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.”