Issue 123: How poetry is changing the way I read

In my mind, this is the only real way to enjoy poetry. It takes time to reveal all the intricacies of what a poet at the level of, say, John Berryman, is doing, and the best way to participate in that revelation is to keep a poem going in your head at the grocery store. You don’t have to memorize whole poems, although that’s a fun challenge—you can

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We live in an age of lexical abundance. More words, more access, more content than at any time in human history. And yet something essential is slipping away. Not reading itself, but the kind of reading that once shaped minds and formed character: slow, immersive, reflective, and richly human. As Harold Bloom noted: “"We read deeply for varied reas... See more