Slippery Hours & Speed Writing

Distant Dwellings #3: Saving Daylight

On Sunday, March 10, I'll wake in a panic and fumble with instructions for the digital clock on my stove. Forward or back, up or down? Can daylight really be saved? What about the hour lost? 

Recently I decided that, since time is slippery, I needed to move faster.  Walk faster, drive faster, read faster, write faster.  I took a workshop in spontaneous composition — Filled a notebook with 6-minute speed writings. The idea was to dodge persnickety inner editors and bypass inhibitions. My classmates wore genius on their shirtsleeves— They wrote amazing poems that, with only light editing, could be considered complete. Me… not so much.

How do some writers write so quickly? Are they more confident? More passionate? More focused? I’ve heard that the secret to speed writing is to develop a clear understanding of what you want to say before you pick up a pen. On the other hand, many poets describe writing as a process of discovery—The epiphany comes while writing, not before writing.

Writers set their own speed limits. No pace is too fast or too slow. Jack Kerouac poured out novels and poetry in a semi-trance, but Elizabeth Bishop spent months and years refining her poems. Allen Ginsberg famously said “First thought, best thought,” but even the Beat master revised his work.

What’s your approach? Do you embrace the energy and spontaneity of speed writing? Do frenzied words bubble up from your bones? Or, do you proceed cautiously through multiple drafts, mulling ideas, narrative strategies, and word choice as you write?

In honor of changing clocks and fickle hours, here’s a poem by Sylvia Plath and one that her husband, Ted Hughes, wrote long after Plath’s death.

“Sonnet: To Time” by Sylvia Plath

Today we move in jade and cease with garnet
Amid the ticking jeweled clocks that mark
Our years. Death comes in a casual steel car, yet
We vaunt our days in neon and scorn the dark.
But outside the diabolic steel of this
Most plastic-windowed city, I can hear
The lone wind raving in the gutter, his
Voice crying exclusion in my ear.
So cry for the pagan girl left picking olives
Beside a sunblue sea, and mourn the flagon
Raised to toast a thousand kings, for all gives
Sorrow; weep for the legendary dragon.
Time is a great machine of iron bars
That drains eternally the milk of stars.

—from The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes

“September” by Ted Hughes

We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold:
No clock counts this.
When kisses are repeated and the arms hold
There is no telling where time is.

It is midsummer: the leaves hang big and still:
Behind the eye a star,
Under the silk of the wrist a sea, tell
Time is nowhere.

We stand; leaves have not timed the summer.
No clock now needs
Tell we have only what we remember:
Minutes uproaring with our heads

Like an unfortunate King's and his Queen's
When the senseless mob rules;
And quietly the trees casting their crowns
Into the pools.

—from Birthday Letters, 1998

Have you written about time or clocks? Feel free to post your poems or links. Never mind the missing hour. Come November, it will return wagging its tail.