• Home
  • Fine Living
    • Start Here—Welcome to Tweetspeak!
    • Read
      • A Poem a Day with Every Day Poems
      • book club
      • Poetry Newsletter!
      • poetry reviews
      • T. S. Poetry Press
      • Quote a Day
      • VerseWrights Journal
    • Write
      • A Book of Beginnings
      • Become a Better Writer
      • Fiction Posts & Prompts
      • Memoir Notebook
      • Poets and Writers Toolkit
      • Writer’s Conferences
      • Writing Prompts
    • Live
      • Art and Disabilities
      • Artist Date
      • Eating and Drinking Poems
      • Journey into Poetry
      • Literary Tour
      • Moms on Poetry
      • Poem on Your Pillow Day
      • Poetry at Work Day
      • Random Acts of Poetry Day
      • Take Your Poet to Work Day
    • Play
      • Coloring Page Poems
      • Mischief Café
      • Music Playlists
      • poetry humor
      • Quote a Day
      • Shop
      • Twitter Poetry Parties
      • Videos
    • Learn
      • A Poem in Every Heart, a Story in Every Soul
      • Infographics
      • Poetry Classroom
      • Poetry Units for Teachers
      • Writer’s Conferences
      • Writing Workshops
    • Grow
  • Poets & Poems
  • Writers’ Resources
  • Daily Poem
  • Teaching Tools
  • The Press
  • Workshops

The Poetry of the Boss

By Glynn Young 10 Comments

poetry of bosses

Leadership in the workplace is more than a minor genre in business books. For decades, stretching back at least to the 1920s when “management” began to emerge as a “science, ” leadership has been a serious business subject to study, pursue, get a degree in, and apply. (Peter Drucker, for example, began writing on the subject in the late 1930s.)

What workplace leadership should–and shouldn’t–do has changed over the years, much as workplace structures have changed and are still changing. Corporations, for example, approached management in the command-and-control image of the military; consider the origin of “staff” functions we’re so familiar with in organizations today. The military metaphor fit a mass-production economy.

Command-and-control management didn’t inspire much poetry, but it did give birth to a considerable number of novels.

The Metaphor Began to Change

The management metaphor began to change in the 1960s and 1970s. The famous “plastics” scene in the 1967 film The Graduate signaled a shift–the business executive telling the young Dustin Hoffman to pursue a career in plastics and his words making no sense to Hoffman whatsoever. The command-and-control boss knew all the answers and all the questions, too. This paternalistic system began to fall apart in the 1980s when the promise of orderly and lifetime employment began dissolving in the reality of waves of restructurings and downsizings.

This conflict and human drama could have easily been the subject of poetry, but it largely wasn’t, perhaps a result of poetry being firmly ensconced within academia.

What did happen was a wave of focus on “best practices” led by management consulting firms. One of the bibles of this wave was In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, until people began to notice that the companies singled out for excellence didn’t all remain successful.

A Hard Time to Be a Boss

This was a hard time to be a boss. So much was changing; so much conventional wisdom was being thrown out. This was the period when poet David Whyte published The Heart Aroused : Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America. His was one of the first works directly connecting the questions of the workplace–the big questions–being answered in some way by poetry. (We wrote about Whyte and his book a few weeks ago here.)

What’s been developing as one possible new model is the network–more than one expert has noted that we tend to organize our workplaces along the lines of the prevailing technology. Email and the internet have changed everything yet again. Senior executives and middle-level bosses can be second-guessed like never before–and often are. Executives giving bad speeches are live-tweeted. Missteps and failures (and embarrassments) live forever on the web. And yet facets of the command-and-control structure are still with us; not every decision can be made by a team.

So what’s a boss to do? How does he or she manage in a complex, unsettled, fluid workplace? Muddle through, ignore reality, or, as Whyte suggests, read Beowulf?

A Poem About the Boss

So consider your boss. Or perhaps, more safely, consider a previous boss. Whether the experience was a good one or a bad one, consider that boss through a poetic lens. In other words, write about that boss in a poem, using the form of poetry to explain, celebrate, understand, or even forgive.

Here’s my effort for a former boss:

Stares at the corner where
two glass walls meet, almost
the exact point where the sun
sets, caught in the rise
of his people asking, probing
how and more and the descent
of this own boss seeking cuts.
He chooses the way
he’s been taught, looking
upward, knowing there’s little
reward in the daily, where
life is.

Post your poem here in the comments, or on your blog and link here, and we’ll choose one or two for a possible feature next week.

If your experience with the boss was a bad one, strive for understanding. But venting is okay, too.

Photograph by Kathleen Overby. All rights reserved; used with permission. Post by Glynn Young, author of the novels Dancing Priest and the recently published A Light Shining.

_____________________

Buy a year of Every Day Poems, just $2.99 — Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In December we’re exploring the theme Haiku.

Every Day Poems Driftwood

Poetry at Work-Hot

You Might Also Like

  • poetry and business lifePoetry at Work: Poetry and Business Life
  • poetry in corporate americaCan Poetry Save the Corporate Soul?
  • Poetry Ted KooserPoetry at Work: Ted Kooser, Insurance Underwriter (and Poet Laureate)
  • Ten Great Articles on Poetry and WorkTen Great Articles on Poetry and Work

Filed Under: article, poetry and business, Poetry at Work, work poems

P. S., With Love

We hope you found something
inspiring here today.

Why not keep it going—for you, and the world?
For as little as $1 a month.

Comments

  1. Tania Runyan says

    December 4, 2012 at 10:35 am

    Well done, Glynn! Hm. . .so do I write a poem about Laura? She’s the closest thing to a boss I have!

    Reply
    • Glynn says

      December 4, 2012 at 12:08 pm

      I think that would take the form of epic.

      Reply
    • L.L. Barkat says

      December 4, 2012 at 1:08 pm

      Are you saying I’m bossy? 😉

      Just don’t write an epic poem about that 🙂

      Reply
  2. Donna says

    December 5, 2012 at 7:22 am

    I love this post and this prompt, Glynn. Thinking back to when I had a ‘boss’ what comes to mind and heart is how perfectly her need to dominate rattled that part of me that could easily be reduced to puny. So, a Haiku:

    suddenly i’m 5
    timidly approaching
    HER door hard and closed

    Reply
    • L. L. Barkat says

      December 5, 2012 at 11:41 am

      Donna, this is marvelous in its simplicity 🙂

      Reply
      • Donna says

        December 5, 2012 at 11:55 am

        Thank you. Nice to put that squirming in my saddle shoes feeling to good use, finally. 🙂

        Reply
  3. Tania Runyan says

    December 5, 2012 at 10:39 am

    Laura, I don’t know if one epic could do justice to your reign of terror!

    Reply
    • L. L. Barkat says

      December 5, 2012 at 11:39 am

      well then, write as many as you need, to heal from the pain 😉

      Reply
  4. Monica Sharman says

    December 12, 2012 at 6:53 pm

    she peels an unripe
    clementine, the rind still sticks,
    the segments sour

    (This is not about a boss, but you said I could vent here. It may or may not be about an extended family member. I might have included “grrrr” in this haiku, but I’m not sure how many syllables that counts for.)

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. This Week's Top Ten Poetic Picks | says:
    September 5, 2013 at 11:05 am

    […] course, writing poems about your boss isn’t necessarily going to add anything to your paycheck, as these writers suggest in […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Take How to Read a Poem

Get the Introduction, the Billy Collins poem, and Chapter 1

Free with tweet

Welcome All the Goodness

Welcome all the
patron-only goodness,
when you become a part of a place
that brings joy to the world.

Follow Tweetspeak Poetry

Welcome to Tweetspeak

New to Tweetspeak Poetry? Start here, in The Mischief Café.

You’re a regular? Check out our February Menu.

Recent Comments

  • rohit aggarwal on How to Write a Poetry Review
  • The cure for writer’s block – Moms on Poetry on A Poem a Day with Every Day Poems
  • Glynn on Poets and Poems: Benjamin Myers and “Black Sunday”
  • Florence F. Brooks on Writing, Paper & Quills: Ode to a Planner Prompt

A Love Story to Teaching

The Teacher Diaires Front Cover with Lauren Winner

“Hilarious, heart-rending, entertaining.”

—KA, Amazon reviewer

GET FREE SAMPLE NOW

Featured In

We're happy to have been featured in...

The New York Observer

The Huffington Post

The Paris Review

Tumblr Book News

Categories

Poetry for Life? Here's our manifesto on the matter...

Poetry for Life: The 5 Vital Approaches

Help make it happen. Post The 5 Vital Approaches on your site!

Learn to Write Form Poems

Whether or not you end up enjoying the form poem, we've seen the value of building your skills through writing in form.

One reader who explored the villanelle was even featured in Every Day Poems!

How to Write an Acrostic

How to Write a Ballad

How to Write a Catalog Poem

How to Write a Ghazal

How to Write a Haiku

How to Write an Ode

How to Write a Pantoum

How to Write a Rondeau

How to Write a Sestina

How to Write a Sonnet

How to Write a Villanelle

Featured Literary Analysis

Poem Analysis: Anne Sexton's Her Kind

Poem Analysis: Adrienne Rich's Diving into the Wreck

Poem Analysis: Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach

Character Analysis: Romeo and Juliet

Order and Disorder in Macbeth

Tone in For Whom the Bell Tolls and Catch-22

Tragedy and Comedy: Why People Love Them

Was Hamlet Sane or Insane?

Shakespeare Resources

Poetry Classroom: Sonnet 18

Common Core Picture Poems: Sonnet 73

Sonnet 104 Annotated

Sonnet 116 Annotated

Character Analysis: Romeo and Juliet

Character Analysis: Was Hamlet Sane or Insane?

Why Does Hamlet Wait to Kill the King?

10 Fun Shakespeare Resources

About Shakespeare: Poet and Playwright

Top 10 Shakespeare Sonnets

Book Promotion, Platform, Publicity

Author Platform: Where to Start

Ten Surprising Secrets to Make Your Book Go Viral

How to Host a Successful Book Launch

Simple Tips on Finding and Working with a Book Publicist

How to Get Your Poems Published!

Pride and Prejudice Resources

5 Amusing Pride and Prejudice Quotes

Infographic: Simpleton's Guide to Pride and Prejudice

10 Great Pride and Prejudice Resources

Happy Birthday Mr. Darcy: A Pride and Prejudice Playlist

Featured Top 10 Poems

Top 10 Chicken Poems

Top 10 Chocolate Poems (Okay, Minus 3)

Top 10 Fairy Tale Poems

Top 10 Funny Poems

Top 10 Laundry Poems

10 of the Best Love Poems

Top 10 Poems with Make or Break Titles

Top 10 Mirror Poems

Top 10 Question Poems

Top 10 Red Poems

Top 10 Rose Poems

Top 10 Summer Poems

10 Great Poems About Work

Children’s Poems, Children’s Books

Llamas in Pajamas and Ten Great Children's Poetry Books

A Children's Poem on the Playground

Come Again: Teaching Poetry to Children

Poetry With Children: What's in Your Journal

Teaching Poetry to Children: There Are So Many Blues

Take Your Poet to Work Day: Poet Treasure Hunt in the Library (Callie's Story)

6 Benefits of Reading Aloud to Your Children

Top 10 Children's Books and YA Books

Little Red Riding Hood: Graphic Novel

14 Reasons Peter Rabbit Should Be Banned (Satire)

The Latest Patron-Only Articles

Handwritten Letter

The Handwritten Letter: How To Tell A Friend You Adore Her

Braiding Sweetgrass Lost in Translation

Braiding Sweetgrass: Lost in Translation

Gratitude Together: Now Our Minds Are One

Braiding Sweetgrass book club

Braiding Sweetgrass: No One Asked the Plants

Featured Infographics

Infographic: How to Write an Acrostic Poem

Infographic: How to Write a Ballad

Infographic: How to Write an Epic Poem

Infographic: Ghazal for a Gazelle

Infographic: Boost Your Haiku High Q

Infographic: Pantoum of the Opera

Infographic: How to Write an Ode

Infographic: Poem a Day

Infographic: How to Write a Rondeau

Infographic: Simpleton's Guide to Pride and Prejudice

Sonnet Infographic: Quatrain Wreck

Featured Playlists

Playlist: Cat's Meow

Playlist: Doors and Passageways

Playlist: Fairy Tale and Fantasy

Playlist: Purple Rain and Indigo Blues

Playlist: Surrealism

Playlist: Best Tattoo Songs

Playlist: Trains and Tracks

All the Playlists

They Bring Poetry for Life

Meet our wonderful partners, who bring "poetry for life" to students, teachers, librarians, businesses, employees—to all sorts of people, across the world.

About Us

  • Our Story
  • Meet Our Team
  • Poetry for Life: The 5 Vital Approaches
  • Contact Us

Writing With Us

  • Poetry Prompts
  • Submissions
  • Writing Workshops

Reading With Us

  • Book Club
  • Dip Into Poetry
  • Every Day Poems
  • Literacy Extras
  • Quote a Day
  • VerseWrights Journal

Public Days for Poetry

  • Poem on Your Pillow Day
  • Poet in a Cupcake Day
  • Poetry at Work Day
  • Random Acts of Poetry Day
  • Take Your Poet to School Week—National Poetry Month!
  • Take Your Poet to Work Day

Gift Ideas

  • Give the Gift of Every Day Poems
  • Our Shop
  • Everybody Loves a Book!

Connect

  • Blog Buttons
  • Put a Poem in Your Heart, Or a Story in Your Soul
  • Shop for Tweetspeak Fun Stuff

Copyright © 2019 Tweetspeak Poetry · Site by The Willingham Enterprise · FAQ & Disclosure

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.OkRead more