The Poetry of Attention

If you happened to get July’s Fiction Newsletter, you might have read that I’m having a summer of the 19th century novel.

Weirdly enough, I like 19th century novels better than I like 19th century poems. I like 19th century poems, too, but I feel like the 20th century did for poetry what the 19th century did for novels: expand the possibilities of the form such that the human spirit could be more deeply and accessibly felt.

Now, “deeply and accessibly felt” is obviously relative. Maybe you, dear reader, feel that way about the 1800s.

For me, that deep and accessible feeling of the spirit is a question of attention. And although “attention” is another relative concept, I find that I like the attention of 20th century poetry better. It feels truer to my own experiences of life, from Modernism through the early internet.

The internet. Where, graciously, you’re reading this newsletter—and where, not-so-graciously, our attentions are fragmented in countless ways.

I’m trying to get my attention back. But first, I want to think through what attention is, briefly, in order to find new ways of thinking about poetry. If you’ll lend me your attention, I promise I’ll bring you somewhere good.

The Humanity of Our Attention

The French mystic philosopher Simone Weil wrote that “absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” She also said this:

• Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
• We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.
• Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.

If you’re interested in how she lays out her arguments, she does so in her 1952 book Gravity and Grace.

Weil explores, in much better words than I can, how goodness and the search for Truth arise in our capacity for knowledge and suffering. Attention is an integral part of this, as the soul will be attracted to goodness if we “turn our mind toward the good.”

We’re obviously dabbling in a lot of abstractions here, not to mention the world’s ongoing disputes about what’s good, what’s Truth, what’s love. I suppose poetry is one answer to those questions.

But what Weil points to is this: attention becomes devotion. 

The quality of our attention necessitates that level of devotion, but when we can attend to something—an idea, a person, a project, etc.—with our minds, our bodies, our spirits, then our lives themselves become forms of worship: deeper attention necessitates better proximity to Truth.

Attention and Language

It goes without saying that our attention spans are rather frayed these days. Screens are everywhere, algorithms are biased, our phones keep buzzing and chirping and dinging and ringing and singing—and little of this helps us seek the truth.

But that’s not the argument I want to make right now.

What I want to say is that new technologies always change our relationship to language and material reality.

Take words, for example, and the technologies of language. Anne Carson makes the argument in Eros, the Bittersweet that the invention of the Greek alphabet—which is the first alphabet to differentiate consonants from vowels—resulted in a dramatically new form of human relation to language and storytelling. The first lyric poets, Carson writes, were

Moreover, the relationship between reader and writer is different than that of audience member and oral reciter. In oral recitation, the poem or story is embodied in the voice and movements of the storyteller. But what happens on the page is this:

Why does this matter? Because:

It’s not that audiences to oral storytellers didn’t have imaginations. It’s that imagination is what makes written language possible: we need it in order to construct meaning out of the symbols we call letters. As a result, the written word is a technology that has greatly expanded our imaginations, as well as the kinds of stories we tell. As Carson notes later in Eros, the Bittersweet, the alphabet was a necessary invention for the further creation of the novel.

The written word is a technology that has greatly expanded our imaginations, as well as the kinds of stories we tell.

So the written word demands both our attentions and our imaginations for it to even work.

Further technologies have molded that relationship, such as:

• The printing press (1440): which made mass-printing possible (at a much slower scale than today).
  • Case in point: Martin Luther’s 95 Theses; the flyers distributed during the American Revolution. Mass production spawned mass communication, effecting new political and religious ideas as well as movements.
• The cast iron printing press (1800): Sped up the production process by making printing faster and easier.
  • Case in point: Literary greatly expanded in the 19th century, especially throughout the middle class. As a result, novels became a common form of entertainment, as did the art of good sentences.
• The typewriter (1870): Made individual writing and printing more accessible and experimental.
  • Case in point: Poetry became radically new during the Modernist era, and Modernist poets played with page space, syntax, punctuation, and lineation because of how typewriters mechanized the writing process. Poetic production greatly increased as well.

I won’t pontificate about smartphones or the internet, because you probably already know how those things have shaped your world and attention.

But if attention is prayer, as Weil suggests, what happens to poetry in the internet age?

Let me answer that question with a poem I really liked, precisely because of the attention of the speaker.

“Elegy to the time it takes to realize the futility of elegies” by Bob Hicok

from his book Elegy Owed (2014).

“Attention” offers a useful way of talking about this poem, whose lens always has one eye on a dead loved one, the other eye on anything that can describe this loss.

At an initial read, the attention in this poem feels almost diffuse. The speaker’s immediate struggle to hold onto the “you” of this poem leads us through amber, arks, surgeons with God complexes, fire ants, bulldozers, goldfish, elephants, fog, etc. That’s quite a sequence.

But the “you” of this poem is central, the poem always orbiting it, and every image and metaphor can only refer back to that “you.” Some poems are like this: a mad dash scramble for meaning and connection, like holding up a photograph next to every stranger’s face. Is it you? Is it you? Is it you?

Some poems are like this: a mad dash scramble for meaning and connection, like holding up a photograph next to every stranger’s face. Is it you? Is it you? Is it you?

Also of note: the poem is a single long sentence, glued together by some muscular, load-bearing commas. The syntax alone is dizzying.

It’s no accident that this experience is happening in an elegy. Elegies are poems that express the complexity of human grief. Often, this grief occurs after a tangible loss; elegies are traditionally for the dead, although contemporary elegies are a little more open. Nonetheless, an elegy can only happen when the subject of the poem is inaccessible to the speaker. Death is the starkest instance of this, and also the topic of endless religious and spiritual musing. An elegy is a prayer.

Elsewhere in Gravity and Grace, Weil writes: “Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right to the soul.”

Captivates. Another word of attention. For Weil, beauty commands our attention to reach our souls. So much of poetry is beauty, I think, and there’s so much beauty in Hicok’s poem. Take these lines:

• like a flag that has thrashed all day
  inside the monologue of the wind and needs to sleep

I love this image, but I also love the assonance here. The first line is filled with “a” sounds, then through a short and long “i” (inside) we get “monologue”—a gorgeous way to describe the speaking of the wind. Also, a lonely description: the kind you offer when nothing else speaks to you.

• I’m sorry for the snot
  at the end, my face full of sheepshank knots
  and nails

Okay, not a beautiful image—but a lyrical one. Again, let’s attend to sound: “sorry” and “snot” are sibilant, with “end” echoing the “n” in “snot”; then we get the interruptive “f” in “face full” but maintain sibilance through to “sheepshank knots.” The rhyme of “snot” and “knot” is gorgeous happenstance, too, but what these lines have is both a bit of euphony and cacophony. Euphony in the sibilance, cacophony in the congregating “f” and “n” sounds paired with vowels that move all over the mouth.

Grief can be like that: beautiful, ugly, all over the place.

• I like it here
  when the fog erases itself and says, I offer you
  the world freshly painted, including the woods
  where you walked, if only I could weigh its shade,
  would it be larger or smaller by exactly
  the size of you, O science, give me such instruments
  of knowledge, they are as passionately useless as poems.

The image of the fog revealing a freshly painted world is dazzling. But then we move so quickly into such a new idea, of the woods’ shade being bigger or smaller in the exact size of “you”—the biggest leap, yet, in seeing “you” everywhere—followed by a line of profound powerlessness: that science, poetry, and any form of knowledge gathering are “passionately useless” in the face of grief.

Poetry, Prayer, and the Internet

Hicok’s poem is only possible because of its absolutely unmixed attention. The poem is endlessly focused on “you,” and anything else that filters through the speaker’s consciousness ends up taking the shape of that “you.”

I introduced Hicok’s poem by asking what the internet’s effect might be on poetry. I have a lot of thoughts on this, but most aren’t relevant here. What is relevant is this: we have absolutely unmixed access to endless categories of knowledge.

What is relevant is this: we have absolutely unmixed access to endless categories of knowledge.

To be clear, I don’t think Hicok had Wikipedia open while he was writing this poem. I have no clue what Hicok does online.

But everyone on the internet (and that includes you) can search engine their way through mountains of knowledge. Fun facts abound online.

Why am I naming the obvious? Because I think contemporary poets are pulling from more disparate, syncretic pools of knowledge. This is the kind of observation that requires way too much data science to prove, but I often observe poets today writing with more categories of imagery, more fun facts, more forms of knowledge than poets of past centuries.

Okay, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf all prove me wrong here, given how erudite “The Waste Land,” Ulysses, and The Waves are.

I think contemporary poets are pulling from more disparate, syncretic pools of knowledge.

New technologies certainly threaten our attentions. I know I’m often fighting for mine. But that doesn’t mean our absolutely unmixed attention is less accessible. If anything, it makes our absolutely unmixed attention more interesting.

Poetry happens out of that deep attention in which our minds are solely attuned to language and meaning. Hicok’s poem has the added benefit of attending to one particular subject. Some poems have many subjects. Whatever the subject(s), we are just as capable of prayer as we have ever been. Perhaps it is harder to access the mind that prays, given how many notifications and screens we have to turn off first. Luckily, the “off” button is just as accessible as the “on.”

August Poetry Prompts

So! Here are a few prompts to get your attentions back—and hopefully write some new poems along the way.

Obsession as insight: Choose a topic of obsession or deep knowledge. Something you know about very, very well. Freewrite about that topic for at least 10 minutes: jot down everything you know about this topic, including what your special relationship to it is.

Once this is done, you probably have a lot of material you can start organizing into a poem. See what arises and what insights you can generate just by writing your special interest. I really like the way Paige Lewis does this with their particular depths of knowledge, as in this poem.

Close attention: Choose an object in your immediate vicinity. Something you can sit down and observe for a long period of time. It can be something experiential, too, like a song or a movie. For at least 10 minutes, write down as many observations as you have about that object: physical qualities, things or memories it reminds you of, emotions you feel, etc.

Once this is done, organize your observations into a poem. Let insight naturally arise from your observations. Make sure some aspect or quality of your object appears in every line of the poem—though deviation from this is expected when the poem demands it. This poem by Jaz Sufi is a good example.

Prayer for ____: If poems and close attention are both prayers, it follows that you can pray for anything. I’m particularly interested in secular prayer, though of course the vast landscape of religion and spirituality are welcome and inevitable.

As such, write a poem that acts as a prayer for something unexpected. A poem titled “Prayer for a Little More Gravy in This Thanksgiving Sandwich,” for example, is immediately unusual and demands to be read. (As far as I know, that poem doesn’t exist, but its yours to write if you want it!) For a real example, a professor of mine, Rochelle Hurt, has a great prayer poem titled “Prayer for Containment.”