I’m rollicking into a new phase. Label it (like a new shade of paint) Poetic Dusk.

In college, after I stopped wanting to be Ralph Vaughn Williams, I wanted to be a poet. I love poetry. Its makers amazed me. I knew one. Why couldn’t I make one of those?

I also, looking back, needed poetry. I had no one to talk to, a confused psyche, and a prideful propriety that insisted on keeping up appearances. I was so confused I didn’t know it. In a poem I could confess without confessing. This was art, not heart.

I was protected, too, by my moment’s indifference to the form. The crowd I hung with talked about much – show-biz, movies, politics, the war, Spiro Agnew – but not poems. It would have been dorky talking poetry and I was having none of that. I scribbled mine in secret, occasionally murmuring one to a lady of interest, who no doubt thought it odd. Like many in this line I imagined a posterity for my productions but didn’t really believe in it (“the Emily Dickinson club”).

I lived a life – as journalist, publisher, pundit – which had nothing to do with poems. In public I was all prose, and not fancy frou-frou prose, but the crisp, lean, efficient, to-the-point, legible prose required of reporters – the sort of prose at which AI now excels.

Into these daily missives I snuck a Christmas poem I’d made – and will again in a few days – and apt citations from poets, but morality, meaning, our bewildering moment were my topics, not poems.

Then one day, I published a little piece about a poem, Frost’s “Pasture Spring,” to make a point about efficient expression. Some readers urged more. I obliged happily. Then I tried another, and another, and my “open rate” smiled. The open rate measures what percentage of readers read what you’ve dispatched. It’s an imperfect and misleading metric but the only one we’ve got to see if, with our readers, we’re hitting the mark.

Thus commenced my Poetic Dusk. I now have a lot of folks to jaw with about poetry – not daily, but maybe once a week – which opens to me a trove of buried treasure. Except for a few old chestnuts, few these days read poems, but multitudes write them, write and store them in slender volumes relegated to high shelves where they gather dust. Twelve percent of Americans, we’re told, read one poem last year, but that hardly makes them a reader of poetry. What a chance that gives us – to go picking poems like wild raspberries in season and carrying home to savor!

Poems are a perfect medium for our Internet-addled age. They’re meant to be read one at a time. You can dance with a poem for fifteen minutes and feel energized – you don’t have to conquer a demanding book. The New Yorker magazine has long deployed poems as they do cartoons, as pleasant interruptions to prose expanses, oases where a trudging brain might pause. Like a cartoon, a poem is a complete experience in a minute, not really a commitment; a compact expression you might clip and keep, but you don’t have to.

Perfect for our six-hundred-word amble. For while small, a poem is a complete machine, brimming with its maker’s aspirations, preferences, attitudes, ideas about technique. A poem “works” – that is, strikes its hearer like a little clock – or it doesn’t. It can be very small – as small as a few dozen words.

And therapeutic! A poem forcibly removes the mind from the mess du jour. It insists you enter into its world, far and foreign, and hear its maker’s voice, distinct from the roar.

It feels great to get away.