Reading poetry is like driving stick shift

The poet Olivia Cronk feels that our world of streamlined, linked, easily accessed information is lacking in something human, like the shuffling sounds between songs on a mixtape. Also, poets read other poets to steal, and that's completely fine because it's what makes us better. Cronk quotes a lot of people and suggests listing to music, drinking tea, and  probably even sleeping on Egyptian cotton to get back that poetic lovin' feeling, but in short, we should try harder to feel poetry, and maybe even taste it, like this:

From Bookslut:

This is what I am interested in: creating mood, experiencing art consumption and passing of time as memory/meaning-making. Conrad’s wonderful sense of collaboration firmed up for me something I experienced when reading Martha Ronk’s book Displeasures of the Table. Ronk uses foods as chapters and as constraints by which to explore prose poetry as a form and memory as poetry. The results are absolutely engaging, soothing, and exciting. The book creates sensations of foods, gives me memories of experiences I have never had. I read these kinds of things and I want to write like these people and I want to suck mint and ritualize the turning on of a hi-fi in my Nana’s moldy apartment and lecture to cool crowds of people some of the ways by which we might coax language into emulation of reality.

She also starts with this quote, which is nice:

“What have you done with all your words & gaudy language hats?” -Lara Glenum