Poets are often thought of as more solitary than most, but a poem is never entirely solitary – it’s a signal sent up into the sky, trusting someone will receive it. Hoping, anyway. Perhaps that’s one reason why they are everywhere right now. Simon Armitage has already written his first Coronavirus poem. You can follow the hashtag ‘covidpoetry’ on Instagram. Actors are reading Derek Mahon on Irish TV.

Or perhaps no one has the attention span at the moment for anything longer. I’ve been thinking of writing a more regular blog for a while, but I do not want it to be me ‘explaining poems’. As if I could. Instead, this would be a regular thing – weekly, if I could keep it up, where I will pick a poem and talk about what I like about it (update: I have not kept it up).

I wanted to do this for two reasons. First, for myself, to work out what I think. I am a big believer that saying and knowing are part of the same process. You don’t know you know something until you say it. It is an extension of the truth that you learn something better when you teach it.

But I also wanted to do it because it is one way of helping other people to get more out of poems. As E. M. Forster says, for anyone who is under the spell of a thing like poetry, this kind of proselytising is an involuntary urge: we can’t help it. Even if I could, I wouldn’t: it is a Bad Thing if the only people who read poems are people who enjoy them already and I don’t see the point in . But E. M. Forster said that the only way to make a case for any kind of culture was to demonstrate your own enjoyment of it. There is no point telling people they will like something. You simply have to demonstrate what it does for you. Which is easier said than done.

There is always a chance a blog will reach someone who doesn’t think they like poems, or, more likely, someone who likes some poems, and understands they have particular effects in particular moments – like weddings, or funerals – but who isn’t really sure what they’re supposed to get from them and so has little incentive to explore them further. I would hazard a guess that the last category includes most people who read for pleasure. Which should worry poets, and people who like poetry, even more than it already does.

But my main reason for actually doing this is that I don’t feel like writing anything else. That attention span again. But I do feel hopeful when I think about poetry. This crisis is making many of us think about what it is we’re grateful for. Among the things I am grateful for are good poems and the poets who wrote them.

I’ll start later this week with a blog about a poem called ‘Into My Own’, which is the first poem in the first book by one of my favourite poets, Robert Frost. Conveniently, for our purposes, it is about being alone.