The Time Is Now

Writing prompts and exercises.

“Language is a living being. I think that language came before humans, not the other way around…. It might not have been a particularly logical language; more likely, it was paradisiacal and timeless, a kind of happy babbling for the sake of babbling, a kind of music.” In her essay “Language and Madness,” translated from the Swedish by Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney and posted on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, Aase Berg writes about the influence of power and patriarchy on language and describes an evolution by which language has become self-conscious and utilitarian, “more descriptive instead of creative.” How has your own language output—in both everyday and poetic usage—been tamed? Write a poem that plays with the idea of a timeless, illogical language. What does happy babbling look or sound like? What expressive potential can you tap into to write with childish madness about the banalities of private life?