Like a Rock?

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...