What is the work of attention? How do we train ourselves to attend to the world around us? Is attention simply looking? Listening? Smelling? Tasting? Stilling ourselves and feeling our breath, the ground under us, the points of connection between our bodies and the ground, the chair we sit on? Is attention slowing ourselves, pausing, observing? The act of attention, the habit of attention is the foundation of good writing–it is the meat, the drink, the daily bread. Writers are often people watchers, world watchers–we love to walk, to take notes. We love to look up at the pines, to watch the birds. Practice attention, practice listening. “Writers notice what they notice,” says Verlyn Klinkenborg.
“[…] keep a journal in which [you] write, very briefly, six things [you see] each day—not beautiful or remarkable things, just things.”
Linda Gregg, The Art of Finding
Your prompt this week is to start keeping a notebook of attention, where you write down six ordinary things you notice every day. That’s it. And here is a longer explanation of where the prompt originates, from the poet Linda Gregg:
I am astonished in my teaching to find how many poets are nearly blind to the physical world. They have ideas, memories, and feelings, but when they write their poems they often see them as similes. To break this habit, I have my students keep a journal in which they must write, very briefly, six things they have seen each day—not beautiful or remarkable things, just things. This seemingly simple task usually is hard for them. At the beginning, they typically “see” things in one of three ways: artistically, deliberately, or not at all. Those who see artistically instantly decorate their descriptions, turning them into something poetic: the winter trees immediately become “old men with snow on their shoulders,” or the lake looks like a “giant eye.” The ones who see deliberately go on and on describing a brass lamp by the bed with painful exactness. And the ones who see only what is forced on their attention: the grandmother in a bikini riding on a skateboard, or a bloody car wreck. But with practice, they begin to see carelessly and learn a kind of active passivity until after a month nearly all of them have learned to be available to seeing—and the physical world pours in. Their journals fill up with lovely things like, “the mirror with nothing reflected in it.” This way of seeing is important, even vital to the poet, since it is crucial that a poet see when she or he is not looking—just as she must write when she is not writing. To write just because the poet wants to write is natural, but to learn to see is a blessing. The art of finding in poetry is the art of marrying the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human.
The Line Break 