Poetry & Prompts
Sarah Burgoyne
$6
Go outside and record what happens or occurs to you for 15 minutes. Make it into a poem.
THE SOUND OF WATER RUNNING
The sound of water is running. It trickles over the balcony, across the alley, into another sound. A child’s voice through a downstairs shutter says, tell me now. Possibly, possibly, says Nana. The wind creates the ivy’s hair which dangles in the breeze. The next plant folds its hands to make a bird. A letter appears, containing a yes or no while closed. The downstairs voices sing beneath the sound of a plane. The plant’s bamboo crutch stabs into the sky. Finish your banana, nana. Child’s voice judders into song. It’s time for bed. Door creak. Am I in or outside of my head? The plane continues not to land. The child protests. The little table, stained under heat and duress, will last the winter. Pom-pom plant. Bird call: a long trilled note. Night’s morse code. Howling dog. Car honk. Trill, again, and bow-wow.
ADD WARRIORS : AN INTRODUCTION
I have been leading a little group called Poetry Studio, usually in the colder, lonelier months of Montréal winter, on and off for some years now. I had this idea that writing in real time (as opposed to bringing in pre-written work… sometimes already dead in the water) would help us to preserve the energy in a first draft that can be easily stamped out for fear of the poem being “too weird” or “not making sense.” The formula of our meetings is simple. We discuss poetry and poetics from something we read together that week, I provide a related prompt, we part and write for 45 minutes, we return and share what we wrote. (It is scary but people are kind.) Everything, no matter how raw or random, is taken as poetry. As Wittgenstein points out, “To say, ‘This combination of words makes no sense’ excludes it from the sphere of language and thereby bounds the domain of language. But when one draws a boundary it may be for various kinds of reason.” Yes, let us ponder, enumerate and celebrate the reasons! I have encountered many stupendous, “non-sense” poems this way. When I was a youngsome poet, in Tim Lilburn’s workshop at the University of Victoria, he wrote “add warriors” on one of my submissions, and nothing else. I took this into my most haunted and blue insomniac hours. What could this mean. Many years later, I wonder if this was his attempt to preserve and foster a strangeness in my early work, what Shklovsky calls “defamiliarization.” What other comment was I expecting? What other comment, now that I think of it, is even possible? In this weird little chapbook, I thought to share some of the prompts behind the poems as a way of fostering some strangeness in your own poetry, if you so happen to write it. Maybe you have never written poetry before. The corresponding poems were written in the span of 30-45 minutes, and if there is any editing, it is very light. Of course, they reflect but one way forward in the infinite paths that branch from a writing prompt. As I tell participants in Poetry Studio, use the prompt as a starting off point, but go where the poem wants to go. And if the poem is too obedient, add warriors.
published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2026
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Cover art by Paige Cooper.
Sarah Burgoyne is the author of Because the Sun (Coach House: 2021), Saint Twin (Mansfield: 2016) and Mechanophilia (Anvil: 2023), an infinite collaboration with American poet Vi Khi Nao.
This is Sarah Burgoyne’s fourth above/ground press title, after A Precarious Life on the Sea (2016), TENTACULUM SONNETS (2020) and the collaborative WHERE FORTH ART THOUGH (with Susan Burgoyne; 2020).
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