Edgar Kunz's "WILLROBOTSTAKEMYJOB.COM" & "[I held him together]"

Thoughts on work.

WILLROBOTSTAKEMYJOB.COM

The About page tells us
half of all human
employment is susceptible:
forklift operators, retail clerks
and manicurists. I am not
any of those things, but I am
not comforted. For each
occupation, the site assigns
an automation risk score.
Car salesman: ninety-six.
Umpire-slash-referee:
ninety-four. Each score
has been assigned a cutesy
translation—anything above
ninety: "You are doomed!"
The data scientists
who run the site deployed,
they say, a machine-learning
algorithm to calculate
the odds. The robots, then,
are making it clear exactly
which jobs they will take.
They assess each 
according to the qualities
required: finger dexterity,
social perceptiveness,
originality, persuasion.
I am surprised to find
that the qualities I think of
as distinctly human
pose little challenge:
the robots are confident 
in their ability to perceive,
to persuade. I click away
and click back, distracted.
I check my phone. The site
assumes a horizon
of twenty years. The AC
rumbles on as scheduled.
Something in the house dings.


from Fixer (Ecco, 2023)

from “Fixer” [I held him together]

I held him together
as long as I could, she says.

He stopped working,
stopped coming upstairs.

He was like tissue paper
coming apart in water.

Like smoke in my hands.
It had nothing to do

with you, baby. You left
when you had to.

I met a woman once
who worked on pianos.

Said it was a hard job.
The tools, the leverage.

The required ear. I love it,
she said, but it’s brutal.

The second I step away
it’s already falling out of tune.


from Fixer (Ecco, 2023)

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Yes, I am doing something a little different today. I was spending a lot of time this week with Edgar Kunz’s Fixer, a book which contains, at its heart, a long poem-suite titled “Fixer,” comprised of many poems at once. And a book, too, that speaks to work in all its forms — the work of a paying job and the unpaid work of caring for someone. The work, too, of trying to get better. And the work of failing to get better. And the work of trying, and trying, and trying — at so much, all at once.

And as I was reading this book, I was struck by the conversation between Kunz’s poems. I was struck, especially, by the conversation between these two poems, which is a conversation that echoes throughout the book, whispering and bleeding and singing and speaking its way into other poems, too.

The first poem today, “WILLROBOTSTAKEMYJOB.COM,” employs near-constant, unflinchingly to-the-point syntax to offer a portrait of a reality that is at once very present and very dystopian. The syntax — terse, unadorned — allows moments of real insight and clarity to stand out and shimmer, even in the strangeness they portray:

I am surprised to find
that the qualities I think of
as distinctly human
pose little challenge

I thought of those lines when I read the opening lines of one of the poems that comprises the suite of poems at the heart of Fixer:

I held him together
as long as I could, she says.

He stopped working,
stopped coming upstairs.

He was like tissue paper
coming apart in water.

Immediately, I found myself thinking about how each of these poems — and so many poems throughout Kunz’s Fixer — portrays a different idea of what work is, and what it means, and who is rewarded for it, and who remains unseen despite all their efforts. Today’s first poem outlines a current state of waged and salaried labor that is perhaps best summed up by these lines:

I am not
any of those things, but I am
not comforted

To be alive and aware in this world is to — despite one’s lack of immediate solidarity with people who are suffering — feel deeply discomforted by the mere fact of what is happening, or the threat of what is to come. That lack of comfort on the part of everyone could breed solidarity across difference and disparity, but really it often breeds further alienation. Notice how Kunz captures this sense of loneliness and distraction in the poem’s final lines:

I click away
and click back, distracted.
I check my phone. The site
assumes a horizon
of twenty years. The AC
rumbles on as scheduled.
Something in the house dings.

I think of those lines from The National’s “Apartment Story”: Tired and wired we ruin too easy / Sleep in our clothes and wait for winter to leave. And I think of the lines that follow later: Stay inside till somebody finds us / Do whatever the TV tells us / Stay inside our rosy-minded fuzz for days. Kunz’s directness here enacts the strangeness of the existence we sometimes feel we are living in without agency, our distraction almost enforced upon us rather than a choice we make. We are so deep in the mess of the system we live within that we can go on websites to find out how deep in the mess we are, and then, tired and depressed from navigating all the messes we live within and among and on top of and inside of, we retreat further into the mess that makes the mess, over and over again. I get it. It’s impossibly hard.

The website that Kunz uses as a title for today’s first poem is still a functioning website. And it is still a strange, somewhat horrifying one. It captures so much of our existence at once: our need for certainty, our overwhelming paranoia, and the way, awash in numbers and data points and terrifying language, we are made to fear, and fear, and fear, rather than to care, and care, and care.

Clicking through the site, I found myself giving in to a wellspring of sympathy for all of us, that we are thinking about these things, these real fears of ordinary losses so extraordinarily experienced. A future that remakes the present, as if we are living in the past made by tomorrow, and never in tomorrow itself, always worrying about what’s to come, and, as such, feeling so defined by worry. And I found myself immediately and wildly depressed by so much more — like this graphic below.

I think of Kunz’s lines:

The robots, then,
are making it clear exactly
which jobs they will take.

And, in thinking of these lines and looking at the graphic above, I found myself struck by what the robots are leaving alone — the care-work of nannies and childcare workers, the endless community and conversation of hairdressers and cosmetologists. Good, I thought. Leave such things alone. Let people be. But then I found myself struck by the fact that, even though this work is left alone, it is not appreciated in any real terms. And, too, I found myself struck by the jobs on the right, the work of a different sort of care — the care of technical prowess, and even of love, offered by someone operating a movie in the booth above where you sit — and how such work is at risk and is still, even in risk, unappreciated.

There’s a passage in Annie Baker’s wonderful play The Flick, which centers around the work of some film projectionists in a kind of last-standing-film-projecting-theater. In it, one of the characters, Avery, writes a letter to the theater’s owner, Mr. Saranac, after realizing that the theater might go digital. In that letter, Avery writes:

Digital movies—I think the phrase digital film is an oxymoron—are actually just millions of tiny dots. These dots, or pixels, cannot express the variation in color and texture that film can. All the dots are exactly the same size and the same distance apart.

Mr. Saranac, projecting a thirty-five-millimeter film digitally is like looking at a postcard of the Mona Lisa instead of the Mona Lisa itself.

So yes, there is a lot of love involved in so much, even the lowest paid work that might soon be forgotten. And there is a lot of care, even, and perhaps especially, in what might feel, to someone who doesn’t know or doesn’t care, purely rote and technical and mechanical. In other words, this thing we live in? This human world full of strange creations and mysterious objects and complicated relationships? It is a world that is full of care at every level. Care helped make our lives. Care should be what helps continue them.

I think of that as I think of today’s second poem, which gets at a different kind of work — not the waged work of society, but the work of lovers and mothers and many others. The work of addicts trying to get better, and the work of those who love them, and want to help them, and sometimes bang their heads on a wall as a result of all that trying, and hurt as a result of it. Work, in other words, is everywhere. As a kid, attending Alateen meetings each week, I remember that near-constant phrase, both in our meetings and in the AA meetings above: it works if you work it. But I remember, too, the unseen work that I didn’t think of as work as a child. The work of hiding bottles and stowing things away. The work of trying to do it alone, or with just a few others. I didn’t think of it as work, then. I thought of it as love. And it was hard work, that love. And often, too, that work just didn’t work. It broke my heart.

All of this makes me nearly tremble at these lines of Kunz’s:

He was like tissue paper
coming apart in water.

What an image. It gets to the heart of what it feels like to care for someone who is slipping away from you. And it gets to the heart of what it feels like to be someone, sometimes, who cares. How often we care for people who come apart, and how often we come apart ourselves. All of this coming apart, disintegrating in the same water.

This is why the final lines of today’s second poem sing so powerfully:

I met a woman once
who worked on pianos.

Said it was a hard job.
The tools, the leverage.

The required ear. I love it,
she said, but it’s brutal.

The second I step away
it’s already falling out of tune.

So much is happening here. The metaphor of man-as-piano. The unappreciated work, made present in that metaphor, of those who care for those who need help, even if such help feels arduous, painful. The belief, made present in such a metaphor as well, that people have music within them at all times. And finally, the callback to today’s earlier poem, in a description of a job — that of a piano tuner — that is complicated and technical and specific and utterly human. Yes, every time I would go to my wife’s childhood home and play her slightly out of tune piano, I’d think of that job — a piano tuner. How it requires tools that only exist for such a job, a profound ear for tones and pitches and keys, and, I think, probably a love of the instrument. And it’s a job that exists because of love, right? Because of the love someone has for their fingers on the keys, and the touch of the felted hammer on the strings. And it’s a job that’s never finished, as today’s poem implies, because the music is always playing, because someone is always trying, and because, as we play and as we try and as we sit and as we live, we do fall slightly out of tune, even and because of all this music we make. It’s a job that exists because we need help.

Today’s poems remind me of our myriad relationships to work. How, in our current society, work is often billed as one of the defining characteristics of someone’s life. How what you do becomes who you are. And how difficult this is to navigate, for so many reasons — the fact that it shouldn’t have to be this way, but that it is, and that, because it is this way and because our current system doesn’t appreciate so many different kinds of work, like care work and low wage work, then so many people are left simultaneously under-valued and under-paid. As Kunz writes in his poem, “Real Money”: But fifty a pop // only gets me so far. Now it’s about / leveling up. We are so struck and caught in this predicament. When I am teaching, I struggle with the fact that so much of education is about preparing kids for work. What an awful strangeness that gives rise to in me. I want to push against that, to not think about the soft skills of an English classroom, the marketable creativity and critical thinking skills that might help someone in an increasingly digital landscape (or whatever they say now). And I try. I try to not make it all about college, or work. But I also know I cannot go completely rogue. That would be a disservice. We are, so many of us, caught in a bind that sometimes feels all the more tighter and more difficult to escape just by virtue of thinking about it.

But today’s poems also remind me that so much of work is inescapable in a way that is utterly human. That there is the work of caring for others and the work of caring for oneself. There is the sometimes difficult work of love. And there is, maybe too often, the work of figuring out if you need to be doing that difficult work. This kind of work, though, is so wildly unseen and personal. It takes time. It, sometimes, takes the kind of energy you might not have if the work you do to find stability in life is threatening or consuming that energy. In other words — this, all of this, is really hard. And it was hard always. But it is harder now than it should be.

And so I think of the piano tuner, and I think of the piano. I think of that phrase I heard in childhood, it only works if you work it, and I think of how it took me years to realize that part of my relationship to myself and the people I love is an ongoing one. We work on each other and work on ourselves. We allow space. We offer grace. We change, sometimes, and we refuse, sometimes, to change. It takes time. And it’s forever unfinished. And somewhat uncertain. And, amidst all of that, we love, still. Or try to.

In the second to last poem of the book, “Night Heron,” Kunz, in a near-breathless sentence that reminds me of the work of W.S. Merwin and Patrick Rosal, details coming home with someone he loves and revisiting memories tinged by loss. The final lines read:

I'm letting
myself feel how astonishing how
astonishing what our love can make
of a place like that

And maybe that’s why we continue working on the sometimes-too-hard parts of a life: the loving and the grace-giving and the caring and the thinking and the turning and the turning away. Because this work — this care-work, this love-work — can astonish us. It can remind us, more so than other work, why we are alive, and what it means to be human. Which is to say: something complicated, manyfold, wildly uncertain, fragile, strange, interesting, interested, and so much that is impossible to replicate or duplicate. Love — the work of it — can make us new, without the help of anyone but each other. Which is to say: with each other.

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Some notes:

1. Consider donating to the work of Doctors Without Borders to support their ongoing work in Gaza.

2. As I will continue to mention, Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here. Here, too, is a link to the New York War Crimes page — their ongoing publication.

3. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.