A Poet’s Guide to Time Management
by Katharine Coles
In the plot device writers of narrative call “the ticking clock,” the protagonist has a limited time to solve a problem. You’ve seen this literalized in movies: the bomb, the clock - in an old film, actually ticking; or, these days, digital, silently running down the seconds by the hundredths.
The protagonist moves wire clippers between the blue wire and the red then the blue then at last (if you’re like me, you’re muttering at the screen right now) choosing, correctly, which to clip.
Or, for comedy and failure, think Lucy and Ethel at the chocolate factory, the conveyer belt moving faster and faster: they can keep up by doing only one thing, and their faces, when the boss appears, are smeared with chocolate.
This is also why I am still a poet, and why you may be wondering, What on earth can a poet have to say about time management?, an idea even my oldest friend cocked an eyebrow over. Doesn’t a poet spend her time lying in clover, counting the bees?
Well, yes. If I am not doing that, I am probably imagining doing it.
*
Before I take any more of your time, here are two promises:
First, I won’t read you any of my poems. A ticking clock provokes anxiety, but we know exactly when it will end – and the how is pretty much built into the plot. Poetry is something different. Even the poet Marianne Moore confessed, “I, too, dislike it?”
Second, I won’t tell you anything useful. As Auden knew, “Poetry makes nothing happen.”
After all, we live our lives in narrative, don’t we? At least, we work hard at it. We imagine, “this happens, THEN this”—or, more to the point, “This, then therefore this did/will/can/should happen.”
Notice, we can have narrative in any tense: in the past we find the source of our guilt; in the present our credit-seeking. In our future tense we plan, “I’ll do this, then therefore this will happen,” trying to find the illusion of control. I listen to my students on their phones, saying, “Then he says, so I say,” working to put a conversation in order, making it present though it’s already happened, to make it make sense.
But despite our linguistic machinations, or maybe because of them, we live separate from time. We unknit events one from another then rejoin them with that “therefore.” Where do we find cause-and-effect? Do we separate ourselves from time so we can always keep it in mind and watch it pass, or is it this constant obsession, this keeping time in mind, that separates us from it? Do you lie awake in the wee hours, reviewing your do-to list for tomorrow, a sequence of actions you can check off once you’ve performed them, thinking nothing feels better? If you follow the time-management gurus, they’ll tell you to complete that list before you go to bed so you can fall right to sleep. Most of this we do against a ticking clock, right? Everything has a deadline; you have to check off items 1-3 before you can get to 4; you’re always on the edge of that cliff, wondering whether or not you’ll make it, whether you’ll get back to sleep in time to get up.
No, sorry, I can’t save you from your narratives. Because, yes, even poets live mostly in that trap, wondering how our efforts will turn out, as often as not with a clock ticking beside us.
I have to get to the grocery store before my meeting or there won’t be any dinner; I have to finish that poem about the Great Salt Lake in time for a composer to use it in the piece she has to finish by January, when the recording studio is booked, and if I am behind, tick, tock, so is she.
We live not only according to the ticking of our own clocks, but to the alarms of the clocks of others.
We live in the illusion that we can manage time, can control it, make the most of it. But we don’t even know what it is or, more to the point, how much we have, or how little.
We try to “use” our time well—by which I guess we mean stuffing as much as we can into every moment, so we can get a return on our investment later.
But what return? Money, I guess, prestige. The knowledge that we’ve stopped the clock a hundredth of a second before sure annihilation – but we won’t.
Only that last, if only we could do it, would buy us that most precious thing— more time.
But what if we didn’t live in narrative, at least not always? What if we could find ways to live the way I suspect humans did not so long ago, not separate from time but as part of it, with it as part of us? What if we could decide to live some of our lives (the more the better, I say) in lyric time, which poetry enacts for us and invites us into.
Believe it or not, lyric is all about time management.
Just bear with me for a moment.
If narrative works on a “this, then therefore this” temporal model, one thing at a time, logically and inevitably proceeding, lyric works on a model I think of as abundance, or, more simply, as “this, and.” Abundance might not make immediate intuitive sense to you here, since on average a lyric is smaller, often much smaller, than a narrative. But though it is small on the outside, like us, it reminds us, it has the potential to be vast on the inside. Many of its figures and devices work quite explicitly to enlarge its own and our interior spaces. Some of them ask us to keep more than one thing in mind at once; others move us backward at the same time that they move us forward, not creating a line we travel but making an ever-expanding space that we inhabit and experience.
Take rhyme, maybe the simplest example.
I’ve never seen a poem do this, but say just for fun that one rhymes “my family” at the end of one line with “anomaly” at the end of the next. A rhyme like that gives us as readers a fair amount to do, asking us not only to move forward from the first line to the next, but also, then, to move back again when we hear the rhyme. As we move back and forth, our inner ears notice how the rhyme is working both through the similarities in the sounds and through their differences (is this really a rhyme, anomaly with my family, can she do that? Well, okay).
But the rhyme also signals something about the family in question, how quite literally it can turn the family into something unusual, simply by changing some phonemes, and make of “anomaly” “my family” again. Through sound, then, it comments.
Of course, this is how metaphor always works: like a magic spell or incantation that turns one thing into another simply by renaming it. In the high church I grew up in the words “Take, drink, for this is my blood” marked what the congregation believed was the literal transubstantiation of wine into the substance of Christ’s body. If you grew up in a different tradition, or none, you might remember from school the poem “The Highwayman,” which opens with a (perhaps rather excessive) extended metaphor that includes, “The moon was a ghostly galleon”—see what just happened? The poem put a ship in the sky? Why ghostly? – and continues, “tossed upon cloudy seas” – so, right, the illusion created by the cloud-seas turns the moon into a ghost ship, tada!
Okay. Definitely excessive.
This is actually a narrative poem, with a ticking clock figured by the sound of approaching hoofbeats on the road, “the highwayman came riding, riding, riding” but notice the little temporal alcove we’ve just lingered within, a respite from the tragedy we know is coming--
poor Bess the Landlord’s black-eyed daughter tied with a shotgun to her breast--
and this alcove keeps expanding, containing us while no time passes; even as we move beyond it into the story it expands, now not a figure we inhabit and linger in but one that keeps growing its little universe inside us, in my case fifty years later. Or maybe for all time, who knows?
I call this dilatory space, because it opens rapidly and simultaneously around us and within us, rising like that loaf of bread full of raisins our science teachers down the hall from English class told us to imagine as an expanding universe, the raisins all flying apart at the same rate, moving with dizzying speed while staying exactly in place, contained. And thus time, whatever it is, comes into being. It contains the moon and the ghost and the galleon, the clouds, the seas, all tossing, this and this and this and this – and we contain it all too, but that’s okay, since, as Emily Dickinson tells us, “The brain is wider than”—not just the sky, but all of it.
Speaking of Dickinson, I promised I wouldn’t read you any of my poems, but I want to linger with you for a very short time inside one of hers, a short one, on some days my favorite. It goes like this:
To make a prairie, it takes
A clover and one bee,
One clover and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.
In your first double take, you wonder who or what that “it” is, making the prairie. Dickinson, yes, and you, maybe God if you tend that way, for sure nature. Then either never mind or mind for the moment or forever that Dickinson, an amateur botanist, knows full well this instruction can never result in a prairie. One bee needs more than a clover and for sure more than one clover, on which Dickinson doubles down, if we’re making this prairie through pollination;
that one clover needs no bees at all, if it can propagate through its roots.
The bee is superfluous, then, there only for our pleasure, so it’s no surprise that, via rhyme, it changes first, through a mere grammatical fillup, from a singular self, one bee, to the representative of a species, a bee, and finally, in rhyme’s turn, into “revery.”
Which, it happens, now we are fully in it, was all we ever needed.
“If bees are few,” this is no tragedy; we can conjure them; it turns out that with our single clover and a single bee we have everything we ever needed for a very brief yet expansive space and time of loitering.
Which we need, to inhabit the poem and let it inhabit us: though Dickinson’s poem took me under twenty seconds to speak, and believe me I was in no hurry, we’ve been thinking about it for two minutes plus, and we could take more, if our time weren’t ticking down.
Like most poets, alas, and maybe like the whole world, all a little poem ever really desires is its unequal measure of attention, which it wants to distract you from measuring.
Which raises the question, Where does the ticking clock carry us? If we fill our lives with that relentless and apparently urgent but maybe only self-important sound, we’ll probably get through lots of to-do lists, perhaps one for every cold midnight of our lives.
I am fortunate. As I often say, There are no poetry emergencies. As far as I know, nobody ever ended up in urgent care or failed to get to the church on time for lack of a poem of mine. That composer’s drop-dead deadline, if you’ll forgive me, is just a lovely exception.
William Carlos Williams famously said, “You can’t get the news from poetry,” which is as true now as it was then, thank goodness. When we go on to read, “but men die miserably every day for want of what is found there,” we should not linger on the word “die.” As Mary Oliver asks in “The Summer Day,” “Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?”
Let’s consider instead the word “miserably” - not the fact of death, then, but how too many of us get there. As we turn over Oliver’s question about what we plan to do with our “one wild and precious life,” I turn again to Dickinson for an answer:
“I dwell in possibility/a finer house than prose.”
The protagonist moves wire clippers between the blue wire and the red then the blue then at last (if you’re like me, you’re muttering at the screen right now) choosing, correctly, which to clip.
Or, for comedy and failure, think Lucy and Ethel at the chocolate factory, the conveyer belt moving faster and faster: they can keep up by doing only one thing, and their faces, when the boss appears, are smeared with chocolate.
This is also why I am still a poet, and why you may be wondering, What on earth can a poet have to say about time management?, an idea even my oldest friend cocked an eyebrow over. Doesn’t a poet spend her time lying in clover, counting the bees?
Well, yes. If I am not doing that, I am probably imagining doing it.
*
Before I take any more of your time, here are two promises:
First, I won’t read you any of my poems. A ticking clock provokes anxiety, but we know exactly when it will end – and the how is pretty much built into the plot. Poetry is something different. Even the poet Marianne Moore confessed, “I, too, dislike it?”
Second, I won’t tell you anything useful. As Auden knew, “Poetry makes nothing happen.”
After all, we live our lives in narrative, don’t we? At least, we work hard at it. We imagine, “this happens, THEN this”—or, more to the point, “This, then therefore this did/will/can/should happen.”
Notice, we can have narrative in any tense: in the past we find the source of our guilt; in the present our credit-seeking. In our future tense we plan, “I’ll do this, then therefore this will happen,” trying to find the illusion of control. I listen to my students on their phones, saying, “Then he says, so I say,” working to put a conversation in order, making it present though it’s already happened, to make it make sense.
But despite our linguistic machinations, or maybe because of them, we live separate from time. We unknit events one from another then rejoin them with that “therefore.” Where do we find cause-and-effect? Do we separate ourselves from time so we can always keep it in mind and watch it pass, or is it this constant obsession, this keeping time in mind, that separates us from it? Do you lie awake in the wee hours, reviewing your do-to list for tomorrow, a sequence of actions you can check off once you’ve performed them, thinking nothing feels better? If you follow the time-management gurus, they’ll tell you to complete that list before you go to bed so you can fall right to sleep. Most of this we do against a ticking clock, right? Everything has a deadline; you have to check off items 1-3 before you can get to 4; you’re always on the edge of that cliff, wondering whether or not you’ll make it, whether you’ll get back to sleep in time to get up.
No, sorry, I can’t save you from your narratives. Because, yes, even poets live mostly in that trap, wondering how our efforts will turn out, as often as not with a clock ticking beside us.
I have to get to the grocery store before my meeting or there won’t be any dinner; I have to finish that poem about the Great Salt Lake in time for a composer to use it in the piece she has to finish by January, when the recording studio is booked, and if I am behind, tick, tock, so is she.
We live not only according to the ticking of our own clocks, but to the alarms of the clocks of others.
We live in the illusion that we can manage time, can control it, make the most of it. But we don’t even know what it is or, more to the point, how much we have, or how little.
We try to “use” our time well—by which I guess we mean stuffing as much as we can into every moment, so we can get a return on our investment later.
But what return? Money, I guess, prestige. The knowledge that we’ve stopped the clock a hundredth of a second before sure annihilation – but we won’t.
Only that last, if only we could do it, would buy us that most precious thing— more time.
But what if we didn’t live in narrative, at least not always? What if we could find ways to live the way I suspect humans did not so long ago, not separate from time but as part of it, with it as part of us? What if we could decide to live some of our lives (the more the better, I say) in lyric time, which poetry enacts for us and invites us into.
Believe it or not, lyric is all about time management.
Just bear with me for a moment.
If narrative works on a “this, then therefore this” temporal model, one thing at a time, logically and inevitably proceeding, lyric works on a model I think of as abundance, or, more simply, as “this, and.” Abundance might not make immediate intuitive sense to you here, since on average a lyric is smaller, often much smaller, than a narrative. But though it is small on the outside, like us, it reminds us, it has the potential to be vast on the inside. Many of its figures and devices work quite explicitly to enlarge its own and our interior spaces. Some of them ask us to keep more than one thing in mind at once; others move us backward at the same time that they move us forward, not creating a line we travel but making an ever-expanding space that we inhabit and experience.
Take rhyme, maybe the simplest example.
I’ve never seen a poem do this, but say just for fun that one rhymes “my family” at the end of one line with “anomaly” at the end of the next. A rhyme like that gives us as readers a fair amount to do, asking us not only to move forward from the first line to the next, but also, then, to move back again when we hear the rhyme. As we move back and forth, our inner ears notice how the rhyme is working both through the similarities in the sounds and through their differences (is this really a rhyme, anomaly with my family, can she do that? Well, okay).
But the rhyme also signals something about the family in question, how quite literally it can turn the family into something unusual, simply by changing some phonemes, and make of “anomaly” “my family” again. Through sound, then, it comments.
Of course, this is how metaphor always works: like a magic spell or incantation that turns one thing into another simply by renaming it. In the high church I grew up in the words “Take, drink, for this is my blood” marked what the congregation believed was the literal transubstantiation of wine into the substance of Christ’s body. If you grew up in a different tradition, or none, you might remember from school the poem “The Highwayman,” which opens with a (perhaps rather excessive) extended metaphor that includes, “The moon was a ghostly galleon”—see what just happened? The poem put a ship in the sky? Why ghostly? – and continues, “tossed upon cloudy seas” – so, right, the illusion created by the cloud-seas turns the moon into a ghost ship, tada!
Okay. Definitely excessive.
This is actually a narrative poem, with a ticking clock figured by the sound of approaching hoofbeats on the road, “the highwayman came riding, riding, riding” but notice the little temporal alcove we’ve just lingered within, a respite from the tragedy we know is coming--
poor Bess the Landlord’s black-eyed daughter tied with a shotgun to her breast--
and this alcove keeps expanding, containing us while no time passes; even as we move beyond it into the story it expands, now not a figure we inhabit and linger in but one that keeps growing its little universe inside us, in my case fifty years later. Or maybe for all time, who knows?
I call this dilatory space, because it opens rapidly and simultaneously around us and within us, rising like that loaf of bread full of raisins our science teachers down the hall from English class told us to imagine as an expanding universe, the raisins all flying apart at the same rate, moving with dizzying speed while staying exactly in place, contained. And thus time, whatever it is, comes into being. It contains the moon and the ghost and the galleon, the clouds, the seas, all tossing, this and this and this and this – and we contain it all too, but that’s okay, since, as Emily Dickinson tells us, “The brain is wider than”—not just the sky, but all of it.
Speaking of Dickinson, I promised I wouldn’t read you any of my poems, but I want to linger with you for a very short time inside one of hers, a short one, on some days my favorite. It goes like this:
To make a prairie, it takes
A clover and one bee,
One clover and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.
In your first double take, you wonder who or what that “it” is, making the prairie. Dickinson, yes, and you, maybe God if you tend that way, for sure nature. Then either never mind or mind for the moment or forever that Dickinson, an amateur botanist, knows full well this instruction can never result in a prairie. One bee needs more than a clover and for sure more than one clover, on which Dickinson doubles down, if we’re making this prairie through pollination;
that one clover needs no bees at all, if it can propagate through its roots.
The bee is superfluous, then, there only for our pleasure, so it’s no surprise that, via rhyme, it changes first, through a mere grammatical fillup, from a singular self, one bee, to the representative of a species, a bee, and finally, in rhyme’s turn, into “revery.”
Which, it happens, now we are fully in it, was all we ever needed.
“If bees are few,” this is no tragedy; we can conjure them; it turns out that with our single clover and a single bee we have everything we ever needed for a very brief yet expansive space and time of loitering.
Which we need, to inhabit the poem and let it inhabit us: though Dickinson’s poem took me under twenty seconds to speak, and believe me I was in no hurry, we’ve been thinking about it for two minutes plus, and we could take more, if our time weren’t ticking down.
Like most poets, alas, and maybe like the whole world, all a little poem ever really desires is its unequal measure of attention, which it wants to distract you from measuring.
Which raises the question, Where does the ticking clock carry us? If we fill our lives with that relentless and apparently urgent but maybe only self-important sound, we’ll probably get through lots of to-do lists, perhaps one for every cold midnight of our lives.
I am fortunate. As I often say, There are no poetry emergencies. As far as I know, nobody ever ended up in urgent care or failed to get to the church on time for lack of a poem of mine. That composer’s drop-dead deadline, if you’ll forgive me, is just a lovely exception.
William Carlos Williams famously said, “You can’t get the news from poetry,” which is as true now as it was then, thank goodness. When we go on to read, “but men die miserably every day for want of what is found there,” we should not linger on the word “die.” As Mary Oliver asks in “The Summer Day,” “Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?”
Let’s consider instead the word “miserably” - not the fact of death, then, but how too many of us get there. As we turn over Oliver’s question about what we plan to do with our “one wild and precious life,” I turn again to Dickinson for an answer:
“I dwell in possibility/a finer house than prose.”