We live in a verbose world. We live in a world bombarded by both images and words, the military-speak being intentional. It’s a war out there. To drive through a major American city these days is almost a violently overwhelming experience, a cross between moving through a virtual dictionary on steroids and watching the film Koyaanisqatsi.

I remember taking my daughter to see the movie Aladdin when it first came out in 1992. I felt assaulted and besieged by images and words that came so fast I couldn’t keep up. I thought maybe they were speaking a foreign language. Having to look away from the screen from time to time just to get a mental break, I couldn’t help but notice that my five and six year old cohorts, even the ones not juiced on caffeine-ridden Big-Gulps, seemed to be having no problem keeping up with the little blue manic man with the Robin Williams voice and moves that made Ricochet Rabbit seem like he was recovering from a stroke.

What does it say to us, mean to us, cost us to live in a world that is inundated with words but devoid of any real appreciation for them? And no matter how hard they try to sell or persuade or lure or announce or warn, it’s as if these masses of words are somehow homeless, sadly disconnected, desperate, and destitute.

In a wordy world, poets save the day (the best without any savior-complex) by recovering the power of words and by reverencing the silence or struggle from which they come and in which, once written or spoken, they fly like birds in a vaulted sky or drop deep like sunken treasure in a dark sea. Through both the condensation and stretching of language, poets use fewer words to say more and use familiar words in unfamiliar ways to say something new.

My modest hope is that through courting good poetry, we can fall in love with words, whether for the first or the umpteenth time, savoring each like a delicious mint in the mouth or, switching metaphors, beholding the beauty of each like a uniquely singular stone.

Each stone its shape
each shape its weight
each weight its value
in my garden as I dig them up
for Spring planting,
and I say, lifting one at a time,
There is joy here
in being able to handle
so many meaningful
differences.

“Before you can love a person,” wrote Carson McCullers, “you have to start with simple things and gradually build up your skill – start with a rock, a cloud, a tree.”

Or start with learning to love the sound of the words themselves – the concreteness of rock, the sure start, slow spacious middle, and the subtle plosive ending of cloud, the at-first serious then gleefully extended sound of tree. Or maybe start with waking to the humor of the word umpteenth or the fun of kerplunk or try the rhyming fun-run-then-wake-up call of Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “The Pool Players,  Seven at the Golden Shovel”:

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

Keep a list of words you are infatuated with, courting, greatly admire, or are head-over-heels in love with. I’ve always loved the quiet, knowing sympathy of the word solace. Of words, Emily Dickinson once wrote that there are some so noble, delightful, or exquisite that the only fitting response is to stop and tip one’s hat.

My not-so-secret hope is that by handling words with reverence and delight that we might learn to handle stones and stories and clouds and trees and those who need solace with a similar appreciation, that by falling more deeply in love with a poem we might fall more madly in love with ourselves, with another person or plant or plot of land, and learn to hold as treasures so many meaningful differences within ourselves, in others, and in the world. My suspicion is that if we learn to tip our hats or curtsy or bow to a word or phrase or poetic image as a regular, intentional practice, that it might alert us to so much more in our midst that is worthy of a tip of the hat, a deep bow, our attention, reverence, and love.♦

Me no fool.
You be cool.

Dan