The School of Soft Attention - Softcover

Owen, Frank LaRue

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1947003968 ISBN 13: 9781947003965

Publisher: Homebound Publications, 2018

Synopsis

It has been said that poetry can be a marker of where a poet has been, or a way for a poet to point to places where we, the reader, can go. Both types of poems appear in The School of Soft-Attention. Not corralled to any one poetic style, the heart-mind-river that forms this flowing collection has been shaped by the author’s diverse cross-cultural experiences, spiritual tutelage with a New Mexican wisewoman and wilderness guide, and fueled by such practices as meditation in the Zen tradition, mountain pilgrimages, fasting in the deserts of New Mexico, and intensive dreamwork. At every point along the way, the poems in The School of Soft-Attention invite the reader to turn to a new way of seeing, a new way of paying attention to the life within and around us.

About this title

From the Author:

Frank LaRue Owen’s poetry is influenced by diverse sources including the teachings embedded within dreams, the seasons, the energies of various landscapes, and the churning gyre of the soul’s journey, resulting in a poetic path his late teacher referred to as "deep-mapping of unseen reality, inner, outer".Owen studied for a decade with a New Mexican wise woman and wilderness guide who — inspired by her own training in Zen and Mesoamerican spiritual traditions — blended contemplative practice, dreamwork, and nature spirituality rooted in the forests, arroyos, and mountains of the American Southwest. The practice of poetry was inseparable from this path...along with lots of green chiles and pan-fried tortillas.He also studied eco-poetry and eco-literature with the late Jack Collom of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

About the Author:

Frank LaRue Owen’s poetry is influenced by dreams, the energies of landscape and the seasons, archetypal psychology, the Ch’an/Daoist hermit-poet tradition, and Zen living.

He studied for a decade with a Zen woman who—inspired by Ch’an and Daoist tradition—blended silent illumination (meditation), dreamwork, mountain-and-forest spirituality (“landscape practice”), and poetics into a unified path.

Owen also studied eco-literature and eco-poetry with the late Jack Collom, a poet and professor in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.

His first book of poetry, The School of Soft-Attention, was the winner of the 2017 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize.

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About this edition

• Publisher: Homebound Publications
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1947003968
• ISBN 13: 9781947003965
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 116