, as though the blow of language needs to be softened for us readers. I always advocate against apologizing for your own work.

And yet, without that line, the poem lacks a certain connective tissue between its metaphor and its question. The relationship between the two are more easily felt, perhaps because the speaker’s own voice adds a sort of human flaw, a voice we can access and relate to. I am not called upon to dance by God or a higher being, but from my fellow mankind.

“[you fit into me]” by Margaret Atwood

you fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

Disturbing! But also, kind of funny? I don’t know. I laughed when I first read this poem, maybe out of surprise, maybe out of discomfort. In any case, the image we are lead to first receive—the eye and hook of a needle and thread—is swiftly and ironically re-interpreted. Something about the poem’s lack of capital letters and punctuation also feels vulnerable, as though the poem itself is an open eye staring into its own fish hook. For me, at least, it’s better to laugh.

Prompts and Inspiration

What do you make of the above poems? What resonates with you? Where do you feel mystery and epiphany? Where do you wish you got “more”?

I love the above poems, and yet I continue to have an uneasiness around short-short work. I wrote a few micropoems in my own workshop, and I would like to write more, if only to prove to myself that I can also find insight at the level of smallness.

In any case, micropoetry is a great exercise in concision. You can even treat it like a warm up, or like a morning writing practice before you get your day started. As such, here are some prompts for you to consider if you’d like to write short-short poems.

First, take 5-10 minutes, and just write on a blank piece of paper a list of images. Anything that comes to mind. Try not to interpret the images, just present them as they arise in your mind’s eye. A seagull pecking at shells beneath a full moon. The red eye of Jupiter pulsing in quiet. A cat’s eye marble. That sort of thing.

Once you have your list, let those images inform your response to the following prompts.

1. Write a poem that is entirely just a metaphor or other literary device.
2. Write a poem whose entirety is a question that cannot be answered.
3. Write a poem whose title is longer than its body.
4. Write a poem that juxtaposes 2 or more incongruous images. Do not interpret or explain the images themselves in the work.
5. Write a poem that responds to a question in the title.
6. Write a poem that includes a metaphor, a question, two juxtaposed images, and an epiphany — all in the same essential brevity.
7. Write a poem with a single central image that carefully unfolds into richer meaning.
8. Write a poem that tells a complete story.
9. Write a poem that presents a complete argument: “if… then,” “because…” etc.
10. Write a poem that reaches towards the divine, sublime, or ineffable.

For the poem to be at a “micro” level, try to keep the work no longer than 9 lines, with no more than 40 words total, not including titles. Exceptions can be made for poems with 10+ lines where the lines are only 2 or 3 words long. Also, this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, just a fun constraint: ignore it as you see fit.

Find more short form poems and prompts here:

The Simple Truth: Writing Short Poems