Summer Job

By Richard Hoffman b. 1949 Richard Hoffman

“The trouble with intellectuals,” Manny, my boss,

once told me, “is that they don’t know nothing

till they can explain it to themselves. A guy like that,”

he said, “he gets to middle age—and by the way,

he gets there late; he’s trying to be a boy until

he’s forty, forty-five, and then you give him five

more years until that craziness peters out, and now

he’s almost fifty—a guy like that at last explains

to himself that life is made of time, that time

is what it’s all about. Aha! he says. And then

he either blows his brains out, gets religion,

or settles down to some major-league depression.

Make yourself useful. Hand me that three-eights

torque wrench—no, you moron, the other one.”

Biography

Poet and teacher Richard Hoffman earned a BA in English from Fordham University and an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College. He is the author of the poetry collections Without Paradise: Poems (2002) and Gold Star Road (2007), which was selected by Molly Peacock for the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and won the Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club.

Hoffman is also the author of the memoir Half the House . . .

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