From Quotes to Prompts to Poetry
A Collaborative Activity with a Singular Result
January is always a wonky month in my classroom. It feels like a new beginning with manifestations and intentionality, but then our first snow day rolls around, and we lose a bit of steam. Afterward, we troop back to school for a bit, but just as quickly we shut down again for flu (this year for Covid). We trudge back, a bit more dispirited each time, until the next “high impact weather event” shuts us down again. These fits and starts create jerky and empty spaces in our work and our community, and we lose momentum toward the goals we set for ourselves on the first day of the new year.
To mend that fissure in our community, I use an activity that is both collaborative and singular in its execution. This activity builds community by not only asking students to read and analyze a quote about writing and create a single writing prompt of their own but also to write a line of poetry of their own in response to all the other prompts in the room.
HOW TO:
Distribute as many quotes about writing as you have students in the room. Give each student one quote. I always have a big compendium of writing quotes in a folder on my desktop. The below quotes come from Dinty Moore’s lovely little book, The Mindful Writer. Moore uses 59 writing quotes (that he didn’t just include one more to make it an even 60 feels like an actual test of the Buddhist teachings he espouses) to unpack and analyze the writing process through the lens of mindfulness.
For five minutes, students write about what they think their quote means.
Then students create a single writing prompt that is connected, in some way, to the quote they’ve just read and analyzed. The prompt might be a) an open-ended question, b) a sentence stem to be filled in, or c) a command prompt, like “think about..” or “describe…” or “explain.”
Now, we go around the room, and students read their quote out loud and say what they think it means. At the end of their explanation, they give us the prompt they just created.
Each person in the room then answers the prompt on a clean sheet of their own paper with a single word, a phrase, or a sentence. No more or no less, just a single line.
Continue around the room until everyone has discussed their quote and given their prompt to the class.
At the end of the exercise, every student will have as many lines as there are students in the class. We had 15 students in our class, so students had 15 lines to create into a poem.
Next, give the class five-ten minutes to “shape” the poem. They can move lines around, add a title or add as many transitional words or phrases or punctuation as necessary to make the lines sing. They can add up to two lines, but cannot cut out more than two original lines.
And lastly, and I think this is the most important step: everyone in the room reads their poem out loud to the class. We are all in the same creative process boat, and I insist that, without apologies, throat-clearing, or excuses, we share our poems. It’s fun and silly and sometimes profane. There is no expectation that their poems are “good” or “publishable.” The prompts themselves were just invented 30 minutes before the poems were written.
We did this yesterday, and my students loved the activity. I asked them for some observations, and Evelyn said, “The best lines were ones that were unintentionally funny. They were lines I wouldn’t have included probably if I was trying to write a ‘poem,’ but they were the best ones.“ Logan said, “I noticed you could almost guess what line answered what prompt.” I loved the fact that students used a lot of repetition, rhetorical questions, single-word lines, and fresh images that married brilliantly with abstract ideas about creation and their writing identity.
Below are the quotes and companion prompts my students came up with.
The more I write, the more I think that everything you’ve done up to the point that you’re writing isn’t much help. You always start out in the dark.
Charles Baxter
How do you feel when you are in the dark?
The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
Flannery O’Connor
What is perfection for you?
Catch yourself thinking.
Allen Ginsburg
Observe your thoughts for a second, and pick out a word or image that stands out among the rest.
When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. This happens every time. Then gradually I write one page and then another.
John Steinbeck
Think about a time when you had a sense of impending doom. How did you overcome it?
A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.
Junot Diaz
When is it acceptable to stop writing, to momentarily give up altogether with the promise that you will start to write again soon?
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
E.L. Doctorow
How could planning out a story ever be detrimental to the story?
If you don’t feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn’t very vital. If you don’t feel like you are writing somewhat over your head, why do it? If you don’t have some doubt of your authority to tell this story, then you are not trying to tell enough.
John Irving
Write a word or phrase about something that scares you or makes you feel uneasy.
Every morning between 9 and 12, I go to my room and sit before a piece of paper. Many times, I just sit for three hours with no ideas coming to me. But I know one thing: if an idea does come between 9 and 12, I am there ready for it.
Flannery O’Connor
Sit and wait and see if an idea comes. Write down the first idea or image that comes. If nothing comes, write down, “nothing came.”
Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble; on paper, not eternal bronze: let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.
Jacques Barzun
Think of something you thought about last class period - a dream, a joke, a scene, a random sentence - but don’t write that down. Write down the next sentence after that.
You can only have bliss if you don’t chase it.
Bhante Gunaratana
What is the one thing you want most of all? How could you lose it in order to find it?
Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of the light on the broken glass.
Anton Chekov
Describe something in this room without naming it.
It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.
Joan Baez
Think of a time when you’ve written something in the past that might have seemed meaningless that looking back you realized had meaning. What was that thing?
Writing teaches writing.
John McPhee
How do you become a writer?
You have to sweep the temple steps a lot in hopes that the god appears.
Dean Young
What does your headspace or workspace look like?
Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing . . . .the rest will follow.
Jane Yolen
When loving a piece becomes difficult, in what ways do you seek therapy?
Here is a sample of poetry that came from this activity:
On My Writer’s Desk
Terror always, but gastrically so, a little fever,
The elusive, never gained, never lost ideal of
a clear glass window with January ice in the panes.
So I put my foot on the pedal and push deeper
Never getting off, pushing empty
Always riding somewhere, but going nowhere.
How would I know, I who never map, but
desperately want to be that traveler sure of her
destination.
What If I was known as I am known, no fear or shame
Then see the dogs, the cistern, the Bosnian pine,
Pneumatic tubes, rice and bells, and perils and ditches
The next sentence after that
and the next sentence after that.
Maybe there are roots and wings in my head
And recipes and notebooks and funeral home cards
Who thinks extruded polymers are the icon of our time?
Give up already, if better is the goal or insistent wishing
Fill me, sadness without and logic within,
the Earth lapping all other planets,
Come on Peloton riders.
Show me what you brought me.
It’s clear now that time passes in disorder and I need a clean desk
Choke down some books
Heal me and make me whole