John Ashbery, in an interview in the Poetry Miscellany, talks about wasting time: “I waste a lot of time. That's part of [the creative process].... The problem is you can't really use this wasted time. You have to have it wasted. Poetry disequips you for the requirements of life. You can't use your time." In other words, wasted time cannot be filled, or changed into another habit; it is a necessary void of fomentation. And I am wasting your time, and aware that I am wasting it; how could it be otherwise? Many, many others have spoken about this. Tess Gallagher: "I sit in the motel room, a place of much passage and no record, and feel I have made an important assault on the Great Nothing. Gertrude Stein: "It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing." Mary Oppen: “When Heidegger speaks of boredom he allies it very closely with that moment of awe in which one's mind begins to reach beyond. And that is a poetic moment, a moment in which a poem might well have been written." The only purpose of this lecture, this letter, my only intent, goal, object, desire, is to waste time. For there is so little time to waste during a life, what little there is being so precious, that we must waste it, in whatever way we come to waste it, with all our heart. Charles Lamb:
"A man can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him NOTHINGTO-DO; he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative."
Recently I found myself filling out a grant application by writing: "I seek an extended period of time, free from all distractions, so that I might be free to be distracted." Distraction is distracting us from distraction. Perhaps we wish to be distracted by the slightest nuances of being, thinking, feeling, or seeing. (We are drifting into the madness of it now.) Sometimes I think a poem is the "essence of distraction," which is certainly an oxymoron, since an essence is that which is most concentrated and distraction so wide; in a poem, life distracts us from our lives, and only with the utmost of our concentration are we able to follow the exchange as it takes place. So the kind of distraction I am speaking of is one that leads to concentration.
— Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey