Mr. Hill left a note on yesterday's post asking me to explain the writing-prompt strategy that's been so useful to me this summer. My approach is a twist on a lesson from Vievee Francis, who taught the Writing Intensive at the Frost Place. In her session, she asked participants to write down four words that they used often in their own work. (That in itself was an interesting challenge: to distill my own language predilections.) Then we passed those words to the person on our left, and we used the new words we received as triggers for a poem draft.

The words I received were not particularly unusual: they were something along the lines of "strange," "though," "right," "sometimes"--words I already use often but that I had never thought of as touchstones. Nonetheless, just getting this handful of unexpected words was enormously generative. As Vievee explained afterward, we always have plenty of stuff to write about--usually the same old stuff that is our lifetime obsession. Yet sometimes we get trapped inside our language expectations, and this blinds us to new ways of seeing our old stories. Because I had to use new words, I had to approach my stuff from a new direction. And that act was tonic.

Vievee says that, at home, she and her husband (the poet Matthew Olzmann) often hand off four words to each other. But I don't have another poet on the premises, so I've had to make personal adjustments. What I've done is to open up whatever book I happen to be reading and randomly poke at four words, which become my draft starters. If my finger lands on "and" or "the" or some other exceedingly bland filler word, I'll choose another one. But I don't try to avoid plain words: prepositions, for instance, even common ones, are extremely generative. I also don't try to avoid crazy hard ones. Lately I've ended up with words such as "thou," "opine," and "hockey," and all have been surprisingly rich and useful.

Sometimes, as a draft moves along, I end up shedding one or more of the original words, and that's fine. Their purpose is to jumpstart ideas, so they may not fit into the final product. Still, a notable number of my recently finished poems retain all four original trigger words.

If I were to use this notion in a student classroom, I'd probably start by tightening the boundaries: maybe begin very simply--"share one word; write one line using that word" or "write a haiku using that word" or "write a rhymed couplet using that word" . . . some approach that would make students cogitate about the specifics of language within an enclosed space. I think apprentice writers might get overwhelmed by the spaciousness of the four-word endeavor. But I've found it incredibly helpful, and it would be wonderful to figure out how to guide young writers toward the experiment.