Kathryn Winograd

On Cow Ponds and Glass Frogs: Using the Poetry Prompt

by Kathryn Winograd

For a long time, too long, I was a poet with a vocabulary needle stuck on muck and scum and their, well, my reflexive associations with midwestern farm ponds. Not that there is anything wrong with muck and scum and their long list, um, short list of thesaurus buddies like mud, manure, muck, and algae (though I just saw, whoa!, dross), but sometimes obsessions with words and summer cow saunas can stand a bit of retooling. Hence, the prompt. 

Broadly, the prompt is anything that gets you out, sorry, of the mire of your own head: someone gives you a writing suggestion, a new word to use, a form to try, or you, in thinking of a longer manuscript, decide on a structural pattern or an image thread to use for a series of poems. If stuck, I am never too faint-hearted to pull out a magazine or a book from a shelf, riffle through its pages, and then blindly stab a finger at any word, phrase, or sentence—the more prosaic, the better. Writing my poem, “Migrations,” surprise winner of one of the Writer’s Digest writing competitions, I opened up the morning newspaper and, in utter frustration, stuck my finger on the phrase, “There is no justification here,” which lead me to my ending for a poem I thought impossible to finish. 

How do prompts work? And why? They quell the obsession; they trip up the “knowing” mind and allow delicious “Freudian” accident to happen. Using prompts is nothing new in the tradition of poetry-making. French Surrealists like Andre Breton, Charles Baudelaire, and Arthur Rimbaud would happily quaff their whatever and partake in games of accidental poetry like exquisite corpse and automatism.   Latin American poets such as the supreme Pablo Neruda are celebrated for the deep and beautifully unexpected associations in their poems. The thought is that the prompt allows the poet to banish the critic-on-the-shoulder and to delve into intuition and the unconsciousness, discovering, ultimately, the deeper guts of the poem. Why? Perhaps  this is because the prompt often kicks the, now, frantic, “what am I supposed to do with this” poet into the nuances of image and metaphor, which, as the poet Edward Hirsch would tell us, create the moments of meaning-making, for both the poet and the reader.  

For “Octopus on a Sea Dock,” I used two different kinds of prompts: a given prompt and a structural pattern that I had been playing around with. The given prompt came from the 2021 Na/GloPoWriMo site. Each April, during National Poetry Month, NaPoWriMo posts a daily prompt. On Day 27th, the prompt was to write a poem inspired by an entry from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Luckily for me, I did not run into another muck, scum, or, oh!, spume word, instead finding the new and wonderful term: onism - n. the awareness of how little of the world you’ll experience. Given that I had just spent a pandemic year isolated on a six by three foot cabin porch feeding the titmice, onism felt like a perfect start to this poem. I would use it as an epigraph, the epigraph in itself a prompt, right?, floating above the poem—word or quotation or reference offering itself up as a new obsession.  

And the term “onism” worked in a second structural way for me. Writing creative nonfiction for the past twelve years has opened me to the beauty of the mind in transit, the journey of the mind the raison d’etre of the essay and, perhaps, maybe, the poem. “Octopus on a Sea Dock,” like the other poems in the series I am working on, uses the three or four beat line and allows memory to arise when memory will arise, with the perfect trust that within memory are image and metaphor, those mysterious meaning-makers. Oh! and there was a third kind of prompt. The poem had to have some kind of reference to whatever I found reading through the National Geographic that day. On the 27th day of NaPoWriMo, during National Poetry Month, that was the glass frog. 

Do my prompt poems always work? No. Do the prompts sometimes lead me to places that have nothing to do with the original prompts? Yes. Do I care when that happens?  No. Unless the poem plotzes.  Just following a prompt and the rules for a poem, whether they are rules you or somebody else made up, does not promise that you will find a “real” poem, however you, personally, define that—whether, like Emily Dickinson, you go so cold you will never warm up again or your head pops off. For me, it’s the bubbles in the stomach. Ultimately, the prompt allows you excavation out of the cow ponds of your own mind and, perhaps, for just a moment, into that  “foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”

Daniel Romo

Daniel Romo on “Dromedary”

I try not to be a prose poem elitist. I attempt not to sneer when I read a “prose poem” that begins with someone conducting a surreal act and escalates to yet more surrealism that overshadows the simple and otherwise lazy language which litters the poem that is actually more of an unremarkable story than anything else and ends with a flat punchline. I try to see that sometimes I overcompensate in the poetic language department in my own poems because SO many other prose poems neglect to add the poetry. I realize some of my recent prose poems lacked imagery (perhaps because of aforementioned prose poems in which imagery became the gimmick of the poem) so with my prose poems, I’ve made a concerted attempt to tie in the language with the images. I want to create a poem that possesses a distinct voice. I want my poems to be smart and sing.

In “Dromedary,” I used the language as the foundation of the poem. I strived to be clever while presenting a slice. And I added the mother from Sheboygan because I like the name Sheboygan and she brings life. I can see this woman struggling to simply live out a routine. I wanted the poem to take the reader to more than one place, but for a purpose. This was a fun poem to write. Not all my poems are. So now, more so than ever, I’m continuing to be conscious of creating worlds in my prose poems in which imagery and language feed off each other and present a welcoming, homecooked meal. 

Michael Hettich

Learning What We Know: Michael Hettich on “The River”

I write for a few hours almost every morning, alternating these days between prose and poetry, and I try not to think much before I start, or even for that matter while I’m working. On good days I find a cadence which finds a voice, and I follow that voice and cadence as far as it takes me. If what I’ve done feels authentic, I sometimes look back over it to see what’s there, but I usually try to avoid doing that, preferring to let what I’ve written cool off a bit before I take a good look at what’s there. I may even challenge myself to write twenty or thirty improvisations of this kind before I take a look at any of them. That’s been my method for most of my writing life, which is most of my life, at this point; and that’s what I did in writing “The River.”

I find that what I consider my “best” poems are rarely drawn directly from events or experiences but instead deal with these things in a peripheral way—discovering what I’ve been feeling or thinking about by writing the poem. Finding a cadence that sufficiently limits my choices without boxing me into an overly formal way of thinking is essential for such discovery, as is entering a voice that feels supple, authentic, and not-quite-my-own. 

So when I look at “The River” with an eye to “what was I trying to do here?” I see that I might be writing about the fact that my wife and I both retired a few years ago, and that we moved to a place both familiar and brand-new, similar to where we both grew up but steeped in a different culture and a whole new (and deeply distressing) era in the culture of our country. So we’ve both entered new iterations of ourselves--new people, in a sense—in a whole new yet strangely familiar place. We’ve had to change our sense of who we are in the world. In doing this, we’ve gained the courage—maybe it’s just gumption—to finally let go of those “classics” that have always bored us in all their various manifestations, as we grow into people we hardly recognize sometimes, though we often feel utterly familiar, too, to ourselves--and even to each other.

Also running through this poem, of course, is a sense of the grief so many of us feel at the environmental destruction we see all around us every day and even participate in, however much we try not to: the conundrum and deepest grief defining our time. By moving suddenly into the present tense with the line “So many animals have been swept away,” I think I’m trying to give as much power to that desperate image as possible. 

Having said all these things about my little poem, I think I should also say—again—that the experience of writing it was really more like listening to the possibilities in that voice I heard in the first line, and following that voice where it led. That’s the most honest truth behind its composition, and lies at the heart of why I write anything, ever: to make manifest what I didn’t know I was feeling, to discover what I didn’t know I knew. 

Radha Marcum

Radha Marcum on “Hours of American Prairie” and Caesura

Born and raised in the American West, I think a lot about the poetics of landscape. As a poet interested in place and ecology, I seek to engender a more truthful and nuanced view of the West and its ecosystems. I’ve often felt that our dry, open landscapes don’t lend themselves to the fluid, sometimes dense poetic structures of the landscape tradition I inherited—from Wordsworth’s Prelude to Whitman’s long, ecstatic sentences in Leaves of Grass.

Set on the plains near where I live in Colorado, “Hours of American Prairie” took its cues directly from the landscape. Colorado’s Front Range has absorbed millions of new residents over the last decade. We watch as bulldozers scrape prairie down to dirt and housing developments replace open grassland and divert water. During the pandemic, I started spending a lot of time birding with my son on small parcels of public land—islands of grassland, lakes, and ponds—between suburban neighborhoods or, further out, past farms and gigantic fracking operations. His devoted attention to local migratory bird species—coupled with recent reports on dwindling avian populations—forged a new, tender connection in me to these places.  

I arrived at the form of “Hours of American Prairie” intuitively while attending to my experience and to the poem’s emerging music and meaning. I explored extending the line (I tend toward short lines) but didn’t want to give up the perceptual shifts offered by enjambment. Marta Werner says about Emily Dickinson’s poems: “The boundary lines . . . create a kind of physical caesura that gets repeated in the lines—where there is also a kind of braking action, or a kind of leap across the boundary. Caesura and syncope. We hear the grammar of discontinuity.” 

It was that kind of intense discontinuity I felt in the landscape. I compromised by inserting midline spaces. As I worked on the poem, I began to trust that long lines paused by caesurae was how I “heard” the landscape—a broad horizontal space, disrupted. Embracing caesura in the poem created rhythmic (emotive) pauses in the voice, while still suggesting abrupt shifts in perception and meaning. I liked how the form embodied continuity and disconnection. 

Since intuiting this form, I've applied it to other poems. I’m interested in how the midline spaces also make vertical shapes down the page—ribbons of silence that look like watersheds, dry riverbeds, or the cracks that form in mud as it dries. Metaphorically they suggest tears in the fabric of ecosystems, the separations within our current social structures and belief systems. There is for me as the poet, and I hope for the reader, a lot more meaning to the form than just a surprising layout on the page.