Writing About Work

A few days ago I heard this piece of philosophy about art and work in which author Alain de Botton states:

"We need an art that can proclaim the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty and horror of the modern workplace and, not least, its extraordinary claim to be able to provide us, along with love, despite current economic mayhem, with the principal source of life's meaning."

I've written a lot about the two years I spent working on organic farms while taking time off from college. Those years were valuable to me personally and also politically in that they made me much more aware of where food comes from and how much effort is needed to produce and consume healthy food.

I've written a lot less about the several years I've spent working in offices. Perhaps the office environment is better suited to satire than lyric? Anyway, here's a white collar poem.


The Secretary (or) A Turn Not Taken

The secretary chooses
her clothes from a palette
of khaki, charcoal, maroon.
Her job is to blend with the walls.
She tips herself forward, a cup and saucer
clinking. Ready.

Purple girl shapes walk into the water.
Girls in purple Spandex form a pyramid
on water skis.
Against the blue-green-yellow day
the cut of the wind
they don their sleek skins.

Their skis swivel—
            her chair swivels—
                        where did she go wrong?
How I wish I were a part
            of that pyramid
                        taking off into the sky.

Humorous Links

Humor can be such a relief during challenging times. I've recently been getting a good laugh out of these sites.

Shitmydadsays
This caught my attention because I just watched Sunshine Cleaning, which stars Alan Arkin as a grumpy old man (he also played a grumpy old man in Little Miss Sunshine), so I was in the mood to laugh at the exclamations of another foul-mouthed older man.

Petty Petitions
From a "petition to set politics aside long enough to agree on a catchy, non-partisan nickname for Sarah Palin" to a "petition to live every day like it’s your second to last," this blog offers satire at its best.

Stuff White People Like
This blog pokes hilarious, though not mean-spirited, fun at my tribe: the class (more than the race) of folks who listen to NPR, own Apple computers, eat hummus, and attend yoga classes on a regular basis.

Amusing Ourselves to Death
More serious than funny, here's something of a different stripe to make you think twice about too much distraction.

The Name Says It All

To Emend the World

In "God Bless the Experimental Writers," Corey Mesler gently and humorously tackles the reasons why many of us write. I'll admit it, I had to look up the definition of emend, especially since it's such an important part of this poem.

John Cage said that all writing, indeed all creative work, is experimental. I'll put myself in the category for that reason. That and a lack of huge, formal recognition puts many of us in the category of Mesler's experimental writers - we might not know why we write, or for whom, but we know that we must. The emending, a gradual righting of the world through acts of creation, is what we hope for.

30 in 30

Inspired by the Northampton Arts Council's 30 Poems in 30 Days Challenge and all my local poet friends, I quietly committed myself to drafting 30 haiku (or haiku-ish things) in the month of November. I'm proud to say that I did it! Here are 4 of my favorites, in no particular order:


marshmallows, cigarettes, and rum
at the birthday party
all grown up now


walking down fifth ave
so this is where all those clothes
at marshall's come from


comfortable habits
collide with love, nervous me
exploding poems


the bones of mount tom
stones from mother's house, a new
path to my front door

Let Us Now Praise Famous Cliches

Nobody hates cliches more than poets. Yet cliches do what we are trying to do in our poems: create condensed, memorable, useful metaphors. In this fun article in the Boston Globe, writer James Parker takes us through the history and function of cliches, the phrases we (to use a cliche) love to hate.

As Parker points out, "Durable, easily handled, yet retaining somehow the flavor of its coinage, the classic cliché has fought philology to a standstill: it sticks and it stays, and not by accident."

The history of the word cliche comes from old printing techniques... "So the cliché was an object, and a useful one: a concrete unit of communication that minimized labor and sped things up."

Cliches grease the wheels of the government... "An American politician can be off-the-cuff, instinctive, zig-zag, but only if he or she is prepared immediately to make a cliché of it: look at what happened to the word 'maverick' in the last election."

And cliches range from the petty to the profound... "But what of the timeless cliché, the cliché you can steer your course by, the cliché that carries a small freight not just of meaning, but of wisdom?"

The author also chooses two cliches (the one about free lunch and the one about the tango) that describe the range of his "entire psychological and ethical structure." I'll have to think now about what mine would be. And what are yours?

Mazel Tov

I'd thought to crack a bottle
of champagne against the corner
of our first home

instead, the first thing I broke
was a basement window,
throwing a ball for the dog.

Oh, the immediacy of shatter and collapse
the laws of momentum and gravity
so unbreakable!