In preparation for the coming month, I did what I'm sure a lot of young poets do and went searching for prompts, paralyzed by the idea of generating so much content that is supposed to cut so close so quickly. A user on Reddit stopped me in my tracks by saying, "A prompt is just a silly word for something to respond to."
They went on to recommend that the searcher go outside (or perhaps, as the kids say, 'touch grass'), read the news, delve into philosophy, astronomy, or whatever (read: seemingly "deep") topics interested them to find this "something to respond to." This gets to the heart of the idea of poetry as a sense-making tool of the commons: even if you don't have the words or the expertise to write an op-ed on something like the war in Gaza, you are still a breathing, living, responding person, and as a poet, you can take artistic license to make sense of your thoughts and feelings surrounding complicated trains of thought. It feels less scary to think about "generative" work if you think of it as responsive. I can write about anything that causes my body, heart or mind to respond, and that's truly hundreds of things a day of varying levels of consequence. I learned a new word yesterday, "ekphrastic," which refers to a form of poetry that is written in response to/about works of art in other media. Art is supposed to make you have a response, make you feel something, right? So it makes sense to me that folks that are inclined to write poetry, an inherently responsive art form, are also inclined to visit museums, theatres, galleries, concert halls, and then write their art about those experiences. I think we all crave the feeling of responding to something, especially when we are all dopamine-addicted and constantly distracted by a million things that don't actually matter. It is a rare experience in modern life to truly feel something. Okay, that sounds incredibly fake-deep and edgy, but the image that I come back to is Mary Oliver's "soft animal of your body." We are carbon-based life forms, someone said basically houseplants with more complicated needs and feelings. I think we are very detached most of the time from the soft animals of our bodies, and the things we write poems about: sex, food, nature, love, pain, loss, death; these are the things that put us back in touch with that organic part of us. Hopefully next month, I'll at least see the curse of living in interesting times as something to respond to.
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