Poetry, Passion and the Pursuit of Pleasure
Fasten your poetic seatbelt and come prepared to experience poetry in a whole new way. Let’s see if there are poems that can actually earn a living out here in the real world. Let’s luxuriate in poetry that engages, entertains and inspires. We’ll go for practical and powerful poems – ones applicable to our everyday lives, challenges and triumphs. Together we’ll abandon those schoolhouse poems we never really cared for. We’ll drop pretenses, jettison airs and simply revel in the pure, provocative pleasure of world-class poetry.
How the Heart Gets In
The Poetry of Change and Transitions
Our hearts are smarter and more resilient than we are. When the heart comes weighing in with its deep wisdom, everything else seems to take care of itself. In fact, once aroused, the heart has the strength to complete any task, any journey, any healing. Therefore if we can find a way to hitch our hearts more fully to the changes we most want to make in our lives, they get done. Or if the change has already happened and has come in a fierce, unasked-for way, then the engaged heart can play its role as healer. And, of course, in either case without the heart’s help, we quickly find what sheer drudgery change becomes. This acclaimed presentation will provide tools and help to anyone involved with significant change in their lives, either personally chosen or ones that life simply thrusts upon us. Using world-class poems, each critical stage of the transition process (as defined by change expert, William Bridges) will be examined. Poems for helping us let go of what we must let go of. Poems to help us as we move through the desert region of the transition process, having left the old ways and place behind, but having not yet reached the new lands. And finally, poems for the new beginning, helping us step more fully into our new self, our new home in the world. Whether you’re already the midst of significant change in your life, or preparing for one, this presentation will contribute to your journey.
Standing In The Fire of Change
Poetry in The Workplace
In the business world today, we’ve discovered two things about organizational change. First, it’s virtually constant. And second, many change efforts yield disappointing results. On a large scale, we see mergers sputter and stall. On a smaller scale we see new hiring methods, or meeting structures, or customer care processes adopted one quarter, only to be forgotten the next. Is there an answer to this challenge? Yes, if we’re willing to engage the power of both our minds and our hearts. And yes, if we’re willing to significantly expand our view of the change process itself. Because just as in our personal lives, change in the workplace happens twice. Once in the external world, which can be observed and measured, such as moving headquarters, installing a new IT system, or merging two departments. Then there is the second, internal part of change, which is just as real but not directly observable. This second part of change is really a personal, psychological journey that begins with an ending phase and the associated letting go of what is being lost. For example in any large organizational change, we’re likely to lose one or all of the following: a feeling of competency, friends, the old comfortable reporting structure and that overall sense of familiarity we cherish as humans.
Fortunately, great poetry can help. It provides fresh, provocative ideas for our minds and powerful images and metaphors to engage our hearts. These practical, solid tools and guideposts are available for every step of the internal journey and transition that’s so often ignored. This presentation is designed for any team or organization entering a time of significant change. Or for those teams or organizations attempting to mend from a change effort that did not go well. It will be a time to work with the internal experience of change. A part of the change process that often goes unspoken and unmanaged because it is not immediately visible in the world. Using world class poems and stories, we’ll explore how the poetic tradition has always been a powerful ally in helping us cope and even thrive in the midst of fierce and fiery change.
Setting Your Wisdom Table
A Feast of Poems To Live and Grow By
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we each had a kind of wisdom table where we could lay out and display gems of deep insight and knowledge, for the exact time when we needed them most? A just-in-time structure to remind us of who we are and what we most intend in the world. Poetry can provide such structure. In this presentation, we’ll focus on great poems of wisdom. Poems unafraid to delve into areas of deep human truths, poems we can use every day of our lives to remind, cajole, comfort, confront and heal.
When The Questions Get Harder
What Poetry Can Teach Us In The Second Half of Life
The Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver finishes her stunning poem The Summer Day with a question that stops us in our tracks: Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life? And at no other time, does this question take on more urgency than during the second half of our lives. What do we really want to do? What options remain open? What paths are closed to us? Great poetry can help. Great poems are perfect for holding everything just as it is, the conundrums and paradoxes that become so apparent during our middle years. It can help us claim our hurt, confusion and disappointments. Just like it can help us open ourselves up to fresh new dreams, to new visions, to our true calling. Through world-class poetry, this presentation will take on the most difficult questions of our middle years, as well as the most exciting, fresh and vital.
Breaking The Invisible Cage
Poetry as a Catalyst for Creativity
Poems say wild things, provocative and true things, even reckless things. They sneak up on our normal assumptions about the world and shine a light on them that’s so bright we’re forced to see new paths and new connections that were never before apparent. In this presentation great poems will be used as a powerful catalyst for creativity. It’s an ideal presentation for any team or group needing to call upon deeper sources of innovation and creativity. This is an opportunity to work in a very experiential way, examining our beliefs and assumptions about the way the world works. This is an opportunity to pull the rug out from under our selves on purpose, breaking free from our own cage of conventional thinking, revealing our most creative selves.
Poetry as Soul Medicine
Healing our Souls in Troubled Times
It is very easy these days to feel upset and overwhelmed by the current state of
the world. It seems our nervous systems are constantly bombarded with difficult news, while our email boxes fill with unending requests: sign this petition; attend that rally; write your Senator; make this donation! Inside the “reactive” pressure cooker that can become our lives, we often oscillate between despair and outrage, knowing both are painful, sensing neither is productive. At times we feel that our very souls are at risk. The purpose of poetry has always been to help us re-imagine our selves in the world. It allows us to name and become aware of our highest aspirations and our most difficult truths as well, healing the places in our psyches, our hearts, and even our souls that have been damaged. In this presentation we’ll explore the poems (AKA soul medicine) we need in these polarized times to regain our center, our peace of mind, and ultimately our ability to effect helpful change in the world.
Regarding The Content and Format of Dale’s Presentations
Each of Dale’s presentations can be delivered in one of several formats.
In Organizational and Business Settings:
- Keynote speeches.
- Breakout presentation in a conference setting.
- Full or half-day workshop done in-house or in a conference setting.
- Supporting presentation at an organizational retreat.
In Community and Public Settings:
- Keynote speeches.
- Supporting presentation at non-profit events and fundraisers.
- Presentations for spiritual communities.
- Special programs for affiliated groups in significant transitions.
- Special events with family and friends.
Speaking Fees and Logistics
Please contact Dale directly to discuss your needs and Dale’s speaking fees. Of if you would prefer, email the following information to receive cost information.
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To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
— Mary Oliver
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“I truly believe that if I came back to planet earth a decade from now, I’d find captains of industry throughout our nation quoting Dale Biron’s poetry during their board meetings and coffee breaks. He’s that clear and passionate a translator.”
— Dr. Peller Marion Author of Crisis Proof Your Career and
Career Tune Up
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There were times in my life when I felt that a poem had saved my life, kept me from falling into despair. Poetry has that power, holds the key that opens the door into life abundant. Dale is a perfect guide to lead you into this realm.
— Margot Fraser, Founder of Birkenstock USA
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The quality of Dale’s poetry often takes the ordinary experience of daily life into moments of inspiration.
— Ron Tilden Organizational Consultant and Jazz Musician
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“Not only can you bring poetry to life in your reading, but your personal text that you weave in between the poems is so artful and articulate. Very powerful.”
— Susannah Baldwin, Ph.D., Consultant and Radio Talk Show Host
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“The first time I arrived at Dale's poetry performance the dust of the day was all over me. I was tired, my mind was flat, and I was thinking that I might be too spent for a thing like this. When it was over and I walked back to my car, I was alive with vision -- a new man with new eyes looking at a new world. It was like Dale had turned those poems into medicine.”
— Don Goewey, Executive Director - The International Center For Attitudinal Healing
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