Blog
The Poetics of Attention: An Interview with Lindsey Royal Wayland
by Writing Workshops Staff
2 days ago
We live in the age of perpetual distraction. Our attention is commodified and fractured, and poet and calligrapher Lindsey Royal Wayland is offering a new class where attention is devotion. Her upcoming workshop, The Poetics of Attention: How to See Like a Poet, is about learning to see the world with the fullness of our senses, to interrupt the automatic, and to honor the extraordinary that lives within the ordinary.
Wayland brings a unique combination of practices to her teaching: the precision of calligraphy, the contemplative depth of research, and the embodied awareness of a poet who believes that the most overlooked moments often carry the greatest poetic charge. A finalist for the 2025 Barbara Deming Money for Women and the 2024 New Letters Poetry Prize, Wayland's work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Florida Review, The Harvard Advocate, and others. Her poetry emerges from a practice she describes as "returning the gaze"—allowing objects, moments, and everyday life to reveal their contents through sustained, devoted attention.
In her four-week intensive, students will learn what it means to cultivate "the radical art of perception." Through guided exercises, close readings of master poets, and presence-based practices, participants will generate new work rooted in deep noticing while developing a personal toolkit of attention practices that support a lifelong creative rhythm. As one former student put it: "Lindsey introduced us to an endless source of inspiration and showed us ways to write about it."
The extraordinary isn't rare; it's so ordinary it's often missed. From this third-generation Texan who lives in the Hill Country with her family comes an invitation to anchor your poems in what is real and near, to write from a place of rootedness that has both weight and motility.
Our Q&A with Lindsey Royal Wayland
Writing Workshops: You describe yourself as a poet, calligrapher, and researcher, three practices that all require intense focus and precision. How did this unique combination of disciplines shape your understanding of what you call "the radical art of perception"?
Lindsey Wayland: Poetry, calligraphy, and research are three practices that teach me the value of presence. In my calligraphy practice, my hands train in the slow art of drawing letterforms. Writing poems teaches me that language is a form of creation, beginning with attention to the body, breath, and the subtle shifts in awareness that occur in my everyday life. As a researcher, I ask questions and follow threads of curiosity, no matter where they lead.
"The radical art of perception" speaks to the kind of presence that is wholly unfolding in these ways. It is a commitment to precision for the sake of connection. It's radical because it resists distraction and insists that the ordinary world is worthy of our fullest attention.
Writing Workshops: Your course promises to teach students how to "see like poets: with clarity, curiosity, and reverence." Can you walk us through what that actually looks like in practice? What happens when someone shifts from ordinary seeing to poetic seeing?
To see like a poet is to interrupt the automatic. It's to pause long enough to notice the way light pools in a stairwell, or how a word carries both memory and texture. In practice, this means writing exercises that slow perception, reading poems that model distilled vision, and giving students prompts that ask them to describe without interpreting.
Poetic seeing is something that some are born with and also something that can be taught; it's a state of being. When someone shifts into that state, what changes is the quality of presence. The ability to see images, to stack images, to let images speak for themselves. They're no longer scanning for what's useful or dramatic; they're receiving what is. This alone illuminates a life as poetry and impacts how we engage with the written word on the page. The poems that come alive from this kind of seeing are timeless, they are what make poems from thousands of years ago still resonate today.
Writing Workshops: You've structured the workshop around what you call "attention as devotion." That's a beautiful phrase that suggests something much deeper than just paying attention. What's the difference between casual observation and the kind of devoted attention that creates powerful poetry?
The things that catch our eye are uncountable. Casual observation is a passive form of attention. But devoted attention is active and sustained. It's a form of intimacy, a way of saying, "I'm still with you, I haven't looked away."
In poetry, this kind of attention is what allows an image to transform. It's the reason a poem about a house in the evening can become a poem about accepting one's life. We are natural meaning-makers, but often writers get into the rut of seeking meaning before daily life/image. This course is a return to Self through deep noticing. With this kind of focused attention, meaning naturally emerges, as opposed to contrived or imposed meaning. Devotion implies care, as well as commitment. Attention is our richest commodity, and its yields are an endless bounty of poetic resource.
Writing Workshops: Week 3 of your course focuses on "Seeing with the Heart—Emotional Truth and Image." Many writers struggle with making their emotional experiences concrete and vivid on the page. What techniques do you teach for translating feelings into images that readers can actually see and feel?
One of the first things I ask students to do to start is not to write about a feeling directly. We start by separating the feeling from the image. Instead of starting with the feeling, we first focus on image collecting and devotion to what is in our sensate everyday world. In my classes, I cultivate a strict dedication to image without feeling or metaphor to begin strengthening our muscles for attention. This is the fertile soil for an authentic voice to emerge.
If you create a routine around observing what catches your attention and staying focused on that attention with devotion, something incredible begins to flourish. We have an opportunity to see ourselves through what we notice. Eventually, we write about the emotional truth at the heart of a poem, what it looked like, tasted like, sounded like. We translate images, actions, and gestures into emotional truth. I also encourage metaphor that arises from close observation, not from cleverness. The heart already knows how to speak in image, it just needs time and the invitation not to be rushed. We employ slow exercises, bodily prompts, and reflective readings to help students build a bridge from their inner world to outer form.
Writing Workshops: Your student testimonials mention that you help writers "surprise themselves" and discover poetry in everyday life. For someone who thinks their daily routine is too ordinary or mundane to inspire poetry, how do you help them recognize the extraordinary that's already there?
I believe the most overlooked moments often carry the greatest poetic charge. I help students shift their frame from "What should I write about?" to "What have I overlooked?" We write about washing dishes, folding clothes, and listening to the sound of footsteps. Through a practice I call "returning the gaze," we allow the object or moment to reveal its contents.
The surprise often comes from looking again at that which we see every day, with intention. I've seen students write powerful poems about dog beds, hairbrushes, and crepe myrtles. The extraordinary isn't rare; it's so ordinary it's often missed.
Writing Workshops: You live in the Texas Hill Country with your family, and you're a third-generation Texan. How does your sense of place, both geographic and generational, influence how you teach others to cultivate their own relationship with their surroundings and write from that connection?
The landscape of my home is abundant and layered: live oak and limestone, aquifers and sun-cracked fields, vultures and butterflies. It's a place that taught me to be both still and attentive. Growing up in the Hill Country meant being close to a very big sky, surrounded by nature and fresh water, and with an unshakable sense that everything around me, every day, is alive and interesting.
Being a third-generation Texan, I embody an effervescence and buoyancy. I try to bring that into my writing and my teaching, not as a call to write about Texas, or how being a Texan has shaped me, but as an invitation to listen to your place, your particular light, rhythm, and voice. Whether students live in cities, forests, or deserts, I ask them to anchor their poems in what is real and near. When you know the grain of your own surroundings, you begin to write from a place of rootedness, and that kind of writing has weight and motility at once.
Begin Your Practice of Devoted Attention
If Lindsey's approach to poetry resonates with you—if you're ready to slow down, to see with new eyes, and to discover the poetry that lives in your everyday life—consider joining The Poetics of Attention: How to See Like a Poet.
This four-week workshop begins Wednesday, January 7th, 2026, and meets weekly via Zoom from 7:00-8:30 PM Central Time.
Through guided writing exercises, close readings, and presence practices, you'll generate at least four new poems while developing a refined perceptual practice that will serve your creative life for years to come.
As Lindsey reminds us: attention is our richest commodity, and its yields are an endless bounty of poetic resource.
All photos by Riley Reed.
