Poets with boring jobs
Because looking for a new job has occupied me lately, I want to talk about poets with boring jobs. In this category I count anyone who's written poems but makes a full-time living in a way other than writing or teaching. It's a presumptuous category, of course: who am I to say that Philip Larkin was bored every day as a librarian, or that Wallace Stevens found insurance claims horribly dull? More likely the poets with boring jobs have been bored and fulfilled and everywhere in between.
I have a job now. I'm fulfilled and bored and frustrated and proud of it– sometimes all at once.
So maybe I've romanticized the routine of being a poet with a boring job: living one life from 9 to 5, hustling my spreadsheets and emails, then transforming like a superhero of syntax on my lunch break or the train home or the weekend. This requires more discipline than I usually have. It's a second shift of work, but I have to be the boss of me.
I wonder, too, because my feminist mind has to: can one make enough time in the day for the boring job, the poetry, plus all the household labor that's so often invisible? Dishes pile up in the sink, and I sit obsessively tinkering with the rhythm of a sonnet or the line breaks in an erasure poem. It'd be even worse if I didn't have the support of a certain kind person who does more of the cooking and cleaning than me.
"Jobs" and "work" both strike me as ugly words for necessary things. They're short and harsh, angular and urgent. They connote struggles and time spent. I love two poems – one newish, one not so much – about each of these words.
Jobs
I walked into a poetry reading in January as Dolly Lemke was reading these lines:
but you got my jokes
about not having career goals
that weren't really jokes
in the first place but how jobs
want you to be innovative
and don't get that you are a poet
and all your energy is used up
I found it printed in this chapbook. Jokes and goals and jobs, enjambed at the ends of these lines, point out both ambivalence and frustration. Jokes that aren't really jokes are good for this purpose.
Here, jobs become personified, with their own opinions and needs. Jobs want something from the speaker, who knows she can't deliver what they want, not completely. I was happy, while writing this, to find another poem Dolly wrote that's called "My Job." These poems illustrate the fragmented attention and lingering resentment jobs can provoke. Jobs will never get that you are a poet. That's antithetical to jobs. Jobs want you to focus on your narrowly teleological path, not wander in the wildness of your mind and your poetry books. This antithesis is something I love about poetry. It's just too messy to be a job.
Work
Philip Levine has called his work on auto assembly lines his "stupid jobs." In "What Work Is," that word "work" wavers. There's work and there's waiting, right from the start:
We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Everyone who can read knows about work, so the speaker refuses to bother defining it. Get to work reading the rest of the poem, he implies. Forget you. Immerse yourself in what you're reading, in the experience of waiting.
Prepositions propel you through the poem:
You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Beside, behind, ahead, before: suddenly thoughts of this brother surround him.
The brother, with his miserable night shift, has a hard job, one that takes him away from another life:
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
I love "the worst music ever invented" with its teenage-sibling petulance. In this line, there's a glimmer of a reminder: love is work, too. Being present and wholly yourself among people you love, even when they love things you hate: that's work everyone has to do.
So maybe everything worth doing is work, even if it's not a job. When this poem ends "just because you don't know what work is," I'm inclined to read it that way.
Maybe it's a lifelong practice: learning how to do every kind of work required of you in a day and feel complete in doing so. This is the work that contains all the other kinds of work.
What poems do you love about work? What's a good boring job for a poet? I really like talking about these things. Reply any time.
(PS: I have ten copies left of Instax Winter. Will you take them off my hands?)