What I’d like to do here is write something about figuring out what I think is going to be a key component of the Quantum Cats story: I’ve figured out what’s in one of the mystery boxes. I won’t spoil it, other than to say that inspiration comes from many places, but none so much as personal experience. “Write what you know,” it is said, which makes me wonder why I’m not writing more stories about playing Nintendo at 1 a.m. on a Saturday while drinking Coors Lite and eating chips brought back from a recent trip to Pennsylvania. There might be a bit of what entrepreneurs call “white space” there; I don’t know.
Now that I’ve got some momentum, I can also say that I think my day job in the corporate world is ripe fodder for some neat poetry. “Poetry for Business,” I call it, or perhaps the pithier “Business Poetry,” which sounds like an English elective they’d offer to Business Administration undergrads at a middle-tier East Coast liberal arts college, or maybe Bentley. Or Babson. Actually, it’s goofy enough for MIT, and would have garnered a short article in Newsweek, if this were 1993.
The idea is that the business/corporate world is an environment rife with shared experiences and an internal vernacular. Everybody who’s ever been assigned a cubicle knows what it’s like to arrive at your meeting room and find that the the previous meeting is running over, which makes your meeting start late, which starts (continues?) a “delay-chain” resulting in the last meeting of the day beginning at approximately 10:47 p.m. Which, thankfully for me, I’m usually able to reschedule because I’m not a, you know, inhuman monster with no concept of work-life balance.
The point being, there are millions of people who have “been there, done that,” and (I’m making a big assumption here) a lot of them don’t seem like the kind of people who curl up with a good poem. I mean, I don’t, and I write the stuff. So I think that if you wrote the right kind of thing, there’s subject matter there that will resonate. “Connect with an audience,” you might say.
I think poetry gets a bad rap. My assumption is that many others’ assumption is that it’s all overwrought, incomprehensible word salad, or awkward rhymes, or bad high school emotional drama, or trauma oversharing, or Classic Poetry which means “full of words nobody uses anymore, or else kind of pedantic but they were the first person to be pedantic about that thing so they get a pass.”
What you can do with a poem is you can dispense with a lot of setup and characterization and plot development and other stuff and just get to the fundamentals of an idea, and start communicating. Poetry is the SNL sketch of writing. “List-based Articles”—or “Listicals” as they may or may not be called by anybody—are basically poems. Improv is poetry. Tweets or whatever we’re calling them now? That word limit makes them perfect for poetry. No need for the constraints of punctuation or spelling or formatting. Pure, uncut ideas, good or bad or profound or “profound”.
A lot of Facebook posts could be poetry, basically. Twitch discourse? Poetry. Even YouTube comments, graffiti, “overheard” conversations, all lend themselves to poetry. Poetry is a medium for the ADHD overstimulated two-seconds-is-too-long world we live in.
I’m oversimplifying a bit; a lot of that stuff is…it’s not good. But the purity of the intention is good; it is meaning, distilled, instantiated by putting the best words in their best order. It can be funny! I’m trying to make some of it funny.
What I’m also trying to do is make that kind of stuff for people who have Opinions on returning to the office, poems about the cafeteria and scope creep and spreadsheets. I am hoping they read it.
See? That wasn’t so hard. I shared real insights on the journey of a fledgling writer, a peek behind the curtain! Hardly any screaming at all. It really upsets the neighbors when I do; they think we’re being invaded by fisher cats.
—jr
