Myles Poydras Suggests Poetry for News-Addled Attention Spans

At The Atlantic, Poydras writes, "[i]f you feel you’re losing your ability to focus on a long book while confined indoors and surrounded by digital screens (as staying up to date on a global pandemic seems to command), try turning to poetry to nurse your shrinking attention span back to life." From there: 

Emily Dickinson’s many short but perceptive poems showcase her unique view of the physical world, distilling its details into spiritual themes and universally acknowledged truths. Yrsa Daley-Ward’s debut poetry collection, titled bone, conveys the difficulty and tenderness of reflecting ​on one’s own, sometimes painful, relationships with others.

The former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins favors the subjectivity of poetry, which allows him to shape-shift reality and create imaginative escapes. Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” leans in to the flexibility of language, unraveling the past usage of words and phrases to create a resonant story from apparent nonsense. W. S. Merwin’s poems never quite reach a clean resolution, reveling instead in the journey from stanza to stanza.

Read on at The Atlantic.