Somewhere Between Soaring and Plunging: A Review of Richard Cole’s SONG OF THE MIDDLE MANAGER

“I didn’t expect I would fall in love with [Song of the Middle Manager] . . . . In fact, I wanted to dislike it.” This quote struck me as sort of egregious given it came from the judge of Grayson Books’ Poetry Contest, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, regarding Richard Cole’s winning book of poems. She wanted to dislike it? Her words seemed like a harsh discrimination, even for a judge . . . until I began reading the poems myself. Then I, too, found myself reacting quite itchingly to the sometimes simple diction and the repetition of a few clichéd images and words (the word beautiful and its many derivatives are incessantly used). Then, suddenly, like Trommer, I fell in love.

It happened when I wasn’t looking. Unlike Trommer, I didn’t want to dislike the book, but I live my days in the corporate world, and I kept wondering how this poet was going shake me up emotionally using the mundane humdrum of corporate life. How could Cole make music out of what I found so uninspirational every day? However, the more I read, I discovered Song of the Middle Manager is not just about corporate America. The forty-two poems in this collection are an amalgam of corporate, artistic, and blue-collar labor. Cole writes about dreamers (“Every unremarkable donut shop/is somebody’s act of faith”), investors, managers, and workers. He covers the celebrations and utter catastrophes of every kind of business—from the building of the Egyptian pyramids to the deadly tragedy of Deepwater Horizon (“steel/groaning as the burning platform/drops to its knees”). Cole himself indicates the book is, “about work and the human spirit, about the sacrifice and gain we can find in the business world, our daily lives, and the labor of creation.” As such, Song of the Middle Manager is as much a work of simplicity as it is a complex illustration of the relationship between humans and our work.

A deep dive into the poems uncovers exquisitely quiet truths about “work and the human spirit,” written in the same simple manner as Ted Kooser’s unpretentious, straightforward poems. However, with Cole’s poems, there exists a dual nature, exemplified throughout the book in the way Cole moves from comfort to chaos in a back and forth, yo-yo like motion. Just when you expect the yo-yo to return again, it slams straight into the ground. I can be reading one poem comfortably, quite unassumingly, and then without warning, “The sky is filled with brokers jumping from windows,” having a “love affair/with gravity.” I’m undone. For a long time. It takes me longer than it should to recover from that image, from those words. Only a skilled poet can evoke these feelings consistently: soft lull of comfort, emotional explosion, rest and recovery, rinse and repeat. Cole’s poetic expertise lies in this playful back and forth of the yo-yo and the yo-yo’s purposeful destruction. As evidence, threaded throughout the poems is a recurrence of people and objects soaring through the sky and then plummeting to the ground. Indeed, in “Song Without Words” Cole asserts,

Let us have poems
that cough, sputter
and soar like kites or plunge
to the ground, dragged
and helpless until they rise again
or not. . .

I expect the kite, soaring with ease and ecstasy, to come back to me, whole. Instead, it plunges to the ground. It may or may not rise again. Somewhere between that soaring and plunging, there exists a realization of instability that symbolizes the largely typical feelings of being part of corporate America where, while things might appear stable, many times there is an underlying fear of being bought or sold. The “earth [could] drop. . . . away” and “the corporate body [be] reorganized.” In this teetering state, one is never on sure footing.

To further illustrate this disorienting duality—this push and pull—Cole reminds us with every poem what it means to be human, then reminds us what it’s like to be one cog in the wheel of a massive machine. In “Perfect Corporations,” he asserts, “Corporations are people, too,/ numbers with skin.”  In “Chapter Eleven,” “The copy machines/ start thumping like combines, spewing out projects, and management/ scrambles in a frenzy, trimming the fat, throwing out bodies, beating the/ drums, and the VPs slam down their phones and roar to themselves in/ silence.” This kind of imagery in a book that also celebrates buying “smooth clean planks” of lumber at Home Depot and making jewelry out of “junk and abandon, out of busted/ nickel,” lets me know I can’t put my guard down with Cole. He’s capable of frightful (or delightful) surprises around any corner. 

While some of these surprises may be macabre, Cole is not without humor or heart. For instance, “Firing the Poem” succinctly reflects, in way that is both snarky and poignant, the vernacular used by managers to let employees go. When the manager says to the poem, “We want to treat you like a human being/even though you’re not,” Cole insinuates that employees often feel less than while sitting across from a person of power. The entire poem is filled with this back and forth of what it means to be human and what it feels like to be treated otherwise. The poem’s ending is not so much an exclamation point as it is a simple resonating truth:

. . . and you’re free to go. Security
will walk you to the door.
I wish you the best,
and be careful out there. I mean that.
You were always a stranger.

The poem that got fired is now simultaneously one thing (free) as well as another (jobless). This dual nature reinforces the symbolic back and forth yo-yo motion as well as that plummeting splat that Cole is so good at. Further, we know that the poem is not human, which makes the subtle humor palatable, and we chuckle, but Cole’s personifying the poem makes the last line so powerfully sad. 

Song of the Middle Manager is ultimately two things: a mirror reflecting a dual human nature and a complex study of our relationship to our labor, our employers, and our physical and artistic creations. I began this journey not expecting to be emotionally moved. Had I given up after the first two “beautifuls” I would not have experienced the next sixteen iterations nor reached the conclusion that it’s not that Cole doesn’t know any other word for beautiful; rather, he’s “making an art of bittersweet discouragements.” So, overlook the few simple quirks and go with Cole wherever his poems take you; he’s painting a specific picture for you: “On one side the ocean, on the other the storm, like a painting that’s alive in a wonderful, terrible way.” Both the ocean and the storm are beautiful.