How Poetry Made Me Articulate | Joseph Tsar

0:00Flowing ad-bunch it on metrics that look great, till the CFO sees them, that's Bullspend. And marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions. I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't. Cut the Bullspend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign term secretions apply. Call us footballers back. So, Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwick up call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day.

1:00This episode is brought to you by PayPal. Holiday Rush? Skip the mall traffic and shop online with PayPal. Shop your favorite online stores like Yide, Fanatics, Walmart, Sephora, Target, and TikTok shop. And choose to pay now or pay later at checkout. Plus pay in four with no interest in no late fees. Shop now with PayPal. Pay in four subject to approval. Learn more at PayPal.com slash pay in four. PayPal Incorporated NMLS 910457. The End I wish to become more linguistically inventive, more verbally agile, athletic, and playful with your words. I want to share with you how I've used poetry to enable me to do just that. Become more articulate with my speech. But first we have to ask what do we mean when we say articulate? If we chart a graph with a common to uncommon axis and a precise to vague axis,

2:01articulate speakers will frequently employ words that fall into this realm. These are precise words that most people recognize, but don't use. Words such as favorable, curtail, or nefarious. If I were to ask you to describe a friend's attitude, you might say he's nice, which is a rather common and vague description. You could say he's enthusiastic, which is certainly less common and more precise. You could also say he's rapsotic, which is even more defined, but words so uncommon, people will scarcely know the meaning. This is why we don't progress past this line, otherwise we risk employing words that sound too scholarly and sophisticated and confuse our listener. Articulacy is about making yourself understood in detail. Poetry, as you'll soon find out, is perhaps one of the richest depositories of articulate words and inventive word combinations that fall within this circle.

3:04Words that are common enough that people know them, but don't use them. We begin by asking the question, how should you be reading a poem? This leads me to the first point I wish to make. Poems must be read out loud. When you're reading a poem, you really should be wrestling the words allowed in your own voice. Why is that? The power, the pitch, the pace and the pause of poems are qualities that have to be spoken aloud in order to be heard. There's a saying, poems should be read three times. Once for the melody, twice for the imagery and thrice for the magic you'll find. The words that you wish to assimilate into your default way of speaking, after all we are talking about, hit rich in your vocabulary, must be spoken aloud and hurting your own voice for you to be building familiarity with them. Let's read through a sample poem. This is High Flight by John Julepse McGee. Oh, I have slipped the Shirley bonds of earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.

4:07Sunward, I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds and done a hundred things you have not dreamed of. Wheeled and sword and swung high in the sunlit silence. When I read this, I'm attempting to embrace the lyrical soothing quality that frequently flavors poetry. What this does is condition your linguistic muscles to feel what rhythmical languages like to deliver. You begin to absorb these patterns of music, melody and meter into your speech. You learn the impact of short sentences. You learn that sentences of longer length can ebb and flow and give rise to energy that builds with the impetus of a crescendo, the role of the drums, the crash of the symbols, words that inform the world that what you have to say is significant. If you've only ever spoken in cheap, shoddy sentences composed of monosyllabic words, you look good.

5:09That's a nice hat. Then you have to realize that there's part of your speaking that remains untrained. If you've never read poetry before, I might suggest listening to the recording of a poem that interests you, preferably delivered by someone who understands how to speak rhythmically. I'll even link below this video the articulate poem's Spotify playlist that I've assembled for myself. This is a playlist I've been listening to as I work out, ridiculous as that may be, as a way of absorbing rich language and conditioning myself to be familiar with smoother speech. The second step I wish to share with you is to keep a record of premium words. If there's a particular word or phrase that you encounter that jolt some part of your being sends a lightning bolt to the heart or tickles the tongue in a unique way, write that word or expression down. Many of the clever word combinations that I employ in my speech and get compliments on

6:09have little to do with my own intellect. In fact, they all stem from poems that I've read somewhere. Frazes like cunning and conniving, questing and questioning, hedge trimmers to hedge funders, condemning and commending, change and challenge, wonderful and wonderful, and dozens of other creative word combinations that have tripped over in some poem from the past. See, we remember things that have meaning to us. When a word or expression means something to you, it feels premium, hence why these are called premium words. Take note of that. I keep what's called a commonplace book, which is a list of words and expressions that I've encountered and am attempting to weave into my speech. If it's helpful, I can certainly discuss this in a future video. Number three, employ the premium words in practice sentences. I've also found it helpful to frequently pause in my reading and engage myself in an imaginary dialogue that employs the vocabulary that I just read.

7:12For example, the other day I was reading the poem Ode by Arthur O'Shockbys, and there were several verses in the poem which read, one man with a dream at pleasure, so go forth and conquer a crown, and three with a new song's measure can trample a kingdom down. I particularly enjoy the phrase, call your ad campaign, so lighting up the dashboard, but not the pipeline. That's bullspend, and marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions. My boss asks for results, so I open my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I add. Impressions. Cut the bullspend. See revenue? Not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $25 credit go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign, turn sick edition supply.

8:24This episode is brought to you by PayPal. Holiday rush. Skip the mall traffic and shop online with PayPal. Shop your favorite online stores like eBay, Fanatics, Walmart, Sephora, Target and TikTok shop, and choose to pay now or pay later at checkout. Plus pay in four with no interest in no late fees. Shop now with PayPal. Pay in four subject to approval. Learn more at PayPal.com slash pay in four. PayPal Incorporated NMLS 910457. Conquer a crown. This actually makes use of a rhetorical device known as metonomi, where a person or object is replaced with something closely related to the original. In this case, crown is used to imply king. I thought that expression conquer a crown was concise and clever, and in the spirit of attempting to weave that into my vocabulary, I took a moment to pause

9:25and began composing organic sentences that employed that description. The fourth step in reading poetry is to observe the poetic punchlines. One of the chief qualities of both poets and articulate speakers is their ability to create structure and simplicity with their speech. Their speech is not a scattershot of information, but rather a sequential stepping through of ideas that often builds to a crescendo of rhyme or crescendo of reason. It's a punchline. And poems are full of these punchlines. In fact, poems teach you how to foster a relationship between something you say now and something you plan to say in advance. There's a brilliant explanation of this from the freestyle rap artist Harry Mack. Freestyle rap, like poetry, is this practice of casting a word into the future and then building toward that word, that punchline by laying a pathway of rhymes and rhetoric. Listen to how Harry describes this.

10:25So the first technique is set up punchline. The way it works, I target the word, in this case it would be soul. Right? I put it at the end of my rhyming couplet. Right? A rhyming couplet is just two lines, the end with a rhyming sound. We're going to target the word and we're not going to say it at the end of the first line. No, we're not going to burn it up and waste it at the beginning. We're going to put it at the end of the second line. Why? Because whatever goes at the end of the second line is going to be the most impactful thing that we say. We're going to quickly work backwards to set up something that rhymes with soul. Right? That could be a lot of things. Pull. Every time I rhyme, they know I got the pull. People about to fail these lyrics up in the soul. That's a very basic example of a set up punchline couplet based on this word soul. I want you to understand how powerful this idea can be of weaving setups and punchlines into your speech. I'll provide an example of how poems can help you accomplish this. Take this stanza from Serojini Naidu's poem Life. Till he have battled with great grief and fears and borne the conflict of dream shattering years. Wounded with fierce desire and

11:28worn with strife, children ye have not lived. For this is, what do you think that last word is? It's probable that you guessed life, which is correct. Not only does it feel right because of the rhyme scheme, but the themes, imagery and emotion suggest that life would be an appropriate ending. We've encountered ideas such as grief, years, desire, the expression worn with strife. They create scaffolding that allows us to complete the picture with that ending word, that ending rhyme of life. This is something I call the macro and micro interpretive frameworks. I've noticed this pattern in articulate speakers where when they answer a question or explain an idea, they will often weave words into their sentences that together build an image greater than the individual word components. Think of it like a mosaic. Each tile serves to fashion a stunning work of art. You could also envision

12:30this macro interpretive framework as a large circle. And inside the circle are an adrogate of micro interpretive frameworks that all inherit equality from the larger circle. For example, say I should say we're on the topic of life, so life is a roadway. That's the macro interpretive framework. Now, I wouldn't state that directly. Instead, what I would do is begin providing examples of how I have navigated life in the past, the detours I have taken, the myopost I've passed, the cliffs I've avoided, the passengers I've provided assistance to along the way. What I'm doing is seating my sentences with qualities that are derived because these micro ideas are inside the macro interpretive framework, which again is never stated directly. Now, I could state it at the very end, I could say life is a roadway and tighten everything together in that crystallized sentence,

13:32but sometimes the most obvious things I find are best left unsaid. And as a poet does, you should trust the intelligence of your listener to piece things together for themselves. Poetry has taught me to think and speak more in this way because poems provide you with macro interpretive frameworks and inside of a verse of Stanza or the main idea, there are dozens of concrete and abstract qualities that you can fill in that circle with, leading to speech that is colorful, clever, and orderly. If I were to provide you an action item to this point, it would be to ask yourself the question, what is the main idea that these verses or the Stanza is building towards or has built upon already? This engages the mental muscle of thinking behind or beyond the current sentence. At this point, you're likely asking Joseph what poems should I read? Well, what we extract from a poem is subjective and based on our lived experience, there are several poets that you might begin reading

14:38Lord Byron, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Mary Oliver, and several others whose works include poems teaming with penetrating thoughts and all kinds of vivid imagery. I've also taken the initiative in compiling a list of poems I have discovered that I have found most conducive to improving articulacy. These will be linked below this video. Please leave a comment of any poem that you've discovered in the past that possesses rich dynamic language. I'm sure others will be interested in that and of course I'm always hungry for more. Thanks for watching. This episode is brought to you by Born in Roma Fragrances by Valentino Beauty, the iconic fragrance duo. Donna Born in Roma Ode to Parfume is a feminine fragrance featuring juicy black current central jasmine, woody cashmurren, and warm vanilla. Its masculine counterpart, Womoborn in Roma Ode toilette, has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver,

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