☀️ You can feel when the poem is good
There's a moment that happens with certain poems where something in your body responds before your brain has fully caught up. A prickle across the skin, a tightening in the throat, the strange impulse to read the line again because you want to feel it once more.
Neuroscientists have a name for this: frisson, a wave of physical sensation triggered by an aesthetic experience. It turns out poetry produces it more reliably than almost anything else we know of, because the brain processes it differently, as rhythm, metaphor, and compressed meaning that activates the same reward circuitry that otherwise lights up for food, music, or a long-awaited piece of good news.
Yesterday was World Poetry Day, which felt like exactly the right moment to sit with a question that sounds simple and isn't: what is a poem doing to us?
A poet recently put it plainly: AI cannot write poetry because it knows nothing of love, loss, or grief. Poetry is what language does when ordinary language is not enough.
📖 3 Articles to Spark Your Curiosity
5 Poems to Help You Defrost This Spring
Five poets, including Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Mary Oliver, whose spring-themed work does what the best poems do: offer a window into a feeling you've had but never quite named.
→ Read on Trill
All Good Poems Tell Stories
An argument that poetry lost its cultural place the moment it stopped telling stories, and why narrative is ultimately what gives any poem its grip.
→ Read on Substack
The Psychology of Poetry: Why Poems Move Minds
From the goosebumps and reward circuitry poetry activates to its use in therapy for grief and trauma, a look at what's happening in the brain when a poem lands.
→ Read on Substack
🗞️ 3 Headlines Worth Exploring
Diana Ferrus: The South African Poet Whose Words Reclaimed History
A poem written in 1998 by a homesick student in the Netherlands became so powerful that it was incorporated into French law and helped bring Sarah Baartman's remains home to South Africa after nearly two centuries.
→ Read on The Conversation
The Tale of the 'Fine Lady Upon a White Horse'
A look at the surprisingly layered history behind "Ride a Cock Horse to Banbury Cross" and how 18th-century chapbooks preserved these rhymes long enough for us to inherit them.
→ Read on BBC
World Poetry Day: Inspiring Words and Thoughts from Euronews Culture's Poet-in-Residence
Aurora Vélez, a journalist and poet, on why poetry is expanding rather than fading, and on AI: "Artificial intelligence is devoid of emotional consciousness. It knows nothing of love, loss, or grief. Can it venture into them?"
→ Read on Euronews
☀️ 3 Actions to Step Out of Your Comfort Zone
Read one poem out loud
To yourself or to someone else. Neuroscience is clear: poetry is a physical experience, and hearing it changes everything. Choose any poem from the Trill list, or one you already know, and give it your voice.
Find the poem you already carry
Think of a line of poetry, a lyric, a nursery rhyme, anything verbal that has stayed with you longer than makes obvious sense. Write it down, then write two sentences about why you think it never left.
Write a two-line poem
Just two lines, no rhyme required, no standard to meet. The point is the compression: taking something you've been thinking about and finding the smallest possible space for it.
⚡ 6 Quick Resources
🔍 To check: The Dark Origins of 11 Classic Nursery Rhymes
Ring Around the Rosie encodes the plague. Humpty Dumpty was a siege cannon. The rhymes children memorize carry considerably more than we imagine.
→ Read on TIME
🎙️ To listen to: Why People Need Poetry
Literary critic Stephen Burt: "We're all going to die, and poems can help us live with that." A charming and moving talk on the human urge to imagine.
→ Watch on TED
🏛️ To explore: Richard Yasmine: Designing Between Poetry and Provocation
A Lebanese designer whose objects carry the same compressed meaning as a good line of verse, a striking example of poetic thinking migrating into physical form.
→ Read on IFDM
🌿 To get inspired: A Poet-Botanist's Lifelong Pursuit of Discovery
A short documentary about a scientist who uses poetry to process her fieldwork, and what it looks like when two seemingly incompatible ways of knowing are allowed to feed each other.
→ Watch on Psyche
📖 To know: What Is Form in Poetry?
Why the shape of a poem on the page is never accidental, and how constraints like meter and line breaks generate meaning rather than limit it.
→ Read on Writers.com
🎬 To watch: What Makes a Poem a Poem?
Is a poem a little machine? A firework? An echo? A dream? Melissa Kovacs on three recognizable characteristics of most poetry, using the metaphors poets themselves reach for when asked to define their own art.
→ Watch on YouTube
🎲 This week’s wonderfully random corner of the internet
⚙️ The Poetry Machine
A playful tool that lets you build poems by selecting the type of poem you want to experiment with and then guiding you on the structure.
→ Play at poetrygames.org
📝 Word of the Week
Duende (Spanish) - The mysterious, dark creative force behind art that truly moves us, a quality that cannot be taught or manufactured, only recognized when it arrives.
The concept was developed by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, who described duende as a kind of struggle: the sense that something untameable has passed through the work. It's the quality that separates a technically correct poem from one that gives you chills. Lorca believed duende lived closest to death, and that's why it moves us: it comes from somewhere genuine and irreducible, something AI cannot yet reach.
🧘♀️ Question of the Week for Introspection
Is there a line of poetry, a lyric, or even a nursery rhyme that has stayed with you longer than you'd expect? What do you think it knows about you that you haven't quite put into words yet?
See you next Sunday! Until then, keep your eyes open, your questions big, and your sense of wonder alive.
Your curious internet friend,
Ruxandra
