Writing for the Hartford Business Journal is a good gig. Add up the money, the backdated options, the power, the credit card, the country club membership — and it’s hard to complain. Except… well… It’s a “business” publication. Every writer deep down inside is a sensitive artiste; every artist wants to write a novel; every artist wants the muse to land on his shoulder and help him write great poetry.
The inspiration is hard to come by, when you are doomed to write stuff like: “The sacrifice of the opportunity cost aggregated by the stability of the counterpart will depreciate the Connecticut Convention Center by a ratio that mirrors the inflation rate of Saudi crude.”
I sort of resigned myself to a life of writing about bond yields, but then, by God, opportunity knocked. Boston is looking for a poet laureate.
The idea that Boston needs a poet comes from a Boston city councilman, which means that it will be referred to a committee, which means that it will sit in committee for so long that I will have time to reengineer myself into a business-writing fool of a poet — a poet who knows about audits and plaudits, about stock and Bach, about marketing teams and Boston baked beans.
Years of writing about property-casualty insurance won’t win me much respect in a competition against guys from Harvard, but I have a huge advantage over those Ivy League types. I can rhyme.
I mean, have you read some of the modern poetry being put out in the esoteric literary journals that nobody reads, except for poet laureates? The stuff doesn’t rhyme. It doesn’t make any sense. It reads like the footnotes at the back of an annual report.I will rhyme. I’m a business writer. I understand the value of “synergy,” which is what conglomerates promise when they take over yet another little company that doesn’t seem to fit in. Words that rhyme are sort of like synergy, because, well, you know, they rhyme.
There once was a UPS driver named Stan,
Who drove from Hartford to Boston in a van.
He got lost in the Back Bay,
Which meant there would be hell to pay.T
he Boston street signs had claimed another good man.
Or, just to localize stuff a bit:
Fidelity Investments has always liked Boston;
But lately, they’ve taken a bit of precaution.
To save themselves some money,
They moved the backroom stuff to places warm
and sunny,
With economic development incentives tossed in.
And a Boston poet laureate should think big, should go beyond the city borders and lap up Massachusetts as the totality of the tapestry in which Boston shows its dynamic, sensuous self (I don’t know what any of that means. It’s poetry stuff.)
The Pilgrims never came to Plymouth Rock;
That bit of “history” is a crock.
It is true, all in all
That Springfield invented basketball;
But no one takes credit for the Red Sox.
There is some talk that the fierce competition expected in the contest to be poet laureate will be a “beauty contest.” If that means you need lots of Boston connections and access to bigwig Boston cocktail parties, I could be in trouble. If it means, literally, a beauty contest, then say hello to the next poet laureate of Boston. Look at that picture of me. Whew.
There once was a writer from Hartford
Who wielded his pen like a sword.
He wrote poems that sang
Like church bells they rang
And the Boston selection committee said,
“All aboard.”
If the final selection comes down to two or three of us, I fear we would all be commissioned to write an ode to the first Catholic bishop of Boston, Jean Louis Anne Madeleine Lefebvre de Cheverus. The problem for me: nothing rhymes with Jean Louis Anne Madeleine Lefebvre de Cheverus.
I know, I know. You’re all telling me to “keep the day job; stay with the Hartford Business Journal.” Great. What rhymes with “manipulate the variable-mesh grid to equalize an index compounded out of two parts tax base per capita?’
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
