The Round-Up

Despite the utter lack of job postings in the KC area, I've been busy lately. I've been conducting informational interviews (Callahan Creek must have the kindest copywriters in the world), reading up on marketing, working on my portfolio, and generally trying to let the world know that I'm looking for a job.

My brain's been fragmented, so this post is going to be, too. Just go with the flow, people. Dig the melange.

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1. I finally chose a poem for my friend's wedding, and she loved it. I'm so thrilled! It's by Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of the first major black American poets. I've never really cared for his poetry (I always thought it was too sing-songy and cliched), but this poem is killer precisely because it so gentle, soft-spoken, and unexpected. I especially love the refrain of "And you are welcome, welcome."

Invitation to Love

By Paul Laurence Dunbar

Come when the nights are bright with stars

Or come when the moon is mellow;

Come when the sun his golden bars

Drops on the hay-field yellow.

Come in the twilight soft and gray,

Come in the night or come in the day,

Come, O love, whene’er you may,

And you are welcome, welcome.

You are sweet, O Love, dear Love,

You are soft as the nesting dove.

Come to my heart and bring it to rest

As the bird flies home to its welcome nest.

Come when my heart is full of grief

Or when my heart is merry;

Come with the falling of the leaf

Or with the redd’ning cherry.

Come when the year’s first blossom blows,

Come when the summer gleams and glows,

Come with the winter’s drifting snows,

And you are welcome, welcome. 

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2. There's a fantastic article about swine flu in this month's Vogue. It's called "The Year of the Pig," and even if you're not a Vogue subscriber, I'd strongly recommend that you park yourself by a Border's magazine section and give it a read. In the piece, Robert Sullivan takes a look at how the government has been planning for the swine flu pandemic and why experts are so worried about it. He explains that H1N1 is behaving very much like the Spanish Flu of 1918: so far, it hasn't proven very dangerous (except to children), but experts suspect that the strain may mutate by next year and cause rocketing number of cases in the fall and winter of 2010. They don't believe that the virus will grow much more fatal, but it will severely strain the American health care system. Scientists are raising alarms about the flu now in order to prepare for next year. So, in conclusion, ack!

Reading this reminded me of Ellen Bryant Voigt's Kyrie, which is one of the saddest and most beautiful books of poetry I've ever read. It's a series of sonnets about the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic. Voigt writes mostly in the voices of the flu's survivors, and her use of the sonnet form is clever, appropriate, and moving. Go out and read it, like, now.

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3. Speaking of horribly sad poetry, I finally managed to read Donald Hall's Without. Hall's collection follows the illness and death of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon. Surprisingly, the volume was a page-turner; I read the whole thing in about an hour, and, naturally, waterworks ensued. Why am I so attracted to poetry that ruins my make-up?

To be honest, I wasn't in love with the poetry in this collection. The poems were just so raw, so straight-forward, so narrative that I couldn't call it very good or interesting poetry (thought, in general, I think Donald Hall is quite brilliant). But it did depict a beautiful love affair and the sort of raw emotion usually reserved for romance novels and chick flicks. I'd recommend this book if only for the catharsis.

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4. I've also been reading The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. It's a fascinating exploration of how to successfully position a product within a unique market. Jack Trout and Al Ries use a ton of real-world examples to prove their points, including the never-ending marketing battle between Coca-Cola and Pepsi and lots of little tidbits from the emerging PC market (well, emerging in 1993, when the book was first published).

But despite the myriad references to Atari, Commodore, and a hundred other computer and software companies I've never heard of, the book feels relevant and useful to a business newbie like me. In fact, these guys are kind of blowing my mind: they make me realize how complex marketing strategies can be, but they're also reinforcing how much I have to learn if I want to be a part of the marketing industry. It's wonderfully exciting to read about something as familiar as Coke and Pepsi, but to find myself seeing it in an entirely new way.