Katy Waldman on Daniel Poppick’s novel, which follows a thirtysomething poet working as a copywriter in New York City.
The novel takes seriously the question of whether you can read Proust and have a day job, circling the perennial tension between art and commerce, or, in this case, between poetry and copywriting. D__ is legible as a type: a thirtysomething with a liberal-arts education who graduated into the Great Recession.
He’s adept at close-reading the world but unsure of his place within it. Adulthood has baffled his expectations and bludgeoned his sensitivity. For seven years, he’s been dating Lucy, another poet trying to mine a more lucrative corner of the culture industry , but their relationship has stalled. He has supportive suburban parents who probe delicately about money and ask if he was friends with W. S. Merwin, whose obituary they just saw in the Times. Adrift but alert, D__ writes down questions, observations, stylized scenes that he labels parables, and glancing mentions of historical events. The notebooks that result, spanning two years, from 2017 to 2019, represent a preëmptive search for lost time, a quest to prevent time from being lost in the first place. Some of the material in “The Copywriter” is banal. “News used to be delivered to one’s door,” D__ grouses. “Nowadays it simply penetrates the face.” Some of it is goofy. “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of nope, I will fear no yeah,” he riffs. Some descriptions refresh or reimagine D__’s surroundings: studying fellow-beachgoers on Labor Day, he pinpoints when a child’s tantrum has attained a “pitch of exaltedness” beyond the reach even of sherbet. Constellations in the night sky are a “toss of fiery points” that drop “silent gossip” on stargazers. Here, he pastes in an e-mail from his great-uncle. Here, he reproduces a dialogue with his co-worker. Here, he transcribes Lucy’s dream. At one point, tongue firmly in cheek, he muses about whether it was profitable for him to spend a whole day noodling on a theory of writing as a “photosynthetic process” that “conceals its blossoming meat.” Looming over the novel is a question: can this existence—this openhearted, roguish, aimless scavenging—yield anything of value, or is it just a waste? In 2020, Poppick published a poem called “Lugubrious Stars of the Tomb,” which employed the figure of a nun’s cell to evoke the claustrophobia of dwelling in time: “If you think this damp little room you live in / is all that’s holding you / you’re right. Every second is a door / bolted shut. You can hear your music / behind a few, but only one or two will open.” In “The Copywriter,” D__’s quest to access the music behind the door of each second, to not waste his life, becomes a similarly spiritual pursuit. As a kid, he attended temple and was bar mitzvahed; as an adult, he seems more inclined to channel his theological impulses into a creative practice. His parables, which draw inspiration from Jewish mysticism, are attempts to get at what his hero John Ashbery called the hidden “schedule” of the universe through the secular prayer of art. Of his poetry cohort, D__ writes, “We’ve seen each other through some kind of crisis. But of what? Faith?” D__ and his friends inhabit a hyper-specific milieu of current and former poets who share references and prophets and comport themselves not unlike secret members of a dissident sect. They worry about being “cut off” from poetry, particularly by the jobs that they need to sustain their daily lives and that they fear may quietly indoctrinate them into a contrary value system. Their gigs enforce long hours away from creative writing; more insidiously, they reshape time, transforming it from a subtle, redoubling mystery into something strict, quantifiable, and nonrenewable. Several months into D__’s unemployment, Lucy comes home, exhausted, to find him perusing Proust in his underwear. He hasn’t made dinner, because he inhabits a different schedule, operating out of Poetry Standard Time while she is stuck in Company Time, several meridians away. Like all believers, D__ must also grapple with the problem of doubt. How do you keep something alive when you’re not sure what it is or if it even exists? Poetry makes nothing happen, poets like to intone. In “The Copywriter,” D__ experiences his art as invisible, ineffable, lacking the numerical markers of value possessed by, say, a commercially successful novel or a viral social-media post. He writes Lucy an anniversary pantoum; she breaks up with him anyway. He writes a eulogy for Ashbery, and the guy’s still dead. At one point, he buys his twenty-four-year-old boss a used copy of “The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property,” by Lewis Hyde, passing it off as a cherished keepsake. He explains that the text reënchants online shopping, revealing the “invisible webs of relationality” behind digital transactions; it’s a naked attempt to keep his job. The ploy fails, delaying but not averting D__’s scheduled termination. Poetry, he concludes, is “labor’s ash.” Still, D__’s artistic efforts can’t be so neatly separated from his commercial ones. Some actions, the book implies, might cut you off from poetry. But plying a bullshit job need not be one of them. In fact, Poppick seems determined to prove that submerging yourself in the inanity of the grindset can pay creative dividends. One of “The Copywriter” ’s most moving aspects is its expansive definition of poetry, which admits bureaucratese and launch-party banter and could theoretically apply to any part of life. D__’s copywriting struck me, at times, as genuinely transcendent: he dismisses a blurb he writes for a designer sandcastle kit as “a sequence of words so stupid I can barely bring myself to type them,” but the solicitation—which begins, “Feeling pail? Dig this: you need sun, and a castle to call your own”—delightfully recalls Ashbery’s poem “Valentine.” At another job, at a Jewish cultural center reminiscent of the 92nd Street Y, D__ and a colleague are asked to rebrand a series called “Mimes in the Afternoon,” which has been moved from Wednesday afternoon to Friday night. They land on “Mimes in the Afternoon on Friday Night.” D__’s centenarian great-uncle Isidore, who gravely reads Keats at the edge of a family gathering and seems to have walked in from a Talmudic tale, supplies an image not only for D__’s scrapbook of found language but also for his eclectic, unassuming approach to leading a life that entertains the sublime. In a note to his great-nephew, Isidore recounts watching the varied possessions of his former neighbors being tossed into a dumpster. “Although the debris never existed in close association before,” he writes, the mass of it, thrown together, now coheres and communicates, disclosing a secret design. That this marginal character, a man who has apparently retired from both his job and his role in family reunions, is given the task of enunciating a central theme is consonant with the gentle, self-effacing tone of a novel whose sympathies lie with the minor and the easily overlooked. Poppick’s point isn’t that everything matters; it’s that anything might. While I was drafting this review at a coffee shop, I overheard a woman telling her friend about a saying that touched her. The maxim, “What you focus on is what you will become,” looked vacuous when I wrote it down, but then it began to work on me, just a little. Over his two years of journaling, D__ discovers that poetry weaves in and out of language in the same unaccountable way that it weaves in and out of our lives. Poetry may be the ash of labor, but it is also a leap of faith: that work was done, that meaning was made, that something happened behind the door. ♦
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