It's a rich subject, and surely many poets have handled it, but few with the resourcefulness or steady
intentness of Hirshfield.
There was an
intentness in his watching which frightened her.
Blake choked and turned away from the stone, conscious of some formless alien presence close to him and watching him with horrible
intentness. He felt entangled with something--something which was not in the stone, but which had looked through it at him--something which would ceaselessly follow him with a cognition that was not physical sight.
Paradoxically, Bracho's language gains body and an
intentness of gaze as it moves further away fromthe physical presence that first provoked these reflections (one assumes that it is a physical presence and will not turn out to be another metaphor).
It's hard to quibble with several of the tenets Wooden espouses, like competitive greatness, "poise," "confidence" and "skill." There is also ample reason to endorse Iris characterization of "
intentness" ("When thwarted try again, harder, smarter.
5: 1216-30), traces
intentness on "formal conditions of its art" (p.
Real's vacancy is the momentary manifestation of what afflicts all these characters--that their more intense life is lived elsewhere, in visions, memories, or obsessions, or is withheld from them, and self-expression is replaced by an
intentness spent in watching others and in interpreting the puzzling hints of incomplete utterance.
``John would try and put you down if you didn't stand up to him,Paul was nice and all the rest of it but he was the PR man, with George there was the seriousness, the
intentness and the bizarre type humour.
What was originally a jokey format is well on its way to becoming--like "I support him 110%"--a minimum unit of conversational currency, beneath which
intentness is insufficiently over-conveyed.