Or more specifically, the world needs more poetry. More people engaged in the regular practice of poetry, reading and writing it, whether they want to call themselves poets or not.
More poems would be helpful, but not nearly as much as more people spending more time in the beautiful struggle of putting words to the page.
This week I read Tracy K. Smith’s book Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times (big rec!), just out on Norton. “Beyond literature, beyond works of art, poems are acts of attention,” Smith reminds us, having earlier said that “there is nothing in a poem that does not wish to be noticed.”
Attention? In this economy?
Exactly.
A recent study published in Psychological Bulletin (ProQuest) looked at the prolonged consumption of short-form video on human brains and attention spans. Spoiler: it’s not good.
According to author Brad Stulberg, who put me onto the study, short-form video – aka Reels, TikToks or *gasp* Stories – is “highly processed information,” doing for our brains what highly processed foods do to our bodies. Necessarily lacking depth and nuance, these videos can function as empty calories, giving us a hit of dopamine without challenging us.
So many of us spend time on the infinite scroll, watching short videos for news and entertainment. Moreover, statistically speaking, the younger you are, the more time you spend consuming information this way.
Regardless of its danger or merit, short-form video is the online lengua franca and the coin of the realm, rewarded by the algorithms and expected by users.
For artists, they become yet another digital to-do. Earlier this week I put out a “talking head video” myself. While I enjoy connecting with people (even online), these videos take a huge amount of time to make and become but droplets in a surging sea of other droplets.
It’s surprising how vulnerable our attention spans are. I’ve been a reader my entire life, but when I started an MFA program in 2018 I was shocked at how hard it was for me to sit with the required books. Sure, I was parenting twin toddlers at the time, but my reading practice had begun splintering years before.
My ability to read was a muscle that had atrophied, a muscle that took regular practice to build back to health.
In this “attention economy,” the solution is to do less of less and more of more. See Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, and Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, or any number of other books – books! – on the topic.
Apart from a fiercely guarded reading practice, you already know my preferred exercise: the writing of poetry.
Like physical exercise, writing poetry isn’t necessarily about how well you do it, but that you do it, and do it regularly.
And what better time to start than now, during a hectic holiday season in a chaotic year?
All of this is part of why I’ve been working on a new offering: Poetry For Every Writer, an online seminar I’ll be leading live via Zoom on January 12.
If you have written, if you want to write, or if you do write: then yes, this all-levels session is for you. I’ll be giving an overview, offering all my tips & tricks, and inviting you to set up a writing practice that serves you in the new year and long beyond. We’ll be doing some writing during the session, but no one is required to share.
To make this happen I’ve partnered with my friend Margo Stienes who is an amazing writer of nonfiction (her book Brutalities: A Love Story is incredible) and writing consultant. Earlier this week we got together on Instagram Live to talk about the seminar.
Registration is open now, and if the tuition is a barrier for you, please let us know, there are scholarships available.
I’ll let Smith have the last word here:
“A poem is an invitation to step outside this loop of habit and haste, and, for a time, to cease jockeying. It is an opportunity–temporary though it may be–to replace a system of worth based on power and capital with something else.
Poetry is a place writers go not to deposit meaning, but to seek it out.”
Hope to see many of you January 12!