NaPoWriMo 2026
30 Days of Raw & Experimental Poetics
Welcome to a month of radical unlearning. This thirty-day prompt series is designed to dismantle conventional approaches to poetry, pushing writers into uncomfortable, experimental, and avant-garde territories.
Erasure / Blackout
Take a page from a technical manual, a legal document, or a dense news article. Using a black marker (or digital equivalent), redact the majority of the text. Leave only the words that create a startling, unintended narrative. The resulting poem should subvert the original document's purpose entirely.
The Cut-Up Method
Print out two completely unrelated texts—perhaps a recipe and a political speech. Cut them into individual words or short phrases, mix them in a bowl, and draw them out blindly. Arrange them exactly as they emerge to form a poem, resisting the urge to force grammatical sense. Let the collision of vocabularies dictate the meaning.
Glitch Poetics
Write a poem about a deeply personal memory, then run it through a translation engine into five different languages and back to English. Alternatively, intentionally introduce typographical errors, corrupted characters, and formatting glitches to visually represent the decay of that memory.
N+7 (Oulipo Constraint)
Select a famous, highly recognisable poem. Using a dictionary, replace every single noun in the poem with the seventh noun that follows it in the dictionary. Observe how the rigorous mathematical constraint produces surreal, unexpected imagery.
Found Poetry (The Mundane)
Spend the day collecting text from your immediate environment: warning labels, spam emails, overheard fragments of conversation, and street signs. Assemble these verbatim fragments into a cohesive poem without adding any of your own words.
Homophonic Translation
Find a poem in a language you do not speak or understand. Write a new poem in English based entirely on how the foreign words sound to your ear, ignoring their actual meaning. Let the auditory texture guide your narrative.
Palimpsest
Write a poem about a secret. Then, write a second poem about a completely different subject directly over the first one, so that both texts are visible but competing for the reader's attention. The tension between the visible and the obscured is the true poem.
Ready to Write Raw?
Join us for thirty days of radical unlearning. Post your work, share your process, and tag us. This is a month to break every rule you've been taught about poetry.