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Good Morning Thinkers!
Archive: June 12, 2000

Poetry Responses:

Thanks to everyone who sent us ideas about how you're using poetry. This is a personal interest of mine so I'd still be interested in hearing how you're using poetry ... or how you've seen it used. And special thanks to everyone who took the 10-word challenge ... such a creative bunch you are!
Joyce Wycoff

Using Poetry:

From: John Gilmore, jgilmore@bellsouth.net
I use poems that are inspirational in order to drive home my point in teaching. "I Am There" by James Dillett Freeman is one of my favorites and I even used it this week. It made such an impact that we had to print copies for all of the participants.

From: Julia B. Riley, jbriley@mindspring.com
Hurrah..the poets come out of the closet. As a nurse educator, I see poetry as a way for students and nurses to give voice to their feelings, their triumphs, and their pain. I use my own poetry to teach and a number of them are in Communications in Nursing, Mosby 2000. They are simple and rhyme and are another modality to help the student understand/contemplate the person's experience with illness and in the healthcare system. For example to illustrate that humor is best directed at self.."Roses are red, violets are blue. I laugh at me. You laugh at you."

In my business, I compose poems in emails to sooth ruffled feathers, engage the reader, and humanize communication. I did this with students in an online course where adding the human touch is a challenge. I edit a poetry column in Geriatric Nurse to invite nurses to have the courage to share their poetry and we have had amazing results.

From: Stephen K. Sharp, sharp3@ix.netcom.com
For me, there are three:
The Road Not Taken by Robt. Frost
In a communications seminar to insurance claims trainees, I talk about delivering a message to ensure that the recipient of the message understands. Explaining the process of an insurance claim (from the knowledgeable insiders perspective of a claims department) to a customer, who often neither understands the process nor even shares a common vocabulary to discuss the situation articulately, is a challenge. To make the point I recite The Road Not Taken machinelike, a ratatat of inflectionless syllables without break (on a good day all four stanzas in twenty seconds within a single breath). The point: Explaining a process to get meaning across cannot be done effectively by assuming the customer can pick up a bunch of scripted words presented in a way that may be understandable enough to another claims person, without taking time to ensure that he/she "gets" it.

Two-roads-converged-in-a-yellow-wood . . .
and-that-has-made-all-the-difference-any-questions?
(Of course the unspoken subversive message is this, based on the text:
Don't go with the crowd. Explore and spread love.)

O Star by Robt. Frost
This I deliver towards the end, sometimes, to motivate and inspire (maybe the one or two among the audience who are given to becoming inspired, however momentarily--small blessings). Any person, especially one engaged in a stressful job, with time crunches and tension and stress and distrust and anger and hurt and confusion, benefits from a sense of center, of distance, and of perspective.

Excerpts from a mid-60s song by the Kingston Trio
At the very end, the kisskiss goodbye:
Presenting the alternative to maintaining a good attitude in an environment of such stress, the alternative to spreading love appropriate to all, I sing a ditty:

They're rioting in Africa
(I whistle a line)
They're starving in Spain
(Whistle)
There're hurricanes in Florida
(Whistle)
And Texas needs rain
(Whistle)
The whole world is festering with unhappy souls
The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles
Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch
And I don't like anybody very much.
But we can be thankful and tranquil and proud
For man's been endowed with the mushroom-shaped cloud
And we know for certain that some lucky day
Someone with set the spark off
And we will all be blown away.

From: "Hagfors, Kathleen (CCI-Phoenix)", Kathleen.Hagfors@cox.com
This is great...... I am on the road and will reply with some further thoughts on this....... anything by David Whyte is used in my work, and Dr Seuss...... we read Yertle the Turtle at the graduation of a leadership class or Oh, The Places You'll Go!

From: John Hogan, John.Hogan@ac.ctscorp.com
A couple of years ago I was an internal consultant for my company, introducing new manufacturing systems in various plants around the world. I would always conclude my sessions with the poem, "The Owl Critic" to warn the audience to beware of the "experts". I did this to remind them that they were the ones who could make the real changes happen. I was just serving to help them unlock their potential and to direct them to new information and technologies.

The poem was one that my dad used to recite often when I was young. I eventually tracked down the full poem at the library and used it. Hope you find it stimulating as well.

THE OWL CRITIC

By James T. Fields

"Who stuffed the white owl!?" No one spoke in the shop;
The barber was busy, and he couldn't stop;
The customers, waiting their turns, were reading
The Daily, the Herald, the Post, little heeding
The young man who blurted out such a blunt question;
Not one raised a head, or even made a suggestion;
And the barber kept on shaving.

"Don't you see, Mister Brown,"
Cried the youth with a frown,
"How wrong the whole thing is,
How preposterous each wing is,
How flattened the head, how jammed down the neck is-
In short, the whole owl, what an ignorant wreck 'tis!

"I make no apology;
I've learned owleology,
I've passed days and nights in a hundred collections,
And cannot be blinded to any deflections
Arising from unskillful fingers that fail
To stuff a bird right, from his beak to his tail.
Mister Brown, Mister Brown!
Do take that bird down,
Or you'll soon be the laughing stock all over town!"
And the barber kept on shaving

"I've studied owls,
And other night fowls,
And I tell you
What I know to be true!
An owl cannot roost
With his limbs so unloosed;
No owl in this world
Ever had his claws curled,
Ever had his legs slanted,
Ever had his bill canted,
Ever had his neck screwed
Into that attitude.
He can't do it, because
'Tis against all bird laws.
Anatomy teaches,
Ornithology preaches,
An owl has a toe
That can't turn out so!
I've made the white owl my study for years,
And to see such a job almost moves me to tears!

"Mister Brown, I'm amazed
You should be so crazed
As to put up a bird
In that posture absurd!
To look at that owl really brings on a dizziness;
The man who stuffed him don't half know his business!"
And the barber kept on shaving.

"Examine those eyes,
I'm filled with surprise
Taxidermists should pass
Off on you such poor glass;
So unnatural they seem
They'd make Audubon scream,
And John Burroughs laugh
To encounter such chaff.
Do take that bird down;
Have him stuffed again, Brown!"
And the barber kept on shaving.

"With some sawdust and bark
I could stuff in the dark
An owl better than that.
I could make an old bat
Look more like an owl
Than that horrid fowl,
Stuck up there so stiff like a side of coarse leather;
In fact, about him there's not one natural feather."

Just then with a wink and a sly normal lurch,
The owl, very gravely, got down from his perch,
Walked round, and regarded his fault-finding critic,
(Who thought he was stuffed) with a glance analytic,
And then fairly hooted, as if he should say:
"Your learning's at fault, this time, anyway;
Don't waste it again on a live bird, I pray.
I'm an owl, you're another. Sir Critic, good-day!"
And the barber kept on shaving.

From: SORIN COSMULESCU, scosmulescu@mailcity.com
I use always poems in my work (being myself a poet).
My favourite poets are:
Wordsworth (Ode to the daffodils)
Shakespeare (Sonnet) The lunatic, the lover and the poet

In many situations I remember memorable verses from great poets of the world, and I apply them to specific situations: project design, business plan, research & development overview etc.

Wordsworth, Ode to the daffodils (excerpts)

The poet could not but be gay
in such a jocund company.
They flash upon that inward eye,
Which is the bliss of solitude