So for 23 years he pursued poetry, revised and polished his poems, worked a tough day job in a mall, and opened his mailbox each day only to find more rejection slips. 

Over this long stretch of time, he only had five or six published, in such out-of-the-way locales as a high-school magazine, in Poetry Wales, and in an Australian litzine.  He did manage to place poems in two U.S. journals, Boulevard and Painted Bride Quarterly.

Then, one day (as in a fairytale), he came home from his job at Brooks Brothers and there was a message on his answering machine.  He pressed the button and heard the voice of Louise Gluck, the famous poetess, later poet laureate of the United States.  “I was shocked” as he tells the CNN interviewer.  “I couldn't believe it. I thought they had made a mistake or lowered the standards in the middle of the night.” 

Well, one thing led to another, and he got his book published.  The book is called “The Clerk’s Tale.”  The book is plenteous not only with good writing but also indications of years of diligent reading and study of past masters.  The title of the book itself is an allusion to Chaucer.  Elsewhere the style of the writing reveals the influence of James Merrill, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gluck.  But the book also is marked by a sense of humility, calm, and compassion which must have emerged out of the long years of working at the mall and having no fame. 

Reece is the first to state that far from battering him and hurting his impetus toward poetry, his day job propelled him and helped him to refine and sharpen his subject matter.  Indeed, it is one of the great under-explored territories of American life:  the workaday life of the masses.  Many poets have no immediate access to this life of offices, factories and mall jobs because the poets are working at a university, which has its own unique culture.  Also, many poets who do get exposed to day jobs and the work life outside of universities, find that they hate it.  Indeed, there is much suffering and oppression in the American worker’s life.  However, there are unique poetic and artistic insights and intuitions to be gained from being a worker, poor, a slave.  “What does not kill me makes me stronger” said Nietzsche, and that aphorism might apply here.  As another example, Simone Weil spent a stint as a line worker in a Renault factory, where her physical incompetence and delicate health made the job uniquely agonizing.  Yet in looking back at the job later, she would say time and time again that the fairly brutal experience opened her up into the point of view of the slave and gave her essential intuitions.

In any event, even after he got his book published, Reece did not quit his Brooks Brothers mall store job.  As of today, he apparently still sells Brooks Brothers suits in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. 

What makes a Reece poem good?  Well, let’s look at the opening lines of the title poem of his book:

I am thirty-three and working in an expensive clothier,
selling suits to men I call "Sir."
These men are muscled, groomed and cropped—
with wives and families that grow exponentially.
Mostly I talk of rep ties and bow ties,
of full-Windsor knots and half-Windsor knots,
of tattersall, French cuff, and English spread collars,
of foulards, neats, and internationals,
of pincord, houndstooth, nailhead, and sharkskin.
I often wear a blue pin-striped suit.
My hair recedes and is going gray at the temples.
On my cheeks there are a few pimples. . .

What interests us in this passage are several things.  First, the attention to detail, careful, in fact a stylistic mimesis or reflection of the finickiness of a good clothier.  Second, the open window into the poet’s own life:  starting at line 1, you are shown right into the landscape, the actual situation, of the poet, as a human being – and not necessarily in his most flattering aspect – no, rather, here we see him, working at his day job, and he is not some high powered stockbroker or something.  So there is something fresh and real about this opening, this presentation.  Third, the careful choice of words, setting them up to spin and hit against each other in some very subtle ways, as Merrill said a poet should do.  Look at the odd yet apt animalization of the “men” at line 3, where Reese deploys terms, especially “cropped,” that would also apply to a description of horses, beasts in pasture.  The use of “exponentially” at line 4 is evocative of the whole power dynamic going on here, and the intersection of the sensitive poet’s perceptions with the American corporate machine.  The itemization of different clothier’s words that follows gently revels in the peculiarity of these terms of art, such as “foulard,” “nailhead.”  And then the passage finishes in self-effaced self-portrait.  One gets the sense not only of an alert mind, but a gentle mind and understatedly exquisite musical sensibility (as in the Bishop-esque rhyme at “temples” and “pimples”).  To use Ezra Pound’s test for a good poem, it is at least as well-written as prose.

In his New Yorker interview dated June 9, 2003, he describes how he came up with the poem:

The poem came to me when I first started working at Brooks Brothers, and it grew over the years. “The Clerk’s Tale” in Chaucer concerns a marriage, and often this work life is very much like a marriage. We’re together so much, I mean. It’s kind of a simple idea, but when I was working on rewrites with Louise the line “Sometimes snow falls like rice” came to me, and it was all I needed to just bring in that hint of a marriage. . . . The ending to the poem was difficult. I went back and read the Chaucer, and then Louise said, “Read Eliot’s ‘Prufrock,’” and I did, and I read a few other things, and slowly it came together.

Here is the ending of the poem, to which he refers; the passage begins with him saying goodbye to his coworker at the mall store:

At last, we bid each other good night.
I watch him fade into the many-tiered parking lot,
where the thousands of cars have come
and are now gone. This is how our day ends.
This is how our day always ends.
Sometimes snow falls like rice.
See us take to our dimly lit exits,
disappearing into the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul;
Minneapolis is sleek and St. Paul,
named after the man who had to be shown,
is smaller, older, and somewhat withdrawn.
Behind us, the moon pauses over the vast egg-like dome of the mall.
See us loosening our ties among you.
We are alone.
There is no longer any need to express ourselves.

Notice how apt and acute the eye is here.  The poem is all about clear imagery, a clearly presented scene.  Both inner and outer landscapes—the world around the poet, and the moods inside – are accurately and unsentimentally depicted.  The truth of the banality, boredom, repetition, oppression and strain of American working-sector jobs is there, in the poem, but so is something else, a triumph, a refusal to accede to cliché formulations, a sense of the profoundness of the individual life even if that life is merely one of the minions, the millions.  So much fatigue is connoted by the line, “this is how our day always ends,” and yet the image that immediately follows is magical and even, hopeful, “sometimes snow falls like rice,” with its faint allusiveness, to marriage, or festival, with its inherent hopefulness.  The freshness and curiosity of the poet’s eye engages the sad aspects of the mall job in a way which is immensely human and fruitful.  Notice the sketch of St. Paul that then follows, which calmly unglorifies him.  Then, an image of the mall, with the moon above it, which is wonderful because here we have a poet giving us images of the real, actual, today American landscape, instead of fleeing into the past or Europe or mythology.  And then the strange twist into silence which ends the poem.  Silence seems a real theme for this poet since he himself was in literary silence for so many years, unheralded and unheard. 

One key to Reece’s delicate perceptiveness is his background.  His family was originally rich, though it disintegrated in later years, and he was afforded a fine education.  His father was a physician, and he grew up in Minneapolis (where the Mall of America is located, which is the mall referenced in the poem “The Clerk’s Tale.”).  He went to a prep school, then Bowdoin College, in Maine, then transferred to Wesleyan, in Connecticut, where he received his bachelor’s degree.  Then, he had the good fortune to go to England and receive a master’s in English Renaissance poetry from the University of York.  While there, he wrote a thesis on the English poet and man of the church, George Herbert (who was also one of Bishop’s favorite poets).  But Reece’s educational perambulations were still not done.  When he returned from Great Britain, he then went to the Harvard Divinity School, and received a master’s in theology, in 1990.

At that point he wanted to become a hospital chaplain — since Herbert and John Donne had combined the vocations of poets and ministers.  But this was not to be for Reece.  Instead, after family and personal troubles, he ended up broke and desperate, and got the job at the Brooks Brothers at the Mall of America.  There, he ministered not to penitents, but executives and office staff, and not at the altar of a church, but at the altar of American capitalism.  In retrospect, an extremely lucky break for the poet.  Because you cannot recapture the past.  Three hundred years ago, to be a poet like Herbert and work in a small church among the peasants made sense and was one of the expected paths.  But today, the environment is different, the landscape is more secular, the peasants are now workers, the countryside is suburbs.  So, the job Reese ended up with, at the mall, arguably is a better postmodern corollary to the ministry jobs that his idols Herbert and Donne worked.  For example, consider the connection he makes here in “The Clerk’s Tale”:

This is the Mall of America
The light is bright and artificial
Yet not dissimilar to that found in a Gothic cathedral.

Reese is the first to admit that it took a long time for him to have his collision with practical life and the workaday world.  Because his family was wealthy through his 20s, he was able to have his extensive education, and then, move back to a nice farm estate owned by his family, living by himself for several years without having to work.  His poem “Midnight,” found in his book, reflects on that period:

All these years later and the hill is still bald,
whispering softly as the revolutions of the sea,
echoing with the mouths of the vanquished. . . .
If you look closely in the left hand corner,
I can just be distinguished from the blue blue brilliance of all this land,
a tiny figure, no bigger than a grass blade, a shadow hugged by shadows,
heading home after a long walk nowhere,
encircled by a halo of rocks, trees, crops, rivers, clouds—
by every blessed thing conspiring together to save my life.

But then, the family fortunes changed and the family went into bankruptcy.  They lost the farm estate and other properties.  He wrote about having to leave the farm:  

this is the day I leave
leave the landscape I love
the way lovers love love
watch me how I leave
I have begun to shake
the hours are fleet
yet expansive as at death

This collapse went far beyond material properties and including conflict within the family itself, and by the time he was 29 Reece was left alone, family contacts broken and bridges burnt.  Imagine the pain and isolation of this situation, for a poet who had previously been afforded some warmth and a good deal of material privilege and protection by his family.  This is one of the keys to Reece’s style.  He brings into his mall job environment the finely cultivated and sensitized mind of someone who got a lot of university education plus spent a long adult stretch not having to work at all. 

His breakdown after the family lost the farm is vividly described in his New Yorker interview:

I had to go into the hospital, and it was difficult and embarrassing. I was just shattered. . . After I graduated to the open unit, I was crying so much I couldn’t stop, and I was very skinny, and the issue of a plan kept coming up: you have to have a plan, you have to have a plan for your life. I recited Bishop’s “One Art” to my nurse, Martha—you know how it goes, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master . . .”—and she began to weep. I really believe God sent her to me. She lived in the same town where the farm was. When I had to go to the hospital, I had to be taken into the city, which was forty miles away, so to have her show up there from the same tiny little town—I mean, the odds were unbelievable. . . When it was time to leave the hospital, in 1997, I had nowhere to go, and I had no money. I had this wonderful education, but it wasn’t very practical. So Martha said, “You can come and live with us,” and she and her husband took me in, and I lived in their living room for about three years. . . . I had to give away my dog and sell my library, and it just broke me. I really knew what grief was at that point, and I didn’t know before.

Every poet goes through lesser or greater scenes in their life like this, where all falls apart.  Poets can be uniquely susceptible to these kinds of emotional implosions because of their inherent sensitivity and introversion.  When a poet is able to make their way through these kinds of pains, the result can be new zones of insight and compassion.  This is what we see in Reece’s poems.  It hearkens back to his master, Herbert.  For example in this famous poem, we see Herbert combining strands of personal guilt, humility, grace, and narrative imagination in a way at once calming and heartbreaking:

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

            Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack

            From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning

            If I lacked anything.

"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here":

            Love said, "You shall be he."

"I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,

            I cannot look on thee."

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,

            "Who made the eyes but I?"

"Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame

            Go where it doth deserve."

"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"

            "My dear, then I will serve."

"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."

            So I did sit and eat.

(“Love (III)”). 

I have noted the strange twist into silence at the end of the title poem of Reece’s book.  This interest in silence, I think, aligns him with Bishop.  Bishop went through life events and life crises that were as bad and shattering as any experienced by, say, Plath, yet Bishop’s approach to those crises, poetically, was very different.  She was indirect and tended to sublimate her autobiographical experience.  For example, she makes no direct explicit documentary exposition of her relationship with her lover Lota in her poems, or her alcoholism.  Instead, these traumas are sort of implied in the silences back dropping her poems.  We see this also in Reece, and as he said in his New Yorker interview, “Silence is my ancestor. . . I’ve found great solace in silence.”