For a Living: The Poetry of Work

by Nicholas Coles (Editor), Peter Oresick (Editor)

In this companion volume to their anthology Working Classics , Nicholas Coles and Peter Oresick present poems written in the 1980s and 1990s that address the nature and culture of nonindustrial work---white collar, domestic, clerical, technical, managerial, or professional. They cross lines of status, class, and gender and range from mopping floors to television news reporting, Wall Street brokerage, and raising children.
 

Genres: Poetry

432 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1995

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read this w/much else preparing for a creative writing class I was teaching through a worker center, which was going ok until I had some mental health issues and had to hand the class over. Wasn't expecting much from it but assumed it would have some kind of class-consciousness. It doesn't, usually. It includes too many writers who have done “work” but haven’t really lived working class lives on the way to professor-dom. The editors also chose poems with narrow apertures: short, moody lyrical-narrative accounts of a single worker and their work. Because of this painfully literal definition of worker poetry, the poems struggles to get past micro-dramas of alienation through and redemption of work and the quotidian. There's no sense that work is something done with other people, something in common, little relation between work and politics, between work and collective struggle and solidarity. Few poems even howl, rage, or even just plumb the depths of the shittyness (or extreme pleasure?) of work. It’s content to turn a poetic image in a quotidian place and call it a day. Again, this is no knock on most of the writers in the collection (or even individual poems, some of which are fine!) but on the editors' narrow vision. Probably also an indictment of 90s mainline poetry aesthetics and critiques of neoliberalism still not in focus during the Clinton era? I dunno. Well, this marks the beginning of some thinking about worker poetry thru intersectional lens that I want to do, so this review is more of an allergic sneeze than anything informed by deep reading in the genre.

[Norma · Rating 5 out of 5]

The used copy I'd ordered arrived in the morning mail -- wanted it in connection with a musing/essay I'm writing on "the work of hands the work of writing the work of making books." Hadn't a clue about the contents, now find I haven't been able to tear myself away from it. Terrific number of terrific poets, many whose work I hadn't read before, and will now track down to read more; many others whose work I had read some of but will now return to having seen this insight into their work; and others whose work I admire but had not come across in the context or writing about "work." One read so far I was moved by all over again -- and in homage to her, because it's not long but it stays a long time after reading it: Tess Gallagher's "I Stop Writing the Poem" --

I Stop Writing the Poem

to fold the clothes. No matter who lives
or who dies, I'm still a woman
I'll always have plenty to do.
I bring the arms of his shirt
together. Nothing can stop
our tenderness. I'll get back
to the poem. I'll get back to being
a woman. But for now
there's a shirt, a giant shirt
in my hands, and somewhere a small girl
standing next to her mother
watching to see how it's done.

I highly recommend the collection -- it will be a companion as I write the essay, and beyond.

Odd to return to this site today, when I'd decided this morning to begin writing every day about one of the books I have: a book a day. Might not finish reading it, but it would be taken from the shelf, given time and attention and my comments, a kind of conversation with it. I had thought 365 days of books, but now may emulate Scheherazade, my favorite storyteller, and aim for 1,001. Will enter brief comments here, longer think-pieces in my private notebooks.