Undercover Poet

By Greg Curtis

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

- Robert Frost

If someone had told me, in, say, 1980, that I would become an entrepreneur, I would have laughed in his face. I didn’t have an entrepreneurial bone in my body. What I liked was getting that steady paycheck at the end of the month. But then something very odd happened: my mother started her own business.

One doesn’t normally think of one’s mother becoming an entrepreneur, and that was especially the case with me. Mom had stayed home and raised four kids. Then, after we’d grown up and left the house, she stayed home as a housewife. But after that, when I was about forty, Mom and Dad split up and, worried about her economic wellbeing, Mom launched her company.

When your mother starts a business, it somehow seems easier to think about starting your own. What was formerly an impossible idea became not just possible, but maybe something you should think seriously about if you don’t want your mom looking down her nose at you.

So I started Greycourt [a wealth management firm]. And then my wife started her own company, the American Middle East Institute. And then my daughter and her husband started their own company, Legume Bistro, the best restaurant between Philadelphia and Chicago. We are now looking hard at the other five kids, wondering when they’re going to get off their duffs and start their own companies.

By the late 1980s I’d stopped thinking of myself as a poet who made his living in business and started thinking of myself as a businessman who wrote poetry.

There’s no real tradition of part-time poets in the West, but there is a long one in the East. In China in particular educated people are expected to write poetry and even to communicate with others in verse. Mao wrote poetry, of course, but so did Deng Xiaoping. Indeed, as Deng slid slowly into retirement in the 1990s, he published a series of “maxims” designed to guide the next generation of Chinese leaders, and these maxims were written in the classical Chinese poetic style.

It’s impossible to imagine such a thing happening in America, so business people who write poetry keep the fact tightly under wraps – otherwise, people would think we were slightly barmy.

– This is a selection taken from Greg’s book, Working for a Living: Selected Poems, published in 2014.