Weeding in the Rain

On the dynamics of attention in the poetry of Kevin Cole.

Dec 15, 2023

I feel obliged to warn some of you that what follows began as an academic paper. It is both longer and somewhat more technical than what I typically publish here. Yet I wanted to share it for the ways it brings together several of the topics I’ve been writing about lately: poetry, attention, and moral formation. The essay feels like a fitting way to close out 2023 here at Conversant.

Of course, these topics are so broad that, even at 4,300 words, I have hardly said enough. Consider this a provisional contribution to the ongoing discussions of attention’s role in shaping reality for us, and shaping us for reality. As always, thanks for your attention.

photo of body of water and droplets — Photo by Alex Dukhanov on Unsplash

Introduction: So Distracted

Even if T.S. Eliot was right to characterize his generation as “distracted from distraction by distraction,” the same could no longer be said of western people today. We are now well aware of our distractions. We know, for example, that targeted advertising, endless news cycles, and novel forms of entertainment have been whittling away at our mental faculties. We know many social media platforms are engineered to be addictive, not unlike slot machines. We’ve read headlines and self-help books about our shrinking attention spans. In short, western people today generally acknowledge their state of distraction and find it troubling. The question is: what now?

Sociologists, philosophers, and “attention economists” are busy researching the subjects of attention and distraction, seeking ways of recalibrating our scattered minds. Some have even turned to the arts for guidance, including poetry. One prominent example is Lucy Alford’s recent study Forms of Poetic Attention, which explores how poems produce, require, and activate specific modes of attention in writers and readers. Her argument comes nowhere close to proposing poetry as a “solution” to the problem of attention, though she does demonstrate the upshot of treating a poem as a site of attention-formation. Specifically, Alford illuminates poetry’s ability to hone the human capacities for perception and response that “underpin our powers of judgment” (Alford 20). Hence, with Alford as guide, the following essay investigates the role of attention in the work of contemporary poet Kevin Cole. Cole’s poetry lends itself naturally to such analysis as it falls within a longstanding tradition of American nature writers, like Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver, who understood attention as central to their work and, indeed, their lives.

My argument is twofold: first, that Cole’s poetic speaker frequently exhibits high-resolution transitive modes of attention, in particular, through the act of naming the objects of his awareness; and second, that such a practice carries moral as well as literary import for readers and writers of poetry. This second point, admittedly beyond the scope of Alford’s book, will take us to the philosophical writings of Iris Murdoch, a twentieth-century British intellectual who situated attention within the realm of virtue and thus of character formation for artists and moral agents alike.

Murdoch not only understood the moral life in attentional terms; she also turned to art as a paradigmatic mode of attention. Great art, she believed, pierces the veil of selfish concerns that so often obscures our vision of reality. And it is reality, finally, to which we must attend.

Transitive Attention: Attending to Objects

Alford divides all poetic forms of attention into two grammatical categories: transitive attention (object-oriented awareness) and intransitive attention (objectless awareness). She then assigns each category four primary “modes” and five “dynamic coordinates,” which may be variously constellated to conceptualize the unique nature of attention in a given poem. For the purposes of this essay, we will limit our focus to transitive attention, or attention that takes a specific object. (Alford 26). A brief overview of the coordinates and modes of transitive attention will prepare us to examine their operations within Cole’s poetry below.
The five coordinates of transitive attention Alford identifies are interest, intentionality, selectivity, spatiotemporal remove, and apprehension. The first two, interest and intentionality, are subject-oriented dynamics that “concern primarily the position and attitudinal stance of the attending subject” (29). The second two, selectivity and spatiotemporal remove, Alford calls object-oriented dynamics, concerning the scale, integrity, and resolution of the poem’s object, as well as the “location of the object in space-time, relative to the attending subject” (29). The final category, apprehension, falls at the intersection of subject- and object-oriented coordinates, denoting the degree to which the subject “captures” the object through the act of attention.

The coordinate of interest refers to a speaker’s express investment in the object of a poem. A typical love poem, for example, voicing the speaker’s desire for the beloved, will almost necessarily evince a high degree of interest. Other times we cannot so easily discern the speaker’s thoughts or feelings toward the object of the poem, in which case we might call the speaker disinterested, in the sense of maintaining objectivity (Alford 32). Next, the coordinate of intentionality refers to the active or passive intention of the speaker toward a poem’s object, or a distinction between endogenous and exogenous modes of attention. Active, or endogenous, attention is intentional, top-down, and purposive; by contrast, passive, or exogenous, attention is when “the speaker’s attention is caught and held by changes or movements in the environment, or by the sheer arresting nature of the object itself” (34). Put differently, intentionality speaks to the dynamic interactions between a poem’s sources of agency, whether subjective or objective.

Thirdly, the coordinate of selectivity measures the degree to which an object of attention is “focalized” in a poem. Alfred explains: “Unlike interest and intentionality, selectivity concerns the scale, intactness, and resolution of the attended object, qualities of the object’s position within the attentional lens” (Alford 36). The integrity of an object corresponds with the integrity of the speaker’s attention, which may be fragmented, fixed, diffuse, and so on. Fourthly, spatiotemporal remove concerns the relative position of the object in space-time, an acknowledgment that some objects are immediately and physically present to the speaker (e.g., a sip of red wine), while others are distant and even immaterial (e.g., a distant memory in the vineyard). Finally, as mentioned above, apprehension refers to the object's degree of “capture” by the attending subject (43). Alford asserts that apprehension, more than the other coordinates, relies on the reader’s attention and capacity to “grasp” the object as presented in the poem. Thus, as a coordinate, it falls at the three-way intersection of subject, object, and reader.

Taken together, these five coordinates enable us to assess how transitive attention functions within a poem. Their “particular convergence” constitutes the unique mode of a given act of attention (Alford 51). The four dominant modes Alford explores in her study are contemplation, desire, recollection, and imagination. Rather than defining each outright, however, we will now turn to an inductive study of transitive attention in several of Cole’s poems, allowing the dynamic coordinates to guide our analysis of their respective modes. Our final aim is not to dissect the poems but to arrive at a fuller conception of how they produce, require, and activate specific modes of attention.

Refer a friend

Transitive Attention in Kevin Cole’s Late Summer Plums

Kevin Cole is a South Dakota-based poet. His 2016 collection Late Summer Plums reveals a distinctive poetic voice and Midwestern sensibility. Nearly all of its poems are rooted in Cole’s own corner of the South Dakota prairie, exploring the region’s distinctive seasons, landscapes, flora, and fauna. Cole’s ability to render its subtle lifeforms with studied precision—his careful attention to and knowledge of the land and its inhabitants—is perhaps his chief trademark. The poem “On Milkweed” demonstrates his skill for attending to small subjects in the natural world, in this case “stoic stalks” of milkweed in autumn. The opening tercets read:

In early fall, when the afternoon light comes
Angling in like a startling memory
I like to walk a field looking for milkweed,
To pick out the stoic stalks standing alone
Among the sworled swaths of grass and stands
Of bluestem, sumac, plum, and mullein.

In the tradition of Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, and others, many of Cole’s poems begin with a walk around a familiar place, then conclude with a new revelation or sense of wonder. The speaker in “On Milkweed” knows where to go looking for milkweed; he knows—because this is a walk he likes to take—that it should be found among the “sumac, plum, and mullein.” Yet already the familiar field glows with afternoon light like a “startling memory.” Thus the poem begins with a higher degree of interest and intentionality on the part of the speaker. In terms of selectivity, however, the opening stanzas feel deconcentrated, spread over the open field.

Speaking of memory, the following two stanzas introduce a shift of spatiotemporal remove, in which Cole’s speaker recalls how “turgid and green” the milkweed formerly appeared in spring and summer. The same pods that were once “As elegant and supple as a doe’s ear, / Are now silvered, bristled carapaces.” The object of attention (milkweed) is the same, but Cole’s relative position in space and time has suddenly shifted with the introduction of memory, creating a sense of tension with the immediacy of the opening stanzas. We wonder, if the pods were so elegant during summer, why does he like to go looking for milkweed in late fall?

The next stanza returns to the present with an answer: because even as a bristled carapace, the pod has “gifts to give.” Now the speaker sits beside a stalk and runs his finger “along the furrowed ochre walls / While marveling at the clump of brown seeds / With white hairs as soft as river’s silt.” These lines display higher degrees of selectivity. The object of attention sharpens as Cole’s speaker finally and literally gets in touch with the milkweed pod, attending to its granular characteristics. Alford notes that high-resolution attention of this sort often leads to a sense of discovery, “as an ordinary experience, scene, or object reveals subtleties and particularities otherwise glossed over” (Alford 38). Cole uses the language of “gifts” to express his wonder. Though he has walked the field before, still the milkweed startles him—provided he attends to a single pod long enough to uncover its “marvelous clump of brown seeds.”

Above we noted the psychological distinction between endogenous and exogenous forms of attention, which sheds light on the relation between Cole’s intentional speaker and the surprises he encounters in the natural world. To repeat, endogenous attention is goal-driven and top-down, while exogenous attention is stimulus-driven and bottom-up, prompted and held by external phenomena. The dynamism of “On Milkweed” lies in Cole’s ability to balance these forms of orientation to the world. His speaker pursues, observes, and names a single object of attention, i.e., a milkweed pod. At the same time, he remains receptive to influences beyond his intentions, as in the final stanza, when he lifts the pod to release its seeds in the wind: “And watch them drift across the sedge and brome, / Each a little song longing to be heard.” The song latent in every seed—perhaps these are the gifts the speaker went looking for.

As its dynamic coordinates shift between stanzas, “On Milkweed” operates in three different modes: first, it is a poem of contemplation because its speaker looks closely and reflects deeply on a singular object; it is briefly a poem of recollection when, in stanzas three and four, he remembers the milkweed during spring and summer; finally, it is, above all, a poem of desire, involving what Alford calls the speaker’s “attentive reach toward its object … perhaps even dissolving or growing porous in the act of attending to another” (Alford 77). Or as Cole himself tells us in the opening stanza: “I like to walk a field looking for milkweed.”

A new configuration of dynamic coordinates emerges in “Deer Fording the Missouri in the Early Afternoon.” The poem’s title identifies the speaker’s object of attention, once again encountered in nature. This time, however, Cole does not tell us he went looking for any particular sight or experience; what captures his attention about a deer crossing a river is “the fragility of it all: / The agonizingly slow pace, the tender ears, / Black snout, and beatific face just above / The dark brown waters, the river’s debris, / And the palpable tug of menacing eddies.” Cole admits such a sight might not startle “those familiar with the ways of deer,” but he—apparently unfamiliar with such ways—stands aghast from the riverbank, awaiting the animal’s fate.

We might describe the attentive dynamics of this opening scene as high interest but low intentionality. Cole’s speaker shows genuine, if uninformed, concern for the fording deer, the object of his attention. Words like “worried,” “agonizingly,” and “palpable” suggest he feels caught up in its predicament. They further reveal his attention to be exogenous in this instance, seized by and passive before the spectacle, even helpless, given his distance from the deer. Building suspense in the poem’s middle stanzas, Cole momentarily believes she will make is safely to the other side, but his hope quickly fades:

At one point she hit upon a shallow shoal
In the braided channel and appeared
To walk upon an illuminated mantle.
I hoped she would rest on the alluvium,
Or forage awhile among the windthrow,
But instead she bounded back into the zealous currents.

Cole employs higher diction (”alluvium,” “windthrow”) to sharpen the resolution of this suspenseful scene. His attention encompasses not only the deer, but the objects of her surrounding, aiding or impeding her journey. Moreover, these stanzas draw us, as readers, deeper into the poem. We, too, find ourselves hoping for the deer’s success. We see the windthrow and wish she would forage there awhile. We catch our breath when she bounds back into the zealous currents. In short, we are ushered into a deeper apprehension of the poem’s perceptual horizon.
What relief, then, to read in the concluding stanzas:

When she finally reached the riffle and rootwads
And climbed into the greenbelt of cottonwoods
And Russian olives, I almost fell down into prayer.
Now I long to bear witness of such things,
To tell someone in need of a story –
Of a doe fording the Missouri in the early afternoon.

Of course, when Cole says he “almost fell down into prayer,” he means a prayer of thanksgiving or praise for the deer’s apparently narrow escape. This final turn confirms what the attentive reader will have sensed by now, namely, that the entire poem enacts the recollective, memory-based mode of testimony. As the object of our attention, the poem realizes Cole’s longing to “bear witness of such things.” The deer disappears into the greenbelt of cottonwoods and Russian olives and we suddenly realize we have become co-witnesses.

But witnesses of what, exactly? It’s worth noting that “Deer Fording the Missouri in the Early Afternoon” is not only the first poem of the collection, but the only poem in its section of the book’s table of contents. This might suggest that Cole understands all his subsequent poems as works of testimony, bearing witness to such wonders as a milkweed pod, warbling vireos, fox snakes, a mattress floating down the Big Sioux River, and a spider found flattened on “page 275 of my Herodotus,” among others. By attending, through language, to the particularities of his surroundings, Cole’s poetry brings us into contact with a richly variegated world, not some realm of ideals or abstractions. In other words, Cole’s poetry provides us with language for reality. Before speech: attention.

It follows that the converse also holds true. Philosopher L.M. Sacasas has suggested that a failure to properly attend to the world can deaden our perceptions of it, such that we only see and speak of reality in general or abstract terms. By the same token: “were we to properly attend to the world,” he writes, “its particularities and distinctions would emerge, and we would be impelled to call these new emergent and unfolding dimensions of the world by their names or search for the fitting metaphor or otherwise learn to speak adequately if not exhaustively about what we have seen (Sacasas, “Too Many Words”). Whereas most of us would look upon a field and think “grass,” Cole sees “sworled swaths of grass and strands / Of bluestem, sumac, plum, and mullein.” And while there is nothing particularly remarkable about a river under ice, Cole finds a startling metaphor: “the river is a frozen bone / Lain across the land by a forlorn, banished god” (Cole 20). This is the stuff of poetry. By carefully attending both to the given world and the precise words to articulate his experience within it, Cole also stands to sharpen our own capacities for perception and judgment. Or, as Alford puts it, this is how poems “shape the contours of our awareness” and even train us “in another mode of being” (20).

Some may find this a lofty claim for so common a thing as poetry, and perhaps it is. Alford’s point, and mine, is less about poetry, per se, than the perception-forming power of attention. It seems the habitual objects of our attention inevitably orient our “mode of being” in the world, our sense of what is and what is possible. Cole’s poetry highlights the interdependent relationship between attention and language. But perhaps no modern poet has explicitly attended to attention like the late Mary Oliver, who once concluded an essay with the remark: “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” The word “devotion,” of course, carries both moral and religious connotations, suggesting attention’s influence not only upon perception and language, but also human action. We conclude, then, with a few reflections on the intersections of attention, morality, and art.

Attention and Moral Formation

It was no coincidence that 20th-century Irish-British intellectual Iris Murdoch built her career as both a moral philosopher and a novelist. For her, the promises and pitfalls of the creative act illustrate our struggle to become virtuous individuals all too well. She summarized that struggle in two key steps for the artist and moral agent alike: 1) the suppression of ego, which eclipses reality with selfish fantasy; 2) the redirection of one’s attention to some worthier, external object. Following Simone Weil, Murdoch used the word “attention” to mean “a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality” (Murdoch 33). More than the allocation of mental resources, attention is a moral orientation to specific objects in the world. So conceived, attention undergirds all other virtues, for “our ability to act well ‘when the moment comes’ depends partly, perhaps largely, upon the quality of the habitual objects of our attention” (55). Interrogating the objects of one’s attention is, therefore, essential to moral formation.

Again though, the great impediment to virtue, according to Murdoch, is the overweening ego, whose imagination so easily draws attention away from reality toward selfish affairs. She explains: “The chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy: the tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what is there outside one” (57). Distinguishing fantasy from reality can be difficult in our personal lives; however, Murdoch believed the difference is more easily discernible in works of art, including mediocre or saccharine works that allow us to see more clearly how the “intrusion of fantasy” and “the assertion of self” obscure reality.

But Murdoch would not have us look to mediocre art for our moral formation—quite the opposite. She argued instead that we may begin orienting ourselves to reality by attending to beauty, including beauty in art. For, just as mediocre art exhibits the human tendency to seek consolation in fantasy, so too, great art exhibits “the checking of selfishness in the interest of seeing the real,” which just is the good life for Murdoch (63). Crucially, this formative quality of art influences both the artist and the art consumer:

To silence and expel self, to contemplate and delineate nature with a clear eye, is not easy and demands a moral discipline. A great artist is, in respect of his work, a good man, and, in the true sense, a free man. The consumer of art has an analogous task to its producer: to be disciplined enough to see as much reality in the work as the artist has succeeded in putting into it (63).

Here Murdoch expresses something like T.S. Eliot’s famous argument in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” according to which the artist must continually extinguish personality from his or her work to become a more effective conduit of reality, whether past or present. The true poet, in this view, is objective, detached, disinterested. His work affords readers an encounter, not with personality, nor with reality as such, but with a faithful representation of reality.

Paying one’s attention to such art—whether in the form of a poem, painting, or piano concerto—likewise demands a level of self-forgetfulness. The mysterious thing about beauty, in Murdoch’s thought, is that it attracts just this sort of attention, allowing us to momentarily silence selfish concerns for the sake of the real. It’s not that beholding great art makes us moral in any direct sense; but it can train us to see reality, and that’s a start. Only a special sort of narcissist could stand before a painting by, say, Cézanne while simultaneously scheming about how to clinch yet another promotion at work, right? But then, part of Murdoch’s point is that most of us really are so narcissistic most of the time, which says less about Cézanne or beauty than the habitual objects of our attention and the extent to which we have traded this world for the simulacrum of personal fantasy.

For Murdoch, the beauty of nature may also avail our “unselfing.” The silky seeds of a milkweed pod, a beatific doe fording a river—such encounters, sought or discovered, pierce the veil of selfishness and awaken us to a world beyond ourselves. Yet the advantage of a poem about nature to a personal encounter with nature is how the poem “reveals what we are usually too selfish and too timid to recognize, the minute and absolutely random detail of the world, and reveals it together with a sense of unity and form” (Murdoch 84). Paradoxically, the objective form of a poem, for instance, aids a reader’s attention, but also demands a level of surrender or conformity. It presents an “authoritative structure which commands my respect” (87). Attending properly to a poem’s unique constellation of dynamic coordinates, its inflections of voice and unfolding logic, rhythm, and tempo, in a word, its unity of form—all this demands the virtues of patience and, crucially, humility. Or so Murdoch concluded: “The humble man, because he sees himself as nothing, can see other things as they are” (101). The humble man is the self-forgetful man, the one in whom ego is most extinguished.

This insight sheds additional light on the dynamics of transitive attention in Cole’s poems. For, the poems in which the objects of attention are most fully apprehended, as in the two examples above, are also the poems whose speaker assumes a stance of humility toward the natural world. He remains receptive to its gifts. He sympathizes with the deer and hopes for her salvation. Eschewing abstractions, he finds dignifying language for otherwise insignificant details, which, in turn, become nature’s gifts to his readers.

We find another poignant example in Cole’s poem “Weeding in the Rain,” which begins: “When dwelling upon my sins, / I like to weed a little in the rain / During a slow steady shower / Without hat or rain gear” (68). The penitent speaker notes how “menacing” the weeds look in sun: “The prickly bull thistle bristles / Like Genghis Kahn surveying a suzerainty,” how “the night-flowering catchfly, / Fleabane, and scurfpea / Sway and swagger like young / Salesman over a third martini.” By now we should hardly be surprised that Cole’s speaker knows the names of several varieties of weeds in his yard; is it just this awareness, this attention to detail, that underpins his vivid similes.

What starts as attention quickly becomes a surprising affinity with the weeds, even admiration. The final stanza begins:

I can’t help but admire their desire
To hold their position in the garden,
How their deep-running
Tubers and roots resist hoe, hand, and spade,
Especially the chickweed, nutsedge
Dogbane and nightshade.
Thus I confess an affinity with these weeds.

Cole’s identification with the weeds no doubt arises from his contemplative mood—“dwelling on my sins”—but his familiarity with their names and ways suggests a deeper relationship of sustained attention, that of a gardener to his garden. We might imagine the speaker would prefer to distance himself from the weeds, as from his sins. He is weeding, after all. Even so, Cole uses anthropomorphism to relate with their “desire” to remain in the garden, before confessing his own weed-like tendencies in these final lines of the poem:

For I, too, have been uncharitable,
Prickly, and prodigal; have been a vagrant,
A tramp, and cast out of the garden.
But in rare moments, I have been elegant.
And in a more virtuous, well-lived life,
Perhaps I would have been elected to bear the precious seed.
In this life, though, you will most often find me among the weeds.

And so, by consigning himself to the weeds as he dreams of a more virtuous life, Cole’s speaker demonstrates the very humility Murdoch believed the cultivation of virtue requires, the humility to silence self and tend to reality, weeds and all. Hence the deepest significance of this poem, for readers, is found not in the names of various weeds—though they do matter—but in the speaker’s attentive posture of receptivity to the world beyond himself.

Some will find the moral edge of this essay off-putting or unwarranted, not least Lucy Alford, who maintains that many of the poetic forms of attention are amoral. To be sure, I have not wished to propound the absurd notion that poetry necessarily cultivates virtue in its readers or writers, nor that attention is the whole story as far as right behavior is concerned. By relating both Alford and Murdoch’s thought to the work of Kevin Cole, I’ve sought to show how the dynamics of attention can shape our reading of a poem and, in turn, how such a reading might hone our capacities for attention—specifically, attention to reality. Of course, it was also T.S. Eliot who said “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” Perhaps poetry can help us bear, even love, a little more.