A Day in the Life of a Poetry Lobbyist

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World. 

                                         A Defence of Poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelley

            I got the call from the White House early this morning.  With a vote on the debt limit coming up, David Axelrod wanted to see me, pronto.  He's a political animal, I'm a poetry animal, but I finally got through to the knucklehead.  As my buddy Percy Bysse Shelley likes to say, poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.  If you want to see all your hard work over the past year go down the drain, call a prose stylist.  If you want to win, you need me--Rudolph St. Cyr, poetry lobbyist, and my K Street firm, The Doggerel Group.

Axelrod:  "There once was a rep from Missouri, who caused me a great deal of worry . . ."

I made my way into the West Wing where I saw Jack Lew, Chief of Staff.

"Who's this mook?" Lew asked curtly.  Always a pleasure.

"This is Rudy St. Cyr, Washington's top poetry lobbyist," Axelrod said.

"Hmph," Lew snorted.  "We don't need an effing bard, to corral the Dem retards."  Not bad, but it's going to take more than a couplet of doggerel to sway the fifty-two percent of Representatives in districts that went for Romney!

 
"Whose House this is I think I know, the party of Franklin Delano . . ."

                      The President has largely stayed above the fray, preferring to leave the hard work to Congressional leaders, who wouldn't know a sonnet from a sestina.  That's why I get paid the big bucks.  I don't like to brag, but my hourly rate is in the mid-to-high two figures.  Not as much as a plumber, sure, but a hell of a lot more than an adjunct professor at some cow college who's still waiting for his first poem to be published in plangent voices, the high-concept, low-circulation quarterly I founded back at the University of Missouri-Chillicothe in my Surrealist days.

Surrealist poetry caucus

                "Jack, we need help, so lighten up," Axelrod said.  Might as well tell Hart Crane to stop hitting on sailors.  "Whatta ya got for us?" Axelrod said, turning in the widening gyre to me.

                   "And it better be good," Lew added.  I could tell he wanted to get back to his office to practice his handwriting.  He's been nominated to replace Boy Wonder Geithner as Treasury Secretary, and there's a movement afoot to block him due to his awful penmanship, which will mar the appearance of every piece of paper U.S. currency if he's confirmed.

Lilly:  "Wrap me up in fluffy flannels, I just heard about death panels."

            "You know," I said, trying keep my emotions tranquil, "people used to laugh about K Street poetry lobbyists until we shook loose a $100 million bequest from drug heiress Ruth Lilly to Poetry Magazine."
             "A hundred million?  We could maybe buy off Boehner with that kind of swag," Axelrod said. 

Boehner:  "I will need a bigger portion if you're going to fund abortion."

                "Chump change," Lew countered. 
                "Don't be so sure," I said.  "In the realm of poetry, it's not just the chapbooks that come cheap.  You could waste your money on a golf outing for a first-term rep from the 8th District of Tennessee, or you can hire me."

Blanco:  "For a villanelle I'll need a retainer of $2,000 a month."

          Lew was quiet for a brief moment.  He knew the president had a soft spot for verse--why did he ask Richard Blanco to recite a poem at his inauguration if he didn't?  
           "Here's the deal," I began.  "If you've been reading the highbrow quarterlies, you've already seen the foreshadowings.  Like Alison Spicka's "poem about the poetess (me)" in this spring's edition of plangent voices?"
           "i'm
            not familiar
            with it," 
Lew said, mocking me e.e. cummings style.

e. e. cummings, registered republican: you can look it up.

"You know he was a Republican, right?" I asked, trumping his lame attempt to one-up me on a question of verse-related politics.

"Er, no," he said, backing off.

"Didn't think so.  Anyway, here's Spicka's deathless a-a-b-b rhyme:

Poets too long have done without bling.
(Look at my necklace-look at my ring!)
I must work free from the toil of scansion--
I want to live in a honking big mansion!

          "Is she on retainer to you guys?" Axelrod asked.

          "You better believe it," I said.  "I'm sending her after Vicky Hartzler, 4th District of Missouri."

Hartzler: "If you would seek to win my vote, I'd like a car, and maybe a boat."

           "How about Steve Southerland of Florida," Lew asked.  "Can you do anything about him?"

           I pulled a copy of an email out of my brief case.  "Take a look at this," I snapped as I handed it to him:

Robert Pinsky

"Spoke to Pinsky.  He will write free verse pushing earmark for Florida water basin infrastructure!  All he wants is playoff tix to Baltimore Ravens game.  Says he loves Edgar Allan Poe, wants to see the only professional sports team named after a poem.  Mentioned something about 'tintinnabulation' (sp?).  Is that what Dick Morris did to women's feet?" 

               "Impressive," Lew said, finally recognizing the power that verse holds over men's minds.

               "How about Stephen Fincher of Tennessee?" Axelrod asked.  "He's still on the fence."

Wallace Stevens

               I pulled out my dog-eared copy of Harmonium, Stevens' first book of poetry.  "Listen to this," I said, running my tongue over my lower lip to wet my whistle before launching into a specially-prepared report:

I need a man from Tennessee,
 To cast his vote, on Capitol Hill.
 'T'would make for a historic change
 This passage of a bloated bill.

          Lew looked at Axelrod, and Axelrod looked back; then they both looked at me.  "I think," Axelrod said quietly, cautiously, "we're getting close."

          "Anything else in your bag of tricks?" Lew asked.  I noticed just a glimmer of a creepy smile beginning to form on his lips.  I'd seen that look before, on the face of my cat as he contemplates a careless chipmunk.

           "You can always use earmarks," I said.  "We've got a guy--A.A. Vazquez, a faculty roué and professor of English at Swarthmore--who's been working on something for a first-term straggler from the Sunbelt.  He calls it 'Ode to Tax Code §168.'"

"Let's hear it," Axelrod said, and I began:

She looked,
her eyelids low-
like window shades.
She spoke-
with hesitation.
"America's capital-intensive manufacturers,"
She said,
"Need accelerated depreciation."
And I--rapt by those eyes
And corrupt in heart-
Could only vote her way.

             As I finished, I heard the two hard-boiled politicos exhale.  Let's face it--the same incantatory powers that poets have used since the beginning of time, if properly molded to fit current hot-button issues, retain their primordial power to persuade, if I may be allowed to lapse into alliteration.

            "We need one more vote," Axelrod said.

            "Not a problem," I said.  "Any House members looking for a Native American casino in their state?

             "Are you kidding?" Lew asked, but only rhetorically.  "This debate would have been over months ago if I had a couple of those to hand out."

             "Then perhaps this will come in handy the next time you talk to the Bureau of Indian Affairs," I said, and recited a Burma-Shave quality couplet from memory:

I love you down to your smallest neutrino--
Now please help me out with the Choctaws' casino.

Available in print and Kindle formats on amazon.com as part of the collection "poetry is kind of important."