Tuesday, September 20, 2011

News at Eleven: Buddhists would call multitasking monkey-minded,

when you're thinking of so many things at once. Poetry gets the monkeys out of our head--or it just leaves one monkey. Poetry offers the opportunity for you to get mentally and emotionally focused.

There's another pragmatic way that it gets us to slow down: it comes in lines, and doesn't rush out to the other side of the page as it does with prose. At the end of each line, the reader's attention is recirculated into the body of the poem. It asks you to kind of tap the breaks and slow down a bit. That's why poetry has been sort of a marginalized art, the poor little match girl of the arts, somewhat neglected.

from The Vanderbilt Hustler: Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate, Comes to Vanderbilt

~~~~~~~~~~~

No comments :