3 marketing lessons from a poetry course
From the archive - On repurposing, double lives & lessons from poetry
“Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
- Mary Oliver
Hi friend,
I’ve spent all week trying to remember how to do my life.
It seems four days of spritzes and people-watching in Venice piazzas makes you forget.
April is National Poetry Month. While I sometimes feel like I lead a double Poet PR life, a week crammed with teen revision and client catch-ups and an awareness month I treasure, felt like the right moment to re-purpose this piece from The Conversation archives.
It’s one I wrote on marketing lessons from a poetry course I took last summer - I hope you enjoy.
3 marketing lessons from a poetry course
I spent much of last week on a super-intense, all-consuming poetry course. Hours of workshops and reading and over-sharing (maybe just me?).
I’m not suggesting you write a sonnet for your next LinkedIn post.
Or you develop a Byron-style personal brand (“mad, bad and dangerous to know” in case you wondered).
But there were a couple of moments in my poetry course last week that I felt resonated so much with what we do as marketers and leaders:
1. Start your day with journalling
I’ve written about the transformative practice of journalling before. *
Free writing. Stream of consciousness or Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages.
It’s three pages of pouring your thoughts directly onto a page. You effectively de-gunk the congestion in your head. It's how we started each morning.
Journalling can set the tone for your day. I’ve used it to work through personal stuff or new projects for my business. Sometimes I can map out a mini plan for the day, commit to goals, get clear on direction of travel. It’s your time.
It’s a technique I encourage in my Magentic Copy for Business workshops, especially for founders and marketers looking to find their own voice.
*I’ve recently been using Summer Brennan’s personal inventory method which is super-clarifying.
2. Get more comfortable expressing who you really are
Course tutor, incandescent poet and human Victoria Kennefick, told us that when she selects poems as an editor, she looks for ones “that most express who the poet is.”
It’s a struggle to show ourselves in our writing and marketing.
We hold parts of ourselves back by using jargon, thin veneers of generic but easy words. That end up being a mask. And create distance with the people we want to connect with.
Where can you start to open more? Share more honestly, and make your audience think “me too”?
Victoria recommends starting with knowing your true point of view.
Start here.
Then do what Mary Oliver says: tell about it.
3. You’ve got to tune that s**t out
In a 121 tutorial with Rebecca Goss, (the Meryl Streep of UK poetry) we got to chatting about pacing in our work.
How easy it is to feel like we’re five years behind where we want to be.
That we’re not going fast enough.
Haven’t hit the right milestones.
How is everyone else doing so much more? So much better?
Rebecca’s advice: “you’ve got to tune that s**t out.”
It’s a line she borrowed from Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness. And now I have too.
Go at your own pace.
Ditch comparison.
Go deeper into your own work. Watch the big magic happen.
What’s one of these lessons you can start today? Tell me in the comments below.
And, as always, I would be forever grateful if you forwarded this onto someone you’d write a poem for.
With love,
Antonia xo
PS for anyone looking to shake off GCSE English Lit memories/ support National Poetry Month, these are the poetry books on my desk now:
England’s Green Zaffar Kunial
Wound is the Origin of Wonder Maya C. Popa
[...]: Poems Fady Joudah
Morning pages are game changing for me, I can’t believe I managed my first 40 odd years without them!
Lesson 2 really hit for me. It's a question I've been posing to myself a lot in my morning pages after realising that even after four years since leaving the corporate world I'm still conditioned to it - particularly in how I express myself! I'm enjoying trying some experiments to see what fits.