Pressing His Ear Against the Hive: Andrew Lazo Reflects on Billy Collins' Introduction to Poetry

Note: By day, through most of the year, All Nine contributor Andrew Lazo works as a high school English teacher, regularly cajoling, threatening, wooing, enticing, bribing, and even tricking teenagers into reading thoroughly and, if and when at all possible, enjoying their reading, especially poetry. As such, he covets such kind thoughts and prayers as you might send his way; here he offers some thoughts as a kind of war correspondent on the front lines of the battle to make poems matter.

Image by Lancia Smith

Pressing His Ear Against the Hive: Reflections on Billy Collins' Introduction to Poetry
Andrew Lazo

Ahhh...summer break. For a teacher, this steamy season of blissful rest and recuperation promises so much more than it can ever deliver—no alarms, no complaints, no Sisyphean and self-replenishing piles of papers. In their place, I draw a contented breath, relishing glorious hours of reading my way down the tower of books by my bedside. Last week I shamelessly indulged in the luxury of pushing everything else aside in favor of a long, captivating book. I didn’t even eat until afternoon, so swiftly did the pages flip before my eyes. And when I was done, I found I’d forgotten about that curious hangover, a kind of stupor that settles over me for a day or two after I’ve submitted to a long book that will not let me go till I’d given it full due.

Summer also affords me the chance to browse lazily through those books I’ve bought not to read right away, but to keep on some shelf in the other room for those insomniac hours that the T’ang Dynasty poet Chang Chiu-Ling calls “the long thoughtfulness of night.”

Do you know such books? Products of casual rambles through a used book store, drifting to the poetry section, or past an author I vaguely remember someone raving on about. I’ll often slip the book off the shelf, roam around inside its covers, check to see if the pages have room for some penciled notes and an almost creamy quality.

And if the random paragraphs or first few stanzas leave me with a little grin broad enough to begin to feel a little self-conscience about visibly enjoying the book in front of others, I buy it. Such a shameless kind of public courtship often enough leads me to hours of delighted engagement once I’ve got such books safely home and into my dark and sometimes sleepless rooms.

So one night this week after pushing the little paper boat of another school year out into the pond, I did a little late-night browsing of my shelves. The results kept me up long past my now non-existent bedtime, and brought me delighted to former Poet Laureate Billy Collins. I must confess a fairly new but rapidly-growing obsession with his poetry, which I plan to indulge until I own every one of his works.

One poem in particular quite literally helped me survive more than one day of cajoling my teenage charges to read and enjoy poetry.  In talking about teaching poetry to his own reluctant students, Collins begins his “Introduction to Poetry” like this:

I ask them to take a poem  

and hold it up to the light  

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

And he ends it saying:

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope  

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose  

to find out what it really means.

As if anyone, even poets themselves, knows what a poem “really means.”

In general, rather than trying to trap some neat and easily-defined “meaning,” I invite my students to explore instead a poem’s ambivalence, its arresting images, and its particular and powerful sounds. I do whatever I can to see that at least once in their lives they’ve read a real poem in an authentic way that might speak to them. I’m happy to report some success, if their end-of-the-year journals are to be believed.

Collins’ poem has helped me to understand why I go to all this effort, for myself deep in long nights and for my students early on bright mornings. It’s all right there in line five. That one line in the poem stands by itself as if holding up its hand and waving it about in the middle of the classroom. Collins asks his students (who by now surely include me, and hopefully you too) to take a poem and “press an ear against its hive.”

Now there’s an image to ponder or to conjure with. Let’s just say for a second that a poem is a hive, and we press our ears against it. What might we hear?

First of all, it implies that, when pressing an ear to a poem, I’ll likely hear only indistinctly what happens inside of it. I find some comfort in the fact that I quite often come away from even the best of poems with only some vague notion about the import of all the activity happening inside it.

Next, it hints that in that hive of the poem, I may well discover that praiseworthy situation where a lot of males scurry busily about, attending to and providing for one female. This refreshing reversal of gender roles and pay equity, this way of turning of things upside down—don’t these alone suggest excellent reasons for visiting and revisting such a poem?

What else do I find by examining the inside of a poem? The structure of beeswax, of course, as deliberately made as it is fragile. Precise and repeated order, all made out of stuff that will easily melt away even as we might make candlelight out of it. Delicate and carefully-constructed containers of a rich and slow liquor—this too gives me an excellent way of thinking about poetry.

And these precise hexagons of course hold a thick, sweet, and golden goodness that will likely get all over me unless I wash it off well. Treasure, and a treasure increasingly rare as something is happening to the honeybees in the world. It occurs to me that poets may be disappearing at a similar rate to bees, much to my distress. Listening to a poem might just make honey drip out into my ears, and slowly sweeten the things inside my head.

I think I like this summer break. I think I like making a little space and time to wander through the pages of a book, as a bee ambles through a drowsy summer meadow.

And so I suggest that you find some new poems, and press your ear against them, especially if some time opens up before you during these swarthy months. And if you do, perhaps you’ll let me know and share some of the rich goodness you happen to find. And maybe that’s what the poem “really means.”

Pen phobia: writing through the fear

 “The real writer is one
who really writes. …
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.”

(Excerpt from “For the Young Who Want to” by Marge Piercy)

I remember like it was yesterday not being afraid to write. Maybe because it was yesterday. It may even have been this morning or two hours ago that I wasn’t afraid. But I am afraid now.

That is what it’s like when the bogey man sneaks up, silent, invisible, and pounces with a completely unanticipated panic, this weird phobia of picking up the pen, of moving it across the page. It’s a bizarre fear-feast that combines several sub-fears:

1.       The fear of having nothing to say

2.       The fear of having too much to say that is unresolvable, disturbing, or life-altering (in some nameless though painful way)

3.       The fear of writing crap

There are a number of logical ways to poke holes in these fear bubbles. On point 1, since when have I ever had nothing to say with my pen? Let’s move on.

Nat Goldberg (though I’ve never met this blessed woman, I call her “Nat” because I feel like I know her, having read so much of her work on this subject that I have yet another fear – of plagiarizing her without realizing it) says that (re: point 2) the disturbing stuff is where the energy is, and (point 3) that those of us who consistently practice writing will write crap a good deal of the time.  Crap is fertilizer. Be grateful for what grows out of it.

Since those fears are bogus and neatly dealt with, what is eating at me today? I realize even as I write that last question, the big “What’s-The-Point” horror is hounding me – the terror of meaninglessness. The world is already drowning in too many words. Everybody wants a platform, wants to be heard. What is so special about my words that anyone should read them?

And now I see the elephant in my peripheral vision. It’s over there, in the shadowy corner of my office, snickering. The big hairy elephant with pink bunny slippers, mocking me, taunting me, swaying his ludicrously large gray trunk back and forth, back and forth, slowly while he chants, “So, she wants to be a writer. So, she thinks she is a writer. So, the world could care less.”

Ok, let’s reason with the elephant. Maybe he’s right – I should give up my delusion. What does the world need with another writer? Maybe I can go back in time to a point when I wasn’t a writer, when I didn’t care about writing.

Sure. Maybe I can crawl back into my mother’s womb.

No, I do not remember a time when my hand did not ache to hold the pen, to move the ink across the page, to find out what my mind was holding out on me. For me, meaning is not a reason to write or not to write. I write through the fear of meaninglessness, even as I breathe through it. Neither the words nor the breath create meaning, but somehow I find it, on the other side of the fear. At the far end of the page.

The only cure to the fear of writing is to write. The “work is its own cure. You have to / like it better than being loved.”

Apparently I do like the work of writing better, since here I am still tapping away at this keyboard, meaninglessness yet unresolved. Me, I’m the one still in the room. The elephant… well, he’s long gone.

The Poet’s Work: A Reflection on Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Windhover”

I am honored once again to welcome poet, teacher, and friend Dr. Holly Ordway back to All Nine to share her insights and musings, this time on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Holly is an apologist exploring the intersection of literature and faith, reason and imagination. Follow Dr. Ordway's reflections on the practice of living a holy life at her website at http://www.hieropraxis.com/ or on twitter @HollyOrdway.

Photo by Holly Ordway

One of my college English professors remarked about The Windhover, “Nobody really knows what that poem is about.” At the time, I let that relieve me from the obligation to wrestle with it, even while admitting its beauty. Looking back, I wonder if I was simply unwilling to see what Hopkins was waiting to show me, for he tells us at least one thing pretty straight, in dedicating the poem “To Christ our Lord.”

I’ve traveled a lot of ground since I was an eighteen-year-old English major, and close on twenty years since I first encountered this poem in the pages of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume II, I find it one of my favorites, a poem that speaks to me in many moods and on many levels. Hopkins always gives me more than I can take in at any one reading.

One of the things he gives me is a taste of pure joy, so that I can recognize it when I feel it in my own life. I need the image of Christ as the windhover, the soaring bird of prey, free and dangerous and beautiful, because in my work as a Christian apologist, it is too easy to forget that my defense of the faith is the work of cooperating with the Spirit; God does not need my protection. Whatever I say or know about Him, He is “a billion / Times told lovelier, more dangerous.”

Most recently Hopkins has helped me as I learn how to be a poet. “My heart in hiding / Stirred for a bird, - the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!” When I feel that my heart will break for sheer joy, Hopkins shows me in the exuberance of his language that this joy can be expressed; that finding the right words and shaping them into the precise and constrained form of a sonnet, can be my response, as his was. “Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume here / Buckle!”

When I do not feel that joy, what then? The Psalmist says, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” He does not say that the Lord will keep him from the shadow, but only that he need not fear it.

Hopkins gives me two images that show me that the dark and weary days, when the spirit is in the valley of the shadow of death, are not wasted days.

He says, “sheer plod makes plough down sillion / Shine”: as the plough’s blade is pulled through the earth, step by weary step, breaking up the hard soil so that it can be planted and yield the harvest, the grinding of the soil will polish the buried blade, removing any rust, so that when it is pulled from the earth at the end of the row, it will be bright and shining.

And again, with another image: “blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, / Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.” The fire is at a low ebb, the embers seeming almost cold; they are dull, ashy. But when the fire is prodded the embers fall out of the grate, and break - and in breaking, show their glowing insides, “gold-vermillion,” the color of blood and royalty.

From a falcon wheeling joyously in the sky, to ashy coals falling from a grate, Hopkins finds beauty and words to frame that beauty. Not a bad way to think about the calling of the poet.

Reference

Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works. Oxford World’s Classics.

Listening to far-off fields: The Man Watching

The Man Watching

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

It was another Friday pepperoni-mushroom-onion-pizza night, home at last from my long commute, talking about the week with my husband. But it wasn’t just another Friday night. It was a Friday night in October of 2001, a month after the world collapsed in on itself, after the storm arrived, the storm that we should have known was coming had we been listening to the Man Watching. If we had only listened to what the far-off fields were saying.

My recollection of that period in history is one of both hunkering down and moving on. Many folks I knew dug in, put up bunkers, mainly emotional ones, but also ones with real ramifications, like choosing to not do anything (not travel, not trade in stock, not make big purchases, not change jobs, etc.).  But even more people I knew made really big decisions within the six months after 9/11, life changing decisions. The sudden then steady images over the news of the immovable being permanently moved, of dust-covered people we could have known (we could have been) running for their lives, created this wave of  realization that life is too short to fight such tiny battles and put off the big dreams. It was a national catalytic moment.

My husband and I were among the dreamers and the deciders, the catalyzed. That Friday night over our usual pepperoni, mushroom, and onion pizza with a couple Diet Cokes thrown in for good measure, we decided to put our house on the market.  Just like that. After years of talking about moving to Maine, as we nibbled on the last bits of crust that momentous evening, we looked at each other and said, “What are we waiting for?” 

You see, before that point (I can easily say now in retrospect), what we had been fighting was “so tiny,” to borrow from Rilke. The “far off fields” had been saying things to us that we needed to bear with friends and love with sisters. We had not loved our dreams well enough until then. Until we had been dominated by the immense storm, we could not move past the small fights that only made us weaker with every win.

Today, a decade-plus older and hopefully the wee bit wiser, even my more noble fights still look petty when I stop and realize my need to be “dominated /as things do by some immense storm.” As things do. Like trees that bend in the wind. Like a river that floods then contracts.

If only I could always pick the really big and important fights, the ones with eternal consequences, the ones that are not so newsworthy, but really matter. Perhaps then I “would become strong too, and not need names.”

Another slice of pizza couldn't hurt, either.

*****

I dedicate this post to the countless warriors (the ones who no longer need names) who chose to fight not the tiny but the greater, to let themselves be dominated, ultimately “being defeated, decisively” for this country and for freedom. Let them grow in our memory.

Reference

Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Robert Bly (Harper & Row, New York, 1981)

A World Aflame with Words

Musing on Malcolm Guite’s “On being told my poetry was found in a broken photo-copier”

Note: By day, guest blogger Andrew Lazo works as a high school English teacher, regularly cajoling, threatening, wooing, enticing, bribing, and even tricking teenagers into reading thoroughly and, if and when at all possible, enjoying their reading, especially poetry. As such, he covets such kind thoughts and prayers as you might send his way; here he offers some thoughts as a kind of war correspondent on the front lines of the battle to make poems matter.

As another school year closes and graduations descend upon us, I’ve found myself thinking about beginnings and endings. The sermon I heard Sunday marked another such end, as we celebrate the last Sunday in Easter and look towards Pentecost next week, the longest season of the church calendar. Endings and beginnings. Words, in the form of greeting cards and speeches and yearbook signings, fond farewells and a welcome in to the summer season. I’m changing jobs, moving to a high school next year, and so as I draw this year to a close, thoughts of my first day in a new place fill me even as I face the last moments with these people, some of whom I shall surely never see again.

Ah, that first day of school. As a teacher, I love that day. I’ve found nothing in the world so potent with possibility as that first-day-of-class terror. Not my fear, anxious though I always am, but the fear of my students. Thick and palpable, I can almost feel it as I walk into the room and write my name on the board. Potent with possibility. And a faint whiff of panic.

It’s always puzzled me that so many teachers let such a powerful moment slip by. So many of us follow the same format: we pass out a syllabus and then proceed to read the most stultifying prose known to man to these unwitting students in such terrific terror. As if they cannot read, at least well enough to register for and find their way to our classes. As if we need a way to lose their attention at once, providing them papers full of rules and deadlines. “Dead lines” indeed—a sort of crisp white boundary to immediately insert between themselves and us. Such a promising moment, so sadly squandered.

Fully confident of the fact that I have plenty of time, however inadvertently, to bore them in the future, I seize this first moment that I open my mouth before them and then dare something different. I stare at them a moment and then begin telling them about my dear friend, the ReverendDoctor Malcolm Guite of Girton College, Cambridge. He lookslike a half-sized, happy Hagrid, rides a Harley, plays guitar and sings lead in a pub band, and writes poetry in form. Everything you want in an Anglican priest, no?

One day at Girton College, one of Malcolm’s poems gummed up the Xerox rather badly and elicited this terse comment from the woman in charge of said copy machine: “Dr. Guite, your poetry is jamming my machine!” After freeing his verses (haha!) from the maw of the copier, Malcolm recognized that she had uttered a perfect line of iambic pentameter: “My poetry is jamming your machine.” He walked away musing, and soon thereafter produced the following villanelle.

I cannot begin to say how grateful I am that he did. I’ve memorized this wonderful piece, and I quote it to bookend the entire class. Each start and end of term, the opening words my students hear out of my mouth on the very first day of class and the last thing they hear as they head for the door come in the form of this poem. These lines for me perfectly take advantage of those vital moments of creative fear or of weary accomplishment. I have memorized through years of good use (and suggest you do the same):

On being told my poetry was found in a broken photo-copier

My poetry is jamming your machine

It broke the photo-copier, I’m to blame,
With pictures copied from a world unseen.

My poem is in the works -I’m on the scene

We free my verse, and I confess my shame,
My poetry is jamming your machine.

Though you berate me with what might have been,

You stop to read the poem, just the same,
And pictures, copied from a world unseen,

Subvert the icons on your mental screen

And open windows with a whispered name;
My poetry is jamming your machine.

For chosen words can change the things they mean

And set the once-familiar world aflame
With pictures copied from a world unseen

The mental props give way, on which you lean

The world you see will never be the same,
My poetry is jamming your machine
With pictures copied from a world unseen.
 

Let’s look at the poem. Several phrases of course leap out right away. These “pictures copied from a world unseen” slyly suggests several things at once. To those of us involved in the daily struggle to grow inside ourselves some kind of a spiritual life, this phrase might suggest the next world, new life. Heaven peeking through the thin places of the world. C. S. Lewis writes that the scriptures are “rustling with the rumor” that a new world awaits us. And the creative arts, poetry, architecture, dance, all the products of all the Nine Muses, these are the pictures we imperfectly create of a world we long to see.

Next I love the quite cunning phrase “we free my verse” all the more because I’ve never known Malcolm to write free verse at all. I feel justifiably certain he’d write EXCELLENT free verse; that he’d suggest it in so complex a form as a villanelle points to the sheer weight of gleeful creativity this poet brings to bear in his outstanding work.

“Subvert the icons on your mental screen” of course points to what both art and the Holy Spirit long to do—turn over the tables in our temples and present the world a new way for us to see into ourselves and into the lives of others. New eyes. Flipping things around. The irony, the paradox of a savior in a stable. And the subtle invitation to turn from the outer screens that bombard us daily and to pay close attention to the images inside. New eyes.

And new ears, for here again Malcolm’s sensuous spirituality slips in and “opens windows with a whispered name.” I think I know that name. Do you? Might it be my name? Might it be yours? Might it be the name at which we all will kneel in joy and wonder one day?

And now we come to the heart of the poem, of course: “chosen words can change the things they mean.” Isn’t that what all of us who labor in language long on our best days to do? I exhort my students never to underestimate the power of language to change the world, because from where I stand, ultimately, language offers us the only thing that ever does change the world.

In class as I round my recitation toward home, I pick out the most reluctant and least-likely faces and make eye contact, and even point a little, pressing home the truth that “the world you see will never be the same” for having allowed my poetry to jam up their machines. And by now, even the dullest among them realize that we are speaking here of more than machines, that a profound and purposeful metaphor has slipped into their soul by way of words.

Their machine may be an Xbox or an iPod, or a football field or a lifelong loathing of English class. It may prove something more primal, like fear of failing, or years of disapproval in the form of red-pen corrections. I tell my students that the books we read are not boring. Properly contextualized and opened up, any book one finds in the current school curricula might well offer wonders  and beauties, riches of several kinds. Perhaps the machine that this poetry will jam is their too-quick dismissal of a beauty that takes time and silence to unfold.

I exhort my freshmen reading Shakespeare for the first time that this searching for its sunken treasure takes time, and effort, and silence. A dictionary, and no distractions. A pencil to parse out the pages. And believe it or not, when they push open their lives to make space for the poetry of the play to arise, they find themselves both powerful in their ability to understand, delighted by the cleverness of it all, and even sensitive to the searing truths that the Bard always touches upon. After opening one passage recently, one young man literally shook in his seat for the joy of it all—both because of the lovely, intricate delight in the excellence of expression and meaningfulness, and because of the proud sense of power that he had understood it. He shook in his seat for joy. A world had opened up before him.

And so, as I face final classes this week, I shall recite this poem again to them, and pray somehow that for more than just one, my poetry has jammed their machines.  Although it may smolder awhile before each knows what to do with it, I hope they have found in their reading, in my poetry that I’ve pressed upon them, a spark that just may set their whole worlds aflame. And, come fall, we’ll try it all again.

Until then, next Sunday on Pentecost many of the churchfolk I know will wear clothes of yellow and red to remember the fire that comes down till it sits on our heads—and sets the world aflame, with pictures copied from a world unseen. Thank you, Malcolm. Your poetry is jamming our machines.

Rock me to sleep: Guest Blogger Sarah Flaherty on a Mother’s Love

It is an honor to welcome social media maven and talented wordsmith Sarah Flaherty to share her best Mother’s Day thoughts for readers of All Nine. A self-described bookworm and work-out junkie, Sarah is also one of those rarest of individuals: a quietly insistent and steady voice for kindness, fair play, and quality work. Follow her tweets at @SarahLiz815.

Rock me to sleep: Sarah Flaherty on a Mother’s Love
Over my heart, in the days that are flown,
No love like mother-love ever has shone;
No other worship abides and endures,—      
Faithful, unselfish, and patient like yours:
None like a mother can charm away pain
From the sick soul and the world-weary brain.
Slumber’s soft calms o’er my heavy lids creep;—     
Rock me to sleep, mother, – rock me to sleep!

From "Rock Me to Sleep" by Elizabeth Akers Allen
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/182732


When I was young, my mother used to hold her hand to my forehead and rub her thumb in the space between my eyebrows. It was as though she had hit my own personal "Relax" button—a switch that would calm my breathing, stop my tears, ease my mind. I wouldn't be able to stop my eyes from closing. I do the same thing now to my husband when he has a headache, and I'm sure one day I'll do it to our children. It's more than just a soothing movement; it's an expression of love.

For Mother's Day, I wanted to find a poem that would express the gratitude and love I have for my mother. The passage above was a little too Hallmark-card for me at first pass, but what I love is its simple message. So many of the poems I found were too complicated, too modern, too focused on the memories of a mother who has passed, or the complications of dealing with a mother's illness, or the intricacies and faults of a mother/child relationship.  All true expressions, in their own rights—but not what I was looking for.

With a few exceptions, I don't normally connect with poems published before the 20th century. They feel too grandiose (case in point: the exclamation point at the end of the stanza above), too large to find a way in. The camera is "zoomed out," as one of my college professors would have said. I can't get close enough to see the intimacies, the brushstrokes, the imperfections that invite me into the poem in a human way.

As I write this now from my husband's parents' house, I hear my mother-in-law on the phone upstairs speaking to one of her other three children (all in their 40s). "Love you, kid," she says as she hangs up. That's what I'm looking for, I thought. A poem that expresses the purest, tender love a mother has for her child that prompts her, 40+ years after their birth, to still call them "kid." And that's what I like about the excerpt above: it gets at that timeless love, the love that remains regardless of illnesses, passings, disagreements. It's beyond that. It's above that.

In Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert describes writing in her journal when she felt scared, lost, or drained. It's been a few years since I read the book, but I remember she talked about a voice that would emerge from the page and guide her forward. It was her own voice, of course--but a wiser, more honest part of herself that spoke only when she was willing to listen. I'm blessed that my mother lives just a few miles from me and I can call her or stop by when I'm overwhelmed with life, irrational fears, or anxiety.  And she's always there to help me dig for what's true, to tell me (and, more importantly, help me believe) that everything will be okay.  But when she's not immediately available and I have to find that voice to help me move forward, the voice of wisdom in my head is my mom.  If I can think about what she would say, what advice she would give, I'm always better off.  It's just one of the gifts she's given me, but it's one of the most valuable, guiding my writing, my work, and the way I live my life.

Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there—and to my own, I love you.

Sweet Accord: 4 writing tips from Wyatt

Throughout the world if it were sought,
Fair words enough a man shall find,
They be good cheap, they cost right nought,
Their substance is but only wind,
But well to say, and so to mean,
That sweet accord is seldom seen.

—Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)

For those of us in the business of communicating concepts through words (and when you get right down to it, aren’t we all?), it helps to review some basics about getting our messages heard through the cacophony of noise.  And for the rest of us who have to sort out all the competing messages, we would give anything for that priceless “sweet accord” that Sir Thomas Wyatt refers to.  The words that will get noticed are those that are “seldom seen,” those fair few that meet at the intersection of “well said” and “well meant.”

Sir Thomas Wyatt provides us a few timeless lessons on finding that priceless “sweet accord” of fair words and truth:

1.      Leave white space. “Fair words enough a man shall find…” Say/write only enough to get your message to your intended listener/reader. It is always better to leave people wanting more than to suffocate them with well-intentioned words.

2.      On the other hand… don’t be stingy with your fair words. “They cost right nought…” There may be a day, a moment, an opportunity when you are the one person who is there in the right place at the right time to say something very true, very well, and very much needed. That is not the time for white space.

3.      Say your most important things very well. “Well to say…” Honor your best efforts by giving them your best words. You are not going to change the world with your ground-breaking study of newfound truth if no one can understand what you are saying (or if they are too bored by it to wait for the punch line).

4.      Use fine words fittingly. “So to mean…” Your loyal readers honor you with their eyes. Don’t betray that trust with empty words or half-truths. If you have nothing of substance or meaning to offer at this time, take a pass and leave space for the next messenger bearing the substance of sweet accord.