Wednesday, December 19, 2012

The Practice of Attention

Read an interesting article by Roger Housden on the Huff Post, musing on the value of poetry. This line struck me.

Poetry is a way of rescuing the world from oblivion by the practice of attention

One of the great beauties of poetry is that it coaxes the eye to slow down, disrupts the pattern of a-one-and-a-two narrative that we often get trapped in. In the same way that great photographs do. The put space and time back into the claustrophobic business of our world.


It is our attention that honors and gives value to living things, that gives them their proper name and particularity; that retrieves them from the obscurity of the general.

You can read the whole of this brief but worthy article here. 



1 comment:

  1. Great article, James. As a writer who is first a poet, then an author, I appreciate the value this article bestows on poetry.

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