A couple of posts ago I advised even non-poets to read lots of poetry. “Good poets make every word count,” I wrote.

Synchronicity rules: The wonderful Brain Pickings e-newsletter just featured a short digression by poet Mary Oliver on this very subject. She set out to “write a poem that uses no punctuation” so she could “see what I could do simply with the line break and the cadence of the line and so forth.”

The poem is “Seven White Butterflies.” The Brain Pickings story includes both the text of the poem and a video of the poet reading it. Check it out.