Day 4: Friction
Stop right there.
It’s day 4 of Poetry Camp and the first day of camp feeling is fading. You look around, you feel changed, but is the idea of poetry, its power to change, really sinking in? It could take time. Maybe you miss home, the comfortable place where rules were rules and when you learned something, you could say you learned it.
Have you learned anything in Poetry Camp so far? Let’s recap.
That slightly unsettled feeling where excitement is tempered by unease is when you are opening up and accepting that there was a whole entire world in front of you that you’ve been oblivious to.
We keep touching on “why” but haven’t said it outright. Why poetry?
And more specifically: Why now?
Why didn’t I fall into the poetry rabbit hole a few years ago when poetry was making its big “comeback” (according to all the news articles I scrounged up from 2016-2019)? Why couldn’t I tell the difference between Rupi and Rumi until now?
I don’t think I was open to it, to be honest. I was in the constant pursuit of productivity, the type of person whose most used talent was skimming text for the applicable takeaway until I got to a point where it felt like I had read it all, which of course I hadn’t but the overwhelming sameness of every SEO’d article certainly made it seem so.
I had my moment when I found myself eyes glazed, hours spent, and (it seemed) years lost.
It took good and honest facts to take me out of this self-imposed simulation. One day, on some random internet skim, something caught my attention. This: The average person spends more than two hours a day on social media.
That doesn’t sound too bad, not dangerous by any means, but when I crunched a few numbers, I realized that two hours a day (and that’s rounding down) is an entire month, if you didn’t sleep at all.
An entire month?! All of a sudden that sounded like a lot of time.
And if I felt better for it, fine. But I didn’t.
The friction that tech companies work so hard to remove entirely from our experiences was paying off. To be clear, paying off for them. They are now the richest conglomerates in the world, owning not just our attention but the dollars of every other brand trying to get our attention.
We are in an increasingly frictionless world of our own making, the pursuit of more time and productivity hacks taking up all our time until we are so exhausted the only thing we can do is sit in front of a frictionless feed of things we can rarely recall the point of. And by the way, I’m being harsh here. I am all for some mindless entertainment. I just don’t want it taking up all my time, you know what I mean?
What does this have to do with poetry?
Poetry, ultimately, is about bringing friction back to our lives. It’s topic-agnostic, genre-agnostic, and form-agnostic. And after going through its many iterations through history, poetry has evolved and adapted to bring in tiny moments of friction in a culture and society that tries to erase it.
According to research, there is one way to truly expand our sense of time, and it’s not a productivity hack for doing more in less time so that we lose all sense of what we were meant to be doing with more time in the first place. And then we’re dead.
The only way to slow time is to increase our moments of awe, moments of highly attuned attention, to increase the friction.
Poems use the raw material of words and the placement of these words and how they sound and the images they evoke to amplify the act of noticing, feeling, stopping.
They do this mostly in short form, so short they can be read or experienced in mere minutes, sometimes seconds.
What could be more productive than that?
Sometimes to go bigger and expand further, stopping right in our tracks is exactly what we need, not the bland, textureless, slowed-down, stripped-down nothing we’ve become convinced is the antidote.
Friction is in the uncomfortable, the textural, the shocking, the unexpected. Without friction, we are beelining to our graves, all the while racing faster to get there.
Poetry stops you on the way there, trains you to stop in other ways.
So I hope you get the point by now: You are here not to read more poetry, but to expand.
Camp Assignment #4: Find the Friction
Your assignment today is to make friction.
What has become your default that really doesn’t make much sense at all?
Do one thing today that makes that default just a bit harder.
When I decided I wanted to read more books because I realized that’s simply how I like to spend my time, I knew I had to find a pocket of time somewhere. It wasn’t just lying around. (Parkinson’s Law and all that.)
But what was lying around, all the time, at easy reach, was the frictionless experience: Social media, email, endlessly scrolling apps.
One of the reasons I stopped reading on the internet was because advertising brought in too much friction: Banner ads, cookie notifications, long load times, paywalls on all the good stuff, content that I had to maneuver like a terribly designed arcade game.
So I thought: If friction changed my once-common habits, how could I use that same concept to my own benefit?
I’ve had most notifications on my phone turned off for a couple years now—including the pesky badges that tell me how many unread notifications I have. Nothing is ever urgent, but that little trick, that little red number, studied and quantified and proven to work, was keeping me coming back and checked in, whittled my attention span down to crumbs.
But the common thread between all my favourite life experiences and moments require the prerequisite of my attention. And life, life itself not the life hack treadmill disguised as life, is all about these experiences and moments. See the predicament?
Sometimes the path isn’t about fighting the best fight. The frictionless experience can’t be won, or overcome, or bested. They’ve got the best engineers and the smartest people over there whose entire job it is to keep your eyes on them.
All you can do is bring some friction back in, give your attention not a hard stop but a little bit of a breather. What habits and systems currently exist around you? What defaults can you change?
Today’s Poetry Reading List
Friction comes in many forms, from sticky to sweet, from the killer joke to the little something extra, the heart-stopping to the gut-wrenching, sometimes an instant piercing hit and sometimes a slow simmer.
Colour and texture and sensation, brought to its limits with language.
Welcome to today’s reading list focused on intentional friction.
Waiting For Your Call and Ode to My Hair by Aria Aber
Color Scheme by Ocean Vuong
What I Learned From the Incredible Hulk by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Night Falls Like a Button by Chen Chen
A Partial History by Ariana Reines
We Lived Happily During the War by Ilya Kaminsky
The X Man by Kathryn Maris
Marionette by Ross Gay
The China Painters by Ted Kooser
Bring Back Our Girls by Marwa Helal
The Riots and After Oprah by Ruben Quesada
See you tomorrow for our final day of Poetry Camp.