Spontaneous Gestures
I don’t like exercise, but I do like to move throughout the week in ways that might look like exercise. I walk, I run, I practice yoga, I sometimes even lift weights, but I treat these activities as movement (an activity to be enjoyed/experienced) rather than exercise (a chore to be performed for a specific outcome). “Movement” probably has the same cardiovascular and strength benefits as “exercise”, but it feels very different—it’s an impulse coming from within, rather than an obligation coming from without.
I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit as I try to craft instructions that will give my composition students the guidance and structure they need to write their first college essays, but won’t be easy for them to feed to the Generative AI Demons. This is a difficult needle to thread in part because my students view every prompt as an assignment to be completed (or delegated to Chat GPT) for points, while I view prompts as invitations to experience challenge and express ideas.
I want them to do the writing equivalent of moving rather than exercising, to respond to the prompt with what the British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott called a “spontaneous gesture” rather than a compliant performance. (Winnicott has been a huge influence on my work lately and on my creative life in general; his approach to the human condition is somehow pragmatic and whimsical and deeply reassuring all at the same time. Playing and Reality is a great place to start.)
Winnicott, with his recognition that the opposite of creativity isn’t blankness (or uncertainty or the abyss) but compliance, predicted this situation decades ago: “In a tantalizing way, many individuals have experienced just enough of creative living to recognize that for most of their time they are living uncreatively, as if caught up in the creativity of someone else, or of a machine.” My students struggle not just because the semester is an artificial high-pressure construct that doesn’t fit anyone’s natural thought-rhythms (but does make it super tempting to turn to AI shortcuts), but also because most of them are emerging from an educational system that rewarded them for compliantly regurgitating facts (and Googling answers) rather than tuning inward or exploring uncertainty.
Poets can face similar challenges. Poems are most alive when they are spontaneous gestures—when they arise from within the poet as a response to internal weather (which is, of course, highly permeable to lived circumstance)—but most contemporary poets exist in an ecosystem that values “productivity” and “rapid content generation” and “hot takes”. It can be all too easy to get caught up in the pressure to react and produce, and to fall out of sync with our own (often slower) creative impulses. And yet I still believe prompts can be useful tools when they invite writers to respond with a spontaneous gesture rather than strictly limiting style or subject matter. It’s sort of like the difference between a scripted play and an improv act. (My MFA advisors made me read a little book about improv and it almost broke my introvert brain, but also was extremely useful. And now I can’t remember the name of the book, just that it was a slim volume with a black and white photo on the front. If you think you know it, please be in touch!)
I give myself prompts all the time—by seeking out or stumbling upon experiences sounds/images/ideas/facts that I want to respond to and then giving myself a frame (not a fence) to bring them into focus. In some ways, the self-prompt is the start of the spontaneous gesture. When I write poetry prompts for others, my goal is always to give them some gestures/possibilities to respond to and some scaffolding to respond with (but not a script for how to respond). I’m still figuring out how to do this for my composition students.
