A daily practice, like doing musical scales, to add to your writing routine.

Strangers on the streets of Seattle and New York read Martha Silano's poem

Boot up, log on, launch your email program. Then sit across the room in your armchair with a novel and a pair of binoculars. Use the binoculars from time to time to monitor your Inbox. If you look through the wrong end, you will find that your workload has vanished, and you are six years old again, turning pages, lost and alive in your happiness.

It's crickets, we say, meaning the silence after a poem, when we lift our eyes to the camera's gaze and to our invisible, muted audience who might or might not be there. It seems unfair to crickets, who insist on being heard, on calling out, "I'm here! I'm here! I need you!" Wouldn't it be sweet if after a poem we heard a gentle crescendo…

“Romantic Poet,” by Diane Seuss, is one of the best things that our critic A.O. Scott read (and reread) this year.

The Milky Way beckonslike a door; how does a personbecome undone? Deathraises love in me, like creamto the surface. I am surprisedby the depth of it. How many waysI am learning to love: others, mys…