If you are staring in front of the blank screen or page needing some inspiration to get into creative flow, here are 10 experimental poetry prompts to push your creative boundaries. These prompts invite you to break free from traditional poetic structures and explore experimental techniques that play with form, structure, and meaning.

 1. Fragmented Dreams: Write a poem entirely from fragments of your dreams—disjointed images, feelings, and scenes with no logical connection but deep emotional resonance.

 2. The Sound of Silence: Create a poem that uses typography or spacing to visually represent silence or pauses, allowing the gaps between words to speak as much as the words themselves. 

 3. Instructions for Forgetting: Write a poem as a set of surreal instructions on how to forget a memory or feeling, mixing the mundane with the bizarre.

 4. Synesthesia of Autumn: Write an autumn-themed poem where you describe colors as sounds, scents as textures, and feelings as tastes, blending sensory experiences in unexpected ways.

 5. Invisible Letters: Create a poem addressed to someone or something where half the poem is written as if it’s invisible—what’s left unsaid, hinted at only through punctuation or absence of words?

 6. Cut-Up Collage: Construct a poem by cutting up text from random sources (magazines, books, your own writing) and reassembling them in an entirely new, unexpected order. 

 7. Digital Static: Write a poem that mimics digital noise or glitching, using intentional “errors,” broken sentences, or repetition to evoke the feeling of technology breaking down. 

 8. Postcards from the Unseen: Compose a series of short, surreal “postcards” from a place that doesn’t exist—write about strange landscapes, odd customs, and fictional people as if they were real. 

 9. Erasure Poem: Take an existing piece of writing (a newspaper article, song lyrics, an instruction manual) and create a poem by erasing or blacking out most of the text, leaving only scattered words and phrases.

 10. Time Travel: Write a poem in reverse, starting with the end and working back to the beginning, revealing the cause of events only as you move backward through time. 

I'd love to hear which prompt was your favorite. Feel free to DM me on IG @peonies_prose.