It’s not like writing for the Hartford Business Journal isn’t a great gig. The money, the cigars, the limos, the barrels of rum, the power — it’s all there for you, if you have the gift of bringing to life the vibrant goings-on at the Front Street development near the Hartford convention center. I saw two mice on a date there just the other day, sneaking kisses behind the tumbling tumbleweed, right where some of those stores are supposed to go.
But, you always have to be looking for that next opportunity. There are guys who probably thought they would spend the rest of their working lives at Hartford typewriter factories, or brass mills in Waterbury. Now, those same guys are probably state employees, with pensions on the order of newspaper publishers and health insurance imported from Sweden. You have to be flexible; you have to be ready to make your move.
That’s why I applied to be the poet laureate of West Hartford. I didn’t get the job. I think the fix was in. The town is going to regret its choice, an insurance underwriter who probably thinks “annuity” rhymes with “perpetuity.”
I know what the nominating committee was thinking. The last time that the Hartford area welcomed an insurance guy who claimed to be a poet, he turned out to be Wallace Stevens, a vice president at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., which, in a desperate effort to sound more poetic, eventually renamed itself the Hartford Insurance Group and then Hartford Financial Services.
Stevens became undeservedly famous for writing obtuse poetry that was hard to understand and didn’t rhyme or anything. Most of his work reads like an annuity contract, but it didn’t stop him from becoming very well known.
That’s what West Hartford thinks is going to happen again, with the appointment of James Finnegan, who is a senior vice president at Lee & Mason Financial Services.
The West Hartford committee had clearly never read any of Stevens’ poetry — just like most of the other people who admire him from afar. West Hartford just considered itself lucky to find another insurance guy who the town thinks can be Stevens-like and make West Hartford famous for something other than its traffic jams on Farmington Avenue. It will be a nightmare. They should have picked Cohen. Here is some of what they’ll miss:
If Hartford is perceived to be yucky
That makes West Hartford even more lucky.
The schools are just fine
The Blue Back Square entertainment district divine
And the town manager makes everything run right on time.
West Hartford yearns to be snobby
They even have tea parties in the City Hall lobby.
But ring suburbs attract all kinds of funky
West Hartford is really quite lucky
City and suburb come together to make everything ducky.
Hartford’s “West End” could get quite a makeover
If West Hartford grabbed it in a hostile takeover.
The schools would get so much more appealing
Taxes wouldn’t explode through the ceiling
And the politics would be less wheeling-dealing.
You see what West Hartford lost by not choosing Cohen. Subtle, nuanced, rhyming. That’s what you want in a poet laureate. And he has his practical side. Part of the job description is to crank out poems for special occasions. No problem. I’m used to writing on deadline:
Today, your local property taxes are due
This is no time for boo-hoo.
Compared to the state
We’re almost a cheapskate
We leave some of your money for you.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
