Can Poetry Matter?

How could it not? Yesterday I met Dana Gioia, Chairman for the National Endowment for the Arts. And indeed it was a joy to be sitting among the audience at the Wharton Leadership forum and letting his verse enchant me along with 300 people. If anyone can tell a story with a poem it is Gioia.

The purpose of art is to bring people together, he said. Gioia sees the arts as an ecosystem that helps bring love into the conversation. If you follow the link above and read his biography, you will be impressed. He received a BA and an MBA from Stanford University and an MA in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. He also worked for 15 years in the corporate world, eventually becoming President of General Foods.

I must admit that the most endearing attribute to me is that he is of Italian and Mexican descent and can not only speak, but also translate from Italian, Latin, German and Romanian. He translated Eugenio Montale's Mottetti: Poems on Love (1990), probably my favorite Italian poet.

We often hear about the science part of marketing, we forget the art part. Yet if we do want to forge a deep emotional connection with the people we serve, if our desire is to listen to what people are saying, if we want to dance in the reinvention of this often pragmatic and 'just do it' business environment -- we would be smart to raise our daily actions into the realm of artistic excellence. My friend Constance Goodwin calls this Leadership as a Performing Art(R).

Montale, who received a Nobel-Prize for literature in 1975, wrote about a man's place -- and displacement -- in the natural world, about remembrance and loss, and about love. The strength of his poetry is direct, intuitive, forceful existential provocation, obtained with dry synthesis, with words and verses distilled to stern minimal syllables and signs: situations, feelings, fears and concepts precisely evoked with three, four words, two, three verses.

These are the things that life is made of. This poem, in a translation I cannot attribute at the moment, is one of my favorites:

[Maybe one morning walking in air of dry glass,

I'll turn and see the miracle occur --

nothingness at my shoulders, the void

behind me -- with a drunkard's terror.

Then, as on a screen, the usual illusion:

hills houses trees will suddenly reassemble,

but too late, and I'll quietly go my way,

with my secret, among men who don't look back.]

We should not try to read too much into it, I learned. It is easier to listen, to feel, and to understand. The poet's obscurity is the reader's liberty. Do you sense the hopeless yearning to relate our life to the life of the universe? The intuition that nothing could be at our shoulders? It is this intuition that produces his affectionate embrace of life, his careful attention to the small daily details and the burden of going with our secret, among people who don't look back.

We spent some time this week discussing a logo as art. Artistic excellence is an attitude, the availability to life, to the things we find important. We never know how long we have. Gioia demonstrated that we can put the heart back into business. Art allows us to see the small mundane details of life in the proper perspective, and by doing that, it makes us see that we matter. Love is a conversation.

Comments

[gianandrea facchini]

valeria, i'va always been convinced that science only cannot run a business in the evolving world. as you state in your post, you cannot build engagement and conversation without emotion and sensibility.
and you a absolutely right when say: We should not try to read too much into it, I learned. It is easier to listen, to feel, and to understand.
this is true for all the modern and contemporary art: poetry, music, painting, sculpture.

[Joe Raasch]

Valeria,

The science of business is data. Data isn't good or bad, right or wrong: it just 'is'. As in, "it is what it is." The art in business is how we use, interpret, understand, apply the data. Data comes alive via engagement, emotion, etc.

Gianandrea makes a wonderful point in comparing contemporary art.

Art exists on emotion - and what emotions the art draws from us. If our reaction to the painting, the sculpture, the poem, the analyses, the Powerpoint, the strategy - is ambilalence, then the "artist" missed the point.

Good art evokes an emotion. Great art engages the artist's audience with the intended emotion.

[Valeria Maltoni]

Gianandrea -- I find that hard data is the basis of all the conversations I have in the business world... yet the finer points, the sensibility, are the ingredients of engagement and connection. Which brings me to Joe's point.

Joe -- interestingly the data is also what we choose to capture. Not all the data we track can help us 'see' so we can feel, so we can act. Sometimes we measure for the sake of proving that something is not working, because we don't believe in it.

[Philippe]

"Sometimes we measure for the sake of proving that something is not working, because we don't believe in it."

Spot on! That's what Tara (http://inmycopiousfreetime.typepad.com ) once wrote in the comments of my blog and this was an awesome remark.

During a workshop, I wanted to show the limits of decision trees. I asked the audience to imagine the ideal man/woman and asked if they felt able to write a profile of this ideal on paper. Of course, no one could because beyond measurable criteria it's all about magic.

[Toby]

For me, "art" is not necessarily kind or gentle, although it certainly can be. For me "art" is a way to connect to humanity, to understand the range of emotions that all people have in common. By participating in art (reading a poem, playing the banjo, watching a performance)you give yourself permission to go outside of yourself and enter a larger world.

The truth in the experiences is that the larger world always takes you back to self and reaffirms that you do "matter" .. we all "matter." Taking those lessons back to a business world reinforces the importance of the conversations with the "people" who are our "customers." Which reinforces that social media is a critical communication strategy.

Thank you Valeria for a wonderful, thought provoking post.

[Valeria Maltoni]

Philippe -- I think sometimes we over think information and force issues. The power resides in the connection and that may be formed in the most intangible ways, as you point out.

Toby -- I am reading now a book called, "Finite and Infinite Games" were there is a long discussion on poietes (poets), and their role in society. Poetry is the making (poiesis) of the real and is concrete, writes James Carse. I had learned that from the Greeks. Social media is a very useful strategy for the exchange of ideas and the making of possibilities in the conversation.