Behind One Desk
I’m asked frequently if I regret not having finished
my Ph.D., a project I gave up after completing my course work
at West Virginia University in 1997. Frankly, the thought
of what lay before me, the myriad hoops I’d be asked
to willingly jump through, seemed much less compelling to
me than did the newly rekindled desire to work on my own poems.
It became odious to me that I would have to put aside the
discoveries my own poetic process might afford me in favor
of a book list, comps, and a dissertation. I was waiting for
lightning to strike.
I’ve worked as a bartender for my friend, Franklin Johnson,
a chef and Toni Morrison’s caterer, for years. Among
the many parties was one given for Toni in Princeton by Ruth
Simmons, now President of Brown University, and one thrown
by Toni herself in Palisades, NY at her interim home there
(her previous home had burned to the ground and was being
re-built). It was Franklin who delivered the bolt I awaited;
TM, it seemed, was looking for a Personal Assistant to deal
with matters unrelated to those for which her Princeton University
Assistant, René Boatman, was responsible. My resume
was in the mail quickly, and soon after I was on my way back
to New York’s Rockland County, where I'd been raised,
to take on my new career as Assistant to Toni Morrison/Working
Poet.
The plan was this: complete my manuscript of poems, get it
published after two or three years, and move on to a teaching
job somewhere, aided in great part by a strong letter of recommendation
from a Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning author. It’s
now nine years later, and that manuscript of poems, Lives
of Water, was published by Carnegie Mellon University
Press in 2003. I have in my dossier a very fine letter from
Toni Morrison; the job, however, continues to elude me. I’m
years behind in the schedule I’d assumed, and the academic
world has changed. For many jobs posted these days, the MFA
is no longer considered the appropriate terminal degree for
creative writing. I’d be better off with a Ph.D., I’m
told. I’m asked if I regret not having finished mine.
I’m also asked frequently about what exactly it is that
I do in my capacity as TM’s Personal Assistant; tired
of that question, too, my answers are often wry or, to my
mind, comical. The fact is, much of what I do is exactly what
one might expect: I handle permissions requests, reply to
various bits of correspondence, set up transportation, put
together and tweak itineraries, act as a liaison officer between
TM’s management company and herself, coordinate with
René, do research, and keep the printers full of paper
and toner. The most important aspect of my job, however, the
part for which I will always be grateful, is not so easily
quantified. If I actually had a specific job description,
it wouldn’t be listed there. Indeed, if, as planned,
I’d have left TM’s employment for the halls of
academe after three or four years, this facet of the job would
never even have fully revealed itself.
Lives of Water has done well for a first book on
a university press. It has garnered a fair number of reviews,
some full of praise, others scathing in their venom. As I
write this, the book is nearly sold out, and my publisher
tells me it is to be reprinted; this is not so common an occurrence.
A new manuscript is nearly complete, and I hope it will appear
before the end of this decade. However well—or not so
well—the next book is received, I realize my poetry,
barring some very strange lightning indeed, will have little
impact on American literature. I sell a few books; I give
readings on campuses; people come up to me afterwards and
mostly say nice things; they ask me to sign my book. And I’m
pretty much fine with that; I’m both lucky and happy
to be recognized as a denizen of the Poetry world. What continues
to matter to me, first and foremost, is the next poem, the
next line, the next revision.
It took several years for TM to get comfortable with me. That’s,
of course, natural. Building trust takes time, particularly
for a celebrity from whom it seems everybody wants something,
a private person whose personal space is constantly threatened
with violation. It comes with the territory. These past few
years, though, TM has, more and more, used me as a sounding
board, not really asking my opinion or requiring a response,
but using my ear as a way to help galvanize her thoughts.
I’ll make some few comments, perhaps, respond in some
way or another. Once in a while, I like to think, there’s
something she finds useful. In this role, I truly am part
and parcel of American literature. What could be more important—or
thrilling—for a writer and student of literature than
to actively participate in literary history, to aid in some
small but significant way one of our most crucial, generous
and lively literary minds, to hear first-hand, before anyone
else, words and ideas that will be enjoyed by readers forever,
analyzed, year after year, in university classrooms? In essence,
I’ve had what amounts to a nine-year seminar with Toni
Morrison.
Do I regret not having finished my Ph.D.? A silly question,
really. In his long piece on TM for The New Yorker
in 2003, Hilton Als writes, “Descending the staircase
off the sitting room, we had a look at her office, with its
two big desks stacked with paper and correspondence. Behind
one desk was her assistant, John Hoppenthaler, a poet. Windows
surrounded the room.” Windows indeed surround the room.
As I sit here now, I’m looking out over the Hudson River,
at the span of the Tappan Zee Bridge, at Sleepy Hollow and
Tarrytown, Washington Irving’s Sunnyside perched high
on the opposite hillside. Should I leave my seat and step
over a few feet, I’d be able to see the place where
TM one day witnessed the character we know as Beloved rise
from the water. There are other windows in here, too, no less
real for their existence only in imagination. Sometimes, I’m
allowed to look through them; sometimes I’m given the
gift of extraordinary glimpses. Sometimes, strange lightning.
