A fellow poet let me know that there was an article in The Paris Review back in 2018 titled "I Have Wasted My Life," which also makes a connection to James Wright's poem, as I did for our September 2025 call for submissions. It is possible that I read that article at some point, but I don't recall it. I read it now. The connection is even more direct to Phillis Levin's poem that we used for that prompt.
The article is by Patricia Hampl, the author of six prose works, including A Romantic Education and The Florist's Daughter. She is also the author of The Art of the Wasted Day.
The book is described as "a spirited inquiry into the lost value of leisure and daydream." In other words, wasted days are not wasted days.
The book begins with two eighteenth-century Irish ladies who ran off to live a life of "retirement" in rural Wales. Then she travels to Moravia to consider the famous monk-geneticist, Gregor Mendel. But her main hero of wasted days is Michel Montaigne. He retreated from court life to sit in his chateau tower and write about whatever passed through his mind. In wasting his time in this way, he invented the personal essay. He would certainly be a blogger had he lived in our times.
Hampl also considers her own life and the ways she has "wasted" days - childhood days lazing under a tree, a daydreaming fascination with having a monastic life, and love and the loss of love.
The real job of being human, Hampl decides, is getting lost in thought, something only leisure can provide. The Art of the Wasted Day is a celebration of the purpose and appeal of letting go.
Though our prompt and model poems seemed to lean towards a sadness about wasted time, Hampl reminds us that wasting time can be useful, even fruitful.
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