Episode 18 - Poetry & paying attention

In this episode I explore the relationship between poetry and paying attention – the ways in which poets are mindful - noticing things that often get missed in the merry-go-round of life. In the act of making poems, poets practice a kind of mindful attention – taking notice of what is happening in, and around, themselves in a clear-sighted yet caring and compassionate way. One of the primary purposes of poetry is to celebrate and share these acts of acute attentiveness as concisely and memorably as possible. This aspect of poetry has an affinity with the practice of zazen or mindful meditation. I begin by discussing the stated aims of a few poets and then go on to offer some examples of poems that evoke the process of paying attention with care and precision.

Transcript

The Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie suggests that poets are listeners, carefully attending to the goings-on in the world, including the world of the mind. Jamie writes: 

When we were young, we were told that poetry is about voice [...] but the older I get I think [...] it’s about listening and the art of listening, listening with attention. I don’t just mean with the ear; bringing the quality of attention to the world. The writers I like best are those who attend.  (in Scott 2005: 23)

Jamie connects the act of attending, of listening, to the act of praying. When her husband was seriously ill with pneumonia, a friend asked if she had prayed, to which she replied that she hadn’t in any formal sense. But, she went on,

I had noticed [...] the cobwebs and the shoaling light and the way the doctor listened and the flecked tweed of her skirt... Isn’t that a kind of prayer? The care and maintenance of the web of our noticing, the paying heed? (ibid)

The poet, Mary Oliver, echoes Jamie’s thinking in a slightly more quizzical fashion, when she writes in her poem, The Summer Day: ‘I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. / I do know how to pay attention.’ (Oliver 2004: 54)

In a poem titled, Conversion of Brother Lawrence, the American poet, Denise Levertov, again echoes Jamie’s thoughts about attending and praying. Levertov writes about Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth century Carmelite monk, entering what she calls, ‘the unending ‘silent secret conversation,’ / the life of steadfast attention.’ (Levertov 1997: 46) This attention to the everyday, is also attention to God, to all that is, and Levertov argues that it transforms Brother Lawrence’s work, infusing ‘even drudgery [...] with streams of sparkling color.’ (ibid) In the ‘clatter and heat of a monastery kitchen,’ Lawrence practices the discipline of mindfulness, attending in silent observance to the particulars of his chore-filled life, and discovers in this practice that he has somehow opened, become more porous and receptive to the beauty and richness of being – which, in Lawrence’s and Levertov’s terms, is expressed as ‘God.’ Levertov continues: ‘Joyful, absorbed, / you ‘practiced the presence of God’ as a musician / practices hour after hour his art.’ (ibid: 47) The reference to the practice of an art, reminds us perhaps, that when we sit in mindful meditation we are also practicing an art – a discipline that enables us to notice more clearly what is going on in, and around, us.

In her marvellous biography of the Elizabethan poet, John Donne, Katherine Rundell quotes from one of Donne’s famous sermons in which he reflects on a person’s life and says: ‘… we sleep all the way; from the womb to the grave, we are never thoroughly awake.’ Rundell goes on to comment: ‘Awake, is [John] Donne’s cry. Attention, for Donne, was everything: attention paid to our mortality, and to the precise ways in which beauty cuts through us, attention to the softness of skin and the majesty of hands and feet and mouths.’ She ends this passage by suggesting that for John Donne it was important to pay ‘attention to attention itself’ (Rundell 2023: 295) And of course, here is another parallel with mindful meditation – the practice of meta-awareness, being aware of paying attention. 

To me, what Donne, and Rundell, are saying is that the vocation of a poet, and maybe the aspiration of any human being, is to wake up to this life, to the world as it is – to notice, value and honour both the tiniest detail and the magnificent wholeness of every being, event and object we experience. Surely there is here a close connection between the Buddha’s invocation to, and realisation of, awakening, and his encouragement to all of us to become truly awake and present. Through the simple practice of mindful meditation, we can learn how to pay attention and wake up to the beauty of each passing moment.

The contemporary English poet, Charles Tomlinson, also writes about attending to the here and now - about developing clear-sighted attention as a poetic discipline. Constructing precise linguistic equivalents for articulating what it is like to be in a place, however humdrum and domestic, is an important part of Tomlinson’s contemplative enquiry as a poet. In the poem, Against Travel, he writes, ‘These days are best when one goes nowhere, / The house a reservoir of quiet change.’ (Tomlinson 1997: 202) For Tomlinson it is, or it would be, more than enough if we were able to open up to the full spectrum of the phenomenal field in which we find ourselves at any moment. If we could perceive ‘only half’ of the world that is immediately around and within us, we would have no need to imagine another transcendent universe and we would have no need to believe in a transcendent being whose intentions determined the shape and direction of the world in which we stand. This world would be more than enough without resorting to speculations about another world, somehow greater, more wondrous or heavenly than this – for what could be more splendid or more real than this reality in which we participate from moment to moment? Tomlinson articulates this belief with precision and concision in his poem, Song. Here are the first three stanzas:

To enter the real

how far

must we feel beyond

the world in which we already are?

It is all here

but we are not. If we could see

and hear only half

the flawed symphony,

we might cease 

nervously to infer 

the intentions of

an unimaginable author

(ibid: 195)

A key phrase is in the second stanza: ‘It is all here / but we are not.’ It is as if we are absent or somehow removed from the very place in which we stand – as if we were blindfolded or shut off from our surroundings. If we could remove the blindfold, we would be able to ‘stand, / senses and tongues unbound.’ (ibid) For the poet, not to be able to perceive the full spectrum of sensory possibility is not to be able to voice that fullness – for when the senses are bound, so is the tongue. We cannot articulate in language what we are not able to experience and bring to mind. To be here, fully present to the relational universe in which we move, think and feel is the challenge that we all face if we are to realise the full potential of our lives. It is a challenge addressed with great tenacity and discipline by many mystics, and many poets.

I would now like to turn to the work of the American poet, Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), whose poetry seems to me to exemplify the Zen aesthetic articulated by the Chinese port, Wei T’ai, back in the eleventh-century: ‘Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling.’

Niedecker writes about the everyday sights, sounds and events of her life in ‘watery, flood-prone Black Hawk Island near the town of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin.’. (Niedecker 2002: 1) Though she lived most of her life in this somewhat remote ‘cultural backwater,’ Niedecker became a very well-known, and highly respected poet, closely associated with the movement in 1930s American poetry known as Objectivism. While her poems often focus on the objects of her perceptions, they also explore the layers of consciousness enveloped in each moment. Niedecker uses local slang and turns-of-phrase, that give a liveliness and surprise to her poems. At times there is a Surreal quality to the way sensations overlap or succeed each other in random ways. This first poem comes from a sequence titled, Homemade/Handmade Poems:

Consider at the outset:

to be thin for thought

or thick cream blossomy

Many things are better

flavoured with bacon

Sweet life, My love:

didn’t you ever try

this delicacy – the marrow

in the bone?

And don’t be afraid

to pour wine over cabbage.

(ibid: 200)

And this poem comes from another sequence titled, Linnaeus in Lappland:

Fog-thick morning –

I see only

where I now walk. I carry

                my clarity

with me.

(ibid: 181)

Anyone who practices mindful meditation will probably recognise that feeling of carrying ‘my clarity with me’ - for meditation is of little value if it does not help us to notice more clearly what is going on in, and around us, throughout our daily lives.

Gary Snyder is a contemporary American poet and environmental activist who spent time as a lay student of Zen in Japan in the 1950s. He was born in 1930 and is, thankfully, still with us. His work has a clipped, tactile quality, full of crystalline observations of his daily working life. Occasionally, as in the following poem, Snyder reflects on the transience of life and the beauty of simple pleasures. This is one of Four Poems for Robin:

I slept under       rhododendron

All night       blossoms fell

Shivering on       a sheet of cardboard

Feet stuck       in my pack

Hands deep       in my pockets

Barely     able     to     sleep.

I remembered       when we were in school

Sleeping together       in a big warm bed

We were       the youngest lovers

When we broke up       we were still nineteen.

Now our       friends are married

You teach       school back east

I don’t mind       living this way

Green hills       the long blue beach

But sometimes       sleeping in the open

I think back       to when I had you

(Snyder 1966: 133)

Another American poet, Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) lived for most of his life in New York – where he trained as a lawyer. Reznikoff used in his poetry material from his observations of urban life, from newspaper articles and transcripts of legal proceedings. Like Lorine Neideker, he was associated with the Objectivist movement, a very loose grouping of poets whose work exhibits as many differences as similarities. One feature they probably did share was a sympathy for a couple of sentences I have already mentioned from the eleventh-century Chinese poet, Wei T’ai, who wrote: ‘Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling.’ In his poetry Reznikoff bears witness to the daily life of the Jewish community of which he was a part, and to the recent traumatic history of his people, drawing on accounts from his relatives and from the legal trials that followed the Second World War.

Here are four short stanzas from a sequence in a collection titled, By the Well of Living & Seeing, published in 1974:

My grandfather, dead long before I was born,

died among strangers; and all the verse he wrote

was lost –

except for what

still speaks through me

as mine. 

                *

My grandmother in her old age

sold barley and groats at a stall

in the marketplace. She did not measure her cereal

more carefully

than I must minutes.

                *

The dying gull

alone on a rock,

wings spread and unable to fly,

lifting its head –

now and then –

with a sharp cry. 

                *

Ah, the drill

breaking open the pavement

again –

and yet again.

This is the nightingale

that sings in our streets.

(Reznikoff 1976: 105-106)

The American poet, William Carlos Williams, (1883-1963) was a family doctor in Patterson, New Jersey. His poetry combines precise, almost forensic, observations of mostly urban life, with the rhythms and distinctive phraseology of everyday speech. Some of his works are very short, distilling observations and reflections into carefully crafted poems of great resonance. Here’s one, entitled Silence:

Under a low sky -

this quiet morning

of red and

yellow leaves -

a bird disturbs

no more than one twig

of the green leaved

peach tree

(Williams 1965: 56)

Another poem is entitled, The Hurricane – it reads like this:

The tree lay down

on the garage roof

and stretched, you

have your heaven,

it said, go to it.

(ibid: 108)

There’s often irony and humour in his work, as well as great clarity of observation and evocation.

In her lovely book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard talks about the experiences of people who have had operations to remove cataracts that have blinded them since birth. She had been reading a book titled, Space and Sight, by Marius von Senden, which was full of accounts of such experiences. Dillard describes one girl who has had her bandages removed and walks in a garden and sees a tree, ‘she is greatly astonished…[and] …stands speechless.’ She touches it and stands back and describes it as ‘the tree with lights in it.’ (Dillard 1976: 38) The spangled tree is emblematic of Dillard’s own approach to writing as a mode of perception. Dillard’s whole book is about paying attention. Writing is for Dillard, a process of noticing, seeing, touching, smelling and tasting the bubbling richness of the world – and trying to convey her feelings of awe and wonder in sentences that vibrate with surprise. As if she is seeing for the first time. This is what it is to be mindful – to be aware and awake without clinging or preconceptions. Just to be here. To be alive.

Jack Kerouac (who lived from 1922-1969) was, for a time, in the 1950s, the enfant terrible of American literature - the pin-up cowboy of the Beat Generation. As well as his famous novels, On the Road and Dharma Bums, Kerouac wrote poetry that encapsulate the experience of noticing tiny details of everyday life. Many of the poems are haiku-like in their brevity and clarity, often with a touch of wry humour. Here are a few examples:

In the morning frost

the cats

step slowly

                *

In my medicine cabinet

a winter fly

has died of old age

                *

The sound of silence

is all the instruction

you’ll get

Another American poet, Kenneth Rexroth, (1905-1982) was a father-figure and mentor to many of the Beat Generation poets. Many of his poems are acts of noticing with an intensity that can be likened to mystical experiences of being-here. There is both vividness and quietness to his writing – a deep empathy with the transience of all things and a reflective acceptance of our mortality. Great beauty lies all around us – if only we pay attention and appreciate. Here is most of a poem titled, Empty Mirror, in which the poet sits by the fireside pondering on life - its dramas and its humdrum details.

…... I sit

In my ten-foot square hut.

The birds sing. The bees hum.

The leaves sway. The water 

Murmurs over the rocks.

The canyon shuts me in.

If I moved, Basho’s frog

Would splash in the pool.

All summer long the gold

Laurel leaves fell through space.

Today I was aware

Of a maple leaf floating

On the pool. In the night

I stare into the fire.

Once I saw fire cities,

Towns, palaces, wars,

Heroic adventures,

In the campfires of youth.

Now I see only fire.

My breath moves quietly.

The stars move overhead.

In the clear darkness

Only a small red glow

Is left in the ashes.

On the table lies a cast

Snake skin and an uncut stone.

(Rexroth 1966: 223)

W.S. Merwin (1927- 2019) is another highly-respected and influential American poet. From the 1970s onwards he lived in Hawaii on an old pineapple plantation that he worked to restore to its original rainforest condition. Merwin was twice the U.S. poet laureate and a practicing Buddhist. I would like to read this one poem of his that is both a statement of his poetic aspirations and an affirmation of his belief in the wonder and ordinariness of everyday life – a life of great richness and meaning if only we pay attention to each moment. The poem is titled, A Momentary Creed:

I believe in the ordinary day

that is here at this moment and is me

I do not see it going its own way

but I never saw how it came to me

it extends beyond whatever I may

think I know and all that is real to me

it is the present that it bears away

where has it gone when it has gone from me

there is no place I know outside today

except for the unknown all around me

the only presence that appears to stay

everything I call mine it lent me

even the way that I believe the day

for as long as it is here and is me

(Merwin 2009: 110)

Only because it is a particular favourite of mine, here is another poem by Gary Snyder, it is a free translation of a poem by the Japanese writer, Miyazawa Kenji who lived from 1896-1933. The title is, The Great Power Line Pole:

rain and clouds drift to the ground

susuki-grass red ears washed

fields fresh and live

and the great power line pole of Hanamaki

sparrows on a hundred insulators

then off to pillage a ricefield

whish whish whish whish flying

light of rain and cloud

and nimbly sweeping back to the hundred insulators

at the fork in the Hanamaki road

sparrows

(Snyder 1966: 106)

Power lines, insulators, and even sparrows, may seem like odd subjects for poetry – but I hope you agree with me that if we are mindful and can set aside our preconceptions and judgmental attitudes, even the most mundane of experiences become sacred and special – transformed by the act of paying attention.

Since I first read his collection, Ring of Bone, in the nineteen-seventies, I have always thought these lines by the American poet, Lew Welch (1926-1971), encapsulate something of the experience of zazen and other forms of mindful meditation. It seems a fitting way to end this talk.

I saw myself

a ring of bone

in the clear stream

of all of it

and vowed,

always to be open to it

that all of it

might flow through

(Welch 1973: 77)

I hope I might have convinced you by now that the writing and reading of poetry can be wonderful methods of opening to the world – ways of waking up to the wonder and preciousness of life.It seems to me that poetry, as an art of noticing and appreciating, can be considered as being itself a Dharma Road – another way of being mindful.

Thank you for listening and bye for now.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Danvers, John. 2012. Agents of uncertainty: mysticism, scepticism, Buddhism, art & poetry. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Dillard, Annie.1976. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. London: Picador.

Kerouac, Jack. 2004. Book of Haikus. London: Enitharmon Press.

Levertov, Denise. 1997. The Stream and the Sapphire: Selected Poems on Religious Themes. New York: New Directions.

Merwin, W.S. 2009. The shadow of Sirius. Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books.

Oliver, Mary. 2004. Wild Geese: Selected Poems. Northumberland, UK: Bloodaxe.

Rexroth, Kenneth. 1966. The collected shorter poems of Kenneth Rexroth. New York: New Directions.

Rexroth, Kenneth. 1974. New Poems. New York: New Directions.

Reznikoff, Charles. 1976. By the well of living & seeing: new & selected poems 1918-1973. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press.

Rundell, Katherine. 2023. Super-infinite: The Transformations of John Donne. London: Faber & Faber.

Scott, Kirsty. 2005. ‘In the Nature of Things: a profile of Kathleen Jamie’ in Guardian Review (18 June 2005).

Snyder, Gary. 1966. A Range of Poems. London: Fulcrum Press.

Tomlinson, Charles. 1997. Selected Poems: 1955-1997. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Williams, William Carlos. 1965. The Collected Later Poems. London: MacGibbon & Kee.