Writing About Your Day Job
A friend (thanks, Stephanie Garcia!) tipped me off to this interview from a few (ok, six) years ago, in which Dana Gioia (one of very few poets who went to business school) talks about a number of fascinating things, including the need to bridge the gulf between... well, business and poetry. He also makes the point that there are plenty of poets who had day jobs outside the realm of academia (Wallace Stevens, James Dickey, T.S. Eliot, etc) but didn't necessarily write about it.
That got me thinking about my own work--not just because I'm narcissistic, but because one of my soap box issues has always been that I think modern poets spend far too much time trying to be clever and far too little time trying to be real. As something of a Zen Buddhist, I believe wholeheartedly that anything can be profound, no matter how mundane, if it's viewed with honesty and most especially, humility. That translates into the belief that anything can be good subject matter for art, so long as it's properly executed (whatever that means).
Taking that a step further, I believe that writers are free to write about whatever the hell they want to write about, but if one automatically excludes one's own experiences in the work place, they're omitting 99% of their potential subject matter and X'ing out a huge chunk of the human story.
Personally, I find myself writing about past blue collar jobs (and current teaching and everyday life experiences) pretty often--not just because I favor narrative poetry, but because I think part of the duty of art is to chronicle human experience. In other words, when I read Li Po, I feel like I've been transported back to 700 A.D. Through the miracle of simple, narrative verse, a 21st century white boy like me suddenly knows a little bit about what it's like to be an 8th century Chinese poet--and in the process, I have a deeper understanding of the common threads that join all generations of human beings throughout history. That's pretty cool.
But assuming the human race still exists in 3326 A.D., I can't imagine somebody picking up an ultra-experimental/"language" poem and feeling that same connection. That doesn't mean that experimental/"language" poetry is bad. I also concede that writing with the hope that somebody will read and appreciate your stuff in eighteen centuries probably isn't always the best goal. I suppose it comes down to the fact that, for me, if I started writing with nothing but Greek allusions and wingdings, I'd feel like I wasn't doing what I'm supposed to do.
Anyway, Gioia's interview also reminded me of poet Richard Donnelly's excellent book, The Melancholy MBA, in which the narrator writes almost exclusively about working in an droll office.
The poems are darkly funny and socially conscious for just that reason. Reading that book is like watching Office Space with a huge but palatable dose of philosophy thrown in. That's pretty cool, too.
But I'll get off my soap box now. Oh, and if you're interested, here's my review of Donnelly's book.
