TOwards the Heart’s frontier:

An Interview with David Whyte

From where does great poetry come? What risks must one take to access these emotions? In this interview with renowned poet and philosopher David Whyte, he teaches us how poetry can help us to grow into our vulnerability as he tells the story of his own writing path and current practices. “Choose something to care about to get your heart broken over,” Whyte says, speaking also to how vulnerability, formed first by a wound, is the doorway to successful leadership, love, and a deep self-understanding. 

You say in Crossing the Unknown Sea that “I returned to poetry because I felt like scientific language wasn’t precise enough to describe the experiences that I had had in Galapagos. Science, rightly, is always trying to remove the ‘I.’ But I was really interested in the way that the ‘I’ deepened the more you paid attention.” Could you tell us more about your reentry into poetry and its relation to your work in Marine Zoology?

The Galapagos was such a remarkable place at such a remarkable threshold in my life. I went there in my very early twenties, and landing in those astonishing islands was quite traumatic to my youthful sense of self; to my understandings of the world, to creation, and to my understanding of science. Galapagos really took me apart and reduced me to some elemental foundation. In some ways, and in compensation, it gave me back the innocence of childhood. I always say I “returned” to innocence because people tend to think of innocence as some kind of commodity that is replaced by experience. But the radical kind of innocence, the innocence of which William Blake spoke, is actually a kind of faculty, a way of being found again by the world. To my mind, innocence is a deep form of attention and sometimes, almost involuntary, intentionality that comes from arriving in the foundational conversation that you were made for in this life. So, when we lose our innocence, we lose not our naivety but something more elemental. I often think there’s a particular form of innocence which is quite necessary at each stage of our lives. Through the trauma in the Galapagos, I found a kind of innocence restored: I rediscovered the states I’d been in when I’d written poetry in my early teens.

I’d been writing poetry since the age of seven or so, probably under the influence of my Irish mother. I was taken by poetry—I saw it as a secret code to life and I didn’t understand how other people didn’t see that. I often thought, witnessing what passed for adult conversation, that all these so-called adults were actually inhabiting a kind of agreed insanity. So, attempting to forestall my own entrance into adult insanity, I wrote quite fiercely in my teens—I used to submit the poems to our school magazine, winning the Mable Thorpe Memorial poetry prize a good few times! But then, in the midst of my artistic reveries, I had this experience of seeing Jack Cousteau, the great French marine zoologist, sail across the screen of our little television set. I thought it was absolutely astonishing that you could have work like this, following the life of the dolphin aboard the good ship ‘Calypso’. I then gave up all my art studies as you had to choose in England and put myself into the salt mines of biology, chemistry, and physics. As you can imagine, this excursion into sciences took me away from writing poetry in university. I do think I had to give it up anyway so that I could pick it up in a more radical way in my late twenties.

By what I see now as sheer luck, I found myself with a remarkable job as a Naturalist Guide in Galapagos almost straight out of graduation. In those far flung islands, shepherding people for hours at a time into the company of birds, animals and astonishing landscapes above water and below, I found myself plunged on almost a daily basis into deep states of silence and attention. I was a Naturalist Guide, part of whose job was policing and safeguarding the islands, but you did your best policing by just educating and you did your best educating by helping people to witness and watch. So, we spent hours looking at things. I’m sure in our evolutionary pasts, the dynamic of meditation came from watching animals quietly if you were hunting or watching a landscape quietly if you were picking berries, and in that silence we found ourselves being touched by the suchness of everything we witnessed and saw. Galapagos was like a very intense retreat, initially traumatic, but eventually quite astonishing. I did leave wondering what I was going to do for the rest of my life—I knew I couldn’t stay there because I would have led a Peter Pan existence and have never grown older. Leaving Galapagos was traumatic too, traveling through South America to come back to Britain in the middle of winter—to the middle of a Welsh winter! I came back in autumn, and by January I was on my way to India because after the darkness of a November and December in Snowdonia, I had to get back towards the sun and, in my mind, to a new adventure in the Himalaya. The adventures proceeded from there!

What advice would you give poets—or to anyone looking to deepen their conversation with the world—to help them ask better questions about their environments?

Good poetry is not about something, it is the thing itself. To write poetry, you must make it very a physical frontier in your own body; our very human bodies are always very emotional at the frontier of realization, and beneath that emotion is the physical substrate from where the emotion arose. That’s where you go to write. Oftentimes at that frontier of realization which you represent through what we call writing, you will break out into tears—at least I do—and that’s when you’ve gotten through this carapace between the way in which the emotion is emanating on the surface and its true source. You’re bringing parts of yourself together that haven’t spoken in a long time. Camus said, ‘live to the point of tears’ not as an invitation to maudlin sentimentality, but to this edge between what you know about yourself and the world and what you are just beginning to understand.

It’s interesting to think of being moved as a practice. Human beings—(especially in Southern England!)—might pride themselves on not being moved until it becomes a barrier to self-understanding. It is interesting to think that there are simple practices such as listening to music in a way that allows you to be moved: by refusing to have it as a background and maybe even turning the lights off while hearing Sheku play the cello. Or to allow yourself to think about the people you love in a moving way. And as I say, it’s not to indulge in becoming emotional but to get to the source beneath, to get to the chordal structure that resonates and brings your body and our voice alive.

If we think about a human life and a human body as being made up of these deeply complex, interlocking chordal structures, both physical and imaginative, it is plain that most human beings have lost their way in the orchestra! We quite often just play a kind of single monotonous melody line made up of our accumulated opinions and which we already know, all too well, by heart. I think this is where the approach to polymathy is very interesting because the ability in a day to write, to be moved, to cook, to walk, to play or listen to music, all of these things start to bring us alive in a much broader way and to get us out of these narrow ruts into which we steer ourselves in order to defend ourselves against being hurt. Often, we can’t speak in life because we’re trying to find a way through where we won’t have our heart broken. As I say in my essay on heartbreak in Consolations, there is no sincere path a human being can take without having that imaginative organ broken. You can’t have a love life without having your heart broken, you can’t get married—be married—without having your heart broken, you can’t be a parent without having your heart broken, you can’t do good work without having your heart broken at times. It’s as if everything is saying just get with the program and choose something to care about to get your heart broken over: choose a person, choose a work. E.M. Forster was very good at addressing this theme in A Room with a View, a novel about a young gentleman brought up by his father to trust his body, not only as the root of his emotions, but as a doorway to self-understanding.

Our journal seeks to celebrate polymaths, and you were one of our original inspirations as to what this word entails. How did you begin to incorporate poetry into business?

I didn’t really—business began to incorporate me! But I was incorporated quite reluctantly to begin with. I had already gone full-time as a poet which of course to begin with, means living on next to nothing. I did have the odd conference keynote now and again and once, after I had I given one in Washington D.C., at the end of the line of people congratulating me, there was a gentleman at the end named Peter Block who was to become a close friend and colleague. In a very American fashion he said to me, “We have to hire you!” And I said, in a very enthusiastic Irish-Yorkshire way, “For what?” “To come into corporate America.” “To do what?” I asked. Then Peter said a marvelous thing: “In your talk, I just heard the language that we need in the business world.” Well, I said no to him then. I was a serious young poet and I wasn’t going to have my principles compromised by the corporate world. I’d come from long lines of rebels on both my Irish and Yorkshire sides, and I’d grown up in a the most raving socialist luddite part of West Yorkshire. Then Peter called again and said, “Will you come? You won’t have to compromise yourself,” and again I said no so he said, “I’m coming out to see you!” I remember talking to my Irish mother just before he arrived and she said, “You’ve already said yes. If someone asks you sincerely three times, you have to go.”

That dynamic of being asked three times is actually in all of our great mythic traditions around the world, and I saw that she was right, I had already said yes. I started working with Peter and another wonderful consultant Joel Henning, and began to learn all the acronyms and vocabulary. I had already worked at a non-profit where the politics could be sometimes quite subtly Machiavellian, so I was prepared for that side of things. As the months went by, I started to build my own themes while working with these two guys who had had so much experience. One thing that has stayed with me were the big dinners the three of us had at the end of each three-day workshop, they often descended into passionate argument and they were very instructive. They were two old-style but radical consultants who really helped me cut my teeth on many of the fiercer dynamics of the corporate workplace.

Fiercer dynamics or no, I did find that people in the corporate world were just as hungry for real meaning as anyone else, and that they did not wish to swallow PollyAnnish propaganda any more than I did; they were all as ready to get to another level and found that the language of poetry could take them to that deeper level very quickly. So, in parallel to all my other audiences I had as a poet, I started to build my repertoire of memorized poetry to look at many of the psychological thresholds people in the workplace had to deal with. The interesting thing now is that when I enter a room in an organization, I almost always have more experience than anyone else there because I’ve worked for hundreds of companies all over the planet. I’ve seen every form of behavior: I’ve seen midnight assassinations, rebellions, politics that would make even Machiavelli blush. I’ve also seen really marvelous courageous things, too. So, in that way I’ve always been a poet who works in the corporate world, but I’ve never allowed myself to be called a corporate poet.

What are your thoughts about the teaching of poetry?

Rather than teaching poetry, I work with the phenomenology of human existence which poetry helps elucidate. I’m working with the phenomenology of deepening the conversation—I almost never formally teach the writing poetry. I’ve always felt there are other people that do that very well and strangely, I’ve also felt that it is not truly possible: poetry is such a private act, a private voice and there’s always a danger of losing the particularity of your own voice whenever you put yourself too much in someone else’s sphere, as in writing workshops where there is real pressure for you start to sound like everyone else. You can get very good in this kind of greenhouse forcing you to write and speak very quickly, but you may never get beyond just being good because the individual voice is so particular, and I think it should be inured from coercion, subtle or not so subtle, of any kind.

In Consolations, you also talk about inhabiting our own vulnerability as “we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate.” How do you think poetry allows us to cultivate this growth into openness?

It allows you to say things you didn’t know you already knew: it allows you to understand why you’ve been protecting yourself or dancing around a point. The vulnerability is the doorway, almost like the wound that you walk through. The trauma you had that exiled you from the ground of your being, the ground of your voice, is the same door you will walk back through to allow it to speak. You think you’re just writing a poem but no, you’re walking through this awful door that you walked out of many years ago and where you often left a part of your body behind, a way of being in your body. Of course, it’s never all trauma because part of poetry is a celebration of all the various beauties of a multifarious existence. But beauty is only truly apprehended when you come to a ground of appreciation, when you don’t see the world as an enemy. If you see yourself as a part of the enemy, then it’s very hard to see the world outside.

What role do you see that vulnerability holding in business settings where “toughness” is often the upheld stereotype?

The ultimate vulnerability in leadership is not having all the answers. The best leaders in the world are the ones who don’t pretend to have all the answers but rather invite people in—that’s a sign of real conversation. You can look at it very practically: vulnerability is the ability to ask other people for their help and for their eyes and their ears and capabilities. As a leader, you only have one pair of eyes, one pair of ears, and one pair of hands so it’s impossible for you to understand everything that’s going on in today’s world without asking for help. This is a very practical way of understanding what I call “robust vulnerability” to counter our tendency to think of vulnerability as a weakness. But what would it be like if you tried to embody your vulnerability which tells you where you need to ask for help? I can’t do this, you say, and that’s the ultimate robustly vulnerable moment. And it’s a correct perception: there’s not any lack of self-awareness. That’s a place in which you ask for the right kind of help. At the beginning of a poetic writing career, poets will often immerse themselves in a particular voice. When I was 13, 14, 15, I went through a Dylan Thomas phase and then after 16 17 and 18 it was all Yeats. When I got to the US, it was Robert Sund, Gary Snyder, the beat poets and their spacious, everyday West coast vernacular. You emulate them because you need the help. When you say to yourself “I can’t do this” over the white page, you are right—you can’t do it: and it has nothing to do with a lack of self-esteem. To be a good poet you need to apprentice yourself to someone and something greater than your own powers; you need to see where others have gone before you, which then prepares us to go where others have not gone, to follow, on a daily basis, the extraordinary invitations of life. This is poetry, the extraordinary invitation into yourself and beyond yourself, at one and the same time. The place where what you think is you and what you think is not you, and where they meet and form a frontier, is the very place from which you learn to speak and write.