Training Our Attention: Why We All Need Poetry Now

The Goldfish Have Us Beat

You probably won't finish this blog post.

Don't take it personally, though; it really is a matter of probability. A recent report found that the median average time spent reading an online article is 37 seconds, and the average human attention span is now infamously shorter than that of a goldfish.

Bloggers and journalist are trained to tailor their writing for "skimmers." You know, two-sentence paragraphs; bullet points; all the important stuff up front. If we're honest, few of us could exempt ourselves from that title, at least when it comes to our behavior online.

Not that there's anything inherently wrong with skimming. The internet already houses more information than anyone could absorb in several lifetimes, so skim we must. But (what do you think—has it been 37 seconds yet?) skimming could also be the symptom of a different, yet related, problem: we're distracted.

Perhaps bottomless newsfeeds, targeted advertising, 24/7 news cycles, and YouTube algorithms have been unwittingly whittling away at our attention spans, such that skimming has become our default mode of engagement, not just with the internet, but with life itself. These days, there's so much we could give our attention to, but we find ourselves incapable of concentrating at all. We become fragmented, frenetic, shallow…

I am not here to argue the point, because many have. Instead, I'm going to continue under the assumption that you already know you're distracted, that your attention feels scattered and enervated by the vast glut of information, images, and opinions "out there," especially online. And then I want to suggest one way you could start reclaiming your attention:

Read more poetry.

In a recent blog post, we explained how the acts of reading and writing poetry help us see the world in new ways. It does so, as this article will explore, by training our attention.

1. The Brevity of Poetry

Most poems these days are relatively short. Only occasionally do I spend more than several minutes on my initial read through a poem. Even sonnets, perhaps the most common form of traditional English poetry, are a mere fourteen lines. For people with stunted attention spans—that's us—this is a good place to start.

Compared to most novels, most poems are bite-sized, meaning they don't demand long stretches of concentration up front. You could read a whole book of poems in a day if you wanted, though I wouldn't always recommend it. Just like I wouldn't recommend you drink espresso all day long.

I've heard that "free divers" can hold a single breath of air for more than ten minutes under water. Getting to such depths, of course, takes practice as the lungs learn to tolerate less and less oxygen. Similarly, reading a poem is like taking a breath and diving under water to explore what's beneath the surface. At first, you may only be able to tolerate a few minutes at a time, but eventually you will find yourself comfortably swimming around the poem's lines for extended periods. You may even find yourself in Paradise Lost.

We can grapple with the content of a poem (more on that below) but its brief length affords us the opportunity to concentrate in phases, slowly strengthening our lungs for deeper dives.

Now, you could raise the objection that tweets are also short, but those aren't improving our attention spans. And you would be right. So here we need to turn to the shape and content of poetry, in addition to its brevity.

II. The Shape of Poetry

Unlike prose, verse poems have line breaks and stanzas. Again, we may struggle to define poetry in technical terms, but we easily recognize it on the page: the lines end early, and sometimes in strange places.

Traditionally, most poets used forms of meter to dictate where lines should break and stanzas end. But even contemporary free-verse poets employ line breaks to add complexity to their poems.

In fact, the line break remains one of the poet's most versatile tools, enabling him to guide readers through a poem's layers of meaning and establishing its unique form, feel, and tempo.

A poem's shape should train us to ask why. Why that line break there? What appears confusing or arbitrary at first may—if you are in the hands of a talented poet—be working to draw you deeper into the poem.

Take Luci Shaw's poem "But Not Forgotten" as an example:

Whether or not I find the missing thing
it will always be
more than my thought of it.
Silver heavy, somewhere it winks
in its own small privacy,
playing
the waiting game with me.

And the real treasures do not vanish.
The precious loses no value
in the spending.
A piece of hope spins out,
bright, along the dark,
and is not lost in space;
love is out orbiting, and will
come home.

To me, the most interesting line break in this poem comes at the start. Why cut line two at "be"? Standing alone, "it will always be" communicates something unique—that this "missing thing" will continue to exist whether or not the speaker finds it.

But when we move our eyes to line three, that meaning expands with the simple addition of the word "more." Shaw's careful line break enables us readers to juxtapose multiple insights: what it means for something lost to "be" and to "be more than my thought of it."

I have come to think that a poem is only finished when changing a single word or line break would somehow diminish its existence—which is to say that everything (everything) in a good poem is there on purpose. The only question: what did you miss the first time through? Better read again.

III. The Content of Poetry

Poetry not only looks different from prose: it sounds different. Poets use an array of literary devices, like rhyme, metaphor, and repetition, to craft poems—all of which train the ear to listen and the mind to consider what the poem is doing.

Figurative language like metaphor opens new ways of imagining the world. As we read a poem, we wrestle with its unusual sounds and images on the page until it yields a blessing, like the angel blessed Jacob in Genesis. The blessing we receive is a fresh perspective on some sliver of life, a new level of attention.

The English poet Samuel Coleridge once wrote that good poetry helps remove the "film of familiarity" from our eyes. It does so by “awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure."

Back to the wrestling metaphor. Coleridge’s dazzling words notwithstanding, we shouldn't forget that reading poetry can be a hard slog. It's true: A poem is not a tweet. But isn't that the point? We're talking about training, after all, and training of any sort means voluntarily forsaking our comfort zones to acquire some new facility or skill.

On the other hand, a great poem does not want to pin its readers to the floor with obscurities. A great poem wants to bless its readers; all it demands is your complete attention, please.

The act of reading poetry trains our attention in the moment, so to speak, but also after we've placed our books down; we return to our lives with a new capacity for perception. It's not just that we get to apply a poem's insights or metaphors to our lives; it's also that we have learned, through the slow process of reading—and it is a slow process—to concentrate for ourselves.

Of course, there are other ways to combat distraction, most of which require us to restrict our engagements with digital media. Reading a good novel can train your attention. You could take up bird watching or learn a new instrument. Or you could pick up a book of poetry and start wrestling—I mean reading. Eventually, if you stick with it, you may just find yourself seeing like a child again.