Poetry should have a place in corporate board room

“Selected Poetry of Ogden Nash”
Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers


Poetry was once defined as “best words in their best order.” If that is so, then poetry should have a place in the executive suites and in corporate board rooms.

We hear businessmen conclude their speeches with a line from Robert Frost … “miles to go before I sleep”. Our bag of phrases is also filled with Shakespearean lines like “To be or not to be; that is the question” to speak of a certain quandary. Or, when we give a gift we quote Thomas Gray with this: “Not what we give but what we share/ For the gift without the giver is bare.” Even some popular songs have been accorded the classification of poetry, especially some songs of the Beatles.

These tell us only one thing. We have uses for poetry to express something deeper than prose; to give “soul” to a piece; or to add intensity to a speech. What’s noticeable, though, is that our poetry collections date back to the Elizabethan Age and earlier ages.

The advent of free verse and the use of allusions (that only students of poetry understand), plus the loading of symbols (that cascade from a literary heritage of myths and imagery) – have turned off many of us. Poetry has become confined to those in the literary circle, and we are outside that circle.

Once in a rare while, a book of poetry comes along to beckon us to become interested again in verse – or versification, if you wish. This poetry collection -- subtitled “650 Rhymes, Verses, Lyrics, and Poems” – is one such book. Ogden Nash was called by literary critics as the “master of light verse,” but respected poet Archibald MacLeish takes issue with them saying, “light verse carries a demeaning connotation. It implies that the art of poetry has its Macy’s basement where a kind of second-rate excellence is the criterion.”

So, when we read Ogden Nash we get real poetry that we can identify with. MacLeish says, Nash used the light verse form to “enable him to examine the inanities of his time in a colloquial language most men understood.”

Writing about what we read in the papers, the poet says:

I find it very difficult to enthuse
Over the current news.
there has never been an era when so many
things were going so right for so many of the
wrong persons.

He also has something to say about the banking industry’s policy of lending money to those who don’t need the money.

Most bankers dwell in marble halls,
And particularly because they observe one rule
which woe betides the banker who fails to heed it,
Which is you must never lend any money
to anybody unless they don’t need it.

If you want some witty one liners in verse, the book 682 of pages offers a treasure. For example, on “Common Sense,” Nash gives his astonishing insight about those who have mastered the art or evasion of blame throwing:

Why did the Lord give us agility
If not to evade responsibility?

We can also identify with him about our daily complaints in the workplace, especially those bosses we would rather not see:

When people aren’t asking questions
They’re making suggestions
And when they’re not doing one of those
They’re either looking over your shoulder
or stepping on your toes
And then as if that weren’t enough to annoy you
They employ you.

The poet, who worked as an advertising executive before he went full time versifying, also knows the value of small talk during cocktails:

Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.

Our library is full of books on management, marketing, production, strategic thinking, and business quotes. It’s time there is a book of poetry to serve as an oasis in a desert of prose. This one (which I bought at Page One in Rockwell Center) deserves to be there. You see, it also has witty lines on personal relationships, like this one:

To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up.

There are long pieces and short ones. The pages are peppered with verses on lovable and not so lovable members of the Animal Kingdom. Like this one: The turtle lives ‘twixt plated decks/Which practically conceal its sex./ I think it clever of the turtle/In such a fix to be so fertile.
Poetry has a way of perking up an otherwise prosaic existence in the business world. Why? The answer will require another piece of writing. Sometimes, we really cannot explain everything. Even Ogden Nash cannot explain the existence of this flying object: God in His wisdom made the fly/ And then forgot to tell us why.