Poetry Prompt 2 - Begin with a Quote

Using a quote can help open up your focus.
Poet Margaret Randall, also a sensitive photographer and world traveler,
has practice looking through other lenses. 

My friend, the poet and activist Margaret Randall, created a stunning book several years ago using quotes as prompts. Where They Left You for Dead includes the words of Adrienne Rich, Joy Harjo, Paul Monette, Audre Lorde, Eduardo Galeano, Linda Hogan and many others. 

After the quote and attribution, Randall springboards off, moving us out of the quote. Each quote helps her to find the deep ends of life. 

Let's consider this quote by Audre Lorde, included toward the beginning of the book, "I could slip anchor and wander / to the end of the jetty / uncoil into the waters / a vessel of light." 


Randall shoots off from those words into a poem about watching her partner suffering in pain, "You say you are / leaving yourself behind. A sort of death (you watch / my face) but not in this dimension, a different recipe / for dying. Pay attention now. ..."


What a wonderful approach to the blank page, and what a way to honor words you love! Find a  beautiful quote (or one that disgusts you, even... this, too, could lead to some intriguing writing..). Then, jump off. Don't worry about landing for a while; just swim around in the words — yours and the other writer. See where you can travel, how far from shore you can swim. 

John Cage, Noise and the Spaces for Poetry

The sheet music for this notorious composition
is basically blank white space, but Cage
"composed" those empty sounds.

"Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating."

— American experimental composer John Cage 

(from The Future of Music: Credo) 

By the end of each week, the noise of our lives can often accumulate to an absolute din. The rushing about, the 9 to 5 schedule, appointments, traffic, news headlines, television, the endless emails, the shoulds. 


John Cage knew a thing or two about finding inspiration in the spaces and chances around him. Best known for a 3-movement noteless composition called 4'33"- which sounds almost exactly like 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence, Cage knew that even silence has fascinating messages to impart. 


In that "performed" composition, the silence is not just silence, it is silence about sound. It includes the noise of our lives, the sounds of which John Cage carved out for us to hear in a quieter place. 


Listen as you go about your days and weeks, and you'll find intriguing bits of poems all around you. This is how I end up with poems based on news stories, tutoring poems, persona poems.


When you pay attention to someone else, you're being given a new story to tell, another perspective. You get to step outside of yourself.


So, listen at a doctor's office, the subway stop, the dog park, the grocery store, or as you're walking through the neighborhood in the early morning. What you hear is so much more than noise. It's an opening, and could make a wonderful poem.

Punctuating a Poem - Part 2

, . ; - : / : - ; . ,

When tutoring college students enrolled in English classes, I describe punctuation as a road map. It helps us readers find our way in a sentence or a paragraph. I explain that a period tells us to stop fully and look both ways. If there's no punctuation, we keep right on going. A comma is more of a rolling stop (the kind we all do at certain corners).

But, whether we're talking creative writing or academic essays, I encourage every student to pay attention to his or her pauses by reading out loud. I reason, "Where you pause, you'll want your reader to also pause, right?" 

As a creative writer, how you choose to do this is up to you. You could insert a comma, a line break, or some other funky, unexpected symbol (a slash, a dash, etc.). You are setting the rules.

But, once you set those rules, just as with a form poem, stick to them. If you put a comma in one place, a line break in another, and no symbol still further along, you will have asked us to detour from the place we're trying to get to - the meaning and feeling of the poem. 

We will be lost in the lines of the poem.  It will be like reaching a dead end in an unfamiliar city.

My advice on punctuation is to do what feels right to you in the piece you're writing. Just maintain that choice all the way through that last line.

Earlier Post: Punctuating a Poem - Part 1

Rewriting Greek Tragedy in Poetry

Theaterwork's Company of Poets generated the words written
on the set of the upcoming play Antigone.

I've been part of a collective for nearly a year now. This is the second theater performance we've worked to enhance with poetry. We began meeting in November, writing from prompts and Jean Anouilh's play Antigone, which premiered in the early 1940's. 

That play was based on Sophocles' original treatment of the Greek myth. Oedipus' daughter buries her brother who has been killed by her uncle, her mother's brother, and in turn, her life is forced to an end. All in all, a sordid story expertly told.

The Company of Poets, as we're called, has been actively exploring the words and themes of the play - writing it into new directions. We will be publishing a chapbook of some of the works we've created, entitled "Other Antigones," and reciting our work before some of the performances. We'll also be doing an event specifically focused on poetry - ours and others - that derive from the many arguments and concerns that arise from the play.


Did I mention the play itself is in a reclaimed city pool? That's what you're looking at in the photo above. Theaterwork has gussied up a 12-year vacant pool. The show opens this Friday. 


Our main poetry performance is still a few weeks off. 

“Antigone” Poetry Performance in collaboration with 

Theaterwork’s production of Jean Anouilh's play 

Company of Poets: Anne Valley-Fox, Jenice Gharib, Angela 

Janda, Lauren Camp and Ann Hunkins

333 Montezuma Annex, Santa Fe, NM

April 24, 7PM

Punctuating a Poem - Part 1

In class the other night, one of my students asked about punctuation. He thought he'd like to write poems without commas because he wasn't confident of punctuating correctly. Rather than get it wrong, he figured it best to leave the little suckers out. Another student added that commas at the end of lines feels excessive. After all, she reckoned, the line break already tells the reader to pause.

Punctuation is a huge topic, and a drag for many people. Rather than turn a perfectly wonderful creative writing class into an exacting punctuation lecture, I offered my hard rule of consistency: Whatever you do, keep doing it throughout the poem.

Next post: Punctuating a Poem - Part 2