Q & A ...

... Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate, Comes to Vanderbilt | InsideVandy. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

Poetry ... asks you to slow down. It runs at a fairly slow gear - for at least two reasons: one is that it causes you to fall into a more meditative, thoughtful state, to stop multitasking. Buddhists would call multitasking monkey-minded, when you're thinking of so many things at once. Poetry gets the monkeys out of our head—or it just leaves one monkey. Poetry offers the opportunity for you to get mentally and emotionally focused.