Writing Prompt for April: Special Poetry Month Edition 2026
by Grace Dignazio
It’s hard to believe it’s already spring. The season promises growth and rebirth, yet arrives in the midst of a particularly devastating historical moment, and that sense of renewal feels almost impossible to access against a backdrop of atrocities and the erosion of democracy unfolding on an international stage. As artists and writers, we are often tasked with registering what resists language. Lately, I’ve found that responsibility especially difficult, and for the past few weeks, writing itself has felt out of reach. And yet, here we are—National Poetry Month—perhaps an opportunity to return to practice as a way of staying with this moment.
This April, I’ve found myself mapping a New York lineage, thinking through place, artistic movements, and LIT Magazine’s roots in Manhattan and Brooklyn. I’ve been returning to The New York School (not to be confused with The New School), a loose network of poets, artists, and filmmakers working in downtown Manhattan in the postwar decades of the 1940s through the 1970s. Although stylistically diverse, their experimental practices often emerged through collaboration with abstract expressionist painters, tending toward the spontaneous, conversational and wry. In contrast to the stringency of many postwar intellectual movements, these poets drew on the quotidian and pop culture, cultivating a poetics of immediacy and exchange.
New York School poetry was closely tethered to visual art: think of Frank O’Hara’s curatorial work and painterly collaborations, John Ashbery’s collage practice, or the playful material experiments of Kenneth Koch, where language was literally cut and reassembled by hand. Or take the kaleidoscopic work of second-generation New York School poet Alice Notley, whose genre-eliding poetry resists easy classification through its hybrid visual-literary composition.
Today, we produce collage constantly, often without naming it: through screenshots, scrolling, copying and pasting. Where the New York School congregated in bars, bookshops, and each other’s studios, our networks unfold across feeds, group chats, and platforms where attention is fragmented, and where images of the everyday circulate alongside those of famine, bombings and state violence; often within the same breath, on the same screen. If the New York School’s lightness edged against the gravity of its moment, ours demands that we hold both at once.
What might it mean to inherit wit and tactility under these circumstances? To write within systems that are faster, flatter and more diffuse, while still insisting on relation and response? This April, we invite you to write a poem in response to a piece of media: a TikTok, a billboard, a group chat thread, a Google Maps route, a news article, a protest flyer. Sit with its visual or auditory language. What is it saying? Where does it take you?
