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“Attention is the beginning of devotion,” the poet Mary Oliver wrote in her final collection of essays. In 2021, the poet Leila Chatti took up Oliver’s words, reflecting on the challenge of them: “All day, the world makes its demands. There’s so much of it, world / begging to be noticed.”
For those of us working to slow down, to smell the roses, to look one another in the eyes rather than in the iMessage bubbles, Oliver is a perfect guide. As my colleague Franklin Foer wrote in 2019, “It was not Mary Oliver’s intent to critique this new world—and it’s hard to imagine she even owned a flip phone—but her poetry captures its spiritual costs.”
The world makes its demands, and distraction has both personal costs and societal ones. My colleague Megan Garber has smartly noted how an overload of information and a fracturing of attention makes people, and Americans in particular, less equipped to meet the challenges of the moment. “Today’s news moves as a maelstrom [of] information at once trifling and historic, petty and grave, cajoling, demanding, funny, horrifying, uplifting, embarrassing, fleeting, loud—so much of it, at so many scales,” she wrote in 2021.
A lack of attention is dangerous. But we might also spend time thinking about the beauty of its presence, what attention gives back to those who pay it. I’ll leave you with a few more of Oliver’s words: “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”
On Attention
“Attention Is the Beginning of Devotion”
By Franklin Foer
The late poet Mary Oliver warned against looking without noticing. In an age of distraction, her work is more urgent than ever.
The Great Fracturing of American Attention
By Megan Garber
Why resisting distraction is one of the foundational challenges of this moment
Mister Rogers and the Art of Paying Attention
By Adelia Moore
The beloved children’s-show host knew what was at the heart of human relationships.
Still Curious?
- “Moccasin Flowers”: Oliver celebrates the beautiful fervor of life in the face of oblivion with characteristically simple and poignant verse.
- The fight for attention: We may live in an endlessly distracted world, but where we focus our gaze still matters.
Other Diversions
P.S.
If you’re interested in reading another poet whose work focuses on attention to the details of our lives and how we share those details with others, pick up something by Maggie Smith. I recommend her poem “First Fall.”
— Isabel
