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“Perception is not passive.”
For a while now I’ve been pondering this essay, sent to me by artist/writer/educator and dear friend of TAoN Amy C. Evans. It describes an approach to poetry that entails a very particular method of observation and attention.
The essay’s author is Roohola Ramezani, a writer with a background in philosophy. He decided that his writing students might benefit from an approach that borrows from phenomenology, “the philosophical tradition that begins with the simple but radical idea that we should attend to things as they appear before we explain them.”
What his students had been doing was the opposite, writing poetry about what an object (such as a coffee mug or a hoodie) allegedly “meant,” without truly seeing — let alone revealing — what it really was. So he devised a two-part procedure. First students had to create a “not list,” a litany of things they could not write about a given object: its name, function, history, any “abstract adjectives,” etc. The idea was to prohibit writing about anything outside the object’s physical self. This process of stripping away context led to the nickname the Naked Object Workshop.
The second stage of the workshop was the “is list.” Students spent ten full minutes regarding their subject-object strictly in terms of “what appeared to their senses: how light hit the object, how it resisted or yielded to touch, how it changed as they watched it.” Only then did they write a short poem on the object, drawing on the “is list.” Ramezani writes:
The first drafts were awkward and electric. One student, writing about a pair of glasses, produced lines like, “Two thin moons press against my face / leaving small dents of heat.” Another, describing a hoodie, wrote, “A dark cave that smells like last week / holds my arms in soft shadow.” They were not trying to be poetic. They were trying to be accurate.
For many, it was the first time they had felt that poetry could emerge from looking rather than performing.
Ramezani went on to have the students move their new practice from focusing on a single object into the world and their experiences — again shaped by the not/is exercises — and create “phenomenological poems about walking down the hallway, about breathing after running up the stairs, about sitting in the cafeteria during lunch.”
If you are at all interested in the additional processes and thinking specifically related to writing poetry, read the whole essay, which won The Bechtel Prize. It’s great.
But for TAoN purposes, I want to land on this idea of “naked” attention. Can you apply that in your everyday? Can you strip observation of an object, place, experience, to its concrete basics? How might that affect what you observe? How might it effect how you observe?
From Ramezani’s essay:
What students were really learning was that perception is not passive. The mug wasn’t just “there.” It was edge against air, warmth against skin, shadow shifting as they watched. Their attention created the object anew each time they looked.
Or as one of his students said: “I feel like I can write about anything now, because everything has something to notice.” Yes.
Try to apply these ideas in your creative practice or your day-to-day, and tell me (us) what you think.
THANKS Amy!
And a note: Ramezani is Iranian, and apparently remains, writing, in Tehran. Join me in wishing safety to him, his students past and present, and all of their loved ones; peace to them all from this violent chaos.
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OKAY THAT’S IT!
As always, I value your feedback (suggestions, critiques, positive reinforcement, constructive insults directed at me, not at anyone else, etc.), as well as your tips or stories or personal noticing rituals, things we need a word for, and of course your icebreakers: consumed@robwalker.net. Or use the comments.
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And thanks for reading …
rw
All this by Rob Walker (unless otherwise noted) PO Box 171, 748 Mehle St., Arabi LA 70032.
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After rereading your comments Mr. Walker, I realized I mistook Mr. Ramezani for you. I think each of you have insights that are useful and I thank you both.
This edition is exceptional!
Thanks for sharing a new (better) way to see and write a poem (and the world).