A Spectacular Poem & a Writing Prompt

Because the work is play

Hi, Friend.

Sometimes we need a friendly reminder that a writer’s work is play: playing with language, with form, with the reader’s expectations. There are so many ways to use wordplay not only in a new piece of writing, but also to generate a new piece: translations, predictive text, word banks, mishearings, autocorrect fails, and even typos can help crack something open that you might not have accessed otherwise.

I recently read a new poem that knocked my socks off, and I immediately wanted to share it with you along with a prompt. This poem is by Martha Silano, and it was recently published online in the Missouri Review: “When I learn Catastrophically.”

The author’s note explains the genesis of the poem:

Way back when, my dear friend and fellow poet Kelli Russell Agodon introduced me to an anagram generator website. How cool is that? When I was diagnosed with ALS in November of 2023, I wondered what the anagrams of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis were. A few days later, I visited Anagrammer and typed it in. Once I had a list of words to work with, this poem just kind of wrote itself.

Martha Silano is a poet I’ve read and admired for years—and she’s a kind, generous, and funny human to boot. (I love when I meet someone who makes wonderful art, and they're also a wonderful person.) Reading this new poem and author’s note, I immediately started thinking about how anagrams might be a way into a new piece of writing for me…and for you.

So, your writing prompt is this: Take a word or phrase that holds meaning for you—the name of a place, a historical event, a phobia, a book or painting title, a beloved quote—and see what other words can be made from the letters. Use the words in a poem or an essay, and credit the author with an epigraph: after Martha Silano.

Some questions to consider:

• When and where do you want to introduce the original word or phrase? Early on, as Silano does, or later in the piece?

• Do you want to deal directly with the subject matter of the original word or phrase, as Silano does by writing about her experience with ALS, or do you want it to be subtext?

• What relevant research or statistics might you introduce into your piece?

I hope this remarkable poem and this prompt lead to something surprising for you. If you’re looking for more writing prompts, scroll back through the For Dear Life archive for nearly a dozen others (and grab a preorder copy of my next book, Dear Writer). And if you’d like to find more of Martha Silano’s poems—and I hope you do!—you might start here, here, and here.

Happy writing (& reading)—
Maggie