Tag Finishing Line Press

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.

hushing with Susan Woods Morse

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

In these days of self-isolation and sheltering in place, the word “isolation” itself has been charged in meaningful new ways. And while the charging and refreshing of language with new meaning has been one of the enterprises of poetry from the start, when life takes on this work for us in a way that startles and discomforts, it is ultimately poetry that is able to show us that what feels new is often familiar enough.

round vehicle side mirror

Photo by Gantas Vaičiulėnas

I’m brought to these thoughts by this week’s poem “In the Hush” by Susan Woods Morse (below) which in its own way explores isolation as both verb and noun. The speaker begins by sharing that she is “contemplating the meaning of “now”.” By doing so, she is, in fact, isolating the present moment as something to be known further. Yet, despite this focus, the speaker admits to being unable commit to the endeavor, at least not when compared to, first, a cat, and later a bird in the second stanza. This inability to get at the meaning of “now” moves us into the noun sense of the word isolation. Even with the second stanza ending as it does with admiring confidence toward a swallow, the image of something making itself distant from the speaker implies the second sense of isolation.

There’s then another compelling turn of isolation and self-awareness in the following stanzas. First, a casual walk to a bar with a partner is described. While the speaker shares that they “[tell] ourselves we want the exercise,” she goes onto confide that “but I think it is also because the phone rarely rings.” This quick admission implies an isolation felt similar to that of the first two stanzas. This poignant, passing insight is echoed in the closing stanza’s final image of a field whose “false luminescence…plays tricks” on the speaker by bringing up memories while in the present moment “in that field a cow chews its cud, indifferent / to the consuming interests of the heart.”

This closing confluence of memory and image drives home the tension of the poem. While the speaker has been making efforts to isolate the present, the same effort reflects back a sense of isolation. This isolation is simultaneously rich in the details and insights offered but also reflects the cold of “indifferent” nuances. In this way, the speaker, as much as the poem on the page, makes her way to seeing “the consuming interests of the heart” clearer.

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Susan Woods Morse

In the Hush

I sit on our deck, hands clasped behind my head,
contemplating the meaning of “now.”
I want to loll like our cat and bask in the heat
with his easy ennui,
only mine would be determined detachment,
not the same thing at all.

Instead, like him, I listen to the birds.
We both watch a swallow beat, then rest,
beat, then rest its wings against the paleness of sky.
And I think that is how to do it,
that is how to climb
a long tunnel of hollow air.

Tonight you and I will walk to the neighborhood bar,
telling ourselves we want the exercise,
but I think it is also because the phone rarely rings.
We will each drink one beer to tide us over
for the quiet walk home. We are just
occasional visitors there, unknown.

And for a long time after your snoring has begun
I will gaze through the dormer window
knowing that somewhere in a field
which has a certain false luminescence,
the green that plays tricks when I remember
being young and in the moonlight,
in that field a cow chews its cud, indifferent
to the consuming interests of the heart.

*

Susan Woods Morse’s chapbook In the Hush can be purchased from Finishing Line Press.