1.
We had a young intern in one of our departments. Turns out she was an aspiring poet. One day I’m briefly introduced to her and she manages to hand me a sheaf of poems. Wants to know what I think. Now, at the time, I didn’t know poetry from a liability report, but I take the poems home and read them to the best of my ability. I like them well enough, and send a short note telling her. A few years later she is already a successful poet, if such a thing can be said to exist. She wins a prestigious award, mentioning me in her acceptance speech, thanking me for the support I gave back when she was a struggling intern. Suddenly I’m getting letters from every poet in the country and they all want money. We have to hire another secretary just to go through the requests. All I did was send a note saying I liked her work — it took me less than a minute to write — but the entire world now thinks I gave her financial support, might soon do the same for them. And that is how our poetry foundation came into being.
As someone who spends the better part of his life figuring out how to make as much money as possible, I believe it is beneficial for us to be closely associated with a pursuit at which it is entirely impossible to make a red cent. It costs us relatively little, since poets don’t need much to be happy, and garners small amounts of precisely the right kind of publicity. To anyone who says that we are only in this for the money, we can always reply that, no, we are also in it for the poetry. I no longer have much to do with the foundation. There is a board that every year selects three qualified judges who read through the applications and patiently dole out the awards. But I am sent a pile of books every year, books in which the foundation is thanked for its support, and I do read each of them carefully. Much can be learned from poetry. When it is boring it is boring in an absolute way, and to write poetry that is not boring is a kind of absolute challenge, analogous to the challenge I take upon myself to change things up whenever I begin to find my position dull. Poetry, like business, is full of tricks and clichés. And one quickly learns just how much energy it takes to write a poem that is genuinely surprising.
I also attend the annual awards ceremony and meet each of the poets in person. I believe there is a certain irony in the fact that they are considered colourful, fascinating artists, while we are considered bland, faceless vultures. From a distance, if one doesn’t look too closely at our respective attires, it would be difficult to tell who among us is a corporate suit and who a poet. It is rare that a poet says or does anything interesting or outrageous during one of these functions. Usually the function itself is as dull as a board meeting (or at least as dull as a board meeting at which I am not personally in charge). But there was one notable exception.
Along with the regular awards, the foundation gives a lifetime achievement award to an older poet. In the past, this older poet would give a brief speech at the ceremony, though for obvious reasons, reasons you will soon see, we no longer allow this. Because one year the award went to a real radical, and for his speech he thoroughly raked me over the coals. He was good at it too, with precise, clear statistics for every evil thing he claimed we had done, but also jokes, personal jokes at my expense and genuinely accurate jokes about the rapacious nature of our business practices. It was one of the few years I wasn’t bored. He even finished by dramatically tearing up our cheque, saying that dirty money and poetry didn’t belong in the same room. And this was one of the rare moments you could tell the poets and vultures apart, since most of the poets applauded, while only a few of the suits had the guts. (Perhaps more of our employees would have done so if I had not been present.) His poetry was good too. I still have his books by the side of my bed. Such a clear-eyed view of the disaster in which we live, and yet every page makes room for some humour or joy.
There was some negative press but it could have been worse. A poetry prize is pretty minor as far as news stories go. And in the weeks that followed, when asked, I had my reply well scripted, explained that giving the award to someone so negative was a clear display of our openness, our willingness to be self-critical. We weren’t perfect but we clearly weren’t close-minded. It wasn’t until two weeks later that I had another idea. I approached the sweetest of the three judges — a bright young woman — and explained to her that despite his performance at the ceremony, which I then admitted how much I had enjoyed, we wanted our fiercest critic to have the money anyway. I asked her, off the record, if she’d be willing to approach him, to find out if he would accept the cash in secret, and that if he did so we promised never to tell anyone. I don’t believe there is any shame in the fact that he graciously accepted, as everyone knows the financial lot of poets is certainly not glorious, and he had never managed to sustain a teaching position. Even though we never had occasion to use it, I always felt more comfortable knowing that we had something on him; he had taken a payoff from the mouth of the beast. Much like those of us in business, he too behaved one way in public and a slightly different way behind the privacy of closed doors.
I met him again a few years later and, more out of curiosity than anything else, suggested we get together for a drink. I don’t know why he agreed, perhaps also out of curiosity, but we spent several hours together as I paid for round after round of the best scotch in the bar. I was clearly fascinated by him, but had the strange sense he was equally fascinated by me. As far as he was concerned I was the devil itself, but the devil always holds a variety of attractions. As he spoke I could tell he was running through his rhetorical gambits, trying to see if he could convince me of anything, if he could win the day on some small point. He wanted me to concede something, anything, and I tried to explain it as clearly as I could. It wasn’t that we disagreed on any fundamental aspects. Of course the profits we made caused harm, both to people and to the earth. Of course the harm was irreparable. From my point of view I didn’t see how such facts could be questioned. It was only that I saw nothing wrong with benefiting from things that were harmful. It seemed perfectly natural to me that some would benefit while others would suffer. I saw nothing in human history that suggested anything should, or could, be otherwise.
He thought about this for a long time. I don’t know what he was expecting, but nonetheless felt I had caught him by surprise. I wanted to laugh at his expression, since back at the ceremony he’d never been at a loss for words, and now he was so silent. It looked like he was thinking so hard he might burst. Finally he said: “We only think it’s bad when it happens to us, or to someone we love.”
“We only think what is bad?” I finally asked, since it seemed he wasn’t going to offer up much more on his own. I had found a way to shut him up.
“The destruction. The destruction you call business. The natural process of making a profit.”
“Is that a poem?” I asked wryly, but he ignored me.
“Have you ever loved anyone,” he asked. He was looking straight at me, suddenly sincere beyond belief. I actually didn’t know anyone could be so sincere, or could turn that way on a dime. But I was unfazed. I looked at his face. Before I’d thought we were pretty much the same age, but now realized he was at least ten years older than me.