Essays
With One Foot Planted Firmly in the Arts (2004) Ted Kooser
If, when I was seventeen or eighteen, a gypsy had appeared on my doorstep to tell me that I could plan on spending almost thirty-five years behind a desk at a life insurance company, I probably would have taken a long walk into a pond with rocks in my pockets. I was a typical, rebellious adolescent, and I thought myself superior to the drudgery of capitalistic America. Nothing would have seemed so horrible to me as to be coerced by the fates to hold down an eight-to-five office job for most of my adult life, shuffling boring documents from "in" boxes to "out" boxes, with a closet at home full of dark suits, white shirts, and conservative ties. I knew people like that and felt sorry for them. Some were my parents' best friends.
Nothing about the business world appealed to me, or matched up with my dream of what a life should offer, which by then included the company of young women. I dreamed of a life that included at least one of those elusive creatures. But what attractive, scintillating woman would want to keep company with a businessman? If I wound up behind a desk I might find myself in a marriage just like that, like a job at a desk. My precious individuality, which in those days I was working so hard to protect, would be lost, absorbed into the great ocean of identical nobodies. What kind of life would that be?
This was to be the great theme of my life, the struggle to preserve my distinctiveness in the face of social pressure to relax and permit myself to be absorbed into normalcy. A life with one foot planted in the arts was to be my salvation.
My father managed a small town department store, and that seemed, well...dumb, if not outright pathetic, to use words I would have thrown about in those days. He was interested in amateur theater, and both my parents belonged to a play reading group, but still.... My mother was just a housewife, and that seemed, well... undistinguished. Our neighbors had...well, they just had jobs. They knew nothing about poetry or painting or theater. I was superior to them in that. They just stooped in their flower gardens and tirelessly washed their cars. Pretty much everything that people in my town of Ames, Iowa, did with their time seemed, well...stupid. Except, of course, for what I wanted to do, which was to be completely unique and irresistibly attractive.
But how was I to accomplish this uniqueness? I wasn't very good at anything. I had already discovered to my embarrassment that I had almost no athletic ability, nor was I musically talented. I was too shy to try out for the debate team or to sing in the school chorus. I was not a member of the group we outsiders called "the neat kids," who were destined, we thought, to sweep through their lives without the slightest chink in their abundant confidence.
Somehow it occurred to me in my late teens that perhaps instead of working at a bank like Mr. Hammer, or running a hamburger shop like Mr. Knight, or working at the Iowa State Highway Commission like Mr. White, I could be mysterious and interesting. I would become a... let's see, I would become a poet! I had read a little about poets in Life magazine and had seen their photographs there. Even the homely ones, like old John Berryman, with scraggly beards and spaniel eyes, seemed always to have young women leaning against them, beaming with adoration. So, instead of accepting a tedious future doing some kind of ordinary work, I would become a poet, a literary artist. I would live a unique, fascinating, completely free and independent life. Pretty librarians would blush when I came through the door.
I fell upon this idea with single-minded adolescent fervor, starting with my costume. I assembled a poet's outfit that consisted of beachcomber pants that tied at the waist with a string, flip-flop sandals, and a loud Hawaiian shirt. I would have worn a beret, but the only ones available in Ames were in the millinery department of my father's store, and I knew better than to start wearing women's hats in our small town. When out in public I kept my brow furrowed, trying to look serious, to look intellectual, to look different. I thought I looked like a poet, but I suppose I looked like an awkward, shy, skinny teenaged boy in beachcomber pants and blue shower shoes. I began to carry stacks of important-looking books around with me and pretended to know what was in them. One of those books, as I recall, was by someone named Adolph Harnack and called Outlines of the History of Dogma. I didn't understand a word in it, but it did look especially good under my arm.
Though I was pretending to be a poet, I hadn't really gotten around to trying to write poetry. It was the look I was after in those days, not the hard work or trying to write something. But I did carry books of poetry around with me, and thumbed through them, and began to find them interesting. And now and then I tried my hand at writing a poem. I thought my poems were pretty good, but the friends I showed them to were very clever at evading high praise. Meanwhile, I graduated from high school and stared out into the cold and indifferent world that might be the rest of my life.
I enrolled at Iowa State and was an average student, getting B's and C's just as I had in high school, with the exception of A's in my writing classes where I excelled because, as an aspiring poet, I figured I needed to make a better showing. I took and enjoyed other liberal arts classes — history, philosophy, literature. I studied German and tried to read the German poets. In my junior year I took a class in poetry writing, taught by a bona fide poet who had published real poems in real literary magazines. He was a very generous man who, while encouraging my creativity, taught me a lot about the mechanics of writing poetry, about literary forms, about the use of imagery and so on. I began to be caught up in the work of writing. I started to work on the student literary magazine under this teacher's supervision and I joined a group of students who met each week to discuss their writing. Iowa's senior senator-to-be, Tom Harkin, was in that group. We were both young Democrats, but he didn't like my poems and I didn't much like his.
Then, suddenly, college was over and once again the indifferent world stretched to the horizon. I didn't see any jobs for poets in the want ads (in fact, I've never seen a job for a poet in the want ads.) I took a job teaching high school English in a nearby rural community, thinking that perhaps it was the sort of occupation in which a poet could flourish. My girlfriend, who was also an English major and whom I had wooed with my adolescent poetry, consented to marry me, and we moved into our first apartment. I was secretly terrified of marriage, which for me meant being an adult, meant being normal, but she and I plowed ahead and hoped for the best. I taught my classes and tried vainly to maintain order in sixth hour study halls. I took tickets at football games and chaperoned sock hops and substituted for teachers who had called in sick. In what little spare time I had from teaching I clung to my idea of myself as an artist, as someone set apart. I wrote my poems and painted a few pictures, including a realistic nude of my wife that disappeared years later, much to my embarrassment, and probably hangs above somebody's basement bar.
I knew within a few months of starting to teach high school that it wasn't the life I was looking for. With faint hope I applied to graduate school, which was the only thing I could think of to do. It was a way, I suppose, of extending my adolescence, where I felt most comfortable. And a university campus seemed like a far better place to put a poet than substituting for the kindergarten teacher when she had strep throat. I sent letters all over the country and was finally admitted to the University of Nebraska. I was given assistance with tuition in exchange for helping a professor with his paper work. I had decided on Nebraska because Karl Shapiro, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet whose work I had come to admire, was teaching there and I hoped to learn from him. My plan was to earn advanced degrees in English and then to support myself by teaching college writing. That seemed like something a poet could do. Other writers were doing just that, and as it turned out, during the next forty years all but a few of the poets and fiction writers of my generation found work as university professors. Today there are only a handful of writers who earn their keep at jobs off campus.
But after we had arrived and settled into life in Nebraska, I discovered I was every bit as inept at being a graduate student as I had been as a high school athlete. I had almost no interest in literature prior to the modern period, and I made only a token effort to comply with the requirements of the curriculum, preferring instead to spend time drinking Irish whiskey with my new friend, Karl Shapiro. Karl had dropped out of college as an undergraduate and returned as a tenured full professor, solely on the basis of his literary accomplishments. He didn't have to pass Chaucer or understand Spenser. He advised me that if I wanted to be a writer I ought to get out of the university and find a job "in the real world," a job that could support me yet give me time to read and write.
As it happened, I didn't get the opportunity to decide. I was tossed out of the graduate program because I spent too much time with Karl and not enough time attending to the required course work. At the end of my first year my advisor called me in and, pursing his bloodless lips and tapping the tips of his fingers together, told me I no longer was welcome. The university had wasted enough of its good dollars on me. I hadn't played the game. But I wanted a Master's degree, I pleaded, and he said I'd have to figure how to do that on my own. This sorry experience took place in the years before there were creative writing programs at universities, with the exception of the Writers Workshop at Iowa City and a few scattered others. Had there been such a program at Nebraska I might have been better suited to the academic life. But even a famous poet like Karl Shapiro wasn't completely acceptable at the university and was kept in an office at the end of a narrow hallway, a leper in his cave.
There I was, thrown out of graduate school and having no idea what I'd do with the rest of my life. I went back to our apartment and closed the door. I fell back upon the steady solace of good books, of the pleasure of looking at paintings and listening to good music. The arts were my church, and I needed only to read a great poem or look at a reproduction of a fine painting to feel that my life was worthwhile because I was dedicating it to something bigger than myself. Poetry was bigger than myself, and I was its servant, or was trying to be.
My wife had a position teaching high school English and drama at a little town near where we were living, and she brought in enough income to pay the rent and buy groceries, but I realized I'd need to find something to do. I wanted to earn at least enough to pay my tuition when I was able to go back to school. One day I saw a newspaper advertisement for an entry-level position at a life insurance company, answering phone calls and letters from policyholders. It seemed like something that I could do, that I could suffer through for a few months until I saved enough to go back to the university. And I ought to be able to hang on to my artistic life by writing poetry before work and after.
I had never had a business course of any kind, and my only experience in the world of commerce had been as a boy, as a newspaper carrier. Oh, at Christmas time I had worked in the basement of my father's department store, making bows for Gift Wrap, but that was, well, not really work in business. I'd never had to sell anybody anything, or persuade anybody to do something they didn't want to do, and the world of commerce and industry was all about that.
The man who interviewed me for the insurance job was, as I later learned, a bookish, unhappy alcoholic, every bit as ill-suited to the insurance business as was I. I'm pretty certain he hired me because he saw something of himself in me. I too was a person who hadn't quite figured out how to successfully get from one end of his life to the other without wandering off the path somewhere in open country. He warmly shook my hand and hired me and I settled in behind a desk that I feared would steal my life, unless I continued to write poetry with every spare ounce of my energy, unless I kept a foot on the raft of the arts, which I saw as my salvation.
My wife and I were renting a small apartment and I found a discarded cardboard refrigerator box in an alley and dragged it home and wedged it in the corner of our bedroom. There was just room enough for a typewriter on its teetering metal stand, and a folding chair. I can still smell that cardboard, warm and gluey on spring days. In that box I wrote my first good poems and pinned them to the cardboard to admire. I began to mail them out to magazines.
My job paid well, better than my high school teaching had, and the benefits were good. Though eight hours of every weekday were consumed by a business I cared very little about, I had the early mornings and the evenings to myself and could sit in my cardboard box and write, or lie on the bed and read while my wife graded English papers at the table or was still at school rehearsing plays. I re-enrolled at the university and took one evening class each semester, gradually accumulating credits toward my Master's degree. I was working in business but keeping one foot planted firmly in the arts. It felt as if that one foot was on a dock, and the other was on a little boat that was trying to drift away into business and take me with it. But by setting my teeth and stubbornly clinging to my dreams I was able to hold onto my idea of myself.
And I was getting better at balancing the two. By that time I was becoming less interested in my image as a poet, as that special person, and more interested in the quality of the poems on which I was working. Respectable literary magazines began to publish my work. I was also getting better at my insurance job. I was good at writing letters to policyholders and assisting with composing memoranda because, well, I could write. Some of my peers, with degrees in business, didn't find the writing quite so easy. They knew how business worked, had taken accounting and business law and so on, but they were afraid of paper and pen. They needed my help. There were times when I actually enjoyed what I was doing at the office, because among these colleagues, I was indeed a little special. I was the only English major in the entire insurance company. I was not being absorbed by business but was bobbing along like a cork on its surface.
I worked for that company for eight years, then transferred to another and worked for the second company for twenty-five years. Meantime my first marriage wore down and broke up and my wife moved back to Iowa, taking our son, who was not quite three. I had too fiercely and too selfishly fought to preserve my idea of myself as an artist and an independent spirit when I should have been a more attentive husband and father.
The second company started out small, with around two dozen employees, and by the time I retired it had grown to nearly a thousand. I tried out several different jobs during those years and because of my skills at communication was promoted and promoted and promoted until one day I found myself a full vice president, making good money while still thinking of myself as a poet just working to support my writing habit. I married again, and my wife and I began to build an understanding that accommodated my work and my writing, yet stood firm on an intimacy I had denied myself before.
Once I arrived in supervisory positions at the company it was necessary for me to hire employees and, like the man who had hired me for my first insurance job, I tended to favor people who seemed to share my interests and who didn't quite fit the big picture. I took a stand against hiring strict business majors because I had by then come to realize that they had few original thoughts. Sure, they were good at the basics. They could fill out spread sheets and add up columns of credits and debits, but.... Even the applicants with MBA's weren't very good candidates for positions because they all had the same fashionable ideas. Each of them had read the latest book by Tom Peters or Peter Drucker, and they all used the same buzz words. Graduate business schools were stamping out MBAs like quarter panels.
I had discovered during my considerable tenure as a businessman that businesses succeeded by being different, by trying new and sometimes risky ideas, and if they were completely populated by MBAs every company would be the same, making and selling the same products, providing identical services. None would excel. Just as I had started to write poetry because it was a way of being different and special, as a businessman I wanted our company to be different and special too. My last department, the one I supervised until I retired, consisted of a visual artist, an English major, and a part-time singer in a rock band. I believe that part of our success was based upon this diversity and the creativity that arose from hiring people who were not those you'd expect to hire for businesses. I've since learned that more and more companies are having second thoughts about hiring business majors, that more and more are looking to candidates with liberal arts educations because these people don't think like everybody else, and can bring a diversity of life experience to the work place, as well as a sense of what people call "the big picture." A person who has directed a play at the community playhouse has a lot better chance of leading a company to success than someone who has read The Pursuit of Excellence and used a yellow highlighter on every line.
Of course, just having a bachelor's degree in philosophy or linguistics isn't likely to be enough in itself to get somebody an entry level job at a Wall Street stockbrokerage concern. When applying for any job, any candidate must show the interviewer what he or she can do to help the company accomplish its goals. And if that candidate can show the interviewer that her knowledge of philosophy has made her an effective and creative leader, she may get the position.
But when it comes right down to it, it's the quality of life that matters. It's not the jobs that help us get from one end of life to the other in relative safety, good health and happiness. It's the sense that we as individuals matter, that each of us has something unique to offer. I wish that everyone could find meaningful and fulfilling work, but not everyone will. Some of us will always have to fight to keep what we care for, and it's worth the fight. For me it was the arts. They helped me hold on to myself when I might have slipped under. And the arts are available for all of us to keep the workaday world in touch with the really big issues, the great human themes. The arts can bring those issues and themes into play in every corner of a life. They can even make an insurance company just a little better, a little less a company and a little more a company of individuals.
|
« Previous Article | Next Article » |
With One Foot Planted Firmly in the Arts (2004) Ted Kooser
If, when I was seventeen or eighteen, a gypsy had appeared on my doorstep to tell me that I could plan on spending almost thirty-five years behind a desk at a life insurance company, I probably would have taken a long walk into a pond with rocks in my pockets. I was a typical, rebellious adolescent, and I thought myself superior to the drudgery of capitalistic America. Nothing would have seemed so horrible to me as to be coerced by the fates to hold down an eight-to-five office job for most of my adult life, shuffling boring documents from "in" boxes to "out" boxes, with a closet at home full of dark suits, white shirts, and conservative ties. I knew people like that and felt sorry for them. Some were my parents' best friends.
Nothing about the business world appealed to me, or matched up with my dream of what a life should offer, which by then included the company of young women. I dreamed of a life that included at least one of those elusive creatures. But what attractive, scintillating woman would want to keep company with a businessman? If I wound up behind a desk I might find myself in a marriage just like that, like a job at a desk. My precious individuality, which in those days I was working so hard to protect, would be lost, absorbed into the great ocean of identical nobodies. What kind of life would that be?
This was to be the great theme of my life, the struggle to preserve my distinctiveness in the face of social pressure to relax and permit myself to be absorbed into normalcy. A life with one foot planted in the arts was to be my salvation.
My father managed a small town department store, and that seemed, well...dumb, if not outright pathetic, to use words I would have thrown about in those days. He was interested in amateur theater, and both my parents belonged to a play reading group, but still.... My mother was just a housewife, and that seemed, well... undistinguished. Our neighbors had...well, they just had jobs. They knew nothing about poetry or painting or theater. I was superior to them in that. They just stooped in their flower gardens and tirelessly washed their cars. Pretty much everything that people in my town of Ames, Iowa, did with their time seemed, well...stupid. Except, of course, for what I wanted to do, which was to be completely unique and irresistibly attractive.
But how was I to accomplish this uniqueness? I wasn't very good at anything. I had already discovered to my embarrassment that I had almost no athletic ability, nor was I musically talented. I was too shy to try out for the debate team or to sing in the school chorus. I was not a member of the group we outsiders called "the neat kids," who were destined, we thought, to sweep through their lives without the slightest chink in their abundant confidence.
Somehow it occurred to me in my late teens that perhaps instead of working at a bank like Mr. Hammer, or running a hamburger shop like Mr. Knight, or working at the Iowa State Highway Commission like Mr. White, I could be mysterious and interesting. I would become a... let's see, I would become a poet! I had read a little about poets in Life magazine and had seen their photographs there. Even the homely ones, like old John Berryman, with scraggly beards and spaniel eyes, seemed always to have young women leaning against them, beaming with adoration. So, instead of accepting a tedious future doing some kind of ordinary work, I would become a poet, a literary artist. I would live a unique, fascinating, completely free and independent life. Pretty librarians would blush when I came through the door.
I fell upon this idea with single-minded adolescent fervor, starting with my costume. I assembled a poet's outfit that consisted of beachcomber pants that tied at the waist with a string, flip-flop sandals, and a loud Hawaiian shirt. I would have worn a beret, but the only ones available in Ames were in the millinery department of my father's store, and I knew better than to start wearing women's hats in our small town. When out in public I kept my brow furrowed, trying to look serious, to look intellectual, to look different. I thought I looked like a poet, but I suppose I looked like an awkward, shy, skinny teenaged boy in beachcomber pants and blue shower shoes. I began to carry stacks of important-looking books around with me and pretended to know what was in them. One of those books, as I recall, was by someone named Adolph Harnack and called Outlines of the History of Dogma. I didn't understand a word in it, but it did look especially good under my arm.
Though I was pretending to be a poet, I hadn't really gotten around to trying to write poetry. It was the look I was after in those days, not the hard work or trying to write something. But I did carry books of poetry around with me, and thumbed through them, and began to find them interesting. And now and then I tried my hand at writing a poem. I thought my poems were pretty good, but the friends I showed them to were very clever at evading high praise. Meanwhile, I graduated from high school and stared out into the cold and indifferent world that might be the rest of my life.
I enrolled at Iowa State and was an average student, getting B's and C's just as I had in high school, with the exception of A's in my writing classes where I excelled because, as an aspiring poet, I figured I needed to make a better showing. I took and enjoyed other liberal arts classes — history, philosophy, literature. I studied German and tried to read the German poets. In my junior year I took a class in poetry writing, taught by a bona fide poet who had published real poems in real literary magazines. He was a very generous man who, while encouraging my creativity, taught me a lot about the mechanics of writing poetry, about literary forms, about the use of imagery and so on. I began to be caught up in the work of writing. I started to work on the student literary magazine under this teacher's supervision and I joined a group of students who met each week to discuss their writing. Iowa's senior senator-to-be, Tom Harkin, was in that group. We were both young Democrats, but he didn't like my poems and I didn't much like his.
Then, suddenly, college was over and once again the indifferent world stretched to the horizon. I didn't see any jobs for poets in the want ads (in fact, I've never seen a job for a poet in the want ads.) I took a job teaching high school English in a nearby rural community, thinking that perhaps it was the sort of occupation in which a poet could flourish. My girlfriend, who was also an English major and whom I had wooed with my adolescent poetry, consented to marry me, and we moved into our first apartment. I was secretly terrified of marriage, which for me meant being an adult, meant being normal, but she and I plowed ahead and hoped for the best. I taught my classes and tried vainly to maintain order in sixth hour study halls. I took tickets at football games and chaperoned sock hops and substituted for teachers who had called in sick. In what little spare time I had from teaching I clung to my idea of myself as an artist, as someone set apart. I wrote my poems and painted a few pictures, including a realistic nude of my wife that disappeared years later, much to my embarrassment, and probably hangs above somebody's basement bar.
I knew within a few months of starting to teach high school that it wasn't the life I was looking for. With faint hope I applied to graduate school, which was the only thing I could think of to do. It was a way, I suppose, of extending my adolescence, where I felt most comfortable. And a university campus seemed like a far better place to put a poet than substituting for the kindergarten teacher when she had strep throat. I sent letters all over the country and was finally admitted to the University of Nebraska. I was given assistance with tuition in exchange for helping a professor with his paper work. I had decided on Nebraska because Karl Shapiro, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet whose work I had come to admire, was teaching there and I hoped to learn from him. My plan was to earn advanced degrees in English and then to support myself by teaching college writing. That seemed like something a poet could do. Other writers were doing just that, and as it turned out, during the next forty years all but a few of the poets and fiction writers of my generation found work as university professors. Today there are only a handful of writers who earn their keep at jobs off campus.
But after we had arrived and settled into life in Nebraska, I discovered I was every bit as inept at being a graduate student as I had been as a high school athlete. I had almost no interest in literature prior to the modern period, and I made only a token effort to comply with the requirements of the curriculum, preferring instead to spend time drinking Irish whiskey with my new friend, Karl Shapiro. Karl had dropped out of college as an undergraduate and returned as a tenured full professor, solely on the basis of his literary accomplishments. He didn't have to pass Chaucer or understand Spenser. He advised me that if I wanted to be a writer I ought to get out of the university and find a job "in the real world," a job that could support me yet give me time to read and write.
As it happened, I didn't get the opportunity to decide. I was tossed out of the graduate program because I spent too much time with Karl and not enough time attending to the required course work. At the end of my first year my advisor called me in and, pursing his bloodless lips and tapping the tips of his fingers together, told me I no longer was welcome. The university had wasted enough of its good dollars on me. I hadn't played the game. But I wanted a Master's degree, I pleaded, and he said I'd have to figure how to do that on my own. This sorry experience took place in the years before there were creative writing programs at universities, with the exception of the Writers Workshop at Iowa City and a few scattered others. Had there been such a program at Nebraska I might have been better suited to the academic life. But even a famous poet like Karl Shapiro wasn't completely acceptable at the university and was kept in an office at the end of a narrow hallway, a leper in his cave.
There I was, thrown out of graduate school and having no idea what I'd do with the rest of my life. I went back to our apartment and closed the door. I fell back upon the steady solace of good books, of the pleasure of looking at paintings and listening to good music. The arts were my church, and I needed only to read a great poem or look at a reproduction of a fine painting to feel that my life was worthwhile because I was dedicating it to something bigger than myself. Poetry was bigger than myself, and I was its servant, or was trying to be.
My wife had a position teaching high school English and drama at a little town near where we were living, and she brought in enough income to pay the rent and buy groceries, but I realized I'd need to find something to do. I wanted to earn at least enough to pay my tuition when I was able to go back to school. One day I saw a newspaper advertisement for an entry-level position at a life insurance company, answering phone calls and letters from policyholders. It seemed like something that I could do, that I could suffer through for a few months until I saved enough to go back to the university. And I ought to be able to hang on to my artistic life by writing poetry before work and after.
I had never had a business course of any kind, and my only experience in the world of commerce had been as a boy, as a newspaper carrier. Oh, at Christmas time I had worked in the basement of my father's department store, making bows for Gift Wrap, but that was, well, not really work in business. I'd never had to sell anybody anything, or persuade anybody to do something they didn't want to do, and the world of commerce and industry was all about that.
The man who interviewed me for the insurance job was, as I later learned, a bookish, unhappy alcoholic, every bit as ill-suited to the insurance business as was I. I'm pretty certain he hired me because he saw something of himself in me. I too was a person who hadn't quite figured out how to successfully get from one end of his life to the other without wandering off the path somewhere in open country. He warmly shook my hand and hired me and I settled in behind a desk that I feared would steal my life, unless I continued to write poetry with every spare ounce of my energy, unless I kept a foot on the raft of the arts, which I saw as my salvation.
My wife and I were renting a small apartment and I found a discarded cardboard refrigerator box in an alley and dragged it home and wedged it in the corner of our bedroom. There was just room enough for a typewriter on its teetering metal stand, and a folding chair. I can still smell that cardboard, warm and gluey on spring days. In that box I wrote my first good poems and pinned them to the cardboard to admire. I began to mail them out to magazines.
My job paid well, better than my high school teaching had, and the benefits were good. Though eight hours of every weekday were consumed by a business I cared very little about, I had the early mornings and the evenings to myself and could sit in my cardboard box and write, or lie on the bed and read while my wife graded English papers at the table or was still at school rehearsing plays. I re-enrolled at the university and took one evening class each semester, gradually accumulating credits toward my Master's degree. I was working in business but keeping one foot planted firmly in the arts. It felt as if that one foot was on a dock, and the other was on a little boat that was trying to drift away into business and take me with it. But by setting my teeth and stubbornly clinging to my dreams I was able to hold onto my idea of myself.
And I was getting better at balancing the two. By that time I was becoming less interested in my image as a poet, as that special person, and more interested in the quality of the poems on which I was working. Respectable literary magazines began to publish my work. I was also getting better at my insurance job. I was good at writing letters to policyholders and assisting with composing memoranda because, well, I could write. Some of my peers, with degrees in business, didn't find the writing quite so easy. They knew how business worked, had taken accounting and business law and so on, but they were afraid of paper and pen. They needed my help. There were times when I actually enjoyed what I was doing at the office, because among these colleagues, I was indeed a little special. I was the only English major in the entire insurance company. I was not being absorbed by business but was bobbing along like a cork on its surface.
I worked for that company for eight years, then transferred to another and worked for the second company for twenty-five years. Meantime my first marriage wore down and broke up and my wife moved back to Iowa, taking our son, who was not quite three. I had too fiercely and too selfishly fought to preserve my idea of myself as an artist and an independent spirit when I should have been a more attentive husband and father.
The second company started out small, with around two dozen employees, and by the time I retired it had grown to nearly a thousand. I tried out several different jobs during those years and because of my skills at communication was promoted and promoted and promoted until one day I found myself a full vice president, making good money while still thinking of myself as a poet just working to support my writing habit. I married again, and my wife and I began to build an understanding that accommodated my work and my writing, yet stood firm on an intimacy I had denied myself before.
Once I arrived in supervisory positions at the company it was necessary for me to hire employees and, like the man who had hired me for my first insurance job, I tended to favor people who seemed to share my interests and who didn't quite fit the big picture. I took a stand against hiring strict business majors because I had by then come to realize that they had few original thoughts. Sure, they were good at the basics. They could fill out spread sheets and add up columns of credits and debits, but.... Even the applicants with MBA's weren't very good candidates for positions because they all had the same fashionable ideas. Each of them had read the latest book by Tom Peters or Peter Drucker, and they all used the same buzz words. Graduate business schools were stamping out MBAs like quarter panels.
I had discovered during my considerable tenure as a businessman that businesses succeeded by being different, by trying new and sometimes risky ideas, and if they were completely populated by MBAs every company would be the same, making and selling the same products, providing identical services. None would excel. Just as I had started to write poetry because it was a way of being different and special, as a businessman I wanted our company to be different and special too. My last department, the one I supervised until I retired, consisted of a visual artist, an English major, and a part-time singer in a rock band. I believe that part of our success was based upon this diversity and the creativity that arose from hiring people who were not those you'd expect to hire for businesses. I've since learned that more and more companies are having second thoughts about hiring business majors, that more and more are looking to candidates with liberal arts educations because these people don't think like everybody else, and can bring a diversity of life experience to the work place, as well as a sense of what people call "the big picture." A person who has directed a play at the community playhouse has a lot better chance of leading a company to success than someone who has read The Pursuit of Excellence and used a yellow highlighter on every line.
Of course, just having a bachelor's degree in philosophy or linguistics isn't likely to be enough in itself to get somebody an entry level job at a Wall Street stockbrokerage concern. When applying for any job, any candidate must show the interviewer what he or she can do to help the company accomplish its goals. And if that candidate can show the interviewer that her knowledge of philosophy has made her an effective and creative leader, she may get the position.
But when it comes right down to it, it's the quality of life that matters. It's not the jobs that help us get from one end of life to the other in relative safety, good health and happiness. It's the sense that we as individuals matter, that each of us has something unique to offer. I wish that everyone could find meaningful and fulfilling work, but not everyone will. Some of us will always have to fight to keep what we care for, and it's worth the fight. For me it was the arts. They helped me hold on to myself when I might have slipped under. And the arts are available for all of us to keep the workaday world in touch with the really big issues, the great human themes. The arts can bring those issues and themes into play in every corner of a life. They can even make an insurance company just a little better, a little less a company and a little more a company of individuals.
