“Good morning. Welcome. How did you find us, if I may?”
“There was a vacancy at PoetryFlow.”
“Do you have an account there?”
“Yes, and at PoemHub as well. My best poem was starred three hundred times.”
“Fine, fine. We’ve surely read the résumé, but could you please briefly introduce yourself?”
“Sure. I started to write poems in high school. ’Twas Hexameter 1.0, on used punchcards, you know. Then Haiku++ (that one having 19 syllables.) Also I did some pure rhymes.”
“Good,” the interviewer makes some notes.
“The only noticeable one was a poem to my classmate Sara in the college. Plus some small exercises.”
“What was your first production-level poem about?”
“It was ‘Mr. Smith is full of shit,’ written on the wall of our college. It’s still not wiped clean.”
“What areas do you have writing experience at?”
“I prefer amphibrach, but, unfortunately, it’s rarely in demand nowadays. Also anapest and iambic. The project I mentioned is done mostly on choree.”
“Good,” the interviewer makes some notes.
“Also I sometimes comment on blog posts. For free. But this happens only in my free time. For that, I use mostly dactyl.”
“Are you a hipster?”
“No, no, no way. That’s for fun. I understand that dactyl is too demanding to resources, plus neither AWS nor Azure support guitar accompaniment.”
“Have you ever been working with the free verse?”
“Not in production, only a couple of pet projects.”
“You see, we have a project in the slightly modified version of the free verse, say, in-house edition,” the interviewer conspiratorially smiles.
“Some fork, like Auden’s?”
“Not really. We have added to the free verse what it lacked: isotonic, rhyme, isosyllabism and some other fancy whistles.”
“What was wrong with a plain old good iambic?”
“Honestly, this is a legacy. The project has been started by an ancient Hindu poet, who could do nothing save for the free verse. In addition, 80% of commercial poetry in the world is written in the free verse.”
“Got it.”
“We have more or less standard backend: love and war. R&D department is trying to use extras like jokes, oxymorons, ruptures of discourse… But in the production, all these nifty features are still off.”
“Got it.”
“Well, whether you’re fine with that, let’s do a tiny whiteboard testing. The tasks would be very simple, that’s mostly to test your way of rhyming rather than deep poetry knowledge.”
“OK.”
“Please finish the stanza ‘What killed Voldemort’…”
“Uhm. I need to think. OK. Here we go. Uhm.” (coughs)
“No rush, take your time.”
“What can I use to implement the ending?”
“Whatever you want.”
“Iambic then. For instance ‘Accidental gunshot.’”
“Almost, but let’s try to improve it a bit. Look. Voldemort is immortal, hence the gunshot, while it definitely could cause some damage…”
“Yes, yes, sure, sec. Here we go. Choree: ‘Bubble sort, bubble sort!’ Or, even better, dactyl. Oh, there is no native interface from your stanza to dactyl. Just a sec…”
“OK, everything is fine, there is another one. How would you implement the anniversary ceremony for some honorable person?”
“Here it’s dactyl for sure. Plus I’d use plugins ‘tears of joy’ and ‘elation’”
“Dactyl? Who do you think would support it in the future?”
“Support? How could one reuse the ceremony greeting?”
“That said, you expect no anniversary in the next year?”
“Uh-oh. Sure, of course.”
“Well, let’s have one question more, and that’s all. What do you think would be the ideal poetic size for everything?”
“The free verse with rhymes and isosyllabism.”
“You are hired.”