Wild Imagination: On Poetry’s Role in Preserving Wilderness

How poetic imagination safeguards our capacity for bewilderment (first published in The Poetry Review)

Dear Friends,

In April 2020, on a late-evening walk through Central Park, I watched as three strangers measured the North Meadow by streetlamp light. By morning, white tents had bloomed like mushrooms after rain, and the park’s entrance was a triage center, wilderness replaced by a grim circus: the COVID-19 field hospital, a desperate, albeit ingenious a…