Pen & Page Prompt #18

This Week: The Body Remembers

Pen & Page: How the Body Holds Memory, Knowledge, and Intuition

A prompt about listening inward — the body as a source of image and meaning.

Sometimes what we understand doesn’t arrive first as thought. It arrives as sensation. A tightening in the chest. A pull toward or away. A memory stored in muscle, breath, or bone. The body often knows something long before we do, and poetry gives us a way to listen. This week’s prompt invites you to begin there: not with explanation, but with attention. Let the physical world of the body — gesture, ache, warmth, habit — lead you into the poem. Trust what is felt. Follow what lingers. See what the body has been carrying quietly, waiting for you to notice.

Embodiment in poetry is the practice of writing from the lived experience of the body, where sensation, memory, and emotion intersect. Rather than treating feeling as abstract, embodied poems root meaning in physical presence: breath, pulse, gesture, weight, ache. The body becomes a site of knowing, shaping imagery, pacing, and lineation. When a poem attends to that interior landscape, it invites the reader into something immediate and human. The result is writing that feels grounded, intimate, and true — language that is not simply observed, but inhabited, and supported by rhythm, silence, and form.

Prompt #18: Embodied Ways of Knowing

Setup

Sometimes what we understand doesn’t arrive first as thought — it arrives as sensation. A tightening in the chest. A pull toward or away. A memory stored in muscle, breath, or bone.

This prompt invites you to begin in that quiet, physical place — the body as a kind of notebook, holding what you’ve lived.

Premise

Choose one bodily sensation, memory, or gesture that feels meaningful to you right now. It might be:

• an ache or tenderness

• the feeling of your breath

• the way your hands remember something

• a posture your body keeps returning to

• the weight or warmth of your own body

Let this be your way in.

Core Prompt

Write a poem that begins with a specific bodily response to a lived experience.

Instead of starting with what you think, begin with what your body feels —
as a result of something that has happened.

Let the sensation point back to its source:

• the way your chest tightened when you heard the news

• the weight in your shoulders after a long conversation

• the tremble in your hands when you held something fragile

• the way your breath shifted in a moment of fear, relief, or recognition

Trust that the body carries the story.

Ask yourself:

• What happened, and where does it live in my body now?

• How does the body remember what the mind cannot say directly?

Let the poem stay with the felt aftermath of that moment, rather than narrating it.

Craft Menu

Choose one or two of these as you write.

• Trace the Source: Let the physical sensation hint at the moment that created it. No full backstory — just enough for the reader to feel its origin.

• Stay in the Body: Describe what the body does, feels, or remembers, rather than what the mind concludes.

• Restraint: Avoid naming the emotion directly; let the body carry the feeling.

• Line Breaks as Breath: Let your lines lengthen, shorten, or pause in ways that echo breathing or pulse.

• Repetition as Memory: Repeat one bodily word or phrase to create a sense of return.

• Fragment as Form: Allow the poem to unfold in pieces, as memory often does.

Shape Options

• A short lyric (12–20 lines)

• A prose poem in one paragraph

• A list poem that begins with “The body remembers…”

Stretch / Expansion

After drafting, remove one line of explanation and let the poem rest more fully in the physical world of the body.

Share Back

If you share, consider including one sentence about what surprised you in writing from this place.

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Thank you for writing here this week. Beginning in the body asks us to listen with a different kind of patience — to notice what has already been carried, quietly, for us. I hope this prompt gives you a way into that attentive space.

Next week, in our paid Frame & Phrase, we’ll turn toward The Ordinary Sacred — exploring how small, daily moments can become luminous on the page. I look forward to continuing the work together.

Write and thrive,
Robbin
10poetrynotebooks@gmail.com