Like the Jurassic shrew, poetry may seem an unlikely candidate to survive the next comet, let alone inherit the earth. Yet like that first of all mammals, poetry has proven itself agile among the feet of dinosaurs. Indeed it has been the animal that always escapes. Able to live on next to nothing—a scrap of paper or, before there was paper, in the ear alone—it survived as remembered words, a remembered rhythm. Once lodged in the mind of its host it traveled easily through time: our oldest literature, earliest history came down to us as poems. And as easily through space: outliving its host, it jumped from language to language, culture to culture. Unfazed by the latest technologies of transfer, it adapts readily to the sound bites of texting, the Twitter-sized attention spans of the new media. Virtual, viral, poetry bestows its blessings on our express world much as it did on the plains of  Troy. Like DNA, a single poem carries down time and into the world its record of emotion and perception, a discrete packet of significance. (read more)