It's an obsession and a vocation. They read it for beauty and art and the life of the soul. Poetry tells you how to live with conflict and with multiplicity. Baker credits a renewed national interest in poetry to efforts by the United States' last two poet laureates and to people's appreciation of the truths they find in a poem's compactly written lines. The average frame speed on MTV is something like 1.4 seconds and when you watch something like that, you can't fix on anything.
Poetry is about impediments.
As you go slower, you go deeper, and learn how to be inside the language. You live in another world for a while a world that's inside this one. Baker draws his ideas partly from his own life, and partly from the lives and works of others. One recent poem, he says, was inspired by the journals of Puritan minister Samuel Sewall. It's putting those two historical moments together and blending them.