‘conduit for all’: Alli Warren’s poethics of tender noticing

In The Argonauts (2015), Maggie Nelson writes of the poet James Schuyler: ‘He had a cruising eye [...] refreshingly without a will to power’. In this paper, I approach porous ecologies of attention through the poetry of Alli Warren, specifically in terms of lyric as a zone of public, private and elemental exchange. In her collection Little Hill (2020) Warren exhibits a poethics (Retallack, 2003) of complexity, speculation, and discovery. Warren’s poetic eye/I, like Schuyler’s, eschews a ‘will to power’ for a paratactic, cruising form of reparative lyricism in which attention accretes, slips and swerves rather than seizes. In singing the residues of daily life, Little Hill constitutes a work of ‘radical tenderness’ (D’Emilia and Chávez, 2015) and negative capability which models poetry’s affordances for expansive, embodied noticing. Warren’s poetry draws on the capacious, associative logics of lyric to unfold an inclusive poethics of care: ‘I hope we can be buoyant together in the break’.

Attending to Warren’s ‘tender measure’, I consider forms of poetic attention which depart from the commodified attention economies of advertising and social media, instead dovetailing with Julia Bell’s idea of attention as ‘conscious receptiveness’. Little Hill is a languid cascade of daily observations, ‘tonal centres’ and reflexive enquiry, concerned with the rhythmic changes technology has wrought upon daily life: what Andrew Epstein calls a ‘crisis of attention’. The emotional noticing performed by Warren’s speaker produces dreamlike ecologies of resonance and abundance beyond the extractive and scarcity logics of capital.

How do we make room for loss and dispersal while also sensing the metabolic possibilities of speech acts for and after the end of a world, ‘mostly unconcerned with narrative’ (Warren 2020)?