The Workshop. Poetry, People and the Dance Of Trust.
As a service designer I have been exploring how to use poetry for organizational and team building workshops.
I recently co-facilitated a poetry and song workshop. The focus of the workshop was “come as you are”. And the participants came as they were. They came like a flood, through the door, a true slice of human history, of people from the Jersey City neighborhood and others from far flung places like Iran, France, Spain, India, Egypt, Brooklyn, Weehawken and someone from right next door. They came with body, instrument, song, voice, rhythm and with the texture of stories from childhood memories, from bygone eras, from different continents, from the ingredients of other worlds, of same worlds.
The Workshop Agenda
I had planned an agenda for the workshop, some exercise about how to distill one of your absolutely most memorable moments into one perfect sentence. I wanted to share one aspect of poetry, just one, and then design an exercise so all of us could be co-creators of this community, this resistance to homogeneity, this celebration of authenticity, and human awkwardness.
Strange To Be in a Room Full of 20 Strangers
As soon as most of us settled into our couches and chairs, I decided to rip up and toss the overly-engineered agenda. I came up with a question to ask the group.
What does poetry mean to you?
I framed the discussion with a few of my own thoughts about poetry, about how it’s an oral tradition and that its inherent rhythms help us to remember all kinds of stuff. Basically it’s ancient art. It’s really human and it follows the beat of your heart and my heart.
Blown Away By These Diverse Perspectives on Poetry
A beautiful poem to me is concise and mathematical proof
Found my way to poetry, motherhood led me to poetry, made me take a break
Poetry carves a way to make sciences and arts collide
Discovered poetry by listening to the Koran and qawals
Poems are recitation of sonnets, beautiful words of lament
The titling of visual art work is a form of poetry — registrations, when is it music or poetry? What is the line?
Memorizing Frost and Hughes, hebrew, medieval spanish, the rhyme helped to memorize, learning Shakespeare, I feel inspired by sonnets, think about the ebb and flow and the etymology of words.
The Power of One Word
As I listened to each person I realized how personal poetry can be. Not only that, but also how one word can mean so many different things. It reminds me of Adrienne Rich’s book of poems, The Dream of a Common Language. On that evening, we shared a common language.
The purpose of doing a workshop is to bring people together, to build empathy, to build community. Asking a question about one word can build bridges. Yes, what we have in common brings us together but that which is unique can also build a universe of commonality, a sense of trust.
If you want to learn more about your customers and the people in your organizations, reach out so we can discuss a potential workshop topic of your choice.
Thanks for reading.
