September 2, 2025

Prompt: Wasted Time

There are certain times when you self-assess how you have spent your time. Before you sleep, you might think about what you did that day. Have you wasted another day? Birthdays might prompt you to assess the past year. The deaths of friends and loved ones might have you consider your entire life.

Our two model poems for this call for submissions are "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" by James Wright, and "May Day" by Phillis Levin. Both poems consider the idea of a "wasted life." 

Wright's poem lures the reader into a serene, almost hypnotic pastoral scene. There are butterflies, cowbells, and late-afternoon light. Then it culminates in a jarring, introspective conclusion: “I have wasted my life.” That jump-cut shift forces reflection and probably some debate among readers. Is it a regretful lament? Perhaps it is a subtle existential epiphany.  

"May Day" is lyrical and metaphysical, and also filled with lush, sensory imagery. But Levin doesn't trip us up at the end. She tells us up front: “I’ve decided to waste my life.” Beneath its surface beauty is something profound and maybe daring. I've been told by others that this is "an assertion of intention wrapped in restraint" and that the motif suggests both surrender and renewal. She does close with a turn, like Wright, but a more hopeful one: "You must change your life."

I was discussing this prompt over coffee with my poet friend Susan Rothbard, and she remembered that in the poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” by Rainer Maria Rilke, the poet describes a ruined statue that still radiates vitality. His final imperative to the reader is “You must change your life.” Probably an inspiration for Wright’s and Levin’s poems, Rilke stages a sudden volta (turn) at the end, where description gives way to existential command.

For our October issue, we are seeking poems that explore the concept of time wasted. It could be a wasted hour, day, season, or life. Perhaps the idea causes someone to change their life. Perhaps it depresses them. Maybe the wasted time is not their own.

Deadline for the October issue is September 30, 2025. Don't waste time thinking about the poem and not writing it. 



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August 28, 2025

Hart Crane's Bridge

Poet Hart Crane was born Harold Hart Crane in Garrettsville, Ohio, in 1899. His mother was a Chicago debutante, and his father was a very successful candy businessman who actually invented the Lifesaver, that popular ring-shaped mint.

By the time Crane was a teenager, he knew that he was gay, and he was fascinated by the life and career of Oscar Wilde. When his parents' marriage fell apart, Crane dropped out of school and took a train from Cleveland to New York to begin life as a poet. 

He loved being in New York. He was hanging out with poets like E.E. Cummings and Allen Tate, but he had trouble holding a job and making a living there. 

Crane was a modernist poet whose work combined visionary ambition with lyrical intensity. Deeply influenced by Walt Whitman, French Symbolists like Rimbaud, and T. S. Eliot (whom he both admired and resisted), Crane sought to create a distinctly American epic voice.

His first collection, White Buildings (1926), established him as a daring and difficult new poet, praised by critics such as Allen Tate for its musicality and imagery. Crane’s work is marked by dense, imagistic language, often challenging but striving for transcendence and visionary power. His themes often revolved around love, modernity, and the search for meaning in a fragmented world.

From his first collection:

At Melville's Tomb
Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death’s bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides ... High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

Crane’s most ambitious work, The Bridge (1930) is what he is most remembered for as a poet. It was conceived as a counter-response to Eliot’s The Waste Land. Centering on the Brooklyn Bridge, it aimed to weave together myth, history, and modern life into a unifying American epic. The central symbol of the bridge represents modern achievement, a link between past and future, and a possible spiritual anchor in a chaotic age. The poem moves through American history and myth: Columbus, Pocahontas, Native traditions, industrial modernity, and the jazz age. Crane tries to fuse these fragments into a mythic vision of America, with the bridge as the connecting thread.

It is Hart Crane's first, and only, attempt at a long poem. You will see it described as an epic or a series of lyrical poems, and more recently as a hybrid, perhaps indicative of a new genre, the "modernist epic."

The poem's reception was mixed. Some critics admired its beauty but questioned its coherence. But the poem secured his place as one of the most important voices of American modernism.

He became an alcoholic, and when things got worse, just three years after The Bridge at the age of 33, he killed himself by jumping overboard from a steamship on his way from Mexico to New York. Although he had been drinking heavily and left no suicide note, witnesses believed his intentions to be suicidal.

Despite his relatively small output, his poetry profoundly influenced later writers for its daring ambition and lyrical brilliance.

Excerpt from The Bridge
To Brooklyn Bridge

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes   
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
—Till elevators drop us from our day ...

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path—condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City’s fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year ...



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August 14, 2025

Thanks a Million

In July, this blog, a companion to our main website, crossed the one million visitor mark. Since that point, as of today, we have added another 19,000 visitors. 

The blog actually gets more visitors than the Poets Online main site, which isn't that strange because this blog has more than monthly updates and also has a wide variety of poetry topics that show up in online searches. 

July 23, 2025 marked 17 years of the Poets Online discussion group on Facebook. It has about 450 followers and certainly gets more comments than the posts here. It is also the place where you can post your favorite poems, your own poems, and comment on things and share news about the poetry world. (Though we still enjoy comments here on the blog, too.)

We also have a Poets Online page on Facebook where we share things about the site, prompts etc.

We are still on X. Should we move to BlueSky or Instagram or wherever the kids are hanging out these days? We don't want to be anti-social, but we don't want to be too social. Better to spend the time writing poems.



Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

August 1, 2025

Prompt: Volta

It is said that a young Japanese poet once asked a Chinese poet how to compose a Chinese poem. “The usual Chinese poem is four lines," he was told. "The first line contains the initial phrase. The second line is the continuation of that phrase. The third line turns from this subject and begins a new one. But the fourth line brings the first three lines together."

A popular Japanese song illustrates this:

Two daughters of a silk merchant live in Kyoto.
The elder is twenty, the younger, eighteen.
A soldier may kill with his sword,
But these girls slay men with their eyes.

Many well-known four-line Chinese poems, particularly those in the jueju (or quatrain) form, masterfully incorporate a "turn" or a shift in perspective, mood, or subject matter in the third line, before the concluding fourth line brings the poem to a close.

Poems from all cultures often have a turn. That turn is known as the "volta" which comes from Italian, meaning “turn.” It traces back to the Latin verb volvere, which means “to roll” or “to turn." In poetry, it metaphorically represents a shift in thought, emotion, or argument. 

Petrarch, the 14th-century Italian poet, popularized the sonnet form that includes a volta between the octave (8 lines) and the sestet (6 lines). In his sonnets, the octave presents a problem or situation, and the sestet offers a resolution or counterpoint.  Later, Shakespearean sonnets adopted a different placement for the turn. It often appears before the final rhymed couplet.

Two examples of turns in longer English poems: In Shakespeare’s "Sonnet 18," the turn comes at line 9: “But thy eternal summer shall not fade…” —shifting from admiring nature to praising the beloved’s lasting beauty. In Elizabeth Bishop’s "The Moose," the turn moves from a mundane bus ride to a mystical encounter with a moose and transforms the poem’s tone and meaning.

"Question And Answer On The Mountain" by Li Po:

You ask for what reason I stay on the green mountain,
I smile, but do not answer, my heart is at leisure.
Peach blossom is carried far off by flowing water.
Apart, I have heaven and earth in the human world.

 For our September issue, we are interested in the shorter jueju form popular during the Tang Dynasty where the turn occurs in line 3 of the 4-line poem. Not unlike haiku, this structure allows for a "finale" and invites reflection. 

"On Returning Home," by He Zhizhang, is a double jueju, so there are two turns. 

When young, I left home, now old, I return.
My hometown accent is still the same.
Children don't know who I am.
Smiling, they point at the strange man.

I dismount my horse at the gate of my house.
I ask after the old friends I knew.
Where are the peach and plum trees, now gone with the spring wind?
The old man who lives there is no longer me.

A turn is a shift in a poem’s tone or mood. It could indicate a turn from sorrow to hope. It could also indicate a turn in perspective or speaker, or mark a turn in an argument, or imagery.

The turn (or turns, in poems of multiple stanzas) in a poem can add several things. It can add depth by introducing complexity and surprise. In a longer poem, it adds movement, keeping the poem dynamic. Near the end of a poem, it can present a resolution to earlier ideas, or even intensify rather than resolve them.


Your poem can be as short as those 4-line Chinese poems, or you can have multiple stanzas, BUT then each stanza must be 4 lines and each contain a turn. 


Submission Deadline: August 31, 2025, for our September issue.



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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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