On responding "wrongly."
Echoes. Reclamation. Pivots.
Today, three separate contemplations on the call & response dynamic, and how it can inform and inspire our writing practice.
1) You don’t have to respond to writing prompts “correctly.”
When I lead poetry workshops, participants often share feelings of insecurity. Did they respond to my prompts correctly? Did they misinterpret the directions? Overlook a step? Is their variation “allowed”? Is it okay that they did something else entirely?
It makes sense to have these worries—for years in school, success depended partly on how well we followed directions. But I don’t see poetry prompts as directions, I see them as bearers of space and permission. So you might respond to the prompt precisely, OR:
Do the prompt mostly by the book but bend some rules
Ignore the letter and lean into the spirit of a prompt
Ignore the spirit of a prompt and instead take it literally
Do the opposite of what the prompt asks
Stare into space or take a nourishing nap instead of responding to the prompt
To me, any of these are valid, creative, and healthy responses to a writing prompt.
Writing tip: Use prompts as diving boards, or tools, rather than commands.
2) You don’t have to answer your readers’ questions.
I recently read Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay, a novel that never quite identifies the reason behind the story’s spooky events. In the foreword, I learned that Lindsay had originally provided an answer, but her publisher cut it. An excellent decision—the book’s power largely revolves around the absence of a neat explanation. She didn’t answer my questions. And I loved it.
Poetry is very like fiction—allowing a poem to float, rather than cementing it to the ground, could make it much more engaging.
And real life is filled with multiple interpretations, simultaneous incompatible feelings and responses, varied (unreliable) viewpoints, copious unfinished business. Why shouldn’t our poems reflect this complexity?
Writing tip: To help a poem retain mystery or ambiguity, and to leave room for the reader’s experience and speculation, leave them with questions. Withhold key information.
Writing tip: To cultivate more sophistication and compassion in your writing, resist binary choices and instead hold contradictory truths (or “answers” to questions), whether political, personal, social, or moral. Be complex. Explore instead of summarize. Break open instead of contain.
3) Tangents, echoes, pivots: allowed.
Magician and showbiz psychological manipulator Derren Brown recounted being out once late at night, when a drunk man aggressively approached him, snarling, ‘What’re you fucking looking at?’
Brown responded with a totally unexpected statement: ‘The wall outside my house isn’t four feet high.’ The man was confused; Brown repeated the statement. Then, what began as aggression shifted—into grief, and the drunk man ended up pouring out his heart.
A creepy dude once passed me in the hallway of a shared office building, “playfully” blocked my way with his body, and said, “Well, hello! You’re a quiet little one. But you’re always secretly here in the mornings, aren’t you?”
I responded with an echo: “You’re always secretly here in the mornings, aren’t you?” Then I pushed past and went on my way. It won’t always work so well, but it did that time—he never engaged with me again, and averted his eyes when we passed in the hall after that. I reckon it’s because I hadn’t responded to his power play the way he’d expected.1 I had, in fact, been a bit weird. I’d shifted the uncomfortable feeling off of myself and plopped it onto him.
Writing tip: Quote a malevolent interrogator (a personal or political adversary), then repeat their question back while draining its authority. Transform it into mockery, or destabilize it by pulling it apart into its constituent parts (break down the sentence and examine it word by word, meaning by meaning).
Writing tip: Quote an interrogator’s question and respond to it with a pivot. Be tangential, or go deep, or both. Be unexpected. Trace the historical lineage of their question (who else has asked questions like this one, and why?), or use their words to pivot somewhere new, ultimately answering a more important question than theirs.
Writing Challenge:
Combine two of the writing tips above and use them to either write a new poem or revise an old one. I would love to see what you make!
I learned this method from a free post I read by dominatrix and feminist coach Kasia Urbanek. I’m not gonna link to her because her website is kind of alarming me right now, with heavily commercialized/questionable guru vibes. Regardless, it was a great tip.
These are sound tips for thinking outside the box that a prompt often seems to be. I read this with great interest. Thank you!