Poetry and the arts—like the right kind of prayer—can help us to stay with grief long enough to feel its sweetness, long enough for the sweetness and grief to deepen our sensitivity to the exquisite agony and ecstasy that we call appreciation, praise, love … and life. We will find or write and recite the poems and prayers that resonate most deeply

... See more

The inner Iran, which I'd excavated through poems, had given me some of the most intimate depictions I'd encountered of how to make contact with the divine; poets really could be the unacknowledged legislators of the world in a culture where taxi drivers recite mystical verses and ayatollahs speak in double-edged stanzas.

But poetry is the form that

... See more