poetry prompts

town

Traci K. Smith divides her anthology, American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, into five sections: “The Small Town of My Youth,” “Something Shines Out From Every Darkness,” “Words Tangled in Debris,” “Here, the Sentence Will Be Respected,” and “One Singing Thing.”

Think about it. Each of those section titles would make a great prompt. Five stirrers for your daily writing cocktail. The first opens up memoir-like possibilities from your past and the town you grew up in.

The second offers a study in contrasts where you can use the rhetorical device of antithesis to explore one small phoenix that poked out from the ashes.

The third? Play with words and see how even tangled debris can take on significance.

Looking at the fourth title, I think of how the word “sentence” can be taken two ways, one if my diction and two if by the judge’s gavel.

And finally, the wonder, the shout, the ode of “one singing thing.”

So much for “I have no ideas.”

As an example of a poem Smith chose for the first section, “The Small Town of My Youth,” here is a poem by Oliver de la Paz:

In Defense of Small Towns
by Oliver de la Paz

When I look at it, it’s simple, really. I hated life there. September,

once filled with animal deaths and toughened hay. And the smells

of fall were boiled-down beets and potatoes

or the farmhands’ breeches smeared with oil and diesel

as they rode into town, dusty and pissed. The radio station

split time between metal and Tejano, and the only action

happened on Friday nights where the high school football team

gave everyone a chance at forgiveness. The town left no room

for novelty or change. The sheriff knew everyone’s son and despite that,

we’d cruise up and down the avenues, switching between

brake and gearshift. We’d fight and spit chew into Big Gulp cups

and have our hearts broken nightly. In that town I learned

to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken’s neck

with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel.

But I loved the place once. Everything was blonde and cracked

and the irrigation ditches stretched to the end of the earth. You could

ride on a bicycle and see clearly the outline of every leaf

or catch on the streets each word of a neighbor’s argument.

Nothing could happen there and if I willed it, the place would have me

slipping over its rocks into the river with the sugar plant’s steam

or signing papers at a storefront army desk, buttoned up

with medallions and a crew cut, eyeing the next recruits.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I could be anywhere,

staring at a hunk of asphalt or listening to the clap of billiard balls

against each other in a bar and hear my name. Indifference now?

Some. I shook loose, but that isn’t the whole story. The fact is

I’m still in love. And when I wake up, I watch my son yawn,

and my mind turns his upswept hair into cornstalks

at the edge of a field. Stillness is an acre, and his body

idles, deep like heavy machinery. I want to take him back there,

to the small town of my youth and hold the book of wildflowers

open for him, and look. I want him to know the colors of horses,

to run with a cattail in his hand and watch as its seeds

fly weightless as though nothing mattered, as though

the little things we tell ourselves about our pasts stay there,

rising slightly and just out of reach.

formula

Not being of scientific or mathematical mind, I’ve never thought of humans in terms of a formula. Imagine my surprise, then, when I poked around Lin Yutang’s tome, The Importance of Living, and discovered this quixotic mix:

Reality – Dreams = Animal Being

Reality + Dreams = A Heart-Ache (usually called Idealism)

Reality + Humor = Realism (also called Conservatism)

Dreams – Humor = Fanaticism

Dreams + Humor = Fantasy

Reality + Dreams + Humor = Wisdom

Lin Yutang himself admitted that these formulas are “pseudo-scientific” and that he distrusts, to a degree, “all dead and mechanical formulas for expressing anything connected with human affairs or human personalities.”

And yet, as writers know full well, abstractions, when given expression through the medium of concrete objects and human character, can lead to poetry. Thinking in this manner, a poet might be moved to find ways to write, for instance, about heartache.

As proof, let’s look at helpful formula #2. Said poet might begin by mixing equal parts reality (concrete images) with the abstraction of a dream (human desire). The contrasts, written with an alchemist’s precision, could conjure poetry to be reckoned with–the type of poem readers read and react to with, “Yes! That’s it, precisely! A wistful, poignant moment captured by an actual moment in time I can identify with!”

The sixth formula might be the most challenging of all. Here the “show” vs. “tell” takes the form of three formidable objects being juggled at once. A slice of life (reality) teamed with mankind’s addiction for dreams, leavened with the spice of wry humor that expands the vision (and don’t you just love the warm smell of vision?).

Easier said than done? Surely! But what fun is writing without a challenge?

And look at formula #4! Does it not remind you of our world’s 1930s-style shift to right-wing governments and brash demagogues? I leave t to political writers who go where angels fear to tread by attempting political poems that don’t come off as didactic and sanctimonious. A good resistance poem is a rare wonder, and sometimes the best approach is to objectively describe the humorless dreamers of a past that never existed and leave it at that.

Meaning? I’m no fan of formulas, but I can see how Lin Yutang’s pseudo-scientific equations might serve as interesting prompts, a jumping-off point into a refreshing quarry pool of wonderful things.

Writing Prompts: They Hide in the Wide Open

If Humans Were Formulas…