Moonlight Musings

What Do You Get Out of Writing Poetry to Prompts?

A friend, a fellow poet, said to me a few years ago, 'Why do you need prompts? There is so much inspiration everywhere!' 

I was somewhat taken aback by the question. It sounded a bit like an accusation, though I don't think he meant it that way but was just genuinely puzzled. I guess he himself wasn't short of inspiration. On the other hand, perhaps he wasn't trying to write poetry several times a week.

I can't even remember what I replied. Perhaps something like, 'It takes me in unexpected directions.' Because that's one thing I love about it.

And yes, it's true there is plenty of inspiration around. I'm aware that, on the rare occasions I experience a 'block', I can look at the outside world for subject matter, instead of within myself. But I already know how I typically react to most things in my environment. Who wants to keep writing variations of the same poem – or even the same several poems – over and over again? We try to see things fresh and new, but it can be hard to shake our mental habits. Perhaps we are not even conscious of them.

For me, playing with form works better. Even if the subject matter is familiar, finding a different way to address it makes the process more interesting. (Why would I do this poetry thing in the first place if it didn't interest me?) But I don't need a prompt to find a new form to play with – though I'm glad when I do find them via prompts as well as by searching.

Mostly, I like surprises.  I like to receive them, and I like to surprise myself. 

The prompts I'm following (at our sister site, 'imaginary garden with real toads') this April – the annual poetry month, if by some chance you weren't aware of this – have mostly been delightfully surprising so far.

One or two have been tried-and-true classics – which many people may welcome – which I've been able to make surprising by subverting them a bit, away from the obvious. This is possible partly because we've been given a lot of scope in how to approach each prompt; various choices for addressing it.

Among the delightful surprises in the prompts themselves have been (so far) one based on the 'Ridikkulus' lesson in Harry Potter: how to enchant your deepest fears into becoming laughable; and another to write about a supernatural creature who is a troublesome roommate. Hmmm, I guess you can see where my preoccupations lie! Even so, I'm sure neither of these would have occurred to me left to myself, and they proved very fruitful. 

The childhood fear in particular led me to unexpected places. No problem identifying the fear – a common one which others wrote about too, and furthermore we all understood, as every small child naturally does, that it takes light to banish darkness. What was unexpected was that I found myself going on from there – practically giving a lesson in how to be a Lightworker! Once I started writing  the poem, it all poured out and wouldn't be stopped. 

The next surprise was that, instead of perceiving it as long-winded and preachy, which I feared, people really got it. A real-life friend even resolved to teach her little grand-daughter the methods I outlined.

'How do I know what I'm going to say until I write it?' 

The distinguished Australian poet, the late Judith Rodriguez, once said that publicly in an interview. She's surely not the only poet to operate that way! I suspect we all do, at least some of the time.

Even better than unexpectedly pouring on to the page your deepest personal beliefs is when you bring forth ideas you didn't realise you had, and get to know yourself better. It can be exciting to discover parts of yourself you were unfamiliar with – or at least educational, LOL. 

What the prompts do, it seems to me, is mine the subconscious – but in different ways than if one were responding to one's own unprompted inspiration. Our own inspiration may well produce better poetry, as it is likely to be a passionate response to whatever triggered it. But that's OK. The rest of the time, I like to think, we're practising, honing our skills for when those inspired moments hit. And hopefully finding some passion about our topics anyway. Best of all is when such an 'exercise' transcends mere exercise and turns out to be a poem you're thrilled to have written.

Either way, mining the subconscious, learning more about oneself and about what it is to be human, seems to me exciting, fascinating stuff.

Here at PU we don't play the April Poetry Month game. With a weekly program already in place, we like to stick to our usual offerings and approach them a bit more leisurely than every day. But they roll around regularly and offer a varied menu.

I know many of you love our Midweek Motifs from Susan and Sumana. I am usually so busy at that time of week that I don't participate, but every so often there'll be something I can't resist and just HAVE to squeeze time for (or which I find I've synchronously written to recently enough to include). That's another thing about prompts – they can be so enticing. The mind starts playing with the idea, almost unbidden....

The new once-a-month prose prompt from Magaly has been especially exciting like that. After swearing that I couldn't and wouldn't do it, on account of I'm so hopeless at ('creative') prose, I very soon became enticed. With fear and trembling I offered up my attempt, and guess what? It passed muster! Thus encouraged, I have proudly amended the subtitle of my blog, Enheduanna's Daughter. It no longer reads 'Poems by Rosemary Nissen-Wade' but 'Poems, and occasional short prose, by....'  (Well, I'm 79. If I don't explore new challenges now, when am I gonna?)

Even our Poetry Pantry, which says in effect, 'Share anything, old or new,' is a kind of prompt, albeit a very open one.

Need I add that one of the great things about writing to prompts, when we do it in a community like this, is getting to read other people's stuff? There's such a lot of terrific poetry out there! And there's not only one kind of terrific. Even when I'm only playing in a smallish community, which is what I like best, there are a number of different kinds of wonderful to encounter. It's very enriching. I mean, we wouldn't be trying to write poetry in the first place unless we loved poetry – and that love arose, of course, from hearing or reading it. So we get to love it anew. First there is the sheer joy of encountering something that curls our toes and makes the hairs on the back of the neck stand up. Then there's the possibility of adding techniques we admire to our own repertoire. 

As a bonus, we get to know our fellow-poets over time; they come to feel like friends. Indeed, real and valuable lifelong friendships can be forged.

What do you think? What keeps you coming back here week after week and throwing your hat in the ring? All of the above? Something completely different? Please tell me, and the rest of us, in the Comments. And do come back to read what others say.


The images used in this post are in the Public Domain – except for the moon image, in which I hold copyright.

Moonlight Musings

Surviving April: 
NaPoWriMo and all that 

Well it could be worse. It's not NaNoWriMo (National Novel-Writing Month) where would-be novelists must churn out thousands of words a day (not necessarily with much attempt to make them good words). 

I did that one year; which was, well, educational – but never again. After all, I am no novelist; I just wanted to get more idea of what writing one would be like, for the sake of my writing students. I managed it with lots of coffee and chocolate, weight gain, sleep deprivation, and a very obliging husband who did everything else that needed doing. I produced an incredibly bad novel and a great lack of interest in trying to improve it. That was actually my second attempt at a novel. The first, years earlier, soon bored me so much that I abandoned it. If your writing bores YOU, not much hope of it interesting others.

It happens that – for no particular reason – I've never actually done NaPoWriMo, meaning the site of that name from whence prompts issue daily for the month of April. But there are other, similar sites which I have tried. April is National Poetry Month in the USA, which means that online it becomes international (just as NaNoWriMo does, later in the year). Everyone signs up to write a poem a day, at that site and/or various others. For some years I participated at Poetic Asides, but so many people joined in over the years that it became too unwieldy for me. Nowadays I play in much smaller groups, where there is some chance of finding time to read other participants' gems and them read mine – on top of finding time to write a new poem every day.

The aim of NaNoWriMo is not polished work but the completion of fifty thousand words. (Amazingly, some people do produce publishable books.) I suppose it's the same with Poetry Month: the requirement is simply to produce a poem a day. However, we poets do like to make our pieces as good as we can in the time available. It's not the length, it's the poetics! In fact, at Poetic Asides, there are now acclaimed poets judging each month's offerings, and an annual anthology of the winning poems.

I know a number of you do participate in April Poetry Month, at one site or another (or several!) while a number choose not to. I have been making resolutions that this year is my last. I always start off well enough, pleased with new, exciting prompts. Then there comes a time, somewhere past the halfway point, when I find myself writing stuff that seems like drivel. Of course, at a poem a day, they must all be regarded as drafts anyway, but even so.... Readers don't seem to agree with my low estimation of those poems, but The Disempowerer in my head says, 'They are just being kind and polite.' At that point every year I make the same resolution: this is the last year I'll do this.

But then, every year, as we near the end of the month, some gear shifts and I start producing things that I am, to my surprise, very happy with. I even start getting inspired to extra poems that aren't prompted! So then I wonder – what if I just kept on forever, writing poems every day? Would I get really, really good at it? And I put the decision to stop on hold again until next April, by which time I am once more raring to go.

I don't, however, continue writing every day – by the end of the month I am ready for a break and keen to do other things, such as clean the house and weed the garden. Perhaps even get out and about a bit. A month-long commitment, even if it's not for thousands of words of prose, tends to interfere with the rest of life. 'We need some life to put into our art,' I used to tell my writing students, advising them not to chain themselves to their desks. After seven decades of living, I have many memories which I can surely use in my writing, but it isn't quite the same. 

And what about revision? Everyone says it's vital, and I agree. When I'm producing a poem a day, I don't spend much time on revising. Even creating just a few new poems a week, as I respond to the slightly less frequent prompts that happen in other months, leaves little time to revise. Luckily, the problem is the solution. (Well, almost.) Because of writing to prompts – not to mention having been engaged in the making of poems for roughly six decades so far – I get progressively quicker at matters of craft. 

I guess we all do a bit of immediate revision at the point of creation; they are not really FIRST drafts we post. We get adept at producing quite decent poems quite fast. Some enviable people seem always to be outright brilliant! 

All the same, there is delight in returning to an old draft years later – or even a piece one had thought 'finished' – and seeing at a glance just what it needs to become as good as it can get. Or, if it's really in a desperate situation, finding a completely new approach to revive the poor thing. There's even satisfaction in the worst-case scenario, deciding to let some die quietly.  (You know they then become compost for new growth, don't you?) 

Well, it's only one month in the year. Why not go for broke, just one month of the year? (No, don't tell me about November at Poetic Asides, where they not only write a new poem a day all over again, but this time weave them around a theme so as to produce a new chapbook, with the possibility of getting it taken up by a reputable publisher ... I told you not to tell me that!)  

But what is one to do with all those April poems? All those years of April poems? Make chapbooks? Collect them as Christmas presents for friends and family? (The ones who want to read my poems have probably seen them on my blog already.) Just leave them on the blog, letting that be my magnum opus? Take them off the blog soonish (to avoid accusations of prior publication) and/or revise, then submit to prestigious literary journals and anthologies? 

Maybe what to do with them is a different question; anyway it only applies if we do keep producing hundreds of poems every year. The question I am trying to explore here is about the value or otherwise, to us as poets, of participating in Poetry Month. And there is the further question of whether we should – or could – keep up that pace of creation all the time.

I don't know. Perhaps it would be good for me to take a long break from writing new stuff and start some serious revising, even some culling. Perhaps I could make a whole lot of collections around themes? Or forms? (I really fancy the idea of a book of haibun, when I have enough of them.) And yet, not writing new poems at least sometimes would get boring, I think. Creation is exciting!

April Poetry Month is thrilling, challenging, daunting, inconvenient, impractical ... and, unquestionably, productive. This May I do plan to ease off on the writing for a bit. But has it swiftly become such a habit that I'll have withdrawals? We shall see.

And then in June.... Well, you see, some weeks back, before April began, I accepted an invitation to be guest poet for a month at a blog of Aussie poets, where the idea is to post a new draft every day. I must have been mad! At least I have given myself a month in between. And at least they are only supposed to be drafts. (In the habit of quick composition, will I be able to leave my posts as actual first drafts, I wonder, or will I be impelled to tinker?)

I'm glad anyway that we at Poets United have no plans to start hosting our own poetry month. Midweek Motif and the Poetry Pantry, interspersed with articles about poetry and poets, allow for a nice balance between frequency of writing and leisure to craft the work – particularly as we can dip in and out as we like, according to what else is going on in our lives. It allows for those sweet moments when the Muse may whisper in our ears, unprompted.

What do you think, United Poets? Is Poetry Month a blessing or a curse, a chore or great fun? No-one twists our arms, so I guess if we do it, we must really want to.

Feel free to share your thoughts.