June 26, 2022 / Esther Choy

Poets pay attention to music of language and have a keen awareness of their audience that includes their physical, emotional, and intellectual experience.

As discussed in my recent Forbes article, poets use impactful communication strategies that can be adopted by business leaders looking to connect with their audiences in meaningful ways. Beyond paying attention to the power of the image, poets also pay attention to music of language and have a keen awareness of their audience that includes the physical, emotional, and intellectual experience of reading a poem. In this article, I will explore that latter two. 

Music of Language

Words have a music of their own. The staccato of consonants, the power of pow, the delight of weeeee! On an intuitive level many people understand the emotional and musical values of certain words, but poets and the greatest orators make it their business to pay attention to this music. 

In his celebratory poem “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” award winning poet Ross Gay writes about the joy of planting an orchard. In this section, he makes an unexpected subject matter sing, 

Hear ye! hear ye! I am here

to holler that I have hauled tons—by which I don’t mean lots,

I mean tons — of cowshit

and stood ankle deep in swales of maggots

swirling the spent beer grains

It starts with repetition of the soft and lulling h’s, which is brought to a halt with the hard c and t of “cowshit.” This dramatic change in sounds emphasize the unexpected subject matter. Next, the poet repeats “s” compound consonants, “st” “sw” “sw” “sp” making a dance out of the act of turning compost. All of these words together, highlight the innate music of language and take the reader on a joyful journey with the poet through the compost pile and into the orchard. 

For business leaders, a great way to enter into the music of language is with repetition. Anaphora is when the first part of a sentence is repeated. Many great (and memorable speeches) employ anaphora, such as MLK’s often quoted I Have a Dream speech or JFK’s famous phrasing: “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.” 

The repetition of similar or exact phrases builds a rhythm and piques your audience’s attention. Repetition also makes your language more memorable. As you begin to pay attention to anaphora, you will notice how often it is employed in everyday speech from television commercials to your neighbor’s storytelling on the front porch.

You can have fun with this. Flip-flopping words and ideas can create punchy, memorable sayings. At a recent session with a client, business leaders created these quotable sayings using playful repetition such as: “Numbers don’t lie, but you can lie with numbers.” This phrase will be remembered by audiences and is a great introduction for a story.

Want Business Storytelling Examples And tips Delivered To Your Inbox? Sign up here!

Audience Awareness

Although all forms of communication should pay attention to the experience of their audience, poetry gets a special prize because a poet pays to the physical experience of their audience as well as their emotional and intellectual experience. 

What a poem is like to read, where you take breaths, how the words feel in your mouth, how easily the words spill across your tongue (or don’t) are all part of the experience that the poet cares about when they are writing a poem. 

Let us explore a haiku written by Issa translated by Robert Hass to understand the power of the breath and line breaks. 

The snow is melting

and the village is flooded

with children.

In this poem, the poet starts with the image of melting snow. He gives you a moment to rest there, before he pulls in the wider view of the village, flooding. The next line break provides a pause before turning to a delightful surprise — children! In your mind, you’ve already created a scene of a wet, flooded village, and then it is populated by children. The surprise turn of the poem is the key strategy of this poem. Had the poet ended the poem with “with puddles” the haiku would be forgettable. The reader would have not experienced any delight or surprise. Equally so, if the poet had written “The village is flooded with children,” without a line break, the reader would not have had time to breath, pause, and make conjectures about what was coming next. 

In business storytelling, this kind of audience awareness can be considered in more than one way. Questions you can ask yourself to help you build up your audience awareness include:

  • What kind of story does my audience need to hear right now? 
  • Do I need to ask my audience to get up and stretch before I continue? 
  • Do I need to add more pauses and breaths to my story to build up anticipation or leave time for my audience to imagine what I’m describing? 
  • Is there a movement in the story that my audience needs to act out in order to better understand my story?  
  • How will my pitch and pace influence my story?

Personal introductions at business conferences or company-wide gatherings can be a great place to engage with some of these ideas about audience awareness. Going around the room to do introductions often includes a standard and monotonous form that most people followed: name, job title, a recent project, and ending with a personal fact. 

Our client created an introduction that would break the normal pacing and format of these introductions. Instead of starting with, “I’m Jim, the Vice President of Sales at ABC Marketing,” he starts with this: “The need for speed and the great adventure has always been part of my nature. I am ‘the one’ in the family that threw caution to the wind to fulfill that dream inside, to explore and create. Early on I did not realize that my quest for speed would also be a great teacher of balance within.” By starting with an exciting and personal story, Jim broke with the expectation of the audience and made them more alert and ready to listen. It also highlights Jim’s values rather than his job title, which is not as important to Jim as his desire to help his team learn how to find balance. 

Tell the right story for any business situation - we'll give you the tools.

Conclusion

Poetry pulls us out of the humdrum of everyday life and asks us to pause and to re-engage with the world with our five senses. It often helps us find beauty and meaning and connect with our emotions in unexpected ways. With a call for an effective use of language, poetry asks that we pay attention to imagery, concision, music in language, and the experience of the audience. The next time you are preparing for a presentation whether it be with a client or your team, what poetic strategies will you employ?

 

 

 

 

Esther Choy

Esther Choy founded Leadership Story Lab in 2010 to help others leverage the art of storytelling to create extraordinary opportunities.

Why Leadership Storytelling Is Actually So Powerful

A Better Way To Lead Your Team Through Change: Leadership Storytelling 

What Happens When You Unlock Authentic Storytelling In Corporate Trainings

Leave a Comment





Better Every Story

"This is an amazing and insightful post! I hadn’t thought of that so you broadened my perspective. I always appreciate your insight!" - Dan B.

Join the thousands who receive Esther Choy’s insights, best practices and examples of great storytelling in our twice monthly newsletter.

  • By subscribing, you are agreeing to our privacy policy.
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.