According to popular superstition, writers are an unruly, and often belligerently drunk, herd of cats. This may be why assignments go over so well in most poetry workshops, typically triggering a frenzied cacophony of embittered grumbles and back-stabbing squawks, the ferocity of which could rival that of this cat, and most of which imply that the particulars of the assignment are clearly informed by the workshop leader’s distinct variety of sexual incompetence. 

For example, I repeatedly smothered, with varying degrees of success, the urge to tuck myself away in the parking garage so that I could pelt a particular workshop leader with frozen peas as she walked toward her car. This impulse was particularly challenging to stifle after she declared—and these were real specifications—that our poems for the following week should include a staircase, a bowl of fruit, a piece of furniture with sentimental value and a past argument recalled in a new light. 

Even so, every so often–despite the initial desire to slingshot spoonfuls of live hornets into her bathroom while she showered or the wild compulsion to teach her small child how to play the SafeAuto advertising jingle on a tin whistle—I did wind up enjoying the play of working with or against the demands of her assignments. 

Like working within a fixed or nonce form, the constraints of abstract or conceptual assignments often provoke me to slip from my own micromanaged garden into an overgrown yard littered with hubcaps, Bud Light bottles and several uniquely disfigured Barbie dolls, the latter seemingly maimed  during the almost phenomenological event that occurred when my neighbor actually mowed his lawn, which happened only once, in April, back before he independently determined his yard was the unlikely home of an endangered black spine-neck swamp turtle—a turtle that is, one notes, most usually found only in Argentina, Brazil or Uruguay–and consequently retired the lawnmower for the rest of the summer.

Put more eloquently, I think what Richard Wilbur said of forms in his 1972 interview with the New York Quarterly can also be said of good assignments: “They are  not simply a straightjacket, they can also liberate you from whatever narrow track your own mind is running on, and prompt it to be loose and inventive, to entertain possibilities it hadn’t foreseen.” 

This sounds a lot like the claim Bret Anthony Johnston makes in the November/December 2008 print issue of Poets & Writers, which is, admittedly, a magazine Donald Hall singles out for belittlement in an essay titled “Poetry and Ambition” as “not so much a trade journal as a hobbyist’s bulletin, unrelievedly cheerful, relentlessly trivial”. Hall is probably cooking with gas, but  Johnston could still have a decent point when he praises writing exercises for providing “loose, empowering structures … [that] bring fingers to keyboards, pens to paper, without bias or expectation.” 

For example, to warm up before writing, Johnston recommends “spending five minutes with nothing but words that start with the letter j.” Another: Open the dictionary blind and point to random entries; once a noun crops up–dishwasher, for example–spend ten minutes writing, trying to showcase that dishwasher. 

The result may not turn out to be stunning evidence of your irrevocable genius, but you will have ten minutes worth of poetry about a dishwasher. Close enough?