Art and Labour, Part Two: Poetry
Last week I wrote about cinema and labour after watching Wim Wender's Perfect Days and feeling conflicted with respect to how the film portrays the value and immersion of work while at the same time ignoring the social and cultural issues that surround the work that was being portrayed (in this case, toilet cleaning).
This week I want to explore the same territory with regard to my own didactic stomping ground, poetry. The thing that interests me is all the moments where poetry has seen things from the worker's perspective, particularly with regard to manual labour. I don't intend for this to be some big, definitive statement on the subject, nor do I hope for this to be some go-to, academic level piece of research. These are just the thoughts and recollections of a teacher of poetry who once made a living working manual jobs at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one.
I'll start with the late Renaissance. Why? Because a lot of poetry historically shies away from depicting the lives of workers, who were mainly the peasantry. These were the people that worked the fields and paid their tithes to their lords. If a peasant showed up in a Renaissance work of literature it was normally the case that they were the layabout, swooning shepherds found in the pastoral idylls that imitated Virgil's Eclogues.
The concept of labour as something with an intrinsic value comes into view in the segments of Milton's Paradise Lost that focus on the Garden of Eden. While many prior depictions of the garden feature Adam and Eve in varying postures of leisure – Paradise Lost portrays Adam and Eve as workers within the garden, which is overgrown and in need of more hands than theirs for its upkeep.
…other Creatures all day long
Rove idle unimploid, and less need rest;
Man hath his daily work of body or mind
Appointed, which declares his Dignitie,
And the regard of Heav'n on all his waies; [ 620 ]
While other Animals unactive range,
And of thir doings God takes no account.
To morrow ere fresh Morning streak the East
With first approach of light, we must be ris'n,
And at our pleasant labour, to reform [ 625 ]
Yon flourie Arbors, yonder Allies green,
Our walk at noon, with branches overgrown,
That mock our scant manuring, and require
More hands then ours to lop thir wanton growth:
Those Blossoms also, and those dropping Gumms, [ 630 ]
That lie bestrowne unsightly and unsmooth,
Ask riddance, if we mean to tread with ease;
Mean while, as Nature wills, Night bids us rest.
Paradise Lost (book 4)
Milton was a Calvinist and a Puritan, and therefore an exponent of the Protestant Work Ethic. The dignity and value of labour was a vital part of his Christian, English epic. A generation later, Thomas Gray would write his famous churchyard elegy, in which a whole class of folk are eulogised rather than the usual singular great man or woman from the upper classes. Seen by many as a transitional work between the Neo-Classicism of Pope to the Romantic concerns for nature and common folk, Gray's Elegy implicitly refutes the Pastoral conceits of abundance and leisure in portraying the lives of the peasantry.
Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;
How jocund did they drive their team afield!
How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile,
The short and simple annals of the poor.
Another stanza moves further into making a direct commentary about the class divisions between poets and their subjects (let's not forget that Gray was a graduate of Eton and Cambridge) – exploring the idea that the nameless workers of the land might have had the potential to write their name in the annals of history if they had been born into more noble circumstances.
Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.
As already stated, labour often features in the poetry of the Romantics, especially through Blake's observations of the city's machinations in his poems 'London' and 'The Chimney Sweeper'. While poetry was and continues to be a constant within labour struggles through the beginnings of the industrial revolution to the present day, the canonical world rarely featured the direct testaments of the working classes. The worker stoops to their labour and the poet observes.
Digging, by Seamus Heaney, marks this separation where the act of becoming a poet is presented as a possible betrayal of the work of his father and grandfather while at the same time being presented as a continuation.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
I have to confess that whenever I read those last lines, I can't help but giggle at an imaginary reply from Heaney's father each time his spade cuts into the ground, "Look at me, I'm writing a poem!"
I am also reminded of all those Irish poets who often wrote about rural labour and earthy characters while the back cover of their book mentioned the Californian university that they taught at.
I felt a similar uneasiness when attending a Zoom poetry reading during the pandemic. A number of young British and American poets read work about the jobs that their parents and grandparents did but it quickly became apparent that they had not done this kind of work themselves. Not that there was anything wrong with them honouring the work of their previous generations or showing pride in it – I just couldn't help but think of the people who were still doing that work and why they weren't able to turn their current lives into poetry.
When we think about poets who worked precarious or labour intensive jobs, we cannot avoid the figure of Charles Bukowski. The proverbial laureate of American lowlife, Bukowski worked a number of casual labour jobs, including a long stint at the Post Office, before John Martin, editor of the Black Sparrow Press, offered him the equivalent of a yearly salary in return for publishing everything he wrote.
Bukowski was never that generous in his assessment of the work he did and his success as a writer has always been seen as a great escape from a life of clocked-in drudgery, Yes, in one sense he connected with the frustrations of a working class readership who also worked those same jobs and felt vindicated seeing one of their own make a name for himself. At the same time he also represented a great escape, a worldly success they would never attain. His poems and novels offered sympathy, not solidarity.
Fred Voss's poetry strikes a contrast in the sense that Voss was never seeking to escape from his work as a machinist. His work and his poetry are both parts of his life that feed into each other. These poems don't just capture the immersion that Voss experiences when sat at his machine, they also capture the relationships between his workers. Supervisors and those who live up in the management office are often given short shrift while their presence provokes an antagonism that in turn creates a camaraderie among those on the concrete floor below. At the same time, as a poet, Voss is also aware of the differences that exist between him and his coworkers.
The immersion is portrayed in poems that detail the ways in which his own body accords with the precision machinery that he operates. This immersion is then situated within the social dynamics of the workforce and the capitalist dynamics that exist beyond that.
Then there is the added dynamic of the Goodstone light aircraft company and the many government defence contracts that bring in the work. In his later collection, Hammers and Hearts of the Gods, Voss muses on his opposition to Bush's war on terror while acknowledging that the parts that he is helping to manufacture will play a part in that war. It is these contradictory elements that spell out the alienating nature of work since the industrial revolution.
One of his funniest poems, A Threat, talks about how his coworkers know that he is different to them, in the sense that he reads poetry as he sits at his machine and has some paintings hung behind his machine. This sows the seeds of an immediate distrust and suspicion (as far as I knew, Voss never told his coworkers that he was a poet):
Tomorrow I think I will start bringing roses to work.
Each day I will stand a rose in a jar of water
on the workbench behind my machine
I want to really terrify my fellow workers
this time.
I had my own tensions in my work when I was a gardener and I also tried to keep the poetry a secret from my workmates, though I must have blurted it out to someone before news of my dirty little habit spread through the workforce like wildfire. My first collection is going to be twenty years old this year and for all the sloppiness of the poems themselves, it still seems to speak with a clearwr voice to its readers than anything I’ve published since.
Another poet that was still working at a trade when his first book came out is William Letford. His debut, Bevel, is still one of my favourite books of poetry about labour. Letford’s opening poems visit his work as a roofer and there’s something about that trade, maybe the halfway point between ground and sky, that allows him to flip from mundane to the lyrical and back again. In 'They Speak of the Gods', he imagines the old greek adopting adopting the forms of labourers he knows. In 'In the Mountains of Northern Italy' he visits a roofless chapel and notes how the locals call the Sistine Chapel a "coffin lid" in comparison. At the same time, while back home in Scotland, 'Be prepared' communicates how dangerous it can be at the top of the non-proverbial ladder, where he scopes out the ground below so he can know which way to fall (fuschia bushes are far more desirable than paving slabs and railings).
One of my favourite poems about work comes from Sally Read and her debut collection "The Point of Splitting". A former nurse herself, she writes in Instruction about a nurse preparing and washing a recently deceased man, his body showing the marks of hard physical work.
…There is
a fogged mermaid from shoulder to wrist,
nicotine-stained teeth, nails dug with dirt –
a labourer then, one for the women.
Of course, we don't necessarily live in an ideal world where poetry publishers and arts admins are looking to elevate and celebrate the work of poets who choose to remain in their regular jobs, especially those whose work is precarious or looked down upon by the great and the good. It is often the case that working class poets in particular have to sieze the means of production for themselves, be that through the live poetry circuit or short runs of slim volumes that became cheaper to print and distribute in the final quarter of the 20th Century.
One thing I loved about running Poetry Unplugged at the Poetry Cafe for fifteen years was the varied backgrounds of the poets who came down for their five minutes at the mic. A fair few turned up still wearing their work clothes or hi-vis jackets, but when the time came for them to declaim their verse, there would be little mention of what they did for a living. They would still address the class struggle, but often in Blakean/Ginsbergian calls for revolution. They would address current affairs in the style of the Ranters, but in a depersonalised, more general sense.
I think that a lot of them had fallen into that mental Bukowski trap, which perhaps made them feel ashamed of their working circumstances, that such elements of their lives were the things that great writers escaped from. I wish I had done more to encourage these poets to see the creative potential in every aspect of their lives.
Perhaps the most encouraging recent development in London at least is Poetry on the Picket Line, an initiative from Chip Hamer (the Bros Grim) that involves poets joining picket lines and performing their poems while raising money for the strike fund. Poets that have joined striking workers have included Chip, Nadia Drews, Janine Booth, Tim Wells, Mark Coverdale, The Repeat Beat Poet, Dave and Lizzy Turner and many more. I love the basic ethos of this – if you can't bring the struggle to the hallowed halls of canonical poetry, then you bring poetry to the struggle instead.
I think that's one of the things we find easiest to forget about poetry. It has no keepers, no spiritual home, no institutional grounding. If a piece of language is sticky enough it finds its way from one mind to the next. It is owned by everybody and it is owned by nobody. It is everywhere, in spite of where it does or doesn't, belong.
Thanks for reading this!
Apologies for being a couple of days later with this one. The school and university holidays did not converge neatly this Easter and so I spent the first week of the summer term having to juggle work and childcare at the same time. I'm toying with the idea of knocking Rusty Niall's usual publication date further into the weekend as Friday afternoon can be a tricky deadline to hit during a busy week.
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Cheers
Niall