26. Should I Compare Thee to a Basketball?
... being a look at the practice of writing, the use of prompts to provide inspiration, and how they might help you to coax poetry that is already deep within you up to the surface.
My son Eddie runs marathons. In order to be able to run long distances he has to train himself up by running a number of miles (or kilometres as he calls them) virtually every day, so that his body gets used to the exercise, his muscles tone and his strength develops. Over time, running further and further comes naturally to him. Regular practice is the thing.
I like to think that I treat writing like Eddie treats running . If I don’t keep practicing, my ability to create coherent sentences, develop a story, follow an argument, or even write a short poem begins to diminish. My literary muscles begin to waste away. When I am in form I can dash off a couple of thousand words before breakfast, but If I get out of practice, I find myself hard pressed to get a couple of hundred down. Even worse, when I look at that couple of hundred words, they seem measly, meritless and hardly worth the effort of my having written them. Then anxiety kicks in, writer’s block paralyses my brain, like cramp in the legs of a runner. I falter, stumble and wonder if I will ever be able to go again.
A blank page can be a frightening prospect at the best of times. Inspiration can be very hard to come by. Motivation can be elusive. The remedy is practice. ‘Sit down and write anything” I say to myself “You can always edit later. Just write one word at a time in the manner of an athlete just putting one foot in front of the other in the hope that the steps will accumulate and the magic will happen”.
But what to write about? What is needed in such circumstances is a prompt. A cursory google search for writing prompts will yield zillions of them. There are even people who will try to sell you their own prompts, ebook writers producing things such as “1000 prompts for writers.” Rather than using their prompts to create their own great literature, they unselfishly offer them in batches to the likes of you and I so that we use them instead.
Here are three opening sentences that you, dear reader, can have, gratis and free of charge, fresh from the top of my head.
“The Princess was imprisoned within the cold stone castle. Suddenly, she heard…”
“My knees are shot Carruthers, I’m afraid that you will have to take…”
“Of all the cases that were presented to my friend during the summer of 1892, by far the most peculiar was that of the petrified….” 1
There are apps that do the same job, I’ll bet that by now you can get artificial intelligence to provide you with excellent prompts. But where is the fun in that?
In a previous article I mentioned using the What Three Words app as a writing prompt for poetry. This app gives a three word reference for every three metre square on the surface of the planet earth. The references are like little poems in themselves. You can plot anywhere: your home ///fence.gross.bats, your favourite holiday destination ///wonderfully.resting.insisting, even the most remote areas of the sea ///costlier.visionary.multifunction. Try it, and do whatever you like with the words. No one is looking over your shoulder - you can change one or just use two of them if you like, or ditch two completely - but have a go, create something. It will get you started.
John Beal presented a version of this game in a recent poetry workshop that I had the pleasure of attending. His three words were generated by passing a sheet of paper around three people who each wrote a single word on it, which they then hid with a fold. A fourth person then opened it out and had to create a poem using all three. I got Rudolph.robot.innocent
Rudolph Robot Innocent
Rudolph Robot Innocent Innocent? Not he! He murdered Spacegirl Prancelot In a distant galaxy Interstellar Sherlock solved it Elementary
Afterwards I realised that I had misread the first word which was actually redemption. Does it matter? Not at all. That poem is going to win prizes!2
Another great prompt was devised by Tracy Dawson had the brilliant idea of using swatches from the paint section at B&Q for prompts. There are some brilliant prompts to be found. Steel Pole, Troubadour, Strawberry Hill, they are just waiting for poetry to be created for them, and when you have written the poem, you can paint your walls with it! I missed this particular session, but now, whenever I am coerced into a visit to a decorating shop to look for something to enhance the humble abode with, I am never bored.
Social Media is a great source of inspiration. You can lift whole sentences from people’s posts and even the little asides that Facebook pop up all the time are worthy of exploration. “Someone is sending you a message”. “We care about you and your memories”. “Accomplish more with automatic actions”.
My very favourite source of prompts online are the requests on question sites such as Answerbag, ASKfm, Quora or even Reddit. On these sites, people often directly ask for poetry. Sometimes they are youngsters trying to get someone to do their homework for them, sometimes they are people who just want to prove that they exist by getting answers to their inane questions, sometimes, just sometimes, they are actually interested in poetry.
Some question and answer sites actually pay people a fractional sum of money for asking questions which attract a lot of answers, as this draws people to the site and attracts advertising. In response to this, there are technically minded people who have devised little programs which ask hundreds of questions in the hope of making some money. They will set up the opening to a question “Can you write a poem about…” and then have the app create lots of endings, by feeding it a wordlist. Someone taking this approach actually went for the opening “Can you write a sonnet about…”
Can you write a sonnet about cheese? Can you write a sonnet about headaches? Can you write a sonnet about blackcurrants? Can you write a sonnet about satanism? Can you write a sonnet about basketball? Can you write a sonnet about fish, chips and mushy peas? Can you write a sonnet about Bernard Haitink and the London Philharmonic Orchestra?
I made up the last two of these, they would never be asked by such a program. As far as I know, they are not sophisticated enough to add more than one word at a time to the end of the sentence. The basketball question was real though, and I chose to answer it. I like writing sonnets, and I like challenges.
The first thing that I thought when I held the words sonnet and basketball, in my mind at the same time was Should I compare thee to a basketball? This was largely because basketball has three syllables. Maybe I would have thought that way with any three syllable word (or group of words). Should I compare thee to a mushy pea?
I wasn’t asked to produce a sonnet about mushy peas, or a cardigan, or even a cassette tape though, I was asked for a basketball sonnet, and once I had that opening line in my mind I couldn’t let go of it. From that moment on, I was completely focused on making links between basketballs and people, and using them to create another thirteen lines of poetry, in strict iambic pentameter. I was so focused on that task that it wasn’t until I had completed it that I realised that everything that I had written might have been about Donald Trump. I didn’t have to change a word. This throws up some interesting questions about the process of writing…
Did I subconsciously know that I was writing about Donald Trump all the time? Did the very thought of a basketball immediately conjure up the image of Donald Trump in my mind? If so, was there a Donald Trump poem deep inside of me just waiting to get out? Did the basketball bounce around in my brain and dislodge that internal poetry and set it free? And most importantly - Is there other stuff in there ready to come bubbling to the surface, given a suitable prompt?
I like to think that the answer to all of these is Yes! I believe that there are unwritten poems inside all of us. Our minds are full of unique thoughts, ideas, opinions and perspectives. We just need to cultivate the conditions in which they will come to the surface. Writing poetry is a bit like gardening. You have the seeds, if you provide soil, sunlight and water, they will grow. You may need some practice to be able to coax those seeds to grow into something strong and beautiful. But as a poet, if you have a basic grasp of language, a means of writing or otherwise recording your words, and are willing to put in a little time and effort, you too could have a poem like mine!
I know that most of what I have written in this article is shit, but I also know that shit makes good fertiliser. I hope that you can use some of it as a fertiliser in which your own poetic seeds can germinate. I would love to see the blossoms that you produce.
Meanwhile…
Should I Compare Thee to a Basketball?
Should I compare thee to a basketball? Thy head is round and orange and thick skinned And tightly packed with air and little else And wanton children use thee for their sport And sometimes thou art hurled into the air And sometimes thou art bounced upon the floor And yet thou bearèst all, and plenty more Needing inflation only now and then How oft and hard they labor to catch thee How nimble dost thou slip right through their net And when the game is done, how thy lone orb Is left all disregarded by the court Thou art indeed a basketball, I say Forsooth thou art like one in every way
I absolutely love Sherlock Holmes style writing prompts. As soon as I wrote the prompt above, I wanted to Write The Case of the Petrified Archbishop. Then I imagined that The Case of the Petrified Parson might be more poetic. Of course, by petrified, I mean turned to stone rather than terrified. Or do I. He might have been terrified and then turned to stone. Recently discovered in the church basement, mistaken for a statue, but after some accidental damage to a finger, revealed to be the body of a missing vicar encased in hard cement.
We can all dream. Dreaming is one of the things that can make us great. But in addition to dreaming, you have to take action. Rudolph Robot may not have much of a chance of contributing to my the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, but it wouldn’t have had any chance at all if I had never written it!
A good idea inspiring more good ideas. I like the paint swatch one. What I've found is that there are degrees of inspiration. To be honest and not wishing to brag, I have the ideas, it's the finesse I crave - but now we're stumbling towards an article I was going to stack so, it will complement this.