Acclaimed poet keeps his day job selling suits at The Gardens mall
By Mike Clary
Staff Writer
Posted May 2 2005
Amid the shelves of precisely folded dress shirts, in the routine and punctuality required of a Brooks Brothers clerk, Spencer Reece found the perfect antidote to a life of emotional turmoil.
Grounded by his daily toil in retail, he started a savings account, took a lover and finished a collection of poems 15 years in the making.
But don’t suppose, just because the gangly Juno Beach resident has been hailed by The New Yorker, won a prestigious poetry prize and published a first book greeted with acclaim, that he will quit his day job at The Gardens mall in Palm Beach Gardens.
“I need my job,” said Reece, 41. “It taught me about life, to be a team player, to work with others. I know it seems pedestrian. But it suits me.”
Published last year by Houghton Mifflin Co., “The Clerk’s Tale” is as thin and spare as its author, yet eloquent in its spot-on depiction of life shot through with longing and loss.
“I do not know a contemporary book in which poems so dazzlingly entertaining contain, tacitly, so much sorrow,” wrote former U.S. poet laureate Louise Glück in the book’s introduction.
Glück recommended Reece’s work to New Yorker poetry editor Alice Quinn, who in June 2003 devoted the entire back page of the magazine’s fiction issue to the title poem of the collection. She said his collection is “one of the most moving and unified first books I’ve read.”
In the past few months, Reece has done readings at the Library of Congress and at book fairs in Los Angeles and Texas, and won grants from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. And he has begun several new poems.
Still, Reece is a poet and a clerk, as much at home now with pinpoint and broadcloth as with the meter and rhyme.
“Poetry is meditative, and requires an amount of silence,” Reece said, “and the store is all noise, movement and fractured interchanges.”
In a world where too few read, and fewer still read verse, poetry does not pay. But Brooks Brothers does – about $30,000 a year for an assistant manager.
The life of a poet has never been easy. As a youth, Lord Alfred Tennyson was dogged by poverty. W.B. Yeats suffered from unrequited love. Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell were haunted by madness.
From a privileged beginning, as the son of a well-to-do Minnesota physician, Reece, too, found anguish. After studying at Bowdoin College and Wesleyan University, he earned a master’s degree in English Renaissance poetry in York, England, and then entered Harvard Divinity School. Headed toward a career in the ministry, he was awarded a master’s degree in theology in 1990.
After returning to Minnesota to live on the family farm, Reece’s world crumbled. His parents went bankrupt and could not accept their son’s homosexuality. He became estranged from his younger brother.
Nearing a breakdown, Reece said he committed himself to a mental hospital in 1994. “When I speak of the weather, is it because I cannot speak of my days spent in the nuthouse?” he writes in his poem Florida Ghazals.
After his hospital stay, Reece needed a job, and found it at Brooks Brothers in the Mall of America outside Minneapolis. “At first I thought it wouldn’t suit me,” he said. “But the job became a good fit.”
Reece transferred to the Palm Beach store in 1998, and four years ago moved to The Gardens, store No. 52, where he rose to assistant manager.
His boss, store manager Ellen Morris, said Reece’s success as a poet has not infringed on his role as a valued employee. “I think he is humbled by what’s happened to him after all these years of trying to get published,” she said. “It has not changed him. He’s a good person.”
Reece’s partner, Paul McNamara, 52, who has a business repairing car interiors, admits, “I’m not a literary guy.”
Yet, said McNamara, Reece “has an open heart. He can really engage the audience. I like watching him perform.”
Out of his formal Brooks Brothers attire on a recent day off, Reece wears Madras shorts, a white shirt, Ray-Ban shades and, from his most recent out-of-town reading, a ball cap stitched with the slogan “Keep Austin Weird.”
During a meandering trek from the beach in Lantana, Fla., to a nearby apartment house, where he lived until moving in with McNamara, Reece is asked to take the measure of his life at midpoint.
Like Prufrock in the T.S. Eliot poem, which has served as one of his touchstones, Reece worries aloud about growing old, about estrangements and opportunities lost.
Yet he is happy where he is, being of service and working with others. Pausing near a dock on the Intracoastal Waterway, Reece recalled a store party the staff threw for him when his book was published.
“They are not readers,” he said. “But they had a party and I cried. I didn’t think they cared that much. But they do.”
Also like J. Alfred Prufrock, I experienced many emotions while reading this piece. One was gratitude that a regular newspaper bothered to interview a mid-career, first-book poet about his life and work. That’s so nice. I was touched by Reece’s difficult journey (the boyfriend sounds like a sweetie) and pleased for him about his success (even despite my bitterness at Louise Gluck’s somehow having passed me over for Yale Younger Poets). And yet I find it all so incredible—the idea that any poet could quit his day job after the a single book’s publication. $30,000 a year? Hang onto your silk socks, friend! It’s not going to get much better than that, especially if you’re an adjunct.
Blogger ate the rest of this post after it went up, but I think the gist was that poets don’t make a nickel, even in academia (supposedly the gold at the end of the sellout rainbow, but I haven’t seen it work that way till people are on their maybe fourth book, and well into their fifties). Forget about Tennyson (I love that aside about Yeats suffering from unrequited love, by the way!)—Spencer Reece needs his job, Louise Gluck needs her job, and so does every other poet you’ve ever heard of or not heard of. Oh, I know; I also said Brooks Bros. should start hiring poets in all their stores—to provide excellent outfit descriptions on the sales floor (we’re good with colors), exude sensitivity and taste, and celebrate with the staff at each publication. I think it would benefit everyone.
