Prompts

Creative prompts developed by fellows, visiting artists and writers, and guests. We are grateful with them for sharing their words and wisdom.

Write a Land Acknowledgment: a prompt by Phillip Cash Cash

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IPL Postcard: 12 Prompts

Indigenous Poetics Lab, Arts Research Center:
created as part of Internet Tour: Invisible Infrastructures and AI Hallucinations, 
a collaboration with Mario Santamaría and Alex Saum-Pascual. October 2023 

list of 12 writing prompts, black text on white page
back of postcard, mostly open white space

Go to the sea
(look up the tide charts).

  1. Write during high tide.
  2. Write during low tide.
  3. Try bird watching for at least five minutes and write down what you see.
  4. Follow another creature and do the same.
  5. Write about the air.
  6. Write about a game you like.
  7. Write about a game you dislike.
  8. Write about a haircut.
  9. Write a scene in which you (or a character) are brushing your teeth.
  10. If you have a pet, ask it what it thinks of you, or the world you both live in, and write down its imagined answer.
  11. If you don’t have a pet, ask another animal, a mirror, a teacup, or projected other object, what it thinks of you, and the world you share, and write down its imagined answer.
  12. Write a poem in the language that you use at home.
  13. Read my poem “Hello Great North Rd” and write your own poem about a road that you know. 
  14. Imagine you’re playing the game Operation on your poem. What will you remove? How are the heart, spleen and lungs of your poem? What does your poem need to be well? Ask it.
  15. Find a phrase in another language of your choosing which you incorporate into a poem written in English. Repeat it in each stanza, whittling away at it until it becomes a single word. Your poem in English can be about anything.
  16. Write a poem about Methuselah the lungfish in the Steinhart Aquarium. Go and visit them.
  17. Write a poem in English that follows the ‘traditional and formal’ rules of ‘poetry’ in a language that you associate culturally with. This may be English or another language.
  18. Write a song that sings to the moon, or write a song to a favourite star cluster such as the pleiades.

– Robert Sullivan