Michael Agar
Ethknoworks LLC

American Life in Poetry: Column 162

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Though at the time it may not occur to us to call it "mentoring," there's likely to be a good deal of that sort of thing going on, wanted or unwanted, whenever a young person works for someone older. Richard Hoffman of Massachusetts does a good job of portraying one of those teaching moments in this poem.


Summer Job

"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."


American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2006 by Richard Hoffman, and reprinted from his most recent book of poetry, "Gold Star Road," Barrow Street Press, 2007, by permission of the poet. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Michael Agar received his undergraduate degree from Stanford and his Ph.D. in linguistic anthropology from the Language-Behavior Research Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. An honorary Woodrow Wilson Fellow, NIH Career Award recipient, and currently Fulbright Senior Specialist, he is professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park, with adjunct appointments in Speech Communication and Comparative Literature, as well as at the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology at the University of Alberta. Recently he became an associate of Antropokaos at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina.

He works independently as Ethknoworks LLC in northern New Mexico. Ethknoworks centers on research, writing and consultation around issues in ethnography, language, complexity theory, and the organization from both theoretical and practical points of view. Kurt Lewin provides the motto: There is nothing as practical as a good theory.

He also works with the Redfish Group in Santa Fe (www.redfish.com), particularly around the application of a blend of ethnography and computer visualization called "OrgViz," short for "making the organization visible.

His past appointments include research positions with public health agencies in Kentucky and New York as well as university positions at the Universities of Hawaii, Houston, and California in the U.S., and visits with the Universities of Mysore in India, Surrey in the U.K., and Vienna and the Johannes Kepler University in Austria.

Publications include articles in journals from the fields of anthropology, linguistics, folklore and oral history, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, public policy, artificial intelligence, complexity, intercultural communication, and the substance use and transportation fields. He also writes for general magazines like Smithsonian. His books include Ripping and Running, The Professional Stranger, Angel Dust, Speaking of Ethnography, Independents Declared, and Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation. A new book, a policy critique based on his decades in the drug field that was just published, is Dope Double Agent: The Naked Emperor on Drugs.

He recently finished work as principal investigator on a seven year NIH project to explain illicit drug epidemics. He also conducts introductory and advanced workshops on qualitative research and complexity theory and consults on the use of those methods in diverse project applications. Lately the use of complexity theory to reformulate social service organizations occupires his time and interest. He is a member of several editorial boards and has served on numerous research advisory committees. In 2004 he was presented with the Leadership Award in Qualitative Inquiry by the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology.