Welcome back to The Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today is Tuesday, April 21st, 2020. And today I want to share with you a few paragraphs from a book that I really love. It's called Why Poetry. It came on a couple years ago, and it's by Matthews a Pruder. And at the very end of the book, he has an afterword.

And the name of this afterward is called Poetry and Poets in a Time of Crisis.

And I was reviewing this book for another podcast that I was participating in

and came across a couple paragraphs that I wanted to share with you

here on this podcast. So today that I'm going to do something a little bit different.

We, of course, are living in a time of crisis right now with the coronavirus, with COVID-19,

impacting all of our lives. And so I thought that the comments that Mr. Zaprooter includes in this section are worth sharing with you.

So if you can get your hands on this book, I recommend you do so.

If you can get on Amazon, bookshop.org, any booksellers.

I'm not going to read this whole section.

I'm just going to jump around a little bit.

But again, this is a little bit different today, but I wanted to share it with you.

Zupreter writes, quote, I'm a poet, which means that my areas of expertise and concern are

language and the imagination. I feel certain it is essential to ask, what does this crisis

mean for poets and poetry? What in these times must we do?

Can poetry help save us?

As an aside here, he's writing this a couple years ago, as I said, but I think this applies.

He's writing more generally about crises, cultural crises, but it applies here in this specific instance as well.

He goes on, I've always believed that poetry has its own special role,

distinct from all other uses of language.

I agree with W.S. Merwin when he writes,

...