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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Lying in a Hammock

I was visiting a friend who has a hammock in his backyard. I have never mastered lying in a hammock. I find it hard to get into, harder to get out of and uncomfortable in the time between. But I must be an exception.

Hammocks are an easygoing symbol of relaxation. Sailors slept in them so the rocking ship didn't throw them from bed but just rocked them to sleep.

What do you associate them with - leisure, escapism, luxury, nature?

I wish I could sway comfortably in one and daydream or read or write a poem. The poem that comes to mind is -

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota  by James Wright, from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose  

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

An article on atlasobscura.com tells us that:

Just about all of the major early European expeditions to the New World talked about the hammock. Columbus described it in his journal: “Their beds and bags for holding things were like nets of cotton.” Bartolomé de las Casas, the first real European historian to go to the Americas, went on at length about them. In his book Historia de las Indias, written between 1527 and 1559, de las Casas described beds “like cotton nets,” with elaborate, well-crafted patterns. The ends, he wrote, were made of a different, hemp-like material, to attach to walls or poles. 

The early days of the hammock are not well understood, but they certainly did come a long time ago. Woven of organic materials that eventually decompose in tropical environments—where pretty much everything decomposes eventually—hammocks were well established in the Caribbean when the first Europeans landed there. The English word “hammock” derives from the Spanish hamaca, a direct loanword from the Taíno languages of the Caribbean.

A depiction of Amerigo Vespucci landing in America and encountering an indigenous woman on a hammock.
by Jan van der Straet, ca. 1587–89. THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART / PUBLIC DOMAIN

This end of summer lazy day would be a good one for hammocking. But besides my fear of falling out of a hammock, I'm afraid that I view hammock time as wasted time. That's a shame. I need to work on the art of not working all the time. Labor Day, indeed...

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A Blessing

James Wright and Robert Bly began a friendship through letters. Eventually, Wright would visit Bly's farm in western Minnesota and fall in love with it. “I think your farm is the first such place I have ever really liked — it is beautifully mysterious and very much its own secret place.”

He began taking the train out there every Friday after classes, and staying for the weekend, sleeping in an old converted chicken coop, which was heated by an oil stove.

On Saturday mornings, he would come into the farmhouse for breakfast, go back out, and return at lunch with a poem. He said of the Blys: “They loved me and they saved my life. I don’t mean the life of my poetry, either.”

One day Bly and Wright were driving home from another friend’s farm when they passed two horses in a pasture. They stopped and got out to see the horses, and in the car Wright began writing a poem in a spiral notebook. That became one of his most beloved poems, “A Blessing.”

A Blessing

by James Wright

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

from Collected Poems

Prompt: Dorianne Laux: Not Just The Facts

Our prompt for this month is to start a poem by first collecting a series of facts about a subject that interests you. It might be a topic, as, in our model poem, that is a bit of a current obsession. You will use the facts in your poem, but the poem will also need to leap, like many poems, to another place. I came upon the poem and the idea for this prompt when I was reading Brian Brodeur's blog, How A Poem Happens where contemporary poets are interviewed about the making of one of their poems.

Laux mentions that she had been reading James Wright's book ABOVE THE RIVER and that it may have been an unconscious source for the leap. "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" is a good example of a Wright poem that leaps, particularly in its final line. (Read that poem and listen to him read it) 

In the blog post (which reprints the poem), Laux talks about how a dinner conversation about the solar/lunar system led her to become somewhat obsessed with finding out facts about the moon.

Among the many facts I learned that night the one that stuck was the fact that since the expansion of the universe, the moon has been steadily and significantly backing away from the earth, which meant the moon once appeared much larger in the past and would only appear smaller in the future. I couldn’t get over it. I went to bed trying to imagine it and woke up thinking about it. I was obsessed.

That obsession led her to seek more information about the moon and was the prewriting for the poem. 

I also read everything I could get my hands on about the moon. That fascination has been long-lived as I’m still reading about the universe and am just now I’m finishing up Timothy Ferris’ Coming of Age in the Milky Way .

The second aspect of the poem is that my extended family was going through a life-crisis, a not uncommon state of affairs for them, so that was in the back of my mind. I was in the process of working to pull away from them. Maybe I became obsessed with the moon as a way to curb my obsession with the latest family crisis. But the tug of the family is tremendous. Even a crazy family can seem better than no family. The poem is two obsessions in collision.

This idea of two obsessions or ideas in a collision is also something we would love to see in your poem.

Laux's original intent ("That the listing of the facts was in some way interesting was my only concern.") took that leap in another direction that led to the poetic collision.

The leap from the planetary to the personal might have been a technique had I thought of it consciously, but I didn’t. It happened naturally, organically, without my being aware of it until I had finished the poem. I really thought the poem was about the moon, and these two people I had made up, the woman and her boy, strangers to me, but realized then it was my mother and my sister, or my sister and my niece, in disguise.

As I mention on the website, you could cheat on the prompt and work backward - start with an idea for a poem and then research the facts about a subject within the poem.
It might be difficult to "prompt" a leap in writing a poem, but I have the feeling that if you can put one obsession into motion, perhaps it will naturally collide with another and produce enough energy for the poem to move.