Proletarian Life : Twenty Poems of Love Hate and Politics in the Capital of Texas

by Wayne Pounds, Bo McCarver (Illustrator)

35 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Wayne Pounds, besides having published a stack of academic essays and monographs, is the perpetrator of five chapbooks of poetry, four books of family history, and a collection of documented narratives about early-day killings in Oklahoma. He was born in Oklahoma and grew up there and in northern California. He began his career as a poet in the 7th grade imitating Ogden Nash and his graduate career in the jungles of Vietnam keeping a low profile. PhDeed at the University of Kansas, 1976. Lived and taught in Japan thirty years, now retired. The attraction of his books may be that he sees American matters from Japan. The books he is willing to own may be found at Amazon.com with this link: https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/ent...

Reviews

[John Francis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book reminded me that the reality of different places, times and even individual people, is richer, more complex and more troubled than I may casually assume.
The poems here are fixed in a certain place (Austin, Texas), certain time (mid 1980s) and on a certain individual's experience (the author, Wayne Pounds). We learn of the anger and other energies created by a divided, unequal and unjust social and political arrangement, and of the contradictions and struggle of the fair-minded individual there.
There are many memorable images and phrases. This is the start of the first poem:
"Where it breaks Austin into two unequal sides,
The sun, declining, dazzles on the Interstate:"
Reality is hard to face sometimes. This is from 'Poem While the Dog Barks on my Birthday'. *
"Ripping the gaudy fabric of dream
stitch by stitch the goddammed dog
tore me naked from night's pocket,
dragging me back to the tepid
sour daylight soup of self."
This 26-line poem could serve as a summary to the whole volume.
Sometimes I felt the words were hard to follow. Maybe it was the time and place I didn't know or the poet's language and obscurity or it might be my own lack of reading insight, or all of the above.
Overall, I found Texas is more than I thought, the 1980s were more than superficial mass memory suggests, and a near 70-year-old man now wandering small back streets of Tokyo may contain more than we imagine.
*And, for tomorrow, happy birthday, Mr Pounds.