'Steeplejacks Top Out the Chrysler Building,'

A friend sent me a link to a 1978 BBC documentary about a working-class hero in England. I had never heard of Fred Dibnah, practitioner of a trade I didn’t know was still extant: steeplejack. In the words of the OED: “a person who climbs steeples or tall chimneys to repair them.” My friend didn’t know that word. Dibnah tells the interviewer he started out as a ”joiner,” which I learned thanks to James Joyce and Ulysses: “Joseph the Joiner.” Neither word is used much in American English. 

Watching Dibnah at work triggered an ever-latent condition in me: acrophobia. I had to look away from scenes that emphasized the heights at which Dibnah was so casually working. The steeplejack comes off as smart, articulate and not particularly impressed with himself. He reminded me of advice I received as a young newspaper reporter: to get people talking ask them, in this order, about 1.) their family; 2.) their work.

 

The friend who sent me the video link is an artist and doesn’t normally read much poetry, though he once acquired a rather fancy edition of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” more for the book’s design than its text. I told him Dibnah’s profession reminded me of Turner Cassity’s collection Steeplejacks in Babel (David R. Godine, 1973) There’s no poem with that title, though one of his epigraphs is Genesis 11: 1-4. The word does show up in “By the Waters of Lexington Avenue”:

 

“Their rivet guns the noise of lily gilding,

Steeplejacks top out the Chrysler Building,

Which is height, and the idea height.

Tongue unconfused and the begun complete,

 

“It will evoke us still that pride which beckons

And the sky it arrogates . . .”

 

I talked up Cassity to my friend and he ordered a copy.