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This is first and foremost a social place. We spend our days talking about, working with, and getting annoyed by each other. Years ago, a poet-friend commented on some of my memo poems from Avoid Activity—which Douglas Rothschild read for me in absentia at the Ear Inn—that they reminded everyone of “how frightening that world is,” by which I assume he meant the business world. I clearly don’t have the luxury of being outside that world, to make such observations. I encounter people here as people; I have my favorites and my not-favorites. I don’t see them as manipulated by a discourse whose motives they don’t understand—many of them have acute understandings of the most subtle nuances of that discourse and offer hilarious insights. So to stand outside and comment ironically on the whole of it would seem adolescent to me.

--william fuller, on poetry and the workplace. for more please read this fascinating and, to me, uplifting interview with fuller here.