In my desire to “Show, Don’t Tell,” and to chronicle the prelude to my third career act, I’ve been writing prose poems about my career, the communications industry, and some of the philosophies that guide me.
I published more than a dozen of these prose poems on LinkedIn. Now, I’m offering eight of the poems in one package here.
According to the Poetry Foundation, a prose poem is a prose composition, while not broken into verse lines, that demonstrates other traits such as symbols, metaphors, and other figures of speech common to poetry.
Poetry Is A Clear Point of Difference
As someone who writes ads and marketing copy for clients, I like the idea that poetry and art can be used to inform commerce. I also like the idea that poetry can be a point of difference for me in my search for meaningful work.
When looking for work, you’re looking for people. In my case, I am seeking to connect with business and community leaders who need help communicating their marketplace value.
There are marketers in the world today who believe they can simply state their offer and win—no personality, charm, creativity, or strategic planning necessary. I’m not looking for these marketers and they’re not looking for me.
I’m a good fit for marketers committed to pursuing a clear point of difference in the marketplace. A clear point of difference starts with the product or service and moves from there to how people inside and outside the company talk about (and think about) the product or service.
To make a brand culturally relevant today, and to give people something to talk and think about, we often infuse brand communications with arts and culture. Lowbrow. Highbrow. It’s all up for grabs.
When I work with clients on a brand communications problem, I reach back to my training like everyone else. I was trained to read and write poems, stories, essays, and news.
Today, I believe in the use of poetry and poetic frameworks to advance the objectives of a business, cause, or political campaign. To get an idea to stick and to get people to share it, there has to be a short powerful punch of words.
To tap one legendary line, “Where’s the beef?” … it is not poetry. It’s advertising that benefits from poetic construction.
Texas writer and literary lion, Larry McMurtry, knows all about this premise. In fact, he has spent several decades making this geocultural reality his own truth and his books are both products of and reflections of The West.
As a new resident of Texas, I love to hear the stories of this place, and I want to hear from the state’s best storytellers.
It’s interesting to me how dated some of the material is—for instance, he describes Austin, but he does so over 50 years ago and the description, while insightful, is of another city. I blame the fact-based form more than the writer. At the same time, some of the things McMurtry says about other parts of the state ring as true today as I imagine they did then.
Like this one:
In Dallas, a flavorless Protestantism seems to have yielded superpatriotism as by-product. The Dallas true believers have made conservatism a religion-surrogate: they hate liberals the way passionate religious dogmatists once hated heretics.
And this one:
The South is memories, memories—it cannot help believing that yesterday was better than tomorrow can possibly be. Some of the memories are extraordinarily well packaged, it is true, but when a place has been reduced in its own estimation no amount of artful packaging can hide the gloom.
We suck at conflict resolution in this country. We suck because we generally lack the skills as individuals, and we almost always lack the collective will do to the right thing as a nation. The price we pay is, therefore, sky high. Until you resolve the conflict in the right ways, it lingers and festers.
When I lived in rural North Carolina as a teenage boy, my friends would constantly remind me that The South was gonna rise again. I would nod and then ask, “Then what?” No one said they’d reinstitute slavery on Day One. It didn’t need to be said. It was nevertheless understood.
Today, nuance is napping. Today, we do need to say what is. For me, this is what is: I believe We, the People, need to atone for our two original sins—slavery and genocide—and until we do, we’re going to keep paying too high a price as a society. Atonement and restitution will not wipe away racism. This is about acknowledging the damages done. It’s too important to leave the next generation. The time is now to take these immense and long-overdue first steps.
Money Doesn’t Make The Man
McMurtry also examines class in 1960s Texas.
Amid the bland Texas middle class, our vulgar rich can seem baroque and delightful, and indeed, certain of them are delightful. As a class, however, they exhibit all the difficulties of the desperately confused, and they are dangerous in proportion to the amount of power they wield. They are frequently very able and very strong people, but I have yet to meet one whose abilities or whose strength counterbalances his insecurity.
That’s casting some serious shade on your fellow countrymen. Of course, this is often the work of a conscious writer. The dark side is the side that needs words to light it up. Thankfully, McMurty has excellent words to express his deepest thoughts.
I know not which “dangerous men” the author has in mind in the above passage. I do know he shows no indication in his book that he thinks highly of President Johnson, who at the time of the writing, held immense power and did not always use it wisely.
I’m sure there were other men that McMurty considered when he took out his knife pen. He did not write about the Bush family in this book, as that family’s Texas story didn’t fully emerge until the 1980s when Goerge Bush became Vice President, and then President. Even if they had emerged in time, the Bush family are Yankees who emigrated to West Texas for the oil. They’re Eastern prospectors, or they were.
Cowboy Love and Longing
The theme of the collection is the disappearance of the Old West, and with it, a way of life lived by a few short generations of cowboys. The McMurty clan lived this life, and Larry McMurtry saw it fade away and in its place, he witnessed the rise of modern Texas.
Now that it’s 2019, we can argue about what parts of modern-day Texas are worth celebrating and keeping. We can also turn to more books, fiction, and nonfiction by The Bard of Archer County. A friend has recommended Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond.
Prose In Accordance with the Land
“A lyricism appropriate to the Southwest needs to be as clean as a bleached bone and as well-spaced as trees on the llano.”
Damn. That is fine advice for a writer to dispense and for another writer to soak up.
How are you? I am red white and blue
Pioneer blood, Indian blood, the blood of slaves, the blood of immigrants…
From the heart of the nation our vital fluids flow
Into the dirt of Turtle Island, which wants water
Delicate flowers, found fortunes
So many petals like promises swept
Ghosts of pale riders, disease in their malice pouches
Brittle and blind, the terrible whiteness
Drained of red, erased by white, we the people dwell in our beautiful blues
How are you? I am red white and blue
Mixed blood, the blood of soldiers, the blood of schoolchildren…
Sister buffalo, father grizzly
Soaring eagle, circling salmon
Divine circles of benevolent council
Forever unreceived
Cold dark metal, Medieval fire
The unquenchable thirst
The growing madness
Bodies ripped asunder
Bled of red, replaced by white, we the people bow to our beautiful blues
How are you? I am red white and blue
Shared blood, bad blood, the blood of brothers…
Pacific waves wash me
Inspiration in the thick ocean air
The Liberty torch, the house of light
These blues move the new you
These blues we move through
Born red, bred white, we the people sing our beautiful blues
How are you? I am red white and blue
Born in blood, the blood of Christ, the blood of sacrifice…
I wrote this poem after visiting a photo exhibit at Mexic-Arte Museum in downtown Austin.
Maria from Monterrey
It’s not terribly far, as a bird flies, from Monterrey to Laredo
Young Maria’s journey was wingless
She moved at night, her thirst unsatisfied
Coyotes and owls shared their star-lit canyons
When she slept she had bad dreams of home
Maria finished fourth grade at Santo Nino Elementary
The family moved to San Antonio for a year
English slid smoothly from her tongue
Sister Sarah said she could go to college
“Do they have scholarships for Dreamers?”
Her softball coach was no Nun
Her history teacher spit white lies
Maria found some solace in science
She played her flute by the lake
Butterflies swooned, Suzy, the poodle exhaled
The people of Laredo named her “Best Dental Hygienist”
Maria was always careful with the instruments
Her husband the handsome highway engineer
They made friends with other parents at the pool
She never served a casserole
When Don descended the neighbors turned
The lady at daycare asked for her papers
The dental group let her go
America turned its lights down
Maria cursed the powers that be
Now, heavy white clouds roll in from the Gulf
Torrential rains pound the dry Earth
Maria bathes half-naked in the yard
Her minerality is pure Meximerican
Her spirit, mighty Texican
The Circus is no longer kid-friendly
What’s all this clankity clank?
Who dares to rattle the cage?
Why are all the clowns on stage?
We can’t see the lion eat his tamer
Downward we spiral into the Dungeons of Deceit
Unfree people in patriots purgatory
Shall we cry out?
How do we climb out?
Amplified trash grows and glows
Poets Howl
Filling vacant minds with word gas
Ignited we rise
Distracted we fall
Break glass in case of fire
Fire!
Barking sirens, dogs in chains
The city says tat tat tat
Another hot pistol
The ring has no master
Go ahead — scream!
Still, the beasts roar
You are free to rhyme
With this well-intentioned reason
When the game gets rough
Hotheads go puff puff
Hands off my stuff
I never get enough
We were in the second row Tuesday night for “Julius Caesar” at Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. The play, directed by Shana Cooper, is both timely and powerful. This modern production is also highly inventive. The ancient tale is set in contemporary times, with urban decay on full display—the walls are literally decomposing as the narrative unfolds.
The play is full of memorable scenes. The closing of the First Act is absolutely searing and unforgettable. We watched a mob stomp an innocent poet to death while chanting “tear him”.
Violence is at the center of this play and at the center of the human drama. Caesar is murdered. Mobs are incited to kill. A civil war breaks out. Shakespeare wrote “Julius Caesar” in 1599. The events that the play depicts occurred many centuries before that. Yet, the play could not be more relevant than it is right now.
Let’s hear from Cassius, a Senator, on the conditions in Rome…
CASSIUS
And why should Caesar be a tyrant then?
Poor man! I know he would not be a wolf
But that he sees the Romans are but sheep;
He were no lion, were not Romans hinds.
Those that with haste will make a mighty fire
Begin it with weak straws. What trash is Rome,
What rubbish, and what offal when it serves
For the base matter to illuminate
So vile a thing as Caesar! (Act 1, Scene 3)
Cassius is the main conspirator, along with Brutus. They’re both moody men who let their assumptions get the best of them, and who are ultimately trapped by their own minds and obsessions. In the above passage, Cassius seems to say it’s the common Roman who is equally at fault, and that people get the leaders they deserve. His conspiracy to murder Caesar was driven by the idea that he might do horrible things sometime in the future. It was not about settling an old score for a crime he had already perpetrated. I like Cassius for the most part, but Caesar rightly notes that “he thinks too much.”
Another theme in the play that stands out is how easy it is to sway the crowd with rhetoric, as Mark Antony proves at Caesar’s funeral.
ANTONY
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. (Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare is the master of duplicitous tongues, and in Mark Antony, the Bard has a perfect snake. Antony praises Caesar while inciting his fellow Romans to drive the conspirators from their homes. He’s a real piece of work, Mark Antony.
What can we learn from this amazing historical drama from the world’s greatest playwright? We can learn that power is a narcotic, while deceit and violence are blunt means to power’s unjust ends.
President Obama’s speech in Selma, Alabama on Saturday—commemorating the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday”—was a major moment in his presidency, and a reminder to all how far we have come as a nation in 50 years.
The context and setting of the speech helped to amplify the power of the President’s words, which ring poetic throughout.
We broke the old aristocracies, declaring ourselves entitled not by bloodline, but endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. We secure our rights and responsibilities through a system of self-government, of and by and for the people. That’s why we argue and fight with so much passion and conviction, because we know our efforts matter. We know America is what we make of it.
The speech contains passage after passage of language artfully rendered. President Obama has a strong vision for America—and his own place in it—which is both remarkable, and proof that we have indeed “broke the old aristocracies,” at least to some degree.
Yet, racism is not gone from the American scene. It is still a daily reality for many Americans. Pick any headline (or personal incident) you want. For instance, David Boren, the President of University of Oklahoma, banned a fraternity from campus on Monday and declared the students “a disgrace” and “not real Sooners”, for singing a racist chant at a frat function.
Hats off to David Boren in Norman, OK. “We know America is what we make of it.” The struggle to make ourselves and our nation better is not easy, nor will it be easy going forward, but it is a struggle worthy of our energy and full attention.
As President Obama said on Saturday, “We are the people Emerson wrote of, ‘who for truth and honor’s sake stand fast and suffer long; who are ‘never tired,’ so long as we can see far enough.”
“Information without context strikes the mind but peters out before the heart.” -Sarah Smarsh
Creative nonfiction is a form I find myself increasingly drawn to. In the hands of a great essayist, we see a real writer struggle with real life.
Sarah Smarsh, for instance. She is a Kansas-born journalist, public speaker and educator, and her recent piece of media criticism in Aeon struck a nerve.
In a media landscape of zip-fast reports as stripped of context as a potato might be stripped of fibre, most news stories fail to satiate. We don’t consume news all day because we’re hungry for information – we consume it because we’re hungry for connection. That’s the confusing conundrum for the 21st century heart and mind: to be at once over-informed and grasping for understanding.
In her essay, Smarsh exposes the mechanics of reporting and the news business as one culprit in the dehumanization on news. She also explores the need for real story, versus packaged up text masquerading as coherent content. Regarding what is sometimes called “hard news” she writes:
…in J-school my peers and I learned never to call 10 inches of lede, nutgraph and body an ‘article’ – true journos, we were told, call them ‘stories’
I hear and admire Smarsh’s call for a higher standard in today’s metric-fed mediascape. Media enterprises need page views, subscribers, events, merchandise and ad dollars to survive. I get that, and most writers get that. We also get that there’s a need to make a product or service out of our writing, and for the most part, we are happy to abide by these terms. Perhaps publishers, editors and writers can begin to work towards more equitable outcomes all around.
Smarsh writes about how we’re “hungry for connection” today. I agree. Imagine hiring a great chef, sous chef, line cooks and prep cooks and outfitting them with all the best kitchen equipment. But then you tie their hands when it comes to ingredients—all this talented crew can make is pork and beans, onion soup and tater tots. Publishers are in a hurry to be mass feeders of media. Conventional wisdom says that’s where the money is.
Brands want a return on content. B. Bonin Bough of Mondelēz International argues that “without the metric of monetization, there really is no way for you to determine whether content is good or bad.”
Media companies also want a positive return on their investment in content. Meanwhile, people find it hard to pay attention, can’t sit still, can’t take it all in. A lot of smart people are working on answers to the media conundrum. I am glad, because it’s easy enough to see the connection between junk media and an unhealthy citizenry.
As a writer, I want to answer Smarsh’s call for more substance and more heart in the pieces we put into the world. As a reader and consumer of media, I want to scroll less and read and think more.
“What do you do?” It’s the age-old question that is always lurking, waiting to be asked at the next industry conference, cocktail party, and/or random encounter on an airplane.
In one way, the question is innocent and a genuine attempt to understand more about you. On the other hand, it’s a moment of truth where judgements will be levied, no matter how conscious the parties involved. Personally, I prefer the question, “What are you working on?” It’s not nearly as loaded. Yet, I can only control what I can control, which is to say I will continue face the question, “What do you do?”
Author and mentalist Tim David, writing in Harvard Business Review, outlines a four-point approach that is both disarming and effective.
When asked, “What do you do?” Mr. David suggests that you reply with:
A verbal slap
Ask a problem question
Go for the head nod
End with a curiosity statement
Let’s examine his approach more carefully:
From studying his example, I’ve managed to work out my own version of an effective reply.
What do you do?
Verbal Slap: I was an archery coach, but I couldn’t take all the traveling by van.
Ask a problem question: You know how company’s tend to annoy you with all their commercials?
Go for the head nod: You’re annoyed because the company doesn’t understand you, and they “talk down” to you.
Curiosity statement: I help companies annoy you less by getting them to hone in on genuine stories, and by using narrative techniques perfected around the campfire for millennia.
