Poetic response to the “Contradictions” prompt
Looking Forward, We Will First Take a Few Steps Back
If I added up all the hours
spent in committee meetings
or brain-storming sessions,
I could add another year to my life.
What was it about sitting around
a conference table, a white board
in front of us, that brought out the bore
in all of us, even the quietest jockeying
for a chance to give an opinion,
often one already expressed by someone else
All those conferences with endless folders
full of ways to be more productive,
based on an industry of books
like The 7 Habits of Effective People
(“Begin with the end in mind,” is number one).
In the early 1900s, Charles R. Allen
set it out in simple terms:
Show, Tell, Do and Check,
which was changed by a committee
to Preparation, Presentation,
Application and Testing
when the book was published in 1919.
As I doodled a little with various contradictory statements, it made me think of advertising slogans and then corporate meetings and conferences with all those gimmicks to help use time more efficiently–which is such a contradiction because they wasted so much time! . So I made up a statement, which became the title, and also found a wonderful contradiction from a popularcorporate training book, which I slipped in at the end of stanza 3. I even ended with a fact and a date! Once I had the title, the poem pretty much wrote itself.
Judith Waller Carroll is the author of two full-length collections, Ordinary Splendor (MoonPath Press, 2022), What You Saw and Still Remember, a runner-up for the Main Street Rag 2017 Poetry Award and two chapbooks, The Consolation of Roses, winner of the Astounding Beauty Ruffian Press 2015 Poetry Award, andWalking in Early September from Finishing Line Press. Her poems have been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac, published in numerous journals and anthologies, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
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