Customer Reviews

The Art of Attention: A Poet's Eye (Art Of... (Revell))

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This book is written as if it were to be understood as a performance piece. It has Three Acts and an Intermission. Acts I and II are accompanied by some pastoral, Calvinistic podium lectures which the author calls "Scholium" -- bits of commentary brought up and expanded from the prior Act.

Many of the "Scholium" from the First Act devote themselves to discussions of piety and peace. The ones from the Second Act devote themselves to a kind of self-help psychology for translating.

The First Act is all about the art of being wholly present such that a poem is merely a "plain record," in short duration, of one's "entire presence." Where is the imagination for a poem? In the very present state of things, as they are, answers the author. That's all there is. Seeing is believing, and God is in the details.

In the Second Act, the author writes about the art of translation. Here, the author emphasizes the fun and sense of play to be had in translating a poem from a foreign language into English, regardless of how poor your second language skills are. Translation is an act that frees the mind from old habits, asserts the author, and helps a poet to see with innocent eyes once more. The author benefited a great deal from translating Guillaume Apollinaire.

The Intermission consists of just two pages of writing where the author asserts that poems are written for the express purpose of refreshing the courage of the good.

The Third Act is the longest. It is a combination of poetic criticism, self-analysis, autobiography, and manifesto, altogether focused on a certain method or genre of poetry-writing that the author advocates and terms "avant garde."

The author admits that this writing in the Third Act, largely, is "my testimonial to myself: writing is easy." He is happy to be writing poetry now and he's zealously happy to be zealously happy about being happy, and he is not going to apologize to anyone about it. He's in-your-face happy; deal with it. Just don't put up your fists or start to argue with him; he'll disappear and hide behind the curtains of his Act.

Some really bad and very silly writing was done here.

The first and prior reviewer of this book cited correctly an egregiously selfish bit of deconstructionist obscurantism found in Act Three: "The self-referent I is interrupted in its plangent gesturing by spastic gestures in the prose. Okay. But interruption has a ways to go before it constitutes erasure."

But there are other bits as well: "Velocities ... are what prove our poems true. They are the aspiration of words approaching light-speed...."

And there is also this: "Experiment has nothing to do with obscurity, and neither is it bent upon proving that language is a hoax or heaven a canard," the author asserts while being obscure, unclear, and seemingly bent upon proving language is some kind of fraud perpetrated upon the poetaster.

One long thread in the entire Third Act resembles a river of argument based on idle or baseless assertions about what is true and what is false about poetry, what is misleading and what is objective, all of which comprise the author's avant garde manifesto. Yet the author, contradictorily, insists that "arguments are incoherent, dependent, like Republicans, on discord."

I thought arguments were based on facts and a logical development of reasoning, having nothing to do with party affiliations or "discord," at bottom. I guess things have changed

If you're already acquainted with Mr. Revell's poetry and like it, then this Third Act is definitely worth reading. I made my first encounter with Mr. Revell for the first time through this book, and I found this Third Act to be a huge bog for the mind and spirit, and I was mightily glad when it was over.

For those literary connoisseurs still interested in following up on this work, the author advises the reader read Alfred North Whitehead's book, "Process and Reality," as well as Robert von Hallberg's "American Poetry and Culture."

As the former or first reviewer initially wrote, the writing in this book is nearly totally metaphorical, so it will be a big disappiontment for any would-be poet seeking practical advice. Long live Andre Breton everyone! "Sense travels fast where no meanings intervene," says Donald Revell.

A book of literary criticism written as if it were poetry. Which meant page after page of metaphoric prose. Meaning was lost in the desire for poetic sound and pages would pass before a shred of the point being made would once again become comprehensible. An example:

"The self-referent I is interrupted in its plagent gesturing by spastic gestures in the prose. Okay. But interruption has a ways to go before it constitutes erasure. And a spasm isn't ectasy, however often the two are confused in our degraded day. I needed to turn my eyes inside out and to use them cleanly. I needed to exteriorize inwardness like the wound it was. I went looking for a new page fresh for poems". (p.132)

One hundred sixty-six pages of that.

Now I think I understand Mr. Revell is out to try something different in this work: to inspire poets to see the world ecstatically and capture that rapture poetically. But I often felt I was reading a memoir of spiritual revelation than a book to inspire writers to write better poetry. And as an agnostic, I didn't leave it a believer.

Even he admits: "Having got out of the habit, outside, of using English sensibly, I used it sensually, for the sake of the game I was playing."(p.151). Inside this book, a little more sense would have been greatly appreciated.

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.

Mr. Revell's prose, or at least his so-called critical prose, suffers, in my opinion, from a sort of vanity. That is, a reader rarely learns anything about the ostensible subjects Revell is writing about because his prose draws so much attention to himself . Every text becomes a mirror for his penchant for abstract (and none too original) wordplay and incessant aphoristic reductions. If you want to deliberate whether or not to buy this book, read a page or two first. If you want to learn anything about the writers he's writing about, you may be disappointed.

I've really enjoyed the "Art of..." series that Graywolf has been putting out lately, which is the main reason I bought this book. My take on this entry, however, is that Revell's personal beliefs (particularly his religious beliefs) get in the way. An example early on in the book that set me on edge involved his reading of a line from Blake's "Vision of the Last Judgement," in which the rising sun is likened first to a coin and then is said to be a "heavenly host." Revell's commentary on this is to say that "At sunrise we may see the sun rising, which is, in fact, a host rejoicing. There you go." He's paraphrasing Blake here, but one gets the sense that he doesn't disagree with the statement himself, and he never questions the glaring assumptions in it. He goes on to say that such poetry is not metaphysical--but how seeing angels in the sun is not metaphysical is beyond me. Basically, he champions poets who see things "as they are," and so, naturally, when Blake sees angels in the rising sun, Revell takes that as a statement of fact, not metaphor. Again and again, his religious beliefs create a peculiar blind spot in his criticism. The book is also full of profound-sounding statements that tend not to hold up on close scrutiny (e.g., "The art of poetry is the abolition of doubt"). Things get better with his discussion of translation later in the book, but too often (for my taste) he focuses on his own growth as a poet and teacher. In the end, I didn't end up learning much about the "art of attention," whereas other books in this series (notably the first, Baxter's "Art of Subtext") really explained something useful about quality writing/reading. So I recommend skipping this one and looking elsewhere in the series.

Long has it been since I have read a book, or tried to read a book, that lacked purpose.

I write "tried to read a book" because I simply could not find a way to read this book. It seemed to unravel continually as I read.

I think the trouble occurred when I could not locate the book's purpose, or Revell's purpose, for constructing it.

Books published by Graywolf Press have a solid reputation. I've read a dozen over the years and they have not disappointed.

I am not one to slam books. But there came a point when reading this when I simply wanted to throw it against the wall simply out of frustration. I did not, but I did jump ahead, in bits, to try to find a foothold, an entry point, something to capture my attention.

Like many readers, I resist dropping a book in mid-read. I feel as if I have somehow failed the book. But in this instance, I did my due diligence. I departed untouched.