https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/144656/in-search-of-distraction
In Search of Distraction
The rewards of the tangential, the digressive, and the dreamy.
BY MATTHEW BEVIS

Distracted是一个很神奇的意境，前一阵看到这篇文章，让我想起一两年前跟老羊讲到我练习表达的心得。练一个东西需要熟悉到成为你自己的东西，但是表达时候要partly distracted才能达到想要的效果。这里看到说诗中相似的意境，竟有一种熟悉感。

节选：

To imagine a “form” for inattention, to imagine inattention itself as a form, when it is so often conceived as a descent into formlessness, is itself a rare new lesson. A few years after Ashbery wrote these lines, when he (指Ashbery) could “no longer escape teaching” and so began offering classes at Brooklyn College, he found himself assailed by questions from students like “What is poetry, anyway?” and “Why is this a poem?” This was his response:

The medieval town, with frieze
Of boy scouts from Nagoya? The snow

That came when we wanted it to snow?
Beautiful images? Trying to avoid

Ideas, as in this poem? But we
Go back to them as to a wife, leaving

The mistress we desire? Now they
Will have to believe it

As we believe it. In school
All the thought got combed out:

What was left was like a field.
Shut your eyes, and you can feel it for miles around.

Now open them on a thin vertical path.
It might give us — what? — some flowers soon?
 — What Is Poetry

For what, in fact, do we see when reading poems? When Ashbery writes of the fields he played in as a child, or the house in which he grew up, or of “how the light stood on the water that time,” I don’t see what he saw, but I do see something: flashes or flickers of my own past are superimposed onto the description I’m reading, or blurred into it. I become distracted by the work, distracted from it, thrown back into my own experience (as Ashbery said of Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation, such writing provides “a general, all-purpose model which each reader can adapt to fit his own set of particulars”). Too much attentive illustration from the poet would leave me with little work to do because it would provide me with a space that is already too specific, too filled in with detail. From this perspective, poems are not simply recipients of our concentration, but spurs to action, and the digressions and inattentions they inspire in us are both side effects and main events. To attend to the poem as an idol, or as a fetish, is a category error because it absolves us of our need to be distracted from it.

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Reference:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/144656/in-search-of-distraction
In Search of Distraction
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Audio: Q