Friends who like poems urge me to write about them. In principle, I’m not averse, in practice, reluctant, for the topic is toxic.

Poetry, except for occasional bromidic psychobabble, doesn’t sell. The mere mention of it hurtles readers off the page. Good poetry is slow, stubborn, taxing – who needs it! Ours is an epoch of gestures and quick takes, soundbites, mental snacks. Any worthwhile poem is worth reading repeatedly – in silence – unharassed by beeps. It may ache, perplex. My polysyllabic prose is hardly popular: why shrink my audience further with meditations unpalatably esoteric?

Yet poetry matters – to me, at least – more than the muck of events. Poetry, said Ezra Pound, “is news that stays news.” It wrestles verities and discovers mysteries. It transforms happenstance into patterns, now into always, pressing language past prose’s polite constraints. When they work, poems stick in mind, meaning more than their words say, tracking throbs of the heart that leave Reason tongue-tied.

What makes a poem memorable is unfathomable – and the search for its magic instructive. It’s not its thought – images – melody – novelty – familiarity – though all these contribute. The strengths and weaknesses of prose one can anatomize. When one can’t, when prose takes flight and sings, it has become poetry, no matter its shape on the page. The Gettysburg Address, Sermon on the Mount, and opening paragraphs of Pride and Prejudice are poetry masquerading as prose.

Poetry’s present disfavor is a puzzling phenomenon. Since Homer, poetry had been the most essential art. Poems were bestsellers from the invention of the book through the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, poetry and popular taste diverged. As with most divorces, causes were messy, fault hard to fix. Poetry became more complex, harder to decode, sometimes inscrutable to all but self-appointed adepts. The arduous pleasure of words was superseded by the lazier charms of recordings and screens. It is easier to watch and listen than to read; reading less our brains lost the knack. Computers demoted language into “content,” as if fine cuisine were grub. I, who love poetry, find most contemporary attempts insufferable, though to say so is to incur the fury of today’s self-styled professionals. Since nobody’s sure what a poem is anymore, anybody can write one. More folks, I fear, write poems than read them.

Poetry, though, cannot go the way of lacemaking and antimacassars, for its expressive potential uniquely satisfies an urgent human need. No more can prayer be obsoleted though sects may wane. Poetry and prayer infuse our moment with meaning. Their words make us matter. What “meaning” and “matter” mean may be hard to explain, but not to recognize. We know when we belong here and now.

I’ve attempted a few meditations on poems in this space; with your indulgence I’ll try a few more. The narrative of this chronicle is what it feels like to live in our moment. Literature, art, beauty, faith are lenses, not my focus. My challenge will be to make poems matter to you, whether or not you read them.

I have needed poetry since my dad died when I was sixteen – as a compass, I suppose, to help me sort out why to be. I’ve returned to poetry recently with renewed dedication to escape the stupidity and brutality of events. Poems remind me what’s good about our species, why we’re worth saving. The turpitude of humanity may startle and sicken, but we are capable of grace: that is the subtext of a well-wrought poem. I’m counting on poems to help me to hallelujah. Let poetry be a rope hauling us from the hell of mope.