The Joy of Attention

The summer I moved to Missoula to study poetry, smoke from a controlled burn outside of town blanketed the valley. The National Guard gated the forest roads, allowing the fire to regenerate the bristlecone pines, their cones requiring heat to open and release seeds for new growth. As the smoke drifted and settled on the rooftops of the university district, the streetlights cast the town with a muted greenish-yellow glow in the middle of the afternoon. I’d moved into an attic apartment in a blue Victorian house; ash dusted its backyard plum tree and bordering sunflowers. I was awed by the verdant and dynamic landscape, its reminder of nature’s capacity for renewal.

In our workshop, we approached poetics as an accounting: We were instructed to return to a place at the same time every day and write in a notebook a list of what we saw and what had changed. Each afternoon, I observed my backyard, its plum tree, its sunflowers, then wandered down to the riverbank, listing what I saw: oak trees with buds that smelled like cranberry holiday candles and yellowjackets with thoraxes thick as antique brooches. As evening approached, streetlights blinked on under the blue slate sky, highlighting the aluminum crinkle of the water beneath the trees’ lace boughs. In the park, dandelions were tucked into the grass like golden Sacagawea coins. When I first walked along the park’s lamplit sidewalk, simple objects were most luminous in the moments in which they coined new metaphors.

As a requirement of the course, we were asked to refrain from using metaphor. The reasons were twofold: First, our professors wanted us to avoid the trending, internet-centric, satirical forms of poetry that were popular online at the time, such as the Flarf movement. They urged us to aim our attention on what was in front of us, to locate emotional truth in objects and their nouns—as William Carlos Williams says, “no ideas but in things.” Observing things as they were, not as we interpreted them or hoped for them to become, would mitigate the powers of the psychoanalytic processes involved in the creation of metaphor. Through diligent observation we’d cleanse our imaginative palettes; we’d alter the present through direct naming language, elicit our poetry from simple artifacts.

In a separate notebook, I continued to record my sometimes-outsized similes and metaphors, but attuned myself to the practice of seeing. Each afternoon, I returned to the park and diligently noted changes: a leaf of grass pinned to the ground leapt forward in an arc; a branch notched between rocks swirled in an eddy until it found a hold on a piece of debris or angled into the current. In the park, people gathered to read on quilts, walk the weaving sidewalk, play catch with their pups while foxes zipped from the hedges into their burrows, their white-tip tails raised in soft copper arrows.

One afternoon, two men arrived independently with their retrievers. The animals, athletic, euphoric, with quivering speckled snouts were attentive to their owners—one dazzled as she played catch with her stick while the other decompressed, panting with a bright pink tongue. It was a normal day: bright sun, green grass, dandelions radiating in the scrub, their discs so broad and bright that the park looked like a video game. Attuned to my notebook, I noted only what I saw, not my interpretation of it. I stored the video game in the back of my mind and smelled the oak buds as oak buds and not as cranberry holiday candles. Their distinction in my sensory field wasn’t determined by the novelty of a simile’s referential tether or the haunted comfort of two entities subsumed within each other in love or in metaphor. It was the vividness of transformation: a cloud passed by overhead; a grass slope darkened and brightened in equal measure; and as it did, the dandelion gained intensity at the sky’s brightest moment, in the collusion of plant, sun, cloud, and everything else in sight, all in a moment of change.

Ahead, the man to my left was playing catch with his retriever. She’d sourced her enormous branch from the incline and was feasting her eyes on its wobbly arc, dashing to fetch it each time her owner tossed it. To my other side, the other man sat with his pup, a slightly older retriever who sat by his side, her flashing eyes on the toy but devoted to her owner. The men and animals were visitors in casual adjacency and separation from each other, united and independent in their leisure. Then, the man to the left tossed the big stick. It wasn’t potent in his hand but it gained potency as it spun, divvying the sunlight like the lace flare at the edge of a candle’s flame. Its whir caught the eye of the resting pup, who rose from her repose to tail her neighbor. The two charged the stick. Paws flashing, seizing the dirt cached beneath the dandelions, they soared in unison and caught the stick together.

The two animals, twinned, landed side by side, the stick in both of their jaws. Their eyes brightened, tuned toward each other, and in the instant recognition of the shared hunger for play—the mental and physical challenge of the hunt or the game—the twins took off, stick in both of their teeth. They sprinted side by side in a common aim, their intent narrowed on the trail, gaits synchronized. Each animal had been a being at work or at rest, and then they were a dynamic force, in synthesis. They charged the circuit of their daily walk in exhilarated attention.

I wouldn’t have witnessed this alchemy if I hadn’t set out to observe smaller beings: the oak buds, the dandelions; the plums, the sunflowers. When I slowed to observe each—as it was, not how I desired to interpret it to others—I sensed each object’s distinct gravity and its buoyant specificity. The act of observing became the site of transformation; to truly see a thing invites it to evolve. In accounting for what I saw, I encountered a visual field as it was and celebrated it as poetry. In ritualizing my search for the concrete, I discovered a world alive in its specificity, the twinned animals linked in instinct, buoyed by the chase, linked as equal beings vibrant in conspiracy, channeling action so pure and undiluted that it was rivaled only by the current.

The Joy of Attention: Generative Activity

Activity Materials

A notebook

Suggested Readings

• Carolyn Forché’s Blue Hour
• Jane Miller’s American Odalisque
• C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining

Poet’s Note and Educational Goals

Although I initially adopted a ritual visitation practice as a workshop activity at the University of Montana, I’ve since adapted the prompt into a generative practice for my own writing students. In the course of reading intricate durational and documentary works, I invite beginning and advanced writers to develop evolving, continuous, durational poems that take shape through the immersive use of an ethnographic model of creative research. Drawing from sensory ethnographic practices in sociocultural anthropology, I introduce students to the acts of attention, observation, and self-reflection as the arts of inhabiting, sensing, and recording. This approach requires them to intentionally center qualitative research, metacognition, and creative generation in a documentary process that’s responsive to the environment and is designed to continue as an open-ended exercise.

The learning objectives for this assignment include becoming familiar with ethnography as an art practice and developing a diverse linguistic palette of commercial and colloquial vocabulary. Through this activity, writers develop spatial awareness and empathetic relationships within an environment through a meticulous engagement with a site as they record consecutive sensory observations and moments of transition between kinetic states, for instance, presence and absence, movement and stasis. Ultimately, these insights encourage a gradual, intentional understanding of how poetic sequences unfold. Writers are empowered to explore poetics as an immersive practice and discover how poems can serve as diaries and field notes, charts and maps, and travelogues.

Generative Activity

Choose a place that you can visit daily for a set duration, whether it’s a week, a month, or a year. This could be a favorite neighborhood spot or a place as familiar as a view from a bedroom window. Make it a habit to visit this place at the same time each day. 

Starting from the first page of your notebook, record what you see, hear, smell, feel, and taste during each visit. Aim to record at least six new observations each time.

Don’t worry about the amount of time you spend writing during each visit; five minutes can be just as productive as five hours. On days when you’re pressed for time, allow yourself to simply record: “ailanthus, roof moss, fireplace wood smoke, fence squirrel, birdbath.” Phrases can be just as powerful as full sentences. Note the small observations as much as the significant ones: “eclipse.”

When you notice that something in the visual field has changed, be sure to reflect on this change. Observe movement in addition to stasis. Pay attention to the appearance of new items and the absences of others. Familiarize yourself with the specifics of your environment: Are there names for the plants you observe? Consider the neighborhood and its human geographies: List the names of streets and businesses, parks and memorials, the names of the residents of the houses you can see from your vantage point. Take note of the environment, the state of the yard, the size and dimensions of the buildings. Identify the names of the cloud formations overhead. Resist the urge to create metaphor or simile; instead, log what you see. Recognize the world for what it is.

Allow the writings to accumulate. Celebrate the serene nature of repetition, the jarring and exhilarating feelings that arise when a pattern changes. Be receptive to surprises that may arise in your visits. 

When you’ve honored your commitment to document the environment, it’s time to reflect on your process. Beginning with the last page of the notebook, write in reverse until you reach the place where you recorded your initial observations, then continue to write in the margins, filling every blank space. Consider the notebook’s contents as a continuous encounter. Write on the page and in the tabs. Write until your reflections on your process become entangled with your observations; let the notebook become a gnarled and ecstatic poem.

When you’re ready, transcribe the writings and reflections from your notebook into a document. Rearrange the material into a documentary poem that explores the experiences you’ve recorded. Once you’re satisfied with your poem, reflect on your creative process: Consider how the practice of poetry invites you to immerse yourself in and engage with your environment. What insights have you gained about the relationship between attention and creation? How has this generative exercise increased your somatic connection to your environment, enhanced your empathy for your surroundings, and shaped your relationship with the practice of poetics?