We’re in a conversation with two accomplished writers about the poetry of transformation, or the many ways that words and imagery can help express and give form to a deep inner process of expanding awareness and renewal.
There is an ambidextrous quality in the capacity to both be in the here and now, and embrace that which is emerging at the edge of our awareness at the same time. To be grounded at the moment in what is real is itself a portal into the realms of potential.
We’re showing up together in a zone that's new in the universe, a conductive zone that is providing us access to expanded human potential. Our job while we are alive is to translate that potential into action. It can be through new permissions in art and poetry,
new discoveries in science, and new frontiers in every other field you can choose to explore.
For people who are curious, who have a sense of wonder, who want understanding or expression or some way to connect, we are all coming online for life, to be awakened, and transformed, and revealed. Every person is a live portal. And it’s an energy that sometimes turns up as poetry.
I've always felt that life is calling for a response, but it was always kind of a theoretical notion that would sometimes have a poetic expression. It feels to me like the call is coming from life, which is itself coming from who knows what. But on this planet, right now, it feels as if every single nanosecond is a call of some kind.
Libby Wagner
One of my favorite ways of being is in wonder and curiosity. What if? What about? Why? I’m drawn to conversations and contemplations about the Beautiful Questions in human life. As a poet, I walk about trying to name things, to use my sensory experience in the world to make sense of it, even when I know that I’m trying to say the "unsayable." This doesn’t deter me from trying to connect, express, reveal. In my organizational work, I create spaces and places where people can connect with their artistry to arrive transformed by their conversations and their creations.
Holly Thomas
The right poem at the right time can loosen, trigger, or buttress almost anything. As intimate catalysts, poems distill and extend our experience—sharing everything from fear to relief, and from dismay to benediction.
As an editor, poet, and painter, I often teeter between creation and critique—with the risk of stifling creation by prematurely attempting to interpret or refine it. But when I find my balance and trust what is emerging, something with a life and agency of its own seems to enter the world. What happens next depends on those it touches.
Aviv Shahar
Aviv is the Founder of Aviv Consulting, helping leaders unleash strategic innovation, and is the author of Create New Futures: How Leaders Produce Breakthroughs and Transform the World Through Conversation.
