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After the Shape of Attention

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

This past Saturday, I had the pleasure of teaching The Shape of Attention: Exploring Form in Poetry and Prose through The Notebooks Collective.

I went into the workshop thinking about form as a way of paying attention. Over the course of two hours, we considered how a piece’s shape changes what becomes possible on the page. A form can create pressure. It can give permission. It can move the mind from one image or thought to another. It can interrupt habits we may not even realize we’re bringing to the page.

The group was lively and open. I was grateful for the seriousness and curiosity participants brought to the prompts. There was thoughtful discussion and some real exploratory writing happening in the room.

As part of the workshop, we looked at two poems that helped us think through different possibilities of form.

First, we discussed Sarah A. Chavez’s poem “Dear Carole, My favorite times,” in terms of address and its effect on attention. With this poem, we considered how address creates a listener. Speaking toward someone changes the direction of the poem’s attention, and can shape tone, intimacy, memory, risk, and movement.

Before we discussed the poem, I shared an image of the chapbook it appears in, like everything else we loved (Porkbelly Press). I chose that image because of a small personal history: I teach a literary publishing class, and a few years ago, one of my students worked closely with Chavez’s chapbook for an assignment and connected with it deeply. I ended up gifting my copy to them. It meant a lot to pass the book forward in that way, and the photo reminds me how meaningful that book was in the classroom and beyond it.

We also discussed Marwa Helal’s “POEM TO BE READ FROM RIGHT TO LEFT” in terms of form as interruption. The note accompanying the poem describes it as written in a form Helal created called The Arabic, a form that includes an Arabic letter, an Arabic footnote, and an Arabic numeral, preferably written right to left.

In class, I made clear that the point was not to imitate Helal’s culturally and linguistically specific form. Instead, we used the poem as an example of how form can interrupt the habits of reading itself. The poem asks the reader to become aware of direction, language, assumption, and the physical act of moving through a text. It refuses the ease of a default path.

Together, these poems helped us think about two different kinds of shaping. Chavez’s poem shows how address can gather memory and feeling toward a particular presence. Helal’s poem shows how form can disrupt and make visible the expectations a reader brings to the page.

Those ideas guided the workshop’s larger questions:

What does this shape allow?
What does it pressure?
What does it make visible?
What does it interrupt?
What kind of attention does this form make possible?

I’m grateful to The Notebooks Collective for hosting the workshop and to everyone who attended for their insights and willingness to experiment. I’ll be sharing details later of another TNC virtual workshop I’ll be doing in September focused on revision.

José

The Shape of Attention: Two New Books & an Upcoming Workshop

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is how form shapes attention.

In this attention-forward sense, form is the shape a piece of writing takes: how it moves, what it holds, what it refuses, what it makes possible. A poem or essay’s form can be a container, a pressure, an interruption, a permission. It can show us not only what a writer is looking at, but how they are asking us to look.

This applies to fixed forms, like the way writing a sonnet places you in conversation with the history of sonnets, as well as more exploratory forms. Poetic epistles, for example, take the intimacy of writing a letter and make that direct address a poetic space. TL;DR: choices in form affect the overall vibe.

I’ve had this on my mind as I get ready to teach my upcoming virtual workshop, The Shape of Attention: Exploring Form in Poetry and Prose, with The Notebooks Collective. I’ve also had it on my mind while celebrating two new books by poets whose work I admire.

First, I want to shout out The Whole Earth Is a Garden of Monsters / Toda la tierra es un jardín de monstruos by Manuel Iris, forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press. I had the honor of writing a blurb for this collection, and I’m grateful to see it making its way into the world.

The book brings together the life and work of Hieronymus Bosch with the imagined life of a contemporary migrant worker, Juan Coyoc, later known as Juan Domínguez. What moves me about the collection is how its bilingual structure lets two lives and two historical moments echo across one another, asking what art can witness when violence, migration, family, and memory converge. In the excerpt “Burning,” the poem’s attention turns toward violence so extreme it becomes metaphysical, reminding us that hell is not only an inherited religious idea but something human beings are capable of making for one another.

I also want to shout out Eden by Jon D. Lee, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Jon is a colleague at Suffolk University, and his work here enters into conversation with history, literature, suffering, inheritance, and the aftermaths of human violence. The excerpt published at The Paddock Review moves through Goya, Saturn, the body, power, fatherhood, devouring, and consequence. Its form, which includes deft incorporation of Miltonic blank verse, creates a field of pressure, where the movement of thought feels restless and exacting, unable to look away.

Thinking of these two works near each other, I’m struck by how both books approach ideas of hell, Eden, monstrosity, violence, and human existence through the shaping force of attention. Neither book turns away from horror. Neither treats suffering as abstract. Instead, each creates a form capable of holding difficult seeing.

That is part of what I mean when I say form shapes attention. A form can make us linger. It can make us look again. It can make room for grief, witness, indictment, tenderness, history, or awe. It can ask: What kind of shape is needed to face this subject? What kind of structure can hold what feels almost impossible to say?

Those are some of the questions we’ll explore in The Shape of Attention: Exploring Form in Poetry and Prose, happening Saturday, August 15, from 3–5 PM ET through The Notebooks Collective.

In this two-hour generative workshop, we’ll explore form as a practical and imaginative tool for writers of poetry, prose, and hybrid work. We’ll discuss how a piece’s shape changes what becomes possible on the page, then move through low-pressure prompts that approach form as a way to direct attention, create pressure, interrupt habit, and invite surprise.

The workshop is open to poets, prose writers, hybrid writers, and anyone curious about how structure can help us think, feel, remember, and discover. You don’t need to prepare anything in advance. Bring something to write with or on. You’re also welcome to bring a short draft, fragment, image, object, or memory you’d like to write from.

More information and registration are available through The Notebooks Collective.