“The Overture”: New "Next Line, Please" Prompts [by David Lehman]

 

On April Fool’s Day, which marks the opening of both “the cruelest month” (T. S. Eliot) and, since 1996, National Poetry Month, I reviewed the previous week’s Next Line, Please entries with some wonderment. The prompt I’d proposed on March 24— to write a “coded dialogue poem,” in which the words memory, dream, and affair appear in code—was even more difficult than I had anticipated, in no small part because I had not been sufficiently precise in my instructions.

But poetic logic has it that the more difficult the task, the greater the opportunity for a poet to conceive of an ingenious poem—not from a lightning strike of inspiration, but from truly exercising the imagination, solving a puzzle of the sublime.

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For next time, a new prompt: I call it “the ironic title.” Take the title of an existing work of art, make it your title, and write a poem (or prose poem) that veers as far away as possible from the work of art you are raiding. For example, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain may refer to an amusement park north of Los Angeles, and The Magnificent Seven may head a piece about last year’s high-flying tech stocks

Here are some titles that strike me as promising:

• “The Lottery”
• Persuasion
• “The Necklace”
• The Wings of the Dove
• Under the Volcano
• Light in August
• Beyond the Pleasure Principle
• The Beautiful and Damned

But, of course, feel free to choose one of your own.

Ideally your poem should have nothing to do—except perhaps obliquely—with the work whose title you have appropriated. Incorporate just one formal device, be it a rhyme scheme, a metrical line, an acrostic, or even a repeated word or phrase. If you run out of inspiration, go to a favorite book, open it at random, pick out a phrase, and remember what T. S. Eliot said: “Immature poets imitate. Mature poets steal.”

Deadline: Ten days from the day this post goes up. Thanks, everyone.

from The American Scholar

Detail of Orpheus and Eurydice by Sir Edward Poynter, 1862 (Wikimedia Commons)

Comments

[Dr. Earle Hitchner]

"The Lottery": Shirley you jest. I don't know jack, son, but I'll give it a hurl, um, whirl.

If "it isn't fair, it isn't right," then I apologize. No wonder I was called "Hitch-in-sin" as a towheaded kid. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.