a device to ignite our creative neurons. This kindly intention might suggest the use of a birthday, a favorite dessert, a first car among your inventory of mundanities.
I envision sprinters at a high school track meet, abreast along a chalk line across the width of cinder lanes. The boys adjust their spiked Nikes against the starting blocks, their prompts. They await the report of the official’s starting pistol.
Anticipation may escape confinement. What rhymes with “false start?”
But our problem is this self-imposed blockage to resume writing, not the trigger to detonate our explosion forward, 100 meters of power in balance. That destination is evident.
Among the artists there’s rebellion in the hills, beyond the jurisdiction of fiction workshops, a resistance to the prompt as warmup, as a lever that unleashes a barrage of imagery.
We distill our own metaphor in these parts. Imagination Without Taxation!
The mules we employ as sentries bray at the approach of critics. Have you seen how a guinea hen greets an intruder? The howl of carnage that upends sonnets.
But let’s prompt anyway, aggressively. Saddle up, we’re marching through Georgia.
I introduce “goat” in my first line. The reader’s optic apparatus ferries the text to interacting cortexes in the hemisphere and lobes and presents a visual goat within milliseconds. I continue to take charge, or more accurately, the reader serves at the pleasure of the poem.
The poem is the prompt.
I may modify “goat” with “one-horned,” with which the brain continues to rapid-file such labeling. What if one reader responds with their reception as “unicorn?” Fair. The poem begins metamorphosis. And if I add “red lips” to convey this hoofed, uni-horned livestock some reader some time will conjure “lipstick” or perhaps extend this trail of images with “Revlon.”
But I didn’t do that. I stopped after planting a goat, sans horn, with red lips on the page. Maybe the goat had raided the farmer’s red berry patch without hiding the evidence of his crime.
This cascade of interpretation has activated and remains perpetual. Infinite meanings exceed half-lives. The poem has this potential, fresh from its genesis as text or sound. It maintains this power as long as it has a reader.
