I remember reading this article! I was also pleasantly surprised. I love this part. Maybe because it flatters my sensibilities, I don't know. That final sentence is a bit hammy when written that way, but there is a grain of truth there I think. Poetry is so often about death; maybe because death is the antithesis to kitsch. There, now I'm hammy, too.19. Someday, when all your material possessions will seem to have shed their utility and just become obstacles to the toilet, poems will still hold their value. They are rooms that take up such little room. A memorized poem, or a line or two, becomes part internal jewelry and part life-saving skill, like knowing how to put a mugger in an arm-lock or the best way to cut open a mango without slicing your hand.
20. Reading a good poem doesn’t give you something to talk about. It silences you. Reading a great poem pushes further. It prepares you for the silence that perplexes us all: death.