How the Neuroscience of Surprise Can Improve Your Poetry Practice

Every February, I draft a new poem each day, putting aside all thoughts of “polish and publish” until later. I’m not alone in this undertaking. I host about 30-40 poets as we receive a common prompt in the evenings, post our response poems the following day, and share positive feedback on our initial drafts.

(Poetry prompts on Writer's Digest.)

This community project has been a game-changer in my development as a poet. Many members of the group have placed February poems in literary magazines and anthologies. They have won contests. One of my poems from the project was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. So what’s working here? The answer might be connected to neuroscience and how our brains integrate surprise.

Although I run the February group, I don’t come up with the daily writing topics myself. Instead, group members take turns creating prompts. We might be tasked with writing a poem about a news article, a work of art, a piece of music, or a concept like “things passed down.”

In I Want to be Creative, Harriet Griffey says “Exposure to different stimuli—new sounds, sights and sensations—create connections in the brain via the synapses, the points of connection between the neurons. The more neurons, the more neural pathways and more synapses, and the greater the opportunity to spark ideas and solutions.”

My take on this is that surprising, unexpected stimuli, such as a writing prompt I haven’t set for myself, is like being handed a puzzle to solve. Drafting the poem is how I piece together a solution.

Here is an example. Our group’s writing prompt on February 21, 2021, came from poet Susan Brisson: “We will focus on all things to do with our feet. From a baby’s first steps to a loved one’s last, from frozen toes to raging blisters.”

How was I going to make a poem out of feet? As often happens when a writing prompt stumps me, I turned to two things for help: Research and poetic form.

First, I looked at foot anatomy and discovered that we have a series of bones called cuneiforms—a homonym for the ancient writing system. Next, I plugged this new information into a poetic form I’d never tried before, the Viator, invented by poet Robin Skelton. The resulting poem will be published in an upcoming issue of Gargoyle.

If I had been relying on my own brain for inspiration, I never would have drafted this poem. It was born from the revelation that the word “cuneiform” means both writing and foot bone.

Of course, dealing with unexpected writing prompts for 28 days straight doesn’t result in 28 publishable poems, but it does get the brain in the habit of responding to the unexpected.

In the academic paper, “The Link Between Creativity, Cognition, and Creative Drives and Underlying Neural Mechanisms” Radwa Khalil, Ben Godde, and Ahmed A. Karim said that “creativity is linked to associative thinking,” or making links between seemingly unrelated ideas—similar like thinking outside the box.

Check out Laura Shovan's Welcome to Monsterville here:

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Surprise has become a regular part of my writing practice. Three years ago, my friend, poet Michael Rothenberg, sent me an illustration of an outlandish creature. For fun, I wrote a poem in response. In “Neighbor,” a child wonders about the monster who’s just moved in next door. Michael and I ended up working on a series of monster illustrations and poems, the basis of our book, Welcome to Monsterville. Michael, who was not a trained artist, had a wild imagination. I never knew what he was going to send me. But that was the fun of it. In order to figure out these monsters’ stories, I had to trust my neural pathways and follow whatever strange ideas showed up on the page.

What if you don’t have a friend sending you outlandish monster art to write about? Here are three ways to incorporate surprise into your own poetry practice.

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Poetic forms are fun poetic games, and this digital guide collects more than 100 poetic forms, including more established poetic forms (like sestinas and sonnets) and newer invented forms (like golden shovels and fibs).

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