In creative-writing workshops at Dickinson, I’ve been assigning poetry prompts for well over a decade. Sometimes – but never at the beginning – they’re wide-open, such as: Write a poem on any topic, in any form. Other times, the prompts come with restrictions, for instance: Write on any topic, but do so in the form of a pantoum.

A pantoum is a poem in four-line stanzas, in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza are re-used as the first and third lines of the subsequent stanza, for a pattern of interlocking repeated lines. Ideally, the poem closes with the reappearance of the first and third lines of the poem as the second and fourth lines of the final stanza (sometimes in reversed positions), so that every line in the poem appears exactly twice.

What is the point of this, someone usually wants to know, on receiving the latter prompt. Why would poets subject themselves to such difficulty, when free verse is perfectly legitimate and a lot easier? Implicit in the question, too, is: When in life is this skill ever going to be useful?

After everyone has turned in the assignment, though, many students report that, yes, it was difficult, but on some level it was easier than facing the blank page with no constraints.

The free-for-all poem is often harder because, looking at the page with no particular guidelines, many writers, both beginning and seasoned, freeze up. It seems that what they’re setting out to do is – to use this word in its vernacular sense and not its actual meaning – random, therefore meaningless. You mean, I can say anything, in any order and any shape, and call it a poem? What is a poem, then, besides a mass of words thrown down by anyone with a reasonable, or even minimal, command of the language?

If that’s what a poem is, then it’s pointless to have people like me and my colleagues teaching creative writing – and pointless to have a minor in creative writing at Dickinson, creative-writing courses at most American colleges and universities, and over 100 graduate programs in creative writing nationally. Neither rhyme nor reason, one might say, except that there is often rhyme.

The reward of the formal assignment is that I always see some students light up with discovery afterwards. Having had to meet a requirement that at first seemed to disrupt their train of thought, they find that they dreamed up something new and different, jumping off that linear brain-track to do something unexpected and surprising, yet plausible (plausible because they worked to make the poem make sense within the constraints). By disrupting habits of mind, the restrictions opened up imaginative wells that the all-too-logical conscious mind prefers not to acknowledge.

I assign poems with constraints because I want everyone who takes my writing classes to emerge better able to access his or her creative potential, in any career, and in daily life. Only a very few go on to become poets, and that’s as it should be.

If the skill of being able to write a pantoum has any general application, it’s the skill of being able to recognize the creative possibility inherent in constraints in many contexts, then embracing – sometimes even seeking – those constraints to turn them into advantages. (By “constraints,” I mean circumstances that limit one’s options, but not to the extent that they paralyze. Hunger, homelessness, lack of health care, for instance – these are disasters, not constraints.) When you have enough money for food, but not so much money that you can order in every night, you learn to cook. When you need to make a sculpture but are limited to materials you can find at the dump, you gain a new perspective on what used to look like trash. When you have limited time to write a short personal essay – say, a week, and you actually start at or near the beginning of that week – you have a time constraint that makes you produce it but also lets you revise a few times, whereas a vague intention to write a personal essay one day, with no deadline, leaves most of us doing nothing (and we all know what happens when you wait until just before the deadline to start).

Fortunately for those who know and desire constraints for their creative value, life is full of them. We have only so much money, time, material. We’re limited in how much of the world we’ll ever see, how many books we’ll read, how many languages we’ll study, how many people we’ll influence. We’re obligated to parents, children, bosses, colleagues, neighbors, friends – and sometimes we feel hemmed in by the obligations. Some outside circumstance may dictate where we’re going to live or how we’re going to spend our weekends. There will always be limitations, and if we’re lucky, most will be constraints and not disasters, and somewhere along the way, we’ll have learned how to turn constraints into the conditions that allow us to tap into our fullest imaginative powers.

Postscript:
Some terrific contemporary pantoums can be found by searching “pantoum” at poets.org and poetryfoundation.org.