Is Poetry For People With Short Attention Spans?

CEO Satya Nadella told the Seattle Chamber of Commerce this week that he has a shorter attention span now that he is running Microsoft.

But now that he's busier and his attention span is limited, he has switched to reading poetry, "because it's easier."

What does a poet make of that? Bill Radke asks former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, who is in Seattle for Seattle's Favorite Poems.

"Poetry was extremely powerful long before those technologies or those companies existed," Pinsky said.

"Every infant responds to it. Kids love hearing verse – they love being sung to," he said. "Human intelligence evolved -- it developed memory with arts – singing and dancing and poetry long before we had digital memory. Something that goes so deep into human intelligence perhaps deserves attention."