The Vocation Poem

I went to Hollywood casino with a friend this weekend in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, and as I was sitting at the No Limit Poker table waiting for a hand worth playing, I wondered if there were any good poems written about casinos. Not a Kenny Rogers ditty about winners and losers and gambling (Don’t get me wrong, I love "The Gambler" and actually listened to it on the drive over.), but a poem that accesses the sights and sounds and unique vocabulary of the casino experience. The blinking neon lights and cacophony of hundreds of slot machines, the middle aged women dancing to an Elvis impersonator with plastic cups in their hands, the streams of people flowing past the Jeep being given away at 11:30, the queue at the poker room, people swiping their Club Hollywood cards at the table, the inane chatter between players trying to take money from each other...what would a poem like this look like from a dealer’s perspective, who sees the same scene play out night after night? What would he or she say? What kind of person decides to become a professional dealer?

Part of what makes poetry interesting is its desire to incorporate a wide range of vocabulary. I still remember the first time I saw some words that pulled me up short—lacustrine, for instance, from John Ashbery, or concupiscent in Wallace Stevens. These words can hit you out of left field, not only because they represent vocabulary that’s rarely heard in conversation, they're also words rarely seen in writing unless you’re reading John Updike.

Writing a “vocation poem” is a way to not only hear a distinct voice, but to access and meaningfully incorporate interesting language into poetry through jargon—that is, vocabulary specific to a job field or community of specialists. A recent example of this that I really enjoyed was Spencer Reece’s “The Clerk’s Tale”, the title poem from his 2004 debut collection. Reece wrote the poem while working at Brooks Brothers, and his representation of himself and his coworker as aging men working at a department store, the brands he names, and the specific vocabulary of shirts and ties and knots—it wouldn’t be possible without believing that a poem about work was worthwhile. It’s pretty long, but I’m going to reproduce it below anyway because the internet doesn't have space restrictions.

The Clerk’s Tale
by Spencer Reece

I am thirty-three and working in an expensive clothier,
selling suits to men I call "Sir."
These men are muscled, groomed and cropped--
with wives and families that grow exponentially.
Mostly I talk of rep ties and bow ties,
of full-Windsor knots and half-Windsor knots,
of tattersall, French cuff, and English spread collars,
of foulards, neats, and internationals,
of pincord, houndstooth, nailhead, and sharkskin.
I often wear a blue pin-striped suit.
My hair recedes and is going gray at the temples.
On my cheeks there are a few pimples.
For my terrible eyesight, horn-rimmed spectacles.
One of my fellow-workers is an old homosexual
who works hard and wears bracelets with jewels.
No one can rival his commission checks.
On his break he smokes a Benson & Hedges cigarette,
puffing expectantly as a Hollywood starlet.
He has carefully applied a layer of Clinique bronzer
to enhance the tan on his face and neck.
His hair is gone except for a few strands
which are combed across his scalp.
He examines his manicured lacquered nails.
I admire his studied attention to details:
his tie stuck to his shirt with masking tape,
his teeth capped, his breath mint in place.
The old homosexual and I laugh in the back
over a coarse joke involving an octopus.
Our banter is staccato, staged and close
like those "Spanish Dances" by Granados.
I sometimes feel we are in a musical--
gossiping backstage between our numbers.
He drags deeply on his cigarette.
Most of his life is over.
Often he refers to himself as "an old faggot."
He does this bemusedly, yet timidly.
I know why he does this.
He does this because his acceptance is finally complete--
and complete acceptance is always
bittersweet. Our hours are long. Our backs bent.
We are more gracious than English royalty.
We dart amongst the aisles tall as hedgerows.
Watch us face into the merchandise.
How we set up and take apart mannequins
as if we were performing autopsies.
A naked body, without pretense, is of no use.
It grows late.
I hear the front metal gate close down.
We begin folding the ties correctly according to color.
The shirts--Oxfords, broadcloths, pinpoints--
must be sized, stacked, or rehashed.
The old homosexual removes his right shoe,
allowing his gigantic bunion to swell.
There is the sound of cash being counted--
coins clinking, bills swishing, numbers whispered--
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. . .
We are changed when the transactions are done--
older, dirtier, dwarfed.
A few late customers gawk in at us.
We say nothing. Our silence will not be breached.
The lights go off, one by one--
the dressing room lights, the mirror lights.
Then it is very late. How late? Eleven?
We move to the gate. It goes up.
The gate's grating checkers our cheeks.
This is the Mall of America.
The light is bright and artificial,
yet not dissimilar to that found in a Gothic cathedral.
You must travel down the long hallways to the exits
before you encounter natural light.
One final formality: the manager checks out bags.
The old homosexual reaches into his over-the-shoulder leather bag--
the one he bought on his European travels
with his companion of many years.
He finds a stick of lip balm and applies it to his lips
liberally, as if shellacking them.
Then he inserts one last breath mint
and offers one to me. The gesture is fraternal
and occurs between us many times.
At last, we bid each other good night.
I watch him fade into the many-tiered parking lot,
where the thousands of cars have come
and are now gone. This is how our day ends.
This is how our day always ends.
Sometimes snow falls like rice.
See us take to our dimly lit exits,
disappearing into the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul;
Minneapolis is sleek and St. Paul,
named after the man who had to be shown,
is smaller, older, and somewhat withdrawn.
Behind us, the moon pauses over the vast egg-like dome of the mall.
See us loosening our ties among you.
We are alone.
There is no longer any need to express ourselves.

There’s a touch of Elizabeth Bishop lurking in the quiet details of this poem (though Reece lacks her artful style, I think), as well as some of Charles Simic in the way the poem is arranged as a long list, and sometimes even hints of Robert Lowell where the adjectives start to pile up in groups of three. The first three lines of the poem especially remind me of “Memories of West Street and Lepke”, where Lowell writes:

Hairy, muscular, suburban,
wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,
they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.

Reece uses irregular rhyme throughout “The Clerk’s Tale” like Lowell did in “Memories of West Street and Lepke” which keeps the poem interesting, because otherwise the redundancy of Reece’s listing would start to wear thin.

Anyway, other examples of the vocation poem that I like are Philip Levine’s “Fear and Fame” from What Work Is (2009), where he writes about “new solutions from the great carboys/of acids” and “A gallon of hydrochloric/ steaming from the wide glass mouth”. The majority of the collection, as you can infer from the title, is based on working class characters from Detroit. An older example, also from Michigan (Saginaw) is Theodore Roethke’s “Big Wind”, a poem about weathering a storm in a greenhouse, and finally, I just read Jorie Graham’s “Reading Plato” from her book Erosion (1983), a poem which is ostensibly about a person fashioning lures for fly fishing, but ultimately becomes (among other things) a beautiful ars poetica.

We happen to have a large number of poems about teaching and writing, and I think that's not only inevitable but wonderful (shouldn't people write about what occupies their time?) but in a better world, where everyone was a reader and writer, literature would be flooded with a wide range of stories and poems that accessed vocabulary from doctors and gas-station attendants and pastors and movie theater ticket-takers and carpenters and judges. In a society where everyone was the singing citizen, our stories would expand to include a diverse vocabulary drawn from an array of professions and lifestyles, and we would all be the richer for it.