cover image What Poetry Brings to Business

What Poetry Brings to Business

Clare Morgan, with Kirsten Lange and Ted Buswick. . Univ. of Michigan, $26.95 (267pp) ISBN 978-0-472-05086-4

Morgan, Oxford University director of creative writing, tackles the false opposition between art and commerce in this thorough and thoughtful attempt at making poetry accessible—even necessary—to businesspeople. Through a liberal application of her favorite poems, Morgan argues that the act of reading poetry changes the way the reader thinks, that bare facts are not enough to elicit good business decisions, and that the act of poetic deconstruction helps develop skills that are applicable to business. She speaks passionately about strategies of creativity and how poems “bridge the gap between knowing and perceiving because they use the highly differentiated, logic-driven structures of language to point to the undifferentiated area where emotions hold sway.” Though she makes some excellent points, her affected naïveté regarding the hard-to-classify nature of her argument and pointed avoidance of practical applications of her ideas make this a hard sell outside the campus bookstore. (Apr.)