Tag art

Federico Herrero and Revision as Listening

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

This upcoming Saturday, September 12, from 3–5 PM ET, I’ll be teaching a virtual workshop with The Notebooks Collective called Revision as Listening: How to Return to a Draft with Curiosity.

As I’ve been preparing for the workshop, I’ve been thinking about an idea I’ve used in my teaching for years, that sometimes a piece of art teaches us how to read it. At first, we may notice color, scale, movement. We linger and a figure or shape stands out, becomes a vibe. The longer we sit with a piece, the more our attention changes. We begin to notice relationships across elements as well as repetitions and the tensions arising from juxtaposition. What seemed abstract begins to feel full of direction. What seemed playful begins to feel deeply structured. That kind of looking has shaped the way I think about revision.

In my classes, I’ve often used the work of Federico Herrero to talk about attention. Herrero is a Costa Rican artist whose paintings bring together vivid color, irregular shapes, landscape, abstraction, and the visual language of lived environments. One piece I’ve returned to is “Caravan,” a large 2018 oil and acrylic painting on canvas.

In “Caravan,” blocks and patches of color gather across the canvas in ways that feel dynamic and alive. There are shapes that suggest buildings and bodies, signs and landscape. Color suddenly feels like movement. Some areas feel dense and social, others more open. The eye keeps having to decide where to go, then revise that decision. The painting does not give itself over all at once.

That is part of what I love about bringing this kind of work into a classroom. It asks us to slow down and notice how we notice. The more time I spend with “Caravan,” the more I see how attention and looking are active relationships. The painting changes because I change in front of it. Or, more accurately, I become better able to see what was already there.

This connects to revision because when we return to a draft, it can be tempting to arrive with an agenda. But sometimes the draft needs us to sit with it first and let the page teach us how to read it. Revision becomes a practice of renewed attention.

These are some of the ideas we’ll work with in Revision as Listening. The workshop is open to poets, prose writers, hybrid writers, and anyone with writing they want to revisit. Participants should bring one draft, fragment, or unfinished piece they are willing to return to during class. Shorter pieces will be easiest to work with (approximately 1–5 pages is ideal) but any genre or stage of draft is welcome.

Registration is available through The Notebooks Collective.

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Image info: Federico Herrero, “Caravan,” 2018. Oil and acrylic on canvas. Image shared for reflection on attention, looking, and revision. More on Herrero’s work is available through James Cohan and Artnet.

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.