Writing Prompts
History
George Elliott Clark
Prompt
Take any canonical (official) poem and rewrite it, replacing many of the current words with those that arise from your own lived experience.
Tawhida Tanya Evanson
Prompt
Tell an ancestral story. Begin with a story about your father, then your father’s father, and so on. Or consider a father figure in your life, someone you truly admire who has been your guide – real or imagined. The story should tell us when, where, who, what happened, why it’s important, what the challenge was and what crescendo took place. The story does not need to have a resolution or ending but should have a lesson for us all.
Kaie Kellough
Prompt
Compile a list that identifies those writers (and perhaps artists at large) whom you consider to be your artistic family. Please feel free to distinguish between immediate and extended family.
Compile a list should identify the writers/artists you consider your influences. Please feel free to distinguish between major and minor influences.
For each artist on each list, identify and write out the one major idea, technique, or property that you learned from their work. Try to be as precise as possible when writing about that property.
Penn Kemp
Prompt
How can you use an image from your past as a prompt to conjure a guide, as inspiration for new poems? How can you work with a poetic community, real or imaginal?
Ian Keteku
Prompt
Think about your own history and think about the ways in which your ancestors, your great grandfather, great grandmother, great, great, great grandfather and great grandmother’s.
Who were they? What did they do? What lessons did they pass on through various generations?
So here’s the activity:
- Write an epistolary poem.
- An epistolary poem is in the style of a letter. It can be dear blank, or salutations blank or to my dear blank.
- Write a letter to the oldest ancestor you know. It could be your grandmother, your grandfather, a grand uncle, your uncle, your big brother, your big sister. It doesn’t matter – write a letter to the oldest ancestor, you know, tell them interesting details about your life, about your family history.
- Ask them questions: what’s missing in your family story that you want to know
- Use that letter as your inspiration for your next piece.
Cat Kidd
Prompt
Voice issues from activated lineage.
Repairing the rifts between generations is palpable magic, a poet may become adept at.
Dwayne Morgan
Prompt
Read this when I’m gone.
I want you to think about your life. Really think about your life and write what you would you want people to say about you when you are no longer here.
If you could leave a message to the people you leave behind, what would that message be?
Read this when I’m gone.
Charlie Petch
Prompt
Spoken word is international. But we all have different styles, using your own lineage. Find out about the artists that came before you: what sort of practices or forms they have and try them on your own. Research the history of where you’re presently living, or where you might feel most at home and do the same process.
Mary Pinkoski
Prompt
Name the river you are stepping into.
Find a writing community that you can be a part of and learn its history.
Consider your own writing and how it is influenced by your community and as creative leaders, your location, and the history of this particular place.
Consider what your role will be in contributing to the whole of your writing community.
Take notes, read them often to remind yourself that you belong.
Andrea Thompson
Prompt
Thought prompt: What personal ancestral streams feed your own approach to spoken word?
Writing prompt: Write a spoken word piece and celebration of these ancestors.
RC Weslowski
Prompt
Find a family photo, hopefully a family photo of you and your family. (But if you don’t have that, find one on the internet and a magazine at the library.)
Just find a family photo and then use that photo look at it and write a word blast.
For 5 to 10 minutes, just write down single words that are expressive of what you feel. This photo is about write down this word blast after 5 or 10 minutes, then I want you to circle your 10 favourite words.
And then I want you to use those words to start describing what happened just before that photo was taken or just after that photo was taken and make it sensory. Tell us how the sky smelled, tell us what the weather sounded like, and what the dirt felt like. Use your senses to get right in there and be very descriptive using your 10 words from your word blast. This can begin your origin story and investigation.
Craft & Writing
George Elliott Clark
Prompt
Take a historical episode and write a poem about it from two opposing positions.
Tawhida Tanya Evanson
Prompt
Four Sufi Questions
- How did you spend your time on earth?
- How did you earn your living?
- How did you spend your youth?
- What did you do with the knowledge we gave you?
Kaie Kellough
Prompt
Take one of your poems that you consider to be complete, preferably an older poem.
Imagine that the poem was to be published in an anthology that would be circulated worldwide. What revisions would you perform on the poem, how would you change it?
Identify the characteristics of a complete work. What lets you know that a work is complete? What drives a work toward completion? Is it a precision of language, a clarity of articulation, or a structural unity, or otherwise?
Longer-term thought prompt: The aim of this longer-term exercise is to encourage us to allow our writing to persist in a state of incompletion. As poets who perform, we may collaborate with artists who work in other disciplines. We may need to adapt our work to forms of presentation other than literary publication or solo vocal performance. Versions of the same poem can exist in multiple formats, but this depends on our ability to keep the work open. This longer-term contemplation is directed toward thinking of our work as variable, as adaptable.
Penn Kemp
Prompt
What personal mythology or memory can you unleash that will inspire and drive you into poetry? How can you use the play of sound to guide your next poems?
Ian Keteku
Prompt
- Walk around your neighbourhood.
- Write down a detailed and specific description list of:
- 5 things you see
- 5 things you hear
- 5 things you smell
- 5 things you touch
- From the list, find words that match the sentence or match the senses.
- Eg. Rough, brown cement, feather, laughing.
- Use these words to write a short poem about the last time that you were angry.
- Using the words that you gathered from your walk, write a poem about being angry.
- Try not to talk about the walk in the poem – just use the rich vocabulary and the interesting words that you found to create something new.
Cat Kidd
Prompt
Take a walk, notice a pattern, the initial iteration sings, then repeats itself in plated chords.
Pay attention to the way the pattern repeats and how it breaks.
Collect up the broken pieces, reassemble them however you like.
Dwayne Morgan
Prompt
I love you the most when…
I don’t want you to think external in terms of who is it you love and when you love them.
I want you to look internal. I want you to write a love letter to yourself, to your body that has carried you through this life and through this world.
I love you the most when…
Charlie Petch
Prompt
The best way to improve your writing is to read more. Buy or borrow from the library poetry journals. You can read those online and read the work out loud. Keep a notebook by to jot down the names of the poets you enjoy.
Mary Pinkoski
Prompt
Entering and exiting the rivers Edie.
Find a poem that you have already written. Read it out loud at least five times. Are there parts that you are in love with? Highlight those pink for love.
Are there parts that come off your tongue so smoothly? It’s like second nature. Highlight those blue for running water.
Are there parts that twisted your tongue into bends that you couldn’t articulate? Highlight those green for growth.
Are there parts you didn’t enjoy at all? Highlight those yellow for caution.
Now rework the poem. Keep the pink lines, keep the blue lines, reword the green lines, and rewrite the yellow lines. Repeat the process of reading and reworking until your page is just a small spectrum of blue and pink and you’re ready to share it with your writing community.
Andrea Thompson
Prompt
Thought prompt: How can spoken word artists learn from other creative disciplines?
Writing prompt: Write a piece in celebration of spoken word using vocabulary from another art form in order to create an extended metaphor.
RC Weslowski
Prompt
This writing exercise is an attempt for you to help maybe come up with new ways of speaking as well. A surrealism synonym generator, basically creating your own library list of words that are now crunched together, juxtaposed to make new words or new phrases.
You can do this by simply beginning by looking around the room and putting them together. Soap, risotto, Bible, lanterns, or you can go and rename objects that are in your room. A chair becomes a butter worshiping hot pot, your tongue is now perhaps a lisp blanket.
Make this library list and then begin to insert it into poems that you feel like you’ve already written or your first draft anyway, and use them to edit and make them more exciting.
Performance
George Elliott Clark
Prompt
Draft a catalogue—a list of nouns (only): This assembly of words—at least a page in length—will reveal to you your deepest concerns, interests, themes, leitmotifs….
Tawhida Tanya Evanson
Prompt
In performance as in exercise, two organs come into action: the heart and the lungs. The heartbeat quickens, muscles tense and lungs consume more oxygen. The body in performance is in flux! It is flushed and awakened—as it should be. To memorize a text for performance, try repeating the text out loud while walking up a mountain, a hill or some other natural landscape. If you can, go outside and change your breathing, your feet will find their rhythm, the heart and lungs will dance. Walking meditation in nature has a way of activating the body, the imagination and the memory banks.
Kaie Kellough
Prompt
Take one of your shorter poems, maximum length of one page, and read it through once, as you might read it in performance. Time that reading. Using the same poem, double the length of time for which it must be performed. Do not write down any instructions for yourself, and do not worry about the performance being “good.” Aim only to extend the length of the poem by finding new pathways through it. Make sure that the performance bears some relationship to the poem, even if that relationship is as tenuous as using the sounds of only fragments of the words in the poem.
Using the same poem, further extend the length of time for which it must be performed. Draw out your improvisations. Use repetition and vary your volume and emphasis as you stretch the performance. The aim here is to simultaneously move deeper into what is possible with the poem, while moving away from the poem as a lyric object that must be read from beginning to end in a specific word-order.
Write down the different techniques you used to extend the length of the poem. Aim to create a catalogue of the oral techniques with which you’re working, and to understand how they come into being during performance, yet they do not necessarily exist in the written work.
Penn Kemp
Prompt
How can you overcome a fear/avoidance of performing publicly? Try conjuring the image of your favourite performer or one you would like to become, to work with you as your inner performer.
Ian Keteku
Prompt
- Take your poem – an old poem – print it out and record yourself reading it. You can do this on your cell phone or on your computer.
- Grab a pen or pencil and mark up the page. Indicate different places where you can add vocal changes to enhance the performance.
- Maybe it’s raising your voice or making it lower.
- Maybe it’s adding a pause or stop in key moments.
- Mark down where particular body or facial expressions would happen to help the poem’s delivery.
- Maybe hear you’re smiling at a certain line you’re furrowing the brow.
- At a certain line, you tilt your head. It all depends on the emotional tone of the poem.
- Now, record yourself reading the poem. This time adopt the notes in your performance.
- Notice the difference between the two reads – the one that you read without the performance cues and the one that you read with the performance cues. Which one is more engaging? I bet you 5 jelly beans that it’s the latter.
Cat Kidd
Prompt
Try selling your worst trials as a comedy routine.
Often the more briefly a story is told the funnier it is.
Dwayne Morgan
Prompt
Half full or half empty…
I want you to think about all of the gifts that you have and what is it that you believe you have that you can pour into other people.
Half full or half empty…
Charlie Petch
Prompt
Too often we shy away from performance because we’re not sure if we can recover on stage from forgetting from being heckled from any embarrassment. So using a partner or a group of friends, practice these moments so heckle each other and review what worked and what didn’t.
Mary Pinkoski
Prompt
Calling forth the stories out of the rivers mouth.
What are the stories that are inside you waiting to burst from your throat? Find a space.
Step up to the microphone and share that story inside of you.
Andrea Thompson
Prompt
Thought prompt: Can you remember a time when you overcame fear through action? How did you feel before and afterwards?
Writing prompt: Take your memory of that moment and turn it into a poem.
RC Weslowski
Prompt
The exercise that I invite you to just practice before you get ready to perform is called a diaphragm release exercise or lightening up. Now I’ve done it for a long, long time, so I can do it standing up or when I first started, I was just lying down on the ground. And this was a cloud exercise that we would do and it’s to help make your breathing less predictable. Because of the breath. The inspiration is unpredictable. It’s going to be exciting for you and for the audience. So all I do is just laugh and practice.
And that’s all I do. And it wakes me up and it enlivens me. And then it helps me step into that space of invitation to offer an invitation because I’m ready, and I’m excited. And so I encourage you to do that. Try it, try it in small doses. If it feels kind of scary, do it before a small performance and see what happens.