‘Remember to slam the parentheses behind you’: structures of attention in the lyric poetry of James Schuyler

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper explores structures of attention in the lyric poetry of James Schuyler. Arguing for a poetics of distraction and boredom, I suggest that Schuyler’s idiosyncratic use of the parenthesis functions as a formal strategy for confronting readerly distraction in the long-form lyric, breaking the reader’s attention to produce new forms of rhythmic and temporal engagement. Through readings of Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text and Camera Lucida, I show how the digressional parentheses in Schuyler’s poems open up syntactical spaces which house the body of both speaker and reader, substituting the cerebral for the corporeal to induce states of textual pleasure and recode readerly attitudes to boredom. This paper situates itself in relation to contemporary questions of attention in twenty-first century culture, proposing models for both writing and reading poetry that might engender continued engagement with the lyric form.