Nicole Daniels Asks About Poetry's Role in Contemporary Life

At NYT, Daniels asks readers "How do you feel when you read a poem?" Picking up from there:

Does it make a difference if you have to read a poem for school rather than for pleasure? Do you ever seek out poems on your own or share poems on social media?

In “How Poetry Shakes Up the National Desk’s Morning Meetings,” Marc Lacey writes about a new tradition to read a poem at the beginning of meetings:

When the National desk gets together to discuss stories, it can be a grim half-hour. We dissect natural disasters. We reconstruct mass shootings. We delve into political scandals and all manner of domestic tumult. Recently, though, we added a new feature to our morning meetings aimed at inspiring us and boosting our creativity before we embark on another long day of editing the news.

We read a poem.

I got the idea from an unlikely source: my son’s high school English teacher, Anne Baney. During parent-teacher night, she explained how she reads a poem at the beginning of every class from “Poetry 180,” an anthology of contemporary poems compiled by Billy Collins, the former poet laureate of the United States. The room turns quiet when she reads, she told us. If she ever forgets to start off the day with a poem, her students remind her. They like it.

And, it turns out, so do we.

Continue from there at NYT.