Attention

"It needs good management to enjoy life. I enjoy it twice as much as others, for the measure of enjoyment depends on the greater or less attention that we give to it....The shorter my possession of life the deeper and fuller I must make it."
Michel de Montaigne

This quotation from Montaigne reminds me of two things:
1.       Montaigne had a very good opinion of himself ("I enjoy it twice as much as others")
2.       He's right - the more attention you pay to something, the more you enjoy it.

Point two is the point I always tried to make on the first day of class when I taught Introduction to Poetry. My first-day lecture began something like this.

Introduction to Poetry. Let's begin by talking about football.

I have never enjoyed football. Of course, I've only watched one game; this happened when I was invited to a Rose Bowl party about 12 years ago. I thought this would be a normal party, except with a TV playing in the background for people who wanted to watch. To my surprise, it turned out to be a small group of rapt football fans, seated around a very large television set, each person furnished with a TV tray to hold food and drink. We got up every so often to replenish our plates and glasses from the buffet table. Except for the sounds of chewing and drinking, there was nothing but the Game and talk about the Game.

I tried to watch the Game, but it was meaningless. Just a bunch of colorfully costumed fellows running around a field, and sometimes piling up in what looked like dangerous, haphazard stunts. I understood that one group was trying to get the football past the goal lines on one end of the field, and the other group trying to get the ball in the opposite direction, but that was about it. The scoring seemed Byzantine. There were frequent dead spots in the program, where everyone just stood around. It was excruciatingly tedious. I ate way too many nachos, just to have something to do.

Therefore, it seems pretty obvious that the game of football is boring, pointless, stupid, and dull. Does anyone disagree? 

Well, of course people disagreed. I asked them why I had not enjoyed that one game of football. And everyone observed that I didn't enjoy it because I knew nothing about it. If you don't understand the rules, and the history, and the strategy, and the ongoing story line of the teams, you won't like the game.

Okay, agreed. And it's the same way with poetry. If you haven't read very much poetry, and you don't understand the history of it, and the "rules," and the strategies, and the story lines of movements and poets and literary traditions, it will likely be just as boring to you as football is to me.

I am more than willing to acknowledge that my lack of interest in football is a result of my ignorance and inattention. It is extremely likely that if I spent ten or twenty hours studying the game, I would start to enjoy watching it. (After all, I'm not opposed to sports; I'm crazy about baseball.)

Now, I'm not willing to put that amount of time into learning to appreciate football. My lack of appreciation for football is just something that I can live with happily. And you might feel the same way about poetry: frankly, I can live without it.

That's a perfectly reasonable conclusion. You might feel that way now, and you might feel the same way at the end of the semester (although I hope very much that by the end of the semester you won't say that you positively hate poetry; that would be an unfortunate outcome). However, sometimes it happens that people who put 20-40 hours into studying poetry end up liking it very much indeed, often to their surprise.

What happens to them is what Montaigne (and many others) have noticed: the measure of your enjoyment of something depends on the greater or less attention that you give it. For every person who finds gardening dull, there is someone else for whom it is delightful. For everyone who finds video games dumb and inexplicable, there is someone who finds them fascinating and even addictive. For everyone who hates opera, there is someone else who loves it, and can't live without it.

The difference is partly innate predisposition, but mostly attention. In this class you will learn how to pay attention to poetry, which basically means paying attention to language - more attention than you might have thought possible, down to the level of syllable and letter and placement on the page, and sound and breath and stress. Some of you already like poetry a lot, and in that case my hope is that a semester of paying close attention to several poems will increase your enjoyment. But for everyone, I hope this class will make your life fuller and deeper --  even if the end result is to make you appreciate football more than you did before, because you can think whenever you watch a game, "Well, at least I'm not sitting in that poetry class."

Let's begin by paying close attention to one line.


And off we went. I really liked teaching poetry classes.