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Daniel Poppick’s Novel of White-Collar Work

The first novel by the poet asks us what fantasies get us through the day?

“Money is a kind of poetry,” Wallace Stevens, the insurance executive better known as a poet, once wrote. As metaphors, money and poetry might be improbably alike; they can both transform one thing (time) into something else (a hairclip, a frozen lake). But for Stevens, maybe this equation had a special import. How could someone who wrote that he had “no life except in poetry” explain the incongruous fact that he spent most of his day parsing surety, risk, and fidelity bonds? Another way to ask this question: If most American poets are required to work at another job (such is the condition of an economy that assigns poetry almost no market value), what tools can be marshaled to make that situation tenable—what fantasies get us through the day?

The Copywriter, poet Daniel Poppick’s first novel, begins with a moment of corporate seduction. The narrator, D__, who markets “last season’s kitsch status pieces” for a living, is called in to meet with his company’s new 24-year-old CEO. “Everything we do needs to have heart,” the CEO tells him, from packaging “Yas Queen” throw pillows to writing copy about eggplant-emoji-shaped drones. “Transfixed, I agree,” Poppick’s narrator reports. “And oddly, not just because my job depends on it.”

Faced with work that one suspects is utterly meaningless, a person might adopt narrower and narrower parameters for meaning. Perhaps reading about the Bluetooth speaker suggestively placed in the tip of that eggplant-emoji-shaped drone really would brighten someone’s day? But then again… really? Almost certainly not.

D__’s acquiescence doesn’t last, and soon after, he’s back to mocking the company’s “garbage” products and juvenile CEO. But he keeps that to himself. At work, he’s punctual, polite, and somewhat obsequious; as he puts it, a “savvy professional operator.” This is such a familiar way of relating to one’s work that it’s become a cliché: to go through the motions without believing in them, to understand one’s compromises as a necessary concession to the stakes of life (such as rent and healthcare) and yet believe that one’s “real” self is located elsewhere. That self might emerge in private, among friends, or maybe in one’s art. In this split, money and poetry return to their familiar, oppositional poles: Poetry is the site of authenticity, money the cause of deception.

The Copywriter follows D___ from 2017 to 2019, a period during which he is fired from his eponymous job, gets dumped by his girlfriend, reads Proust, moves in with his parents, travels across the country, and eventually finds another copywriting job. The book is organized as a series of journals that blend prose, parables, aphorisms, and poetry. D___ describes his (or, really, any) office as a place so incomprehensible, it sounds surreal. The dial tone of the office phone is “the drone of desire, gilded with anticipation.” The calendar is arranged “like a vase of corrected flowers.” When the 24-year-old CEO disappears “like a puddle in extractive sun” just as D___ and his whole department expect to be fired, his absence is like the absolution of a minor god: “The word we are all awaiting never comes.”

Stevens never wrote about his work, giving the impression of its ephemerality and unrelatedness, as if it were completed in a vacuum-sealed container and excised from his inner life. And yet the office—its smells and politics, its grievances petty, existential, or edifying—must have made an impression. Perhaps Stevens chose to locate those conflicts elsewhere, in a snowy field. Poppick takes a different approach: The........

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