Comments on: Working

By: Brian Salchert

Brian Salchert — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:08:30 +0000

Read this post today.
Was a third-shift employee in the hospitality industry
for most of my working years
and did often write about my experiences,
especially in 1976.
Kent Johnson quoted Henry Gould,
and then began a paragraph with:
“I agree, Henry.”
I also agree.

By: graywyvern

graywyvern — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:40:31 +0000

if you ever spend any time with a slush pile, you will know that there are plenty of genuine working-class poets out there, some of them even good.
what we don’t need is people who want to write about things outside of their experience just because they think it’s something they’re supposed to do.
as a whole, of course, americans (of every class) are hostile to literature & deeply anti-intellectual–a problem which is not unrelated to our present political debacle; in comparison with which, i might add, the qualms of individual writers shrink into complete insignificance.
m.

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 01:42:48 +0000

I don’t think there is a single relationship between something called poetry and the constellation of working-class and service-sector lived experiences which Mark has the Denny’s waitress represents. Rather, each poet worth rereading, and maybe each poem, establishes such a relationship– or does so if that poem takes an interest (as all Mark’s poems do) in that constellation of topics.
I am less interested in how poetry-in-general is related to these tough lives than in how Mark’s poetry is related to these lives. And in how Richard Hugo’s poetry is related to them (for example). And in how Tom Leonard’s poetry is related to them (for another example). The relations are not the same.
I’m also interested in what Mark thinks is the relation between engage’, documentary reportage, the irrefutable establishment of facts about a social wrong, facts which ought to impel some of us to do something, and poetry of the kind he writes. (That’s an important question for the poetry Mark writes, where the reportage always has something to do with class and with class injustice; it’s not as important a question, I’d say, about some other kinds of poetry: for example, despite the many rural working-class people in Frost’s poems, it’s not a useful question about Frost.)
Neat thread.

By: Lucia

Lucia — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 17:56:59 +0000

In the country, poetry has become largely afffiliated with academia, and so it is interesting to read about Nicaragua, and its creation of a (nation-wide) structure created for communities of poets to evolve from. Here there are non-academic venues (community groups, open mics, slams) but the poems and poets to come from these places generally aren’t valued by the official poetry machine (when I was teaching I didn’t know what to do with hip-hoppy, slam-type poems, because that is outside of what I consider my expertise, the mainstream and, yes, sentimental-type poem.)
I was interested to see Tracie Morris on the blog, because she’s a hip-hop-inflected performance poet whose work I showed videos of in my classes, as the best of the genre, not that I knew anything about the genre. The other blog-posts on conceptual poetics put me to sleep, and I would bet that most waitresses are tired when they come off shift and are similarly prone to snooziness and some veg-out American Idol watching (though I know that is a stereotype.) A little sentimentality of the Millar ilk can ward off sleep more effectively, I would venture, than a conceptual poem.
Poets, of course, also have this idea that poetry-writing is more empowering to the “underclass” than other activities like star-gazing or biirding, activities that also create communities that transcend class.

By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 21:50:08 +0000

Henry Gould said:
>In fact I believe the idea that style itself has a political quality, that there is a “political style” of poetry (progressive, regressive, avant-garde, reactionary, or what have you), has been one of the most misleading, divisive, & barren notions ever to plague US literary history of the last 100 years.
I agree, Henry. The notion that form harbors some kind of intrinsic value informs and drives Language poetry from the start, and thus, to some degree, all the branchings and buddings from it. The shameful stance of prominent Langpo figures towards the Poets Against the War phenomenon ca. 2003 made clear, as times of heightened crisis often do, the bankruptcy of this position. Of course, there has been plenty of silly dogmatic pronouncement from the “mainstream” side of things, too.
Adam, yes, Pound and Imagist/Vorticist principles are key to Nicaraguan Exteriorismo, a deeply influential current in Latin American poetry that Cardenal, Jose Coronel Urtecho, and other Nicaraguans develop in late 50s and 60s. It comes to be the poetic style par excellance of testimonial, political poetry in Latin America, much more limpid, vernacular, ironic, than Neruda’s rhetorical effusions–Roque Dalton, perhaps Latin America’s greatest revolutionary poet of the past half century, writes under the immediate influence of exteriorista principles. So it’s very interesting: Pound the fascist is the root of a radical leftist poetics in another language. The rather thrilling curiosity is further evidence, actually, of Henry Gould’s point above.
Mark, that is fabulous, what you are doing. Will there be an essay or book written on this experience? Again, let me know if you would like any copies of the book I mentioned for possible use.
Kent

By: Adam Strauss

Adam Strauss — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 19:41:37 +0000

This is likely the best discourse-node I’ve yet to see on this blog: interesting, not mean, diverse.
I love discovering that Pound’s dictums–excellent ones but almost impossible to
practice they’re so pure–were used in Nicaragua for a poetics which massively intersects the political sphere. I hope everyone is doing well.

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 18:14:03 +0000

… to follow up on my previous comment : I would just like to underline this idea that a poet’s moral or social or political commitment is a personal, not a literary thing.
In fact I believe the idea that style itself has a political quality, that there is a “political style” of poetry (progressive, regressive, avant-garde, reactionary, or what have you), has been one of the most misleading, divisive, & barren notions ever to plague US literary history of the last 100 years.

By: Flap Jack

Flap Jack — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 18:02:30 +0000

Laux and Millar are an interesting case. I of the mindset that the imprecision and sentimentality in their poem specially show a condescension to the very figures They’re supposedly valorizing. And what’s interesting is how Laux churns out working class student poets, like Mike McGriff, whose poems I just encountered in The Missouri Review, along with a rather defensive explanation about how his work inhabits the imagination and speaks about the working class and poor from his Oregon hometown. But who are McGriff and Laux intending their poems for? Fellow workshop students? Tenure committees? I don’t necessarily mean this in a disparaging way, but I get the feeling when reading their work that I’m being told, This is how things really are. You can never know.
It’s uncomplex, and to paraphrase Susan Howe, Don’t the working class dream, too?
I agree with the commenter about the net result of reading poems about Denny’s and American Idol. But then what to do about a work like James Agee’s Let Us Know Praise Famous Men? A book filled with the complexity over Agee’s own concerns of exploitation of his subject matter. Fair enough. But again, what has a book like that done, practically, except enlighten the already enlightened?

By: maria d

maria d — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 17:01:43 +0000

good questions, mark. inspiring. i think the answers are so multiple as to open up many questions and dialogues that can go in lots of direcitons. i’m thinking, still, of the ways the US is torturing prisoners and suspending habeas corpus, and the relevance of poetry to this phenomenon. i’m sure there is a relationship between the Denny’s lady and Guantanamo/Abu Ghraib; perhaps her relatives are serving in the armed forces, perhaps they are in punk bands protesting the war.
were questions such as the ones you raised brought up at the Vancouver conference? in what ways?

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 16:52:57 +0000

Robert Frost had a very interesting suspicion about “literary” writing. He thought that the further poetry got from the way people actually talk, the more effete, mandarin, unreal it became. The more it became a kind of specialized activity of a disconnected intelligentsia. Real poetry was rooted in the sound of people speaking to each other.
I say this is interesting because, on the other hand, Frost was a classicist, who schooled himself in old Roman literary modes of poetic style & rhetoric. Somehow he combined the two. Every poet finds a unique path – surprising, paradoxical.
It seems to me that there is no purely poetic or literary “answer” to Mark’s interesting question. No single approach which will guarantee this living relevant vitality which we look for in poetry. Given a basic talent or bent for making poems, the issue of vital relevance has more to do with the unspoken motivation of the poet. The sincerity, the fatal commitment of the vocation itself.
The person who one way or another has a serious bond of conscience & feeling with his or her fellows, with the earth, with this particular time on earth – this person will endeavor to seek out a responding mode of address. It’s really a moral & emotional & existential impetus, which can’t be taught as literary style. The serious poet will write serious poems (& by serious I don’t mean lugubrious or self-righteous). The poems will display a challenging moral heft & complexity – & maybe a clear & limpid simplicity, as well.