Writing Prompts: Stopped You in Your Tracks

Free Write Prompt

Tell me about something that stopped you in your tracks— for shock or awe. Write for 10 minutes.  Ready? Go! 

Poem Prompt

Write at least three stanzas that poetically relay the mystery of the event that “stopped you in your tracks.”  (If you're really stuck, consider this suggestion:  Let stanza 1 establish the setting, stanza 2 relay the event itself, let stanza 3 be the processing of the event.)   Write for 15 min. 

Image by Jake Stiel | Instagram @jstiel2

Example Poems

Dannie Abse, “In the Theatre” from New and Collected Poems, published by Hutchinson. White Coat Purple Coat: Collected Poems 1948-1988 (Penguin Putnam Inc., 1994)

​How do these contextual resources influence your experience with Abse's poem?

1.  Where in Your Body is Your Soul? Candida Moss and Jessica Baron for Daily Beast.
2. Set design tour of 1900s surgical theatre for Cinemax series THE KNICK (below).
3.  Brain surgery scene also from THE KNICK -- if you have the guts for it! 

James Wright, “A Blessing” from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose. Copyright 1990 by James Wright. 

Indian ponies are typically small but hardy, robust horses of western North America descended from stock introduced by Spaniards and re-domesticated by Native Americans that are valuable as utility range horses and for crossbreeding. Many are piebald in color.  Other horses of comparison are the pinto pony, mustang, and the quarter horse.​  

This segment on the Lac Lacroix Indian Pony rare breed preservation effort may help you to know the pony "characters" in the poem -- but "breaking into blossom?"  Well, does anybody know how to explain that kind of blessing?  

Image by Lisa Runnels

Something Extra

Another great physician-writer is William Carlos Williams.  Though famous for the "I have eaten the plums" poem ("This is Just to Say"), he was also an essayist, novelist, and playwright.  Doctoring for 40 years, he pulled information from his town Rutherford, NJ,  his patients, and the evolving America around him as the subjects for his writing.  After a long-sustained interest in writing despite his parents' demand for perfectionism in his medical training, Williams moved beyond his early interest in the strictures of John Keats poetics to develop a uniquely American voice.  Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound were his new text mentors.  He also claims that having met Ezra Pound was the turning point in his own stylistic development. William Carlos Williams is associated with modernism and imagism and was a Pulitzer Prize Winner for Poetry.  

One of my favorites is his novel length poem Paterson. His author note explains:​

​Paterson is a long poem in four parts — that a man in himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody— if imaginatively conceived — any city, all the details of which may be made to voice his most intimate convictions. Part One introduces the elemental character of the place. The Second Part comprises the modern replicas. Three will seek a language to make them vocal, and Four, the river below the falls, will be reminiscent of episodes — all that any one man may achieve in a lifetime.