Attention Equals Life

Attention Equals Life examines why a quest to pay attention to daily life has increasingly become a central feature of both contemporary American poetry and the wider culture of which it is a part. Drawing on theories and debates about the nature of everyday life from a number of fields across the humanities, this book traces the modern history of this preoccupation and consider why it is so much with us today. Attention Equals Life argues that itis no coincidence that a potent hunger for everyday life explodes in the post-1945 period. This deep cultural need should be seen as a reaction to the rapid and dislocating cultural, political, and social transformations of this epoch, which have resulted in a culture of perilous distraction, interruption, andfragmented attention. The book argues that poetry is an important, and perhaps unlikely, cultural form that has mounted a response, and even method of resistance, to a culture gradually losing its capacity to pay attention. It examines why a compulsion to represent the everyday becomes predominant in the decades after modernism, why it has so often led to unusual, challenging projects and formal innovation, and why poetry, in particular, might be an everyday-life genre par excellence. Thebook considers the variety of forms this preoccupation takes, and examines its aesthetic, philosophical, and political ramifications. By exploring the use of innovative strategies, unusual projects, and new technologies as methods of attending to dailiness, Attention Equals Life uncovers an importantstrain at the heart of twentieth and twenty-first century literature.

Andrew Epstein's Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture is perhaps the most dazzling work on American poetry this year and can justly be read as the culmination of several years of work on American poetry and the everyday ...Epstein's work is, quite genuinely, the culmination of this fine red thread of scholarly work. [The first two chapters] summarize and clarify work on poetics and the everyday decisively. Readers seeking a complete and concise overview of the state of the field should turn to these two chapters as well for a rehearsal of the increasing use of Henri Lefebvre in contemporary literary studies and the leveraging of his form of Marxism in tension with French theory and the Situationists ... Epstein's nuanced close readings, critical acumen in theorizations of the everyday, and fluid movement through diverse poetic visions are deeply impressive., Andrew Epstein's Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture is a sharply focused contribution to the field of everyday life studies that underscores the rhetorical stakes of daily life and the role of poetry to channel attention in an age of distraction., Attention Equals Life contributes meaningfully to a growing body of critical work on avant-garde literary conceptualism and its precursors and will be of interest to a wide range of readers with and without specifically academic interests in contemporary poetry; the book is accessibly written and makes a propitious introduction to twentieth-century theories and poetries of everyday life. Like the extravagantly inclusive long poems Epstein favors in his study, poems that awaken us to the elusive textures of habitual experience, Attention Equals Life will awaken its audience to the exhilarating formal experiments that the everyday, fraught with inexhaustible paradoxes, has lately inspired., It's no wonder that a scholar who has written extensively on the poetry of friendship produces such generous close readings of individual poems. But the greater significance of this book lies in the exhaustive argument it provides for why everydayness has become the driving concern of post-1945 poetry, an argument that brings him into fruitful contact with the depths of the Frankfurt school and the so-called shallows of our digital episteme., Attention Equals Life is an exemplary work of criticism. Authoritative but not dogmatic, at once wide-ranging and immersed in the textual details of individual poems, it provides in each chapter both a conceptual map for understanding broad cultural and aesthetic trends and the sort of sensitive and synthetic account of a poet's career that will stand as the starting point for future scholars and students. It is certain to become one of the definitive literary histories of postwar and contemporary American poetry.

Andrew Epstein is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Florida State University. He is the author of Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry.