Good Friday afternoon, everyone:

First and foremost: Happy Valentine’s Day.

I’m in Southern California attending a convening choreographed by Accelerator for America, which focuses on building networks of problem-solving capacity across cities by convening mayors and philanthropy. We have about 20 mayors (together with Gates, Blackstone, JP Morgan Chase, and Emerson) here, exploring the implications of the new Washington order for urban policy and practice.

The news is both good and bad: the good is that there is enormous innovation abreast in every one of the cities represented, with the expectation that that will continue even if in recalibrated form; the bad is the uncertainty of funding cuts across the civic spectrum, growing attacks on opportunity structures for low-income people, draconian and cruel treatment of immigrants, the potential elimination of key federal sources of support, and on and on.

The latter consideration prompted Bruce Katz of the Drexel Nowak Metro Finance Lab to note at last night’s dinner that what comes next will be “ugly.” I thought it accordingly appropriate to try to leaven the tone just a bit by calling on the invariably thoughtful writer, Maria Popova, who urged us to remember that cities are like poetry.

A poem pulls together and condenses a great deal into a small space and adds rhythm and harmony and nuance to accentuate its meaning.  The city is like that. It compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and structure and purpose. Like a poem, its magic is both comprehensible to its residents and sufficiently complex to remain elusive.

Popova then asks what would happen if “we governed human life not by politics but by poetry?” She cites James Baldwin in support of the idea: “We made the world we’re living in, and we have to make it over,” Baldwin wrote. He continued:  “The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.”

That is hard to translate into the hardscrabble environments in which we – and our elected officials and our spectrum of civic colleagues – must now work. But it strikes me that it’s worth thinking about.

Rip

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