Franklin Foer writes:

I can say definitively now that I faltered in pursuit of my New Year’s resolution. My self-improvement project for the year was to read a fresh poem every morning, before glimpsing the accumulation of unresponded email and lifting the lid off Twitter. My purpose, when I explained it to my wife and kids a few hours before midnight, was to ritualistically remind myself of emotions other than those triggered by the front page.

What I didn’t say is that I was also positioning myself like a senior citizen hunched over the crossword. I was warding off the possibility of mental deterioration.

I have a fear stoked by a doomsaying prophecy about the future of reading: A century ago or so, poetry was a fixture of everyday life, enjoyed by everyday people. Then it slowly lost its audience. It turned out that the poem required sharper focus than a television audience could sustain and more patience than modernity would permit. This decline, according to some publishers and bookstore owners, is a harbinger. As the age of zombie swiping runs its course, the novel will follow the fate of verse. It will become a niche passion, enjoyed by a shrinking caste of connoisseurs trained to slow their minds and absorb long, twisting chunks of narrative.

I worried that the culture would succumb to this stultification and I wouldn’t be immune. Thus, my self-prescribed daily dose of poetry to sharpen the faculties that stare at the world. I would read to bulwark my attention against the assault waged by my phone.

On the 17th day of the year, the poet Mary Oliver died, and I pulled her books from the shelf. Her oeuvre became my morning ritual—and because she wrote with directness, the windowpane clarity achieved when a writer aims to persuade, I found myself reading many pages at a time. There were poems I knew, the ones recited at weddings or quoted on yearbook pages (“Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”). But this was the first time I had read Oliver beyond her hits. Her books had tumbled into my arms at the right moment. Her collected works amount to an instruction manual for how to focus the gaze. The exhortations that filled her poems became my command: “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” [Continue reading…]