In honor of National Poetry Month, we are taking time to consider how poetry makes us better readers of all different types of literature. George Quasha suggests that learning to read poetry is akin to learning to speak a new language:

A reader has to learn a poet’s language. It’s not fundamentally different from learning a foreign language. The very first hearing of an extremely foreign language, which one has never laid ears on, may not sound like language at all—was it insect chatter, clicks and gulps? crazy music?