Thanks to some offline encouragement, I’ve decided to start re-posting my column here at Harriet once a month or so. In my time away, I’ve been penning reviews of new working-class poetry volumes (an extremely critical one of the highly problematic The Way We Work: Contemporary Writings from the American Work Place, edited by Peter Scheckner and M.C. Boyes, for Labor History and another more positive one of You Work Tomorrow: An Anthology of American Labor Poetry, 1929-1941, edited by John Marsh, for the Labor Studies Journal).

And I’ve also been watching the economy plunge further since I last wrote for Harriet, reading of its effects on working people across the globe and trying hard to find new poems that innovatively address the current economic clime and its effects on workers in the U.S. and across the globe.

Several years ago in my essay for a special symposium on Adrienne Rich published in the Virginia Quarterly Review (82:2), I outlined a series of industrial accidents and union/social movement engagements with capital that had all occurred during the week the essay was written: 42 workers trapped in a flooded Chinese coal mine… 600,000 Korean temporary workers launching a strike over working conditions… Aerolinas Argentinas pilots and mechanics ending a successful nine day strike… a strike unfolding in French Polynesia… and much more from Guyanese workers, Jakarta teachers, Kenyan oil workers, Trinidadian employees, anti-globalization protestors in Hong Kong, etc. etc.

The paragraph for this past week would sound eerily similar: a strike by Guyanese sugar workers, 9 coal miners trapped in an illegal mine in China's Hebei Province; a wave of strikes and sit-ins and labor protests in Iraq’s industrial sector; news of three murdered trade unionists in Colombia in August; the arrest of the secretary general of the Swaziland Federation of Trade Unions. [Note: for those interested in these and related stories, bookmark Labourstart in your browser.] And in the upcoming week, here in USAmerica alone, with Gustav nearing New Orleans and the RNC protest marches here in St. Paul tomorrow, what will the news bring?

And what will the reportedly “news that stays news” bring?

2.86 miles.

According to Mapquest.com, that’s the distance from my front door to the barricades outside the entrance to the Republican National Convention, which opens on Monday at the Xcel Energy Center here in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

On Labor Day no less.

Four years ago, when we as a nation supposedly democratically decided that four more years of Bush2 was the way to go, James Bowman, a resident scholar at the right wing Ethics and Public Policy Center, was so captivated by a line in Georgia Sen. Zell Miller’s speech at the 2004 convention that he decided to pen a poem a day from the RNC at MSG (or maybe his room at the Four Points Sheraton). Here’s a stanza to whet your whistle:

One of the unadulterated joys of living in the Twin Cities is the presence of the Penumbra Theater just a few blocks down the road from my house. Founded in 1976 by director Lou Bellamy, Penumbra has embarked on a five year project to stage each play in August Wilson’s 20th century magnum opus—which is, as many of you may know, a bringing home of the native Pittsburgh playwright, who lived in St. Paul from 1978 to 1990 and wrote a good portion of his 10-play cycle here. And as Chuck Smith, resident director at the Goodman Theater, recently said, “If you want to see an August Wilson play done right you've got to go to Penumbra. Those guys know him, they know how to speak that language, because they developed it with him.”

Last night while I was at the Bellamy/Penumbra preview of Wilson’s Fences—which runs through late September if you happen to be anywhere near St. Paul—and again this morning while I was rereading sections of the play and thinking about Chuck Smith’s statement, I latched onto the concepts of reciprocities, development, and the dialogism of collective action that have propelled me in the past decade to experiments in articulating poetry to documentary/workers’ theater within transnational social movements.

As I bask in the humid afternoons of August sipping a mint julep on the shore of Lake Wobegone (ok, I’m actually utterly landlocked in my office, wearing a COSATU t-shirt, sans beverage, but who’s counting), I wanted to celebrate the season of pants at or above the knees (the ones we wear over our briefs… well, most of us) with a few not-so-long takes on several books they probably won’t have in stock at Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery or Skoeglin's 5 and Dime:

Photo by Katharine E. Wright

Mark: There’s a wonderful anecdote early in June Jordan’s Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood about waiting as a young child for the arrival of a train, that “moaning in the dark,” that “transitory signal from a hidden fire” that “eased its promise into the night.” I seem to be reminded of this Jordan passage every time I read your new writings. The acknowledgements section in your new book, Prairie Style, concludes: “Portions of this poem were written on Amtrak.” And the trains themselves rail their way, so to speak, across the book, particularly in the central (Mid-American?) section, “Inland (…poems about Downstate Illinois),” in works like “Fever” and “A Train at Night” and “Afro-Prairie.” What is it that keeps bringing you back to those modernist machines that roll along on pre-determined tracks?

The following email message appeared in my inbox over the weekend:

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso (AP) - National radio says at least 31 people have been killed in a mudslide at an unofficial gold mine in Burkina Faso. There are thousands of unofficial, or bush mines, in West Africa. Desperately poor villagers eke out a living, risking their lives to descend deep chutes and then use mercury to force the gold out of the dirt. The mines are especially treacherous during the monsoon season. According to radio reports, the landslide was brought on by heavy rains in a mining village in southwest Burkina Faso. Local authorities are digging for survivors.

The email was sent to me by the United States Mine Rescue Association’s listserv (to which I’ve subscribed for years—which is probably not that surprising to anyone who perused my Harriet post, Poetics (Mine), a few weeks ago). And in my ongoing exploration of Langston Hughes’ interrogative (“What kind of poem/Would you/Make out of that?”), I like to keep tabs on the global extractive industries and especially their toll (Engels called it “social murder”) on working people across the globe.

In one of my earliest posts here at Harriet (on the conference celebrating the retirement of poet, editor, and Japanese-Canadian internment activist Roy Miki, “Tracing the Lines”) I mentioned being introduced by my transnational roommate, Jeff Derksen, to Phinder Dulai and his work. Since May, I’ve had a chance to read both of Phinder’s superb poetry books, Ragas from the Periphery and Basmati Brown: Paths, Passages, Cross and Open (as well as recommend them to several USAmerican readers). Below is part of an online Q&A we’ve been engaged in the past few weeks. Enjoy!

Mark: In your first book, Ragas from the Periphery, you include several poems—such as “The Booth” and “I Work On Your Holy Days”—that directly engage issues of race, labor, and socio-economics in the service sector in direct and unique ways. Can you tell us a bit about these poems and why you felt it necessary to include them in your first collection?

Gravitating into my book-holding and keyboard-typing fingers of late have been a series of texts that articulate modern and contemporary poetry and poetics to issues of habeas corpus, governmentality, the state (particularly the judicial branch/state-sanctioned executions), and human rights—perhaps not so surprising in a country engaged in ongoing pre-emptive wars. I wanted to say a few words about four items I’ve picked up and put down and picked up again over the past few months.

Seeds of Fire: Contemporary Poetry from the Other USA, edited by Jon Andersen, appeared earlier this year from Smokestack Books in Middlesbrough, UK. Mike Alewitz’s stunning mural from the Roosevelt School in New Brunswick, New Jersey (“Temporary Sanity”) graces the cover (and those not familiar with Alewitz’s work should check out Insurgent Images: The Agitprop Murals of Mike Alewitz). Epigraphs from June Jordan and Paul Robeson open the book—so take your cures from there. (And in full disclosure, an excerpt of a verse-play from yours truly appears in the collection.)

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know a thing about Philip Levine’s “poetry eternal.” I don’t even know what I’m going to have today for lunch (aka, “all this temporal crap”). Now the order for how the condiments go on a Wendy’s hamburger (mayonnaise, ketchup, pickles, onions, tomato, lettuce, mustard), that I know. Because there’s certain things you never forget after nearly a decade of practice, something “unforgettable (that’s what you are)” about spending a good portion of your life assembling cars or changing bedpans or typing memos or “manufacturing hamburgers” (remember that great idea from George W., right up there with the Reagan administration’s idea of classifying ketchup as a vegetable in the pre-NCLB school lunches). By the way, is “ketchup as a vegetable” a simile? Mmm, mmm, good…

Likewise, I’d say as far as temporal repetitive jobs go, with making your kid breakfast. Taking out the trash. Feeding the cat and the barking thirteen-week-old puppy (and cleaning up his poop in the yard). OK, maybe this is getting too specifically about my morning. Or is it? Is there something about working, about “everyday life” that scales across many of the divides? (Except, of course, if a nanny or au pair made the kiddo breakfast, the maid or cleaning service took out the trash, the dog walker and/or the lawn crew cleared the dog-done deeds along with the excess leaves of grass.)

Back in the early 1980s in the anathema that was Reagan-era Buffalo, “Ghost Town” was as close as it got to our anthem. “This town… is coming like a ghost town… All the clubs have been closed down…” Little did I know then that, across the pond, Bill Griffiths (who I’ve mentioned here before at Harriet in “Poetics (Mine)”) was penning a “skeptical militant” verse about parallel scenarios in Thatcher-era Britain.

Sonali Perera, an Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers, has published an engaging new essay in this year’s first issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies that dovetails in unique and productive ways with much of what I’ve been writing here for Harriet the past two months. “Rethinking Working-Class Literature: Feminism, Globalization, and Socialist Ethics” performs a detailed comparative analysis of the writings of Tillie Olsen (with particular attention to Yonnondio and the documentary poem “I want you women up north to know”) and the Dabindu (sweat or “drops of sweat”) worker-writers from Sri Lanka’s free trade zones.

the ratatat and bomb booming .....calls for the lost
compliantly igniting troubles and provocation
my bull elephant
people sheltering .....engaged ever betrothed
to mucus and weakness .....of all diseases
malaria tuberculosis
they’re led astray by killing’s admirers son of Barre and his lot
in ignorance following .....the mistaken animal haired humans
for my people ... ..with wickedness poured into them
i pass you this message .....alliterating in ‘d’

Who was it that said “poetry is news that stays news”? [Rhetorical question alert.] Reading today’s NYTimes article “Somali Killings of Aid Workers Imperil Relief” I remembered Cabdulqaadir Xaaji Cali Axmed’s gabay, “Samadoon”, published several years ago in Modern Poetry in Translation.

Very few literary magazines get me excited when they arrive in the mail. As has probably become more than evident to those reading my blog posts the past six weeks, I’m seeking something decidedly different than many USAmerican poetry journals regularly provide when I crack the spine of that pefect-bound or saddle-stitched or stapled paper object that is newly disembarking from its postal envelope.

Enter Chimurenga, whose new double-issue (no 12/13) arrived in my mailbox from Cape Town, South Africa, a few days ago. Transnationally poetic? Check. Innovatively interdisciplinary? Check. Designed by the gods? Check. Unafraid to simultaneously articulate the aesthetic, the political, the cultural, and the economic? Check(mate).

Several weeks ago in my post on the symposium celebrating the work of poet, editor, scholar, and Japanese-Canadian internment activist Roy Miki, I mentioned that a new book by Rita Wong, Forage, had been awarded the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for the best book by a writer from British Columbia or the Yukon. Since then I’ve been able to re-read Wong’s book, and as with her previous collections Monkey Puzzle and Sybil Unrest (the latter co-authored with Larissa Lai) I am simultaneously aesthetically astonished and socially energized by the articulation of deft and daring cultural production to the politics of social and environmental injustices within and among (simultaneously) the local, national, and transnational scales.

Forage opens with a circular photograph (notes at the back of the book inform the reader of the photograph’s origin, the interior of the Victoria Rice Mills with packaged rice in mats and a Chinese worker in the foreground). On the facing page is a crescent-shaped visual poem that moves the “r” sound through the terms rice, rise, and riven. So hums the poetic politics, in sound and image and poem, in the opening salvo of the book. On the next page, the poem “Value Chain” opens with the questions “how to turn english from a low-context language into a high-context language?” and “what is the context for ‘you people are hard workers’?”, questions to which the remainder of the book will offer a series of possible and varied (poetic) replies.

Several people have e-mailed me recently to ask where I come across the poems and poets of social movements and organized labor that I’ve been discussing here during my interlude upon Harriet, as well as why these poems and their presumed dubious “aesthetic quality” should matter. Yesterday, as part of another project I’m working on, I revisited Robin D.G. Kelley’s seminal Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class and reread (with Harriet in mind) Kelley’s fifth chapter, “‘Afric’s Sons With Banner Red’: African American Communists and the Politics of Culture, 1919-1934.” The quote that opens his chapter title comes from J. Thompson’s poem “Exhortation,” a Claude McKay-“If We Must Die”-esque piece that Kelley discovered “buried in a barely readable microfilm edition of the Liberator.” In addition to his expansion of Marxism beyond the (white, male) figures most critics seem delimited to invoking in academic literary criticism (and readers interested in exploring further should begin with Cedric J. Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, though it is still unfortunately overwhelmingly masculinist), Kelley’s chapter on Black radicalism, class struggle, and poetry provides a unique and engaging overview of the social poetics and poetries of the era—much of it dug up from microfilms and archives.

One of the poems in the chapter that interested me on a variety of levels was “Southern Organizer” [Note: The periods represent indents, which I can't seem to figure out on Movabale Type]:

.......Badges gleam; they dump the sack
.......Into the water, turn and go.
It is peaceful in the Southland; tomorrow
They will hang and shoot some more
Of ours: but tonight, as all true men
.......with southern blood will tell you.
The possum is abroad, the bloodhounds sleep,
And it is beautiful. Comrades.
.......“Let us do this thing together.
Black man, comrade, we must together.
And he is dead. There is work for living
Men to do. We salute him.
We have no tears for him.”

I’ve spent more than a decade researching the global extractive industries, in part for a project on the I.W.W.-led 1916 Mesabi Miners’ Strike in northern Minnesota’s Iron Range; in part for a new collaborative book (with Beijing-based photographer Ian Teh) forthcoming early next year from Coffee House Press—Coal Mountain Elementary—on coal mine disasters in Sago, West Virginia, and across China in the early years of this new millennium; and in part simply for the nascent pleasure of the (labor) historian in me. I once even went so far as to develop an entire syllabus for an English Department class on the poetry and cultural poetics of the global mining industry and its culture and the wide array of historical and contemporary works in poetry, music, anthropology, photography, and film that uniquely represent and critique it. Then I realized that maybe not everyone shares my passion for this particular stratum of, well, Notes from Underground.

*

“Johannesburg Mines”
Langston Hughes

In the Johannesburg mines
There are 240,000
Native Africans working.
What kind of poem
Would you
Make out of that?
240,000 natives
Working in the
Johannesburg mines.

“On the left is a black woman, determined to articulate political and ideological positions that would contest the boundaries of freedom of speech as defined by American bourgeois democracy. These boundaries, while ostensibly ‘real’ rights such as freedom of the press and habeas corpus nonetheless carry limitations, which keep the individual within the structures that define the modern market economy and the definition of the ideal American citizen. On the right are the institutions of the U.S. government such as the FBI, determined to discipline those rights within its historical project of the rise of capitalist freedom. Thus, while American democracy would seek to position itself as the ideal democracy and as the major exponent of international human rights, challenges to this claim continually emerge internally from a range of cultural and political activists, like Claudia Jones, as well as from the global political movements of decolonization.”

So opens “Piece Work/Peace Work: Self-Construction versus State Repression,” Chapter 6 of Carole Boyce Davies’ Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones, a chapter that uses Jones’ massive, two-volume (nearly 1,000 page) FBI file “as the finished product for the [textual, legal] framing mechanism” of the U.S. Government to “use its already preconceived conclusions as legitimate judicial premises for the indictment of radical political practices.”

As has probably become more than evident to anyone reading my entries thus far on Harriet, I’m interested simultaneously in both Poetry and poetry—that upper case canonized (MLA-ized, Norton-ized, Super-sized!) beast as well as its lower case comrade which I’ll loosely categorize (with a change of preposition) by June Jordan’s phrase “poetry [by] the people.” And within the latter, of particular interest to me is “poetry” produced within transnational social movements and especially transnational social movement unionism.

So Claudia Jones is my kind of people.

Late last year, The Monserrat Reporter published an article whose title begins “Deputy Governor of Montserrat writes book…” We can all imagine the subject matter of hardcovers that would be penned by (or ghostwritten for), say, the governor of Wyoming or Alabama or New Jersey or _________ (fill in your favorite state). In fact, just last night on Charlie Rose the former governor of West Virginia (Bob Wise) was out pumping his new book Raising the Grade: How High School Reform Can Save Our Youth and Our Nation. Let’s just say it didn’t quite sound like Michael Apple.

But back to The Monserrat Reporter, which late last year ran an article whose full title read (in full) “Deputy Governor of Montserrat writes book about Lasana Sekou.” Born in Aruba in 1959 and reared in St. Martin until he was 13, Sekou has since published more than a dozen books of poetry, non-fiction and other imaginative writings including Maroon Lives…for the Grenadian Freedom Fighters, Big Up St. Martin—Essay & Poem, The Salt Reaper—Poems from the flats and most recently Brotherhood of the Spurs.

Amidst the engaging recent posts by Peter O’Leary on the "Poetry of the 1970s" conference in Maine and Alan Gilbert on poetry and identity/identifying practices—as well as steering away from the seemingly looming question of whether or not I ever was a member of the Communist party!—I wanted to continue to post &/or discuss poems that I’ve used or plan to use in my factory and workplace workshops, poems that push the political and the innovative in myriad ways yet always include a race/class overlay or overdetermination (rather than fronting one at the expense of the other) as well as poems that scale back and forth between the local and the global. So, having already written about U Sam Oeur’s “Work at the Douglas Corporation, Urethane Department…” and Emelihter Kihleng’s “Micronesian Diaspora(s),” let me add a poem that I think it would be most productive to read alongside any 1970s configuration of poetry that has been inscribed to include Late Capitalism and Language as well as poets such as Tom Raworth and Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer (to cite just a few mentioned by O’Leary), Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “It Dread Inna Inglan”:

dem frame-up George Lindo
up in Bradford Toun
but di Bradford Blacks
dem a rally roun

I poetry. You poetry. He/she/it poetries. We poetry. You poetry. They poetry.

That’s my conjugation.

Early in the process of developing my transnational social movement “poetry dialogues,” when I was asked by the education directors at NUMSA (National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa) to lead a series of two-day, eight-hour per day poetry workshops at Ford plants in Port Elizabeth and Pretoria, I formulated a schedule that included a “first person singular” poetry day and a “first person plural” day. In the former, autoworkers would read poems like U Sam Oeur’s “Work at the Douglas Corporation, Urethane Department, Minneapolis, Minnesota” and view digital videos of workers from my previous workshops; they would then write individual, often documentary/reportage poems (think Tillie Olsen’s “I want you women up north to know”) about their experiences.

One the second day, the “first person plural” day, I devised a series of exercises for workers to collectively compose collaborative “choral” poems from their experiences, poems that they would then perform as a chorus of workers. If interested, you can find printed examples of both types of poems online in the UAW 879’s October-November 2006 newsletter. [Note: they are not meant to be center-justified, but oh well…]

Yesterday, somewhere between the boyhood home of Sinclair Lewis and the city of Fargo, I facilitated another one of my trade union poetry workshops for Education MN (who represent 70,000 public educators from across the state).

The news from Zimbabwe is terrifying and rapidly escalating. Two days ago, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai withdrew from the run-off elections. I read this morning that Tsvangirai has now sought refuge in the Dutch embassy in Harare and that Britain will lead a campaign to declare that Mugabe is no longer the leader of Zimbabwe. But what else will be done, or not be done, by the rest of the world this time?

I had wanted to write yesterday about how, amidst what is occurring and what we can only hope may and may not yet occur in Zimbabwe, labor groups were still pushing unique cultural aesthetics to address the current situation--how the TUC assembled photos of 2,000 trade unionists (mine, you'll find, as part of one eye) for a massive Chuck Close-esque banner to be used at protests today in London; how, on the way to my poetry workshops at Education MN, I want to inform all teachers about teachers murdered in the days leading up to the Zimbabwe elections; how, here at the Harriet blog, we can maybe listen to at least one poet from Zimbabwe speak, Comrade Fatso's "What's up guys...? (Click on the link in the top left corner to hear him read the poem.)

When I was invited to be a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota this past spring, English Department Chair Paula Rabinowitz asked that one of the classes I teach be a senior seminar based, loosely, on the “poetry dialogues” I’d been facilitating between Ford workers at the closing St. Paul Assembly plant here in Minnesota and autoworkers at downsizing Ford plants in Port Elizabeth and Pretoria, South Africa.

As I planned the syllabus, I went back over the central points I forwarded in my critique of MFA-land, “Neoliberalism, Collective Action, and the American MFA Industry” as well as the propositions I’d made for alternative models: the CP’s John Reed Clubs, the “Talleres de Poesia” of the Sandinistas, the Johnson-Forest Tendency (C.L.R. James, Grace Lee (Boggs), and Raya Dunayevskaya), and others. The eventual syllabus included some of this work, additional readings such as Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, visits from St. Paul Ford worker-poets, and films such as Roger and Me and Travis Wilkerson’s extraordinary An Injury to One (I’d also wanted to show Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave but couldn’t get it in my hands in time).

The final charge on the syllabus was that students had to organize, facilitate, and document (preferably using iMovie or GarageBand or digital photography with accompanying sound files, etc.) work- and/or community-based “poetry dialogues.” Additionally, I promised students that since they would be leading workplace poetry workshops, I would as well (I’m still working on editing footage from mine, with clerical workers from AFSCME 3800 who went on strike against the University in fall 2007 and read their poems to the University community at the “Late American Poetics and the Politics of Exception” symposium).

It’s not every day that a poetry collection I write a blurb for appears on the U.S. Department of Interior “Office of Insular Affairs” website. OK, so I’m one of those US poets imbricated in party politics: I read on a 2004 Democratic campaign stop with former VP Walter Mondale and then VP candidate John Edwards (though Edwards’ plane, perhaps foreshadowing the 2004 election results, was delayed for nearly two hours to clear airspace for current Vice President Dick Cheney’s Labor Day arrival for a Republican crowd here in ’Sota). Additionally, I used to be a writer for local Green party campaigns and was chair of the Political Issues committee of the National Writers’ Union Local (and its representative at the Minnesota AFL-CIO convention in the first years of this new century, back in the Paul Wellstone days). Maybe we can talk about the over-riding contemporary separation of poetics (church) and politics (state) at some later date…

A poem from this poetry collection announced on the Department of Interior website, Emelihter Kihleng’s My Urohs, opened XCP no. 14 and I’ve been a fan of her writing ever since, watching for its appearance in such innovative journals as Tinfish, boundary2, Chain, and others. Here’s what I wrote when she approached me to pen something about her first book:

Driving the width of USAmerica from Minnesota to Texas and back as I did the past two weeks (and may again later this summer), I began to imagine somewhere in Kansas or Missouri what a tri-national, social, cultural, and politicized middle North American poetry and poetics would look like, sound like, and read like. It’s a thought I return to with some regularity--child of rust-belt Buffalo, educated on the outskirts of Toledo, sequestered the past two decades at the western edge of the Great Lakes, or, as Lorine Niedecker called the region, “North Central�? (though that’s perhaps a more apt moniker for Thunder Bay or Nunavut than south-east Wisconsin). Having read and studied the New York Schools and San Francisco Renaissances of the previous century, as well as the countless other coastal poetry and poetics communities of eras far and close, I can’t help but try to imagine a geography of North America poetry production centers recalibrated along a North-South Central axis.

Try to imagine a continuum that begins with Magnus Einarsson’s Icelandic Canadian Popular Verse composed on farms north of Winnipeg and ends with Subcomandante Marcos’s versification at the Zapatista Encuentro “for humanity and against neoliberalism�? in Chiapas in 1996; try to imagine “the port of Kansas City�? (as some of the NAFTA superhighway literature describes) and its potential poet laureate Diane Glancy--her book Claiming Breath is central, I think, to any reading of what, here in the US nation-state, we might imaginatively dub an emergent US-35 literary tradition.

More than a decade ago, just after I’d published the first issue of XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, a sheaf of poems arrived at my office. They were bi-lingual poems (in Khmer & English) from a poet then new to me, U Sam Oeur, whose collection Sacred Vows was scheduled to be published in 1998. I fell in love with the poems, and published two of them (“Neo-Pol Pot�? and “Work at the Douglas Corporation, Urethane Department, Minneapolis, Minnesota�?) in the second issue of XCP. Shortly after receiving the poems, I invited Sam to give a reading to open the conference I was organizing with Maria Damon at the University of Minnesota to celebrate the launch of the journal. The poems, read by Sam, hooked me deep. When XCP no. 2 appeared, I invited Sam to give a reading at the community college where I teach.

Over the following years we remained in touch as Sam eventually moved from Minnesota to Texas, and when his haunting and immensely powerful autobiography, Crossing Three Wildernesses appeared in 2005, I again invited Sam to read from it at my school and spent a wonderful afternoon with him at an Argentine restaurant. Having studied and taught Sam’s work for a dozen years or so, I’m still completely engaged and inspired by his invocation and exploration of the Whitman “democratic�? and the Whitman line, which additionally includes his ongoing work translating Whitman into Khmer; the way his poetry and prose invokes and (re)scales the personal, the local, the nation-state, and the global; the way humanity continually surges against, and directly in the face of, the horrors of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

So when I found out that I was going to be in Fort Worth, Texas, for a week, I immediately emailed Sam and asked if I could drive out and visit with him. That absolutely wonderful late morning and early afternoon was yesterday.

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.

“Tracing the Lines: A Symposium on Contemporary Poetics & Cultural Politics in Honour of Roy Miki�?

Over the course of the past half decade or so, I’ve been invited to speak at conferences celebrating the retirement of two seminal Canadian writers, Fred Wah (University of Calgary in Alberta) and Roy Miki (Simon Fraser University in BC). Since I started my blogging here at Harriet with some notes on restaurant culture and class, let me start by saying a few words about Wah’s work and then move on to Miki and the “Tracing the Lines�? conference.

If one were to be asked to give as gift a single book to the waitresses and fast food/diner restaurant workers of the world, my choice would be Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill. Dubbed both a “biotext�? and a “gastro-graphy�? (by Rosalia Baena in her essay on Wah in a recent issue of the Canadian Ethnic Studies Journal)--though probably oversimplified as memoir by the stateside genre gendarmes--Diamond Grill is a stunningly lyrical-critical reading of the everyday workings of race and class in a family owned diner in Nelson, BC. Unlike the elegiac tone (and form) that subsumes so much US class-based writing (where working people, it seems, are always doomed to their material conditions and live lives utterly without agency), Wah’s Grill serves as a site of constant race-class negotiations and is written in a way that pushes far beyond the standard working class social realism. (Maybe, at some point, I’ll blog on the excellent commentary on my first post and try to sketch out some terrain for what I see as a much-needed shift from social to socialist realism in contemporary working class poetics--there’s a hint of it in my invocation of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People articulated to the Johnson-Forest Tendency of C.L.R. James, Grace Lee (Boggs), and Raya Dunayevskaya).

Hello Harrieteers,

Although I was hoping to start posting a few days ago, my computer crashed my first day on the road. Thanks to the Oklahoma City Mac Genius Bar (double thanks to Caleb!) I'm back online and set to begin Poetry Foundation summer camp today. In the next day or two, I’ll try to post impressions from last week’s conference in Vancouver honoring the career of poet-editor-activist-social critic Roy Miki. But I wanted to open by saying a few words about some areas that I hope my posts will begin to explore and open up for conversation.

This morning I went to the only breakfast place within walking distance of my hotel here in OKcity, a Denny’s off the interstate. When my wife asked our waitress about the closest movie theater (in case we needed to escape the 90 degree heat), she said, “Well, I’m not from around here. I moved here two months ago so I could work at this better restaurant.�?