For Those Looking For The Light by Victoria Pen, From Emoji to Empathy: Mastering Customer Service in The Digital Era by Susan Williamson, and The Corsico Conspiracy by Raphael Sone
For Those Looking For The Light by Victoria Pen
Victoria Pen’s concrete poetry is filled with deep emotions like depression, grief, nostalgia, worry, but also joy, hope and peace. It dares Readers to empathize and feel what the Speakers are feeling and listen to their voices.
The best poems are:
“My Dear Child”-A poem in which the Speaker mourns the death or separation of their child. The constant repetition of “I wish I could” recognizes the regret of things that the child could have learned and felt with their parents like warmth and protection but now cannot. It is melancholic and sadness not only for what was lost but what can never be.
“Learning What Home Feels Like”-A poem in which the Speaker weighs many negative feelings towards themselves such as “ugly,” “dim witted,” “awkward,” and “embarrassing.” The twist is that the Speaker accepts those words and takes pride in them. They and their strange interests are what makes them who they are. Anyone who has ever felt self-conscious because of their personality traits, their occupation or study path, or their own interests will understand and even relate.
“I Aspire To Be a Writer”- A poem in which the Speaker addresses their desire to be a writer. Even though they have the drive (and assuming this was Pen’s point of view herself, she also has the talent.), they constantly worry about how to get started, their subject, and publishers. This poem addresses the insecurities and anxieties that creative people have when they work on something. They worry about how their message will be projected and what will people think of it or if they bother reading it at all. The important thing in creation is not the doubts but being able to move past them and exploring talent and creativity to the fullest.
“The Colorful Leaves”-A nature poem in which the Speaker illustrates their love of autumn. It is filled with visual imagery like the orange, purple, and red leaves and the anxious people worried about snow. The poem talks about the season’s transitional function as not yet cold for winter, not hot for summer, and not thought of as beautiful like spring. It is an in between season but for this Speaker, that can see through that between and recognize autumn’s own individual beauty and uniqueness.
“Drifting At Sea”-An extended metaphor in which the Speaker compares their life to a sea in which they are just drifting along. The Speaker feels like they are not in control of their life and things are just happening around them. Sometimes they feel that they are deliberately being set up to fail and all that they can do is just wait. It is very similar to Depression and how people who have it often feel disconnected from their lives. Even when they try to improve, they are still met with failure, rejection, and disappointment. They want to move but can't so they remain stuck and floating.
“The Four Walls”-A poem in which the Speaker thinks of their room as a sanctuary by protecting them from abuse but also a prison keeping them from facing that fear and getting away. The Speaker’s room protected them from the monsters, implying that they were abused as a child. As an adult, they realized that remaining hidden in their room was only a temporary reprieve. It took leaving and finding a safe place away from the abuse to really find inner peace.
“If I Were a Flower”-An extended metaphor in which The Speaker compares themselves to a flower. The Speaker asks their lover some difficult questions whether they would take away their beauty or rather their view of themselves, would they leave them, if they would forget about them, or would they leave them for other lovers. The Speaker is very insecure and even though is looked upon as someone of great beauty and emotion, is concerned whether their Lover’s feelings will change.
“The Importance of Boundaries”-A poem that addresses boundaries and The Speaker’s changing feelings towards them. They realized that boundaries aren't the signs of a bad person. They are a sign of limits, that someone can only take so much. There is a metaphor of animals that instinctively run from danger. The Speaker compares themselves to those animals who know to run and they do the same.
“Cultural Cash Out”-This poem addresses the problems of the “greedy culture” where people are cruel, ignorant, care only about making money, and step on those under them. Pen’s poems rarely get political but this one does. It addresses health care denial, the work grind, low pay, and the desire but not the opportunity of moving up. It's a cry of anger at a culture that not only doesn't care if people live or die but profit off of their death and destruction.
“Hope Has A Name of Ivory”-This poem addresses the Speaker’s Faith. The poem personifies Hope in human terms that it has beautiful eyes and gentle hands. Hope’s name is compared to ivory and gold, precious bones and metals that hold great value. It almost reads like a Medieval riddle poem in which Pen drops hints about who Hope’s human form is. The answer becomes obvious by the final stanza and shows the depths of the Speaker’s spiritual devotion and faith.
From Emoji to Empathy: Mastering Customer Service in The Digital Era by Susan Williamson
In this Digital Age of virtual assistance, self checkout, prepayment, shopping online, and AI Interface, the human element is still important particularly in customer service. Like many other professions, customer service is adapting to modern technology. However, the human element is still a factor. Susan Williamson’s book From Emoji to Empathy: Mastering Customer Service in The Digital Era explores how customer service representatives still need to maintain empathy and interpersonal skills to give customers quality assistance.
One of the key factors in good customer service is emotional intelligence. That includes behaving with empathy and implementing active listening. Empathy allows one to understand what the customer needs and using the right probing questions to fully comprehend the situation and provide for their needs. Active listening is the process in which one summarizes, uses open ended questions, and allows the other person to verbalize their situation and make their own decisions. Emotional Intelligence can be used to pick up emotional cues like active observation, feedback analysis, and validating emotions.
It's important for customer service representatives to design memorable customer experiences and that involves identifying customer personas, mapping their journey, implementing feedback mechanisms, and analyzing trends. These procedures help representatives learn about the different types of people that they need to help, how the customer retains information, when the representative needs to probe and when to leave off, and individual personalities and needs of the various customers. In doing this, they can create individual personalized experiences for different people and build variety into their busy days. Even personal creative touches like extra services, sales for regulars, or representatives remembering details such as regular customer’s names or birthdays add to a personalized experience that makes customers feel unique and individual.
Of course difficult customers are frequent and can make the customer service job extremely stressful. Williams's book peers into conflicts between representatives and customers. The step-by-step approach includes identifying the root cause, using “I” statements to communicate understanding, brainstorming solutions together, implementing and following through, and seeking feedback for continuous improvement. Things like tone variation, body language, mirroring positive customer behavior, cultural sensitivity regarding nonverbal cues, body language, and paying attention to communication barriers goes a long way to improve interaction.
The book includes various examples of challenging interactions and describes how a representative should handle them. For example aggressive customers raise their voices, demand action, and use harsh language. The representative must stay calm. A simple phrase like “I understand that this is a frustrating situation. Let's work together to fix it” is helpful. Customers want to be heard so that approach makes them feel heard and validated. They can go from being combative to collaborative.
Technology presents its own issues with representatives integrating it in their work but also maintaining the human connection. Williamson suggests that workers can select the right tools, prioritize user friendliness, ensure integration capabilities, and conduct a cost-benefit analyses. Personal connection can be integrated with technology by making tech work with employees and not replace them, making human oversight an easy seamless process, using feedback loops to stay ahead of customer needs, and creating an emotional impact.
This book tells customer service representatives that the best way to show good customer service is to increase the human connection while integrating and adapting to modern technology.
The Corsico Conspiracy by Raphael Sone
While William Shakespeare’s name is practically synonymous with Dramatic Theater, English Literature, and The Elizabethan Era, there is still much about his life that remains a complete mystery. Between his marriage and career as a school teacher in Stratford Upon Avon to the time he began to establish himself as a playwright and actor with Lord Chamberlain’s Men, there is a ten year period in which he was undocumented. What happened during those ten years and what was he doing? He was married though frequently separated from his wife, Anne Hathaway and fathered three children, Susannah, Judith, and Hamnet by her (adding to their tempestuous marriage was that Susannah was born a mere five to six months after their marriage suggesting that Anne’s pregnancy was the reason for it.)
However some of his romantic sonnets are addressed to a Dark Lady,which the pale and fair haired Anne was not. Who was this Dark Lady and what was her and William's relationship really like? For that matter, Shakespeare was a country lad with a limited education mostly attributed to reading books and watching plays yet his plays suggest a vast intellect, creative talent, high education, traveling experience. Is it entirely possible that Shakespeare was only given the title of author and someone else actually wrote the plays, but who? Just what was Shakespeare’s relationship with Queen Elizabeth and King James really like? Many of his History plays trace back their family lineage and the lines in the plays often speak of deep respect for the Royals but during a time when religious schisms between the Protestants and Catholics, many of the plays show a more than passing acquaintance with Catholic rituals and beliefs. Also, the plays feature various conspiracies and uprisings against the people in charge. Was Shakespeare vilifying or encouraging the protests?
Historians, scholars and authors have addressed these questions in different ways. One of my favorite series, The Shakespearean Fantasy Series by Sarah A. Hoyt, gives a magical fantastic interpretation to these questions in which Bill encountered fairies on his path to literary immortality. Another possibility is the more realistic but still fascinating Historical Fiction novella, The Corsico Conspiracy by Raphael Sone.
This interpretation suggests that Shakespeare was a closet Catholic in a predominantly Protestant country and spent time abroad in Southern Europe and Africa where he became involved in political conspiracy, espionage missions where he learned how to be a master of disguise, and romance with Amina Safuwa, a former apprentice nun who was the Dark Lady. Oh yes and his plays were written mostly by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford who did not want authorship credit. Shakespeare as a Lord Chamberlain's performer and later head was given sole credit. Though Shakespeare was no slouch in writing himself as he composed his own sonnets, the epic poems Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece, and some of the plays himself by combining various sources that he read.
This is a brilliant book that drops some tantalizing theories that fill in the blanks of Shakespeare’s life. It fills them by Sone paying tribute to what would later be known about his life and work while dropping some interesting speculation about the parts that needed filling. His time in Rome, Spain, and particularly Corsico become fruitful in his education both as a spy and the head of an acting company.
His training consists of adopting disguises and being in character through voice, mannerisms, and body language. One of his colleagues, Victoria is an example of a seasoned actor using their skills in the espionage game. She acts as a courier and go between while taking various forms, most notably as a hunchbacked old woman. Another character, Dr. Lopez has a variety of aliases and identities that he goes by including a final one which no doubt inspired many of Shakespeare's Comedy plays that involve mistaken identity and characters disguising themselves.
Shakespeare is also given literary works to study that would later be instrumental in his theatrical work such as Hollingshead's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (where the sources for his History plays and many of his tragedies like Macbeth began) and Plutarch’s Lives (where works like Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra originated). We see that many of the survival tools that later made him famous were based on research and observation.
Sone writes Shakespeare as compelling, complex, and contradictory as well the protagonist in a Shakespeare play. He does this by playing various roles to the public, his intimate circle, and to himself. He is a devout Catholic who is appalled by the treatment that his fellow practitioners receive at the hands of Queen Elizabeth, particularly his father who was arrested. He is involved in some pretty daring plots to restore the monarchy to Catholicism. Most notably late in the book he works behind the scenes during the infamous Gunpowder Plot headed by Guy Fawkes but he does not openly defy the monarchy.
In fact he works so well behind the scenes that while he is under suspicion of conspiratorial ties, he is never arrested for them. There are some pretty tense moments where he comes close such as a performance of Richard II which escalates into a sting operation against conspirators.
Shakespeare takes a pragmatic approach to rebellion. As the figurehead leader of his company of Players and a central figure in the rebellious espionage ring, he can't afford to give himself away by being openly defiant. If a spy goes down, that's terrible but results in the loss of one person. If he goes down, the whole network and acting company goes down with him.
He knows when to restrain himself in the presence of superiors especially royalty. In fact, he develops such a good rapport with the Queen that after she is amused by Falstaff, the supporting character from Henry IV and V, she commands that Shakespeare write a Comedy about Falstaff in love resulting in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
As for the other Shakespeare mysteries, they lead to some interesting analysis to Shakespeare’s character. He shows that he is able to write effectively through his poems and sonnets. He also has some creative planning and thinking skills as he comes up with the idea of combining multiple sources to create a new work as he does with Romeo and Juliet combining one story about feuding families with another about separated lovers.
However, the book suggests that the dubious authorship is born because of mutual insecurities. Shakespeare needs to be seen as the head of Lord Chamberlain's Men but is concerned that his lack of formal education and rural background would be barriers in his writing. De Vere is a nobleman with tremendous talent but is concerned that his acknowledged authorship would be a threat to his status. Plus they are both involved within the Catholic community so they work out a deal. De Vere writes and sends the plays, Shakespeare accepts credit and his troupe produces and performs them. Also their plays contained coded messages and inside references to the Catholic community.
Amina is also compelling even if her appearances shorten as the book continues. She is strong willed and devoted to her causes as much as Shakespeare is but because of her physical appearance in Renaissance England, she doesn't have the luxury of hiding in public the way her lover does. As a result, they spend a large part of the book separated by distance and authority. However, the time that they spend is seen as a meeting between two strong feisty individuals who stand equally to one another. Amina and Shakespeare”s relationship in the book results in some intriguing plot twists that add to the speculation that the book conveys.
The Corsico Conspiracy shows that like his characters Shakespeare knew that the world was a stage so he was ready to play many parts.
