I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

I know some people find the character limits on social media posts, well, limiting.

But I think that's where poets shine.

We know a thing or two about economy of language.

Poets are known for making big moves and small spaces.

We value brevity and compression, which go hand in hand. In a brief poem, maybe a poem with only a handful of lines, each word weighs a ton.

We have to choose them carefully.

An enormous amount of meaning and possibility is packed inside every word.

I picture them as expandable suitcases, unzipped, so that we can stuff even more inside them.

That's compression.

The words themselves may be few, but they carry a great deal. Word and character limits are productive constraints. It's a challenge to use only a few words to describe a scene or

communicate an idea. I think it's more challenging to do the same

work in 20 words rather than in 200. In this sense, limits can make us more creative. We have to work a little harder to do the job with less. Less is more.

When I revise, my work tends to shrink rather than grow. I'm always looking for words or lines

that can be cut because they aren't essential.

I whittle my work down as I revise it, trying to do the most with the least.

Cut and compress, cut and compress.

I joke that if I'm not careful,

I could revise a poem to nothing

until poof, it disappears.

Today's poem is about being limited

in the language we can use

...