Greg Kosmicki: “I worked for the State of Nebraska for almost 25 years as a social services worker, a Medicaid and food stamps worker and supervisor, and for the last twelve years as an adult protective services worker. Before that, I worked two years for a private agency providing case management services for homeless mentally ill persons. Prior to that my wife and I lived four years in a privately-operated group home for developmentally delayed persons, which we managed. Though these sorts of work are quite literally gold mines of human interactions for a writer to use, rarely have I written directly about my face-to-face experiences with the people I served because it did not feel ethically right to do so. Rather, I wrote often of the frustration of the need to work when all I wanted to do was to sit around, be a spoiled poet, and write. I retired in June of 2016 when a golden turd I wrote about in a poem in 1981 fell out of the sky, fulfilling all my magical thinking about poetry, which all who know me well know I have always worshipped as my primary god.”
I’ve missed so many dawns and early mornings. There is such beauty and potential to admire in them, but we all make choices. It’s much easier to join in later when there’s more momentum to the day. Perhaps it’s laziness. I can think of numerous other ways to describe it, but perhaps it’s laziness. Come to think of it, I’ve missed a great many afternoons too. Working through lunchtime is another choice, but it denies a perspective on the passage of time. Immersion is more of a default setting than a strategy. Diving deep into work removes the extraneous noise of stray thoughts. Emerging from such episodes is confusing in the same way I imagine time travel would be. What happened ten minutes ago? Twenty? I should remember, shouldn’t I?
revised prognosis
none of us dying
to know
Stuck in the evening rush hour; almost going nowhere, but not quite. Retracing a familiar route time after time; adding occasional variations, as much to avoid boredom as anything else. What of these others around me, flooding the city’s arteries. This is not so much a salmon run, as a salmon slough, after spawning, when all energy has been spent and the vital urge to continue has dissipated.
David Kelly: “Having tried to write poetry as (redacted), I (redacted) and concentrated on crosswords. (redacted) Passport Office (redacted) Official Secrets Act. In (redacted) after leaving the Passport Office, (redacted) encouraged me to join (redacted). I found it (redacted) to pick up (redacted) and would (expletive deleted) recommend poetry as (redacted).” (twitter)
A.M. Juster: “I’m a little bit more old-school than a lot of today’s poets, but I think that the purpose of poetry is to improve the lives of your audience, to get them to reflect on something that they might not reflect upon, or to think about something in their lives that they might not think about. In a funny poem just try to give them a little joy, which I think is worthwhile in and of itself.” (twitter)
Rodney Gomez: “I’ve been working as an urban planner in local government for many years, specializing in public transit issues, especially mobility and accessibility. Recently, I moved into a management position at a new university—The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, where I direct the parking and transportation program. I’ve loved buses and public transportation since I was a child—we were very poor, and our family of nine would use the bus to get everywhere. My poetry and career stem from many of the same concerns with family, place, and social justice. They tackle many of the same issues; the difference, of course, is in the method. I’ve confronted intractable problems at work that seem to have solutions in lines of poetry. But poetry can’t be used in a grant application, a survey, or a planning study. We are all worse off for that.” (twitter)
Maryann Corbett: “When I earned a doctorate in English in 1981, I expected to end up teaching. I didn’t expect to spend almost 35 years working for the Minnesota Legislature. It was a privileged place to work, in more than one sense of the word. There was the frisson supplied by the constant presence of the media, the satisfaction of believing one’s work served the public, the thrill of working with smart, motivated people, the pleasure of being surrounded by the striking buildings and gardens of the capitol grounds, the sense of history. There was also the uncomfortable awareness that with every legislative session there are winners and losers, and that the same battles for justice are fought, and often lost, by the same people, year after year. More painful still was the knowledge that laws enacted with the best intentions do much less than what is hoped for. I’ve retired now. I miss the pleasures. The uncomfortable knowledge has not gone away.” (website)
Dane Cervine: “I worked for three decades as a therapist and director in the county mental health system in California, much of it as Chief of Children’s Mental Health in Santa Cruz where I was responsible for a ‘system of care’ that linked services with probation, child welfare, substance abuse services, and education. Like the ancient Chinese bureaucrats who balanced administrative life with poetry and the arts, I’ve always relied on each to balance the other in my own professional career. At times, I’ve written and published poems with an overt focus on issues that have arisen during the course of my civil service, as well as included client poems and stories in my annual report to the board of supervisors, and the state of California. Often though, it is simply a way to work out of both hemispheres in my brain—bring a bit of lyricism to civil service, and a bit of social justice and mental health awareness to my poetry.” (website)
David Blaine: “I live and work in rural Michigan, where my wife and adult children run a hardware store, and I work for the Department of Commerce as a field agent for the Census Bureau. I see everything interviewing for the census. Although I can’t talk about it, you might glean a little insight through my poems.” (website)
