Some Poetry Prompts as We Leap into National Poetry Month

Some of us are about to start our April regimen of writing a poem a day. You might be like me, with lots of poetry ideas stored up that you itch to get started writing.

But maybe you're not inspired. So, I offer here a week's worth of poetry prompts. I decided to focus them all on fairy tales, myth, and other types of tales that already exist. That way, some of the work has been done for you.

So, first you must choose a fairy tale, a Bible story, a myth, your favorite novel (or TV show or movie) or some other tale that has a narrative. Then try some of the following:

--Write a poem from the point of view of one of the minor characters. Don't limit yourself to the human characters. For example, what would Cinderella's pumpkin which was turned into a pumpkin and then into a coach and then back into a pumpkin say?

--Write a poem that's a prequel or a sequel. How are Cinderella and the Prince getting along 10 years after the Ball?

--If you're working with an older story, modernize it. For example, think about the big, bad wolf. What would today's big, bad wolf, come to blow down our houses, look like? A predatory lender perhaps?

--Take one of the strong images from the work and incorporate it into a poem that has nothing to do with the original story. Could you use the image of a glass slipper without mentioning fairy stories?

--Take strong images from several works, combine them, and see what happens. For example, take melting wings from mythology, glass slippers, red capes, a baby in a manger, and Oliver Twist's empty porridge bowl--put them all in a poem, and what kind of glorious mess will result?

--Take characters from two (or more) different works and have them collide. What happens when the Prodigal Son meets Cinderella during his travels?

--On a day when you have no time to write, turn the myth or fairy tale into a haiku (you remember haiku--3 lines, 5 syllables in the first and third line and 7 in the second).

How a Poem Happens

I've really been enjoying the blog How a Poem Happens. Each blog posting includes a poem and an interview with the poet--as you might expect, the questions revolve around the creation of the poem.

Unlike at some sites, which have the same questions for each poet, I feel like I learn something new with each interview. With some sites, after a few interviews, I feel like I'm reading the same thing over and over. Not here. In fact, I've been reading it for months now and not realizing that the questions are the same.

The poets are varied, some very famous, some I'd never heard of. Likewise, the poems are varied, but so far, I haven't seen any poems that occupy the far reaches of the poetic spectrum. What I'm really saying with that statement: so far, I haven't read a poem on this site that's incomprehensible to me. You know those poems, the ones by famous people, so you feel like there's something wrong with you because you read the poem 90 times, and still you just don't get it? I used to doubt my own intellect, and then a friend said to me, "C'mon, Kris, you have a Ph.D. You're not a dumb woman. If you can't understand the poem, maybe there's something wrong with the poem, not with you."

I haven't had a chance to use this site with my Creative Writing classes, but it might be useful for students who really hunger to know the process of poem creation.

Now, if we could just have a similar site for the creation of books. I've seen several sites which explore the first book, which is useful. But I'd like a site that focuses on the creation of the book manuscript itself, not the publication/promotion process, which is what many first book sites devote the most attention to.

Latest Poem Publications--and a Return to the Online Publication Question

Three of my poems are up at the online journal Clapboard House. Go here to read them.

This publication reminded me of the posting I wrote considering online journals vs. paper publications. When I went to Clapboard House, I gasped with delight. One of my poems references a statue on the South Carolina State House grounds, and the editors included a picture of that statue with my poems. At least, I think it's the same statue--it's been almost twenty years since I saw it. If nothing else, it's a picture of a statue that works very well with the poem.

A paper journal wouldn't have been able to do that. It would have been too expensive. Paper journals would save whatever art budget they might have for publishing original art, not for including pictures that add to the visual pleasure of a poem.

I love this online journal, which focuses on the American South (my Latin American students have a fit when I use this term, and they've helped sensitize me to the issue). Until we moved to South Florida in 1998, I spent all of my conscious life in the Southeastern states of the U.S., and those experiences still shape some of my creative work. The work that I've found in Clapboard House manages to avoid cliche and sentimentality, which is why I decided to submit.

And in case you're wondering about the poem "Progress," let me just give some background. Until 1989 or so, it was legal in South Carolina for a man to rape his wife. I was part of a campaign to change that law. I remember heading over to the State House after my graduate school classes at USC (an easy walk) and watching the proceedings. I didn't testify, since I wasn't married and had no horrifying stories, but I like to think that the fact that so many women jammed the meeting halls led to the change in that law.

"The Middle Passage of Marriage" is a poem that worries me a bit. I worry that the metaphor is a stretch. I worry that it doesn't pay enough respect to the horrific experiences of slaves being transported from Africa. But I also think that a poem that pulls together disparate images is one that might make people think, and so I didn't file it in my failed poems folder.

I wrote "Lessons of the Rocking Chair" after reading Jane Hirshfield's poem "The Button." The end of Hirshfield's poem has the button remembering a time before it was a button, when it was part of an animal tusk. I spent the whole day looking at objects, thinking about what they were before they were these objects. For example, my rocking chair was once a mighty pine tree. And this poem emerged.

I'm enjoying the work of other writers and artists in this journal. I hope that you will too.

A Break from Teaching

Last night I finished my Poetry class--what an interesting quarter it has been.

And next quarter, I'm not teaching. And after that, I'm not sure.

I'm the Assistant Chair of our department, so it's not like I won't have plenty to do. But part of me feels strange. I haven't ever taken a break from teaching (except for school breaks, like Christmas vacation) since I started teaching in 1988.

And I've taught a lot. As soon as I completed my M.A. in 1989, I started teaching as many classes as the community college would give me, while continuing to work as a T.A. while working on my Ph.D. I've never had the luxury of having a summer off.

In the last year, since my job transitioned into a more traditional, 40+ hour a week, office job, I've still taught 1 class a quarter--4 classes a year, a heavier load than some people with tenure.

I've enjoyed that, because I've moved away from Composition classes and gotten to teach primarily Creative Writing classes, primarily Poetry classes. I like that I've continued to read alertly, always on the lookout for poems that my classes might enjoy. Often, a class has inspired an idea for a poem that I wouldn't have had otherwise.

And unlike years when I taught 5-8 classes at a time, teaching one class a term doesn't leave me too exhausted to do my own writing. Unfortunately the other demands of my job often do.

So, it's an experiment. I won't return to teaching until July, at the earliest. I expect to miss the interactions with students, and I expect to miss the classes that make me feel like I've inspired people--it's that old drama major in me who loves the thrill of being onstage. I don't expect to miss the aggravation of having copies to make, lesson plans to dream up, grading to do.

What If I Don't Have 10,000 Hours--The Joys of Fifteen Minutes

I spent much of yesterday thinking about the issue of 10,000 hours of practice, and how demoralizing that idea could be to someone who is having trouble finding even one hour a day.

I've also spent the last week being interviewed by Ph.D. students. Several of my colleagues at work are earning Ed.D.s and for one of their class assignments, they have to interview people who have written dissertations. There aren't many of us on campus who have written a dissertation, so that's how I came to have several interviews.

At the end of the interview, I was asked for advice, and I said, "Don't wait until you have huge chunks of time to get the work done. Work for a little bit every day, and you'll be amazed at what you can accomplish."

I've always used this approach with subjects that scare me or work I just couldn't face. When it looked like I might fail Statistics as an undergrad, I made myself study the subject and work on the problems for 15 minutes a day. I can face anything for 15 minutes.

Likewise with my dissertation. The thought of writing a long, scholarly work terrified me. But when I thought of it as 6 or 8 conference papers, I could handle it. The thought of working on it for 2-6 hours a day exhausted me. So I made a deal with myself. If I put in 15 minutes, I didn't have to do any more.

Some days, 15 minutes was all I did. But most days, I sat down and after 15 minutes, I was in a groove, and I kept going.

We can accomplish so much, even if we only have 15 minutes. In 15 minutes we could send a packet of poems to a journal--maybe even 2 packets or 3. In 15 minutes, we could write down ideas for a poem. In 15 minutes, we could do some word play. Many of us could write a poem in 15 minutes. In 15 minutes, we could read some poems which might inspire us. In 15 minutes, we could begin to think about how our poems work together--and after a week of 15 minutes of work each day, we'd likely have a chapbook or a book-length manuscript--or at least, we'd be well on our way towards one.

And many of us have 15 minute chunks of time scattered throughout the day that just evaporate. I cannot tell you how much time I've wasted because I get to meetings early, assuming that the meeting will start on time, even though it rarely does. I could take my poetry notebook and write. At the ear doctor last week, I had to wait for 45 minutes, which shouldn't have been a surprise (except that the last time I was at the ear doctor's, I went right in). If I had brought my notebook, I could have accomplished something. Last month, while stuck on a plane, on a trip where I'd read all the books I brought with me, I understood the appeal of some kind of hand-held device which could store all my computer files and would be so portable--but scraps of paper can also do nicely. What might I have managed to get done if I had forced myself to write, instead of rereading books I had just read on that trip?

For me, the hardest part is the getting started. I want to feel like I have hours and hours of time in which I won't be interrupted. Sadly, if I wait for those days, I won't write very often. My poetry self will get mad or depressed and that's not good for anybody. If I can give myself 15 minutes a day, and some days longer, I can accomplish so much more than if I wait for the perfect circumstances. Perfect circumstances aren't coming my way very often these days. But I can find 15 minute chunks here and there.

10,000 Hours of Practice--Talent vs. Persistence

Last night, I read much of Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. It's not a complicated book, but these days, I find myself profoundly grateful when I can just focus on a book for longer than 15 minutes. Some days, I have so little time, but some days, I just feel distracted and fragmented (do I blame this on my Internet habits? yes, to some extent).

Gladwell claims that what separates the good from the very, very good is practice. He claims that 10,000 hours of practice is what separates the good from the very, very good.

I've had this talent vs. practice argument with students through the years. They claim that they have certain talents, like drawing, and they shouldn't be expected to develop others, like writing. They claim that if you don't have innate talent that practice will get you nowhere--a reason they offer for why they shouldn't be expected to take Math classes.

I disagree, and it's heartening to read Gladwell, who would also disagree. He points out that cultures that we think of as good at math aren't innately good--but the culture rewards hours of hard work and persistence. He points out that when we look at any genius, we tend to believe any variety of narratives (the poor kid pulling himself up from his bootstraps, the young girl who sits down at the piano and creates symphonies, even though she's never played a piano before), but in fact, geniuses have put a lot of time in practicing their craft, be it computer programming, math, music, or quilting (Gladwell doesn't mention quilting, but I couldn't resist).

I've had a similar experience with drawing, which my Art students refuse to acknowledge. I used to claim that I couldn't draw, and then I spent a year trying to draw, training myself to see. I practiced. I got a lot better.

My students believe in their talent. They don't believe that they're talented because they work at it. They discount all the hours they've spent with a pencil in their hand.

This morning, I tried to apply the theory to my poetry. How many hours have I practiced my poetic craft? Would I get better if I worked more hours each day?

I started calculating: an hour a day, 365 days a year--how many years until I'm at 10,000 hours? And how many hours have I already put in? Do those count? Or is it better to have an intense time of practice?

And can the middle-aged brain still improve with more hours of practice? I think so. In the fall of last year, I started writing poems in form and/or rhyme, and rewriting poems into ones that had form and/or rhyme. Why did I do this? I was trying to get enough poems together to have a book to send to Steel Toe Books during their first call for formalist manuscripts; when I first read the call, it was 2 months until the deadline, and I counted up my possible poems, and decided that if I applied myself, I had a shot at having a manuscript ready.

I don't usually work in form or rhyme. Yet, as I immersed myself, I found that it came easier. When I sat down to write something new, it came out in sonnet form. It was exhilarating. And scary.

Another intriguing point from Gladwell: a lot of the geniuses he talked about had logged their 10,000 hours during adolescence and early adulthood. In my younger years, I used to be able to immerse myself in something for weeks or months. As a bored teenager, I wrote novels for fun in my free time and during down times at school, of which there were many. As a sometimes-frazzled woman in early midlife, I find that my immersion ability comes and goes in cycles, depending on what's going on at work.

And I don't even have children. I have no idea how my artistic cycle would fluctuate with more family responsibility, but I suspect I'd feel that I had even less time for my creative pursuits. My 10,000 hours of practice would get even more spread out.

Or maybe we'd sit around as a family and write poems together.

"Stealing Dust"

I've been reading Karen J. Weyant's chapbook, Stealing Dust. I'd been enjoying her blog for many months, and I've discovered that when I like someone's blog, chances are good that I will enjoy their poems. I don't know if the same holds true for fiction writers; I tend to go to the blogs of fiction writers whose work I already know.

I love poems that give a voice to populations that rarely find a voice, and Weyant's poems do that. About half the poems in the book revolve around the lives of factory workers. I particularly enjoyed "Beauty Tips from the Girls on 3rd Shift." By juxtaposing the traditional use of cosmetics with the ways that factory workers use them, we get a more poignant view of their situation. Poems like "Tasting Twilight" and "Why Men in Factories Should Never Write Love Stories" remind us that factory workers give up significant chunks of their private lives in order to have a job, a job that most of us wouldn't want.

And these poems, with their emphasis on dirt and scary machinery and abusive or neglectful management, remind us of exactly why we wouldn't want these jobs. And yet, it's not all bleak. The poems also show a sort of camaraderie, particularly amongst the female workers.

The other poems in the collection remind me of growing up in the 70's, even though I didn't grow up in a factory town, as did the people in these poems. But even if you didn't grow up in the 70's, chances are that some of these poems will speak to you. There's "Canning Season," which recalls those days when people actually put food away (and it talks of the summer of a royal wedding, hearkening back to those days when Charles and Diana seemed like a storybook couple). And "Eating Watermelons" reminded me of childhood rituals that I hadn't thought of in years. "The Girl Who Carved Jesus Into Her Forearm" is the poem I think of most frequently, that pain that finds its relief in the mutilation of flesh.

Of course, the chapbook covers all sorts of territories of pain, and yet Weynant has such a lyricism that it's not unpleasant. In some poems, like "The Girl Who Carved Jesus Into Her Forearm," the pain has already happened offstage. In others, like "The Oldest Woman on 3rd Shift," Weyant shows the recompense for a hard life: strength and ability and the knowledge of past difficulties ("But then, she reminds us all / that she remembers the strike of '82, the big layoffs in '85, the buyout in '91"), which reassures us that present difficulties can be endured.

I've returned to these haunting poems, this chapbook, again and again in the past weeks. And the chapbook itself is such a beautiful artifact. Finishing Line Press knows how to create a thing of beauty. Go here to get a copy of your own.