Do poems help you pay attention?

Elliott Holt reads the same poem every day for a month. She says the practice of paying attention to one thing is an antidote to endlessly scrolling the Web. Her lovely essay “My Secret Weapon Against the Attention Economy” is in The New York Times Magazine, Aug. 17, 2021.

It’s an interesting question — what the human mind does when it’s paying attention. It’s almost as if we are different personalities, different people. We’ve all seen the distracted parent, ignoring a child who wants to play or just ask a question.

We are quick to say that the distracted parent is an absent parent, but we spend much of our lives on autopilot. 

Holt says the practice of rereading a single poem reminds her of the rewards of paying attention. She sees things in the poem on Tuesday that she didn’t see on Monday.

In a way, it’s a resetting of expectations. You find good things in the work of good poets because those good things are there.

You absorb the material. After a month with the same poem, you learn it by heart. 

Holt’s practice is similar to those of the world’s great religions, which urge devotees to pay attention. Christian monks have prayed the Psalms for centuries. Some Hindus recite the Bhagavad Gita.

I’d choose some poet who really speaks to you. I’d choose the poems of William Stafford, Kim Stafford and Norman MacCaig over those of the Psalmist. I’ve gotten more from these poets who lived in my day than I have from King David and his co-authors.

And this practice doesn’t work with bad poems. It also doesn’t work with good poems you’re not ready to hear. As William Stafford puts it, “some things aren’t learned by manyness.”

My version of this practice involves writing a poem on an index card. I carry it around in my pocket until it wears out.

When I’m waiting in the doctor’s office or standing in line at the grocery store, the card comes out of my pocket. A really absorbing poem carries me far away, and I’m probably setting new standards for being a distracted citizen in public places.

If you have a suggestion for a good notecard poem, please let me know. I’ve included three of my favorites in the notes below.

• Elliott Holt’s essay

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/magazine/poetry-repetition.html?referringSource=articleShare
• Kim Stafford’s “Citizen of Dark Times” 

https://www.thenatureofthings.blog/2019/10/poetry-sunday-citizen-of-dark-times-by.html

• William Stafford “The Little Ways that Encourage Good Fortune”

http://inwardboundpoetry.blogspot.com/2006/01/51-little-ways-that-encourage-good.html

• Norman MacCaig’s “Praise of a collie”

https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2013%252F01%252F17.html 

An incident on Zarzamora Creek

I walk along Zarzarmora Creek just about every day, reporting the news in my notebooks. The other  morning, a big black dog — part Lab, I think — ran the tame ducks into the water and jumped in after them.

The dog swam like an animal born to water. The ducks and geese stayed a few yards ahead. Once they were in the water, the birds weren’t frightened, although the dog, swimming confidently, pursued them for 100 yards.

This section of the creek runs through a park, and people walking by stopped to watch. They wondered where the dog had come from and whom he belonged to. This is entertainment in my neighborhood.

But further down the creek, there is a duck with a broken wing and one with a crippled foot. And so I watched the dog with delight and dread.

In his poem “Over the North Jetty,” William Stafford wrote about watching a flock of geese go by and seeing one laggard peel off.

If you follow an individual away like that

a part of your life is lost forever,

beating somewhere in darkness, and belonging

only to storms that haunt around the world

on that risky path just over the wave.

One of my convictions is that the world would be a better place if everyone owned a copy of Stafford’s poems. He finds words for things that many of us feel, and don’t quite know how to express. 

Why I love a good paragraph and Teddy Roosevelt

This paragraph is about President Theodore Roosevelt and dates from the era of Woodrow Wilson:

When he was President of the United States a cowboy came up to him and said, “Mr. President, I have been in jail a year for killing a gentleman.” “How did you do it?” asked the President, meaning to inquire as to the circumstances. “Thirty-eight on a forty-five frame,” replied the man, thinking that the only interest the President had was that of a comrade who wanted to know with what kind of tool the trick was done. No other President, it is said, from Washington to Wilson would have drawn that answer.

It’s from Virginia Woolf’s essay “Body and Brain” and it shows what a good paragraph can do. That short anecdote gets to why I admire Roosevelt, despite so many flaws. It gets to a particular quality in his personality.

Some lengthy biographies provide so much detail of a life that the personality behind that life is lost, or at least hard to find. And then you run across a writer who can get to the man in one paragraph, 93 words. It’s why I admire Woolf.

Charlie Wilson saw it coming

 Afghanistan is a tragedy, but most of my grieving was done years ago, when we went in.

As a young newspaper reporter, I covered Charlie Wilson, a beloved rascal and congressman from East Texas. He represented a vast district in the pine forests. It’s mostly woods, farms and small towns. There were few reporters to keep track of Charlie. Charlie enjoyed that fact.

But Charlie sought the newspapers out when the Soviet Union went into Afghanistan in 1979. Charlie hated the Soviets.

Charlie was jubilant. He thought the Soviets would ruin themselves in Afghanistan.

One of the maxims of modern military strategy is that it begins with anthropology and sociology. Charlie would have scoffed at the language. But he understood that the people of Afghanistan did not want the Soviets there and did not want to adopt their way of life. They could not possibly be won over, which begs the question of what the Soviets had in mind when they talked about a winnable war.

You might remember the movie “Charlie Wilson’s War,” starring Tom Hanks.  Charlie really did go across the border to shoot at the Russians. He really did get Stinger missiles to the “freedom fighters.” He hoped the Soviets got mired in a long, bloody, hopeless war. He couldn’t quite believe that when the Soviets checked out of that disaster, we checked in.

The tragedy was foreseeable — even to people in the pine forests of East Texas, not exactly a place that provides itself in the sophistication of its foreign policy analysis. 

Making time to write

Being a physician is full-time work, but some physicians think of themselves as writers.

William Carlos Williams was one of the most famous American poets. He also practiced medicine in Rutherford, N.J. He had a typewriter in his office and worked on his poetry between patients. He sometimes wrote between house calls, waiting for a baby to arrive.

In The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1967), he wrote: “I have never felt that medicine interfered with me but rather that it was my very food and drink, the very thing which made it possible for me to write. Was I not interested in man? There the thing was, right in front of me.”

Richard Seltzer, a professor of surgery at Yale, wrote essays and fiction while teaching and seeing patients. He had an unusual routine. He went to bed around 8:30 p.m., got up at 1 a.m., wrote for a couple of hours and then went back to bed until 6 a.m. Both of these physicians were mentioned in an article “Making Time to Write” by another physician, Dr. Lucy M. Candib (Annals of Family Medicine, July 2005; 3(4): 365-366).

Candib discussed the different strategies that busy people use to cultivate their interests. She mentions these classes of writers:

• Deck-clearers, those who get other work done so they have uninterrupted time.

• Wedgers, those who “wedge it in,” as Williams did between patients.

• Schedulers such as Dr. Seltzer. I think I’m part wedger, part scheduler. But the point is not how you do it, but that you do it. People who find ways to cultivate their interests tend to be happy and contented, and those who do not tend to be frustrated.

When I was a newspaper editor, one of the real pleasures of the job was reading a weekly column by Dr. Melvyn Schreiber, a professor at the medical school in Galveston. He would rotate topics. He wrote mostly on books. He wrote one column a month on opera. But my favorites were the personal essays, those he wrote about himself and his own view of life. I have no idea how he found the time to do it, but he did. The readers of a newspaper in a little city in Texas were better for it.

The parable of Thales’s mule

Thales’ mule, carrying a heavy load of salt, stumbled crossing a river and noticed the load got lighter as the salt dissolved in the water. Thereafter, Thales noticed the mule stumbled at all rivers — until he loaded it with wool.

Thales was, at least in tradition, the father of Western philosophy. The story suggests a simple thing — a fundamental thing — about human nature: When we consider the larger world, it’s usually with the motive of trying to make our lives easier.

But when we examine the world a bit more carefully, we find that the motives of others conflict with our own.

And so, in one short story, we go from a simple thing to an impossible thing: a paradox.

If you are wondering why some people love the literature of the Ancient Greeks, there it is. Maybe it takes a certain cast of mind.

Needed: A biologist who makes house calls

In Mississippi, a rumor started that a common chemical used to treat cattle for worms could prevent coronavirus.

Naturally, that’s the kind of rumor that would go viral during a pandemic. And that explains why a physician who is the state’s top medical officer was on television, pleading with people to lay off the cattle worming meds.

I liked the story, but only because it briefly got the government of Texas out of the headlines. Briefly.

It’s a profoundly depressing story, especially when you consider that Texas is bigger than Mississippi, with more cattle, and a bigger supply of worm medicine.

It’s also a reminder that there are limits to all explanations, including biological explanations.

Human beings have a tendency to fuel rumors. That behavior seems to be universal, part of our nature, part of what makes us human.

What’s the evolutionary advantage of that? What’s the biological explanation?