I was finishing a run by the river near my house the other day, and a guy waved me over. Normally I would keep right on going, but he was with two women, and they were all looking at something by the water. It was a beaver: a huge furry lump, just snacking away at the river’s edge. From the distance he looked like a rock.
But normally, he would have looked like absolutely nothing to me. I wouldn’t have looked that way at all, or if I had, I would most likely have looked without really seeing it. My husband runs that same trail at different times of day, and he sees entirely different things than I do. When my dad visits, he walks on the that trail, and he’s seen snapping turtles, another thing I’ve always missed.
I’ve been re-reading Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing for a course I’m developing on the attention economy. The book has me thinking about attention as an active state - and especially about the poor quality of my own attention. (Some of what I’m describing here, Odell reminds me, is called inattentional blindness. You probably remember the experiment with the guy in the gorilla suit walking through a basketball game from an intro psych course somewhere along the line.)
As a corollary to attention, I’ve also been thinking about how much we screen out of our writing because it doesn’t seem like it’s poetic enough. (Full disclosure: I put a slice of American cheese on a breakfast sandwich this morning and I was thinking about how delicious this kind of highly processed food is and how I’ve never once put it in a poem.) One of the many (many many) things I love about Erika Meitner’s work is how she just lets the whole world in. (Walmart Supercenter, from Copia, is a great example of the capaciousness of her attention.)
In the spirit of that attention (and the title of Erika’s next book, Useful Junk), let’s let some new things into our poems today.
Prompt #7: New Real Things
Go for a walk you’ve been on many times before and record at least ten new real things. You’re trying to see things you haven’t seen before. It might help to turn your gaze differently than you usually do (look up, or across the street, or into your neighbors’ windows). It might help to walk with someone who notices different things than you do, provided they’ll help notice and not just talk to you. Small people are good for this, except when they’re very bad at it.
Make a list of things that are part of your daily life that you haven’t included in a poem - American cheese, toenail clippers, and so on.
If you need more details to get you going, look into your poetry deck. Do you see any images or lines that connect with anything on your page so far?
If you’d like a formal constraint, try writing a prose poem.
Sharing your work helps sustain momentum. I’ll leave the comments open, so you can share a poem title, a snippet of a line, or something else about your writing life.
Easier for me to walk inside this morning in a house I know too well. Some discoveries:
metal plate for keys painted with a goose with a ribbon on its neck
a flock of birds out my window holding, trilling on bare branches of a maple tree
a stack of 3 panama hats