°®åú´«Ã½

Speakers): Lucy Alford

This dissertation offers a systematic exploration of how poems compose attention and how attention is in turn poetry’s core material of composition. Yet despite the centrality of attentional dynamics to poetic experience, this relationship has never been explicitly addressed. This dissertation breaks new ground by addressing the dynamics of poetic attention in detail, and distinguishing its characteristics from those of other forms of attention. Doing so required developing a new lexicon built at the intersection of cognitive and literary studies, enabling me to unpack the multifaceted nature of poetic attention by parsing its movable variables—or dynamics coordinates—and demonstrating how these characteristics combine and recombine to create a variety of forms of poetic attention, within which we find as much nuance and subtlety of variation as there are individual poems. 

Part One of the dissertation, from which this workshop's reading is drawn, focuses on the dynamics of transitive attention, or modes of attention that take an object. I consider how the poem, an object itself, composes the object of transitive attention formally, semantically, and figuratively. I organize my discussion around the particular dynamics of attention itself, breaking it into its cognitive elements and demonstrating how these dynamics are produced by specific poetic moves. Drawing on attention studies in phenomenology, psychology, and cognitive science, I identify five essential dynamic coordinates of transitive attention: intentionality, interest, selectivity, spatiotemporal remove, and apprehension. These five qualitative variables combine to shape a given act, event, or experience of transitive attention. A more detailed consideration of transitive attention sheds new light on how more conventional poetic categories work. Later in Part One (not included in this excerpt), I demonstrate this through an exploration of four of these generic categories: deixis or descriptive poetry, love poetry, elegy and fantasy, offering detailed analyses of poems from each genre and showing how the above dynamics come together in each to generate complex and varied forms of poetic attention. Exploring these conventional genres through the lens and lexicon of attention reveals their workings as particular modes of attending, each derived through a specific combination of transitive attention’s constitutive elements. 

In order to both honor and illustrate the transhistorical yet historically inflected nature of poetic attention, I have drawn from a wide-ranging archive, while situating my readings of particular poems and particular attentional trends in relationship to their historical and cultural terrains. I have focused primarily on the American 20th Century. However, I've aerated this modern focus with examples of earlier western and nonwestern poetries that reveal or problematize specific attentional dynamics. 

Lucy Alford is a poet and doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at °®åú´«Ã½. She holds a PhD in Modern Thought from the University of Aberdeen. Her research focuses on twentieth-century poetry and poetics, attention dynamics, and metaethics.