Disclaimer: this post is about poetry. For many people, the mention of poetry has always been a signal to immediately abort. The medium, if correctly crafted, is complex–and often obscure. Kinda sissy-seeming, too–so emotional. Okay I admit it: I used to think of the genre in that caveman-like way, too. That feeling gradually disappeared in the process of earning my English degree in mid-life.
Anyway, you may not want to abort just yet. Listen up–turns out that many are discovering that poetry is good business, too. Yesterday I read a great article about that subject in the Harvard Business Review: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/11/the_benefits_of_poetry_for_pro.html.
My rediscovery of the importance of poetry to our everyday lives was brought about by my attending a literature lecture and open mic a couple of nights ago. Though other genres were read, most of the eighteen pieces presented were poems.
Though a few sucked, most were amazingly good. During the break, I had wine and cheese and conversation with the writers. Their intelligence and remarkably perceptive, empathetic, and upbeat personalities were readily apparent. Almost all were published and known in literary circles. Only one, a professor of the genre, writes poetry for a living.
With the exception of a few retired military folks and some in the medical professions, almost all of these poets worked in the business world. Successfully, too. No starving artists here.
A quote from the HBR article sums up the reason best. It comes from the Pulitzer lecture “The Poet and the World” by Wislawa Szymborska:
The world — whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, is astonishing. Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events” But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.
This rings especially true to me because I was a prodigal (they say) musician that started playing professionally at fifteen. When I made the move to the business world a decade or so later, I used the knowledge gained in the music discipline to differentiate me in the marketplace.
In music, each note rather than each word is what is carefully examined, but the translation is parallel. The bottom line is that a thorough understanding of the arts allows one both the courage and ability to think outside of the box. To color outside of the lines, if you will.
Okay, no more clichés.
In the business world, though, standardization is highly valued. Differentiation is, too, to a degree–it just needs to be used within the traditional context to make it through the boardroom. Artists have been trained to do that. Hey, I know HTML and how to build a website from scratch. I just happen to view these skills simply as vital communication tools, not as a required task.
Poetry good.
Right Good 