The Art of Attention: A Poet's Eye

by Donald Revell

The Art Of series is a new series of brief books by contemporary writers on important craft issues. Each book investigates an element of the craft of fiction, creative nonfiction, or poetry by discussing works by authors past and present. The books in the Art Of series are not strictly manuals, but serve readers and writers by illuminating aspects of the craft of writing that people think they already know but don't really know.

Donald...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1555974740
• ISBN13: 9781555974749
• Release Date: July 2007
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.1" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

Here is a revelation from Revell

I see this book has acquired some negativity from other reviewers here, which is not entirely beyond me to comprehend, but I believe they are mistaken. Perhaps this book did not come at the proper time for them. Revell has created a work which doesn't instruct in the typical sense. It is not a how-to, nothing at all resembling a textbook. Rather, it is a poetic work, at once made up of text and sub-text. There is a certain amount of reading between the lines that needs to be done here in order to make out the full message of the book. The author has obviously struggled through his early career. He makes no bones about it, or the - to him, entirely mistaken - attitudes present in his early poetry. Why they are mistaken might not be obvious to us, since the examples he gives are entirely passable and artful poetically. But the humble assertion that the work was poor resonates with me, also struggling in much the same way as he did. You might call it "finding one's voice", although I think that term does not really cover it. Revell says we need to, to a large degree, abandon our "voice", or what we want to say, and focus instead on attentiveness, seeing what's there to be seen, and taking joy from it. This is as much a spiritual condition as a mental one - perhaps one reason why the book takes some flack. To a rationalistic, materialistic mind, it makes little sense to make off with joy from the nature of the empirical world. Perhaps Revell's Christian faith helps him in this instance. If that is distasteful to anyone, they should question themselves as to why. From this attitude of open-eyedness, the poet makes an impassioned and very poetic argument - some of it unspoken - that creativity does indeed flow, not from the conceptions and ideas the poet had before, but out of a new, freer and in a way, happier, mindset, one birthed in the appreciation of what is. This is a profound concept, and I believe that Revell is not telling us to give up being imaginative and concentrate on describing exclusively, but that he recognizes that we never cease to be creative, to use the imagination in a way only we can (perception is deeply colored by experience, after all, and nowhere does Revell seek to destroy that), and that, from a reverent and seeing attitude, creativity flows not sluggishly or slavishly, but joyously. As I said, this message is not all apparent. In telling us to do one thing, I believe Revell fully intends us to do another, but the directions he gives enable us to reach that point. That is what makes this a profound book, and worthy of a five-star review. I'm a little sad that this message hasn't made its way to the other reviewers here, but I can only hope that they hold onto the book, and perhaps come back to it when they are ready to experience the change of vision that it gives.