Factory

by Antler

Hardcover

Genres: Poetry

67 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Antler (born Brad Burdick; 1946 in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, U.S.) is an American poet who lives in Wisconsin.

Among other honors, Antler received the Whitman Prize from the Walt Whitman Association, given to the poet "whose contribution best reveals the continuing presence of Walt Whitman in American poetry," in 1985. Antler also was awarded the Witter Bynner prize in 1987. Antler was the poet laureate of the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for 2002 and 2003. He is also an advocate for wilderness protection.

Education and career
Antler received a bachelor's degree in anthropology from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1970. Later he completed a master's degree in English from the same university after spending some time at the noted Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. During the 1970s he also worked at various factory and other jobs just long enough to get money to support his poetry writing and time spent in wilderness areas across the United States.

Antler's first major work, the long poem Factory, was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore in 1980. Allen Ginsberg declared him as "one of Whitman's `poets and orators to come'". The collection Last Words appeared in 1986 from Ballantine Books, and Antler: The Selected Poems was published in 2000 by Soft Skull Press. He has also published several chapbooks and has contributed to numerous local, national, and international journals and anthologies.

Writing style
His work reflects the influences of Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, and the American traditions of transcendentalism and environmentalism. He celebrates the wilderness, often comparing urban, industrial life unfavorably with natural phenomena. His frank, sometimes earthy poems frequently exhibit sexual and spiritual energy entwined with the wonder of the natural world.

Reviews

[Laura Leaney · Rating 5 out of 5]

This poem blows my mind. Antler knows what's happening in America, in the bowels as well as the mind. (If countries had bodies). I adore this poem more than I can say, and anything I say will never be as wonderful as the poem itself. On par with Whitman and perhaps more relevant.

The poet brings beauty to the Factory. I love the questions:

"Must the beercan on the mountainside / always be part of the view?"

"And even you, backpacks, compasses, and maps of the wild? / must you be from factories? / Et tu mountain climbing gear?"

"Must we see the slaves behind every toy of our childhood?"

"Is it too late to ask - 'What good is it if we're immortal / when we're bored with eternity even before we die?"

[A.B. Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read this wildly under-read and -rated poem as an undergraduate. I reread it today to prepare to teach it, myself, in a workshop on documentary poetry. It always shocks me that this poem was published in 1980, steeped as it is in the sexual politics and aesthetic programs of the 60s, in Whitman and Ginsberg (so: in Ginsberg.) Ginsberg even blurbed it! It's this heightened presence of Ginsberg that felt most acutely like a defect in the work, to me, the first time I read this book. Both poets like to position sexuality as a kind of utopian realm of immediacy beyond the humiliations of everyday life under capitalism. It's even more explicit in this poem than in most Ginsberg, because in Factory the outside-ness of sexuality is specified as the outside of the eight-hour working day. I remember thinking that it was both quaint and luxurious to be able to assert that sex wasn't a facet of the miseries of the workplace, itself. Who IS sexual harassment? I don't know her!

My gripe with this obvious and embarrassing sexism has softened, with time. In part, it's because the queerness of the disalienated sex the poet dreams of having does, in 1980, a little more than it does now to drive sexuality beyond the acceptable violence of public (working) life. It's also because I've simply decided I can put up with Ginsberg if he'll throw me a "Wichita Vortex Sutra" every once in awhile. Make of that compromise, reader, what you will.

I was more interested, this time around, in Antler's complex and thorny negations of Whitman's nationalism. The way Blackness and blackface form the fleetingly-glimpsed but essential backbone of that negation. It really sounds from my review like this is a gross and fucked-up poem, and I guess it is. It seems to me to most succeed on the level of form. It is a poem that is constantly saving itself from itself, or trying. If Factory was chopped into a collection of short lyrics, I doubt whether the fruit they bore would be worth the cost of admission. Inasmuch as this poem tries to be complete, to try from every possible angle to identify our common enemy, it also tries to redeem itself. Sometimes, in joyful glimmers, I think it does. It is playful, and lush, and, in the throes of our apocalyptic conjuncture, a kick in the ass of revitalizing optimism. If you can find a copy, you should jump on it. If you can't find a copy, you should DM me.

[Leonardo Muñoz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Factory debe ser uno de los primeros textos que hablan de la extinción humana bajo el consumismo y la industria moderna, no viéndolo necesariamente como un augurio sino como algo que ya estaba pasando en ese entonces. La concentración del trabajador en las máquinas dentro y fuera del trabajo, que le impiden "escuchar el trueno y ver la lluvia que cae afuera", convertir sus manos en las herramientas de su autodestrucción y de destrucción de los demás, ser parte de un tiempo donde "nadie quisiera volver con una máquina del tiempo", haciendo de nuestra Prehistoria un lugar mucho más deseable.

La frialdad transmitida por la evolución de los pensamientos del autor llega a su punto cúlmine al citar a Albert Speer, segundo al comando de las fuerzas de Hitler: "hay una enorme distancia entre nuestro potencial tecnológico y nuestro desarrollo moral que hacen de esta era tan desafiante y a la vez tan terrorífica (...) En un mundo aterrorizado por la tecnología, todos vivimos en un Auschwitz".

Lamentablemente mi nivel de inglés me impidió disfrutar del todo las largas enumeraciones, que a mí parecer son un recurso importante al dar mayor intensidad a dicha frialdad. Espero volver a leerlo otra vez.

[William Irwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you work in a factory and toil for the ungrateful masses with thoughts and dreams that are pulled away by conveyor you appreciate this style. Bukowski writing of working at the light fixture plant gets me too.

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

former poet-laureate of milwaukee, often compared to walt whitman or allen ginsburg. yet he's more dynamic than that, edward abbey for the working class?