In the canon of American velocity, we have an inexhaustible primer in the Journals of Henry David Thoreau. Uncrafted, instantaneous, and epical, tossed off in the direction of anyone or of no one and, thus, eternal, their two million words and more instruct us in the rigorous discipline of true carelessness: i.e., in seeing what there is to see and not what we expect or mean to find. Bums and troubadors can have no truck with the intentional fallacy. Everything depends upon attentions innocent of mind and open-eyed. (P.S. the poetry of attention is the “improved infancy” Hart Crane opined—see White Buildings, and in particular, “Passage.”) In every sighting and incite of his Journals, Thoreau proposes to become a poet by being one.

Whatever things I perceive with my entire man—
those let me record—and it will be poetry. (September 2, 1851)

Attention is a question of entirety, of being wholly present. The poet who fully comes to his senses brings all his words, all of his cadences when he comes. (He brings his enzymes and his immortal soul as well.) And so a poem has nothing to do with picking and choosing, with the mot juste and reflection in tranquility. It is a plain record of one’s entire presence. If the record is faithful—nothing adjusted, nothing exaggerated or nuanced—faith is rewarded: “it will be poetry.” Why? Because it is. Poems are entireties undisfigured by intent and upheld by perfect attendance. Attention improves our innocence every time. And with time, the poem comes right.

As you see so at length will you say. (November 1, 1851)

What shapes the poem? Simple duration. To presence, the poet adds time by adding attention. (Thus is an American masterpiece made of two million offhand words.) To see at length is enough to say, and to say more, see more. Craft elaborates. Attention extends.

On my deathbed, I shall want a longer not a more elaborate life. I shall want an extension, not a revision. And so in the meantime, I take my lesson from Thoreau. I improve my poem by opening my eyes a little wider for a little while longer. Nothing is revised, but vision, as always, changes everything.

The poet is a man who lives at last by watching his moods. (August 28, 1851)

To write the poetry of attention is to live “at last,” to be free, at last, of those awful ventriloquists, Convention and Memory. Having come to his senses, the poet needs no inner life. He sees his moods spread out before him, a continuous revelation of his present circumstances. There’s nothing to elaborate, nothing to work out. Infancy improves with every hour spent in Eden, and attention makes an Eden—i.e., a wholly new heaven and new earth—everywhere, every single time. As Olson said in “Maximus, to Gloucester,” it all comes “to the eye and soul/as though it had never/happened before.” Why? Because it has never happened before. How do we know that? We’ve been watching. Our eyes have been open the entire time, i.e. ever since the poem began.

Why did I not use my eyes when I stood on Pisgah? (January 24, 1852)

The poem is a promised land, and poetry is what happens there. Who would close his eyes to imagine it?

Of all contemporary poets, none has more perfectly visioned with Thoreau’s Edenic eye than Ronald Johnson who, in his wild epic, Ark, encounters again and again an “Eden, glossolalia of light.” With the protraction of sight into saying, Edens are forwarded in real time, the paradise of which is poetry spoken directly to the eye. Where light is sovereign, senses are revelatory, and even prophecy is effortless. The future is apparent to every opened eye. This is the circumstance in which creative writing and creative reading become one and the same. The heliotrope does not imagine the sun, nor does it seek it; it simply, by its nature, finds it out. It is faith incarnate. Not surprisingly, then, a heliotropic poet such as Ronald Johnson finds faithful reading rewarded with poems, such as this, a piece from his Ark taken verbatim from Thoreau’s Journals.

“I look under the lids of time,
left without asylum
to gather a new measure

through aisles of ages
art, every stroke of the chisel
enter own flesh and bone

without moving a finger,
turning my very brain
reflected from the grass blades”

(from “Ark 74, Arches VIII”)

Johnson finds his poem already written because he reads as he sees, i.e., with open eyes. I know it might seem ridiculous, but then, the world is alive. Think a moment. Enthralled by memory, do we not spend most of our waking life in a dream of recognition, failing to see that everything we see has never been seen before? Enthralled by convention and the representations of rhetoric, do we not spend most of our reading life rereading, failing to see the poem on the page, even our own poem, as something happening Now and so for the first time ever? Revision is sleep. The poetry of attention comes to our senses not as a dream and not as a representation. And Johnson writes it so, gladly professing his poem’s measures and his poem’s newness to be “gathered,” not made. Eyes harvest the light they have not sown. In poetry, seeing is meaning, and Johnson is not ashamed to find it in the deepest sense (as eyes go deeply to the brain) effortless. “Ark 74” was gladly gathered “without moving a finger.” The poetry of attention proposes a heroic unoriginality whose entire faith rests in the tireless originality of the real. Eden was already Eden when the gardener arrived. Go ask Adam gladly occupied by paradise, when he was glad. “Ark 74” is likewise literally occupied by Thoreau. When an eye is occupied by light, we call it vision. Johnson avows as much very early in Ark, in this passage from “Beam 4”:

The human eye, a sphere of waters and tissue, absorbs an energy that has come ninety-three million miles from another sphere, the sun. The eye may be said to be sun in other form.

“As you see so at length you will say?” A poem is “said to be sun,” Eden spoken directly to the eye. The absorbent eye becomes, Ronald Johnson avers, a sun, a source. Its authority, its authorship if you like, is effortless once it opens. The poetry of attention is absorbed with what is real. Not original in itself, it becomes a source of originality simply by its being real. The world is alive. Where is the art? Get real. By which I mean to say the art of poetry is effortless once it opens. A poem opens words and the world pours in “as though it had never/happened before.”

There is always more to read in more than books, lively as they sometimes are. The world is alive and languaging, though it will not pause to be reread or composed. There is no such thing as a still life. The French phrase gives the game away: nature morte. Composition is taxidermy. Life presents itself at velocities beyond representation, but quick attentions can quicken our poems, and then oh how prolific all presences become.

From The Art of Attention: A Poet's Eye. Copyright 2007 by Donald Revell. All rights reserved.