Cover Photo: This is a color photograph of a lone aspen tree in a forest. A ray of light is shining on the aspen tree's yellow leaves and the rest of the forest is in shadow.
Photograph by Joey Kyber/Unsplash

Generating a Poem from Nature’s Patterns

This prompt will help you reconnect with nature and explore ways to write a poem as an extension of the natural world.

Walden.

If you enjoyed this prompt, check out Beatrice’s upcoming poetry workshop, Ecopoetics in a Time of Environmental Crisis, which begins in January 2023.

Beatrice Szymkowiak is a French-American writer and scholar. She graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2017, and obtained a PhD in English/Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2022. She is the author of RED ZONE, a poetry chapbook, and the recipient of the 2022 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in poetry for her full-length collection B/RDS, which will be published by the University of Utah Press in 2023. Her work has appeared in several poetry magazines including Terrain.org, The Berkeley Review, The Portland Review, OmniVerse, The Southern Humanities Review, and many others. Exploratory and experimental, her poetry investigates the new environmental trajectory of the Anthropocene.