9.2.14

I never finished this yesterday. Truthfully, I barely started it. I wanted to share something for Labor day, particularly part of the tradition of labor poetry. I even had a poet in mind, Philip Levine, the former Poet Laureate of the US, who has a good body of work about Work. (He writes in many other themes, including beautifully transcendent nature poetry, but this theme does stand out among his poems).

In a short essay of his titled Overhand the Hammers Swing: the Poems of Work, Levine differentiates between those who see work being done, and those who do it. The main differences being, the first group tends to see work as beautiful and as an element of community, and the second sees it as a destructive necessity.

Sarah Ehlers writes in a review of the book Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys by John Marsh, that the borth of the labor movement and the birth of modern American poetry coincided. A snippet:

In Marsh’s narrative, during the early part of the twentieth century, writing about workers and the poor provided a means for U.S. poets to buck 19th-century genteel verse traditions. Those traditions emphasized poetry’s role as a wellspring of beauty and held that the art transcended, rather than reflected, the clamors of modern life. Poems portraying the gritty realities of modernity were antithetical to poems written by genteel versifiers.

I can see why labor poetry would be a strong tradition in the US. There is a ton on this topic, and I feel like I'd need to break it up to do it justice. I'm going to stick with a Levine for now and we'll see where it takes us.


What work is

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is--if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it's someone else's brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, "No,
we're not hiring today," for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who's not beside you or behind or
ahead because he's home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you're too young or too dumb,
not because you're jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,just because you don't know what work is.  


I enjoy the contrast between the speaker and the brother. Even though the brother works, it is done as a means to an end for his art, whereas the speaker doesn't seem to have any aim other than to find work. I find this poem terrifically sad, partly due to the bleakness of the visual elements and pace, and partly due to the speaker's desperation. The pace of Levine's poems are something I really enjoy, because they move forward calmly, despite the turmoil of the content. (I wish I had this skill)

One more for good measure:


Detroit Grease Shop Poem

Four bright steel crosses,
universal joints, plucked
out of the burlap sack --
"the heart of the drive train,"
the book says. Stars
on Lemon's wooden palm,
stars that must be capped,
rolled, and anointed,
that have their orders
and their commands as he
has his.

Under the blue
hesitant light another day
at Automotive
in the city of dreams.
We're all here to count
and be counted, Lemon,
Rosie, Eugene, Luis,
and me, too young to know
this is for keeps, pinning
on my apron, rolling up
my sleeves.

The roof leaks
from yesterday's rain,
the waters gather above us
waiting for one mistake.
When a drop falls on Lemon's
corded arm, he looks at it
as though it were something
rare or mysterious
like a drop of water or
a single lucid meteor
fallen slowly from
nowhere and burning on
his skin like a tear.