Craft Focus: Time in Poetry

A mini lesson and a writing exercise

Dear Friends,

“Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow.”
― Louise Erdrich

“Time is the longest distance between two places.”
― Tennessee Williams

“How did it get so late so soon?”
― Dr. Seuss

“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

Today’s post is a mini craft lesson on the role of time in poetry featuring examples and a writing exercise to help you integrate your learning.

Poems are chronically aware of time. They communicate this awareness through their rhythmic patterning (meter, rhyme, line length/pacing, etc.) that often mimics or reflects the subject’s own particular cadence. They are full of different kinds of time. Poems are also timeless, transcending time, capturing that “amber of the moment,” as Vonnegut says above, or containing “spots of time,” as Wordsworth believed. They disrupt narrative time, slowing down to amplify what’s most essential to memory, often foregoing linearity entirely. They capture what is fleeting and enduring. They beautifully traffic in the paradoxes of time.