Poetry At Work Day

What the day is

Poetry At Work Day is observed on January 14. The premise is that poetry and paid work are not opposites, which is easier to demonstrate than it sounds.

Origin and background

The idea of the poet as someone who does nothing else is largely a nineteenth-century invention, and it never described most poets. T. S. Eliot spent years as a bank clerk in the City of London and then most of his career as a publisher. Wallace Stevens worked his whole life at an insurance company in Hartford and became a vice president there, reportedly composing on the walk to the office and handing drafts to a secretary to type. William Carlos Williams was a practicing doctor who delivered thousands of babies and wrote between appointments, sometimes on prescription pads. Philip Larkin ran a university library.

None of these were struggling artists waiting to escape. Several said plainly that the job supplied what the writing needed: a structure, a supply of other people's language, and a reason to be somewhere at nine.

The workplace also produces its own dense and peculiar dialect, which is half the joke of the day. Any office generates phrases that mean something specific to a handful of people and nothing outside, which is a fair description of a private language, and much of it is more figurative than its users notice.

There is a practical argument too. Writing poorly is expensive at work, and the habits poetry trains, cutting, choosing the exact word, hearing how a sentence lands, are the same habits that make an email land the first time.

How to take part

• Read a Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams poem at your desk, both of which were written in one.
• Write something short about your actual working day, badly, and do not show anyone.
• Collect the strangest jargon in your workplace and notice how much of it is metaphor.
• Cut a paragraph of your own writing in half and see what survives.
• Put a poem up where colleagues will read it accidentally.