I use poetry as jumping off points for many of the prompts you’ll encounter in “Prompts & Circumstance.” I use poetry for most prompts in all of my workshops actually. Why?

First, part of the purpose of generative writing prompts is to shake up our writing habits. All of us have writing go-tos. I love them em dash. I love lists of three. I love fragments. But when you read a poem – when you let the language wash over you – the poet’s syntax can offer new ways to experience about what language can do. I think we all have limits that we’ve imposed on ourselves, some known and others unknown. Poetry reminds us more is always possible. Strangeness. Repetition. Inversions. In a poem, everything is intentional. Nothing is accidental. And there is something powerful about that. Poets show us there is no limit to what language can do, to how it can be used.

Second, the point of reading the poems (and you might even consider reading them out loud to yourself and reading them more than once) is not to figure out “what the poem means.” I think the way many of us are taught poetry (if we’re taught it at all) scares us into worrying that there is a right way to understand the poem, and that we’re not getting it. I don’t “understand” many of the poems I’ve chosen for you. But I don’t think that’s the point. When Ada Limón was interviewed by Krista Tippett, she put it this way:

“[W]e read naturally for meaning. I mean, that’s how we read. We read for sense. And poetry doesn’t really allow you to do that because it’s working in the smallest units of sound and syllable and clause and line break and then the sentence. So you get to have this experience with language that feels somewhat disjointed, and in that way almost feels like, “Oh, this makes more sense as the language for our human experience than, let’s say, a news report.”

I feel the poems I chose for you. They move me. There’s something in each one that I find electric. Don’t worry about “getting it.” Let the language wash over you and see what happens.

Third, in my own writing, in terms of form, I love white space, line breaks, emptiness on the page – and poems are made of that. Here’s Ada Limón again:

“Yeah. [Poetry’s] got breath, it’s got all those spaces. The caesura and the line breaks, it’s breath. And then that’s also the space for us to sort of walk in as a reader being like, ‘What’s happening here? Why are all these blank spaces?’ It has silence built all around it. Silence, which we don’t get enough of. When you open the page, there’s already silence. And we think, ‘Well, what are we supposed to do with that silence?’”

The writer Alice Dark shared with me how receptive she thinks writing it. Most of it is listening, she told me. I think she’s right. Poetry’s blank spaces remind me of this, of silence, of listening, of receptivity. We don’t need to muscle it.

Fourth, poems are mysterious. Even as they reveal the possibilities of language, poems also point to its limits, reminding us that everything and everyone transcends. There is more to every tree, every rock, every beast than what we can write about them. Poetry points to this more and shows us how we too might do that on the page. The best poems are extremely well crafted. Like an incredible piece of visual art, there is nothing there that isn’t meant to be there. But at the same time, poems don’t offer “answers.” They open questions, make room for mystery and uncertainty. They offer the opportunity to hold many truths at the same time.