Poetry and mindfulness

POETRY AND MINDFULNESS Interruption to a Journey Bryan Walpert Poetry and Mindfulness Bryan Walpert Poetry and Mindfulness Interruption to a Journey Bryan Walpert School of English and Media Studies Massey University Auckland, New Zealand ISBN 978-3-319-68680-6    ISBN 978-3-319-68681-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68681-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017955051 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations Cover illustration: Pattern adapted from an Indian cotton print produced in the 19th century Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland For Nancy, Abigail, and Zachary, here and now Preface Much has been said about the speed of our lives at this particular point in history Many forces, professionally and socially, pressure us to flit from one thing to another, to be in two places at once The prevalence of smartphones, tablets, and wearable technology not only make it possible to multitask across time zones but obliges us to so Whatever the advantages of the internet and the many technologies we use to leverage it, there is growing evidence that we are paying a price in distraction and in neurological changes that are affecting our ability to concentrate, to follow lengthy arguments—and perhaps even to empathize with one another This book is about how a very old and ultraportable piece of technology can help us to stave off such problems That piece of technology is called a poem And I will make my argument about poetry in the context of mindfulness For every action, there is a counter-reaction And in an age of technological distraction, mindfulness offers an increasingly popular counter-tendency toward focus and attention Mindfulness has been around for 2500 years, but in recent decades it has infiltrated the West via the conduits we tend to value—science, medicine, business, and, increasingly, education It encourages us to be present to our lives, both external and internal, and to attend to the moment as it is Not as we wish it to be, not as we think it is on the basis of the habits we have formed, but truly to pay attention and see things for what they are The values of mindfulness would include a calm concentration and, as a result of practice, a better awareness of ourselves and others, and the development of empathy This book stems from my own personal and professional journey I have been writing, publishing, and teaching poetry for about two decades vii viii   PREFACE My MFA and Ph.D both focused on writing and exploring poetry I have taught poetry at the university level at multiple institutions in two countries And I have published three collections of poetry and a monograph on the links between poetry and science My interest in mindfulness is less academic than my interest in poetry, but it is no less personal My exposure to mindfulness began with an Eastern Religions class as an undergraduate at Brown University, an interest I picked up a few years later with The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts, followed by as many of his books as I could find, and then books by many others My practical introduction to mindfulness occurred twenty-two years ago, when a friend introduced me to weekly meditations and talks at the Baltimore Shambhala Center On Sunday mornings, I would drive downtown, climb a set of stairs, and spend an hour alternately sitting on a cushion or walking in circles around the carpeted floor, sunlight filtering through the windows, the scent of incense hovering in the air Eventually, I took a weekend mindfulness course, where we sat largely in silence for hours, interrupted with occasional group discussions and one-to-one sessions with a mindfulness mentor I came to see how difficult it could be to sit still and focus on my breath My back hurt During one of our group discussions, a fellow participant, a beginner like me, said, “This sucks!” I tended to agree But after that weekend he became a regular devotee And, as with him, it made a difference for me I became aware of just how much buzzing my mind did, flitting from subject to subject, worry to worry My relationship with mindfulness meditation practice has been an uneven one, but during periods when I have practiced consistently, I’ve found myself much more aware of my emotions, much more capable of dealing with situations and my reactions to them in a conscious manner, rather than reacting unconsciously on the basis of learned behavior My interest in mindfulness has remained strong throughout—in my reading and my thinking—even if my practice has not always consistently followed suit In no small way, my introduction to mindfulness meditation—and the reading I did around it—paved the way to my interest in poetry as I became increasingly aware of my own thoughts and interests, my satisfactions and dissatisfactions Eventually I would see the two, mindfulness and poetry, as connected Poetry, I will argue here, offers a means of developing concentration, focusing on the present, and cultivating both contextual and ecological thinking—the sort of thinking Buddhist mindfulness helps to inculcate and that has societal benefits in helping us to grow accustomed to complexity and training us to consider causes and effects as  PREFACE     ix more dynamic than they might appear It might even, as a few studies tentatively suggest, help to develop the parts of the brain that increase attention span and compassion Poetry is not just a means of occupying our minds, not just a form of entertainment or solace or wisdom, though it can be all of those things In an age where we are encouraged always to focus on the next destination, poetry offers an interruption to a journey Or, more to the point, our multiple journeys Poetry opens us to looking much more insightfully at the scripts, habits, and conventions that our journeys entail and permit us to see those journeys in new ways—and in some cases rethink them completely, just as my explorations of mindfulness helped me to rethink my own career journey and led me here I will suggest that poetry has in that sense a kind of personal and social utility There is a larger context In a world of distraction, one that values the quick hit, the surface skim, and the YouTube sound bite, what we call the liberal arts or the humanities are under more pressure than ever to show their value In thinking through how reading and studying poetry might help us to be more focused and compassionate, I am making a small part of the larger argument for the humanities, for the arts, and for a liberal education Others have offered good, broad arguments for the humanities, so I will simply deal with my own small part of it I will argue that as we look for ways to persuade students, humanities colleagues, and those outside of the humanities of the value of studying poetry, it is useful to link what we do—whether we teach the reading or writing of poems—to the growing societal interest in mindfulness, an interest that itself is seen as a means to resist some of the unfortunate effects of technology I will argue that the popularity of mindfulness is in one sense a useful way into literature, given its growing use throughout society But I will also argue that there is a natural fit, that the consequences of mindfulness training are in sympathy with the benefits of studying poetry as a reader or writer And I will suggest that some of the greatest benefits of studying poetry stem simply from the way we engage poems, as readers or as writers—not from their content or with any claim for greater wisdom among poets themselves This book, then, is in that larger sense a defense of poetry in a society that undervalues it That mindfulness is finally gaining a foothold in the West offers a means to show the value of poetry because poetry and mindfulness truly are, as I see it, connected in a number of ways These ways seem to me quite evident, but when I mentioned to colleagues that I was considering a book on mindfulness and poetry, the general reaction was surprise This confirmed for me that such a book was worth writing x   PREFACE This book is primarily for colleagues in literary studies and creative writing who find themselves pressed by students, colleagues, or those beyond the academy to explain the relevance of poetry But it is also for those colleagues in other areas of the academy, and the potential audience for this book is, to my mind, much broader than the scholarly or teaching community I hope to engage anyone with an interest in poetry or an interest in present-oriented awareness and mindfulness My hope, then, is that any reader—scholarly or general—will come through this book with a greater appreciation, in the context of mindfulness, for why poetry matters so deeply at the present time Acknowledgments It is easy to start acknowledging the many people who in one way or another made it possible for this book to exist, but it is hard to know when to stop Thanks to Mark Ferrara for reading the manuscript and providing useful feedback and support; to Douglas Osto for pointing to me a very useful source; to Massey University for research leave; to the College of Humanities and Social Sciences for a research grant that permitted time for revision; to Associate Professors Joe Grixti and Jenny Lawn, successive Heads of School, for funds to pay for poetry permissions; and to the anonymous reviewers for their supportive and constructive comments, which led to a much more focused argument Many thanks go to my parents for being so supportive over the years Though they thought my initial forays into mindfulness meditation amusing many years ago, I am pleased that my father has on his own come around to the wisdom of Alan Watts (my mother remains amused) My greatest thanks go to my wife, Nancy Golubiewski, who suggested I write this book, and to my children, Abigail and Zachary All three remind me, in ways both explicit and implicit, both of the importance of staying present and of just how far I have yet to travel simply to be here now There are publishers I wish to thank for permission to use material, but I cannot, as they declined to give the sort of permissions required by Palgrave Macmillan This was in some cases despite the very strong desire of the creators of the work, the poets themselves, to see their work discussed Perhaps one day the conflicting requirements of academic and trade publishers will be ironed out such that it is easy for a critic to fully discuss poems in scholarly books xi 110   B WALPERT owned—“it is a poem concerned with ownership,” as Richard Poirier put it (Poirier 1977, 182)—draws a distinction between humanity and the environment, and the idea links the two in a hierarchy in which nature is subordinate The distance of village and the owner from those woods also suggests the fragile hold humans have over wilderness: He might own them, but they have an existence apart from him The loveliness and darkness of the woods, its naturalness, also sits in contrast to the promises the speaker must keep, the social commitments that are constructions of society The “miles to go” to meet those commitments is set against his ultimate need to sleep Miles are a form of human—that is to say constructed—measurement, hence useful but artificial (we can divide distance into any number of constructed forms of measurement, since miles are no more “natural” than kilometers) This is in contrast to the natural condition of sleep Our quick and dirty ecocritical reading might also take a deconstructive turn For instance, it is possible to argue that the stability of the human/ nature dichotomy in this poem is put into question by the acknowledgment that in the end, despite our constructions—property, roads, systems of measurement—we are natural creatures The poem would seem to acknowledge that the social world’s stronger hold on the speaker is temporary, as he will eventually have to sleep; no matter how much society calls to him, nature will take its course If we read sleep in this poem as death, of course—as some have—that puts social constructions into even greater perspective as temporary and flimsy Yet Frost’s speaker also assumes his horse has become so domesticated as to have internalized human patterns of responsibility So a horse can be this domesticated (can go as far as to remind the speaker of his commitments) yet remain clearly an aspect of “nature,” while a person (a human being who agreed to these commitments and shares in their construction) can be tempted by the beauty of nature to abandon those commitments So is it possible to distinguish clearly, in any essential sense, between human and nature, between the structures (physical or cultural) that we build and those objects in the natural environment? The idea here is simply that there are all sorts of assumptions embedded in language, and theoretical approaches are useful for becoming mindful of the conventions and scripts we often accept unconsciously, without question, such as that personal property is a n ­ atural state of affairs or that there is a clear division between nature and human Of course, we are not obliged always to read poems in this way But it is important to convey to skeptics, including students, that the study of   THE THIRD FRUIT: POETRY, ECOLOGY, CONTINGENCY    111 poetry invites such deeper investigations The fact is, as Hans Bertens argues, “theory and practice are inevitably connected and have always been connected.” In other words, as he emphasizes to students (and implicitly suggests we as well), much of the current thinking is that when “we interpret a text we always so from a theoretical perspective, whether we are aware of it or not” (Bertens 2014, 1) Studying poetry now requires a greater awareness that we are always interpreting within a system of values and so invites us to develop an awareness of what those systems are The particular contexts elucidated by particular theoretical lenses are of course very useful to the study of literature and useful more broadly to drawing out particular social and political values and concerns These help us in diverse ways to see through our scripts, to see past paradigms and conventions presented to us that go beyond poetry to cultural or economic assumptions that encompass so many aspects of life But more to the point here is that, beyond the particular assumptions any theoretical lens might render visible, the practice of theory itself acts as a model for thinking in terms of systems by requiring that we see a poem as one node in the dynamic set of relationships such systems entail, Macy’s “interweaving circuits of contingency” (Macy 1991, xii) Ecological Thinking Though any literary-theoretical lens is useful for making the point about context and, by extension, the manner in which studying poetry teaches systems thinking, ecocritical readings are thematically relevant and therefore rhetorically and pedagogically useful for making the point This is because systems thinking is precisely what is required by what increasingly seems an environmental crisis This sort of thinking is what an ecologist does To give one more personal example, the ecologist I know best is my wife, a landscape and ecosystem ecologist whose passion for the environment is linked to all things domestic and global Every piece of plastic that winds up in our home in New Zealand is sorted by number or by no-­ number into categories for recycling In New Zealand, certain plastic bottles (e.g small shampoo bottles from hotels) cannot be recycled So when we go to the United States for visits, we bring our hard-to-recycle items What can’t be recycled there can often be taken to TerraCycle, an organization involving material scientists who transform such things into consumer products These recyclable objects weigh little, and bringing them with us takes advantage of the carbon expended by the air travel For my 112   B WALPERT wife, everything is linked to everything else, and with nothing in isolation, nothing can be ignored as unimportant She has taken to permaculture as the paradigm for our yards and gardens, as well The cardboard boxes that inevitably flow into the house (via packaging, mailing, pizza) are turned to weed mat, which not only suppresses unwanted plants but enriches the soil as it decomposes We bought chickens to help weed the garden, but of course their waste is fertilizer and, once we have consumed the eggs, the shells go into the compost, again for the garden The parts of the vegetables from the garden that we don’t eat (ends of carrots, stalks of broccoli) are given to the chickens, which then produce more eggs, more fertilizer, more energy to pick at the garden weeds Ecology in her garden reflects her professional thinking For instance, there is a tendency among some planners to use the metaphor of “metabolism” to describe the city’s workings, its inflows and outflows My wife wrote an article arguing that this metaphor is misleading and leads to distortions in city planning policies Instead of a body metaphor, she argued, we should simply treat the city as it is, as an ecosystem (Golubiewski 2012, 756) In fact, urban ecology is a growing field of inquiry As an article of which she was one co-author in the journal Science put it: “Urban ecology at the local scale centers on the relationships among urban design and construction, ecosystem services delivered in the new system, responses of people and their institutions to evolving opportunities, and actions that drive further change in the system The ‘edge’ of the city expands into surrounding rural landscape, inducing changes in soils, built structures, markets, and informal human settlements, all of which exert pressure on fringe ecosystems” (Grimm et  al 2008, 756) One part impinges on another, which impinges on yet another To give just one example, cities are termed “urban heat islands” (UHI); they have higher temperatures than rural areas because, for example, there are more impervious surfaces (streets, roofs), as well as less vegetation and water The extra heat created by cities has a number of effects, which in turn create feedback loops: A city’s heat island “affects not only local and regional climate, but also water resources, air quality, human health, and biodiversity and ecosystem functioning Urban warming in hot climates exerts heat stress on organisms, including humans, and may influence water resources by changing the surface-energy balance, altering not only heat fluxes but also moisture fluxes near the surface” (Grimm et al 2008, 758) Yet another effect is to generate demand for air-conditioning, which means burning more fossil fuels for the required energy: “For example, about 3–8% of electricity   THE THIRD FRUIT: POETRY, ECOLOGY, CONTINGENCY    113 demand in the United States was estimated to be used to compensate for UHI effects, representing another indirect feedback to global climate change” (Grimm et al 2008, 758) We could seemingly go on ad infinitum, which is the point: to suggest the importance of thinking like an ecologist—of being accustomed to thinking of individual decisions and actions as part of a dynamic system It is not surprising, then, that ecocriticism itself is beginning to see literature as part of a larger “ecosystem” that encompasses culture and nature Hubert Zapf, for instance, posits a “cultural ecology of literature,” whereby “the interaction and mutual independence between culture and nature is posited as a fundamental dimension of literary production” (Zapf 2016, 3) Importantly, he argues that this “is not merely a matter of thematic orientation or content, but of the aesthetic processes staged in imaginative texts, which in this case can be described as functioning like an ecological force within the larger system of cultural discourses” (Zapf 2016, 3–4) As the study of literature takes its place in the broader field of environmental humanities, the opportunities continue to develop for showing the relevance of literature to such issues But for my purposes, the argument is simply that poetry—whatever its “thematic orientation and content”— teaches us to think in terms of systems from the very first poem A poem’s “ecology” and the way it teaches us to think in terms of systems, just as mindfulness does, becomes even more rhetorically useful as we move more deeply into the study of poetry to engage with more complex poems It is useful, for example, as we encounter postmodernism, whose poetics tend toward juxtaposition, disjunction, and resistance to unity and closure— the very sorts of challenging or “inaccessible” poems likely to fuel skepticism about the value of studying poetry This returns us to the fractal In “Fractal Amplifications: Writing in Three Dimensions,” poet Alice Fulton uses the fractal as a model for such a poetic structure Mandelbrot coined the term fractal, she notes, to describe patterns that underlie seemingly chaotic phenomena A fractal is part of “the larger field of complexity theory,” she writes, noting that such “complex systems” as the economy or the immune system “are balanced on the edge of chaos” and, quoting John Holland, “the components ‘never quite lock in place, and yet never quite dissolve into turbulence either’” (Fulton 2001, 113) Fulton describes a postmodern fractal poetics characterized by “digression, interruption, fragmentation, and lack of continuity” (Fulton 2001, 112) She explains: “Riffing and jamming, 114   B WALPERT rough edge and raw silk—such wet-paint effects take the form of long asides, discursive meanderings, and sudden shifts in diction or tone By such means ‘spontaneity’ becomes a structural component of the poem.” She adds that “‘spontaneity’ does not refer to a method of composition, but to linguistic gestures that feel improvisatory to the reader” (Fulton 2001, 113) The phrase she borrows from Holland—“never quite lock into place”— seems important to the idea of seeing the world in terms of dynamic systems It is an idea she emphasizes when she writes, “Complex adaptive systems not seek equilibrium or try to establish balance; they exist in unfolding and ‘never get there’” (Fulton 2001, 113) By way of illustration, we can consider Fulton’s own poem “Fuzzy Feelings,” which strikes me as an example of a fractal poem This long poem is not settled on a single meaning, though there is plenty of meaning to glean from it if we are willing to look at it as a dynamic system What comes as close as anything to unifying this poem is a scene in a dental office, a grounding that is essentially the “setting” of the poem We are prepared for that scene in the third line: “Do you want novocaine?” (Fulton 1995, 58), followed by the speaker’s description of staring at the ceiling as she sits in the dental chair She interrupts the narrative of the dental appointment but returns to that office several times What exists around that scene in the dentist’s chair (which we might consider her version of the speaker on horseback in Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”) are a series of questions, assertions, speculations, and other scenes Most are not explicitly connected to the dentist’s office These include meditations on lace, information about emeralds, information about the universe, and a multi-­ stanza description of a friend, Sandy, whose daughter has recently died Connections among these scenes and ideas emerge; they speak to one another, in effect For example, Fulton provides information about jewels “Simulants/tend to be flawless” (Fulton 1995, 59), she writes, while natural emeralds have defects known as inclusions, imperfections with a value all their own This description of inclusions is echoed a few stanzas later in a description of the scientific view of the universe, which she says began as smooth but gradually became textured and characterized by defects She reflects on that information, musing that a texture is “not localized” but rather more like a “sensation” such as being “enthralled or born, in love or mourning” (Fulton 1995, 60) If the reference to defects and textures in the universe recalls her description of the emeralds, the word “mourning” gains in significance a few stanzas later with the introduction of   THE THIRD FRUIT: POETRY, ECOLOGY, CONTINGENCY    115 Sandy, grieving for her daughter, who died the year before She describes, too, how Sandy works to hide that grief at a party—she prepares herself to “flex/the verbal abs and delts” so that she does not the next day relive and regret “how she broke into emotion.” The description of Sandy’s restraint becomes relevant, in turn, to the question posed in the penultimate stanza There, the speaker asks herself whether “grace” refers best to the state of being free of pain (“not writhing”) or rather to the ability to disguise one’s pain (“hide it/when you writhe”) The speaker then returns us to the dentist’s chair The description suggests that she, like Sandy, is learning to hide her pain and the flaws it suggests: “I’ll leave this place with a refined smile/outside a headache that makes me cry all night” (Fulton 1995, 62) The word “refined,” its echoes of her thoughts on the values we give to surface and seeming perfection and therefore to simulants, echoes her discussion of jewelry The connections keep occurring as I reread this poem The speaker’s distaste for lace and beige is manifested in her distaste for the dentist who changes one rock tape for its “clone” (Fulton 1995, 60), a dentist whose role model is a man who boasted hundreds of sexual partners The dentist’s attention to bland surfaces—he gives her new “veneers”” (Fulton 1995, 59)—in both music and relationships is echoed in Fulton’s remark that flaws make emeralds valuable; the dentist is unlikely to appreciate the value that lies in flaws, in deep and uncomfortable emotions that disrupt our social surfaces While I could go on, my point is that the abrupt shifts and returns create a complex interwoven set of associations, each amplifying the others Taken together, the diverse set of references creates a web-like structure of meaning While it is possible to come up with “a reading” of this poem—having to do, for instance, with our tendency to value surface perfection over the flaws that provide character, such that we must even disguise our deepest feelings, our grief, with the veneer of a smile—I not think it resolves so easily; that is, a single reading does not “lock into place.” What it does, however, is require our mindful attention to the structure of this poem as a system with many parts that impinge on one another Without a single explicit mention of the environmental crisis, per se, it requires us to attend to the ecology of the poem, to think in systems And in that sense, this “fruit” of the practice of poetry is in great sympathy with the ecological attitude toward the world that is the third fruit of mindfulness: It cultivates thinking of each aspect of the world as a node on an intricately entangled web As much as we need information about the environmental impact of consumption, or as much as we need literature that questions easy 116   B WALPERT ­ istinctions between, and hierarchies of, human and “nature,” we desperd ately need such a model of ecological thinking that studying poetry—as traditional as Frost’s and as edgy as Fulton’s—cultivates That is, the systems model that studying poetry provides us is of particular use now, as we are forced to acknowledge that causes and effects—political, social, environmental—are not linear or hierarchical Unsurprisingly, Macy wrote her book on Buddhism and systems thinking out of “concerns made urgent by the global crisis of our time,” which include “the progressive destruction of the biosphere, the acceleration of human need and desperation, and the risks of deliberate or accidental use of nuclear weaponry” (Macy 1991, xiii) Buddhists and Buddhist scholars have a history of engagement with ecology, for example, a three-day conference at the Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions that drew Buddhist scholars and Buddhist environmental activists, a conference that led to an anthology on such concerns, Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnection of Dharma and Deeds (Tucker and William 1997) The need to develop a habit of systems thinking is increasingly obvious The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) wrote in its November 2014 report, “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and sea level has risen.” Further, “Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems” (Core Writing Team 2015, 2) Climate change, in sum, would seem to give clarity and urgency to the need for systems thinking Timothy Morton argues, “The ecological crisis we face is so obvious that it becomes easy—for some, strangely or frighteningly easy—to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected This is the ecological thought And the more we consider it, the more our world opens up” (Morton 2010, 2) Evidence indicates, though, that it is not as easy as Morton suggests “to join the dots”—and I would argue this is because thinking ecologically is not the manner in which many of us are taught to engage with the world: While 87 percent of scientists in one 2014 poll believed the climate was getting warmer due to human activity, only 50 percent of all adults did (“Major Gaps” Major Gaps Between the Public, Scientists on Key Issues 2015) And skeptics continue to argue against either the existence of climate change or the responsibility of human actions for these changes Some of those with an industry interest   THE THIRD FRUIT: POETRY, ECOLOGY, CONTINGENCY    117 tend to attribute change to natural processes, rather than human ones Though 66 percent of corn producers surveyed in 2011–2012 believed the climate is changing, only percent attributed it to human activity (“Farmers, Scientists Divided” Farmers, Scientists Divided Over Climate Change 2014) The systems thinking required to understand the origins and effects of global climate change and persuade if not the skeptics then at least the agnostics of its reality extends to the economic sphere Increased economic globalization, thanks to neoliberal unfettering of corporate enterprise—a set of policies involving the promotion of free markets and privatization while rejecting government regulation—fed greenhouse gas contributions to climate change and hindered efforts to contain the problem, as Naomi Klein has noted in her book This Changes Everything Her book persuasively shows just how connected the weather in, say, Alaska is to an economic policy made in Washington D.C. But of course the weather in one part of the world then affects profit in another As Klein reports, “quite a number of major multinational corporations have begun to speak openly about how climate change might impact their businesses,” noting that insurers track the frequency of major disasters, and “companies like Starbucks and Chipotle have raised the alarm about how extreme weather may impact the availability of key ingredients” (Klein 2014, 49) Environmental degradation is in other words a node on a larger web of interdependent elements—a global economic system that, as Robert B. Reich has documented, has led not only to systemic inequalities but to an increasingly unresponsive democracy in the United States How we try to deal with this? Often poorly, without regard for the system For instance, there are frequent attempts to pressure individual companies to treat employees more fairly, but Reich has argued that such actions, however intuitive and well-meant, ignore the interdependent nature of free trade agreements, the collective power of investors in, say, pension funds, technological and regulatory changes that have permitted both global consumer choice and global supply chains, and a shift in the legal status of corporations In a system that he terms “supercapitalism,” to try to pressure one company or another to act more responsibly—however you characterize such responsibility—ignores, therefore, the huge pressures on companies to maximize profits (to keep up share price) and minimize costs (to keep customers) as well as a corporate environment that is more competitive than ever, thanks to these regulatory and technological changes If you persuade a company to raise wages, offer insurance, or put in place environmental protections, you’ve quite possibly forced it to raise 118   B WALPERT c­ onsumer prices and/or report lower profits Given how easily consumers can shift their purchasing and how much power investors have, the result is that another company will simply take its place with the same low wages and poor environmental record—drawing consumers with its prices and investors with its profits Reich argues that changes need to be made that take into account these interdependent elements That is, he argues we need to change the system, not the behavior of individual companies: Instead of guarding democracy against the disturbing side effects of supercapitalism, many reformers have set their sights on changing the behavior of particular companies—extolling them for being socially virtuous or attacking them for being socially irresponsible The result has been some marginal changes in corporate behavior But the larger consequence has been to divert the public’s attention from fixing democracy (Reich 2007, 210) This sort of argument can be a tough sell if we’re accustomed to thinking in terms of the isolated problem, action, or solution rather than thinking in terms of systems and interdependence As we look for ways to persuade students, humanities colleagues, and those outside of the humanities of the value of studying poetry, I have been arguing for the usefulness of linking what we do—whether we teach the reading or writing of poems—to a growing societal interest in mindfulness, an interest that itself is seen as a means to resist some of the unfortunate effects of technology I have argued that the popularity of mindfulness is in one sense a useful way into literature, given its growing adoption throughout society, in health care, business, and education But I have also argued that there is a natural fit, that the consequences of mindfulness training are in sympathy with the benefits of studying poetry as a reader or writer As with mindfulness practice, studying poetry calls for interrupted (and interrogated) journeys, for focusing on the process over the product, journey over endpoint Like mindfulness, the study of poetry leads inevitably to questions about subjectivity, to interrogations of what it means to be a subject, or self, and to consideration of the ways in which we view and treat others And as with mindfulness, the study of poetry offers training in ecological thinking, cultivates thinking in systems and interdependence As with thinking about subjectivity, ecological thinking has societal benefits: We grow accustomed to complexity, to considering causes and effects as more dynamic than they might appear It is increasingly apparent that we need a systems approach to policies— environmental and economic (among others)—that takes into account   THE THIRD FRUIT: POETRY, ECOLOGY, CONTINGENCY    119 Macy’s “interweaving circuits of contingency.” The third fruit—the ultimate insight of—mindfulness is the cultivation of just such thinking And this, too, is a fruit of studying poetry, even if those poems have nothing to with the environment or economics An ecological approach requires a way of thinking that permits for seeing the whole as a dynamic of its parts, as a set of interrelationships that impinge on and shape one another That requires both education and practice—“practice” being the word that often follows “meditation.” As Morton puts it, “Thinking the ecological thought is difficult: it involves becoming open, radically open—open forever, without the possibility of closing again.” Importantly, he adds, “Studying art provides a platform, because the environment is partly a matter of perception Art forms have something to tell us about the environment, because they can make us question reality” (Morton 2010, 8) But it is not just what the art is about that makes us see reality in a new way It is how a particular kind of art, such as poetry, requires us to engage with it and, as a fractal of our larger experiences, how it trains us to engage with the world in all of its systems complexity—or as mindfulness would teach us to see it, with its dependent co-arising, the “interconnected and interdependent structure in the universe” (De Silva 1998, 41) Many of the pleasures and benefits of studying poetry would be challenging to quantify or reduce to use-value, nor would we want to so But it seems worthwhile to take the larger view at times, to explain what poetry practice, like mindfulness practice, offers: an interruption to our journeys, where we learn to substitute the actual view of our landscapes for our habits—we learn to think of relations rather than poles, to consider the global rather than only the local, to think in terms of the recursive rather than the linear Surely, one might argue, in defending a life in this corner of the humanities, it wouldn’t hurt to start with a mindful journey through the strange and surprising ecosystem of a single poem References Badiner, Allan Hunt 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In The Mindfulness Revolution: Leading Psychologists, Scientists, Artists, and Spiritual Teachers on the Power of Mindfulness in Daily Life, ed Barry C. Boyce, 11–20 Boston, MA: Shambhala Tucker, Mary Evelyn, and Duncan Ryuken William, eds 1997 Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnection of Dharma and Deeds Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Watts, Alan 1970 Nature, Man, and Woman New York: Vintage Books Zapf, Hubert 2016 Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts, Environmental Cultures 1st ed London: Bloomsbury Academic Index1 A “AID/I/SAPPEARANCE,” 47, 49 Ambiguity and benefits of “creative uncertainty,” 75 and literature, 72 and mindfulness, 72 and poetry, 70–73, 75 Anatman, 8, 11, 81 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 42 Auden, W.H., 38, 51 B Barthes, Roland, 88 Beat poetry, Berry, Wendell, 39, 40, 57, 58 Birkerts, Sven, Bradfield, Elizabeth, 74, 76 Buddhism and literature, C Carr, Nicholas, 25, 26, 36–38 Ciardi, John, 41, 51, 54 Contemplative education, 5, 19 Cummings, E.E., 8, 43, 44 D Defamiliarization, 10, 65, 67–69, 75 and “sensureship,” 68 Dependent co-arising, 102, 103, 119 Discovery importance in poetry, 51, 52 value of, beyond poetry, 52, 53 E Ecocriticism, 71, 103, 104, 109–111, 113 Ecological thinking, 8, 12, 104, 111–119 Ecopoetry, 12, 71, 73, 103, 104 Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refers 1to note © The Author(s) 2017 B Walpert, Poetry and Mindfulness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68681-3 123 124   INDEX F Flaherty, Colleen, Foucault, Michel, 88 Fractal and Alice Fulton, 113, 114 Frost, Robert, 38–40, 42, 49, 51, 52, 104–106, 109, 110, 114, 116 Fruits of Zen, 9–11, 35, 81, 97, 102, 103, 115, 119 Fulton, Alice, 113–116 G Goldsmith, Kenneth, 94 Golubiewski, Nancy, 112 Gunaratana, Bhante Henepola, 22, 36, 70 H Habito, Ruben L.F., 9, 11, 35, 81, 102 Hanh, Thich Nhat, 36, 41, 96, 103 Hass, Robert, 62 Hejinian, Lyn, 89, 93 Hoch, James, 45 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 5, 64 Hugo, Richard, 51 Humanities enrollment declines, J Jha, Amishi, K Kabat-Zinn, Jon, 3, 18 L “l(a,” 44 Langer, Ellen J., 3, 23, 24, 26, 28, 32n1, 69, 70, 75 Language poetry, 87, 89, 90 Literary theory, 9, 11, 48, 72, 87–89, 93, 103, 108–111, 113 Literature effects on the brain, 30, 31, 42 M MacCaig, Norman, 37–39, 45, 49 Matthews, William, 85 Meditation, 3, 4, 8, 9, 18, 20–23, 27–29, 32n1, 36, 37, 58, 63, 81, 83, 96, 102, 119 Mindfulness and attention, scientific support for, 18, 19, 22, 24, 27–29, 83, 118 and being present, 3, 6, 9, 12, 20, 22, 24, 28, 31, 35, 36, 39, 40, 42, 50, 58, 60, 61, 63, 67, 70, 89, 103 and conditional thinking, 70 defined, 20–22 and distraction, 4, 7, 24 and nature, 58, 59 and the ode, 59, 60 and paying attention, 3–8, 10, 20–22, 24–30, 32, 36, 39, 40, 42, 47, 50, 53, 58–63, 68, 69, 74, 83, 89, 115, 118 in psychology, 23 and technology, 2, 6, 24, 28, 29, 118 and video games, 26, 29 without meditation, 3, 28 Mindlessness, 4, 6, 23, 24, 26, 37, 69 N Naropa University, 19 No self, see Anatman O Ode and attention to the present, 61 and beauty, 64  INDEX     defined, 59 Horatian, 59 Oliver, Mary, 8, 39, 57, 58, 67 Orr, David, 2, 105 P Parini, Jay, 58 Perloff, Marjorie, 94, 106 Plumly, Stanley, 61 Poetic form and paying attention, 42 Poetry and ambiguity, 70, 72, 74, 75 and attention, 10 and defamiliarization, 66–68 effects on the brain, 42 as interruption, 10, 37–41, 45, 49, 113, 119 and paying attention, 10, 39, 40, 61–63 as performance, 44–50 Pratitya-samutpada, see Dependent co-arising R Retallack, Joan, 2, 6, 31, 47–49, 68 and fractal, 2, 3, 13, 52, 69, 113, 119 “Riding Backwards on a Train,” 45–47 Roth, Michael S., 125 S Self benefits of interrogating, 95, 96 impermanence of, 81, 82, 94 interrogation of, in literary study, 83, 86–89, 93, 95 Shapiro, Alan, 66 Silliman, Ron, 88, 89 “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” 38 Subjectivity, 8, 11, 70, 84, 87–89, 91, 94, 96, 118 Supercapitalism, 117, 118 Swensen, Cole, 90, 91 Systems thinking, 6, 12, 28, 97, 103, 104, 106, 108, 110, 111, 113–116, 118, 119 societal benefits of, 116–118 T Technology and the brain, 4, 24–27 Tolle, Eckhart, 3, 18, 36 W Warren, Rosanna, 73 Watts, Alan, 3, 12, 69, 102, 108 Wedde, Ian, 64, 65 “The Wild Geese,” 40 Wilson, Jeff, 5, 18 .. .Poetry and Mindfulness Bryan Walpert Poetry and Mindfulness Interruption to a Journey Bryan Walpert School of English and Media Studies Massey University Auckland, New Zealand ISBN 978-3-319-68680-6    ISBN... reading literature in general and poetry in particular Keywords  Mindfulness popularity • Mindfulness benefits • Mindfulness and the brain • Poetry and the brain • Technology and the brain • Contemplative... of studying poetry Walpert lays out the role mindfulness plays in considering the utility of poetry and suggests the major parallels between the study of poetry and the “fruits” of mindfulness