The Art of Not Paying Attention

I have little patience for the theater. Maybe it’s more accurate to say I don’t have the attention span for it. As such, intermissions are a double-edged sword: they provide a much-needed break while also delaying the trip home. Not that my attention span actually makes it to intermission. Long before the lights go up for that interminable break, my thoughts and eyes are wandering far and wide—to the bit of set in the back, to the cast member giving their all to an unnamed part, to the conductor flailing in the orchestra pit, to the network of wires and battery of speakers suspended from the ceiling. It’s hard to say for sure whether it’s boredom or mischief, but shining a spotlight on something is a sure way to get me to pay attention elsewhere.

Mercifully, poetry rarely requires an intermission and even rewards a propensity for letting your attention wander. I’ve shared my inability (unwillingness) to watch the actual show with groups of poets before and found knowing nods in the crowd: the spotlight illuminates what everyone already knows, so it’s poor ground for cultivating poetry. I’ve heard poetry called the art of noticing, and I might call it the art of not paying attention. Of course, I don’t mean the art we seem to have perfected—the art of total disengagement, our ears plugged with tiny speakers and our eyes occupied by tiny screens—I mean the art of noticing what you aren’t expected to notice, the art of not paying attention to the obvious stuff. Poets often point to things that nobody else is pointing to.

As I’ve looked back at pieces I’ve written, I can see a clear pattern of not paying attention, but I’ve also noticed poems that explicitly refuse to pay attention, beginning with the first poem I published as a bright-eyed undergraduate and its title that announces an immediate rejection of its context:

Written during a lecture on the scientific method