7.12.2023

YAKETY YAK, PART 1

PINK-COLLAR DEFECTOR: A MEMOIR 

                            PROLOGUE
The job was a sinkhole, but I needed it
for rent, for food and above all for parties
so I’d have an answer to What do you do?
besides Wreck my life with wage-slave freelance gigs.

                              CHAPTER 1
Every morning, Golden Boy arrived in style,
his trouser crease a shark’s fin disquieting
my cool lagoon, the click of his heels on tile
the tick-tick-tick-tick of a bomb counting down.

                              CHAPTER 2
It never hurts to be the founder’s nephew.
That’s one way you get to be a golden boy.

                              CHAPTER 3
Call me an unreliable narrator.
To clarify, Golden Boy didn’t arrive
in style every single morning. It might be
afternoon. Maybe he’d show up in stained sweats,
if he troubled himself to show up at all.
That depended on how much he’d had to drink.
Also on whether he had gone off his meds.

                              CHAPTER 4
One day Golden Boy invited me to lunch
with a client. Not because he wanted to,
but because he had handed me her account,
which he himself had landed, and needed me
to sweet-talk her. The client was furious
about the twelve-week delay in her schedule,
though she had no clue who had caused the problem
by playing Candy Crush Saga at his desk.
Hello, I said. Hello, the client replied,
why the fuck are you slow-walking my project?
                            
                              CHAPTER 5
Then there was the time Golden Boy raised his fist
and punched out half a wall of my cubicle.
I was told to requisition the repairs
in triplicate, white and pink and baby blue.

                            CHAPTER 6
It’s not always the worst thing when a man leaves
the seat up. It’s when he puts it down but shakes
a trail of droplets onto the floor for you
to slip and break your neck. That was Golden Boy
with his golden messes, and HR agreed
but essentially suggested that I stop
being such an uppity bitch and keep on
drawing my piddling paycheck and learn to run
with Golden Boy’s rages and incompetence.
                              
                              EPILOGUE
I never did file a Title IX lawsuit
or rig a remote detonation device
to Golden Boy’s silver Lexus. I cleaned out
my desk. As I did, Golden Boy sauntered by,
nonchalant in the nimbus of protection
clinging to him like a soft lambskin condom.

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CRAFT NOTE: I’m still wrung out after a recent trip, so today and for the rest of this week I am digging into the vault and sharing some of my older, “talkier” poems. Several of them were published in various journals as long as fifteen years ago. Like almost everything else I’ve posted on Diary Poems, these poems are syllabic.¹ All of them are narrative, telling a story of some kind.

But why put the word talkier, above, in quotation marks? Why should the word talky and its derivatives need special marking?

The quotation marks are an apologetic gesture.

I remain influenced by the anglophone notion of the model poem as a spare, chiseled, sparkling little free-verse gem of compression.² So I try, but this is me falling off the wagon.

One poet who never bothered to climb aboard is Albert Goldbarth, the subject of an entertaining essay by the poet Eric McHenry. Sympathetic though his essay is, McHenry does include this caveat: “The conventions Goldbarth ignores exist for some good reasons. It would probably be best if the world were to . . . [think] of poetry as ‘language distilled.’ Most good poetry is. And most bad poets do have brevity going for them, if nothing else.”

I hope you will enjoy reading this week’s talky little narratives. If they do “nothing else,” let them serve as proof that it’s easier to publish a poem than to write a good one.

1. Except for today’s poem, the format varies from what has been my general practice here of using eleven to fourteen lines of eleven syllables. Thursday’s poem uses three nineteen-line stanzas of fourteen syllables per line. Friday’s uses run-on, enjambed repetitions of the standard (in English) Japanese tanka form (a five-line stanza of, respectively, five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables).

2. As literary history shows, however, many other kinds of poetry are and always have been common across a range of languages and cultures. For a recent survey of poetry’s broader horizons, see the third edition of Jerome Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred. As for poetry and poetics in the United States, the late Irish poet Eavan Boland remarked somewhere that American poets tend to line up behind either the concise Emily Dickinson or the freewheeling Walt Whitman.

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YAKETY YAK, PART 2

YAKETY YAK, PART 3

YAKETY YAK, PART 4

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