Natalia Cecire on Poetry and (Gendered) Work

Worth checking out at Jacket2 is Natalia Cecire's newest commentary, "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers." Cecire, a lecturer in English and American Studies at the University of Sussex, considers poetry's relationship to work, thinking through recent dialogue from/on Ben Lerner and Joshua Clover. Further: "But we know all too well that this category, 'work,' is not what it seems."

"Work is gendered, of course. As I discussed in the first installment of this commentary, the sense of feminine irritation of 'I, too, dislike it' seems to accompany a female textual labor that is closer to editing, or even word-processing, than to authorship." Here goes:

Moreover, work is gendered in ways that play out via sexuality: not for nothing does Melville sharply gender his portraits of celibate life in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855). The “quiet, unmarried, literary man”—Dr. Johnson (a “nominal Benedick and widower but virtual bachelor”) or Charles Lamb, for example—can acquire a spot in this paradise of bachelors, but the world of maidens is a Tartarus of grinding, repetitive, unrewarding labor in a paper factory, turning out “only blank paper; no printing of any sort.” And yet it is only as a “maid” that, for many years, American women could be workers, or rather, paid workers retaining the legal status of feme sole (Kahan 14). For women, celibacy, in the minimal sense of not being married, is historically the way to remain a (paid) worker. In Melville’s story: “For our factory here, we will not have married women; they are apt to be off-and-on too much. We want none but steady workers: twelve hours to the day, day after day, through the three hundred and sixty-five days, excepting Sundays, Thanksgiving, and Fast-days.”

And why would you want to be a worker? Isn’t it to be resisted? Who the Tartarus wants to work in a paper factory? “The world is too much with us; late and soon,/ Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” Hasn’t women’s entry into the paid workforce, usually at lower pay, only hastened the degradation of working conditions, the erosion of real pay, the demise of the single-income family? Haven’t more recent management techniques for devolving risk onto the worker—“flexible” working hours, “flexible” contracts, telecommuting, “teams,” therapeutic “wellness” initiatives—so often entered under the guise of efforts to create a “woman-friendly” workplace?

And yet: there are reasons; of course there are. Does not the utopian hope of a world outside commerce that, for Lerner, poetry represents eerily resemble hopes otherwise invested in domesticity, a gift economy of labors, only, of love?

Is not that alleged domestic gift economy, rather famously, a trap?

Continue at Jacket2.