Forms of Poetic AttentionPoetics and the Gift: Reading Poetry from Homer to Derrida

There is a widely told story in literary studies, in which historicism was supposed to have dominated across the millennium, exerting at least a default influence long past its methodologically and polemically "New Historicist" phase in the 1980s and 1990s. Despite this narrative, and undermining it, a shift toward poetics-based approaches has been visible as a groundswell of works and research gestalts over the same span of years. The recent trend of book titles using a "poetics" moniker, when on first blush another term might seem equally functional, is only its most visible expression. In my own primary field of scholarship, British Romanticism, quite a number of excellent monographs with poetics appearing in the title or subtitle have been published within the last decade (for starters: McGrath 2013; Guyer 2015; Gurton-Wachter 2016; Rohrbach 2016; Ford 2018). One might cite as a condition of possibility for such titles the relatively modest movement toward "New Formalism" of the 2000s. Yet the restored enthusiastic embrace of poetics—or at least tactical recourse to the field as an idiom of approach—moves independently of the fates of form and formalism. Arguably, poetics as an approach claims a region of interests more generous at its borders than even the most diverse manifestations of literary form.I see much to commend in this paradigm shift from talking historical ideology to talking critical poetics. I do not view it so much as a historical transition in itself, but rather as a reappraisal of vantage point. The method shift from history to poetics is not notably chronological; it canvasses the same terrain of empirical time, but with different eyes for what we were doing all along, and so may alter, conserve, and renew in critical practice. This trend may be considered a helpful product of the long moment we are now having not only of (exhausting) disciplinary self-critique, but also of redescription.Nevertheless, if it can be effectively worked into almost any title, have we now reached the moment to ask of approaches to poetics of this kind—as philosopher Stanley Cavell (1982) once did of politics—poetics as opposed to what? Would criticism's commitment to poetics be strengthened by restoring a sense of its limits? What kinds of organization, pattern, and motivation are we especially promoting to awareness by using poetics in a zeitgeisty and catch-all way? What kinds of organization does the poetics heading (on principle or inadvertently) leave out? What work are we asking poetics to do for us as an expanded term of art, if the traditional and technically specifiable concerns of narratology, stylistics, and prosody are not always kept clearly in view as its principal topics? What if we get too critical or philosophical? "Poetics is ranged on the side of objective description, interpretation on the side of subjective appropriation," Paul H. Fry sensibly writes in a recent essay (2020: 269). Is it some kind of disorder to cross this line, or a new, richer disciplinarity that is being sprung loose?Then again, Fry's use of ranged itself nicely suggests the disposition of movable pieces on a board we ourselves set for play. Any polarity (or even stable differentiation) of subject and object is indefensible except in the spirit of the most nominal practice of gaming. Perhaps it is true that, as a discipline, we are not obsessed anymore with the structure of that "appropriation" as a bad-faith naturalizing of ideology, with the workings of complicity hiding at every turn in the folds of literature itself. In this age of academic post-critique and reparation, when both nonlinguistic existential threats and urgent, potentially affirmative matters of concern abound, we may do well to practice care for our own primary knowledge base and keep our main oppositional energy for the courthouse steps and the streets. But is poetics then as a descriptive practice just a kind of difference in aspect-vision for the "same" set of professional behaviors we would once have called interpretative analysis?Lucy Alford's and Adam R. Rosenthal's exciting and challenging books do not require their reader to address the meta-level questions above regarding literary studies, and not due to a lack of "theoretical" ambition. Rather, both studies ambitiously engage with high-level reflection elsewhere. Moving around and beyond the stable inherited periodization of literature, each study shares its own distinct large claim that exceeds mere disciplinary intervention.Though different from each other in many respects, Alford's and Rosenthal's distinguished studies both tackle a range of comparative poetic commentary so vast in scope that only an approach based in poetics can intelligibly organize it. Alford works in multiple language traditions (she includes poems in non-European languages such as Arabic), and her readings span in time from Sappho to Anne Carson, her translator. Rosenthal's commentary is equally multilingual and runs from Hesiod and Homer through texts that one would not consider poems without an argument (Thoreau's fascinating page of magazine prose, "A Poet Buying a Farm"), onward to twenty-first century "uncreative" conceptual writing. (From curiosity I noted that Friedrich Hölderlin, William Wordsworth, and Anne Carson are three poets both authors treat in common.) Alford seems most at home in modernist and contemporary American poetry, and Rosenthal in transatlantic and European Romanticism. Nevertheless, no literary period or corpus of authorship, and only the most large-scale horizon of economic periodization—that of capitalist exchange itself (in Rosenthal explicitly; in Alford less so)—can serve contextually to ground either book.To motivate and effectively organize their huge comparative frames, each book offers a distinctive perspective that challenges traditional understandings of poetry's status and essence. Alford's phenomenological account argues that poems are not fundamentally artifactual objects at all, but occasions for developing the "subject-space" and "attentional space opened up (or proposed)" by the poem (10). For Alford, "the poem exists only in attention," though it is "a more or less stable object of intelligent design" (19). Insofar as "language is an event of attention" (3), that interplay of attentional dynamics constitutes "the poetic event" (9). In part 1, discussing what she calls poems of transitive attention, which attend to objects through modes such as contemplation, desire, recollection, and imagination, "the act and event of attention, its tensional activity, is necessarily located in an immediate present" (52). With commendable directness and in prose that is a pleasure to read, Alford thus presents attention itself as not just a vehicle of argument but also the "hero" of Forms of Attention (2). (It is a hero function properly adjusted to the damaged conditions of contemporary life, "leaving us semi-intact at the end of the day" 2.) The initial imperative of this inquiry develops "the capital currency that may boost our productivity and mindfulness quotient," in the self-focused language of the new attention-based labor economy (2). But Alford's book throughout—and especially part 2, on the "Objectless Awareness" she calls intransitive attention—intently and quite often brilliantly embraces the poetics of idleness. "Today, when attention has become synonymous with only one of its many aspects, that of focalized concentration, to think of states like boredom and idleness as modes of attention might seem oxymoronic" (212). But what about the delights and rigors of "task-negative" idling (213)? Importantly, then, what Alford calls the "ecology formed by the poem's own act of attending" (93) leaves room for "unsung regions," "attention downshift," and arts of "focused non-focalization" (213, 234–35). Along with this frank and resourceful allowance of boredom ("I love poems about boredom" 242), another delight of Alford's study is its juxtapositions: in one chapter, just a few pages separate T. S. Eliot and Charles Bukowski. On the other hand, if one is looking for new interpretations, the book's climactic reading of late Eliot at the interface of "Christian and Buddhist forms of monastic askesis" was for me an actual letdown (256–67).Forms of Poetic Attention is marvelously conceived in terms of organizational structure. As noted, the first half of the book focuses on the dynamics of what Alford calls "transitive attention"—meaning attention to (26), a poetics that is fundamentally object-oriented (43). Correspondingly, the book's second half presents examples of intransitive attentional states of (non)relation or only indirect objects (151). The clarity of this bifold structure at the book's topmost scale provides plenty of space underneath for meaningful subdivisions, as well as furnishing niches for discussion that contain nearly endless local richness and variety. The very schematic power of Forms of Poetic Attention could evoke something like the genre theory of Northrop Frye translated into the field of contemporary lyric studies. While the discerning, available, and temperamentally moderate qualities of Alford's writing on poetry evoke the best aspects—those that ought to be preserved or rediscovered—in the writings of the mid-twentieth-century "New Critical" poet-scholars. To be clear, Alford's version of poetry depends on the opposite of their closed canon and contains no verbal icons of spatial form, but she everywhere presents tensional dynamics in terms of a critical performance of balance.Present beyond the structural outline and operationalized in the writing at a syntactical level, such a fundamentally grammatical distinction between transitive and intransitive aligns with a plethora of small-scale, two-way orientational gestures that Alford makes in order to gather and fork her discussions all the way through. These include distinctions between "medium and mode" (3), attitudes both produced and required by poetry (4), endogenous and exogenous modes of attention and intentionality (33, 148, 245, 276), semantic and formal levels of meaning in poetry (37), internal versus external objects (53), perceptual versus procedural ways to manifest idle and errant attention (offered as a means to distinguish poetry by A. R. Ammons from the poetry of Joan Retallack 231), writings "on" and "about" a given topic or mode (as, for instance, in the illuminating and quite useful chapter on imagination) (132), parataxis and hypotaxis (160), noetic and noemic modes of attention (161), pivots on the axes of "about" and "of" (196), or "on" and "of" (241), and around the status of observers and participants (144; my emphases added throughout the list). All these nuances of footing are instances of a micro-level grammar that choreographs the way poems can variously embody, produce, and enact forms of attention (154). Mostly in the book's second half, there are also gestures of both/and observation that do not set the perspective outright but toggle contiguously: for instance, poetic process that "both enacts and describes" (119); or performs and embodies (to distinguish the idleness of Frank O'Hara from that of Ammons 224); or inhabits and embodies (as in the way the voice in Eliot's "Prufrock" conveys alienated relationships 257). These kinds of gestures are present in the book in such volume as to form its critical poetics. They indicate the likeness I have described between Alford's Forms of Poetic Attention and the texture of New Criticism. They are exemplary small maneuvers of a critical pedagogy that is almost universally appealing but might also verge toward something too near an ecumenical criticism of poetry. I admire this book deeply but would have liked it even more if it had owned up to some partisanship.Poetics and the Gift showcases the opposite tendency, in its dazzling but at times self-confining commitment to Derridean argumentative protocols and interpretive effects. A strength of Poetics and the Gift is its frontloaded thesis—noticeably and admirably for a work in that famously tortuous writerly tradition. Right from the start, Rosenthal's bracing large contention is that "the Western poetic tradition is in need of reappraisal. An essential element of its form by which he means something prior to established literary form has been under-theorized" (x). Jacques Derrida himself gave the terms of such a theoretical counter-genealogy, before a different modality, récit, takes the place of poetry in Derrida's gift poetics (19). For Rosenthal, the enigmatic logic of the gift structures poetic discourse and thereby must always stay alive to the unsettled status of poetry as a metaphysical question, even as he follows through a deconstructive itinerary from the "cast off" project of the "helio-poetic" in Derrida (1, 19, 26).Rosenthal encounters the giftedness, not givenness of poetry, in the book's ranging and ingeniously linked case studies of Homer, Wordsworth, Stein, Heidegger, Shelley, Thoreau, and Baudelaire. In these authors the gift is variously construed as a donation (37), endowment (59), process of reception and reciprocation (96), and occasion of chance and risk (139). A final, tenth (!) chapter engages appropriation as a version of gift poetics in contemporary lyric and finds with regard to historical injustice that "'givens' are not given, but founded" in the poetry of M. NourbeSe Philip (261). A flexion or breaking point may be said to occur in the poetic genealogy of the gift at the point when the "dominant line of thinking which binds the essence of poetry to its divine or inhuman beginnings" faces "the reduction of poetry to a commodity" (50, 162). Even in Wordsworth—who bore the conditions of patronage with ambivalence—"the question of the gift of poetry" emerges "amidst the rise of political economy" (162). Modern economies "contradict the generosity of divine-oriented models of poetic vocation" (162), "now in the era of the market" (163). It is, interestingly, first in the chapter on Ralph Waldo Emerson that Rosenthal finds a "poematic force of . . . address" that proffers a gift (a flower) so beautiful "to outvalue value" (169).Whereas Alford's version of a phenomenological criticism accepts a charge mostly tangentially from the current prestige of cognitive literary studies, without much referencing brain science per se (though see p. 4 for a brief comment), Rosenthal boldly flies his deconstructive flag regardless of whether it is out of fashion. He locates his coordinates in Derrida (and, later, Georges Bataille) as a rogue disciplinarity "between phenomenology and anthropology" (xiii). As indicated above, Rosenthal's chapters and their key figures repeat names that are standbys for the literary instantiation of philosophical high theory in comparative literature: Kant, Heidegger, Homer, Wordsworth, Hölderlin, Shelley, Baudelaire. The chapters on these authors are rigorous, inventive, and consistently illuminating. But the book's most daring and revelatory chapters are those on American writers who are often reduced to some other stabilizing school or conceptual property: Gertrude Stein, who is often read within the Jamesian tradition of experimental pragmatism, but whose interest in naming here segues into the discussion of Percy Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" (121–26; 138–63), and the transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (165–212). In the short Stein chapter, and then again in the conclusion of the book, Rosenthal's approach crisply departs from Alford's, precisely on the once inescapable literary-philosophical crux of presence and non-presence: "Poetic history is the history of a certain recognition of the non-presence of the present" (267). That said, it would be misleading to position Alford's claim that "the poem only exists in attention" (19) as a stalking horse to reintroduce the old idea of pure presence in the guise of poetry's new relationship with science rather than the ancient one with philosophy. Her fascinating maneuver around the poetics of "extreme deconcentration of the attention" (151) itself argues and shows that the practice of poetic close reading deconstructs the very logic of concentration.