Tweetspeak Poetry

Another Poetry at Work Day is in the Books

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Poetry at Work Day snow and clouds
There’s something to be said for meetings amongst decentralized teams that take place over time. Not the conference or video call type of meeting, but the kind that takes place in a discussion thread over time. Sure, the immediacy of a real-time brainstorm can often yield interesting and sometimes revolutionary results. But, particularly if your team is weighted more heavily to the introverted end of the scale, ideas are often lost in the thunder and lightning of those sessions while words pull themselves around a good idea over time like a bright white cumulus as the sun comes and goes.

Such was one of those meetings of the editorial team of Tweetspeak back in 2013 when Poetry at Work Day and Take Your Poet to Work Day were born. With one question on the table (which I no longer remember), a meeting went on all day, in starts and stops, with time for thought and exploration, as fledgling ideas were tended to and nurtured into something that’s grown much larger than our creative little group of editors. Poetry at Work Day is now celebrated around the world by writers, readers, teachers, businesses, government entities and more. Here are some of the tweets we saw in recognition of this day, which seeks to find and elevate the poetry already alive and well in our places of work.

There’s good reason to love poetry at work on the Hudson above all others.

It is the work of poetry to translate us, after all.

Few places need poetry to break out of the lines like a cubicle wall.

On Poetry at Work Day, it’s always good to hear from the patron saint of work-from-home employees, Emily Dickinson.

As they say, code is poetry. So it’s good to see the folks at Wix stepping into the game.

(And of course we’re all about equal time for WordPress.)

Along with our friends on the other side of the pond (and the other side of the mountain), we always encourage a good walk to loosen up the stanzas.

Some days, work can be downright astonishing. Mary Oliver would agree.

Always good to see what our friends in radio bring us on Poetry at Work Day, this time channeling Marie Kondo and her tidying magic.

Rushdie famously said that the work of a poet is to name the unnameable. I think we’ll let this one speak for itself.

A Poetry at Work Day without bard and entrepreneur William Shakespeare wouldn’t really be a Poetry at Work Day.

You may not, however, want to follow poets into the dark.

The next generation of poets working:

These folks kind of give new meaning to Poetry for Life.

And then there’s poetry (at work) in motion.

Which, of course, can take on various forms.

Remember when William Carlos Williams said it’s difficult to get the news from poems? El Universal is here to help us out, a la the remarkable Rosario Castellanos.

Hey. Schoolwork is work. And it’s poetree.

As we’ve been saying nearly forever: There’s poetry in the workplace. Even in the office supplies.

Photo by Jan-Helge69, Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by LW Willingham.

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. Sandra Heska King says

    These are so good. So fun. I’m hard pressed to choose a favorite–but I did learn about fatbergs. Ewww… Also, I loved the hospice nurses’ poem/video. This is one of my favorite days of the year, and it’s so good to watch people look for and create a little poetry. So fun!

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  2. Hospice at Home West Cumbria says

    We are honoured to be included this Poetry at Work Day round up. Goodness. Thank you for sharing our poem internationally, we are so glad you like it. There are some wonderful poems here to inspire us too ❤

    “we have all of us one human heart.” William Wordsworth, The Old Cumberland Beggar

    We are the first hospice the Reimagining Wordsworth Project have worked with as part of a wider community project to share the power of poetry. We are excited to tell you The Wordsworth Trust will be working with us again in 2019, more poetry ahead!

    You can read more about the project here: http://www.reimaginingwordsworth.org.uk

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  3. Donna Falcone says

    The best part of Poetry at Work Day comes AFTER Poetry at Work Day! This! I always look forward to the compilation of shares. 🙂

    And… my theory is confirmed, thanks to Snow Dance. I much prefer the poetry of snow than the frozen fingers of it.

    Reply

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