Friday, November 13, 2009

Please Fire Me, a poem by Deborah Garrison.

Post 36- - Deborah Garrison was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1965. She earned her bachelor's degree in creative writing from Brown University and subsequently earned her master's degree in Literature from New York University. In 1986, she joined the staff of The New Yorker where she worked for the next fifteen years, ultimately becoming the senior non-fiction editor. She's currently the poetry editor at Alfred A. Knopf and a senior editor at Pantheon Books. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

Garrison says, “I have a nine-year old, a six-year old and an almost-five-year old, and I just can't convince myself it's a priority to close myself off from them and spend time alone in a room, which is what I need in order to write. I'm just a person living her life, and once in a while I'm struck by something - a detail, a moment - and this might become a poem. Sometimes while I'm commuting into the city, I scribble ideas or images in a notebook. I also keep a notebook by my bed, and occasionally I jot something down just before I fall asleep or when I wake up in the middle of the night and have an idea. These notes develop into poems eventually, but I write so infrequently that it might be a couple of months before this happens. I'm someone who is seduced by life, and my life is very full. Writing poetry fits into the interstices. One of the great things about poetry, though, is that there’s no pressure to make a living from it. So I'm really in no hurry to write.”

Please Fire Me by Deborah Garrison

Here comes another alpha male,
and all the other alphas
are snorting and pawing,
kicking up puffs of acrid dust

while the silly little hens
clatter back and forth
on quivering claws and raise
a titter about the fuss.

Here comes another alpha male --
a man's man, a dealmaker,
holds tanks of liquor,
charms them pantsless at lunch:

I've never been sicker.
Do I have to stare into his eyes
and sympathize? If I want my job
I do. Well I think I'm through

with the working world,
through with warming eggs
and being Zenlike in my detachment
from all things Ego.

I'd like to go
somewhere else entirely,
and I don't mean
Europe.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Ha ha! I like that. Although I'd actually like to go to Europe!

john cotter said...

Me too. Maybe we'll go together!

Jana Ramic said...

I just stumbled across this post from a google search. I'm currently doing writing a paper on this poem. In my opinon its about office politics but I read another persons take on it and it states that its a poem about prostitution. Either way, great poem.