I Replaced Twitter with Mary Oliver Poetry for a Week
I am what you might call chronically online. And as a completely unrelated coincidence, I’m also easily distracted. Scattered. Often unfocused. I’m the kind of person who watches 50-second TikToks on double speed. So it’s no surprise that Twitter’s firehose of bite-sized hot takes and fun facts is tempting for me. (No, I will never start calling it “X”.)
Part of what I do at Book Riot is edit posts. This is one of my favourite parts of my job, but it’s also one of the hardest. It requires a lot of concentration, and after editing for hours on end, I feel like my brain can no longer process sentences. So I take mini breaks between posts. And what better way to cleanse your mind and reach a peaceful state than Twitter?
Admittedly, it doesn’t work very well, but that doesn’t seem to dissuade me from doing it every day. Mentally exhausted from editing, I’ll pop onto to Twitter to see a firestorm of global crises, rage-inducing opinions, and out-of-context memes. After doing the online equivalent of staring into the sun for five minutes, I stumble back to my actual job, more confused and overwhelmed than when I started my “break.”
On a seemingly unrelated note, I’ve been meaning to read a Mary Oliver poetry collection for years. Like every other sentimental queer person out there, I love “Wild Geese,” but I’ve only read bits and pieces of Mary Oliver’s writing — never a full book. As the darkness of fall settles in, I decided to comfort myself with some of her poetry and borrowed Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver from the library.
It was a little longer than I expected, and I don’t read a ton of poetry, so I wasn’t sure when I would make time to read it. I decided to do a little experiment. I put the ~450 page collection on the corner of my desk and promised myself that for the next week, whenever I would usually check Twitter for five minutes, I’d read some Mary Oliver poetry instead.
Surprisingly, I’ve actually stuck with this arrangement. I’ve gone on Twitter after work, but not as a break between projects. I’m just over 100 pages into Devotions. Here’s how the experiment went.
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