The Poetics of Attention

February 21st - March 6th, 2024

The history of lyric poetry is a long-running experiment in human attention. Lyric becomes itself when it succeeds in making us attend differently to language: more closely, more slowly; with our ears open, even in silence; over and over again. It makes us attend to the world differently, too, as translated by metaphor, and broken open by lines. Lyric calls attention to attention as no other kind of language does.

Over three sessions this class will explore the ways that lyric poetry stimulates our capacity to meet its attentional appeals. Readings from literary theory, philosophy, and cognitive neuroscience will guide and inform our questions. Poems by Emily Dickinson, Renée Gladman, Kurt Schwitters, and others will serve as our objects. (As is only fair, we will volunteer ourselves to serve as theirs.) Our collective project will be to develop an account of the special kind of attention that we give to poetic language, and its relation both to material perception and to interpretation. These are basic questions, down near the roots of words and things, where they are hardest to tell apart. From there we will try to work up and together towards possibilities of linguistic alertness and aliveness that might also reshape the way we lead our lives in company.

Taught by Jeff Dolven, poet and Professor of English at Princeton University.