Prompt: Time Passes

A Copernican calendar based on the Sun's movement through the seasons

Humans have many time-keeping traditions. Our calendars track the movement of the Sun or the Moon. You could have a celestial calendar that tracked the movement of the stars.

I suspect that some people might track the year based on the changing seasons. You might personally mark the new year on your birthday. After 40 years of teaching, it is difficult for me to not feel that September starts a new year. The way we mark time throughout a day or year is often personal despite the larger time-keeping that is supposed to organize time for us.

When I mentioned to another poet that I was thinking about using a writing prompt about keeping time, she said: "You mean like in music?" That was a natural way to view my prompt for her because she is a musician.

In Walt Whitman's "To Think of Time," his thoughts turn to questions all of us have had at some point.

To think of time—of all that retrospection!
To think of to-day, and the ages continued henceforward!

Have you guess'd you yourself would not continue?
Have you dreaded these earth-beetles?
Have you fear'd the future would be nothing to you?

Is to-day nothing? Is the beginningless past nothing?

In our model poem for this prompt titled "Time Passes," Joy Ladin personifies Time which seems to have as much trouble dealing with itself as we have dealing with it. I love that while the other three dimensions are sleeping, Time is sweating it out in the middle of the night and feeling lost.

Time too is afraid of passing, is riddled with holes
through which time feels itself leaking...
Time has lost every picture of itself as a child.
Now time is old, leathery and slow.
Can’t sneak up on anyone anymore...

All of our attempts to control time ultimately fail. Even the best calendars and clocks are off at some point. Laura Kasischke has a poem titled "The Time Machine" which suggests that long-wished-for-ability to go back or forward in time to somehow change the present.

My mother begged me: Please, please, study
stenography...
Without it
I would have no future, and this
is the future that was lost in time to me...

When I first read T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," the image that stayed with me was of measuring a life with coffee spoons.

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

This month, we ask you to write a poem that measures the passing of time using some personal metric that may only be useful or relevant to you.

Deadline for submissions: February (Leap Year!) 29, 2020

Visit our website at poetsonline.org

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You Probably Think This Poem Is About You

Novelist Erica Jong wrote this:

Where does autobiography end and fiction begin? Best seller lists and publishers' catalogues assume we know the answer to this question, as they assume there is a clear- cut difference between fiction and nonfiction. Many writers are not so sure. The strongest and most passionate writing always comes out of our own experiences and obsessions - but how we transform these obsessions depends on the writer, or even on the writer's mood, at a given point in time. In E. E. Cummings's classic novel of World War I, ''The Enormous Room,'' the author writes as ''I,'' identifies that ''I'' as Edward Estlin Cummings, even includes sketches from his own notebooks, and yet the shapeliness of the book, the sense of a beginning, middle and end, lead us to think of it as a ''novel.''

So there I was reading through poems in the collection edited by Billy Collins called Poetry 180. I read "Gee, You’re So Beautiful That It’s Starting to Rain" by Richard Brautigan, and then I flipped pages and settled on "Bike Ride with Older Boys" by Laura Kasischke. Synchronicity was at work and the radio was playing Carly Simon who was singing "You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you."

I remember when that album was released. There was much speculation about who was the "you" of the song. James Taylor? I heard Warren Beatty was the one. Mick Jagger had a connection with Carly, but then he sang backup on the song. Now, THAT would be vain! (The speculation continues apparently - look at Carly's site.) 

I know teachers of poetry who deliberately remove the poet's name from a poem they hand it out in order to try and shut down the baggage that comes with knowing who is the poet and attaching a life story to the poem. 

How about this situation? Have you ever read a poem written by someone you know, and thought that it was about you? That might be flattering, insulting, or embarrassing, or it might give you thoughts about a lawsuit. I tried, but I couldn't find a poem that exactly fit the prompt I wanted: a poem about someone that tries to convince the reader and the subject of the poem that it is NOT about them. (Like Carly's song) 

So, that becomes the August prompt - Can you come up with the model poem that the prompt needed? The two model poems I did include on the site are certainly about someone. I suspect that Brautigan's Marcia really existed. Kasischke's boy (I do think of them as one) probably existed but she didn't actually do what happens in the poem, so the poem is about them, but not about them. Do you think the boys would recognize themselves if they read her poem?

You're so vain, I'll bet you think this song is about you. Don't you? Don't you?