Let's call this a story.

*

In the year 2000, Verse Press published Joe Wenderoth's Letters to Wendy's, a modern epistolary novel. Responding to the company's official call—"TELL US ABOUT YOUR VISIT / WE CARE!"—a customer addresses Wendy's over the course of 289 letters. Each page, about the size of a restaurant comment-card, bears one letter. Wendy's never responds. The narrator, per John Stuart Mill's famous formulation of lyric poetry, is not heard but overheard.

*

In 2012, I joined the payroll of a fast-food corporation I will refer to as Helicopt. My job was to respond to their customers' letters and emails, roughly 70,000 such messages over the course of my six-plus years on the job. It was my responsibility to make sure the writers of all 70,000 messages felt not overheard but heard. Understood.

*

Among other things, Letters to Wendy's is a story of address. How do we talk to the legal persons that are American corporations? How do we address the abstract? So many customers began their emails "Dear Helicopt," and perhaps would have preferred their responses signed by Helicopt instead of me. As if those were separate things.

*

At stake in Mill's definition of the lyric is authenticity. Poetry differs from eloquence, he claims, because poetry is "the nearest possible representation" of emotion in "the exact shape" it occurs, uninterested in "other minds." Poetry is "feeling confessing itself to itself." In other words, "Poetry, when it is really such, is truth."

*

My job was to accept the stories relayed by the customers as, essentially, poetry, "the exact shape" of their experience and emotion. What they wrote was "the nearest possible representation" of how their visit made them feel. "I had the worst experience ever," almost every one of these 70,000 missives would say, and every time, I would agree. It was the worst experience ever. 

*

"Dear [customer.FirstName],
     Thank you for writing. I am so sorry to hear how your visit went! Our guacamole should always be green, not brown, and we should always have cheese! I will share your concerns with the GM and regional leaders who oversee our [location.Name] Helicopt so this doesn't happen again. In the meantime, please respond with your postal address so I can mail you a free-burrito card (good for any main-menu item)."
     Sixty of these a day, at least.

*

In Persons & Things, lyric theorist Barbara Johnson traces the American legal personification of corporations back to the "Dictionary Act" of 1871, in which Congress decreed that the word person "may extend and be applied to bodies politic and corporate." She theorizes that any address to or from such a corporation is a poetic act, a figure of speech. My job at Helicopt was to disguise the figure with my voice and my name. The more "authentic" my voice, the better the disguise.

*

The thrust of Letters to Wendy's is that the unreliable narrator, through his correspondence with the legal person that is Wendy's, goes insane. He starts off ironic, snide: "I had a wonderful meal, in every sense of the word. I especially liked the ordering of the food. It asserts an altogether proper dominance." This comes from the first letter, dated July 1, 1996. I cite by the date of the epistle because the book bears no page numbers. It is one way this book resists review.

*

Here is the final epistle, August 7, 1997, in its entirety:

Nonplussed. Nonplussed and recovering us. Recovering us even. Uneven. The brightnesses of it. All is light! Do you hear? Light.

Non plus: no more. The book reaches a saturation of meaning and keeps on trying to mean, contradicting itself ("even. Uneven") and confusing the senses: "Do you hear? Light." Though the speaker demands to be heard, the "exact shape" of his feeling cannot be understood and must be, per Mill, overheard.

*

I say "speaker" because the book, purportedly a work of fiction, has been read as poetry. David Lehman's anthology Great American Prose Poems includes "Twelve Epistles" from the novel. My undergraduate Intro to Creative Writing teacher photocopied and presented these twelve to class in Fall 2005. I had never laughed at a poem the way I laughed at the epistle dated August 27, 1996:

*

Still high on those brownies, but coming down. I've eaten, in the past twenty-four hours, so very many burgers and chicken sandwiches. The Sea of Coke is heavy today with meat—its cold swells with the meaty goodness that objects to language. Some kids drift by, talking. One of them says 'that sucks dead donkey dicks,' and the other agrees. Imagine.

*

If the kid wrote "This sucks dead donkey dicks" to me in a Helicopt email, I would have had to agree.

*

The clause immediately preceding the "bodies politic and corporate" clause in the 1871 Dictionary Act (Title 1, Chapter 1 of the U.S. Legal Code) codifies insanity: "the words 'insane' and 'insane person' shall include every idiot, insane person, and person non compos mentis." This flattening of difference stands in contrast to the recognition of diversity among "corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies." It also suggests such corporate persons may be, or become, insane.

*

No one could spell Helicopt. Helipoct. Lipotech. Many people believed guacamole was spelled with an initial Q. Voice recognition software turned barbacoa into Barbara Cohen. Merely interpreting the letters' literal meaning sometimes required the help of coworkers. Sometimes, I had to guess.

*

I fell in love with Letters to Wendy's instantly. I bought my own copy, dogeared my favorite passages, took it to parties to read aloud. It felt enormously liberating to read a fast-food restaurant as the subject of something as rarified as poetry. It gave me the confidence to write about my own experience, to imagine deeper, more authentic care from the culture that raised me. It suggested that poetry lies dormant in every form of language. It was just a matter of calling it forth.

*

But Letters to Wendy's is a novel, that genre which, per Mill, excites "the shallowest and emptiest" minds and hearts. Perhaps it is unfair to expect the novel to describe more than "outward things, not the inward man." Perhaps there is no inward man worth knowing.

*

"Dear Hecilopt, I'm not one to complain, but I just got takeout from your Overland Park location and found a women's tank top in my bag of chips. It was covered in salt and grease and smelled as if it had been recently worn. Please respond."

*

It is possible that, had I never read Letters to Wendy's, I would not have accepted the job at Helicopt. From about 20 to 25, I called the book my favorite, my pet. It spoke to me in a way I thought my service at Helicopt would honor. Wenderoth's speaker was the "I," and I would become the "thou."

*

Barbara Johnson highlights apostrophe as the central figure of lyric poetry. A literal "turning away," apostrophe pivots from the human to address the nonhuman: a nightingale, the west wind, a steamroller. It is a figure of, among other things, "authority." It is also the central figure of the customer-service letter—at least, from the customer's side. It turns the corporation from an "it" or "them" to a "you." It wants answers.

*

From the company's side, the central poetic figure is personification: "to endow a quality with a psychology," per Johnson. As a personification of Helicopt, my official psychology was penitent. My job was to say "I'm sorry," and then pivot, seamlessly, to we: "We should clean our dining room regularly. We should wear our gloves when cutting chicken. We should certainly never serve our chicken undercooked." I was a subject for Helicopt's predicate.

*

What does it mean for a person to operate as a personification? What became of me after 40 to 60 hours a week as a figure of speech? It did not help my writing. Sitting down to start a poem after a full day of apologizing for Helicopt, I found myself with little to say beyond the obvious: "Who the hell am I?"

*

"The customer is always right": this, too, is figurative, poetic. It asks the reader to accept the inherent made-ness of a customer's account as real, inviolably true, a representation of the customers themselves. They are their word. In a famously difficult essay on anthropomorphism, lyric theorist Paul de Man identifies this taking of the writing for the writer as the central fallacy of lyric poetry. The truth, what is right, becomes "a proper name" instead of "a set of propositions." The customer becomes the truth.

*

At Helicopt, I grew sick of the word experience. "I had the strangest experience at your Inner Harbor Helicopt last night." "I can always count on the Fry St. Helicopt to deliver a top-notch experience!" The comments revealed how sacred the average person holds their own subjectivity. De Man offers lyric as the cause of this blur between subject and object, not the antidote.

*

January 14, 1997

I confess I don't feel like sending you my thoughts today. I'd like to say that I have no thoughts, but that's not true. I have no thoughts that seem worthy of clarification. Of course, the distinction is ridiculous—NO thought is worthy of clarification. Clarification is just the process the fantasy needs to pretend it's on the way to itself. Fuck clarification; give me the meat and leave me alone.

*

Another reading of Letters to Wendy's is as a restaurant review. The novel is a kind of hermit crab, per Suzanne Paola and Brenda Miller's taxonomy of such prose forms, which take on the carapaces of different, often non-literary genres. An obvious argument the novel makes is that such reviews say far more about the customer than they do about the restaurant. Our voice betrays us even on a Wendy's comment card. Even there, we may be overheard.

*

By far, the most common Helicopt complaint was about the subjectivity of proportion. The customer (guest, as we were to call them) would ask for chicken, and the server would scoop what the guest perceived as a too-small scoop. The guest would ask for more, and the server would scoop a few additional cubes. The guest would ask for more, and the server would say it costs extra. It's not about the chicken, the guest would say. It's about right and wrong.

*

"Dear [customer.FirstName],
     Thank you for sharing your experience with us. I'm sorry it was such a bummer! Our chicken is delicious, and you should get a nice, heaping, four-ounce scoop every time you order it. I'll reach out to the [location.Name] team and make sure we're scooping nice, consistent scoops. We charge extra for meat servings over four ounces, but you can ask for additional servings of any other line item at no additional cost."

*

In the I-thou address of the customer-service letter, the restaurant employees—the ones doing the actual work—are either erased or turned into objects that both the customer and the personified corporation own: "my server," "our team," a collective noun widely circulated at Helicopt for its relation less to sports than to horsemanship. This de-personification comes through in Letters to Wendy's, too, in which the restaurant's employees are scantly mentioned. When they are, they are theorized, abstracted:

*

July 31, 1996:

Your employees are beautiful—they do not have authority. Even the manager has no authority—if pushed, he will just call someone, who also has no ultimate authority. It's extremely pleasing to recognize this fact—one feels so fairly situated in the teeming absence of authors. At Wendy's, one writes not from an author, but to an author, a sleeping owner who will never wake.

*

In corporate satire, this lampooning of a worker's non-authority is boilerplate: the squeaky-voiced teen saying, "I'll have to ask my manager..." At Helicopt, the authority of the restaurants' crew and management was real enough to wound. If my response ingratiated a rude or combative customer, the restaurant, copied on my response, would write back with their own account of the "guest," his racist slurs, his threats of violence. The truth turned from the customer back to a set of propositions.

*

Is poetry fiction or nonfiction? Of course, it is neither and both, but many systems do not accommodate such ambiguity. This may be the reason behind Verse Press and Wenderoth's designation of Letters to Wendy's as a novel. Its disclaimer reads, "These letters are 100 percent fiction." But the disclaimer, too, is figurative. It is less a comment on the book's fiction than on the fiction of the book's titular, corporate subject.

*

Later in the disclaimer: "Where the names of real places, institutions, corporate entities or figures are used, those names are meant only to denote imaginary figures, possible images, the stuff of collective dreams; they do not denote, or pretend to private information about, actual persons." The shift from "figures" to "persons" simultaneously challenges corporate personhood and evades liability. It deliberately invokes the Dictionary Act to undermine its premise.

*

It's been four years since I quit Helicopt, and eighteen since I first read Letters to Wendy's. I still appreciate the book's wiliness, its dense calculations of irony. It's thrilling to track the leaps of thought across the December 27, 1996 letter: "I can say without hesitation that if Wendy's ever started to 'deliver' I would end my life. And in a way, my suicide would mimic Wendy's decision to 'deliver'...Yes, our homes are dust. Don't pretend you are surprised."

*

The narrator wouldn't fare well in 2023. He'd have DoorDash and Postmates on his phone, making Wendy's perpetually deliverable. He'd also have social media, where fast-food companies invent complex, occasionally absurdist voices. Wendy's Twitter voice is famously "savage": "@wendys, who's running this savage page?" "Three dogs in a trench coat pretending to be human."

*

In Letters to Wendy's,the conversation between the corporation and the person is one-sided. On a human scale, this may be true. But it also erases the humans behind the various gates corporations keep, humans who are themselves subject to various forms of privation. Their job is to give voice, be it behind a cash register or a computer screen. This job may be taxing, occasionally even rewarding.

*

The book operates through a certain early-2000s ethos of humor that holds provocation as a virtue in and of itself: South Park, Family Guy, Wonder Showzen. It is a book in which "a midget's big penis" (in the October 11, 1996 letter) is made the butt of a joke. At such times, it seems to endorse the corporate dehumanization it satirizes.

*

To provoke: to call forward, to challenge. It is one power of the voice. How we use it says a great deal about who we are.

*

The first year I worked for Helicopt, I kept a file of favorite passages pasted from the customers' letters. The most absurd. The most baroquely misspelled. The most entitled. I kept it, specifically, as material for my future writing. After a year, I completely stopped caring what the "guests" had to say outside generalizations of tone and category. This was the only way. There were days I had to respond to over 200 emails some crisis provoked. A botched Boy Scouts fundraiser. An Oprah spot. I deleted the file.

*

Occasionally, I acted as a Helicopt social media "listener." I scanned each tweet at Helicopt and could respond if moved. Fans (no longer guests) would ask me to "roast" other fast-food companies. They would compare my tweets to those of other restaurants. "You'll never be Arby's," they'd say.

*

Johnson identifies the "mirror image" of personification in reification: not becoming man but "becoming thing," from idea to thing or from human to thing. Turning to stone, in other words. It is not a figure, Johnson says, but a process—one which poetry must counteract: "[F]igures that increase humanness are by nature working against a decline of humanness and a thingification that ... have only accelerated with commodity capitalism."

*

Twenty-three years after Letters to Wendy's, what has changed? Corporations enjoy more human rights than ever. The 2010 Citizens United ruling protects their unlimited campaign contributions as free speech. Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014) grants them religious exemptions. As Johnson argues, personification works two ways: affirming the personhood of the thing and destabilizing that of the person. Letters to Wendy's, for all its flaws, still sounds a relevant, urgent alarm about the power and figuration of voice.

*

In 2019, as part of my severance agreement with Helicopt, I signed a non-disparagement clause, stipulating that, for the rest of my life, I would say nothing financially harmful to the company's corporate person. Heard or overheard, my voice is still under the company's control. It was not a happy ending. But it may have been a kind of poetry.

__

Part of what I love about Wenderoth's [Letters to Wendy's] is its prankish take on genre. I wanted to imitate that attitude, as well as the novel's prose fragments, which are about as square and dense as Wendy's hamburger patties. It's a "review," broadly. I'm reacting to the Y2K nostalgia of our moment and coming to terms with middle age.