Naked Objects

* Reminder: The Savor of the Month theme for July is DOORS. Details here; Supporters can share their findings in the thread here. Check it out!“Perception is not passive.”For a while now I’ve been pondering this essay, sent to me by artist/writer/educator and dear friend of TAoN Amy C. Evans. It describes an approach to poetry that entails a very particular method of observation and attention. The essay’s author is Roohola Ramezani, a writer with a background in philosophy. He decided that his writing students might benefit from an approach that borrows from phenomenology, “the philosophical tradition that begins with the simple but radical idea that we should attend to things as they appear before we explain them.”What his students had been doing was the opposite, writing poetry about what an object (such as a coffee mug or a hoodie) allegedly “meant,” without truly seeing — let alone revealing — what it really was. So he devised a two-part procedure. First students had to create a…