Your Organization Needs a Chief Poetry Officer
“‘I liked that,’ said Offa, ‘sing it again.’”
What? You’ve never heard of a Chief Poetry Officer? That’s funny because everyone else has. Kings, queens, presidents, and warlords. Cities, states, countries, and planets. They all recognize the value of a team member who can find the words to explain what you have always known but did not know you knew.
It’s the linguistic equivalent of finding a quarter in your ear and then giving it to you to spend.
The Chief Poetry Officer (CPO) takes the ordinary to extraordinary and then gives it back again for everyday use. CPOs use all available resources and know how to stay within a budget—they fabricate “a quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” into anything you need. Over and over again. You want a creative thinker who can communicate ideas to others and find options where there are none, right? Right.
You want a poet on your team.
I am not suggesting you bring on a Chief Poetry Officer to write poems about you and your organization. That would be silly. Ha-ha. But I am suggesting that you bring on a CPO to help you and your organization create reality and fantasy and possibility (aka mission and vision and goals) you and your organization can use to drive your endeavors.
Poets make complex ideas into simple things.
It’s simplicity that makes poetry so hard to understand. It’s concrete, visceral, real. It lives in the body and not the brain. People who have difficulty with poetry do so because they try to interpret before they observe—they assume meaning before they listen to the evidence. A poet brings evidence to the surface.
She writes to reify. A lovely word that floats happily in the intellect.
She writes to concretize. A clumsy word that does a better job of giving physical weight to an idea.
She writes to carbonize. A new use of the word that solidifies and brings life to ideas.
Poets observe and communicate observation. They don’t create meaning; they unearth it and then create vehicles—containers to carry understanding—for each of us.
Poets create alternatives.
Poets don’t make mistakes; they create alternatives. One of my teachers, Donald Revell, once said in class that a poem of his was published with a typo—”own” instead of “won” (or perhaps it was the other way around) and he liked it better with the revision.
A CPO who knows her craft might convey accidental meaning as in, ”Oh, I did not think of that when I wrote it, but yes, that works” but not unintentional meaning as in, “Oh no, I don’t mean that at all.” She has more command of her language than that. She’s a poet, for Christ’s sake.
Yes, that is what I meant. And, yes, I meant that, too.
Poets own it/won it.
Because they have to. If you go around telling people you are a poet, you can’t do it half-heartedly—you have to mean it. Creative writing programs graduate thousands of poets each year. Not all of them write good poems, but all of them are poets. And by virtue being poets—and having the courage to call themselves thus—they wield curated language, conscious point-of-view, and a certain amount of chutzpah in everything they do.
Poetry can be a lonely place. The poet takes the seat in the room that no one else wants because she believes it will allow her to see what no one else can.
At least that is what she tells herself.
I’ve been trying for a few months to communicate my identity as a poet without scaring (or do I mean scarring?) people. I tried descriptive sentences, “I find connections between the seemingly unconnected” and “I understand the power of language.” I played with trendy words like storyteller and metaphorist (I know) in my personal statement. But I think, in the end, I’m going to say I am a poet who can help you say what you mean. Because I can.
