The quiet focus that poetry requires is a gift

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There seems to be a theme month for everything these days — and April is no different. April is National Poetry Month. I didn’t set out to become a collector of poetry. It just kind of happened. I think it started in earnest in 2022 when I read an Ada Calhoun essay in Vogue. I loved it so much that I preordered her book, “Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me,” which led me to buying O’Hara’s “Lunch Poems.” Soon, I stopped scrolling long enough to read the poems that popped up in my social media feed. And eventually, for once, the algorithm started working in my favor,sending me one banger after another. That’s when I started buying more poetry books.

As my own journey to poetry fan shows, the genre is more accessible than ever. Lucky us. The Poetry Foundation has an “audio poem of the day.” Button Poetry hosts local and national events, and has a fabulous TikTok account (Olivia Gatwood reading “Girls from Long Island” is my favorite). Around 4.5 million high schoolers have participated in Poetry Out Loud, a poetry recitation competition. Last year brought us a documentary about Andrea Gibson (“Come See Me in the Good Light”) and in August 2026, we’ll get another about Mary Oliver (“Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World”). Closer to home, Cog has hosted poetry events with poets Kate Baer, Saeed Jones and Maggie Smith at CitySpace. (Smith also hosts “The Slowdown,” a daily podcast about poetry.)

I’ve been looking for ways to take my love of poetry to the next level. I’ve thought about enrolling in a poetry workshop or taking a class, but I’m loath to add any calendar-based commitments to my schedule. So, I was really excited about The New York Times’ poetry challenge this week. The task was to memorize a poem — ”The More Loving One” by W.H. Auden —  in five days. The challenge features celebrities reading poetry; games to help you memorize the poem, one stanza at a time; and archival images of Auden and pages of his notebooks. It’s brilliant editorial work with a compelling premise: We should memorize poetry just for the fun of it — “a mental challenge with a solid aesthetic reward.”

But I think there’s more to it than that. One of the Instagram accounts I follow is  @poetryisnotaluxury. The name comes from the title of a 1985 Audre Lorde essay. To paraphrase Lorde, we need poetry because there are no new ideas — only new ways of making them felt. And, boy, do poems make us feel things. In an age where it’s all too easy to be distracted, the quiet focus that poetry requires is a gift.

If memorizing poetry doesn’t appeal, I have another idea: You could write a cento. Stick with me.

I hadn’t heard of this kind of poem until last year, when I read “Dear Writer,” by Maggie Smith. A cento, which takes its name from the Latin phrase for a “patchwork garment,” is a poem written using lines from other people’s poems — a literary collage of sorts. Smith describes it as “a perfect prompt when we’re feeling stuck or less than inspired,” a state of mind many of us can relate to.

When you’re working on a cento, you read poetry differently. You read a wider variety of poets and you see poems in relation to each other.

So that’s what I did when I was trying to figure out how to write this note while avoiding the actual writing. (I love any form of productive procrastination.) So, here it is, with lines from the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Mary Oliver, Kate Baer, Maggie Smith and John Kenney:

They hold this spoon out to me,

This spoon of life.

Well, I want it, and I don’t.

Today I’m flying low and I’m

Not saying a word

I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

Who will confess that their children are dull

Or their marriage has holes at the knees.

I carried my fear of the world

without knowing how to set it down.

I want to share my life with you.

I do.

Give it a try. You might like it.