It has occurred to me more than once lately, as I scroll Twitter or compose a text, that the time for the mass popularization of poetry has come.

Think about the proliferation of visual memes, for example: they are nothing if not ultra-versatile figures of speech, capable of encapsulating layers of complex meaning in a moment. What else was Bernie in his mittens, but a deft visual couplet, shaped and edited to mean something like an ironic version of Hamlet’s “The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body.”

Think about how multi-layered our lives are now, and how poetic that is. We live in ordinary space, and we now also lead digital lives via video conference for work, school, family and friends, multiplayer video games, watch-parties, and through conversations on social media. The dualities of poetry, once esoteric, are now endemic.

And what are most texts but word play and line breaks?

Let’s test this theory on a poem by one of my current favorite poets, Megan Fernandes. Here’s the first stanza of her poem, “Amsterdam.”

Sometimes the mythologies of a city are true—

like when I see a blond man bob for red apples

in the street selling records side by side with a black cat

wound in a cushion, deep in dream. Josh says

he does not want to go see Anne Frank, that this kind of tourism

depresses him, the one where the demonstration of grief

is like a voyeuristic tug at suffering

that is not yours to possess. How do you eat after that,

he seems sad today. How do you stay alive.

When he was young, he visited Auschwitz and told

me not to go because it had a gift shop and that

made him angry and nobody knows how to grieve

in public, how to make public space for loss

unless you can make money off of it but really

there is something else to his anger, the child