Copywriter

by Daniel Poppick

Genres: Humor & Satire

Synopsis

A portrait of the poet as an office worker, plumbing the depths of the spiritual gulf between art and work.

It’s the summer of 2017 and D__, a poet working by day as a copywriter at a retail start-up, can’t dispel a creeping sense of dissolution on the horizon. Whether it be the company’s new twenty-four-year-old CEO, who has more charisma than work experience, the growing distance between D__ and his longtime girlfriend, or a mounting sense of unreality in the wake of the first delirious year of the Trump administration, there’s a sense that things are speeding towards collapse—and that they’ve perhaps been unraveling for some time.

Borne along on these ambivalent straits, D__ begins to keep a notebook, filling it with everything: dreams, scenes from his own life, emails, and broadly-defined moments, both real and fictional, that he calls parables—attempts to learn from the underlying schedule of the universe, some music of the spheres that, if heard correctly, might help him finally understand his life, his art, and labor. Unfurling over the course of two years, season by season, The Copywriter circles a series of perennial questions, capturing in the process the unique absurdism of the gone-but-not-forgotten era of office culture between the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic: How should an artist balance a job and life when art doesn’t fit into either category? How does one find meaning in work that is stubbornly, uncannily, comically meaningless? Does one need to find meaning in one’s labor at all? What concessions do we make for the sake of a paycheck? What does all of this do to our art, and our souls?

Utterly original and lyrically beautiful, burrowing deep into contemporary disaffection without falling under its spell, The Copywriter is a comic story in the vein of Kafka’s Jewish mysticism, following the absurd paths that office work can take us on, and the subtle ways in which seemingly mindless labor can determine our fate.

Release date: February 3, 2026

Publisher: Scribner

Print pages: 208

Sample

1. June JUNE
The wind erases a line in the sand.
Parable of the New CEO
The company I work for recently got a new CEO. He is twenty-four years old and has never managed a company before, but he is charismatic; when he looks at me during our private two-hour coffee break, a conversation he is having with every single employee to “get to know us better,” I feel his time matters.

“Everything we do needs to have heart,” he says near the end of this meeting. “When someone writes a negative review of their lavender-scented yoga mat, we need to ask ourselves how we could have strengthened our connection with that person. When we pack up and ship our customers the ‘Yas Queen’ throw pillows, we need to affirm them the way they affirm themselves. When we write a description of the eggplant emoji drone, we need to be anticipating how that product makes our customers feel—would highlighting the Bluetooth speaker installed in the tip connect someone more deeply to their joy in the moment they read about it on our site? I don’t know, D__, you’re the writer—you tell me. From here on out everything we do is going to have heart.”

Transfixed, I agree—and, oddly, not just because my job depends on it.

“Tell me, D__,” he says, sipping cold brew from a straw. “What kind of poetry do you write?” And just like that, the spell is broken. It is only now that I start to dislike him.

At this point I should really have an answer to this question, but I do not. I give him my stock answer: “Most of it doesn’t rhyme.” But then I remember that, come to think of it, there is a lot of internal rhyme in my recent work, and add, idiotically, “But recently a lot of it does.”

He continues as if I haven’t spoken—as if what I just said was uttered outside of time. “I’m going to ask that tomorrow everyone bring in a product that means something to them. Really means something to you”—narrowing his eyes as if to switch the italics on in his voice—“you know?”

I don’t. “Yes, of course.”

“Good. Bring it in tomorrow and we’ll talk about it.”

When I get back to my desk, I Google:

what is a product

I do not pride myself on being a savvy professional operator, but after a decade of attending poetry readings, I have learned a thing or two about power-hungry nihilists who for one reason or another need to believe themselves to be gentle. It is clear that someone is going to be fired as a result of this meeting, which is in fact a test, and I resolve that it will not be me.

Directly after work I walk across Tribeca to a used bookstore and buy the rattiest, ugliest available copy of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, an anthropological study of “gift economies.” The subtitle of this older edition, omitted from more recent ones, is “Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property.” Perfect.

In the meeting the next day, my colleagues present earrings, an appealingly faded denim jacket, picture frames, a hair clip—the CEO is especially impressed by the hair clip—a notebook, and a synth keyboard. My turn comes around. I present the volume of The Gift as my personal copy, one I’ve owned for many years, and explain that I value this book over other property because it has taught me to see hitherto invisible webs of relationality when I shop on the internet, and that the material sustaining these relations—in human commerce, but also among plants and fungi, even rocks—is time itself, the most precious commodity imaginable. I note that I also love the vintage font on the cover.

My colleagues look confused, but the CEO does not. “That is not a product,” he says. “It might be a prized possession. It might be a book.” He lets a dramatic silence fill the conference room. I pray that the meeting will end with that observation, but he is just getting ready to drive his point home. “And yet it is not a product.”

Nearly anyone who attempts to publish their writing learns, often in humiliating and painful fashion, that to most of the world a book is a product designed to give its reader a narrow set of experiences. This is a brutally restricted way of imagining literature, and much else—but even within this potentially soul-killing purview, an entire ecosystem has survived, tenaciously, for centuries. Yet to our CEO an unfashionable, worn-out volume advancing even the mildest critique of capitalism could not be a product, because he cannot imagine the person who would use this particular book as a hair clip. That is my advantage.

After the meeting ends, I follow him into his office. “Can I talk to you?” I say.

“Yes, of course, D__.” He smiles tightly.

“I was thinking about what you were saying about everything we do needing to have heart. I’d like for you to have this.” I slide the book across his desk. “My only request is that after you’re finished reading it you pass it on, which I think is in keeping with the spirit of the book and what you’re trying to bring to this company. It feels relevant to what we’ve been talking about. I think you’ll really love it.”

He regards me anew.

This is not a story about fate. It is a story about serendipity.

“Thank you so much,” he says. “I will. Noted.”

I meet his gaze as he waits for me, like a dune waits for wind, to speak.

I’m not a religious person, but sometimes I find myself in a situation that seems concocted elsewhere—in a parallel dimension, created by an intelligence with narrative omniscience. John Ashbery wrote, “Everything has a schedule, if you can find out what it is.” In these seemingly concocted moments, it feels as if some presence is trying to teach me a schedule, should I wish to learn. And I do wish to learn, but I never find out what it is—in fact I am rarely aware of learning anything, in any situation, ever. But I do know a good story when it falls into my lap.

But it’s not just stories. I’ll overhear someone saying something that seems to suggest an entire reality splintering off from reality as I know it—like the other day when I was walking by the steps of the courthouse in downtown Brooklyn on the way to the subway, a red-faced man in a crisply pressed suit muttered into his phone, “There were all sorts of civil rights I didn’t expect the extent of.”

And sometimes it’s not overheard language, but language that seems transmitted to me via radio signal. When I remember a dream, it will often simply be a disembodied phrase in a distinct, unidentifiable voice, like “What audible skin you have!” as if spoken by a midwestern banker. And it’s not just dreams. Sometimes it’s not language-based at all but an idea, like the idea that the alphabet could physically cast shade on a sunny day; or a sound, a piece of music, a particular toll of a bell.

I feel that if I follow the logic of these moments a bit farther, I will discover the answer to a great riddle, but if I follow them too far I will never find my way back to my own life.

Our company is deeply “in the red,” a phrase I’ve always loved. Another way of saying it might be that our company “isn’t making enough money,” is perhaps even “hemorrhaging money,” or “isn’t creating objects imbued with value, or ‘heart,’ sufficient to motivate customers to exchange their hard-earned fungible assets for ownership, because the kitsch status pieces that we sell are last season’s kitsch status pieces, otherwise known as garbage; and because these customers’ fungible assets are vital to the company’s continued survival, the company, our company, is teetering on the edge of ruin.”

A breeze blows through the CEO’s open window, scattering a few loose sheets of paper across the office. The CEO, rattled and caught off-balance as if for the first time in his life, smiles at me again and frantically tries to gather them. I take this opportunity to leave.

I reheat last night’s leftovers in the microwave and cheerfully return to my desk to eat. I sink my teeth into what can only be described as the Versailles of meat loaf.

Layoffs have been widely expected all month. But the next day the new CEO doesn’t show up. Or the next. Or the next. He disappears from the office like a puddle in extractive sun. The word we are all awaiting never comes.

I drape myself, in realist fashion, with my laptop and a small cup of Keurig-brewed coffee, across the gray chaise longue by the ferns, trying to imagine what people who are in the market for a coat hook shaped like a panda want to believe about themselves.

“I liked that denim jacket you brought in for the meeting,” I say to my colleague Fatima the next week in the office kitchen.

“Aw, thanks,” she says. She returns to her desk, shoes clapping across the linoleum floor.

After that, it is as if the ritual we had all taken part in had never occurred at all. That’s why I need to write things down.