On Being’s weekly newsletter The Pause includes Poetry Unbound host Pádraig Ó Tuama’s reflection on his counseling experience in his twenties.
Pádraig Ó Tuama writes (excerpt):
I told him how angry I’d been with him the first time I saw him. I’d come along laden with burdens I wanted to solve. But he kept on asking me about poetry.
Why the hell is he asking me about poetry? I wondered. I asked him that on our last day together and he said he’d always had as much interest in his clients’ gifts as their griefs. I was both a victim of my grief, but also slightly obsessed by it. I was young, yes, but I did need to learn that my love of poetry was a way of noticing, not just an art form.