When I heard this story, I wanted to give Ruth Stone a butterfly net. All around her, poems were floating, and she was trying to catch them. On that farm in Vermont, she caught some beautiful poems and when she was 89, she won the National Book Award.

Her intuitive mind was always ready: flighty, loose, and associative.

Poets cultivate this receptivity—that’s the butterfly net—and then they shovel words onto a page. The Butterfly Net” is what to use when you want to be receptive to a-ha moments. It’s also a powerful tool for intuition-building and collecting information. “The Shovel,” on the other hand, is what you use to wrangle inspiration into craft and attach language connect the bits. Shoveling involves moving words around until they shift away from what you intended and surprise you.

My concept of the Butterfly Net comes from philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. Books about consciousness too. Magic books offer insight as well, though more for illusion setting: the behind-the-stage efforts it takes to create something that feels real.

Sometimes I ask college students, “Where do ideas appear and what happens to them after that?” Most say that they have more ideas than the ones they “capture” by writing. They forget them. Other inspirations, students say, aren’t even that great, but they push them into something workable— especially when deadlines loom. These ideas become class projects, papers, or new procedures for research. They shovel notions into craft.

Lots of poets have written about inspiration but few have created working models of how to find it. One of my favorites is poet Richard Hugo’s small classic, The Triggering Town. In this collection of essays, Hugo likens the process of making poems to imagining small towns and furnishing them with real and imagined details. You pull from memory and imagination, from a place that is both your hometown and not your hometown. From there, your little poem takes hold, and another, “real” subject emerges, and the poet needs to be receptive enough to follow where it leads.

Hugo blends the use of butterfly net and shovel, swapping back and forth. With practice, the craft becomes second nature and improvisation happens. Sometimes he ends up with poems about baseball fields and rivers. Other times, the poems stay in small towns. This might point to why poets do this work: they’re attracted to speculation, surprises and the sense of being lost for a little while.

Deep down, creative people crave to be lost in what they are making. That’s the adventure.

I have a friend, an executive in the C-Suite at Microsoft, who writes poems. One day, he captured a couplet. He tried it out on me. “Excellent,” I said. “More net? Or are you ready with the Shovel?”

Then, my friend used the shovel to dig out the implications of his ideas. He took hold of that little couplet by the hind legs and held it up. Then he tried out a few more couplets and some reading he was doing on things outside of poetry, and he tried to shape something. The shovel is the hard work of extending the poem. It’s of digging around until something else shows up and takes root.

Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley cautions against the assumption that “the finest passages of poetry are produced by labor and study.” He pushes against the formula of “a careful observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial connection of the spaces… by the intertexture of conventional expressions.” That’s what “the limitedness of the poetical faculty” imposes. Open your minds, poets! Let your connections and conventions drift!

This wild mind is a fleeting one. Stay in the garden awhile, Ruth Stone. And carry a pencil, for heaven’s sake. Then your net can become a shovel, and the shovel can transform into a net.

Here’s a little poem by Ruth Stone about this sweet plight:

PRIVATE PANTOMIME 

I will reach into the grab-bag of unconscious things 
And pull forth what? Here, a featherless bird 
Supine in the palm of my hand with bony wings 
Folded inert, beak agape. What sort of raw word 
Explains pinfeathered skin and the certain death 
That rides in the quivering flesh? I turn it out. 
It falls with a weighted thud. Blood and the sight 
Of such weak eyes waiting, puts my humor about; 
And I thrust both my hands into a pair of gloves, tight.


Source: Poetry Magazine, 1957.

But the corporate tinge has gone too far. The language alone destroys an artistic view of things: infrastructure, benchmarking, leveraging and accountability aren’t the diction of inspiration, surprise, and collaboration. Now that we’ve become so efficient and lived in the rabbit hole of data collection, we don’t know how to pivot, innovate and speculate.

It’s time for a reversal. Artistic practices need to infiltrate business, government, social agencies, engineering and science. In many places this is already happening. Consider Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a theoretical cosmologist at the University of New Hampshire, whom the New York Times recently profiled as “A Physicist Who Thinks in Poetry from the Cosmic Edge.” But we need a large-scale movement to bring artistic leadership into all of our organizations.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Just look at the job ads for managers and leaders. The single most sought-after skill is “creative thinking.”

AI will provide the business implementation and data collection practices that boards of directors have become so fond of using. AI can take raw data and create financial planning tools and management charts. What it can’t do is imagine how to come up with new ideas that have the mark of the human hand on them.

To innovate with a group of colleagues, you need points of contact that AI can’t predict. The person at the theater performance who notices who is dropping the fifties into the donation box can go over and thank them. Or if someone at the show tells her about another theater that has extra sound curtains (Expensive!) that they are tossing out, then she can take some initiative. Seeing openings, noticing what’s around you—those are things that artists do.

Creative practices of generating, sustaining, revising and presenting ideas shouldn’t be left to the bots. You need to observe, listen, make space and act.

It’s time for leaders to think like poets.

In the mid 1900’s, boards of directors of large metropolitan symphonies, dance companies and operas were mostly white men in suits and ties. They showed up after work from their professions as lawyers, accountants, doctors and gave advice. They followed Robert’s Rules of Order that they’d learned at Mason and Rotary Club meetings. These leaders wanted to be near the arts and govern them too. There was status and energy in that.

Maybe they were inspired by IBM’s crisp white shirt culture. In the 1960s came Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive: the Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done. The orderly, intact corporation run by intact, disciplined people—that was the ideal.

At the same time, self-organizing arts groups were thriving. The Grateful Dead, for one, figured out that letting bootleg tapes of live concerts circulate for free increased the popularity of the music. And their sales too. They were as far from Harvard Business School as you can get, though these days even Forbes Magazine and some of the most elite business journals have focused on the Dead and how their “models” were so “effective.”

The tech booms of the 1990s and aughts brought a renewed vigor to the notion of holding arts folk to particular standards. In their gold rush, the entrepreneurs felt they knew best. They aspired to data and metrics that would form benchmarks and leverage points in the organizations that they took on as hobby leaders. They were sharing the good news of their own success and trying to spread it around. More effective practices would lead to streamlined organizations with clear job descriptions and regular financial reporting.

If you think someone can benefit from your expertise, you might get a little adamant. Artists could be disciplined! They are like children, in need of taming! Sometimes, board members simply want to get close to artists. Artists are inspiring.

And that’s exactly the point. Instead of following the artists and their energy, this movement of applying business accountability escalated through the grantmaking and foundation worlds. Funders of all stripes demanded that arts organizations become more efficient and better organized. As leaders in the arts were asked to prove how they were doing this, they spent more and more time filling out surveys and carving financials into pie charts rather than being inventive with programming and listening to artists.

As one young nonprofit professional said to me, “You Boomers and Gen Xers got all ‘creative’ and left a big mess for us to clean up.” She wished that arts start-ups were tidier and more predictable.

What she didn’t say was that with all this housecleaning and tidying, people weren’t paying as much attention to the artists they were supposed to be working with. Nor was she talking about how the arts, by their very nature, thrive on surprise and accidental connections.

Another administrator told me, “You can’t be an artist and a leader of an arts organization.” This was a belief system more than a thesis statement. “My god, I thought, of course you should! That’s what they call industry knowledge! And how else are artists going to trust you if you don’t have a creative practice!” I tried to see why she believed this. I came up with these possible motivations:

· She was not an artist, or saw herself as an inadequate artist and wanted to justify herself;

· She wanted to quarantine the art and artists like children in a playroom so that she and the other “adults” could rule the roost;

· She felt that being an artist while also being a leader might activate an advocacy for art and artists that would challenge business principles;

· She couldn’t integrate the two worlds.

That’s a problem all the way around. Clearly, she wasn’t thinking like a poet. A poet wouldn’t question her right to make art and she’d allow the two worlds to osmotically seep into each other.

What if leaders cultivated less control and generated more creative activity? Thinking like a poet is one way in. Instead of Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive, we now need The Poet in the C Suite—a leader who thinks like an artist.

Here’s a poem about what we have to replenish:

FALLING FROM THE SKY

By Wislawa Szymborska

Magic is dying out, although the heights
still pulse with its vast force. On August nights
you can’t be sure what’s falling from the sky:
a star?  Or something else that sill belongs on high?
Is making wishes an old-fashioned blunder
if heaven only knows what we are under?
Above our modern heads the dark’s still dark,
but can’t some twinkle in it explain: “I’m a spark,
I swear, a flash that a comet shook loose
from its tail, just a bit of cosmic rubble;
it’s not me falling in tomorrow’s news,
that’s some other spark hearby, having engine trouble.”

From Poems new and Collected 1957-1997, Translated from the Polish by Stnislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, A Harvest Book, Harcourt, Inc. 1998.

When poets first look at poems, they see shapes. They see how words lengthen into columns or scatter across the page or how they assemble in tidy, alternating rows of long and short lines. Whatever that architecture is, a poet will take it in. She’ll absorb it from a distance to get a sense for what she’s dealing with. Then, she’ll read on.

This same sensibility helped me to read a room as though it were a poem. The room was my first real office. By “real office,” I mean that it was a space designated for me, inside a building where I worked with other people. Sure, I’d had a room at home where I’d write poems and essays—an old, slanted porch enclosed on the side of a house scabby from paint coming off—and I’d worked as a clerk in law firms where I was given a little corporate room with file cabinets and a laminate desk, but this office I’m referring to was the first one that was really mine.

In that room, I worked with some friends to set up a fledgling nonprofit arts center inside an old Victorian apartment building. Over the first few years, we hired people. Creative Writers mostly, and some theater and tech folks to help with productions. Soon, the place was really busy. It buzzed with meetings and readings and classes and writers going to and fro. I set up an office on the second floor, facing the street.

One thing I loved about that room was that it had a balcony. People who claimed not to smoke went out there to smoke. Others joined in for the chat and the view. Writers George Plimpton, James Tate, Rebecca Brown, James Welch, Jim Harrison—they all smoked on the balcony. A lot of poets too. Maybe Anne Waldman, Lucille Clifton and Seamus Heaney didn’t smoke but I remember them standing outside, looking across Seattle’s Capitol Hill. Once, we hung an enormous portrait of Gertrude Stein’s face, four feet by four feet, from the railing and people from the playfield across the street could see it all the way from home plate.

My room was a pass-through with a view. As I look back on it, I can see how that was a poetic structure. Poems are portals into seeing other things too. It wasn’t an accident that I cherished bringing people to the balcony so we could enjoy the view and some fresh air and perspective.

But there was something else about that room, something I hadn’t noticed until I was with a reporter from a local paper. He’d come to interview us about the place we worked.

We were standing in my office. I was doing my best to answer his questions.

That’s when he interrupted. “You have eight lamps in here,” he said. “Did you know that?” He shook his pencil, counting them out.

“To help me see,” I stammered. “I have them to see what I’m doing.” I rubbed my hands on my arms. “It’s an office.”

The reporter smirked. “I guess,” he said.

There they were: two desk lamps, table lamps, a floor lamp, a lamp that gave out no light beyond a small glo on a corner table, and a banker’s lamp on the side of my desk. (I rarely pulled the cord to turn that one on.)

The metaphor stung. The article would probably focus on a young woman with too many “bright” ideas and not enough vision.

When I looked at the room, I realized I was trying to cope with a job with a lot of different challenges. Each little circle of light was given off by a lamp I’d placed like a cairn marking a path. I had so many things going on at once and I was trying to focus. I walked through the forest of lamp shade canopies, and none was strong enough to illuminate the whole space. I worked long hours and I was moving between islands after dark. Bigger interventions were needed.

Put a truth teller in a room with eight lamps and you’ll start to figure some things out. That was the poet in me speaking up and seeing my work more clearly.

The lamps represented different roles: over here was where I’d sit when I talked with a colleague; at the banker’s lamp, I’d review budgets; under the light from one of the table lamps, I’d sketch out organizational structures and poems.

That room was an 3D poem and an early leadership map. It taught me to read my challenges under good light.

Here’s a mysterious poem about lamps and poets:

The Poets Light but Lamps

By Emily Dickinson

The Poets light but Lamps —
Themselves — go out —
The Wicks they stimulate
If vital Light

Inhere as do the Suns —
Each Age a Lens
Disseminating their
Circumference —



Source: The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998)

In the field of teaching writing, researchers call this “high efficacy off the prompt.” It’s ironic to describe one of the most enlivening human processes—inspiration moving to action—with language that sounds like the muse buried in a pile of bricks.

In elementary classrooms where children are learning to write, the students who move quickly into putting words down when they hear a prompt (“Write about your summer vacation” or “Imagine you are a polar bear”) typically become better writers. When I was in eighth grade, we used to write by hand in blue booklets. The idea was to blather on, filling them up and exhausting our teachers. It worked. The more we wrote, the more we stumbled upon to say. Of course, that’s not always true, but it was more entertaining than sitting frozen in front of the page. At the very least, were trained in repetition and thin associative leaps. To this day, if prompted, I could write an easy thousand words about a toothpick.

High efficacy off of the prompt is something that you can learn. So is sustaining a piece of writing. In fact, your process (when you write, for how long, under what conditions, how you revise) is as important as skills with language. They enhance each other. When people write, they do struggle. If we’d been asked to revise that blue book jabbering, we would have felt that process of rewriting and editing. Our teachers would have seen us struggling.

It’s not a good thing to outsource. The struggle is the source of creative thought. But imagine being really, really good at dealing with odd creative dilemmas. It’s also a way to live more deeply: You collect reflections, impressions, quotes, observations and experiences. Then, you sift through those and generate some drafts that connect these things. Afterwards, you revise and sustain what you are doing and gather feedback. It’s a loop that drives you back to reconsider what you are doing. In the end, you publish, present or simply finish it.

That’s surely how you find your way in a new work environment, how you move through a project or even how you participate in a relationship.

What’s weird and interesting is how a prompt generates an emotional and nervous system response. A poet will wrangle with that every time she writes. Her nervous system recognizes the challenge: the surge of energy, the wary and stalled sense of what to do next, the confidence to move ahead, the ability to shuffle and revise. Past experience brings recognition of the process, though it changes depending on the context. No two writing products have exactly the same routes to becoming what they become. So, you can get good at facing prompts and build efficiencies to respond to them.

Wouldn’t it be nice to perform with high efficiency no matter what “prompt” we’re facing? It means that you would see the tasks in front of you (or set up your own tasks), make judgement calls and improvise as you go.

If you were an angel on the shoulder of a poet, you might see some edits and additions that are quick and others that seem reflective and slow. “What,” you might ask, “is she doing?” The nascent poem looks like a heap of words and then it starts to look like a pattern. The whole thing is a strange construction site. Voila! There’s a new building.

Here’s a poem I love, by Richard Blanco. It’s full of prompts and repetitions:

Since Unfinished
By Richard Blanco
I’ve been writing this since
the summer my grandfather
taught me how to hold a blade
of grass between my thumbs
and make it whistle, since
I first learned to make green
from blue and yellow, turned
paper into snowflakes, believed
a seashell echoed the sea,
and the sea had no end.
 
I’ve been writing this since
a sparrow flew into my class
and crashed into the window,
laid to rest on a bed of tissue
in a shoebox by the swings, since
the morning I first stood up
on the bathroom sink to watch
my father shave, since our eyes
met in that foggy mirror, since
the splinter my mother pulled
from my thumb, kissed my blood.
 
I’ve been writing this since
the woman I slept with the night
of my father’s wake, since
my grandmother first called me
a faggot and I said nothing, since
I forgave her and my body
pressed hard against Michael
on the dance floor at Twist, since
the years spent with a martini
and men I knew I couldn’t love.
 
I’ve been writing this since
the night I pulled off the road
at Big Sur and my eyes caught
the insanity of the stars, since
the months by the kitchen window
watching the snow come down
like fallout from a despair I had
no word for, since I stopped
searching for a name and found
myself tick-tock in a hammock
asking nothing of the sky.
 
I’ve been writing this since
spring, studying the tiny leaves
on the oaks dithering like moths,
contrast to the eon-old fieldstones
unveiled of snow, but forever
works-in-progress, since tonight
with the battled moon behind
the branches spying on the world—
same as it ever was—perfectly
unfinished, my glasses and pen
at rest again on the night table.
 
I’ve been writing this since
my eyes started seeing less,
my knees aching more, since
I began picking up twigs, feathers,
and pretty rocks for no reason
collecting on the porch where
I sit to read and watch the sunset
like my grandfather did everyday,
remembering him and how
to make a blade of grass whistle.

Copyright Credit: "Since Unfinished" from Looking for The Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco, © 1998. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260.  Used by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.
Source: Looking for The Gulf Motel (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012)

Instead of saying, “Play Van Morrison’s Moondance,” you can command, “Tell me the history of the Duwamish people in Seattle.”

I’ll spare you a rant on how that is destroying higher education. How it is killing elementary and secondary classrooms. How it inspires people to lean on shallow findings and trust them. How it is, indeed, replacing workers.

What we really need to worry about is how AI replaces thinking. Outsourcing the steps we all take to make decisions and wrap language around ideas—that leaves us as diminished humans. More and more, we are becoming less and less. As individuals and as a collective, we’re losing our voices. Our imaginations are withering.

Here’s where thinking like a poet comes in.

Poets engage the good thinking that makes things out of words. To do that, they wrangle language, draw from memory, observe, test hunches and cause linguistic accidents. Then, they make patterns and shift between focusing on the larger context and the details. They negotiate and tinker with the forest and the trees.

If you ask most other people about what “thinking” is all about, they’ll point to “critical thinking.” Parents want their children to “be critical thinkers.” They want our leaders to “think critically.” But too often, critical thinking tears down, picks apart and negates. It’s a cheap way to sound authoritative because it zooms straight to negative responses.

Someone puts a cake on the table, and someone else says, “The icing is a little thin here.”

Or someone floats a new idea, and the “critical thinker” blurts, “That’s silly. That won’t work at all.”

Being critical is like what you do with three-day old roasted chicken. You yank it apart without reverence. You tweeze the meat off the carcass and chuck the bones into the bin. “Done,” you say and wipe your hands.

To a poet, thinking is deeper and wider. Here are three versions of thinking that poets rely on:

They associate.

· What does this remind me of?

· What if this were in a different context?

· What resemblances are there between this and what follows?

They connect.

· If I want to get from one idea to another, what can I use to make a link?

· How might the unspoken ideas on either end of two poles have something in common?

· Can I take a multistep process rather than a shallow one to connect ideas?

They spatially organize.

· What sounds and images reverberate?

· What patterns can I see?

· What will happen if I shift the pattern?

Once, I gave a group of fledgling writers this task.

Connect these two poles with exactly seven steps:

Buoy ——————————————-Vulnerability

One came up with this:

1: A Buoy sets out to guide ships while

2. anchored to the sea floor

3 and being part of infrastructure in natural world

4. It works under stress—slants sideways

5. and signals danger

6. to makes other routes visible

7. and open possibilities—just like vulnerability.

The thinking is spatial and associative as well as connective.

Poets embark on these good thinking modes of observing, transforming, naming, wrapping, speculating and presenting. They cause accidents and mistakes. Sometimes those are what deepens the art of making a poem—something crossing your path that you hadn’t intended or expected. Vulnerability becomes a trait of openness, for example, as well as a danger marker.

Here’s one of my favorite poems. It employs all of these ways of thinking:

Riprap

By Gary Snyder



Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
             placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
             in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
             riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
             straying planets,
These poems, people,
             lost ponies with
Dragging saddles—
             and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
             four-dimensional
Game of Go.
             ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
             a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
             with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
             all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.



Copyright Credit: Gary Snyder, “Riprap” from Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems. Copyright  © 2003 by Gary Snyder. Reprinted by permission of Shoemaker & Hoard Publishers.

Then I received news that my state department of revenue was doing an audit.

The world of leverage and profit margins and accountability to the man—it was coming after me. I tried not to sound whiney when I called the auditor.

“I’m a poet,” I said.

“That’s the most niche thing I’ve ever heard of,” she said. “How do you make money?”

“Well, not a whole lot,” I said.

“Wow,” she said. “Do you sell stuff?”

“Just my services,” I said. “The bookstores and publishers sell the books. I’m a freelancer—”

“A poetry consultant,” she said. “Amazing.”

I felt a little surge of confidence. I asked, “What’s excise tax?”

“It’s B&O tax,” she said. “Tax on what your business earns.”

Reading enough Brené Brown had taught me that a little bit of vulnerability was a good thing.

“When I fill out the forms,” I said, “I can’t see a box to check for being an artist.” It sounded dumb when I said it, so I added, “The closest I can find is under ‘Gambling, Games of Chance and other services.’”

“I see,” the auditor said.

“I mean it’s under ‘other services,’ I guess.”

She responded cheerfully. “I’m here to help you file correctly. Sometimes, we help people even get money back.”

“I never seem to owe anything,” I said.

“Oh.” Was it pity in her voice?

I should say that I tried to find the right way to file. Even when I checked the Department of Revenue website, I couldn’t find “poet” or “writer” or even “artist” as a profession.

“Business and Occupation taxes,” the auditor said. “Like do you buy things for your business?”

“Lots of books,” I answered. “Tickets to museums and performances—you know so I can see what’s happening in the culture.”

“Stuff,” she said. “You know like a table and chair, maybe?”

“Not really,” I said. “I can’t think of anything else. Paper?”

After we hung up, I searched “culture” and “artist” under the Department of Revenue website. Nothing there.

The auditor and I kept at it. She sent lists of documents, and I’d find them and send them along. She’d ask questions and I’d try to answer them.

“What do you actually do?” she asked. “Like is it all over email?”

She really didn’t know what poets did. How we had to feed our heads to do our work.

So I sent her this list:

· I look for poets. I seek them out.

· I read articles about the outdoors, economics, politics, history, philosophy, geography, farming, literature and leadership.

· I go to the movies.

· I wander through art galleries and museums.

· I interview people.

· I coach people to write poetry.

· I try to get people to understand poems.

· I mentor other people in how to infuse poetry into leadership.

· I research what’s new in art, music and poetry.

· I read hundreds of poems a week.

· I write poems. I draft poems. I take notes on poems.

· I call other poets on the phone.

· I read novels. Short stories. Memoirs. Social commentaries.

· I take walks and jot notes.

· I dictate drafts of poems when I’m on the bus.

· I hike and stop to take notes.

· I write comments on poems and I make editorial suggestions.

· I write about other people’s poems.

· I attend gigs and performances.

· I listen to music and podcasts and books and random conversations.

· I daydream.

The auditor was nice and I was nice back to her. It felt like we were taking turns pulling each other over the lip of a cliff, onto safe ground that we both could understand.

The Department of Revenue had their ways to assure I was paying my fair share which I think has turned out to be $0.00. At first, I thought that was because I’m an artist. It’s actually because I don’t make the basic income threshold to be taxed. Anyone else who makes as little as I do in her business doesn’t pay anything either. Culture producers aren’t special, it turns out.

Why isn’t there a Department of Cultural Benefit? There could be audits on state, local and national government to show us how they are enhancing culture. In a way, the auditor’s enthusiasm for my “niche” work made it visible. I’d crossed a divide in real life by sharing my job description with her. For now, that would have to suffice.

I’m waiting to hear back from her, hoping she has all she needs. Then, I’ll send her a book of poems.

Here’s a poem about being a freelancer and having a tough boss:

Self-Employed

By David Ignatow

For Harvey Shapiro

I stand and listen, head bowed,
to my inner complaint.
Persons passing by think
I am searching for a lost coin.
You’re fired, I yell inside
after an especially bad episode.
I’m letting you go without notice
or terminal pay. You just lost
another chance to make good.
But then I watch myself standing at the exit,
depressed and about to leave,
and wave myself back in wearily,
for who else could I get in my place
to do the job in dark, airless conditions?



Source: Against the Evidence: Selected Poems 1934-1994 (Wesleyan University Press, 1993)

I was in trouble. People were yelling at me, hollering so much that their faces contorted. They punched their fingers into the air. I worried that somebody would get socked or stroke out on the floor. The living room we were pressed into was as tense as a barroom, just before the brawl. Boom! One cowboy would go too far and the whole place would explode into fistfights and pistols and tables crunching under bodies. That’s what I conjured as I stood, holding my dessert plate, in front of our neighbors.

My friends and I were starting a nonprofit organization, and we were getting major blowback. One of us had rented the old mansion in which we stood, and we planned on turning it into a writers’ retreat center. We envisioned a place where poets, fiction writers and dramatists could do their work and meet each other. Quiet enough, right?

That was when the screaming began.

This was Seattle in the mid-1990s and things were booming. Folks were knee-deep in tech money, including my friends. A new symphony hall and opera house were appearing along with proposals for grand city parks and stadiums. With all of this came anger and suspicion of “the new rich.” Our proposed writing house was in a venerable old neighborhood of doctors and lawyers. They didn’t want this new money in their urban oasis and that meant they didn’t want a writing center on their street. They formed a group to protest it.

So, we’d invited them over.

“We want you out of this neighborhood,” a woman shouted raising her finger between my eyes.

“Find somewhere else to do this,” her husband growled. “Our property values will be in the toilet.”

I hoped that they’d give me a chance to say something. I was pretty young. I had a fourteen-month-old child and my husband I were navigating her care, along with several jobs. Other than some arts adventures that involved writers and performers and Tuesday night keg parties in college, I hadn’t directed anything. Plenty of people had yelled at me though—mostly unhinged narcissists, white supremacists or alcoholics—and that was the experience that I drew on as I faced the pissed-off neighbors.

Before I faced the neighbors, my incredibly wise mentor, Anne Stadler, taught me about pulling from a deep place to face hard things.

“You’ll need to be silent for a while and let yourself go into a space where you are most yourself,” she instructed me. “Down in there,” she continued, “call on a time when you’ve been resilient and had to face something really uncomfortable.”

We’d been standing in the attic of the mansion. It was large and unfurnished. I sat down on the carpet and started to breathe in and out. I flashed to these lines from the poem “The Room of My Life” by Anne Sexton:

The windows,

the starving windows

that drive the trees like nails into my heart.

Each day I feed the world out there

although birds explode

right and left.

Those lines appeared to me, and I thought of times when someone in authority had emotionally assaulted me. I had practice with that.

In that big room with Anne, I mouthed the words: “Each day I feed the world out there/although birds explode/right and left.”

The space I drew from was my floating shed. It’s an imaginary space between me and the world. Inside the shed, my memories, whims, experiences and intuitions mingle. I envision it as a splintered clapboard and tarpaper shanty for tools or old bits. In physical reality, the floating shed was my childhood treehouse, one of the only places I’d had any peace until my early twenties. I curled up in there and listened to Radio Mystery Theater and wrote little lyrics.

The floating shed is what poets pull from to write poems. It’s where a poet stores quotes, observations, inspirations and reflections. When she squeaks open the door, she can see what her inventory is. From these artifacts, she can make things and grow her voice. That’s what poets need and leaders too.

When I finally spoke up that night in the living room, I heard my own words carve out the air and describe what we hoped to create. The neighbors didn’t change their minds at all. Instead, they hired lawyers and ran us out. But something had changed. We moved a mile south, into another part of the city, and we set up shop. Our center welcomed more people than we’d ever dreamed of, and I’d grown a voice out of the bits in my floating shed.

We were making a very big poem.

Here’s the whole poem by Anne Sexton:

The Room of My Life

By Anne Sexton
Here,
in the room of my life
the objects keep changing.
Ashtrays to cry into,
the suffering brother of the wood walls,
the forty-eight keys of the typewriter
each an eyeball that is never shut,
the books, each a contestant in a beauty contest,   
the black chair, a dog coffin made of Naugahyde,   
the sockets on the wall
waiting like a cave of bees,
the gold rug
a conversation of heels and toes,
the fireplace
a knife waiting for someone to pick it up,
the sofa, exhausted with the exertion of a whore,   
the phone
two flowers taking root in its crotch,
the doors
opening and closing like sea clams,
the lights
poking at me,
lighting up both the soil and the laugh.
The windows,
the starving windows
that drive the trees like nails into my heart.   
Each day I feed the world out there
although birds explode
right and left.
I feed the world in here too,
offering the desk puppy biscuits.
However, nothing is just what it seems to be.   
My objects dream and wear new costumes,
compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands   
and the sea that bangs in my throat.

Source: The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1981)

When I reached the ship canal, the bridge was already going up. The metal grid split and rose into a tent-pitch. I watched it click upright, opening a rectangle of space. Water swelled through the passage below. I stood over my bicycle, rolling the wheels and clicking the brakes on and off. All I could think about was getting to the other side.

When you’ve lived in Seattle long enough, the wait can be a nuisance. “The bridge was up,” people say when they come in late and dump their dripping bike bags onto the table. “Come on,” I thought, let’s go.”

In a poem, a line break is where a row of words come to an end. It’s the bridge going up in the middle of things. It’s also the pause that keeps a poem from becoming prose (that’s the stuff that washes across to the other margin). Sometimes, a comma or a period or a dash (Hello Emily Dickinson) tucks it all in, and sometimes there’s just air on the page, in the hinterland after the words, and you pause before you tumble down to the next line.

The bridge was an interruption that forced a line break into my thinking. It would eventually lower down, back into its sockets and the world would look a little different. A line break is empty space that promises a connection. At the end of a row of words, the connection drops from a height— down to the next line.

Poetry is an interruption in the regular narratives of our lives, the Russian scholar Yuri Lotman once said.

The water felt unreal to me as it sloshed under where the bridge used to be. The bridge brought the road to an end and left us looking at air. It formed a line break. The pause in the action enhanced both my view and my sense of possibility.

Then, my job, the one that awaited me on the other side, felt like a poem. I could change some things about it. I started to tinker with those ideas as I waited.

In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” written in 1856, Walt Whitman is describing the boat ride between Brooklyn and Manhattan. The poem begins:

Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!

Clouds of the west—sun there half an hour high—I see you also face to face.

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!

On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose,

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

Imagine a man extending a hand and speaking to us across the big gulf of time, imagining people generations ahead of him “face to face.” With roadway tipped into the air, I thought of all of us who “shall cross from shore to shore” and I looked around at other riders and people in their cars “attired in the usual costumes”—and cyclists wearing their corporate logo jerseys.

Every time a person reads this poem, every time someone opens the poem or hears it spoken, there comes Whitman— alive again—bringing joy across the water.

It was a pause, a split, a moment before the road sealed back into place and I kept going. Waiting let me see that. A line break let me see that. I’d already reimagined how I’d show up to work.

Here’s a poem to shift your thinking:

Crossing the Bridge

By Nicholas Goodly

There is a moment

on the bridge,

piles of clothes

along the margin.

The pile

is behind you,

the moment is

you looking

in the rearview.

Somewhere,

a clean white

minivan,

a family

gathering

fallen luggage.

You are

the margins.

The moment

is looking

back at you.

The bridge

is between

you and

the moment

you look in

the rearview.

It is only

the bridge,

it is in the shape

of you, the bridge.

The bridge is you,

you a part of it,

somewhere.

The bridge

is nothing,

only

the shape

of

it

now.

It is behind you.

Source: Poetry (September 2023)

In the flagship state university where I teach, my courses are filled with students who may become the next generation of CEOS, Executive Directors, Presidents and Senators. They may also be leaders in other spheres, ones that will make life better for other people. I try to help them envision how that will happen and I do it by teaching them how to write poetry.

Some are already extraordinary leaders and practitioners of other crafts. I know, for example, a barista who directs a coffee enterprise with love and good will. An expert on the sewar and drainage system at my house relishes poetry books and live readings and thinks through his trade as though he were constructing a villanelle. A recent graduate who studied Linguistics and Creative Writing wants to become an electrician with his own business. “I just like fiddling,” he says. “Sometimes it’s with wires and switches, and sometimes it’s with words. Plus, it helps people.”

When you think of the analogies between leadership and writing poems, you can see some rich connections. Say, for instance, that you create something new (a poem) and to do that you extinguish the problems you see in your early drafts. In this case, the “bugs” are clichés and other bits of weak language. Then you beta test your new iteration with your colleagues. After that, you insist this thing that no one knew they needed into a marketplace. That’s entrepreneurship in a nutshell.

I’m not a professor of business. I don’t teach in the business school (though I’d be happy to give it a try). My classes do not have the word leadership in the titles or course descriptions. I’m not an expert in such theories. For me, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a better book on leadership than How To Win Friends and Influence People. What I do know I’ve learned from instigating and directing startups, from reading all sorts of books and by working with wildly different individuals with a shared set of interests. At its core, my expertise comes directly from being a poet.

Poetry, reading and writing it, is one way to envision the kind of person you want to become.

Our former president at the University of Washington, Ana Mari Cauce, once told me that she would want to know that any surgeon who was operating on her had read and understood poetry. In other words, she wants to know that thinking and empathizing in an artistic realm are part of the surgeon’s capacity.

Indeed, I’ve seen how reading and writing poetry changes how my students think and engage with each other. They become more confident and open. Then, they become more imaginative and reflective. By this, I don’t mean that they are merely world-building. On a deeper level, they are envisioning the plights of other people with empathy and curiosity. Literature helps them see the world askew, at a slant, with an eye for opportunity.

My students start to imagine situations that they haven’t lived through.

Strong leaders, too, pre-imagine scenarios that might come up. They rehearse for what hasn’t happened. That kind of initiative and speculation prepares them well. Fiction and poetry offer some practice. If, for example, you want to see today’s horrors pre-imagined, you need look no further than Fletcher Knebel’s Night of Camp David, a 1965 political thriller. As Fintan O’Toole wrote in the 2/12/26 issue of The New York Review of Books, the novel’s “renewed appeal was summed up in the stark tagline on the cover: ‘What would happen if the president of the USA went stark-raving mad?’”

To envision things that haven’t happened but could, my students navigate all sorts of writing. They speculate about their own turns as they write a sonnet; they ask questions to understand the leaps their colleagues make in their own work. By giving each other helpful, thoughtful feedback, developing common interests, learning technical skills and applying them, my students are also constructing rich and complex inner lives. They are accessing their own consciousnesses and shaping ideas with words. I watch as they carve language out of the air.

This is what they’ll need to become good leaders and you can’t get this stuff wholesale. Chat won’t take you through the thinking you need to do to get there. Poetry, on the other hand, gives you the apparatus to practice and slow down how you think.

Lingering is something my students crave. Most of them want to read and write without interruption. They want to be in the experience of speculating, testing, expressing and thinking, even when those are challenging. A lot of them want to spend time away from their phones. They like the headspace, and that headspace does not come with cognitive outsourcing.

Writing by hand in a blue exam booklet, writing on the spot in class, reading aloud, and pointing to moves that poets make on the level of the phrase, meter and line—that’s all practice. Reading with a pencil in hand, noting what you notice, that is a kind of deep thinking. It brings your opinions and observations into visibility. On the other hand, short-cutting answers, dictating instructions and copying what comes up, iterating towards core questions that aren’t complex—this merely dumps into the landfill of shallow thinking. This is what people draw from when they stop reading novels, poems, plays and stories. Or when they stop looking at art and asking, “What If?”

My friend, the psychologist Laura Kastner, recently wrote a bracing article about how children are being deprived of developing thinking skills. Instead of engaging in the slow struggle of taking images, concepts and language into their bodies and transforming these into thoughts of their own, many young people are learning how to dictate what they want, cut and paste it, and deliver it as homework. The process is merely a motor skill.

Kastner points out that “Challenging mental tasks physically increase brain growth…you do not become a clear thinker and communicator by repeatedly handing your thinking over to AI chatbots.” She breaks down some of the missed steps: “To build the capacity to read something complex and track meaning, decide what matters, form an argument rather than just an opinion, write with precision and in one’s own voice, and revise.” As she says, “learning happens in the rewrite.” These are the processes that “develop cognitive endurance and judgment.”

One of my students recently said, “I think in word clusters and when I’m speaking, I pause to consider what comes next or what effect the words might have.”

“That’s a description of your own consciousness,” I said.

“It is! And that’s what my poems do,” he said.

“And that is what you can do when you are supervising other people.” I smiled as I said this because I could already see what a great leader he would be.

Some of my students will remain poets, long after their careers nose into other directions. If I could, I’d do a longitudinal study of how many poems my former students write in the years to come. I’d also ask how many books they purchase and what they are. In my data collection dream, I’d love to find that 80% of my students purchase five poetry collections and five novels or story collections each year, for the rest of their lives. I’d also like to know that they, like the former Cherokee Chief Wilma Mankiller, are writing poems as they lead. I’d trust that.

Here’s one of those poems that Mankiller wrote.

Feeling

i kiss the rare fruits of joy
and feel the heat of being alive
embracing closely the lights of
fading dreams
as they circle the edges of
something called freedom

Wilma Mankiller, Mankiller Poems: The Lost Poems of Wilma Mankiller, Pulley Press, 2022.

The man had reserved and paid for his seat. The airlines needed the seat for an employee to travel to another city. Because of the contracts we all engage in when we fly, United Airlines actually had the right to ask the man to give up his seat. As CEO Munoz faced the microphones to deliver an explanation, he nestled into contractual language to excuse the United employees for assaulting the man. He relied on a communications protocol to limit the airline’s liability.

That protocol could have been written by a robot. You could feel it in what Munoz recited: “This is an upsetting event to all of us here at United. I apologize for having to reaccommodate these customers. Our team is moving with a sense of urgency to work with the authorities and conduct our own detailed review of what happened. We are also reaching out to this passenger to talk directly to him and further address and resolve this situation.”

The word, “reaccommodate” appears in United’s standard Contract of Carriage. Munoz simply repeated that word to frame an apology. Interestingly, he also uses the phrase “a sense of urgency” which is not the same as something being urgent. The language simply feels contrived. Inflexible. It gives a sense of being authentic, but it isn’t.

Other people noticed. Over the coming days, Munoz faced outrage in the press, the public and with his employees. Perhaps it was fear, or a sense of duty, to stay with protocol that led Munoz to further poor communication. In an email to employees, Munoz “praised and defended the crew’s actions,” while claiming that the passenger was “disruptive and belligerent.”

But the man wasn’t. He was a doctor who needed to see patients the next morning and politely but firmly refused to give up the seat. Frankly, the fact that he was a doctor flavors the whole parable. A doctor insisting on getting home to his patients was right out of central casting. However, if the man had been a bricklayer or a barista, or if he had a sick child at home, he’d also have had a right to refuse.

Let’s pause here. Munoz had an opportunity to exercise his voice—even to develop his voice with depth, clarity and empathy—but he chose to use the lawyer-approved, canned response. It short-circuited the thinking and feeling that he needed to do.

Over the coming days, Munoz’s language and tone changed. Instead of sticking with the robotic, by-the-book voice, he developed an empathetic, personal response. He came up with a statement completely his own. He said, “That is not who our family at United is. You saw us at a bad moment; this can and will never happen again on a United Airlines flight. That is my promise.” When he was asked if the passenger was at fault, Munoz said, “No, he can’t be . . . no one should be treated that way, period.”

What changed?

Munoz went home and reflected on his response. What he’d said wasn’t something he was proud of, and he thought about his grandmother and how ashamed he would be to tell her his response to the incident. He created a new statement that called upon her perspective and his relationship to her. Invoking his grandmother and changing his language was not only the right thing to do, but it also had a much better impact for everyone.

That’s a technique a poet would use. As she looked over the draft of a poem, she might come across clichéd language and wonder how to transform it. She might address the poem to someone, inhabit a perspective, and rethink her word choice.

It’s a little ironic, isn’t it? To concoct something so that it feels authentic?

Leaders, too, might construct a form and stance that lets empathy and honesty seep into it.

How could you, as a leader do that? Here’s a little creative model a poet might use.

1) Look at the situation you are facing and write a one-page private response to it. No one else in the world will see this, so you are free to write what you like. Include details. Write sentences about the context in which you have to deliver this news. Write down your feelings. Read it out loud a few times. Highlight the parts that make you feel connected to what you wrote.

2) Then, envision three perspectives on this bad news. For example, you might choose the perspective of an employee who will be out of work, a peer who will console you, and a tough-minded supervisor or board member. Write a paragraph from each of these characters.

3) Then, synthesize these perspectives and your response into one statement. Leave out the verbs “to have,” “to put” and “to be.” This will push your voice into what you are writing.

That sounds like a lot of work. Maybe so. This is how your voice takes root and blooms. Because you aren’t outsourcing your response and short-circuiting the thinking that goes into it, you too can come up with an original statement that has your voice in it. You won’t be short-changing the emotions that you are encountering on the way.

What you say will have your leadership voice, stamped with your own empathy. You make that happen by using the techniques of a poet.

W.B. Yeats wrote this terrific poem about how difficult it is to have a voice. Though he’s writing about his frustration with Irish theater, he’s really pointing to the courage needed to “find the stable and pull out the bolt.”

The Fascination of What’s Difficult


By William Butler Yeats


The fascination of what's difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There's something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day's war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)

In these little pieces, I’ve been writing about how the skills and talents of poets can offer some ways to reimagine leadership. At some point, I decided to work in reverse. Instead of considering what poets have to offer leaders, I’ve been speaking with scientists, engineers, CEOs, inventors and others who are already thinking like poets. It’s been inspiring to see how language moves across disciplines and how we share expressions of thinking and acting in the world. These conversations help me think as a leader of my own poems.

Not long ago, I had the honor of speaking with Anette “Peko” Hosoi, a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. I’d heard about her research projects, teaching awards, her invigorating leadership as Associate Dean, and her warmth and enthusiasm. As we spoke, I realized that Peko operates like a poet within a world of mathematics and structural conceptions. She’s doing what poets do: exercising imagination amidst a cluster of givens.

What does that look like? She connects unlikely ideas (that’s the stuff of making metaphors); she is open to other perspectives (she sees other viewpoints as vital to problem-solving); she interweaves form and content to create designs and models (think of how a sonnet is a miniature model of feeling and thinking); and she works to find the essence of any project.

Peko researches locomotion. How things move and how they are propelled—that’s the center of her fascinations. Her own enthusiasm and curiosity propel her through a range of projects. She’s studied fast-digging snails, the physical benefits of humans who swim in groups, and worked with students who are making robots that simulate biological creatures.

Like many mechanical engineers, Peko’s work is inspired by the natural world. Ancient biological processes are models for what she envisions and creates. Since organisms evolve and get better and better at certain practices, they are the ultimate model of systems thinking. Peko describes it this way: “The idea behind this sort of biologically inspired design is that these natural systems have had millions of years to evolve and they just try everything. Because they’ve been doing this for millions of years, they have evolved like strategies and structures that can perform certain tasks really effectively.”

The process is like a time-lapse of efficiency. She and her colleagues can see the progress all at once. Why not rely on methods tested over millions of years? In hindsight, you can see how they all developed.

“If we as engineers want to perform a similar task like pumping,” Peko says, “it can often be really helpful to look at the biological structures and understand what they came to, and what they did to perform these tasks. And one of the interesting things behind this is that when we look at those structures, we are looking at the pieces of the mechanism are that make this effective.”

Evolved designs like these remind me of poems. What are “the pieces of the mechanism” that make poems effective? How are they constructed to imitate what we feel and encounter in real life? Over centuries, poems tested out oral forms, songs, ballads, typography, spoken word and predictable written patterns. It’s not evolution exactly, but a series of overlapping models to express what it means to be human. In a way, poems are contained living systems that imitate life processes. Any poem is a portal into a particular moment of human development because poets are individual organisms who rely on their own experiences and observations as material. Poems are distillations of their findings.

Poems are simulations of feeling, thought and human physicality. Some feel as though they’ve been exhaled all at once, arriving whole and intact. But they are actually fake things that are designed to feel like they are happening as you read or hear them.

My old teacher, the poet David Wagoner, used to say that poems imitate and regulate breath. He’d point to poems with alternating long and short lines and inhale and exhale through them as he read, showing us how those lines imitated that act of breathing. Poems push you to pay attention to that essential biological function. After that, I started to think about poems as things that arose from one’s body.

I, too, was learning to imitate biological systems.

In Peko’s field, she and her students create simulations of biological systems. What happens in the natural world informs their work. She’s had her thinking changed by her students. She tells me a story of a student who came to her and said he’d like to build a robotic snail.

Peko had said, “That is impossible. That is hard. Pick an easier project.” She told her student to come back in two weeks. She was thinking, “He’s going to get discouraged after two weeks and I can steer him in another direction.”

But the student came back. “He was incredible and he persisted,” she says, smiling. Then, Peko asked him, “What did you learn?”

He said, “Oh, I solved it. I built the robot.” Her student “whips out this robot” and all Peko could think was, “you are kidding me.” She laughs. “I was totally wrong.”

Her own imagination shifted. “I was thinking in my headspace, of these sort of traditional robots, which are very complicated. They need a lot of precision.” Her student, she says, “had in his mind that these biological systems somehow function without this precision that we have in robotic systems. He was thinking, ‘How do I take that and make a really simple system that can sort of replicate the biological solutions?’”

Peko says, “He was thinking as the snail and I was thinking like a roboticist.” Occupying a different perspective shook things up for her. “I was actually immersed in old thinking,” she says, and “I didn’t even realize I was in immersed in old thinking.” As she tells the story, she seems thrilled to acknowledge this.

I felt my own sensibility shift as well. At the end of a writing process, a poem usually departs from its original intentions. It steers into something completely new and only the essence of the early draft might remain. Peko notes that “When I build something that mimics a biological system, it might not look like a snail; it might not look like a clam. It might look totally different.”

I agree. A poem could start in first person couplets and end in a third person sonnet. As Peko says, “You start to understand how biological and simulated structures interact with each other.” I can see, too, how a poet documents her experience, how she makes things up, plays with the music of language and sees things evolve. Peko describes it this way, “Once you get the essential bits, you expand these into something that uses your own voice. Something with a snail’s essence or a clam’s function may not look like a clam or a snail but the new form still relies on those processes. And that’s the idea behind bio-inspired design is that you work really hard to get that essence and then you express it in the engineering form that we are more familiar with.”

As a poet, I have my own engineering forms and I try to express what I can. Poems are always in search of an essence. To get there, I realize that “You need to think as the snail, not the roboticist.”

Here’s a cool poem by Thom Gunn.

Considering the Snail

The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth’s dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,

pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail’s fury? All
I think is that if later

I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.

Copyright © Thom Gunn, 1961. Used by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. All rights reserved.

You might wonder what she’s doing. Why take that nice line away? Why take out that rhyme? Look at those two images. Why are they together? Could she explain that more? What is that form she’s making? A sonnet?

For the poet, every addition and erasure is a choice.

If someone paid that kind of attention to you as you worked, your moves might seem just as complicated. Whether you are writing code, teaching elementary school, managing a retail store, or reimagining your corporate marketing structure, there’s a level of confidence you’ve come to as you shift and shuffle things along. You, too, are making small decisions that add up by working within a set of constraints. You have a context that you are given and you do what you can with it.

If a poet decides to run a string of metaphors through her poem, she’ll get certain effects. For example, a comparison between a giggle and a sink draining sounds very different from a laugh that resembles a gentle shore breeze. The poet can set the throaty gargle inside a kitchen or push the wispy pitch onto a beach.

Instead of asking “Would this function better as a sonnet?” a workplace leader might ask, “What if we move this part of operations over here?” Or “What if sales were done by everyone taking turns? What if we tweaked our product line?” She’ll reflect on the possibilities, sketch them out, make a few judgment calls and follow her ideas into a form she can share with other people.

If a leader decides to switch a product line, for example, she might have to change out her equipment. That’s what Nintendo’s leaders did when they moved from manufacturing playing cards to video games.

While the process of writing a poem involves a negotiation within the limits of craft, the journey to lead also involves a back and forth of articulating what’s already happening around you as you express possibilities. You reflect and act at the same time.

This gets tricky. If you need to be both spokesperson and strategist, you’ll need to have a strong voice and the right language.

This is where thinking like a poet comes in handy.

The nervous system of an organization expands and shrinks in response to all kinds of pressures.

When the stress is on, our vocabularies wither. We run out of language. Part of this is the amygdala overload, the endorphins smothering our ability to coax nuance into expression.

Think about the last time you felt elated. You might have been breathless after winning a match. “That’s so awesome! I’m so excited!” You repeated that over and over. Or you needed to find something to say to a friend who was suffering. “I’m so sorry for your loss.” That was the best you could come up with.

Under pressure, corporate leaders may rely on beige talk when the company hits a rough event. Faux honesty emerges: “We all drank the Kool-Aid” or “Mistakes were made.” Or “Fail Fast.” Or “Move fast and break things.”

A cliché is easy to summon. At its best, it’s bland. It’s rolls along without resonance because it’s been so overused. No tread left on it. At its worst, a common saying can be dangerous. Does a CEO want their customers to call upon the cult that encouraged its followers to take their own lives with a poisoned, sugary drink given to children?

Call in the poets, instead! They’ll dismantle clichés and break open the stock phrases that have become useless. They’ll use the spare parts to assemble new expressions. In those moments steeped in difficulty, a poet will express what Donald Hall called “the unsayable said.”

Here’s the last paragraph of his essay, “The Unsayable Said.”

“When we wish to embody in language a complex of feelings or sensations or ideas, we fall into inarticulateness; attempting to speak, in the heat of love or argument, we say nothing or we say what we do not intend. Poets encounter inarticulateness as much as anybody, or maybe more: They are aware of the word’s inadequacy because they spend their lives struggling to say the unsayable. From time to time, in decades of devotion to their art, poets succeed in defeating the enemies of ignorance, deceit, and ugliness. The poets we honor most are those who—by studious imagination, by continuous connection to the sensuous body, and by spirit steeped in the practice and learning of language — publish in their work the unsayable said.”

Copper Canyon Press, 1993

Plus, he’s a poet who isn’t afraid to think like one.

Early on, after receiving an MFA in poetry writing, Wagner embarked on a journey to become a professor. That journey into teaching, Wagner quickly realized, was filled with adjunct instructors like himself. “Adjunct,” if you haven’t heard, is what the culture calls people who don’t belong to the places where they work. By definition, adjunct is an adjective that means supplementary, not essential to the whole. In grammar, it refers to an extra phrase or piece of syntax that ornaments a sentence. The sentence could be fine without it.

In academia, adjunct became a noun. A person is “an adjunct.” It means you aren’t on the faculty where you teach, and you teach too many students and receive no healthcare or retirement benefits. Colleges and universities have come to lean on adjuncts. They are far from non-essential. They hold up these institutions. One poet I knew said he was a “Road Scholar” because he drove from one college to the next for his teaching gigs. It’s like working retail between several shops and you don’t even have a business card. Your identity goes to shit.

Police officers, firefighters and pre-school teachers can be adjuncts too. Basically, anyone who wants to do work that helps other people can fall into this morass because good people will never stop wanting to make a difference.

What happens to poets? Do they disappear into the fabric of the world, sinking into other professions?

The better question is: What happens to homes, workplaces and communities that poets are a part of?

Back to John Wagner. When he left the working poverty of academia in Alabama, John took on writing jobs. He wrote persuasive materials for USAID and a few corporations. For a number of years, Wagner nosed his way along and found himself in meetings where corporate and government folk needed someone to articulate what they were doing. That kept happening and John kept showing up. He wrote summaries of meetings and deals. Eventually, he became a Mergers and Acquisitions investment manager at a boutique firm.

Let me slow that down for a second. Here’s what Wagner did:

1. He translated his ability to write poems into other kinds of writing.

2. He looked around his work settings and saw that other people needed someone to articulate what was happening.

3. He listened and wrote what he heard. He summarized and offered relevant details.

4. People started to ask his opinion, and he stepped up and offered it. He speculated and other people liked what he wrote.

5. Those in charge of a start-up asked him to join. He did.

6. He kept going and it led him to his current job.

Instead of writing sestinas or villanelles, the patterned documents that John creates now are mostly Confidential Informational Memoranda. CIMS are one of the biggest power tools in the investments and trades of businesses today. They take the complexities of businesses and distill their work into clarity. Does an “informational memorandum” sound dry and dull? Blowing dust off of numbers? Not so in John Wagner’s world.

His CIMS have the mark of his practice as a poet.

He links this to the Confidential Informational Memoranda, noting that “a protagonist in business has to want something. And if you’re writing a financial document, that document has to want something. It has to be aspirational, and it has to hold an imperative reason not only to exist, but to grow.”

Sounds like a poem to me. Poems are both aspirational and inspired. Wallace Stevens said so.

Inside Wagner’s CIMS, a speaker (what we call a narrator in a poem) tells the company slant, as Emily Dickinson might say. He has a perspective and he makes that, along with the details of the business, really clear. As a result, Wagner’s CIMs are known for being lively, trustworthy and surprising.

Just like poems, they move away from clichés. They have a voice you can identify. They strip language to an essence. (Lots of people assume that the craft of poetry involves ornamenting and detailing things. It’s more about editing and cutting things away to see images clearly.) Wagner makes this a cornerstone of his practice.

He also considers what a reader might anticipate. This sometimes leads Wagner to turn in another direction, reversing expectations. He might, for example, be totally up front about a company that is a mess—riddled with poor performance and bad leadership. Instead of avoiding the obvious, Wagner might be blunt about how the business is struggling. He’ll inspire readers to step in and imagine ways to salvage the company. Because of Wagner’s clarity and bluntness in positioning the company as a fixer-upper, potential buyers appear.

In short, John Wagner does what poets do. Here are a few of those activities:

• Poets create things to go in empty spaces.

• Poets build out a thinking process.

• Poets use language as a resource to get to an essence. They can ornament or strip away an image or idea.

Wagner also knows how to connect with live audiences. He is a real performer. At conferences, hundreds of people will come to see him talk about his work in mergers and acquisitions. He is entertaining, profound and has a great sense of describing what he’s up to. People circle around him after his presentations. He learned that from giving readings as a poet.

In his profession, Wagner is creating the most powerful tool that investors use to assess businesses. It’s his training as a poet makes these documents sing, though not with rhyme, but with a certain coherence and form—like a really clear poem with line breaks that have you reconsidering everything.

For a whole lot of reasons, I thought of John Wagner as I read this poem by Kay Ryan:

Bait Goat

BY KAY RYAN 

There is a
distance where
magnets pull,
we feel, having
held them   
back. Likewise
there is a
distance where
words attract.
Set one out
like a bait goat   
and wait and   
seven others
will approach.
But watch out:
roving packs can
pull your word
away. You   
find your stake   
yanked and some   
rough bunch
to thank.

Source: Poetry (September 2008)
 

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But what if you didn’t keep them apart? What if your workplace used some of the practices that you learned from poets or other creatives?

Better yet, what if your work was like a big poem you were writing?

Early on, when my friends and I created a startup, our fledgling enterprise soon felt the draft of a poem. No surprise, now that I think about it. Some leadership experts will tell you that startups reflect their founders, and I was no exception. I am a poet and poetry was my craft. I even relied on a book by a poet, The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo, to get us going. Hugo said that you never know where the next great idea is coming from, so you welcome everything. That goes for people too.

He was right. A new idea sometimes knocks at the door. You have to be curious enough to look up. That’s receptivity and that’s a state of being that poets can teach us about. Being receptive is a state of mind that poets cultivate.

Into our little enterprise, we invited everyone we knew and many we didn’t to join us in “Open Space” gatherings. We asked them to advise us. We listened to recommendations. (Of course, we sorted some ideas out, too.) Butcher-paper maps of circles with spokes and names and phrases were pinned to our walls. Those diagrams represented people to call, ideas we were considering and connections between all of them. From there, we made To Do Lists. We never really used an outline or a rigid linear strategy. Like poets, we looked for the forms that emerged and revised as we went along.

Every poet I know has receptivity in abundance. They constantly are asking “What if?” They notice flickers that beckon poems. Then, their poems bloom with even more possibilities. Plus, most poets have been in writing workshops. Trust me when I say that a writing workshop can be the most challenging enterprise to subject yourself or your work to. If you aren’t receptive, it’s hard on you and hard on your writing. Receptivity leads to progress.

Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish knows this well. For him, receptivity is his method: “Whenever the earth narrows, I expand it/ with the wing of a swallow,” he writes.[1] Darwish’s vision of “the earth” expands when he adds the swallow’s wing. That opens a whole new perspective.

Then a poem takes over. (An organization might take on its on life, too.) In “Poetic Arrangements,” Darwish describes a poem hovering just out of reach:

“The poem is above. It is able
to teach me what it wants
like how to open a window
or put my household affairs in order
among myths. It is able
to wed me to itself...in time."

Once he sees the image above, the speaker is open to learning from it. “In time,” he says, it will “wed me to itself.” That’s what makes this poem wise, I think. It’s aware that you can see something; you can have an idea, and it will take some reflection and practice to bring it into utterance.

Here’s an example from outside of the world of poetry and business. Dr. Kristin Laidre, a polar bear scientist, is one of the most receptive people I know. She has the focus and skepticism of a good scientist, but she has another trait that drives her work. She is alert to possibility. This isn’t the kind of possibility that destroys her investment in the scientific method. Nor is it the kind that keeps her from following through on her research.

This is different. Laidre’s receptivity is more poetic. (Some of her artistry may have been rooted in her early career as a ballerina in the Pacific Northwest Ballet.) Laidre is open to what’s around her and she takes in more information than she uses. That openness helps her create hunches, and the more she develops practices to surface possibilities, the more she finds her hunches are correct.

That’s how Dr. Laidre found a whole new population of polar bears and ended up placing her study as the lead article in Science. (Science may be the fanciest and most rigorous research journal on earth.) She was flying over Greenland, headed back to one of her research locations when she asked the pilot to keep going, into an area other scientists had ignored. They said that the region didn’t have bears and research there would have been a waste of time. But Dr. Kristin Laidre defied common wisdom. She sensed the possibility of more bears living in that area others had dismissed.

Sure enough, Laidre looked down from the helicopter and there they were: a whole family of polar bears. She planned a study and her subsequent research showed that the bears were genetically unique. Since they were using different strategies to cope with melting ice, they were a look into how some animals were adjusting to climate change. It was a crucial discovery.

Years of study in Greenland, long hours of sleeping in the cold, tagging bears, banging along in freezing helicopters, managing research assistants who were new to rough conditions—all of these played into her resilience. Being receptive was one thing, but living through her choices was something else.

Dr. Laidre was constantly taking initiative. This is one of the biggest leaps any human can make: the one from seeing a possibility to acting on it. Laidre, leaping into far flung regions to tag the bears, did it every day—even in small ways. She took photographs, for example, that display the colorful houses in Greenland and the expanse of the icefields.

Taking initiative is the second practice that leaders can benefit from. Lots of people have good ideas but not everyone musters up the courage to set them into action. It seems invisible, that art of taking the leap from receptivity into doing something in three dimensions.

Both being receptive and taking initiative demand imagination. That may not seem obvious. One practice asks you to let ideas and images in and the other demands that you put your feet on the floor, or fingers to the keys, and do something. Neuroscience tells us that flickers of recognition instigate the dopamine surge to savor the novelty and the energy to act. Action brings more desire to act and makes one more receptive. It’s a feedback loop.

As for me? I had no training in business, not even a marketing class—but after I earned an MFA in poetry, I did study educational administration, architecture and linguistics for an interdisciplinary degree—all of which offered me models for seeing how things might fit together in new ways. But it was being a poet that really helped. I drafted ideas, tried to steer around obvious clichés, and was willing to revise. Mostly, I welcomed new people and ideas and then included them in what we were doing.

In all of the leadership material I’ve read and digested, no one has really tapped into how being a poet, an art form with the most accessible medium—language—

can inform the practices of leadership by inspiring colleagues and moving them into organizational unison.

Taking the leap from an artistic practice into your day job isn’t as big a leap as you might think.

A poet could teach you that.

[1] From “The Tatar’s Swallows,” Why Did You Leave the Horses Alone. Archipelago Books. 2006.

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Poets harness inspiration and shape magic into expression. “The Poet’s Leap” brings the wild, brave methods of poets into how we live and lead.

Hi everyone!

I’ve been thinking about “The Poet’s Leap” for quite a while, but what inspired me to finally jump the gap was an old bumper sticker on my car. It’s been there for a long time, and it’s pretty nicked up. It reads: What would Walt Whitman do?

Beloved American poet of democracy, breaker-of-forms, status-toppler, nurse, teacher, journalist and voice of conscience, Walt Whitman wrote poems that allowed him to connect to a whole lot of people. America in the 1800s was growing and diversifying and Whitman relished the wild array of characters around him. They showed up in his poems and in his life.

Whitman himself was a man of action while many of his poems, set in lines so long you’d need to print them sideways if you didn’t want to indent them, are filled with lingering. “I loafe and invite my soul,” he writes early on in “Song of Myself.” That line gives me a relaxing soak in the ebb and flow of his verse.

But Whitman didn’t do a lot of loafing. In real life, he wandered the hills of Brooklyn and watched ships in the waterways around Manhattan; he roamed the dense streets of the city; he visited and worked in Civil War Hospitals. The new democracy was teeming with people. In a later section of “Song of Myself” we meet a carpenter, a pilot, married and unmarried children, a mate, a duck-shooter, deacon, spinning girl, farmer, paving man, conductor, printer and machinist. There are even more.

In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Whitman relishes the other passengers: “Crowds of men and women, attired in the usual costumes! How curious you are to me.” As the poem washes along in the brackish tide, Whitman imagines those in the future who will trace a similar route: “It avails not, neither time nor place—distance avails not,/ I am with you…a generation or ever so many generations hence.” He reaches toward them: “Just as you feel when you look at the river and sky, so I felt…”

When I read that I feel shivery.

As the Civil War was raging, Whitman spent long afternoons in hospitals with wounded soldiers.

 "To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return,
  To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss,
  An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail,
  Soon to be fill’d with clotted rags and blood, emptied and filled again.”

   (From "The Wound-Dresser")

Not all of us can be both poet and nurse or activist, journalist, documentarian, civic voice or editor and earn a living. However, what Whitman models is the art of heading out, into the world around us. “Arise and go now,” W.B. Yeats would suggest about thirty years later in “Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Yeats meant for readers of his poems to return to the old rural places in Ireland while Whitman encouraged Americans to enter into their complex, new mostly urban world. Whitman took his own initiative. Yeats stayed mostly in his house.

Even if you don’t head right out the door to meet strangers and jot in your notebook, you might apply Whitman’s spirit to what you do encounter.

Let’s say that you are in a fender bender. A frazzled driver has hit your car and no one was hurt. What might old Walt say?

“I see that you didn’t mean it. I am with you. I, too, have made mistakes. It’s okay.” Then, he might add, “Tell me about who you are.”

What Would Walt Whitman Do? He’d greet the situation with empathy and curiosity.

That’s a poet’s leap.

So, that’s why I’m writing this Substack. It’s my chance to think through some of those joyful connections between the work that poets do and the circumstances we encounter.

These days, that’s important. Our imaginations need nourishment. Drawing connections helps. Envisioning how to “make things up” and how to act on something takes creativity. Job ads and trending news stories tell us that creativity is in short supply. AI needs our questions to iterate; leaders need thinkers who can engage with data on a human scale and associate new ways of viewing it; students need to imagine their ways through dilemmas and knowledge. Tech folks imagine new products, but the rest of us need to envision their impacts.

Many of us feel isolated. Whether it’s caused by remote work, social media or the hive-mind of the internet, individual thinking and expression can feel confining. No wonder we feel hypnotized and bereft within the strange rigors of quick and easy answers! But it’s not only screens that are impairing what we imagine; we’re also stuck in how we solve problems or make the leap from our values to how we act on them.

This week, I went to see Patti Smith play during her Horses tour. The music unhooked me from all of my usual thought-spools of to-do lists and nattering. What a gift that was! I marveled at Smith, almost 80 years old, and how much energy she brought to the performance. At the end of the show, she yelled, “Use Your Voice.” And she repeated it. “Use Your Voice!”

In agreement, we pumped our fists in the air. But how might we use our voices? Patti Smith was already using hers and it inspired the rest of us. The rest of us were going to need some imagination to figure out how to act.

Being open to such a question and listening for the answer is what poets do.

My own responses unrolled. I’ll mail in my ballot. I'm going to write letters to my friends and neighbors over the holidays. Then, I’ll give money to causes that uplift other people’s dreams.

Patti inspired me to get started and Walt Whitman has me following through. That’s The Poet’s Leap.

Twice a month, I’ll publish vignettes, think-throughs, speculations and meanderings about how poets think and how that might light up other arenas outside of poems. You can expect new posts on Tuesdays.

In the meantime, May Whitman be with you.

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