Tuesday 9 December 2014

Poetry in Motion

Asking increasingly beautiful questions is a a fundamentally beautiful practice that poet David Whyte encourages.  His salon series, which I joined for the past year in a small company of others, was an oasis for such explorations.  Academic pursuits, like other institutionalised endeavours, can lack life's full juice - a caricature that's all head and not much else - yet poets can provide a wellspring even there. And it's vital that they do.


Taking my academic research to a Higher Education Academy dissemination event early this year, a senior academic whose name I am sorry I didn't write down, responded enthusiastically to my interest in poetry. And, to my relief, so did others.  He asked me, "Have you read Seamus Heaney's The Redress of Poetry"? I had not. "I was lucky to hear him speak.  You should get it."  So I did.

The HEA event was something of a redress itself: a chance to glimpse exceptional attention to enthralling enquiry, enquiry finding space in which to keep breathing itself alive during troubled times for thinkers of any stripe, academic or other-wise. And in Heaney's Redress I found what I had been going on about, only put much more elegantly:

"I wanted to affirm that within our individual selves we can reconcile two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the poetic; to affirm also that each form of knowledge redresses the other and that the frontier between them is there for the crossing." (p201 Kindle edition).

This was implicit, he wrote, in a poem from a sequence called 'Lightenings' in his 1991 book Seeing Things.  Heaney had been considering the experience of being in two minds, of finding harmony, or not, when worldviews seem to exclude. He seemed to me to say that there might yet be fruitful redress through which different futures could be brought into being, and different relationships forged, whatever the prevailing institutional circumstance. The poem was this:

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain,
"This man can't bear our life here and will drown,"

The abbott said, "unless we help him." So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed
back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.



If you think, as I currently do, that organisations are conversational creations, and leadership perhaps like-wise, then you may too be heartened to consider the sort of conversations and beautiful questions that redress might enable, and might enable redress. 

If the aridity is, however, permitted to reach tongue-stilling dimensions -- as I sometimes lose heart and believe to be true -- I then wonder what form of rain dance is needed.

It's a question for us all. What poetic practice is ours to offer, to serve good sense and wiser ways?

Seamus Heaney The Redress of Poetry: Oxford lectures. Faber and Faber.  This text contains ten lectures given while the author was Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1989-1994).
David Whyte can be found here.

Sunday 9 February 2014

Practical wisdom and meta matters


Previous blog contained telling phrase “might have a moment to upload documents needed for my PhD application”.  Long story short, my first year review is imminent and explains the gap between the previous post and this one.   My PhD subject is metacognition, in adult learning, so it means me too.  As it concerns thinking about thinking, I’m obliged to consider my thinking: how meta is it, and does it help anything? Does meta matter?  Will it connect with wise(r) ways?  And what about my new identity, or occupation, or station, craft or label or. . .




I spotted Pat Thomson’s Patter debate about whether somebody doing a doctorate is a student, candidate, researcher, dr (not yet Dr) or “dottorando” (Italian), a word that contains its process nature - wave rather than particle.  My business card says I am a student; I have a student ID; I am administered as a student by institutions various.  I stopped being a director of my company, and my business partner has plenty to do other than continue it in my scholarly absence (find out what here).  My former existences, and the skills that came with them, are no longer always visible even to me.  And my children want to know why I am being so selfish as to inflict poverty of time and funds on them. Good questions.


So far, so tricky. And is any of it remotely of consequence?  I write as people's homes, livelihoods and, in some cases, lives have sunk.  Flooded away.  My quip about walking the dog having become a doggy paddle is only funny if you haven't seen the news.  Clutching at the straw that my new occupation of research is meaningful, some recent research has, unhelpfully it seems to me, indicated that choosing a meaningful life isn't going to make you happy.  Must remember to ask the vicar about that one.  And colleagues working with climate change.  And those folk trying to achieve something constructive with/about education:  encouragingly, Child1's head of music seemed overwhelmingly chipper even before his shortlisting as world’s most fortissimo teacher ever.

So, I've recently completed 15,000 words on the topic, 'What is metacognition?'  You may think it isn’t a question on everyone's lips, but it is. It sounds like:  Do you think that’s wise. . . ? What were they thinking. . . ? How could we. . . ?  What if we take a step back and think differently? 

Perhaps I can get a new chant going in the playground – “2, 4, 6, 8, Let's all metacogitate. . .”

Practical wisdom may seem elusive, but it isn’t so far away, when we find the right questions.  My superstar colleague Sarah is launching her book Bolder and Wiser, containing the voices of 20 women whose everyday living gives some clues.  From the open space sessions that colleagues from Bath Consultancy Group and the Association for Management Education and Development generously joined me for, came: "what is the ‘it’ you get when you ‘get it’?” And, “why don’t we subjugate theory in favour of noticing what we are doing to one another?" And if you haven't discovered Triarchy Press yet, have a look.

You know how sometimes you start with a particular intention and then you realise you have arrived somewhere unexpected? Best to stop there and listen.

Making sense of the space between

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns ou...