Creative writing prompts: are they a crock?

In Introspections: American Poets on One of their Own Poems, Chase Twichell, poet of some renown and co-editor of the even more renowned The Practice of Poetry, makes a startling admission:

About a year ago, I did something dramatic: I impulsively destroyed fifteen months’ work. One morning I sat down at my desk and looked at the poems I’d written since the Ghost of Eden, and realized they disappointed me. Way up here in the mountains, we have to pay for our trash disposal by the pound, so everyone burns their nonrecyclable paper. In the yard, my husband was burning ours. With the thrill of rashness, I dumped the sheaf of poems into the barrel, then erased them from the floppy disk and hard drive. All this took less than two minutes. I actually broke into a light sweat, but it was the sweat of exhilaration, of freedom – I was back at the blank page, the threshold of the unknown. Since I hadn’t yet articulated what it was I next wanted to know, I’d been writing poems that hadn’t taught me anything and that ultimately bored me. So I burned them, and never thought about them again.

The Practice of Poetry is, as anyone in the know will tell you, one of the workshop bibles. Basically it's a compendium of poetry writing prompts -- jumpstarts to overcome dreaded writer's block and get you going -- by some of the most famous teachers in the business. Yet I find it particularly telling that the editor of this same book can fall into the funk of writing poems over a long period that, as she put it, "hadn't taught me anything and that ultimately bored me." Are these creative writing prompts all that they're cracked up to be? Of course, no one ever claimed guarantees. Maybe doing something as radical as jettisoning over a year's work will make it into the next edition.

I myself have found The Practice of Poetry quite useful -- the first exercise, Thomas Lux's "Not-So-Automatic Automatic Writing Exercise", spurred me to riff out not a few of my best prose poems, although I never, beyond numerous drafts, got to Lux's winnowing Not-So-Automatic part. Frankly, though, I've never really gotten past that first exercise. Everything else I've tried in that book, "ultimately bored me". Maybe this is from lack of trying -- but it always strikes me with these prompts that a crucial element is missing: should I call it fire? Reams and reams of so-called poetry may get cranked out in the writing workshop industry, but nothing, it seems, will take away from the rarity of the truly inspired poem.

CONTEXT

I don't like poems that seem to say, "Guess what I mean." And I don't much like symbolist poems, in which people and things are standing in for the real subjects, who for some reason are absent. I also don't care for surreal or impressionist poems that assume a reader wants to help interpret the poet's dreams.

This is not to say that I think everything in a poem should be on the surface. Not at all. It's simply to say that there should be a surface, a place for a reader to stand. Young journalists used to be taught to answer the questions who, what, where, when and why in the first compressed paragraph of a story. I would go so far as to say that the first four of these ought to be answered in a single reading of most poems.

-- Miller Williams, in Introspections: American Poets on One of Their Own Poems

I quote this not because I like it, but because I generally agree with it; with the second paragraph I exclaimed, "Yes!". (Strange confluence of attitudes...) I suppose I would say poems that keep you guessing too long. I find the first paragraph a bit reactionary for my liking. But the journalist questions, which I've never thought to apply to poetry, provide an interesting criterion to assess accessibility, even reader/writerly fulfillment. Generally, I don't feel satisfied with poems I write unless they communicate clearly on most if not all of these basic levels. But such a stricture makes me want to see what I can get away with and still feel satisfied with the effect of the poem... e.g. a poem that clearly answers the question who, but not what, where, and when, or what but not who, where, and when. Maybe such a poem would achieve a greater universality than one that clearly demarcates its where and when.

Introspections

I just finished Introspections: American Poets on One of Their Own Poems, edited by Robert Pack and Jay Parini. (Believe it or not, I read this book from cover to cover over the space of three years. I ordered it when Charles highly recommended it in a comment on this blog.) In it some 55 poets -- some eminent, others established, still others "up-and-coming" -- select a poem and then write a brief article on some aspect of writing it. How illuminating! How insightful about the creative process! It also introduced me to a number of excellent poets and poems.

The contents highlights contain a number of famous names, but as in many an anthology or literary revue, some of the stellar contributions are by relative unknowns. My personal highlights (poems and essays that quite set my mind on fire) include -- following the alphabetical order format of the book -- David Baker, "Still-Hildreth Sanatorium, 1936"; Stephen Dunn, "The Guardian Angel"; David Huddle, "Basket", Erica Jong, "The Buddha in the Womb"; J.D. McClatchy, "My Mammogram"; Wyatt Prunty, "The Ferris Wheel", Sue Ellen Thompson, "What Happened After"; Eric Trethewey, "Scar"; Nancy Willard, "Questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him"; Miller Williams, "Adjusting to the Light", and Clara Yu, "Little Purple".

Still others wrote excellent expository pieces about poems that made them much more accessible and memorable -- i.e. , Thomas Swiss on "On a Stanza by Rilke", Richard Wilber on "Bone Key", Robert Pinsky on "Desecration of the Gravestone of Rose P.", Catherine Soniat on "The Captain's Advice to Those Heading for the Trees". Some poets shed light on pieces so private in nature that they would otherwise been quite hermetic: Ellen Bryan Voight's "Kyrie", W.D. Snodgrass's "Lifelong", Lynne McMahon's "For Gabriel, Falling Through Glass and Ice". Peter Balakian's "The Oriental Rug" is in many ways a marvelous poem, but rendered all the more so by "Falling into a Rug", an essay I actually liked better, which filled us in on the biographical and historical importance of that rug. In a number of cases I liked the essays far better than the poems they were written for. I should add too that there were a number of duds (and as luck would have it, most of these are in the first half of the volume, one reason it took me so long to go through it) -- prosy poems and stuffy expositions which one might expect of professor poets. A.R. Ammons and Mark Strand, poets I admire, disappointed with rather perfunctory contributions.

The glory and woe of poetry is its implicitness of context, or even lack thereof: poems make great demands on the reader to bring cultural and even personal context to them. All too often the intensity of that demand, even for me, can be too much. Prose makes sure it fills us in on what's going on. That's why I often like prose to be included in a book of poems: it gives a breather. A volume like this one gives the lie to the notion, popularized by the New Critics, that only the poem counts, and that the poet's experience is of little relevance to a critical appreciation of the poem. The blog format offers the opportunity for poets to provide valuable commentary on their own work -- and this book, as far as I'm concerned, serves as a model.

Conversation vs. Ritual

As one who enjoys the informal qualities of free verse, but who likes (or at least would like) to employ fixed forms where useful, I like this observation of Miller Williams:

Everything a poet does in a poem has the effect of moving the experience of the poem closer to that of conversation or of ritual. Anglo-Saxon root words, contractions, enjambment, lack of rhyme or slant rhyme or irregular rhyme, all make a poem more conversational; Latin-root words, end-stopped lines, regular and true rhyme, all make the experience of a poem closer to that of ritual.

This in Introspections: American Poets on One of Their Own Poems. An excellent book, by the way.

THOSE POOR DEAR ABSTRACT LINES...

CAESURA

Waters purl, silky over smooth stones. A far flung echo curves out among undiscovered inlets. Contours of round sound flow out of mouth, forming a long bubble that snaps off and floats away on the wind. Dandelion gone to seed, seeds leaping from the porous sphere. Landscape of a horse’s back and haunches. Moon setting over dunes. Wisps of air through lips of a monk as he opens the shrine, breath humid round the folded slip of paper in his mouth. Stillness of plants. Through a microscope, tines and barbs of a feather: but still a feather, floating, arcing, tipping in air.



This is one of mine, published here in the second issue of Dusie. Actually, though, when it was first posted there it had an additional sentence. It was this:

A restraint that is not because the idea doesn’t enter.

This was between the "Wisps of air ..." and "Stillness of plants", so the last part read

Wisps of air through lips of a monk as he opens the shrine, breath humid round the folded slip of paper in his mouth. A restraint that is not because the idea doesn’t enter. Stillness of plants. Through a microscope, tines and barbs of a feather: but still a feather, floating, arcing, tipping in air.

Funny, originally I was attached to that line. Like, very attached.

The whole poem had come as a stream of consciousness writing one morning -- I was writing upon stillness and pools, riffing on words, as Charles has put it, to suit the mood of the morning.

(Here, although unbidden except by some emotional agency of my own, I'll proceed with a kind of Introspections reminiscence about the poem -- but I'll get around to my main point eventually. Introspections: American Poets on One of Their Own Poems is a book I highly recommend, fascinating and very instructive about process behind the writing of some good & excellent poems. Another book well worth ordering of a similar nature is Ecstatic Occasions: Expedient Forms, edited by David Lehman.)

A childhood memory came to mind, of blowing on a dandelion gone to seed and seeing the seeds floating off over a field, and it so happens there was a magazine open on the kitchen table -- a certain issue of The Sun, I don't know which one -- which showed a large black and white photo of haunches of a horse with the moon setting or rising over it, which looked like dunes, so that got in the poem too. Then I came upon another memory of opening a Buddhist shrine at our cultural centre when I had volunteered there as "Gajokai" (receptionist and, more traditionally, "guard of the shrine"), and amazed at how quiet it was there, how there was such a natural restraint that the very idea of restraint doesn't even enter the mind (until of course it did, in my case, but doesn't usually).* This was the idea that clinched the poem, it seemed, the still point around which the whole poem moved. As for stillness of plants -- well, our kitchen table is surrounded by plants -- and I was thinking "stillness" with that abstract realization. That image of the feather beneath the microscope came from childhood -- at around twelve I had owned a microscope, more of a toy than a serious microsope, and there were slides with feathers and spores and moth wings and blood samples that revealed themselves as shingled and spiky and crystal worlds... this whole sense of the infinite being found within the infinitely small has always fascinated me, and may date back to my hours of peering through that microscope at sugar, at salt, later, through a much more powerful microscope at high school, at a the tail of a live goldfish, the glossy, transparent tubes of arteries with their charge of corpuscles and platelets hurtling by...

Anyway, reading the poem out to my poetry group a month after it was taken by Dusie, a friend of mine, an honest and sensitive critic, said he loved the poem but was stopped by that sentence. It seemed rather obscure to him, and on the face of it, didn't even make sense ... what idea? enter where? Even the effort to figure it out disrupted the poem. I (and the others there with me) tried a number of alternatives to clarify it -- I really wanted something there, a suggestion of mental reaching, as it were, which approximated my original experience of the poem -- but then suddenly realized the line really didn't contribute, that it actually distracted, absorbed energy away. Reading it out without the line, the poem was freed. What I had attempted to make explicit was implicit in the images as they were, which expressed so many other things besides.

So often it is the case that commentary or summarizing within a poem actually distracts. I think it often comes out in drafts because in poems we are trying to come literally to terms with our experience, and language is also used for commentary and analysis to the exact same end.

In this case it was one of those pieces of scaffolding that could be knocked down now that the house was built. And so I did. On the publication of Issue 2 the editor of Dusie had invited even those who had published in Issue 1 to make any editorial changes they wanted -- so I wrote her saying I was taking her up on her offer. Though she took a while to get around to it, eventually the sentence was removed.

Revision after publication -- that's one thing you can't do in a print review!

*"The folded slip of paper in his mouth" -- in an ancient Japanese tradition continued in the Soka Gakkai, at enshrinements or re-hanging of the Gohonzon scroll or mandala the senior leader (once the senior monk, but now, in SGI, it's a senior lay person) puts a small, folded piece of rice paper in his mouth to prevent the moisture from his breath from accidentally staining the scroll. My own friend and mentor Sekai, a senior leader in this organization, did this at the enshrinement of my Gohonzon, in front of which I chant most days...