Forms of Poetic Attention / Lucy Alford.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Alford, Lucy, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Poetry--History and criticism.

Poetry.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiv, 365 pages)

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Columbia University Press, [2020]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

A poem is often read as a set of formal, technical, and conventional devices that generate meaning or affect. However, Lucy Alford suggests that poetic language might be better understood as an instrument for tuning and refining the attention. Identifying a crucial link between poetic form and the forming of attention, Alford offers a new terminology for how poetic attention works and how attention becomes a subject and object of poetry.Forms of Poetic Attention combines close readings of a wide variety of poems with research in the philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology of attention. Drawing on the work of a wide variety of poets such as T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Frank O'Hara, Anne Carson, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Harryette Mullen, Al-Khansā', Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, and Claudia Rankine, Alford defines and locates the particular forms of attention poems both require and produce. She theorizes the process of attention-making-its objects, its coordinates, its variables-while introducing a broad set of interpretive tools into the field of literary studies. Forms of Poetic Attention makes the original claim that attention is poetry's primary medium, and that the forms of attention demanded by a poem can train, hone, and refine our capacities for perception and judgment, on and off the page.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: What Is Poetic Attention?

I. Modes of Transitive Attention

II. Contemplation: Attention's Reach

III. Desire: Attention's Hunger

IV. Recollection: Attending to the Departed Object

V. Imagination: Attention's Poiesis

VI. Modes of Intransitive Attention

VII. Vigilance: States of Suspension

VIII. Resignation: Relinquishing the Object

IX. Idleness: Doldrums and Gardens of Time

X. Boredom: End- Stopped Attention

Coda: Toward a Practice of Poetic Attention

Notes

Bibliography

Permission Credits

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 06. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780231547321

0231547323

OCLC:

1134393807