One of my students’ most urgent questions is how to find a topic for a poem. This activity helps writers identify material for poems and develop a mindset for recognizing what might become a poem. I have used it in creative writing poetry classes at Baylor University and with our school’s poetry club, but it can be adapted for younger writers, too, or for other non-academic settings.
Most often, I begin by telling the story of Anna Akhmatova, the twentieth-century Russian and Soviet poet who, as she was standing in line outside the prison where her son was being held, was quietly asked to write about the experience by another woman standing in front of her:
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):
“Can you describe this?”
And I said: “I can.”
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.1
Akhmatova’s description became her poem Requiem, one of the most important poems to emerge from the Stalinist terror.
We then talk briefly about the poet’s task to put words to the unsayable. I like sharing a couple of quotes with them, one from Thomas Lux: “Poetry exists because there is no other way to say the things that get said in good poems except in poems. There is something about the right combination of metaphor or image connected to the business of being alive that only poems can do.”2 And another from Chen Chen: “One of my pet peeves is the belief that a poem is just a more complicated way of saying something you could say plainly. No. At its best, every line of a poem is actually the simplest way you could say something—it’s just that the something is complicated & strange & alive.”3 This conversation lays the groundwork for identifying the complicated and strange and alive in poems we read and in our own lives.
Finally, we get to the Jukebox. I share a long list (~30) of motivating factors for poems—questions or reasons that seem to be why a poet needed to begin writing. For example:
- What it’s like to try to live a separate emotional life from someone you love
- What Jesus must think when he wakes up from a nap
- Why leaves make me feel so sad
- What it’s like to be an immigrant with a little son in America
Students pick one to “play.” I have a corresponding list for myself, and when a topic is picked or played, I tell everyone the title of the corresponding poem so that they can google it. We read it together and share thoughts. We usually have time to discuss three poems in an hour-long class. Sometimes it’s also instructive to let students make a Jukebox description from a poem they have read.
The activity helps us remember that feelings, urges, and questions are the start of art and poetry, and that recognizing our own feelings, urges, and questions should be a habit of mind we develop so that we can make our own poems. “Can you write this?” becomes the voice in our heads as we pay attention to our lives.
The poems paired with the above Jukebox list are:
- “Daughter” by Lisel Mueller
- “Goodtime Jesus” by James Tate
- “Spring and Fall” by Gerard Manley Hopkins
- “Safety Concerns” by Oksana Maksymchuk
1 Akhmatova, Anna. “Requiem 1935-1940.” 1157: from “Requiem 1935-1940.” Translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward.
2 Los Angeles Times, April 10, 1995.
3 Twitter, Dec. 2, 2021.
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Ginger Hanchey is the director of the Literature and Creative Writing program at Baylor University and the director of Core Curriculum in the College of Arts & Sciences at Baylor. She is the author of the chapbook Letters of a Long Name, and her poems have appeared in such journals as Nashville Review, Foundry, Tar River Poetry, and Whale Road Review.