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A Defense of Writing Prompts: In reply to Dan Beachy-Quick
By Paul Bone
Dan Beachy-Quick argues against the prompt in the classroom and, by extension, in the writing life:
“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 that does our art any favors.”It’s a perennial problem of the poet-teacher. As poets, we want students to understand the attentive and sometimes obsessive urgency needed to write poems. As teachers, we’re responsible for giving them models for reading and writing. He’s right: too much prompting can retard the imaginative development of young poets, especially when they are begin to find their own notion of style and subject. And of course any serious-minded young poet will be imitating icons anyway, providing in a sense his or her own prompting. Stanley Plumly is suspicious of the prompt for nearly identical reasons in his short chapter in Robin Behn and Chase Twitchell’s The Practice of Poetry (Harper, 1992):
“I have never found poetry-writing assignments very useful, unless they can somehow be construed as involuntary, unless they can somehow be made to meet the already established needs of the words themselves through the agency of a first draft. That way, unlike the typical assignment set-up, one is not dealing with a blank page of whole cloth. As for the terror of the original blank page itself: that is a test of whether one should be writing at all.”Again, wise, if not austere, advice. There should indeed be a compulsion beyond the assignment deadline or the filling-in-of-details in a half-finished narrative to satisfy the requirements of a writing prompt. Something about these warnings rubs me the wrong way, though. It’s probably inadvertent, but it mystifies the poetic impulse in the wrong way to create yet another image of the anguished poet hunched over the page. Certainly there is a non-rational, compelling voice driving poetry and its composition. Attempts to wrestle poems into prose have been successful, and we need to combat this. To be fair to Plumly and Beachy-Quick, I am probably coming at the teaching of poetry from a different angle. The kinds of classes I teach are hybrids; they are neither workshop entirely (in which I, too, would not assign prompts) nor poetry-appreciation courses. They are poetry-writing classes, and my approach is to practice in the tradition for a good part of the course. But in the classroom, and in our own work, the idea that assignments somehow profane the poetic process suggests the poet is simply waiting for the terror and the fits to seize him: a conduit rather than a conjurer. It also negates the notion that, as Mallarme said, poems are made of words, not ideas. Those words follow, in both senses, the ideas and images, to be sure, and that’s why, if I could adjust the terms a bit, working in certain forms (not only fixed forms but also modes), for example, can liberate student-poets from their own inchoate notion of what poetry should be, show them how various it can be, and as well teach them that it is possible to de-mystify the process a bit.
For the rest of my life, I will try to achieve the level of control of my poetic heroes. If nothing else, prompts and exercises instill the idea of the balance of non-rational poetic thought and some sense of mastery over its presentation.
Note: Paul Bone is co-editor of the journal Measure and he teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Evansville in Indiana. After graduating from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, he earned an M.F.A. from the University of Arkansas in 1999. His manuscript Momentary Vision of the Assistant Meteorologist won the Uccelli Chapbook Contest and is forthcoming from Uccelli Press, and his poems have been published in The Cream City Review, Quarterly West, and Farmer’s Market.