Why we’re doing poetry right now, and not prose....

Hi, everyone. It's been a minute since I've just

spoken to you. I tried to record a poem about why we're having

poems now. But it didn't really work out. So let me see if I can

say what I need to say and not get sidetracked by some weird

element of my childhood. Sometimes there are things you

can't say in prose. And for me, that's most things, most

feelings. The more important it is, the harder it is to put

straight into sentences and periods and paragraphs. The

first time I remember getting praise for poetry, I was writing

about friendship, and it was fourth grade, and Mrs. Litvin

who had seen a lot and been through a lot already by the

time she was a soft, round gray-haired lady teaching in the

suburbs of New York. And she said that it was beautiful. And

she put it on the wall. I remember that it was Mrs.

Litvin. And not Mrs. Gus from third grade. Because I remember

where that yellow piece of paper- you know, that

rough-draft, blue lined, newsprint-y paper that we used

when we weren't writing the real thing yet. I remember where that

yellow piece of paper went on the wall to the left of the

classroom door just as you walked in. It was a haiku. They

were trying to introduce us to poetry forms. This is back in

the day when they thought that was an important thing to teach.

I wish they still thought that was an important thing to teach.

But I've never liked poetry forms. But I like the way that

poetry allowed spaces for the poet and the poem and the reader

to interact. It wasn't so pushed, it wasn't so rushed. It

wasn't so directive as prose. I have a lot, as you know, a very,

a lot of very definite opinions. But I also think that I am only

one carrier of opinions and ideas and possibilities. And so

I'd rather put what I think in front of you as a sort of a

buffet or even like, you know, one of those restaurants where

you go and you pick out the ingredients and you give them to

the chef, like pick out some ingredients, pick out some ideas

from what I'm saying. If you can't figure out how what I

said, has to do with business, I want that tangle in your brain

to be generative. I want the tangle in your brain to be

spacious. I want it to wander around in the crevices between

dropoffs and pickups and groceries and doctor's

appointments. I want it to eat popcorn in the back left hand

corner while you're watching that show that you love and

watch with you and comment. I'm less interested in anybody

picking up my ideas wholesale than I am in what happens when

they become seasonings, or seeds. Mustard seeds, foxtails-

I know we don't like foxtails, but also, I'm sitting next to

foxtails. Sometimes I feel like clear directive prose is exactly

what we need. But more often than that, we have so much

clearer directive prose around us. And then so much

insidious... something. That thing that some marketers do

some of the time, where they create a gap that you naturally

fall into because of the way that our brains work. And then

they act like it was your choice, which sort of was, but

that's not a thing I would call consent. So first, I want you to

consent. I want you to consent to play with me in these ways.

And then I want you to roll it around your mouth on your

tongue, to kick it down the road like a can or a soccer ball, to

weave or knit or embroider it into something and see if you'd

like to put it together with great long basting stitches; to

dig your thumbs in and see if there's a vessel in that lump of

mud. It's art, I want it to become part of the art of your

life. And I think prose is awkward and clumsy for that. Not

always,

I think there's a place for prose. And there's beautifully

crafted prose out there, my god. But I like the uncertainty of

poetry. I like the ambiguity of poetry. I like the way that

images and pieces of your life that feel completely unrelated

can overlap and run together. Because that makes it easier for

pieces of my life to overlap and run together with pieces of your

life, and pieces of my thinking to overlap and run together with

pieces of your thinking, and vice versa. I want your thinking

to overlap and run together with mine. I want to have places and

ways and structures that that can happen. And I'm not sure

that those places and ways and structures are necessarily are

even usually encased in the structure of prose. Language is

an incredible tool. And they always told me I had to learn

the rules before I could break them. But I only know the rules

intuitively and I break them the same way. And I know that

irritates people. But poetry is also the first place where I had

to learn not to mind that poetry, and specifically my

poetry, is not for everyone. So I'll keep doing prose. I will

come back to it. I know myself, I circle through these things, I

cycle around; but not just prose and not even necessarily

predominantly prose. Sometimes I want the poems to work in a way

that you don't know what hit you, and you're not sure how to

feel about it. Sometimes I just want a gut punch because I want

the world, because the world is such a place right now.

Sometimes I want a snippet of beauty. And sometimes I want a

complete sentence. So that's what I'm doing. I want to say

one more thing. I make this sound like I planned it, I did

not. I sat down one day, the way I usually do to record a snippet

of an idea, the beginning of a sentence, and it came out as a

poem. And it still felt like the right thing to do. And so I

posted it. And then I sat down again a few days later, and it

still felt like the right thing to do. And so I posted it. And

after a while, I had to ask myself "what happened? you were

making these prose essays, and now you're making something

different?" And so one of the things I learned in seminary is

that sometimes it helps to explain. And so I'm explaining

as much as I can, I'm explaining why once I figured out what was

happening, I didn't stop it. I didn't tell myself that I had to

stay in that form of prose, I didn't tell myself I had to stay

inside the structure of an essay, I didn't force myself

back into that. A large part of that is how intensives work, we

can't be forced into a form simply because somebody said so,

even if that somebody was ourselves, we need space to do

things differently, if that differently has integrity for

us, if that differently serves our larger purpose. And so once

I noticed what was happening, I went back and took a look. Why,

why would this feel right? Why was this working? Why? Why did I

suddenly feel freer and more grounded and much more

enthusiastic about sharing my podcast? And the answer was

because there's a level of authenticity that's available to

me in poetry that isn't available to me in prose. And as

an intensive, that authenticity is absolutely vital to my pride

in my work. So if prose starts to feel like half a lie, I have

to do something different. And what is that different thing

going to be? In this case, it turns out to be poems. So thanks

for being here with me, in my intensive space in my poetry

space in my ethics-oriented business space. Thanks for being

nimble. Thanks for being curious. Thanks for being wise.

Thanks for being creative. Thanks for wondering how it

could be with me, and thanks for being with me, in this moment,

different. Because this is where the change begins.