When you applied for your current job, did it come with a ten year commitment?
If your current job is parent, well, that’s a lifetime commitment. If you have a summer job at the amusement park, that’s just a few weeks’ duty. Most of us expect a job to last a bit and then, maybe, if we’re lucky, lead to something else, or at least a variation on the role in which we started.
Britain’s Poet Laureate job comes with a ten year commitment.
Simon Armitage was recently announced as the UK’s next poet laureate, which is a 10 year commitment / sentence / honor. He follows Carol Ann Duffy and, before her, Andrew Motion, making him just the third laureate to be appointed to a ten year term. Prior to Motion’s time in the role, it was a lifetime term. The UK’s poet laureate position traces it’s lineage back to Ben Johnson in the 17th century.
A lifetime commitment sounds frightening, particularly when it comes with an expectation to write occasional verse–which in this situation means verse to fit an occasion or topic, not infrequent writing.
Writing to order is pretty much the opposite of what most poets do, although there are those that take up the challenge, usually in competitions. But their results are rarely published widely and they don’t often have to go on national television and read their written-to-order poem.
Poets have been known to turn down the laureate role, precisely because it requires them to take time away from their own writing.
And, to be fair, the stipend isn’t enough to prevent a person from needing to earn a living elsewise. Imtiaz Dharker, in fact, turned down the opportunity to follow after Duffy, in order to focus on her own writing. Which seems only fair–if you think pursuing the work of poet laureate will essentially prevent you from writing poetry–and some say it has ruined them for writing poems–then why take the job? Imtiaz Dharker has stood up for herself in a way which some might find disappointing, since she would have been the first poet of South Asian descent in the role, and only the second woman.
Knowing when a job is NOT for you is as important as knowing when it’s the right fit, and I applaud anyone who has the sense of self and presence of mind to refuse to take on a role that will not suit them.
Just because you can do the work doesn’t mean you ought to do the work.
Ten years is a long time
I’ve been in my current job, at least its current configuration, for about half that length of time. But it wasn’t the sort of job I applied for. It was more the sort of job that needed doing, and I might have mentioned I was willing to do it, and then one day there I was talking to people about how long I’d be willing to do this thing.
I imagine getting the role of poet laureate is something similar. One day, all of a sudden, someone (who has been talking to a bunch of other someones that they call the selection committee) is talking to you about being poet laureate.
How do you weed out the hype and seed in the skills?
What’s changed a lot over time is the way corporations assess people for jobs. We used to have a very specific, if quite limited, set of criteria that were easy to assess against. Degree, grade point average, written test results, ability to hold a rational conversation…and once a person went past the 3-5 year stage of their career, it was all word of mouth. Simple, not always effective, and limited to filling jobs with people we already know.
Now people don’t spend a career with one employer, so we are often interviewing people with 1-4 prior employers, a variety of experience, and not for entry level roles. And we only know them from their resume, not from years of seeing them around the corporate canteen.
It’s a whole lot harder to assess people who have worked for places you are not familiar with. Whose GPA was ten or more years in their past. Whose accomplishments, on paper, sound fantastic. Or, sometimes, fantastical. The job of the interviewer, now, is as much about weeding out the hype as it is about seeding in the skills a person may bring to the role.
Just because you can do the work doesn’t mean you ought to do the work.
But after the housing bubble burst in ’08 and the economic downturn refused to do much more than think about becoming an upturn for several years, jobs were scarcer and people were willing–and needed–to take on roles they rather would not have taken.
Because just because you ought not do the work doesn’t mean you can afford to not do it.
Interviewees became a little more desperate. They stopped putting their graduation dates on their resumes so they would seem younger. Some didn’t put dates of any kind on their resumes. The way their resumes were written, it was impossible to tell if they worked for four companies one year each or one company for fourteen years.
That’s when I became something of a resume cynic.
Managed the supply chain of goods and services? That phrase was used by someone managing a global supply chain of tire rubber and by someone who manages the track team’s workout schedule, uniforms, and snack schedule. It’s not that managing the track team is bad–in fact I’d be more impressed by how someone managed the parents of the track team than I would be by the person managing the flow of rubber–but please don’t couch it in the terms you think I need to hear. Don’t game me.
I’d rather know just what you did and what you learned doing it.
Well, that’s the set of frustrations that led up to this poem. Nothing to do with the UK poet laureate honor. It was the oddities of how a person gets a job that reminded me of this poem. Spoiler: my cynicism comes through…
How to Get a Job
Lie about it, about everything you say you want
About the sunny day it’s not and how you didn’t notice the dandelions like blazing stupid smiles on the lawn
About your work ethic and how you love to dress up and you think kids these days are too casual and they should grow up and anyway you have always thought people your own age tended to be a little immature compared to yourself
About your age or at least slur the answer
About your last job and how dead end it was and how the guy who liked to pet your hair was tolerated because he was somebody’s son and while he never took it any farther it wasn’t even the petting that was creepy but the way he gazed happily into your eyes while he petted
About your interests outside of work and how unassuming they are how they are so white bread and milk toast that they couldn’t possibly offend
Unless you play in a chamber music quartet which sounds impressively boring and intellectualized but don’t worry no one will bother trying to catch your performance
About how you’re excited for this opportunity even though you can’t possibly be because the job description is completely unintelligible and anyway you plan to make it up as you go along
About the tattoo of a daisy above your ankle and how you didn’t get it drunk one night and making out with a guy to take your mind off another guy but yeah it really meant something to you personal and you’d rather not say
About the possibility you see ahead for yourself and how you will learn so much you love to learn every day is a new day
If you enjoyed How to Get a Job
You’ll find more of my poems on this blog or in the collection Stars Crawl Out From Their Caves, which is available in both ebook and print.
And no, I don’t have a daisy tattoo. That idea originally comes from an old camp song. Maybe you know it? Go ahead, search “I have a daisy on my toe” on the internet and you’ll see a ton of videos of people singing the song.
Missed a poem of the week? Links to prior weeks are on this page.
Want a few more links about Simon Armitage?
Andrew Motion’s comments on Armitage as Laureate
Guardian Article announcing Armitage
2015 guardian article in which Armitage already sounds suited to public poetry service