FORMS OF POETIC ATTENTION
LUCY ALFORD
Introduction What Is Poetic Attention?
People are grabbing at the chance to see the earth before the end of the world, the world’s death piece by piece each longer than we. — E D RO B E RSO N
Redwood City, California
I
t is October. The neighborhood bar where I write is illuminated with two football games playing simultaneously. I have my phone on the bar table, my laptop open. One ear takes in (but doesn’t really follow) both games, another takes in the bizarre conversation at the next table, which is somewhere between networking meeting and Tinder date. Amid all this, I’ve been reading and rereading a poem by James Wright, “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” and a line has caught in my mind, bringing everything to stop on a word. The poem goes like this: In the Shreve High football stadium, I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood, And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel, Dreaming of heroes. All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home, Their women cluck like starved pullets, Dying for love.
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Therefore, Their sons grow suicidally beautiful At the beginning of October, And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.1 The poem turns on the word “therefore,” and the necessarily long mental space that precedes it, which it creates in its turn. Semantically, the poem enacts a series of removes, lifting off from the immediate context of the high school stadium to the mental recollections or reflections on other spaces: bars at workday’s end, steel mill work lines, then the step back to the collectivity of “all the proud fathers” and “their women.” “Dying for love” draws to a full stop. Rhythmically, nothing can follow the absolute downbeat of “love.” At “Therefore,” the poem gathers itself into a hairpin turn of pure force, a kind of blast of wind smiting from above or beyond. The language darkens toward an epicentric closure in “suicidally beautiful,” and the final line and its final word, unnecessary and necessary at the same time, knock me flat. Wright could have stopped at “each other,” but people don’t gallop terribly: bodies do, bodies of matter and force and velocity, charged with suicidal beauty. The poem could not take a single additional line. Its brevity is power, earthbound by the working-class proper names and populational markers: Tiltonsville, Benwood, Wheeling Steel, Polacks and Negroes, grayed with labor as the watchman is ruptured by night and by long-held insomniac vigilance. For the past ten years, partially imprinted in the pages of this book, I’ve been thinking about attention. More to the immediate point, I’ve been mulling over, in scenes like the one snapped above, what it means to read a poem like Wright’s, or a psalm like 137, or a fragment of Sappho, or a line like Edward Taylor’s “let this be a vent hole,” in a place like this: the Silicon Valley, in the Hoover Tower’s surveillant shadow, in 2016. Facebook opened up shop near my small cottage, and kombucha has made its way into the once-shabby grunge coffeeshop on the corner, and if you can say you know Drupal on a job application you’re playing a whole different game than if you said you’ve got a reading of Dante that will change everything. And running through all these changes is an obsession with harnessing attention, attention being the one hero that might take us through the web, the webs, and leave us semi-intact at the end of the day, and the capital currency that can boost our productivity and mindfulness quotient at
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the same time, draining our accounts along the way. We’re told to pay attention to twittering petitions and to Kickstarter campaigns, but also to the increasingly abstract flood of Syrian refugees, all while “slowing down” and baking more bread, making more things ourselves, and at the same time moving more of our lives into linked format, hypertext, bit and Bitcoin and sound bite and GIF.2 At a gut level, I know that the kind of operation Wright’s “therefore” performs in my mind is experientially different from the kinds of attention valued at this particular cultural moment. This difference, and all the differences contained within it, are the subject of this book. Thinking about “therefore” and its reshaping of the space-time (textual and readerly) that surrounds it entails and inspires a consideration of how other poems activate and manipulate shifts in the field of spatiotemporal perception we call attention. It inspires a consideration of how attention, under the radar of all our other critical tools and terms, operates in poems as medium and mode. I house this observation and its internal investigations under the name poetic attention: the ways attention is formed by poetic language in readerly and writerly experience. This book is an exploration of the multitude of forms “poetic form” assumes, and an attempt to trace the dance of attention within as far-reaching an archive of poetic examples as my linguistic capabilities allow— or, if I am honest, as far as slightly beyond that horizon. Admittedly, my own capacities for both reading and attention are limited, and my exploration is the imprint of that limitation. I consider the structures I unfold to be invitations for further investigation and attention.
Form The notion of poetic form is as old and familiar as the study of poetry itself, an easy shorthand for “how poems work.” But what exactly is formed in a poem? Do we mean its shape on the page? Its sound in the ear? Its sequence of images? Yes and no. “Yes” because critics and students can fashion conventional interpretations of poems that have to do with shape, sound, and images. But “no” because in a sense each of these common terms stands in for something else. It is true that poetic language is densely formed. But what is formed by and in poetic language is an event of attention generated
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in the acts of both reading and writing. I suggest that a poem might be better understood not simply as a gathering of composed formal features, but as an instrument for tuning and composing the attention.3 This book tests this premise, analyzing how poems compose attention and how attention is in turn poetry’s most essential “raw material.” Not only an interpretation of poems in terms of how they dispose attention, the book theorizes the process of attention-making itself: its objects, its coordinates, its variables. Drawing on primarily twentieth and twenty-first- century North American poets such as Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Anne Carson, and Claudia Rankine, this book gives language to the particular forms of attention poems both produce and require. This investigation is a kind of bidirectional lens, looking at poetic form through the lens of attention and looking at attention through the lens of poetic form. The bidirectionality of my focus is fitting, since attention itself is a bidirectional lens: the way we attend to the world changes the world we perceive, and the world we perceive changes the way we attend. Thinking about how attention operates in the context of a work of art, whether textual, sculptural, filmic, or musical, the same holds true: we bring a certain kind and quality of attention to the work by virtue of our in-the-moment cognitive and emotional capacities, our cultural context, and previous attention training, and the work, in turn, shapes and manipulates our attention through its form and thematic evocations. Attention has been an underlying theme in poetic theory since Aristotle but has not, until recently, been explicitly acknowledged or given extended analysis. With the emergence of the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of attention studies, this is beginning to change. Recent literary scholarship has explored the play of attention in individual poets (Donne, Lawrence, Ashbery), periods (the eighteenth century, Romanticism, the digital age), and politics (spectacle and cultural commodification, post- 911 America).4 Making explicit the centrality of attention to poetic experience as such, this book addresses the dynamics of poetic attention transhistorically and examines the modes of this poetic attention that take shape in specific poems. Doing so has required developing a lexicon built at the intersection of cognitive and literary studies, one that articulates the multifaceted nature of poetic attention by parsing its variables. As I show, the variety of forms of poetic attention yields a rich object of analysis within which we find as many nuances and subtleties as there are individual poems. [ 4 ] I N T RO D U C T I O N
Unfolding a Language The categories I develop in this book are intended as functional tools— they offer a flexible language for describing a variety of forms of poetic attention and how they work. They are both the products and primary offerings of this investigation. These terms derive from my direct observation of the dynamics of attention suggested in a variety of individual poems, complemented by philosophical and empirical research on attention and poetic theory. My development of these terms is thus primarily a bottomup, phenomenological process. For ease of reference, I have included a conceptual outline at the end of this introduction. Readers may find it useful as we move into chapters that delve into the workings of specific poems. The first half of this book focuses on the dynamics of transitive attention, or modes of attention that take an object. I consider how the poem, an object itself, composes the object of transitive attention formally, semantically, and figuratively. Drawing on attention studies in phenomenology, psychology, and cognitive science, I identify five dynamic coordinates, which can be thought of as the “moving parts” of transitive attention: intentionality, interest, selectivity, spatiotemporal remove, and apprehension. These five moving variables combine to shape a given act, event, or experience of transitive attention. I then explore this process as it plays out in four primary poetic modes: contemplation (reading Francis Ponge, Seamus Heaney, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and Harryette Mullen), desire (Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, George Oppen, Amy Lowell, Robert Hass, and Audre Lorde), recollection (Al-Khansā’, Geoffrey Hill, Paul Celan, Anne Carson, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha), and imagination (Samuel Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Rainer Maria Rilke, and John Burnside). In each case, I constellate poems that engage with a common mode of transitive attention, showing how the coordinates come together dynamically. Exploring these common poetic modes through the lens and lexicon of attention reveals their workings as particular modes of attending, each derived through a specific combination of transitive attention’s constitutive elements. For example, in the chapter on desire, I show how Emily Dickinson’s poem “I had been Hungry all the Years” not only describes but composes a mode of desirous attention through the maintenance of lack, withholding the image of ample bread from the reader’s eyes, syntactically keeping the reader in a state of attentional hunger. I N T RO D U C T I O N
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In part 2, I turn to intransitive attention, exploring modes of poetic attention that are objectless. As in part 1, I begin by thinking through the variable elements that combine to generate a given act of intransitive attention. These coordinates include intentionality, scope, the presence or absence of an indirect object, temporal inflection, and the effect on the subject-space of poetic attention (its expansion, contraction, or kenosis). Having unpacked the moving parts of intransitive attention, I then explore how they blend and interact in four poetic modes: vigilance (in Friedrich Hölderlin and Stéphane Mallarmé), resignation (Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Wright), idleness (Frank O’Hara, A. R. Ammons, and Joan Retallack), and boredom (Charles Bukowski, Thom Gunn, and T. S. Eliot). Placing these very different poetic examples in conversation with one another serves to reveal the complexity of each mode. For example, considering three very different approaches to idled attention in the work of O’Hara, Ammons, and Retallack, I show that idleness as poetic form involves a tension between the playful, conversational, and exploratory potentials of poetry and the intensity of formal precision required to bring it about: the honing of attention toward the perfectly slack line. As I show, in O’Hara and Retallack’s work idleness comes into play most actively in the compositional process, whereas in Ammons idleness is embodied and produced by the form of the poem. These three approaches highlight both the historicity and transhistoricity of idleness as a mode of poetic attention: On the one hand, all three poets are interested in a specific historical urgency surrounding the need for idleness in modern and contemporary American life. At the same time, by engaging with much older discourses on idleness, their work underscores a longer relationship between creativity and play, between idle hours and the making of song and story.
Historical Inflection Stated simply, poetic attention is the attention produced, required, or activated by a poem. But, of course, it is not that simple: there are so many ways that poems engage our attention, so many different minds contained in this “our,” and both change historically and contextually. Any event of poetic attention takes place at a complex site: the intersection of multidirectional relationships between reader, writer, and text (or other poetic material). Each of these relationships is formed and constituted by attentional [ 6 ] I N T RO D U C T I O N
dynamics, from the relationship between writer and poem-in-progress to the relationship between poem and reader. Each, moreover, is informed by and responsive to environmental factors such as sociopolitical context, poetic convention, prevailing modes of reading, and the attention cultures surrounding both the act of writing and the act of reading. Thus poetic attention is always historically inflected. Yet the phenomenon of poetic attention itself is also transhistorical, as old and as central to poetry as language itself. Modern and contemporary America, with its intrinsic diversity of languages and national origins, the conflux of native and immigrant populations, as well as its rapid urbanization, industrialization, and technological change, offers a rich and complex site to consider attention dynamics both in poetic work and in the social and cultural environment. The attentional challenges posed by each of the modern poems considered here, from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to Anne Carson’s Nox, must be understood as a part of a larger constellation of aesthetic movements toward increasing experimentation, nonreferentiality, and ambiguity beginning with modernity and moving through the twentieth century. At the same time, many of the attentional concerns worked out and worked over in so much modern and contemporary poetry are to be found in premodern poetry; indeed, these concerns are intrinsic to the form of poetry itself. Considering the formation and reformation of attention in modern and contemporary poetry offers a vantage point from which to look back, through the lines of influence, translation, and adaptation, at poetic attention’s longer history. In order to honor and illustrate the transhistorical yet historically inflected nature of poetic attention, this book draws from a wide-ranging archive. While focusing primarily on modern and contemporary North American poetry, I constellate my examples with earlier Western and nonWestern poetries, from an ancient Egyptian love song to a Sapphic fragment to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, that share specific attentional dynamics. In selecting my examples, I chose poems that clearly demonstrate a given mode as well as classics whose interpretation might seem conventional or rote. For example, rereading Sonnet 18 with an eye for its attentional dynamics reveals how Shakespeare accomplishes a shift in the speaker’s focus, generating tension between two simultaneous objects of love—the semantic object (“thee”) and the formal object (“this,” the poem itself ). Reading poems for how they shape, orient, and inflect a plurality of I N T RO D U C T I O N
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attentional pathways requires examining the formal dimensions of poetic works where they intersect with readerly attention, on the one hand, and with writerly attention, on the other, considering how both readerly and writerly attention, as well as the formal dynamics of the poem, are situated historically.
Po(i)etic Attention In developing the term poetic attention, I intend the word poetic to function on two levels: first, the literal. The formal, material, historical, cognitive, and sensory availabilities of poetry make the attentional experiences of reading and writing poetry different from those produced by other media. Poems are made of language: aural, graphic, semantic and symbolic; on paper, on screen, in the ear, signed by the hands. Because processes of thinking, sense-making, and perception are also deeply rooted in and bound to our language-making systems, poetry takes place close to the bone of our perceptual and attentional hardware, at the least remove from the medium of thought and response. Moreover, while they are composed in such a materially minimalistic medium as language, the polyvalent nature of language as medium— that language lives in sound, logical pattern, rhythm, graphic sign, and bodily gesture—makes it a uniquely (and perhaps unexpectedly) multisensory aesthetic medium, engaging and requiring attention on a variety of sensory, logical, and emotional planes at the same time. But the poetic also moves beyond the collection of loosely related entities convention has called poems. In this second sense of poetic attention, I intend the first term to modify the latter, suggesting modes of attention that function poetically: attentional acts and modalities that are fundamentally noninstrumental, not subjugated to the conveyance or extraction of information, and not in the service of rhetorical persuasion. Poems might also contain information and might also be argumentative, but these are not their poetic qualities, in the sense that I use the word here. And, usually, edification and argumentation are accomplished more effectively in other genres. Poems can do a lot of things, but they don’t make the best lectures. Given the focus of recent debates, at least in Anglophone poetics, on the history and theory of the lyric, readers may wonder why this term is not more central to this book. The lyric and lyrical are often, it’s true, used [ 8 ] I N T RO D U C T I O N
as shorthand for the poem and the poetic. And, as Virginia Jackson has pointed out, the normative genre characteristics of the lyric (individual voice, temporal suspension, subjective interiority) have, since Romanticism, been imposed on a wide variety of historically specific texts (jingles, lists, and letters, but also epics and ballads) that could do with more elbow room to be what they are, not generically pigeonholed through critical “lyricization.”5 While I find this claim compelling, I also find it both important and useful to view objects of formed language comparatively and transhistorically, and the constellation of qualities that gathers around the term lyric offers rich veins connecting the far reaches of the porous and evolving territory of poetry. Lyric, with its ancient roots in song, voices one aspect, one modality of poetic making— of poiesis. And it is this act of making— an act I see taking place (as event) in the medium of attention, that centers my focus on the poetic rather than the lyrical. In this sense, while Jonathan Culler attributes the “ritual” dimension of the lyric poem, its standing as event, with the word lyric, I see the central “event” as poetic—lyric-making being one kind of poetic event.6 I think of poems, and thus the poetic, as dynamic, porous entities. As Jahan Ramazani has shown in Poetry and Its Others, poems partake in, contribute to, and cross-weave the boundaries of many modalities of language use.7 These certainly include song, but also prayer, play, propaganda, and reportage. In this book, I explore many kinds of poems. Some (including two by Dickinson) could easily be categorized as lyrics. Others (Joan Retallack’s Errata 5uite, for example) can be seen as deliberately antilyrical. Some work within and stretch the boundaries of conventional form, others draw form out of chaos. But they are all poems, and as poems they are all composed by, and compose in turn, acts and events of attention.
Reading, Reaching As event, the poem takes place in the reading (or recitation) of it. And yet it is itself the product of an event of attention. And that event of attention, the writing and crafting of poetic language, is itself the product (to the extent that one can separate process and product) of another event of attention—the writer’s attention to the world and to language. Language itself constitutes a relationship of attention to the world. Language is the site of that relationship and embodies its reach and its limitations. I N T RO D U C T I O N
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This reach of poetic language is attentive, both phenomenologically and etymologically. In Edmund Husserl, attention is a physical act of tendingor, more aptly, tensing-toward.8 My method in these investigations begins in noticing, reaching, and tensing toward poems. Based on direct phenomenological observation, the investigative work is carried out in the “twofold energy of the mind.”9 Looking at once at the poems I consider, and at the movement of my own attention in response, I use a combined process of induction and deduction to suggest possible categories for the synthetic movements of poetic attention. While I draw on literary, philosophical, and psychological research on attention and poetic experience to develop my own concepts and terminology, my reflections on the poems themselves are thus deeply subjective, rooted in firsthand acts of attention.10 This approach locates me in a limited position, bound by my own blind spots and conditioned lenses, which I have kept in mind throughout my theorization of poetic attention. I have chosen this precarious vantage point between subjectivity and objectivity because poetic attention is itself positioned between the subjective experiences, moods, and capacities of any given reader, and the objective formal and thematic features “really existing” in the poem. Because I am engaged in reading poems written by others, I focus for the most part on the readerly arm of this relational web. At the same time, I try to listen beyond the horizon of my individual and momentary reading experience, paying attention to how the poem works and what kind of reading it seems to ask of the hypothetical subject-space of an implied reader.11
Subjects and Objects This leads to an essential question: who is the subject of poetic attention? The subject of poetic attention, as I conceive it here, is a postulated subjectspace, the attentional space opened up (or proposed) by the form of the poem itself.12 The subject of poetic attention should not be equated with the speaker of the poem (where there is one). The speaking voice of a lyric poem is one formal feature among others that contributes to the shaping of poetic attention— a unique feature in that it exercises an act of attention in the poem, and that act of attention shapes the content (thematic and formal) of the poem itself, as well as its effect on the reader’s attention. The presence of a speaker is one of the effects the poem has been designed [ 10 ]
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p r a i s e f o r Forms of Poetic Attention “Lucy Alford awakens us to the subtle powers and true breathing room that poems extend to us. Her focus ranges from Sappho to pre-Islamic poetry through the Renaissance to French and German modernism and the living poets of North America as she attends to the emergent forms of individual works and the manifold experiences of their reception. Close or far, immediate or withdrawn, vivid or abstract, with or without present subjects and objects, poets and their readers begin in perception and arrive at an ethics of care and even love.”
S U S A N S T E W A R T , Avalon Foundation University Professor of the Humanities, Princeton University “Widely read in modern poetry and in philosophical, psychological, and sociological studies of attention, Alford has produced a boldly ambitious book with a new take on poetry in general and the sorts of things it can do. She explores how poems shape and are shaped by different kinds of attention with authority, eloquence, and sureness of touch.”
J O N A T H A N C U L L E R , author of Theory of the Lyric “Alford’s elegant and original book incisively distinguishes among the various forms of poetic attention. Fusing lyrical responsiveness with sharp-eyed analysis, it offers supple and intricate readings of attention in a stunningly transnational and transhistorical array of poems, from ancient Egypt and Greece to contemporary America.”
J A H A N R A M A Z A N I , author of Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres “Alford proposes a truly new taxonomy of interest to any student of poetry and poetics: how do poems hold our attention? What are the separable ways in which they do so? How does a poem send us back out into the rest of the world, and when does it encourage us to go, and to stay, nowhere? These questions apply not just to particular poets but to the whole of a literary enterprise: Alford gives us an acoustically and aesthetically sensitive way to talk about poems from varying languages and periods and about the diversity within their unity.”
S T E P H A N I E B U R T , author of Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems
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