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Some (Skeptical) Thoughts on Prompts
by Dan Beachy-Quick
I should admit to a long and increasingly ambivalent relationship to the use of “prompts” in the classroom, as well as in my own writing practice, to the point where now I exclude them almost completely. I’m sure my fear isn’t unique—that offering students a method by which to produce language exacerbates talent at the cost of subtler difficulties. They do have a benefit, of course. A prompt well-used, in my mind, introduces a student to a poetic problem from the inside-out: image, symbol, rhythm, and so on. Better, in one-on-one conference, a prompt, or a suggestion of writing in a particular mode, with a particular purpose, might open a student’s eyes to a latent possibility in his or her own verse that might not be apprehended otherwise. But the habitual use of prompts in a class risks training students to turn to prompts, or some version thereof, to create poems. I like to think that the blank page is its own best prompt—How against this nothing can I find a language to fill it? The only real prompt is language in crisis with itself, a crisis not only of word, but of how language must find a way to bridge the gulf separating self and world. “Prompts,” other than this fundamental one, may offer too many ways to avoid the basic problem of writing a poem by always offering a ready means to do a work that seems similar; I don’t think this does our art any favors.
Note: Dan Beachy-Quick is the author most recently of This Nest, Swift Passerine (Tupelo, 2009). Chicago born, Beachy-Quick grew up in Colorado and upstate New York. He attended Hamilton College, the University of Denver, and the Iowa Writer's Workshop. He has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently assistant professor of English at Colorado State University. His previous books include three volumes of poems: North True South Bright (Alice James, 2003), Spell (Ahsahta, 2004), and Mulberry (Tupelo, 2006); two chapbooks: Mobius Crowns (with Srikanth Reddy: P-Queue, 2008) and Apology for the Book of Creatures (Ahsahta, 2008); and a book of essays: A Whaler’s Dictionary (Milkweed, 2008).