Watch Your Tone (and Mine and Theirs)

I find it fascinating that someone took exception to a famous male poet’s poem that suggested, though quite emphatically, a way to live in this world that was encouraging people to be independent and to taste life more fully. This particular poet has a reputation for being a drunkard and a womanizer — to use that old phrase that doesn’t quite capture the act of using women as fodder. Some people see him as overly male. I happen to like the poem in question, but that has nothing to do with anything because we all have the right to like and dislike whatever whenever. Things hit us the way they hit us. We bring our own filters, our own history, our own trauma, and our own joys and hopes and fears to everything we encounter, real or manufactured — if there is even a difference between those two things. But meanwhile, what struck me was that this woman had every right to react authentically, and how wonderful that she did react authentically and did share her reaction. The thing is she said she was upset about this poet telling us what to do, and yes his suggestions sounded a bit like: Go and do this! But I’d like to point out that Mary Oliver does the same thing and that often the same people who are irked by how this poet throws out his suggestions, which often sound like commands, don’t have any trouble when Mary Oliver does the same sort of thing. Perhaps it is because she exhorts us to actions that are about nature and the joys of life. But joy is subjective and so is poetry. So is language. Reactions based on tone obviously happen in real life too. We can become so mesmerized or triggered by someone’s tone that we might miss the actual message. Sometimes that message proves to be important. There are times when sweet nothings are far worse than nothing. They wiggle their way into our ears, then we swallow them down to our hearts no matter how poison laced they may be. I don’t know why some people always speak so gruffly or arrogantly. Do they not hear themselves? I don’t know why some of us seem to be overly sensitive to tone. Maybe we needed to pay attention to tone in order to survive. Maybe it’s the past and not the present we are hearing, or maybe we are saving our lives right here and right now because we are tuning in to tone. We all know there are plenty of grammar police around. There are tone enforcers too. Perhaps the tone enforcers are of the plainclothes variety. I should know, I used to be a card-carrying member. I was at the head of the class in tone-enforcer brutality. But tone actually is important. All of this is not to criticize any listener but rather to urge all of us to pay attention to tone, to watch our own, and to draw boundaries to determine which tones we will not tolerate for more than a small aural tidbit. But if you will forgive me for sounding as if I’m telling you and me, and all of us, what to do, may I suggest that sometimes we reject important messages because we can’t get past a particular tone and other times we suck in poison because it’s sugarcoated in a tone we happen to like. I know you don’t have to listen to me. Perhaps many people have already stopped reading this, but just in case you’re still here, just in case you’re still listening, please do with it what you will, and please, pardon my tone.

Cinse Bonino
2024