Poetry As The Gift Of Attention

by Kate Millar (Young Makar, 2023)

What is poetry, to me? I can only speak in metaphor. It is the notes app on your friend’s phone where she keeps a list of your favourite sweets (strawberry pencils, peanut M&Ms, the blackcurrant starbursts). It is your mum noticing that you get cold and tired every time you’re sad. After a few days of wearing fleeces in summer and falling asleep in even the shortest car journeys, she brings you a mug of tea and knows to clear space to hear how you really are. It is an unexpected observation from a new lover, “your eyes plagiarise the sky.”

Poetry is the affirmation that you cannot go unnoticed. A heart cleaved open, eyes pulled fully awake. A moment of intentional attention. Poetry is the gift of attention.

Even something as small as a description of an unremarkable coastal town – with its ‘shiplike kirk / the snooker hall above the library / the gift-shop on the corner’ and ‘rabble of gulls’ – feels like a gift.^[1] Our town is given dignity. The poet sees it, and in that sight, it is given value.

Poetry notices the moments that we easily pass by, then builds a paper-and-ink memorial to them. Alden Nowlan writes a love poem to the small moments shared between him and his friends in ‘Great Things Have Happened.’ Of all the ‘great things / that have happened in our lifetimes,’ the greatest is not the moon landing but the cinnamon toast they shared in the wee small hours of the morning, together in their three-roomed flat.

‘Is that all?’ he hears someone ask. Yes, he replies. Because that moment represented more than a few bites toast:

                                         it was like the feeling
             you get sometimes in a country you’ve never visited
             before, and the bread doesn’t taste quite the same,
             the butter is a small adventure…
             except that there was nobody in this country
             except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
             of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.[2]

Nowlan has given the gift of attention to this moment – but also to the feeling that moment evokes. He gifts us with words for that feeling of delirious sleep-deprived happiness between friends. In his act of gratitude, we are given the same gratitude, for our own friends, our own 4:30am meals. To use poet-speak, this is the celebration of the ‘quotidian,’ the beauty within the everyday.

In his poem, ‘Invocation,’ James Schuyler asks, ‘who stops to count the waving willow leaves?’^[3] The answer is, the poet. Attentive to the world and people around them, the poet moves beyond the ways of automatic perception towards a lingering type of perception. They notice the details and qualities of what they are experiencing and seeing. We are invited to move beyond the it-is-sunset type of perception towards Barbara Guest’s way of seeing:

                the landscape with its water
		of blue colour, its gentle expression of rose,

We are brought into a state of attentiveness ourselves. This is no small gift, especially in these times. It is all too easy to live on the surface of our lives. We are either too busy – anxiously striving for productivity, trying to prove our own worth – or too distracted – compelled to scroll and consume to avoid whatever thoughts or emptiness we’re avoiding – to notice the details that make up living, to consider the deeper currents of what matters in life.

Poetry bears witness – not just to the beautiful moments in life, but also to the inarticulable pains of being alive, of losing, of never having. Norman MacCaig bears witness to grief, the way it follows us: ‘Everywhere she dies. Everywhere I go she dies.’^[5] Denise Levertov traces the gradual loss of hope for a daughter, the dawning sense that a dream will never be realised:

          Ages ago 
          you enjoyed thinking of names 
          for a daughter… 
         And all those sparks of future 
         winked out behind you, forgettable.[6]

Emily Jungmin Yoon is attentive to the common experience of wanting a yet-unknown thing, the inscrutable longing:

         There is nowhere in this world
         that I want to live…
         I confess
         I want to live. Nowhere, but still, with great desperation, I want.[7]

To read our inarticulable feelings articulated is to receive an act of love.

In this prose-flattened world that churns towards productivity, I rush around, unaware of my lack and need, distracted and busy and burnt out, anxious and numbing and self-destructing – living more like an automaton than a soul. To borrow the words of Malcolm Guite, poetry jams this machine. Poetry lifts my eyes to the states and longings of my own soul.

Simone Weil writes that ‘attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.’ In which case, poetry is abundantly generous.

Kate Millar is a 22-year-old poet from Edinburgh. She currently lives in New York City, pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at The New School. You can find her writing in Gutter, Ekstasis, The Inflectionist Review, and Lucent Dreaming.

^[1] John Burnside, ‘Ports,’ Asylum Dance (Vintage Books, 2010)

^[2] Alden Nowlan, ‘Great Things Have Happened,’ What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread (Nineties Press, 1993)

^[3] James Schuyler, ‘Invocation,’ Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)

^[4] Barbara Guest, ‘Wild Gardens Overlooked by Night Lights,’ Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, ed. Paul Hoover (W.W. Norton & Company, 2013)

^[5] Norman MacCaig, ‘Memorial,’ The Many Days: Selected Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2011)

^[6] Denise Levertov, ‘The Past III,’ Sands of the Well (New Directions, 1998)

^[7] Emily Jungmin Yoon, ‘Related Matters,’ The New Yorker, March 1, 2021, issue.

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