Tweetspeak Poetry

How We Spent Our Poetry at Work Day

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Sunset Brooklyn Bridge Poetryat Work Day
Even though we’ve been celebrating Poetry at Work Day for five years now, each year is a bit of a surprise. Will we be met with clever poets reminding us all that they are at work every day? (That’s the point, actually, for both poets and the not-so-poetic, that there’s poetry in the workplace every day, not just the special ones where we pay extra attention.) Will we see dozens of would-be haiku lines that take that sudden turn at the end toward “Coffee”? Or will we see, as we do every year, hundreds of different manifestations of people finding a way to lift the poetic in their work, or to bring an extra measure of poetry to the day.

The biggest surprise this year, at least for me, was seeing Poetry at Work Day in the chyron of a local news station. (That’s the digital headline you see at the bottom of your screen.)

Paul Conrad of WGN morning news had a poem for his colleagues and viewers.

And not to be done by a newsroom in another market, the floor director of Fox 17 in Michigan read his poem in front of a roaring fire. (Things that you can do when you have a whole newsroom at your disposal.)

Another favorite of mine, which has nothing to do with the news, was the delicious haiku written by the folks at Frango. (Frango means chocolate in many languages.)

The theatre contingent was big this year:

Libraries, as usual, led the way:

Look what Scholastic was doing:

And there was some participation from both sides of the aisle:

Poetry and coffee and cafeterias, oh my:

The Mary Rose was hard at work throughout the day crafting poems about the ship’s very wet (and now dry) fate.

While some like to think of Poetry at Work Day as a national celebration, the day is routinely celebrated all over the world. This year we saw participation from all kinds of places:

Our wonderful neighbors in Canada came along:

I just like this picture:

Poems remind us to be healthy:

We had a wonderful reminder of the power of poetry in dealing with dementia:

A poem about plums that is not the poem we usually think of when we think of a poem about plums:

And it doesn’t take a fan of T.S. Eliot to know that cats will always have a place in poetry:

Though if cats aren’t your thing, maybe you like cows:

As always, thanks for celebrating with us. You, and poetry at work, will help make the world a better place.

Photo by Guillén Pérez, Creative Commons license via Flickr.
______________________________
POETRY AT WORK, THE BOOK—BY A FORTUNE 500 LEADER
Free-Ebook-Poetry-at-Work-Cover (1)
Poetry at Work, by Glynn Young, foreword by Scott Edward Anderson

“This book is elemental.”

—Dave Malone

Will Willingham
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About Will Willingham

I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel is Adjustments.

Comments

  1. Laura Brown says

    I just love how these days have spread far and wide, and how much fun people seem to have writing verse to participate.

    Reply

  3. L.L. Barkat says

    Cats, cows, and chickens. My life feels complete. 😉 🙂

    As always, I love this day. I love how more and more people approach it with open hearts instead of old poetry fears.

    Thanks for your hard work in the festivities. 🙂

    Reply

  4. Bethany R. says

    What a blast. Loved reading through the array of responses to Poetry at Work Day!

    I enjoyed silently reading one poem by Glynn Young and another by Maya Stein during my lunch break in the car. #peacefultransport

    Reply

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