1. June JUNE
The wind erases a line in the sand.
Parable of the New CEO
The company I work for recently got a new CEO. He is twenty-four years old and has never managed a company before, but he is charismatic; when he looks at me during our private two-hour coffee break, a conversation he is having with every single employee to “get to know us better,” I feel his time matters.

“Everything we do needs to have heart,” he says near the end of this meeting. “When someone writes a negative review of their lavender-scented yoga mat, we need to ask ourselves how we could have strengthened our connection with that person. When we pack up and ship our customers the ‘Yas Queen’ throw pillows, we need to affirm them the way they affirm themselves. When we write a description of the eggplant emoji drone, we need to be anticipating how that product makes our customers feel—would highlighting the Bluetooth speaker installed in the tip connect someone more deeply to their joy in the moment they read about it on our site? I don’t know, D__, you’re the writer—you tell me. From here on out everything we do is going to have heart.”

Transfixed, I agree—and, oddly, not just because my job depends on it.

“Tell me, D__,” he says, sipping cold brew from a straw. “What kind of poetry do you write?” And just like that, the spell is broken. It is only now that I start to dislike him.

At this point I should really have an answer to this question, but I do not. I give him my stock answer: “Most of it doesn’t rhyme.” But then I remember that, come to think of it, there is a lot of internal rhyme in my recent work, and add, idiotically, “But recently a lot of it does.”

He continues as if I haven’t spoken—as if what I just said was uttered outside of time. “I’m going to ask that tomorrow everyone bring in a product that means something to them. Really means something to you”—narrowing his eyes as if to switch the italics on in his voice—“you know?”

I don’t. “Yes, of course.”

“Good. Bring it in tomorrow and we’ll talk about it.”

When I get back to my desk, I Google:

what is a product

I do not pride myself on being a savvy professional operator, but after a decade of attending poetry readings, I have learned a thing or two about power-hungry nihilists who for one reason or another need to believe themselves to be gentle. It is clear that someone is going to be fired as a result of this meeting, which is in fact a test, and I resolve that it will not be me.

Directly after work I walk across Tribeca to a used bookstore and buy the rattiest, ugliest available copy of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, an anthropological study of “gift economies.” The subtitle of this older edition, omitted from more recent ones, is “Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property.” Perfect.

In the meeting the next day, my colleagues present earrings, an appealingly faded denim jacket, picture frames, a hair clip—the CEO is especially impressed by the hair clip—a notebook, and a synth keyboard. My turn comes around. I present the volume of The Gift as my personal copy, one I’ve owned for many years, and explain that I value this book over other property because it has taught me to see hitherto invisible webs of relationality when I shop on the internet, and that the material sustaining these relations—in human commerce, but also among plants and fungi, even rocks—is time itself, the most precious commodity imaginable. I note that I also love the vintage font on the cover.

My colleagues look confused, but the CEO does not. “That is not a product,” he says. “It might be a prized possession. It might be a book.” He lets a dramatic silence fill the conference room. I pray that the meeting will end with that observation, but he is just getting ready to drive his point home. “And yet it is not a product.”

Nearly anyone who attempts to publish their writing learns, often in humiliating and painful fashion, that to most of the world a book is a product designed to give its reader a narrow set of experiences. This is a brutally restricted way of imagining literature, and much else—but even within this potentially soul-killing purview, an entire ecosystem has survived, tenaciously, for centuries. Yet to our CEO an unfashionable, worn-out volume advancing even the mildest critique of capitalism could not be a product, because he cannot imagine the person who would use this particular book as a hair clip. That is my advantage.

After the meeting ends, I follow him into his office. “Can I talk to you?” I say.

“Yes, of course, D__.” He smiles tightly.

“I was thinking about what you were saying about everything we do needing to have heart. I’d like for you to have this.” I slide the book across his desk. “My only request is that after you’re finished reading it you pass it on, which I think is in keeping with the spirit of the book and what you’re trying to bring to this company. It feels relevant to what we’ve been talking about. I think you’ll really love it.”

He regards me anew.

This is not a story about fate. It is a story about serendipity.

“Thank you so much,” he says. “I will. Noted.”

I meet his gaze as he waits for me, like a dune waits for wind, to speak.

I’m not a religious person, but sometimes I find myself in a situation that seems concocted elsewhere—in a parallel dimension, created by an intelligence with narrative omniscience. John Ashbery wrote, “Everything has a schedule, if you can find out what it is.” In these seemingly concocted moments, it feels as if some presence is trying to teach me a schedule, should I wish to learn. And I do wish to learn, but I never find out what it is—in fact I am rarely aware of learning anything, in any situation, ever. But I do know a good story when it falls into my lap.

But it’s not just stories. I’ll overhear someone saying something that seems to suggest an entire reality splintering off from reality as I know it—like the other day when I was walking by the steps of the courthouse in downtown Brooklyn on the way to the subway, a red-faced man in a crisply pressed suit muttered into his phone, “There were all sorts of civil rights I didn’t expect the extent of.”

And sometimes it’s not overheard language, but language that seems transmitted to me via radio signal. When I remember a dream, it will often simply be a disembodied phrase in a distinct, unidentifiable voice, like “What audible skin you have!” as if spoken by a midwestern banker. And it’s not just dreams. Sometimes it’s not language-based at all but an idea, like the idea that the alphabet could physically cast shade on a sunny day; or a sound, a piece of music, a particular toll of a bell.

I feel that if I follow the logic of these moments a bit farther, I will discover the answer to a great riddle, but if I follow them too far I will never find my way back to my own life.

Our company is deeply “in the red,” a phrase I’ve always loved. Another way of saying it might be that our company “isn’t making enough money,” is perhaps even “hemorrhaging money,” or “isn’t creating objects imbued with value, or ‘heart,’ sufficient to motivate customers to exchange their hard-earned fungible assets for ownership, because the kitsch status pieces that we sell are last season’s kitsch status pieces, otherwise known as garbage; and because these customers’ fungible assets are vital to the company’s continued survival, the company, our company, is teetering on the edge of ruin.”

A breeze blows through the CEO’s open window, scattering a few loose sheets of paper across the office. The CEO, rattled and caught off-balance as if for the first time in his life, smiles at me again and frantically tries to gather them. I take this opportunity to leave.

I reheat last night’s leftovers in the microwave and cheerfully return to my desk to eat. I sink my teeth into what can only be described as the Versailles of meat loaf.

Layoffs have been widely expected all month. But the next day the new CEO doesn’t show up. Or the next. Or the next. He disappears from the office like a puddle in extractive sun. The word we are all awaiting never comes.

I drape myself, in realist fashion, with my laptop and a small cup of Keurig-brewed coffee, across the gray chaise longue by the ferns, trying to imagine what people who are in the market for a coat hook shaped like a panda want to believe about themselves.

“I liked that denim jacket you brought in for the meeting,” I say to my colleague Fatima the next week in the office kitchen.

“Aw, thanks,” she says. She returns to her desk, shoes clapping across the linoleum floor.

After that, it is as if the ritual we had all taken part in had never occurred at all. That’s why I need to write things down.

This reading group guide for THE COPYWRITER includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

INTRODUCTION

Everything has a schedule, if you can find out what it is.

It’s the summer of 2017 and, D__, a poet eking out a living as a copywriter for a start-up, notices a looming dissolution on the horizon. Whether it’s the impending layoffs at his company run by a clueless CEO, the unraveling of his relationship with his longtime girlfriend, or the way the country is staggering through the delirium of Trump’s first year in office, D__ senses that something is fraying, maybe has been for years.

So he begins a notebook: dreams, overheard conversations, emails, scenes from his life—scraps he calls parables. Maybe if he records everything, he’ll catch the hidden tempo, the schedule that undergirds his life, something that can untie art from labor, self from work.

In The Copywriter, two years unfurl in fragmented seasons under low-wattage florescence, exposing the same inescapable questions: How should an artist balance a job and a life when art doesn’t fit neatly into either category? Is it necessary to extract “meaning” from work that so often seems designed to parody the very concept of meaning? What concessions do we make for the sake of a paycheck? What does all of this do to our art, to our souls?

A comic examination of the spiritual gulf between art and labor, The Copywriter is a portrait of a poet in an open-plan office, asking what meaning, if any, can be found there.

QUESTIONS

The copywriter wanders the absurd corridors of contemporary employment, tracing how a trivial job can quietly colonize the spirit. In what ways does the protagonist resist, or attempt to resist, the engulfing of his art by his labor?

Consider the author’s note, which opens with the line: “I believe in the reality of absent things. If something isn’t here, it must be somewhere else” (page vii). How does this statement shape our understanding of the story’s fictionality? Do you interpret the note as belonging to Daniel Poppick himself or to the character D__? Why do you think the protagonist is referred to only as D__?

D__ laments the culture of corporate job-seeking: “I open LinkedIn, a website whose founders should face trial at the Hague” (page 99). In what ways does the LinkedIn-era of self-marketing, with its emphasis on self-promotion and reduction of talent to marketable assets, bleed into the art or “real” worlds? How does the pressure to package and market oneself—as if writing classified ads for the self—distort art and personal identity?

Consider the opening line of the June 2017 notebook: “The wind erases a line in the sand” (page 3). What does this line and image suggest about the nature of time or other forces and their capacity to reshape or swallow up previously held beliefs or positions? Discuss how this metaphor might be applied to questions of “selling out,” conformity, or resistance. How might the line highlight the malleability or impermanence of one’s stances or beliefs?

D__ maintains a close-knit group of friends, bonded by their shared love of poetry despite the different life paths they embark on. What sustains their friendship, and what does the novel say about the role of friendship throughout adulthood? Discuss the importance of friendship--how do relationships evolve over time, and in what ways have your own friendships endured or shifted?

The novel frames millennials’ angst and their protracted adolescence as tied to the effects of the Great Recession. When D__ observes that “Adults of my generation—traumatized by the disastrous economy that awaited us when we graduated college—are in a lifelong process of self-infantilization” (page 21), what specific behaviors, attitudes toward adulthood, and labor or relational dynamics seem shaped by the economic crisis? Or might these attitudes, behaviors, and relationships instead be symptomatic of some other cultural influence that has contributed to existential anxieties observable among millennials? To what extent are similar tendencies observable among members of Gen Z?

The novel is a narrative that takes on many forms: a love story, a breakup story, a road-trip novel, a diary, a collage—a nesting-doll novel about art and storytelling—to oneself, to others. Discuss the various forms that The Copywriter took for you during your reading experience. In what ways does the novel’s shape-shifting design bolster its themes of self-inquiry, revelation, and the conundrums inherent to art-making and laboring?

The line “No art, no melody, no time that is not bound up in some dark labor” (page 24) offers a view of art and time that is inseparable from exploitation and commodification of the self. Do you agree that all art is or will inevitably become complicit in “dark labor,” or can art exist as a space of freedom and resistance against it? Have members of your group pick a side and defend their positions.

Eliza seems to have opted out of the rat race that D__ and his friends, to varying extents, are all still running. What do you make of her character? Discuss your theories on why she decided to live as an off-the-grid recluse in the woods. Why do you think she continues writing, and scrapping, a novel that no one else might ever see?

Discuss the role of power in the novel. Who is powerless and who wields power? How is power exercised, and what are the moral or psychic consequences for those who have the authority to subjugate others? How do they reconcile (or fail to reconcile) their actions with their conscience?

Examine the dissolution of Lucy and D__’s seven-year relationship. What specific tensions or moments in the text signal towards the unraveling of their relationship? To what extent does D__’s lack of ambition or professional success contribute to the breakup, and does the novel suggest that greater achievement would have secured the relationship? Or were there deeper emotional or personal fractures that made their separation inevitable?

The protagonist takes a moral objection to his assigned task of writing an event description for a lecture by a prominent former US statesman who is “widely despised all over the world for the bloodshed and destruction resulting from his policies” (page 196). He refuses, demonstrating an insistence on personal integrity over complicity as he draws “a line in the sand” (page 206). His refusal exposes the precariousness of dissent under capitalism, where survival is bound to labor and obedience to authority. Discuss with your group the effects of standing up for what you believe in, even if you endanger your career mobility, security, and overall livelihood. What are the benefits of doing this? Is it ever possible to fully resist without sacrificing one’s livelihood—and if so, at what cost?

ENHANCE YOUR BOOK CLUB

Keep your own “copywriter’s notebook”! Record the parables, overhead lines, and dreams of your own life.

Select one of the books quoted in the epigraph, George Eliot’s Middlemarch or the sixth installment in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time series, The Fugitive, for your next book club pick! Discuss with your group how The Copywriter resembles these works’ meditations on the balancing of individual desires with societal expectations, the art of introspection, and search for some essential truth.

Cast a film or television series adaptation of The Copywriter! Who would you cast in the role of D__, Lucy, the twenty-four-year-old CEO, Ruth, Will, the parents, and other roles?