Today’s Poem: Confused about the Ivy League

Think of these schools as crime families

L.V. Carstens’s “A Cosy Corner.” c. 1888 (Wikimedia Commons)

A.M. Juster (b. 1956) is an American treasure. The only trouble is that America hasn’t quite figured out how to cash in on that treasure.

I have a special place in my heart for Juster — in part because in 2010 I commissioned the poet and critic Paul Mariani to write a profile that broke the story that “A.M. Juster” is the pseudonym of a man named Michael J. Astrue, who, in his spare time, was a senior lawyer and high-level public servant, serving at the time as commissioner of the Social Security Administration. It was through his poetry that I got to know him in Washington, not through his time as a wheel in Republican administrations, a figure at HHS and the White House Counsel’s office.

To think about his high-level work in government and his poetry at the same time is to be reminded of no one writing today. The only comparable figures are senior figures in Victorian Britain, holding powerful cabinet and sub-cabinet positions during the day and going home to translate classical languages at night (see, ad passim, Gladstone’s Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age).

Juster’s poetic Latin translations include The Satires of Horace, Tibullus’ Elegies, Saint Aldhelm’s Riddles, The Elegies of Maximianus, and John Milton’s The Book of Elegies.  And then there are his Italian translations, including his forthcoming translation of Petrarch. And then his recent comic reconstruction of a lost Greek work,  Gerytades: An Aristophanes Play . . . sort of. And then his own poetry, including Wonder and Wrath. And then his poetry editing at Plough Quarterly . . . and on and on it goes, an endlessly productive poet.

Michael J. Astrue as Social Security Commissioner

In Today’s Poem, the newly composed “Epistle to a Friend Confused about The Ivy League,” Juster indulges a Greek and Latin form, the elegiac couplet, in English stresses: a hexameter line followed by a pentameter line. (In Coleridge’s illustration: In the hexameter rises the fountain’s silvery column, / In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.)

The point is an inflated prosody to describe the brutality of genteel control at such places as Yale (where Astrue was an undergraduate) and Harvard (where he got his law degree). And since the Ivy League is much in the news these days — the quiet gentlemen’s anti-Semitism of the 1920s and 1930s quotas, reborn now in unquiet ways — we thought to showcase Juster’s advice for an academic friend, explaining how “dean” and “don” are only a vowel sound apart, and the way these schools are run brings to mind a crime family.

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Epistle to a Friend Confused about the Ivy League

by A.M. Juster

for MAG

Deans manage their departments like Don Corleone,
     although their crimes are not as organized.

Philologists may quibble, but who can deny
     that “Dean” and “Don” are just a vowel away?

With either type of boss, their vengeance will be swift,
     particularly with assistant deans,

who always have a chilling eagerness to prove
     that — badda-bing — they will execute their orders,

and yes, your death will be the same if left to die
     in some committee or in a Chevy trunk,

and yes, enrolling as a soldier in the Mafia
     is not unlike the Harvard tenure process —

except that getting tenure takes more patience, time,
     and self-restraint than Mob initiations,

though both insist upon your total loyalty
     despite long hours, low pay and legacies,

and both expect you to abandon fussiness
     about the legal aspects of your work,

and yes, if you dissent, no dean or don will flag 
     the timing of your hitman closing in,

and yes, if the financial gross is large enough,
     clear character concerns must be ignored,

and sure, the Ivies rig elections to their boards
     in ways “made men” control a waterfront,

but deans at Ivies are denied the consolation
     of dreams about their witness relocation.

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