Frank LaRue Owen Releases “The School of Soft-Attention”
Mad Genius VP, researcher, strategizer, Zen mountain wolf, and office prankster, Frank LaRue Owen, is also an award-winning, published poet!
His collection of poems, “The School of Soft-Attention” is the winner of the 2017 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize. Winners of this prize have their work published and distributed to large retailers as well as independent bookstores.
Join Us for a Reading at Lemuria Books
Frank will sign copies of “The School of Soft-Attention” at 5:00 p.m. Wednesday, November 28th at Lemuria Books in Jackson, MS with a book talk and reading at 5:30 p.m.
Author Q&A with the Clarion-Ledger
A Q&A with Frank appears in the Sunday print edition of the Clarion-Ledger by Jana Hoops. Below are some excerpts that give a closer look into his philosophy and work.
Frank LaRue Owen’s interest in poetry began to develop in his teens, and his journey to become a poet in his own right has developed alongside his spiritual growth, through years of thoughtful studies of Asian spiritual practice.
His first book of poetry, “The School of Soft-Attention,” was named the winner of the Homebound Publications Poetry Prize in 2017.
The book puts into words Owen’s reflections on key influences on his life, including the Ch’an/Daoist hermit-poetic tradition, Zen meditation, eco-psychology and a practice he calls “pure land dreaming.” Shaped by Owen’s diversity of cultural experiences and the depth of his spiritual training, his poems encourage readers to “turn to a new way of seeing, a new way of paying attention to the life within and around us.”
Explain the term soft-attention, and its meaning in your poetry.
“There is a dynamic contrast between urban modernity, with its high-velocity pace and incessant barrage of information and bad news that assaults the senses, and the natural world, which has a slower rhythm and a healing power that restores balance in a person, body and mind. The latter isn’t just a quaint idea. As clearly demonstrated in a book titled ‘Forest Bathing’ by Dr. Qing Li, it is verified by vast studies by medical science.
It’s possible to “get too much of the world on you.”
As I say in one of my poems, it’s possible to “get too much of the world on you.” When this happens, we may find our consciousness becoming harsh, hardened, disfigured. Too much time lived in such a state is detrimental to our health, both physically and psychologically. So, the turn of phrase, ‘the school of soft-attention’ is a poetic way of referring to the natural world, what we call ‘the realm of mountains, forests, and rivers’ in Daoist and Zen traditions.
Time spent in this ‘school’ invites, invokes, instills a very different quality of consciousness, one characterized by a ‘soft-attention.’ From my point of view as a poet, poetry is about observation and perception. For me, the craft of writing poetry has become inseparable from this ‘soft-attention.’ I essentially can’t write unless I’ve entered that level of awareness.”
You can find more of Frank’s poetry on his website, purelandpoetry.com.