In Reprise: Next Line, Please

From May 2014 to September 2019, I wrote our “Next Line, Please,” column, the brainchild of the Scholar’s then-editor, Robert Wilson. As Bob envisaged it, the column would be a sort of weekly competition from which we “crowdsourced” a sonnet.  For the inaugural edition, I wrote a first line (“How like a prison is my cubicle”) and for line two, we received excellent entries from composer Lewis Saul; poet Amit Majmudar; Matt Brogan, now the executive director of the Poetry Society of America; and the pseudonymous “Millicent Caliban,” who became a beloved NLP regular. I chose Professor Leo Braudy’s entry: “And yet how far my mind can freely roam,” and each week we added a line. You could call it merely a game, but then so were the literary jousts that produced Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and Keats’s “On the Grasshopper and Cricket.” By August 5, 2014, we had a sonnet with a title: “Monday.” The idea quickly attracted a group of dedicated contributors. It included some more published poets (Frank Bidart, Sandra Gilbert), but most players were simply intellectually spirited individuals who harbored a love of literature regardless of their profession.

After 15 weeks, we had a flow of self-sustaining energy that urged us to extend “Next Line, Please,” far beyond its initial timeframe. Our poets turned out haiku, sestinas, centos, and other formal poems. They also impelled me to keep coming up with new ideas to keep the flames of inspiration burning. In 2019, Cornell University Press rewarded our efforts by publishing Next Line, Please: Prompts to Inspire Poets and Writers, a selection from the column’s first three years, edited by myself and Angela Ball with a foreword from Wilson.

Five years have elapsed since my “valediction forbidding mourning,” but fans of and former contributors to “Next Line, Please,” still sometimes ask me to devise a new poetry prompt. We call them prompts; teachers used to call them assignments; Henry James spoke of the donneé, the French word for the germ or seed of a new work.

An old reliable is the epigraph, the line lifted from a source either beloved or random. Of all modern poets, T. S. Eliot was the greatest master of the epigraph. The ones he chose are as memorable as they are key to the poems they introduce. So, I thought to compile a list of possible epigraphs, or lines that could be appropriated to help kickstart a poem. To narrow my list, I limited myself to the first and last lines of movies, novels, and plays. In the process, however, the prompt I had in mind transformed itself—more on that later.

Here’s my list. See if you can identify the novel, play, or movie that begins or ends with the quoted line. (Quotation marks indicate things said by a character in a book or a movie.) Cheat if you must, but pick one that grabs you and think about the line of your choice. Next week I will provide the correct answers, comment on them, and compose a prompt built on this challenge.

1. 1. Our is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
   2. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.
   3. “Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.”
   4. “Look, the West Wing!”
   5. “Jeepers, I love you, Johnny.”
   6. Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
   7. “Sure, forgive your enemies. But first get even.”
   8. “Then under the authority granted me by the state of New York, County of New York, City of New York, I hereby pronounce you men and wives.”
   9. “Who’s there?”
   10.  “I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”
   11. “Shut up, and deal.”
   12. “Even if you accept the belief that a high Trendex automatically means a rising sales curve …”
   13. In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically, descended upon him.
   14. “Oh, Jeanne, to reach you at last, what a strange path I had to take.”
   15. “The victory belongs to those peasants. Not to us.”