We want to share with you some of the poetry writing resources that we like. We hope they will inspire new writing, give you new ideas about how to develop your work and connect you to communities of writers. If you are looking to write in your spare time, being home-schooled or you are looking for ideas to support young people aged 11 – 18 with their writing, you should also explore the links below. We will add new links to this page as we find them. Make sure you check back to this page soon. Happy writing!
Inspiration
Author of award winning YA verse novel Poet X, the inspiring Elizabeth Acevedo, talks about how she developed as a writer and drew on support from other writers from middle school onwards here.
Rhyme
Welcome to the Ssssssnake Hotel is a superb blog by children’s poet Brian Moses. It’s for young writers and readers and yet many of the writing ideas could be used by anyone looking for a nudge to write something new and to have fun with words. We like: HAVE YOU EVER….?
(about writing rhyming couplets) and Places we remember.
Free ideas
https://www.arvon.org/learning/learning-resources/ – two brilliant resources are available as free pdfs: Writing the Game Learning Resource: Football as a gateway into the imagination – a learning resource to develop creative writing projects with young people
Arvon’s (M)Other Tongues project to support creative writing with bilingual and multilingual young people
Delicate Sight
Delicate Sight: a new resource (suitable for writers aged 14+) packed with creative ideas in the dark from Sam Winston, Raymond Antrobus, Bernardine Evaristo,
Don Paterson and Max Porter
Questions
Asking questions Can be a brilliant starting point for writing. A poem could in fact consist entirely of questions. Christian McEwen explains how this might work in his article
Prompts
The Poetry School collected together lots of prompts to get people writing. Click here for some ideas.
First Story National Writing Day video tutorials
June 24th 2020 is National Writing Day in the UK and First Story have prepared some new writing video tutorials led by their writers in residence. Try out poet Dean Atta‘s workshop on water or Caleb Parkin taking a fresh look at the objects around you or explore lots of other resources to stimulate new writing available here
Young Poets' Stories 