More notes on the Working Class, Obama, and “the superstructure of poetry”
Alan’s excellent post and the excellent running commentary have pushed me to try to clarify a few things in my earlier entry. First off, by my use of “contemporary poetry” (and Alan is right to read a hint of skepticism) I mean the entire realm of the field, inclusive of poets, poems, publishers (journal and book), reviews, institutions (university and non-university based–MFA programs and the MLA or the Green Mill, for example), etc. We might call it “the superstructure of poetry.”
And while I don’t necessarily want to single it out as example, the poem of Adam’s published as a comment to Alan’s post, printed in Living Forge (which also ran a few of my poems several years ago), signifies the precise type of “working class” poem I’m trying to argue against in my initial posts. For me, while solid in the almost canonical working class tradition, “Doing my part for the tool and die industry” repeats what became in the early years of deindustrialization and neoliberalism (the 1970s and the 1980s in particular) the standardized stereotypical lyrical gaze from the factory floor, inscribed almost exclusively as male, white (verging on racist in its excision of race from its view–see David Roediger’s magnificent Wages of Whiteness for one of the best takes on this), heterosexual (sexist) and heteronormative, etc.
Personally, I’m more than tired of the Bob Seeger songs as representative of the working class, tired of the poetic characterization of the working class as “lost” and “nameless” and “high” and “fuck[ed]” and “cheated” and “[un]spared.” I was tired of it by the early 1980s when I was living in Buffalo and seeing every one of my neighbors–steelworkers, autoworkers, bricklayers, bakery truck drivers, clerical workers, et al–struggling to hold on to their tiny, tiny piece of their American dream. To me, other then-evolving (musical) forms and styles spoke much more directly to the conditions of the time and the potential for moving beyond them: electronic music coming from Germany and elsewhere (Kraftwerk, Throbbing Gristle, etc.), the Manchester sound (Joy Division and Factory Records), rap (just give a spin to Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” or Run DMC’s “Hard Times,” both of whom I saw perform in Buffalo around this time), and local rust belt music scenes which I’ve written about elsewhere.
Watching the news nightly as I am these days (out in motels and hotels in Texas while on the road), this Bob Seeger view raises its head every single day. When one of the talking heads on MSNBC last night raises the question of whether Barack Obama can get the elderly Catholic church lady from Pittsburgh to vote for him, what is the question really asking? And when anchors erase the word “white” from working class when asking about the potential for Obama to get the vote from Saginaw or Scranton? Why don’t they mention the working class in Gary and Detroit?
My mom, a former church secretary, before that a coat salesperson at the mall, before that a clerical worker–daughter of a woman (my grandma) who dropped out of grade school to clean houses of the more well-to-do, eventually becoming a “Rosie the Riveter” (and Teamster) during the war and after–should be one of these triply-undecided voters (a white, working-class woman). Yet on the very first post she ever made to a blog, she wrote, “I am one of those old white women who the polls always said were against Obama, how wrong they were. Obama for President!”
Perhaps I’m naive, but I think “the superstructure of poetry” can play a determinative role in helping to shape the definitions. I think reading & teaching class engaged works like Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill and Lolita Hernandez’s Autopsy of an Engine and U Sam Oeur’s factory line poetry (more on Sam later this week) that extend the definitions and makes readers & students question the hegemonies of race and class and gender in the workplace and in the world that we see formed by the nightly news anchors and MSNBC and CNN and FOX-News debates (okay, maybe not FOX!) is invariably a push towards a working class that might not be “Like a Rock,” but maybe more wholly and softly human–which is what I’m always looking for in poetry and literature. Additionally, it’s something that’s already present in so much of the factory and class-based social movement poetry traditions across the globe, from the Sandinista workshops of Nicaragua to the cultural centers of Durban, South Africa, during late apartheid. Only, it seems, in the exceptionalism that is America are working-class words regularly devoid of that concept so central to the Obama campaign as it was during other times of focus upon the working class (such as when Marx wrote his “Theses on Feuerbach”)
: change.
Until next time…
What do you think of this previous post on Harriet:
Posted By: Jilly on June 10, 2008 at 12:23 pmTN: Do you think Frost’s poetry is particularly suited to providing lessons in civics and justice?
JP: I think Frost is very much an especially useful case here. His poems deal with Vermont people of a certain class — and the students could connect, I think, to these people, such as the boy who loses his hand in “‘Out, Out–’”
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interesting post.
Posted By: David Michalski on June 10, 2008 at 3:48 pmThe “working class” that is being summoned by the media (Clinton, CNN, Seger, poets…) does seems at first to have little to do the way labor is organized and more to do with summoning a narrow market segmentation for consumption. Niche marketing classification, in politics and in marketing, relies on and exploits consumption statistics gleaned from the record of consumer purchases. These consumption patterns are classified to produce what is passed as class texts. In turn these are used in the production of subjectivity. Dialectically, such class texts or identities are written in various discourses, through the language of commodities (i.e. Clinton vs,. Obama, Seger vs. Throbbing Gristle). The simple widening of this market segmentation to include a diversity of brands or styles only validates this reading of class.
However, for the poet, and perhaps to the rest of us, the choice of words do matter, as does the aesthetic qualities of music, political candidates, and other objects we choose to appropriate. And any predetermination, especially those based on abstract market classifications rather than discussion or social argumentation, will occasionally rub more coarsely against one’s sensibility. But this reaction is not just a symptom that emerges when the abstract classifiers occasionally get it wrong, it is instead, one that relates to the reduction of culture to the mechanics of commodity exchange, that is, any summoning of the “working class” effects an abrasion, not only because of its falsity, but also by its truth. In the effort to determine the intimacies of taste through classification, one exposes the dominating nature of an abstraction, one which not only substitutes for real conditions, but one which, in its audacity, becomes the real itself.
DM
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Isn’t it only a small slice of the “superstructure” that will even mention class issues in poetry? Bill Knott, on his old blog (taken down now, unfortunately), used to raise these issues, and in response to one of his posts I wondered if it might not be useful for some Ph.D. candidate somewhere to look into the class backgrounds of (let’s say) winners of the top half-dozen poetry prizes over the past 20 years. I have no preconceived notion about how such a study might turn out, but I think it would be interesting—certainly more worthy of a doctoral sheepskin than the typical thesis project.
Posted By: Joseph Hutchison on June 10, 2008 at 4:02 pmLet me add that Jilly’s right: one could search Frost’s Collected Poems in vain for a character who makes his or her living in a classroom, or a boardroom….
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Class: Identity or Structural Relation? Cultural or External to Culture?
Posted By: Jon Senchyne on June 10, 2008 at 5:09 pmI am one of two founding editors of Living Forge, a journal that from 2003-2005 published what was broadly thought of as working class writing (poems, short fiction, and creative non-fiction) from the rust belt, and which was proud to have published poems from both Mark Nowak in Fall 03 (whom I also interviewed for that issue) and Aaron Fagan in Spring 05 (who interviewed Phil Levine for that issue). Joining a long list of companies and cultural organizations in Buffalo, Living Forge is now closed for business, but I think that some of my experiences along the way, and some of my thoughts since those days, might be germane to this budding conversation. I am overwhelmingly pleased to see such a conversation even happening in a forum associated with the Poetry Foundation; the fact alone that we’re having a conversation on class and poetry under the banner of one of the world’s most prominent journals of anglophone poetry, is meaningful. Thanks to Mark for that.
A conversation about “what is working-class poetry?” will eventually lead to a conversation about “what is working class?” or more simply, “what is class?”. One begins at the the question “is this a poetry by or about working-class people?” briefly considers “is it any poetry read by working-class people?” until finally arriving at the problem, “who is the working class?”. Mark hints at this problem in the post above.
We are in an environment in which “working class” has generally signified “white blue collar labor,” and this is the result, as Roediger’s book shows, of a long history of (re)constructions of the boundaries of racial inclusion and exclusion in order to prevent meaningful and coherent class-based affinities and movements. There was a moment when the “white working class” phenomenon in public discourse seemed to be shifting – I’m thinking specifically after Hurricane Katrina and the May Day Immigrant Rights march when the corporate media could not, in good conscience, unravel race and class or ignore one in preference for the other – but this seems to be be vanishing since the 2008 Ohio and Pennsylvania primaries. We are back to a situation where, as Mark mentions, we’re talking about “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” to use Senator Clinton’s infamous construction.
The fundamental question underlying all of this is whether class is to be understood as an identity (constructed socially as we understand race, gender, and ethnicity to be) with its own set of cultural signifiers (that can, at times be emphasized or de-emphasized, code-switched, iterated, so on and so forth), or is class the product of a person’s structural relation to the means of production, determined not by signs (language, clothing, foodways, lived experience, self-identifications, affinities) but by “real” alienation from one’s labor and the attendant power differential?
The question matters for poetry because poetry is a cultural form, one used to communicate and construct identifications, and therefore the role of poetry in discussions of class depends on how we think class works.
Let me go back to the founding of Living Forge in order to contextualize this problem. My co-editor and I grew up in Buffalo, the de-industrializing Buffalo of the 80s that evacuated high-paid industrial manual labor and the post Savings and Loan crisis Buffalo of the 90s that took a lot of white-collar work and investment dollars with it too. We were both sons of white-ethnic working-class parents which meant that we got a hefty amount of Catholic ethnic holidays wrapped up in a kind of “Regan Democrat” populist-conservatism. For me that meant Christmas began at the union hall party where every last union kid got a present and it ended with the performative suffering of staying up until after midnight at mass repeating phrases like “Lord I am not worthy to receive you” and celebrating the birth of the Christ whom, you knew, was brought into the world this day only to be murdered on your account some 33 years later. Easter was even more of a tangle because you went to the East Side Broadway Market where your Polish relatives used to live before, we learned, the jobs at the steel plant were integrated and the neighborhood “changed,” meaning blacks moved in and your relatives hit the highway for the suburbs taking their still-decent factory incomes and publicly-subsidized GI Bill educations with them. At Easter, then, we learned that God so loved the world that he sent his only Son to die for “us,” but through the rituals associated with the reverse Exodus to the Broadway Market, we also learned that “us” did not include the to-be-feared African-Americans who lived on Paderewski Drive. You saw the number of police the city sent to the market during Holy Week to protect the “hard working Americans, white Americans” and their cars in the parking lot from the perceived threat of black youth. You went to the place in town where you could get authentic Polish and old-Buffalo food (kielbasa, pierogies, real horseradish, butter-lambs, sponge candy), yet the market was now squarely in the middle of a struggling African American community, which you were to understand was evidence of decay (moral, social, political, economic).
In the above I’ve been talking all along about my childhood memories of class, yet you’ll notice that they involve all kinds of boundaries and signifiers of identity: food, religion, race, ethnicity, region. A few times I mentioned unions or factories, but what is most vibrant in my memory is not my, or my family’s, structural relationship to the means of production (my dad’s employment through a trade union), it’s the things I ate, the stories I heard, and the kinds of rituals I participated in. I was brought up in a white-ethnic working class that struggled to define, and cling to (and I use the word “cling” purposefully) its perceived racial and cultural superiority over the black working class. This happened at the same time that Bethlehem Steel was busy pulling out of Lackawanna and leaving miles of contaminated Superfund sites without paying for anything, residents at Love Canal had discovered what Hooker Chemical thought of their corporate responsibility to the community, city officials engaged in racketeering left and right, and a class of developers emerged to latch onto the city teat to insure private profits from public funds and public land after the days of the industrial corporation. You’d think the people around me would have more to fear and organize around than differences in skin color and food. Next to everyone, black or white, was on the verge of being broke but there was very little structural awareness of the power relationships creating the conditions. (For a condensed version of this history, one can gain a lot from the second season of HBO’s “The Wire.”)
Class interests, relationships to labor and power, which ought to have aligned diverse “identity” affiliations, did not prevail. Class was lived as something filtered through, or tangled up in, racial, ethnic, religious, and regional identifications. The effects of this contradiction are bewildering for those who live it and who try to deconstruct it alike.
When we started Living Forge we had the idea that we could form a public discourse around this tangle of class and identity. The thinking was, naive as it sounds, that literary expression could articulate the boundaries of the tangles and at the same time to celebrate the culture (what we called “rich history” in the first issue) of rust belt cities that we perceived to be disappearing from national relevance. Looking back, the term we came up with combined ideas of class and identity, indicating the depth of their imbrication. I asked Mark Nowak in an interview if there was something like a “rust belt identity” [which one would have, we imagined, by identifying with regional, class based, and cultural affinities] that poets could articulate or construct, an identity that could be the basis of pride and common-feeling? Mark’s answer was, “identity is another can of worms.” I was a junior in college then, and that was Mark’s polite way of saying that class and identity are big problems and that our idea of the “rust belt” was as based on unquestioned assumptions of belonging as any other.
The question, as embarrassed as I am by it now, was indicative of the way I, and many others, first thought about class and poetry. If what seems to make class is a bunch of cultural identifications, then how to make a cultural work (poetry) appealing to or meaningful for the working class? Is there a way to make a poetry that matters for working people? Is there a poetry for Denny’s workers, as Mark asked a few days ago? Is there a poetry for tool-and-die workers as Aaron asks? Can artful articulation of the memory of working-class neighborhoods and workspaces (from the 60s, 90s, or 00s) bring them into the zietgeist and fight back against national cultural disenfranchisement, or even economic disenfranchisement? Could poetry cause us to rethink the assumption of a ubiquitous middle-class. What good would that do? What is the relationship between poetry, thinking, and national/global economic forms? Can poetry create meaningful movements against oppression?
I can’t answer these questions right now, I don’t know enough yet. I suspect many others can’t answer them that well either. I hope, however, that I have been able to present the difficulty of the snarl of class and identity, the snarl that produced the “Bob Seeger” genre of working-class text to which Mark refers. I am as skeptical of it now as Mark was back in ‘03 when he warned me of the “can of worms” into which I was directing my short-lived journal.
The “class as an identity” model has produced a kind of literary scholarship that has a limited horizon. This is a kind of scholarship that at times wants to “bring class to the diversity table” by recovering working-class writing and installing it into the curriculum as a way of including working-class perspectives or celebrating working-class contributions to society. There can be a perverse logic to this: pushed to it’s limits, this model can end up celebrating structural disenfranchisement. What does it mean to celebrate one’s alienation or the powerlessness of others through the poetry that those conditions constructed?
What’s the difference between working-class identity in poems and songs and working-class identity in Blue Collar TV and various other popular “redneck culture” outlets? I’ve struggled with these questions ever since I first started reading poems as an editor for Living Forge, and I don’t know that I have the answers. As reluctant as I am to walk around celebrating structural powerlessness through the art that it creates, I’m also not willing to turn away from poems like Aaron Fagan’s that attest to the processes of every day life that working people undergo, ways of being that are unknown to those who don’t see them (and so much of labor is hidden from view – it’s part of the commodity fetish and the market: if you knew how that meat was processed, you wouldn’t eat it, if you looked in the eyes the kid who sewed your jeans, you wouldn’t buy them). But also, if you knew how the mind of the tool-and-die worker functioned, you might think of “manual labor” differently, and that’s what drew me into Aaron Fagan’s poems that don’t just celebrate the shop floor, but ask deep questions about the very nature time, scale, reality, and space in the mind at work. Here’s the poem that accompanies Fagan’s “Doing my part for the tool-and-die industry” in Living Forge 2005 and his recently published “Garage” (Salt Publishing). The poem is called, “Drastic Measures”:
Drastic Measures
Each morning I set my lathe’s counter to zero.
For each part I make, I imagine a year. Moving
Forward or backward from the birth of Christ,
History helps pass the time. As I go, I do my best
Not to think in the small increments that make
These parts possible. I can’t be a hair offas I slide
Out into the years where man doesn’t exist
In either direction. It all goes back to tiny again.
I was dead a thousand parts ago. It’s lunchtime,
And I can’t remember if I had children with a woman
I love. There’s no feeling more accurate than grief,
I scream, but the machine is loud and I don’t know
If I’ve said it. When the little ones came, which one
Had hair approximately the same size and color as mine?
I distrust the Bob Seeger/Bruce Springsteen model as much as Mark does, the model that valorizes and celebrates a lost way of life, but I don’t find that working across Fagan’s work poems. I’ve known Fagan’s work poems to be about the visibility of the worker (in poems such as “Deus ex machina” and “Grout”) or about the mental life of the worker, the worker’s interiority, a subjects often obscured from poetry as from daily life. Aaron’s poetry may or may not challenge the racializing of class as white in the popular blue collar shop floor depiction – he doesn’t race his speakers in any clear way that I can discern, but as Mark points out, the genre is overdetermined such that “white working class” is the default setting. Still, though, I think Aaron’s work poems can’t be reduced to the Seeger/Springsteen model.
So, I have no answer to the question, what is the poetry of (for, by?) the Denny’s waitress. I only hope to have highlighted how important it is to deal with the question of the relationship between a cultural form (literature) and class, where whether class is cultural, or is an effect of structural economic realities that is, for a number of reasons, experienced as cultural is an essential, yet unanswered, question.
[There are bound to be errors in syntax and orthography, and I beg my readers' forgiveness. The library in which I write this is under the spell of the East Coast heat wave and I'm feeling the need to escape to a cooler area before I can proofread this. Please be generous in discerning the meaning wherever my prose has worked to obscure it. - JWS]
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Just an add-on to Jilly & Joseph’s comments : might be worth remembering that by the time Robert Frost was 20, he had a lot of first-hand experience with parental alcoholism, family mental illness, “single-parenting”, unemployment, “menial” labor, poverty, family dislocation & near-homelessness, dependency on in-laws & relatives, & dropping out of school.
Posted By: Henry Gould on June 11, 2008 at 7:35 amI don’t want to extrapolate any political lessons from this. But when Frost wrote about the hard life in early 20th-cent. New England, I don’t think he was playing the literary tourist. Funny to think of him as a working-class or “lumpen” poet, rather than simply the “crotchety old Yankee sage”.
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,,, when i used to teach poetry, i would ask the students
Posted By: bill knott on June 11, 2008 at 10:48 amto imagine the speaker of Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on
a Snowy Evening”
as a pizza or other delivery guy taking a toke-out to
ease the drive . . . the landowner’s “house is in the village”
cozy and comfortable while the poor workslob can barely stop
in the roadside to take a breather before his ass has to
haul back to shlepping miles and miles, no wonder he wants to lie
down and sleep . . . he can’t even relax a second without
paranoid worrying the boss will “see me stopping here” . . .
the horse shaking its head can translate to a van engine
creaking as it cools in the froze air of “the darkest evening
of the year”, winter solstice December 23—24 hours
later it’ll be Rudolph shaking his reindeer bells to urge
a sagging Santa on . . .
whose land this is i think i know, and it ain’t mine,
the Bushes and them crats own it, they own me too,
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Now that is a fine reading of this poem, Bill Knott.
Posted By: Henry Gould on June 11, 2008 at 11:16 amIt makes me think of a book I read about Virgil’s Georgics – how he conceptualized the role of the poet as standing between the Golden & Iron Ages. The poet’s “audacity” is to remind Iron Age denizens of the values of the Golden Age (pity, compassion…). (The book was The Poet’s Truth, by Christine Perkell.)
Here you have the speaker, as you say, pausing on “the coldest evening of the year” – responding to the dark & beckoning beauty of the woods (or perhaps poetry itself). A kind of death-wish for release from Iron Age toil. (Hopkins : the earth is “smeared with toil”.) But he moves on : “promises to keep” & all that. You suggest he is driven by promises to his employers – but it’s possible also to read a more more subversive “promise” here (like Mandelstam’s “pledge to the Fourth Estate”) – a stance similar to Virgil’s (in Perkells’ interpretation).
The utopian allure of poetry can be taken as both a challenge to, & an escapism from, the laborious order of “post–lapsarian” (after the Fall from the Garden of Eden) humanity. The latter might characterize literature, I guess – the former, prophecy.
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… p.s. what I meant to say is that Frost sets up a VERY SIMPLE & iconic image :
Posted By: Henry Gould on June 11, 2008 at 11:25 am- poet pausing
- coldest night of year
- beauty of earth
& that it is this very simplicty which makes it a powerful example of this Viriglian role of the poet in the Iron Age.
The poet pauses – and Poetry halts Time & Earth here (on the cusp of midwinter). Even in the midst of all that laborious oppression whcih Bill Knott described so well.
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