Jessea L. Vaughan's "Professional Amateur" draws a portrait and then rubs it out, line by line. The man at its centre arrives through three paradoxes: "Perfectly flawed / Abnormally commonplace / Entirely incomplete." Each pairs a word of totality with a word that undermines it, so nothing about him is allowed to be just one thing. By the time we reach "A slave to laziness he is," we have learned the poem's rule. Any claim made about him will be met by its opposite.
The central idea is that a person can be so contradictory that description fails. The refrain says so outright: "To know him well is / To know nothing at all." It appears in the middle and returns at the end with only "And yet" added. That small addition sounds like a speaker who has tried once more to say something solid and come back to the same wall. The poem does not explain this man. It shows why he cannot be explained, and its form carries the point. A poem built from statements that cancel each other adds up to zero.
There is no regular metre and no end-rhyme, and the poem is a single block with no stanza breaks, so the contradictions pile up without a pause. Sound still does a lot of work. The nearest thing to a rhyme is the phrase "at all," which closes "Accomplishing nothing at all," "know nothing at all," and, in a slightly different form, "deafens us all." "All" is a word of totality, and the poem keeps attaching it to emptiness. The wordplay is just as deliberate. "A hard worker in the hardly working trade" turns "hard" into "hardly" mid-line. In "Accomplished in the art of / Accomplishing nothing," the line break after "of" lets us expect a real skill before the next line deflates it. The same root gives "accomplished" (skilled) and "accomplishing" (achieving), and the two end up opposed.
The title works the same way. "Professional" suggests skill and "amateur" suggests its lack, yet the man is expert at being inexpert. "Amateur" also comes from the Latin word for "lover." That may be a coincidence here, but it sits oddly well beside "A lover of hatred / And a hater of love," where the mirrored phrasing makes the sentence fold back on itself.
The poem has very few concrete images. We never learn what the man looks like or where he lives. The one physical picture is "An aspiring face in the crowd," and it is a picture of wanting to disappear, which sits uneasily beside "Abnormally commonplace," since he longs for a normality he can't reach. The other vivid image is violent: "stabbing the air with his words." The verb is sharp, but the target is empty air, so all that force wounds no one and achieves nothing, like the rest of his life. The same line returns near the end, as if he is stuck in a loop.
The most interesting moment comes in the middle. "Well-spoken in the language of silence / A silence that deafens us all / And a stillness that moves us." Here "us" appears for the first time. Until now the speaker has seemed to be observing from outside, but suddenly the man has an effect on a group, and the speaker is part of it. "A stillness that moves us" plays on two meanings, since stillness stirs our feelings and also somehow sets us in motion. The man does nothing and affects everyone.
Tone is what keeps the poem from being a simple insult. "Slave to laziness" is harsh, while "Dreaming of being ordinary" is almost tender. The only motive offered is "Simply because anger gives him joy," and the word "simply" is ironic, because it promises an easy answer and delivers another paradox, anger as joy. The poem never says whether "he" is a stranger, a friend, or the speaker in disguise, though the distance it keeps could suggest a self-portrait. That is a reading, not a fact the text gives us.
The poem is worth reading because it recognises a type most of us have met, perhaps in the mirror: talented-seeming, idle, withdrawn, quick to bite. It also admits, with a refrain that closes the poem without solving anything, that the closer we look at someone, the less sure we may be of what we see.