Poetry

Deferential, glad to be of use, 
Politic, cautious, and meticulous; 
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse...
                                                    – T.S. Eliot

I seem best suited for bit parts on small stages, at my best when squeezed by circumstances scripted by someone else.  Not a great resume bullet:  "Kept head while all around lost theirs and blamed it on him."  But there it is.

"What do you do?”

I’m a manager.

"Oh."

Exactly. 

No vision.  No great things.  Just pressure.  Just standing between demand and performance.  Just wondering, mostly, what the hell to do.

Talking back to the voices in my head, I usually just grunt.  One time, I said aloud, "No, I don’t."  Recently, I said, "Frost."  And was happy to have guessed right.  And happier, then, to hear it read well.

What poetry is, what good it does, and, certainly, why anyone should care – if, in fact, anyone still does – poetry, those beautiful bits of tightly compacted language, results from somebody feeling squeezed somehow, and speaks to those squeezed similarly. 

And I feel silly saying management and poetry in the same sentence.  But where I live professionally, the way my work life tends to work out, is nothing if not humanity at odds with its own ambitions.  People at cross-purposes in a common enterprise.  Feeling pressured.  Squeezed.

What to do?  Certainly, please, I’d like a bone – some set of steps – to gnaw the remains of my high-mindedness. 

But, if you please, a way to be okay with it.  As it is.  And not satisfied.

Paul Schweer

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=180106

http://www.echonyc.com/~poets/carruth.html#ray

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=181701

http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~keith/poems/dover.html