Screen Time
Write about attention: where yours goes, what it costs, and the world waiting off-screen.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about screen time: vivid imagery, craft techniques, mistakes to avoid, with exercises and prompts in this free guide by Writory for poets.
What this theme is
Screen time is really a theme about attention, the one resource poetry has always traded in. The weekly report arrives like a small verdict: your screen time was up twelve percent. Behind that number sit the dissolved hours, the scroll that started as a glance at the weather and ended forty minutes later somewhere unaccountable. A poem on this theme watches where a life's noticing actually goes, and what the glow does to time.
It is not automatically a poem against phones. The insomniac scroll is also company; the screen carries the far-away sister, the recipe, the map home. The honest screen-time poem admits the comfort along with the cost. Its true subject is the divided self: the body in the room, the attention elsewhere, and the thin blue light where the two fail to meet.
Why poets return to it
Attention is the beginning of devotion, as Mary Oliver liked to insist, and poets take that professionally. To write about screen time is to audit your own instrument: a poet who cannot say where their noticing went all week has mislaid the tool of the trade.
It is also simply where the readers are. A poem that names the 2 a.m. scroll with precision earns instant recognition, and recognition is half of emotional power. Writory's judges, reading for creativity and theme among their five criteria, consistently reward poems that notice what everyone has stopped noticing, and nothing is less noticed than the thing we stare at most.
Where it comes from
The complaint is older than the device. In 1807 Wordsworth wrote that the world is too much with us, that getting and spending we lay waste our powers, and he had never seen a notification. Frank O'Hara made the opposite move, walking Manhattan on his lunch hour and letting every headline and shop window into the poem: attention as appetite rather than anxiety.
In our own century, poets such as Patricia Lockwood have written the internet's weather from inside it, proving the feed can be a subject rather than merely a distraction from subjects. Between Wordsworth's warning and Lockwood's immersion lies the whole territory of the screen-time poem.
The elements that carry it
- Blue light at 2 a.m., the face lit like something underwater.
- The infinite scroll's soft repetition, thumb moving like a rosary gone wrong.
- Screen-time reports and battery percentages, a life audited in numbers.
- Charging cables trailing to beds and sofas, the house on a drip.
- The phone face down at dinner, still felt, like a guest who has not left.
Techniques that work
- Build a found poem from one evening's notifications, arranged but not invented; the juxtapositions will be stranger than anything you could plan.
- Let timestamps structure the poem: 11:47, 12:30, 1:15, the stanzas sinking further into the night.
- Write the body, not just the mind: the scrolling thumb, the bent neck, the dry eyes at midnight.
- Use repetition to enact the scroll's loop, then break the pattern hard when something real interrupts.
- Earn your off-screen ending: one image from the unmediated world, a moth at the window, rain starting, works only if the poem has not preached its way there.
Mistakes to avoid
- The sermon. If the poem could be summarised as 'phones bad,' the reader wrote it before you did.
- Purity nostalgia, the golden age before screens; your grandparents were warned about the radio.
- Writing 'technology' in the abstract instead of one device, one room, one specific ruined or rescued night.
- The fake redemption ending where the speaker throws the phone away and is healed by a sunset. Nobody believes it, including you.
An exercise
Open your actual screen-time report and copy out its numbers and category names. Write a poem around this found data, letting the cold figures sit against one warm, specific memory of what one of those hours actually contained.
A challenge
For one week, write four lines each evening about a single thing you saw that day that was not on a screen. On day seven, weave the strongest lines into one poem about where your attention lives.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem set in the few seconds between locking the phone and the room coming back: the furniture, the quiet, whatever was waiting.
Before you submit
- The poem contains one specific night or hour, not a general era.
- Numbers or found data, if used, sit against something warm-blooded.
- The body appears: hands, eyes, posture.
- No sentence lectures the reader.
- The last image belongs to the world, the screen, or the space between, by choice rather than habit.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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