Those seeking to have more productive morning meetings are often advised to hold them standing up, keep them as short as possible and – in desperate times – to serve coffee and pastries. A US newspaper executive had a different idea: read a poem.

In a recent column, the New York Times’ Marc Lacey wrote that – as well as discussing how best to cover natural disasters, mass shootings and political scandals – the paper’s otherwise grim morning news meeting had acquired the new feature to “inspire us and boost our creativity”.

The news organisation’s journalists have started their day by sharing work by, among others, William Wordsworth, Langston Hughes, Charles Simic and Marianne Boruch. And while Lacey admits that the move initially provoked eye rolls, he quotes a photo editor at the paper saying “it jolts your mind into thinking about a subject or theme in an unexpected way”.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Roger McGough, poet and presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please, thinks it is an excellent idea. “In the olden days, people would start off meetings or school with a prayer,” he said. “It was religious, but it was also a moment of thoughtfulness, taking your mind elsewhere, in the same way that poetry can do.”

As for the inevitable eye rolling, “I’ve done it myself,” said McGough. “I’m a great eye roller. Sometimes I still do it. It depends on what the poem is and how it’s done. It shouldn’t be like, ‘hey, pay attention, this is good for you’. Or, ‘you will find this very moving’… It’s got to catch you unawares.”

Susannah Herbert runs the Forward Arts Foundation, which is responsible for Forward prize for poetry and National Poetry Day, and has long advocated for more poetry in the workplace. “We’re not saying sit down for hours to listen to and recite epics,” she said. “But a homeopathic dash of poetry – another way of using language, of getting beyond cliches and soundbites – can only be good.”

“Rather than suggesting that people chose a poem that’s about coronavirus, for example, I would recommend something like Auden’s The Fall of Rome, which has a little reference to ‘flu-infected cities’ but is actually about the birds’ eye view of all the things that happen to humans and how they may not be quite as important as we think.”

While basically supportive (“I’m biased, but I think it’s a fine idea”), poet Don Paterson cautions that reading a poem is not necessarily a worthwhile endeavour. “These things don’t have any intrinsic merit,” he said. “It depends entirely on what the poem is. If it’s not a good poem, then it’s a meaningless activity.”

Reading good poetry though, he says, can “draw you out of your rut”. “It can remind you that the most powerful use of language is an original combination of words. What we tend to suffer from too much – in our conversation, in our journalism, in any kind of habitual writing – is using entire phrases as if they were one word.

“It’s a certain zombified use of language … People understand it, but it really goes in one ear and out the other and it doesn’t lodge in the brain. It doesn’t make people think any differently and it doesn’t make them pay attention. I think that [reading a poem] could be a reminder of how you get people to pay attention to what you’re saying.”

• This article was amended on 9 March 2020 to replace the picture. Originally we used a picture of the composer William Wordsworth.