Tommy Sissons: 'Why the Ode?: Poetry in the Attention Economy'
Why I have spent two years writing odes
In December, my poetry collection Out of the Hearing Sky will be published by Broken Sleep Books. Every poem in the collection is an ode. In fact, aside from the occasional digression, I have written in no other poetic form since 2024.
This was not originally my intention. My writing background before Covid was primarily in spoken word, but during the pandemic I turned first to non-fiction, then fiction, and eventually drama. When I returned to poetry in 2024, I found myself looking for a form within which I could develop my page poetry. The ode provided this.
More specifically, I found myself drawn to the English Romantic ode: usually three to six stanzas of ten or eleven lines, as in Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on a Grecian Urn. While the subjects of my odes may occasionally induce revelation, I was less interested in the ode as an extended celebration of its subject, and the circumstances of my own life (a working-class writer and part-time educator living in London) did not lend themselves to the kind of sustained contemplation that the Romantic ode seems to presume.
The engine of the ode is attention. And while Keats inhabited a world in which he could give himself over to close consideration of the environment around him, Britain in 2026 makes such attention increasingly difficult. Today we live within an ‘attention economy’, amid the relentless landscape of competition produced by late capitalism. How many of us have time to pay prolonged attention to anything anymore, let alone to supposedly ‘inconsequential’ or ‘mundane’ objects? We have bills to pay, places to be, emails to answer and an endless stream of information demanding our response.
I wanted the form of my own odes to reflect something of this condition. I began to cap them at two ten-line stanzas, limiting each poem to twenty lines: the ode itself seems forced to hurry, as though the subject is being witnessed in passing from the window of a speeding bus.
Just as I wanted to alter the duration of the encounter, I also had little interest in the conventional history of the ode as a form of address associated with elevated subjects: rulers, gods and abstract values. As I developed my relationship with the form, it became clear that I was interested in the ode not as a poem of praise, but as a way of re-establishing contact with a world that, in its own ways, has never stopped speaking, even as late capitalism and unbridled technological advance encourage us to experience it as increasingly disposable, interchangeable and inert.
This, for me, is where the ode began to offer a means of challenging the subject-object distinction within which so much of contemporary Western life is entrenched: the assumption that ‘I am here, conscious and significant, while everything outside me is merely matter to be used, consumed, classified or discarded’. The ode can instead become an attempt to re-establish a sense of presence and consequence in our relationships with the world around us and with other people, and through them, ultimately, with ourselves.
A World That Exceeds Realism
Writers from working-class backgrounds are often expected to work within the conventions of literary realism. Realism is, of course, most closely associated with prose fiction, but its influence extends well beyond the novel. It has often been treated as the natural literary mode through which class experience should be represented: fact-like accounts of places, their inhabitants and their economic circumstances, intended to expose inequality and encourage social change. Because of this, the working-class writer (whether out of a sense of duty, or through an alienation from more ‘avant-garde’ forms to which we are often first exposed at university) can easily come to adopt realism as their wheelhouse.
The problem is, the world has changed. The ontology of everyday life has shifted radically in recent decades and the stable, naturalistic reality that realism once claimed to hold a mirror to is increasingly difficult to locate.
Britain in 2026 is stranger than fiction. The distinction between lived reality and the stories through which it is represented has become increasingly difficult to maintain. The world arrives mediated. What we see, what we are told and what we experience no longer necessarily coincide. Political mythmaking circulates alongside fake news; AI can fabricate images, voices and information at will; financial precarity makes the conditions of our lives unstable, disrupting any secure sense of place or identity; and climate catastrophe makes the future itself uncertain.
These conditions do not exist independently of one another: they bleed into one another, intensifying each other’s dystopic and alienating potential. How, then, does realism contend with a reality in which language can no longer faithfully account for its subjects, and in which it is bound to fall short?
This is part of what led me towards the strange, mythic logic of Out of the Hearing Sky. Objects of poetic attention become invested with the grotesque meanings imposed upon them by late capitalism: a bottle of milk with a security tag around its neck is “wearing men” and their starvation, and to drink it “you must be willing to surrender everything”; churches become casinos; housing benefits become lambs vulnerable to being stolen by a ‘feckless underclass’ of claimants. As I write in ‘Postrealism’:
No, I cannot attest to the actuality of
anyone. These photos you have of me are
all not of me. […]
As we become estranged from the material world around us, we also become estranged from ourselves. We become vulnerable to the same forces that act upon the objects around us: to be defined, classified and even ‘made’ by hostile exterior forces that seek to commodify human life. For the working-class subject, this can mean being made to inhabit the very caricatures imposed upon them: the brute, the burden, the threat. In ‘Postrealism’, the speaker begins to talk from within that process, describing himself in the language of his own caricature:
[…] I am underdeveloped,
typically. I eat peas with a blade, do not smile
for cameras, and lurch through the cat night
cankered with song. […]
There is much more to say about the difficulty of literary realism in contending with this ontological condition. Suffice it to say for now that realism has become one of the least realistic ways of writing about the world. The strangeness of our present reality requires a poetic form capable not of smoothing that strangeness into something familiar, but of meeting it head-on.
The Work of Attention
There is a Zen story about a painter who is asked by an emperor to paint a bamboo. The painter tells him it will take several years. “First I have to be a bamboo,” he explains. “Otherwise how do I know what a bamboo is?” He must live among the bamboo and watch it in every condition (in wind and rain, in sunlight and darkness, and through the changing seasons) until he comes to know it ‘from the inside’.
After a year, the emperor sends people to find out what has become of him. They return frightened: the painter is alive, but they no longer think he is a man. He has become so absorbed in the bamboo that he swings with it in the wind and does not hear them when they call to him. When the emperor himself comes, the painter still does not answer. After several years, he finally returns, takes up his brush and paints the bamboo in moments. The emperor is astonished: the painting seems not to have been made from the outside, but to have emerged from the bamboo itself.
This story proposes a transformative kind of attention: one which depends on remaining with an object long enough for the distinction between observer and observed to become unstable. It is almost the inverse of the conditions under which we live now. In Britain today, our attention is subject to unprecedented demands: tailored algorithmic feeds, sensationalist news, the pressure to respond immediately, the compulsive pull of doomscrolling, and the constant production of AI-generated text and images. Information can now be produced and transmitted almost instantaneously, with the labour of composition increasingly removed from the process.
All of this encourages what Buddhism calls the ‘monkey mind’: an uncontrolled movement of thought in which the mind leaps from one object of attention to another, as a monkey leaps between trees. When our attention is continually pulled away from the present moment, our relationship with the world immediately before us becomes correspondingly weaker. We become accustomed to experiencing reality through a succession of mediated images, narratives and abstractions, until the distinction between the real and its representations begins to dissolve.
The ode offers a counter-practice. Like the painter who remains with the bamboo until he can no longer regard it simply from the outside, the ode creates a space in which we can remain with a single object long enough for its particular qualities, histories and effects to come into view. In doing so, it asks us to reconsider what deserves our attention in the first place; and now more than ever, what we give sustained attention to is a political decision.
In Out of the Hearing Sky, I confront the meanings, myths and associations that the media and political class impose upon subjects, events and people in working-class communities (a prison tattoo, a discount loaf of bread, a bull terrier, a greasy spoon, etc.) and refuse to let those acts of demonisation, ridicule and caricature define or exhaust them. Instead, the poems allow these subjects to speak back, to exceed the descriptions imposed upon them and, in some cases, to name themselves.
This, in turn, changes what I think the modern ode can be. It cannot simply be a form through which a ‘rational’ speaker addresses or praises a ‘sublime’ or ‘perfect’ object, because in the contemporary world both speaker and object have already been conditioned by the representations imposed upon them. It is increasingly difficult to imagine an impartial act of witnessing when neither the observer nor the observed stands outside those representations. Without the possibility of such detachment, the modern ode cannot be entirely one-sided. It must become a conversation between speaker and object, in which both are engaged in the attempt to understand (and perhaps to rescue) one another.
This does not mean that the objects literally possess a human voice. It means that they have histories, relationships and effects that exceed the speaker’s description of them, and therefore the capacity to act upon and transform the person who is attempting to describe them.
In ‘There is Much I Shouldn’t Say (I am the Sky)’, the sky responds to an illogical, debased speaker’s letter by making him reconsider the relationship between sender and reader:
[…] I wish you knew
how the reader locates themselves in the sender
The speaker is reminded that the self is not formed in isolation but comes to know itself through its relation to another.
Elsewhere, a taxidermy mermaid (an embalmed monkey’s torso sewn to a fish tail) becomes a reflection of the working-class speaker and his friends, who encounter it on a school trip. Already living in close proximity to violence, they recognise in the grotesque creature a version of the fate that has been laid out for them. The speaker writes:
[…] I know what it is
to be joined to unnatural ends. The taxidermist
will not admit to the suture. […]
The unseen taxidermist becomes a figure for the society that has sutured these boys to violent ends while refusing to acknowledge its own part in producing that fate.
Later in the collection, a Robot Buddhist monk “can’t tell himself apart from others”, and cannot be blamed for the debasement of human spiritual potential that he represents.
The imaginative leap of the modern ode therefore must be to treat the supposedly inanimate world not as inert matter awaiting our interpretation, but as something with which we can enter into relation - something capable of responding and changing how we understand ourselves and the world that acts upon us. In doing so, the ode offers a small resistance to the atomisation and hyper-alienation that contemporary life increasingly presents as inevitable.
Myth is not an Escape from Britain
The reason I turn to working-class lives, objects and experiences so often rendered expendable, demonised or sensationalised by the media and political class is not simply to declare them worthy of lyric attention. It is a response to a crisis of representation, and a refusal of the processes by which working-class lives are defined through reductive social categories.
Working-class people are accustomed to having their lives flattened into social narratives: ‘the estate represents deprivation’; ‘debt represents fecklessness’; ‘single parenthood represents a lack of prospects’, etc. Such representations impose hostile meanings from outside, reducing complex lives to caricatures.
The implication for the ode is clear: it must resist that reduction by changing the relationship between subject and object. In Out of the Hearing Sky, that relationship becomes a negotiation. In ‘Milk’, a milk bottle with a security bag around its neck becomes a political, historical, biological and spiritual event; elsewhere, in ‘Cicatrix’, the speaker asks a scar what it believes itself to be. The working-class ode responds to the misrepresentation of the world around it by allowing the world to regain its agency: by treating its objects as complex sites of collective memory, desire, mythology and reflection.
This is where myth becomes one of the most important tools available to the poet. Myth can communicate at a felt level what literal language cannot.
One of the poems at the centre of the collection, ‘Arrow’, begins:
What shall I say to my people?
I want to tell them about the archer
who found a way to stand
on the black beach
and fire a single arrow
the sky could not contain [...]
The arrow in this poem is fired beyond the limits of the universe, leaving some of its witnesses “wild with belief”. Though it disappears from the universe, and from all photographs taken of its journey into the sky, it travels on having “went knowing / who we are” and “will never be lonely now”. There are any number of ways to interpret the poem, but myth was the only language through which I could articulate what I wanted to say. The poem could not have been written as anything other than myth.
This may prompt a question: if reality has become unstable, why respond by making things mythological?
My answer is that myth is not the opposite of reality. It is a way of extending reality when literal description reaches its limit. For this reason, myth is at least as important a political tool as realism or reportage for exposing the conditions of the world today and resisting the hyperreality produced by late capitalism.
The myths in Out of the Hearing Sky do not exist to help the reader escape Britain in 2026. They exist because contemporary Britain already exceeds literal language. Security tags on milk. AI models. Housing benefit debt. Postcode-based gang wars. These things are already strange enough to feel mythical, dense with meanings that exceed what straightforward description can convey. Myth may therefore be the most naturalistic - the most ‘real’ - way of rendering contemporary reality.
The speaker of many of these odes acts as an intermediary within this working-class mythscape. He is called the Groundling, after the poorer theatregoers of Shakespeare’s time who paid a penny to stand in the ‘pit’ and look up at the stage: a convenient mirroring of the conventional speaker of the ode, looking upwards towards a sublime spectacle from a position of supposed inferiority.
In Out of the Hearing Sky, the Groundling is the collection’s recurring anti-hero. He robs ASDA, assumes the role of a cowboy, is interrogated in a police station, among other things. Yet these episodes are less important than what they reveal about him. He is not a prophet, nor particularly wise. What distinguishes him is that he has abandoned the fantasy of the subject-object dichotomy: the idea that human beings stand outside the world and possess some inherent superiority over it.
The Groundling is porous. Milk, scars, wars, debt, technology, songs and history pass through him. He is altered by his encounters; a citizen of the same ecology as birds, horses, the sky, the sea, and radio waves, all of which communicate with him on something approaching equal terms. In ‘Somnus’, he would gladly exchange places with the bat:
the proletarian hippy who will not even drowse in line
with tradition. […]
His radical permeability is what enables him to write odes.
It is also what makes the Groundling a position rather than just a character: an embodiment of the ode as a mode of attention and, in a world increasingly defined by alienation, a mode of compassion. The ode is, in the words of the collection:
an ownerless song the ache blustering through the universe.
The ode, therefore, begins with the act of attending to something beyond the self, but in doing so discovers that the self is already entangled in what it attends to. Ultimately, that attention becomes an admission of dependence: on other people, on the material world, and on the wider interconnective ecology of which we are a part.
What does this mean in the age of AI?
With our new access to artificial intelligence, language can now be produced almost infinitely and instantaneously. This seemingly limitless possibility should, and perhaps already does, make us more conscious of the value of our own human limitations: our natural fallibility, imperfection and uncertainty, upon which great art depends. But we also possess a capacity for sustained attention that can transform both ourselves and our surroundings.
What we pay attention to becomes our world. We are constantly engaged in the process of making a world, at least at the level of consciousness, through what we allow to occupy our minds. If we do not want that world to be made for us (and, in my view, against us) by AI, technological advancement and the attention economy, we need to return to the difficult work of attending to what is actually around us: not attempting to master or impose ourselves upon it but entering into a relationship in which we are capable of being changed by what we encounter.
When I think about it now, dedicating myself to writing forty odes was an unexpectedly similar act of attention. When I wrote the first ode in the sequence, ‘Bull Terrier’, in 2024, I had no idea I would spend the next two years writing more than forty others. I kept finding things I wanted to enter into conversation with, and somewhere during this process, I found the ode to be the most fruitful poetic mode through which to address - and listen to - the world around me. Spending so long with the form allowed me to discover how its conventions could be stretched, disrupted and reimagined according to the particular demands of each poem: how a poem might test what a line could be, or where a ‘unit of meaning’ (what I have come to think of as a line in this collection) might begin and end. The attention changed me as a poet as much as it changed what I was able to write.
What I have learnt is that the ode is not an ‘old form’ in need of defending. It is a mode charged with contemporary urgency: the urgent need to be slow (ironically enough). In an age in which language can be produced instantaneously and meaning increasingly arrives pre-mediated, the ability to remain with something long enough to really encounter it may be one of the most valuable things we have left to practise.
Tommy Sissons is a poet, playwright, novelist and educator based in London. He is the Editor-in-Chief of GRASS Magazine.
