"Mindfulness is hardly a new idea-when have we not wanted to live more vividly in the present?-but the search for a balanced life has never required so many devices. The word itself has become something of a catchall recently, calling forth an entire industry of platforms, wearable tech, and wellness gurus. Poetry predates all of our meditation apps -and its capacity to immerse the reader in the moment still promises a greater payoff than any smartwatch."
"The poet and teacher Linda Gregg, whose poem "The Last Night in Mithymna" was published in The Atlantic in April 1989, has said that poetry comes from the "resonant sources" of a human life: "your long family life, your political rage, your love and sexuality, your fears and secrets, your ethnic identity-anything." Without the impress of experience, she wrote, poetry is tantamount only to a kind of "manufacturing.""
Mindfulness has become a commercialized industry of platforms, wearable tech, and wellness gurus, yet the impulse to live vividly in the present remains longstanding. Poetry predates meditation apps and still immerses readers in immediate experience, tracking sensory and emotional data without aiming to optimize humans. Poetry confronts a core source of unwellness: the sensation that life has slipped away. A respected poet describes poetic material as arising from resonant sources of human life—family, political rage, love, sexuality, fears, secrets, and ethnic identity—and warns that without lived experience verse risks becoming mere manufacturing. Poetic style can be both restrained and exuberant.
Read at The Atlantic
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]