Poet Mary Oliver will be visiting Sanibel next week. She will be giving a public reading at one of our neighboring churches and helping to raise support for a local environmental concern. She was supposed to come last year, but had to cancel due to illness, so folks are really looking forward to her visit.
A lot of people think poetry is irrelevant in our day and age. Just a lot of froth and nonsense. But it is hard to read the poetry of Oliver and walk away with anything but a real sense of respect for her ability to observe the world around her and then capture her impressions in a few carefully chosen words.
I think that is the real lesson we can all learn from poets. Making a point doesn't take a lot of words--not usually--just a few that are carefully chosen. Today there are so many platforms, so many venues, so many ways that someone can share his or her words many folks have become overly verbose. Instead of carefully chosen words, they spew out uncensored tirades.
You'll often here the parent of a three or four year-old child who is throwing a tantrum say something like, "Use your words!" Good advice. But for older throwers of tantrums I would add something: "Use your words," I might say, "just not all at once!"
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