Ignorance of working-class poetry is ignorance of the working-class body. Like the proliferation of only a certain (narrow) range of body types in mass media, canonical poetry has historically shifted its eyes from the bodies of millions of people. The rough hands of laborers, cuts and scars, bruises, head injuries, muscularity, flat feet, hangnails, frown-lines, broken bones, black lungs, missing teeth, dark skin, amputations, and I could go on. I guess a logical question might be, why does poetry resist training its gaze on this segment of the population? That question seems unproductive though. There are a hundred reasons why and knowing those doesn’t make it any less a travesty to dismiss working-class literature.
But wait, you say. You’ve forgotten about Walt Whitman! He wrote about the working-classes. And my response to you would be, “No I haven’t!” It’s contemporary poetry that has forgotten, not him as a writer, but him as a working-class writer. We’re all about the sexy man-love sections of his poetry, but rarely are the other, more labor and working-class themes talked about with so much interest. I’m also not talking about writing that’s just about the working-classes, I’m talking about the writers themselves. The ones a bit rough around the edges, the ones that didn’t know it was rude to cuss at the dinner table, the ones that never read Beowulf (okay, that has nothing to do with being work-class, but for the love of Gaia, give me a break! It can’t be that good). I’m talking about the writers who can’t necessarily hold the working-class body at arm’s length to examine it as a representation of American stoicism or as some kind of metaphor for capitalism, but for the writers who live in those bodies.
One wonderful characteristic of working-class poetry is that it is often transparent about the dependent relationship of the private and public; this is one of its strengths. As so many working-class people know, all aspects of life – even the most concrete and mundane – crash endlessly against itself. An injury on a job can irrevocably change a person’s life. I am all too aware of the permanent damage caused with my own father’s factory injury. Two weeks before shipping off to army boot camp (which he excitedly signed up for) his left arm got caught in the long, steel, crisscrossing teeth of an industrial tomato crusher at the cannery where he worked. In one accident that severed all the muscles, ligaments, and nerve-endings in his left arm and hand, the life he had imagined for himself (first the military, then police academy) was lost. Had the men working at the plant, his coworkers and friends, not found him when they did and immediately taken him to the closest hospital, my father would have lost much more than his dream career.
Poems like: Gary Soto’s “Mission Tire Factory, 1969,” Philip Levine’s “Every Blessed Day” (or the whole collection What Work Is), Dorianne Laux’s “Waitress,” Jim Daniel’s “May’s Poem” (or the series of Digger poems), Jan Beatty’s “The Waitress Angels Speak to Me in a Vision,” Allison Hedge Coke’s “The Change” (I could go on) focus on bodies that remind us that capitalism has a cost. It is a system that breaks and maims, forces bodies to sacrifice. There is no food in the grocery store, no shirt on a department store rack that wasn’t made available through the work of strangers’ bodies. But more than that, working class poems teach us how to love those bodies, how to run our finger tips over calluses and enjoy their protective texture. How to hug through sweat, how to take advantage of stolen moments between rows of grapes, in a restaurant’s walk-in. They remind us that there are thousands of versions of beautiful if you just slow down to look.
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Sarah A. Chavez, a mestiza born and raised in the California Central Valley, is the author of the chapbook, All Day, Talking published by Dancing Girl Press (2014). She holds a PhD in English with a focus in poetry and Ethnic Studies from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Luna Luna Magazine, So to Speak: Feminist Journal of Language and Art, among others. Her manuscript, This, Like So Much, was an Honorable Mention for the 2013 Quercus Review Press Poetry Book Contest. A selection from her chapbook manuscript All Day, Talking won the Susan Atefat Peckham Fellowship in 2013. She is a proud member of the Macondo Writers Workshop.
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Don’t forget the work of B. H. Fairchild.
Thanks for the reminder!
“They remind us that there are thousands of versions of beautiful if you just slow down to look.” Yes to this. Thank you for this post.
Phillip Levine, also.
In the last paragraph, I specifically referred to Levine’s poem “Every Blessed Day” and his most celebrated collection _What Work Is_.
Yes, yes, and yes. Thank you for writing this! Thank you for mentioning the Working Class POET as well as the POEM. It is an enormous void that I have felt since I was first introduced to poetry. Sure, I clung to Levine and Winters, but damn, out of all the people writing poetry, there must be more! There must be people who aren’t ashamed of their upbringing, not hiding in the throngs of privileged conference goers and residency lifers. I decided to fill that void by writing my own collection (forthcoming Spring 2016, Noemi Press). I say this to reach out, not self promote. I would love to talk to you about all this, not hog up your comments section! TheBestFitzgerald@gmail.com
But I do hear you, Sarah, and agree completely. As I said I on the Facebook thread, part of the problem is lack of computer and internet access for working class poets. Half of America is still on the other side of the digital divide. Most of the working poor don’t even have access to a computer and printer, not even a typewriter. You can’t submit work that’s handwritten. Yes, there’s free access at public libraries, but between working long hours, perhaps at several jobs, and the transportation issue, how do working class poets even type up their work, let alone get it out there? So, out of sight becomes out of mind. As a culture, we must fix that. Dylan Thomas couldn’t get his work published today.
I’d humbly suggest my book BRACKISH (http://www.amazon.com/Brackish-Jeff-Newberry/dp/0615705634). I grew up in a working-class family on the Florida Gulf Coast in a mill and fishing town. The book features narratives and lyrics drawn from my experiences there.
Thanks for this essay. You make some great points here.
Thank you for the inspiration and direction. This is something I’ve written about for a while. Speaking from this side of the nation, in the cities and pennsyltucky regions, the most striking aspects of the working-class body is that it is large and adorned. It’s large because working and poor = little access to decent food and exercise, and the food you have greatest access to is treated to become addictive substances. The adornment is a gorgeous assertion of value and a refusal to be silent and humble–hair in elaborate styles and colors, nails, tattoos. Manufacturing is near-dead so the bodily damage caused by working is more systemic. Working-class bodies also show age. Other groups are determined to erase its signs, and they project the awareness of time’s harshness onto the working class; the working poor must carry the burden of a fleeting youth, of being a sort of living memento mori. (Please forgive the poorly thought out things here. And note I’m speaking out of a position of having survived at the margins of many different demographics and am where I am now purely out of privilege. If it were by my own hands, there would be more beside me, because it’s damn likely others’ hands have clutched harder at the rungs than mine did.)
All need to watch this. Philip Levine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxD5XAMKMuQ
Great article. 🙂 One of my favorite poems is Painting the Christmas Trees by Joe Weil. It was one that hit me and made me gear my thesis toward accessible poetry. 🙂