Tag Archives: Theodore Roethke

Promptings

I have mixed feelings about poetry prompts. There have been times when using prompts has really got me writing and feeling inventive about poetry. I’ve had instructors (and read books) whose prompts seemed terrific for me; but maybe I felt already ‘primed’ for writing, anyway, and it was not so much the prompt itself but the circumstances that led to fruitful drafts. At other times, prompts appear useless, or even–dare I say–insipid. My current belief is that, for me, circumstances and instructor matter more than the cleverness of the prompt. Any prompt can be delightful if only I find myself situated in the mood or feel an urgency to write.

The virtual workshop I’m taking with Anita Skeen opened with a discussion of poems (by Roethke, initially) and then moved to some list-making and prompts. This is not unusual for workshops, and lists are a fine way to begin thinking about poems. The prompts we were assigned employed both lists and a method for drafting a poem. So far, I’ve drafted four or five poems in a week: therefore, success (!) even though only one of the drafts seems to have legs.

I think what happens is that after many, many years of writing poetry (or making any kind of art) one begins to feel a rhythm that is almost circadian–as analogy–that informs a person about flow. I ask myself, “Am I ready to write today?” The answer may not be yes. But if it is yes, then I can just write. No expectations, and it’s okay to use a prompt, or re-write an older poem, or just free-write about whatever moment I happen to be in. Usually, in this frame of mind, I don’t get concerned about writing well. I just start on in.

If the am-I-ready answer isn’t a definite yes, then I may procrastinate or distract myself by cleaning the house or reading a book. I can overcome the “maybe” by turning to work by a poet whose work I find interesting or by experimenting with a prompt. Sometimes, it helps to give myself a deadline of some kind–this is why workshops are often useful!

But the answer may simply be, “No, not today.” Sometimes we have those non-creative days. It is alright to have them. Art shouldn’t be about pushing out ideas to get to a “product.” I’m suddenly laughing to myself, thinking of Billy Crystal as Miracle Max in the movie The Princess Bride: “You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.”

At least with writing, one gets a chance to revise.

Carol Kaine & Billy Crystal in The Princess Bride (20th Century Fox, 1987)

If you are a writer, what do you think about the use of prompts?

Breathe

2024 closed with “thundersnow” in my neck of the woods, a weather phenomenon that I find rather thrilling in its strangeness. And the year commenced with the conflagrations in California, not to mention everything else that goes on daily in the cosmos. Oh, the difficulties of life in interesting times.

Photo by Sabian Symbols on Pexels.com

It so happens that I had made plans, and purchased plane tickets, to visit my son in Los Angeles during the week that AWP is holding its annual conference there, in March–that is, assuming the situation in Los Angeles County doesn’t get even worse and assuming his apartment building survives the fires; it hasn’t been easy to keep myself from doom-scrolling and watching updated fire maps. I remind myself that there is not a thing I can do beyond sending money to charities and such, perhaps, and waiting for the winds to change, and that making myself stressed will actually do harm. But I am not one of those Pollyanna types (now termed a “toxic positivity” person, I have recently learned). I’m aware that the world can be hard, and that we may suffer. So, as my yoga and tai chi instructors would tell me:

Breathe.

There’s no point in trying to decide whether this start to the year is auspicious or inauspicious, though if I’m going to go with signs and auguries, I might choose to follow the Chinese year and move my year’s start to January 29, Year of the Wood Snake–and get all this awful stuff (including January 20th) packed into LAST year.

As I noted in my year-end post, a year’s end–or beginning–is arbitrary.

~

As for writing-related resolutions, I make them all the time, not just at the beginning of the year. But in that one respect, the first dozen days of January are going surprisingly well. I’ve been spending more time on revising older–sometimes much older–work, and I have been drafting some new poems. I even submitted just a few things to lit journals and have been making minor progress in the monumental task of culling and organizing my writing files.

Best of all, I enrolled in an online poetry workshop with Anita Skeen through the Friends of Theodore Roethke Foundation, which starts this week. And I registered for an art class in February, so my plans to focus more on my creative work post-retirement are proceeding more or less apace. We balance fear and misery with art.

~

Cloud sketch in acrylics