Biotherm

 Yesterday I attended a lecture by Andrew Epstein, of Florida State, invited here by English dept. I know him a bit, not super well, but he has an excellent blog on the New York School Poets (Locus Solus) that I read. We talked a bit before and after the lecture.  

Anyway, his talk was on "attention" in poetry, and he used a poem by Bishop about a sandpiper paying close attention to the sand of a beach; then some poems by Rae Armantrout; then a book by Harryette Mullen, one that I happen to like a lot.  The talk was exemplary in the way it constructed an argument with those example.. 

My question was about "Biotherm" by Frank O'Hara, in which attention is paid to many things but in a meandering form. It seemed as though attention was always about being attentive to one thing at a time, not attention as attention in each moment to what might be happening.  Now I want to re-read Biotherm and "Ode to Mike Goldberg's birth (day and other days"), poems in which O'Hara develops this new kind of American long poem, that we see also in Schuyler, in "Freely Espousing" and "The Morning of the Poem."  They are acts of attention as process, not attention as shutting everything else down to pay attention to one thing.  This is kind of impossible anyway.  I sometimes try to listen to a song three times, once for the drums, once for the bass, etc... It is great to try to do this, but I rarely succeed because the drum part is not meant to be listened to like that.  

About Bishop's sandpiper: it seemed to have escaped the poet's mind that the sandpiper is staring at the sand because it is looking for insects and other small creatures to eat.  Its lack of concern for looking at other things (the bigger picture) is not a flaw, but a biological necessity.  It's a wonderful metaphor, but from an anthropomorphic perspective.