The Poet and the Whole Enchilada: guest blog by Jon Obermeyer
The poet walks the earth in relative obscurity. You might see him surface briefly at an open microphone event or at a workshop in a hotel ballroom, but for the most part he stays in his burrow.
The poet has made $300 lifetime directly from poetry, the result of a prize from his undergraduate days, sponsored by a woman's literary club in Montecito. The poetry journals used to pay him in printed copies (no more than two copies). Now they pay nothing at all, and charge reading fees.
So, the poet keeps his day job. The poet's bosses love him. He can sum up a one-hour staff meeting in three words. He'll write up something funny for the Christmas holiday party, a nativity pageant mimicking the best lines of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
The poet writes elegant copy and sticks to his knitting. You hardly know he's there in his cubicle.
His wife and kids worry about him. His doctor would like to see him walking more often, hills especially.
He's happiest on a rainy, Saturday morning, when the traffic is lighter on the road, and only a few of his neighbors are stirring. He doesn't like the sound of a leaf blower or someone repairing a dirt bike in the driveway, though he's fine with your lawnmower and band saw (apropos of Studs Terkel, Phil Levine and Walt Whitman.
The poet is happiest with the simplest of things: sourdough toast and apricot jam, an etymology dictionary, or a 700-page biography of Josef Stalin (also a poet, in his younger pre-purge days).
He is interested and amused by just about anything lying around: last month's light bill (especially the four-color chart explaining hot water usage), the Viet-Thai menu at lunch (including typos), or a dated airplane boarding pass (SJC to EWR). His ADD serves him well.
The poet is an introvert, but not really. He reaches out boldly to every particulate on the planet, because everything is subject to him (he delights in this double meaning).
The entire enchilada is fair game: Ebola, ambulance drivers, Tottentham Hotspur hooligans at a Premiere League football match, Polish refugees, linotype operators, panhandlers, rookie pitchers at spring trianing, theoretical physicists, circus aerialists, pile driver operators and West Marin ecologists.
The poet is billionaire and bugler, vogler and ogler, voyeur and king. He is a generalist who specializes to the nth degree.
Today he might choose to write about just about anything.
Jon Obermeyer is a Durham, NC poet, short story writer, essayist, editor and ghostwriter. He is a native of Santa Barbara, and a former resident of Potrero Hill in San Francisco. If he's invited to a party, he will work the room and make sure he talks to every single person before he leaves. His newest book is "Briarcliff, A Memoir of 1985-1993" (Tomol Press, 2018).