Time

My favorite poet is Larry Levis. He was born and raised in San Joaquin Valley on his family’s

farm. 

I’m going to put the one largely forgotten, swaying figure of Ediesto Huerta

Right in front of you so you can watch him swamp fruit

Out of an orchard in the heat of an August afternoon, I’m going to let you

Keep your eyes on him as he lifts & swings fifty-pound boxes of late

Elberta peaches up to me where I’m standing on a flatbed trailer & breathing in

Tractor exhaust so thick it bends the air, bends things seen through it

So that they seem to swim through the air.

It is a lousy job, & no one has to do it, & we do it.

Larry died at 49 in 1996, a year after I graduated from high school and five years before I would discover his work.

Celebrated, revered, and accomplished with six published collections of poetry and tenure at Virginia Commonwealth University with multiple prizes now named in his honor (one of which my friend Lisa just won), Larry was a drug addict. He was married and divorced three times.

In the years leading to his death, Larry wrote about the horses that lived and died on his father’s acreage in central California.

The palomino was called Misfit & the bay was named Querido Flacco,

And the names of some of the other shapes had been Rockabye

And Ojo Pendejo & Cue Ball & Back Door Peter & Frenchfry & Sandman

And Rolling Ghost & Anastasia.

Death would come for both of them with its bridle of clear water in hand

And they would not look up from grazing on some patch of dry grass or even

Acknowledge it much; & for a while I began to think that the world

Rested on a limitless ossuary of horses where their bones & skulls stretched

And fused until only the skeleton of one enormous horse underlay

The smoke of cities & the cold branches of trees & the distant

Whine of traffic on the interstate.

Levis is like this. 

Exacting and unforgiving. Relentlessly beautiful in attendance to the finitude and fragility of our lives and attempts to make meaning from such brevity.

That morning, when she asked me to leave, wearing only

The apricot tinted, fraying chemise, I wanted to stay.

But I also wanted to go, to lose her suddenly, almost

For no reason, & certainly without any explanation.

I remember looking down at a pair of singular tracks

Made in a light snow the night before, at how they were

Gradually effacing themselves beneath the tires

Of the morning traffic, & thinking that my only other choice

Was fire, ashes, abandonment, solitude. All of which happened

Anyway, & soon after, & by divorce. I know this isn’t much.

But I wanted to explain this life to you, even if

I had to become, over the years, someone else to do it.

I didn’t want children, and when Hazel was born, I was a distant and distracted father. But no

matter how far I traveled—in mind or spirit—during the day, I would come into her room at

night, and I would sit beside her, and I would read her Levis, and in this strange way, we got to

know each other. 

And when Lisa told us a couple of weeks ago at party that her new book, The Fire Passage,

had been selected for the Levis Prize in Poetry, Hazel’s face lit up, and she turned to me, and

she said, “Dad! He’s the one with the fires and the horses.” And I said, “Yes.” And she said,

“He’s my favorite.” And I said, “I know, he’s my favorite, too.” And she said, “I know.”

The summer that my wife found out she had breast cancer, my friend Paul Otremba died of stomach cancer. He was 40 years old and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Rice University. 

Paul’s first book of poetry is called The Currency, and I love what Michael Collier (who Paul and I shared as a professor while in grad school at the University of Maryland) says about the poems in the collection. 

In their openness to friendship and love and in their fearless directness, they remind me of the work of Larry Levis. Like Levis, Otremba promises to be an influential and important voice for his generation. 

It’s Paul’s voice and the bright jewels of his eyes that I carry—walking with him in the city streets of DC and Chicago and Prague.

When Paul died, he refused flowers at his funeral. His wife asked, on Paul’s behalf, for donations to be sent instead to the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

Writing on social media, one of Paul’s student posted, “I cannot quantify the impact Paul Otremba had on my life as a poet, and more importantly, as a person. He gave so much to the world, especially to young people. I am greater for having met him.” 

We can’t choose our allotment of time anymore than we can our legacies, but do we choose how to spend the time we have. It is a currency that everyone carries. 

For Angi, currency is joy that moves like an ocean and holds like a tree—building a life on kindness, humility, and the audacity to make something out of nothing. 

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Creatives are hired to inspire and invent in spaces where “what’s next?” is always fuzzy.

To do this well takes a rare mix of kindness, humility, and audacity. Kindness is communicating. Humility is collaborating. Audacity is the rupture that can, when coupled with the first two, win hearts and change minds.

Same talents apply to working for a firm as small and specialized as ours. Bonded by our curiosity and a dogged pursuit of design excellence. 

It is at once a humble and audacious effort.

To submit to the craft. To accept the unknowing. To launch a product. Design a new line of revenue. Rebrand a brand. Write an executive address. Grow a digital store. Conjoin collaborators, communities, and brands to create third things from two things—a gestalt. 

It’s a founder’s mentality. And that’s why we choose to work primarily with brands and creators founded in meaning. They get us. We get them.

Building on kindness, humility, and the audacity to make something out of nothing. Or, as Paul once put it in writing:

Even when we knew I’d be leaving

soon, I stopped to listen to the girl

selling her clay pipes: a small grace

so amazed it had any currency at all.

I once wrote to Angi, “Imagine if we could inspire the same belief in ourselves that we inspire in others.” It took us years to come to the beginning of where we are today. And looking back, all I can see is the grace that is now the currency of my life.