Tag prose

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: Exploring Form in Poetry and Prose

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

On Saturday, August 15, from 3–5 PM ET, I’ll be teaching a virtual workshop with The Notebooks Collective called The Shape of Attention: Exploring Form in Poetry and Prose.

This workshop grows out of a question I keep returning to in my own writing and teaching: What happens when we change the shape of a piece?

Sometimes, a draft stalls because of the shape we have asked the subject to live inside. A memory may not want to become a straight narrative. An image may need the pressure of a list. A question may need to remain a question. A fragment may be asking for other fragments beside it. A block of prose may create a kind of momentum that line breaks would interrupt; a poem’s white space may allow silence to do some of the thinking.

In this two-hour generative workshop, we’ll explore form as a practical and imaginative tool for writers of poetry, prose, and hybrid work. Rather than treating form as a rule to obey or a test of mastery, we’ll approach it as a way to direct attention, create pressure, interrupt habit, and invite surprise.

We’ll think together about four possible ways form works:

Form as container: What pressure does this shape create?
Form as movement: How does this shape move the mind from one line, sentence, section, image, or thought to the next?
Form as permission: What does this shape allow me to say that I might not otherwise say?
Form as interruption: What habit does this shape disrupt?

Participants will move through a series of low-pressure writing exercises designed to generate new material and offer fresh ways into existing drafts. We’ll work with forms such as lists, address, questions, fragments, blocks of prose, braids, and sequences, asking: “What does this form make possible?”

Writers are invited to bring a short draft, fragment, image, object, or memory they’d like to write from, though no prior preparation is required. Something to write with or on is enough.

This workshop is open to poets, prose writers, hybrid writers, and anyone curious about how structure can help us think, feel, remember, and discover.

Registration is available through The Notebooks Collective.