In a moment of rare humility, I told David Whyte I am a poetry Luddite and asked for the equivalent of Poetry For Dummies. He told me no such book exists—and I would have to get over the “dummy ditch” myself. David is a poet, philosopher, and performer whose books Consolations and Consolations II take familiar words and turn them over until you see them differently. Here’s what stuck with me: Anger is the deepest form of care. It can be care that has no articulation yet—boiling over because we cannot say what is happening in our broken heart. The words we avoid may carry the most weight. Regret. Despair. Vanity. Death. He even wrote an essay on “the.” Regret isn’t the enemy. He sees it as an admission that we are fallible—and a way of paying attention to the future. Stop waiting for perfect conditions. Whyte once needed a quiet study to write. Then he wrote “Regret” on gold-edged paper in a French restaurant and realized he could write anywhere. Starbucks, the Tube, his phone—it a...