Looking for a poem

April 24, 2017 11:18 AM

I believe it's by Robert Creeley, maybe George Oppen.

It is very short. The gist of it is: work sucks.

I wrote it down and now I can't seem to track it down online.

posted by Cwell to Writing & Language (6 answers total)

I know a lot of Creeley, and knew the poet, and this doesn't sound familiar. Also doesn't seem like a sentiment he'd endorse.
posted by Riverine at 1:26 PM on April 24, 2017

What Work Is, by Philip Levine? Total long shot.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 1:53 PM on April 24, 2017

Doesn't sound like Oppen either. I just looked through all the short poems in his Collected and there was nothing like that.
posted by languagehat at 2:35 PM on April 24, 2017

Wait, can you post what you have written down?
posted by tapir-whorf at 7:28 PM on April 24, 2017

Maybe "Dolor" by Theodore Roethke?

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.
posted by stuck on an island at 5:23 AM on April 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

Perhaps Toads by Philip Larkin?
posted by désoeuvrée at 11:30 PM on April 28, 2017 [1 favorite]