Some poets I know are trying to write one poem each day for the month of April—National Poetry Month. If you, like I, tend to write not according to a schedule, but only when inspiration strikes, this is a challenge that puts even experienced poets back at the starting gate. Fiction writers or memoirists, for example, have the arc of a plot or the development of a character that, with discipline, they can pursue even when the creative well seems to have run dry.  How to approach a poem, when no compelling theme or epiphany seems to be working within the poet? How to set words upon a page, on command?

First, there are a number of resources for creative writing prompts. This month, I’m looking at three that I hope will help inspire a “poem a day”:  MER Journal, Poetry Super Highway Prompt-a-Day, and NaPoWriMo. If a suggestion from one doesn’t strike me, perhaps another will. The wonderful thing about prompts is that they let you discover what you could say, but have not, yet. Here’s an example: one of the prompts I consulted was to find 12 words from the Random Word Generator and write a 14-line poem using each of those words in one line each, in order. You can keep clicking until a list of words “clicks” for you! In one of the lists that popped up for me was the word “motorcycle.” Mind you, I’ve never ridden a motorcycle, but always wanted to. Just seeing that word “prompted” enough reflection and emotion to write about how our hopes and dreams change as our awareness of our mortality deepens. I didn’t know I wanted to write about that. But 12 words—with a motorcycle revving in the middle—got me going down that road.

Second, poets may not have the structure of plot to lead them down a creative path, but they do have the structure of form. The momentum of meter, rhyme, or pattern may provide momentum when the seeming arbitrariness of free verse has you stymied. Look for an example of a villanelle (or some other established form) and try your hand at one.

Third, and conversely, the lack of structure may be the magic door that opens poetic possibilities for you. Some writers have a talent for riffing, a flow of seemingly spontaneous non sequiturs and surrealism (that could be carefully crafted). My tendency is to write with some story in mind, or some structure to keep me on track. Therefore, I was struck by this passage from poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert, reminding me, basically, that coloring outside the lines can be a good thing:  the next line could always be anything.

When I’m writing a poem, and I get stuck, it’s often because I’ve forgotten this principle: The next line could always be anything. The poem has free will; the future in the poem is not beholden to its past. This is true for any piece of writing, but poetry seems to foreground those choices, those leaps outside logic or predictability, as if the possibilities of what comes next are more infinite in a poem.

I’ve started thinking of this moment, this chess move where the poet breaks a line and almost resets the game, as the lyric decision. How do poets decide what comes next? How do they make us want to read another line, and another? There has to be a system of coherence to the poem — even a list of random horses has coherence, via theme — but it can’t be unsurprising either. A series of lyric decisions is how we write something between order and chaos.
— Elisa Gabbert, New York Times, January 25, 2022

These suggestions provide a starting point for the craft of poetry. The next steps are to put those initial efforts aside for a while, and then revisit and revise.

Once on paper, swirling thoughts become concrete artifacts, so do not turn that into an idol, worshipping your own imagined cleverness (Been there, done that!). Manuscripts in the British Museum show that even the sublime Keats savagely revised. Write it, print it, put it in a drawer. Take it out after a few days (or even weeks if the content is personally upsetting).

–Anne Redmon

You may end up discarding an unsatisfactory effort, or bringing a rough draft into beautiful fruition. But for now, the point is to charge your battery and start your poetry engine.