FORMER US defense secretary William S. Cohen was captain of the basketball team at Bowdoin College in Maine when his English professor asked him to write a sonnet.
Cohen tried to duck the assignment, he told Globe editors last week, arguing that he was, after all, the captain of the team, and that the team was, after all, traveling.
Write the sonnet or fail the class, the professor countered.
So Cohen wrote his sonnet, and it transformed him. He says he can recite it from memory to this day.
"One person changed my life by forcing me to have a different view of who I was," Cohen said. He started reading everything. He left Bowdoin with a degree in Latin.
Cohen describes the poet's job as "to squeeze words until they hurt - to compress a big idea into a few words."
This personal history glints a bit more brightly during national poetry month, when people have an explicit invitation from the Academy of American Poets to talk about the poems that matter to them.
The academy launched national poetry month in 1996. This year, on April 17, it is set to launch the first national Poem in Your Pocket Day, asking people to carry around a poem that they love and share it with people they know - or don't know.
Those who can't come up with their own selection can download a poem from the academy's website, choosing among works by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Shakespeare.
Or there's Sara Teasdale's yearning "I am Not Yours," which begins:
"I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be
Lost as a candle lit at noon,
Lost as a snowflake in the sea."
Or, instead of choosing a poem, one might accept the assignment from Cohen's professor. Write a sonnet. Then watch and see what changes.
