Love the Limits
Creativity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Neither is freedom—at least absolute freedom. There’s nothing that shuts me down like being told, “Do whatever you want. There are no limits.” Perhaps it’s related to the way I sometimes feel frozen at the sight of the blank page or empty canvas. I always hear the echo of a voice from childhood, “Don’t mess it up, kid.”
To get creative, I have to trick myself. I have to make rules like “you can only use three colors” or “this has to be done, start to finish, in 2 hours and 23 minutes. Go!” I’ve learned to love limits, even the ones that are arbitrary or seem silly. They give me somewhere to start, something to weave my thoughts around, and yes, something to resist.
I’m not alone. When I teach poetry or art classes, I create a prompt for each week’s assignment. No matter whether a student is intrigued by the prompt or hates it, as they grapple with what it means, what it requires, and what it refuses, it gets the artist thinking and creating.
“Write a poem your mother wouldn’t like ” is a perennial favorite. The potential poem asks the writer to recall all they know or do not know about their mother, all they carry with them about her approval and disapproval. It is fertile emotional ground, but left to roam without fences or landmarks, they may never have found this particular field, this garden bed and these seeds of feeling and the poem that grows from them.
Once they begin to appreciate the prompts, it’s time to introduce the poetic forms. I start by telling them that even if they never again use any of the traditional forms we study—tanka, sonnet, cinquain, double dactyl, or the dreaded villanelle—they will be better writers of free verse if they learn about and find a way to play with the rules of poetic forms.
And it’s true. Though most of the poets return to free verse, they never forget that every poem has a form and that by making form intention al, they have new tools: meter, line length, stanzas, rhyme, and even the white space on the page, to build worlds and create encounters with the reader. Suddenly iambic pentameter is not just an archaic rhythm, but a way to carve words into a familiar shape which can create comfort or discomfort, depending on the context of the poem and the choices of the poet.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve begun to apply what I’ve learned to other areas of my life. Whenever I hear someone insisting on their right to absolute freedom, I question the wisdom of their argument and wonder if it’s boring and lonely and empty to be so free. I guess I’ve come to prefer the kind of liberation that comes with limits. Give me a covenant to live into, a promise to keep, a deadline to meet, a form to wrestle, a community to serve, a prompt to remind me that I am more creative, more powerful, more alive when I choose to set aside my ego’s hunger for the glaring expanse of freedom and learn to love the limits.
- Love the Limits - July 1, 2021
- Creativity, Art and Failure - April 1, 2017
- Living in a Multi-Racial Family - November 11, 2011
