(Stanford University)

Fellow of the DHC

May 20 – August 15, 2012

Unfolding Presence: Poetic Attention through the Lens of the Twentieth Century

Poetic language is visually, sonically, and semantically dense, intricate, layered, structured, valanced, formed. This linguistic density amounts to a gathering and focalization of aesthetic attention, readerly and writerly. Poetry is predicated by this tension of attention. This dissertation will explore, or unfold, the relationship between poetry and attention - between poetic language and the dynamics of attention it both produces and requires.