This collection has a twofold purpose: both to present a breadth of scholarship on poetry in relation to work, and to stand testament to the work of scholarship itself, as one of the mediums within which poetry prospers and accomplishes a rich variety of significances and effects. The collection’s contributors explore a range of post-war and contemporary poets writing in English, with some emphasis on modernist and avant-garde writing. Drawing on a variety of theoretical approaches, these essays address how work and labour manifest in and around such poetry.1 They explore questions like: What can poetry tell us about work? What kind of work is poetry? What kind of workers are poets? What can the act of writing poetry tell us about other kinds of work? What kind of work do poets do when they’re not writing poetry? How does poetry imagine ‘better’ work—work that is freer and more just, work that is less exploitative and less alienated?
If you start to look for references to work in modern and contemporary poetry, you’ll find them everywhere. A line from George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous (1968) evokes a perpetual busyness: “They will begin over, that is, / Over and over.”2 The poem “Money and Land” by Karen Brodine, from her collection Illegal Assembly (1980), lists the jobs she’s had: “berry-picker, baby-sitter, dance-teacher, writer, secretary, bread-baker, art model, waitress, house-cleaner, old woman’s companion, slide-mounter, writing teacher, dish-washer, paste-up person, typesetter, house-painter, inventory-taker, label-maker.”3 The first poem from Harryette Mullen’s S*PeRM**K*T (1992) draws together the poet’s work with that of a supermarket worker. “Lines assemble gutter and margin,” and among these lines of commodities is “[h]er hand scanning throwaway lines.”4 While poetry booklets have gutters and margins, and lines of poetry are scanned for their metre, the “gutter” is also proverbially where you may end up if you have no work, and the word “lines” implies the taxonomising of commodities via barcodes. “Her hand,” presumably that of a woman working on a checkout, becomes the labouring component. The focus on the hand alone suggests alienation, and the way capital disintegrates the worker into the components that create value and the components that don’t matter; probably the “she” whom this hand belongs to would rather be elsewhere. These actions fit Oppen’s description too: presumably they will occur “[o]ver and over” until the working day is done. And then the next day.
In Poetic Artifice: A Theory of 20th-Century Poetry (1978), Veronica Forrest-Thomson argues for poetry as a form where language is inherently autonomous from its everyday use. Forrest-Thomson’s argument confronts what she sees as the unambitious and impoverished spirit of post-war British poetry, exemplified by Philip Larkin. At the same time, we still find her own poetry inextricably bound to the everyday world of work. For instance, Forrest-Thomson writes in “Strike,” from On The Periphery (1976), that “Jobs were scarce and someone with a purple-point siamese to keep / In strawberries and cream has a certain standard of living. When I sold my rings and stopped buying clothes I knew / It was the end.” These ironized references to recession and poverty inevitably also imply their de-ironized versions.5 Even poetry that seems to be determined not to be about work can be understood in the shadow of work. One famous example is Frank O’Hara’s “A Step Away From Them,” in Lunch Poems (1964), which Peter Middleton discusses in the following chapter.
Within poetry, the theme of work can create a window onto much wider views of self, society, and universe. Since the end of the nineteenth century, the story of work in the West has, in its rough outlines, been the story of Taylorism and Fordism , of the construction and partial dismantling of the welfare state, and of the rise of neoliberalism and post-Fordism; we also could identify a distinct recent phase characterised by the growth of the gig economy and the use of digital platforms to organise work. It has also been the story of the interaction between the labour movement and new social movements, especially women’s liberation and feminism, and struggles for access to paid work and to careers, for more just recognition of who is a worker and what should count as work, and for the right to reject work. Finally, it has been the story of globalisation, and the intensifying connectivity and exploitation across the Global North/South divide.
The poetry explored here does not provide any straightforward reflection or distillation of this history. In plenty of cases, events in the world of work do emerge immediately and palpably in the poetry being written at the time. But poetry’s untimeliness can be just as significant. For instance, half a century ago, Language poetry aimed to subvert the hierarchy of author and reader, hoping to recruit the reader as a more active meaning-maker. This avant-garde strategy now appears as a foreshadowing of the dispersed digital labour of social media content, in which the roles of producer and consumer are likewise blurred. On the other hand, a long, complex backward glance can be discovered in relatively recent writing by J. H. Prynne, in its concern with a productivist ethos that does not merely romanticise pre-Taylorist craftwork. To take another example, Andrea Brady’s Wildfire: A Verse Essay On Obscurity And Illumination (2010) actively positions itself within a very large history of incendiary devices, from Greek fire to IEDs. Brady has also tried to make the work of poetry-writing more visible and accountable, letting the poem take shape online, while minutely registering her sources and inspirations. In the following fragment she invokes complicity, consumerism, and the mundane condemnation to the labour of self-reproduction:
The hope drunk in which we dress ourselves
for a day labour gaming
with maximum power and killer graphics
taking it hard, the must-haves this autumn
whinge at the prison of the veil.
Secularism is another orthodoxy we can’t shake,
to recognise the politics in fancy dress
also buries its charge under the base
though the countdown is not due to start
for you or your oldest child
or for the slaves you inherit after that.
Across the stanza a curious twist occurs between the pronouns “we” on the opening line and the “you” of the last two lines. The stanza starts with the kinds of internal fantasy people (“hope drunk”) use to sustain their energy “for a day labour gaming.” The word “gaming” might imply computer games (or gamification specifically7) and suggest how labour is mediated and transformed by technology. The word also brings to mind the labour of gendered and racialised performance in the workplace: that is, both submitting to ‘playing the game,’ and seeking where possible to ‘game’ your own domination. By the end of this stanza, what is really stressed is that capitalism is not a system where everyone equally suffers from “a day labour gaming.” Some of the people included in “we” are “you or your oldest child / or the slaves you inherit after that.” These “slaves” must include the estimated forty million people, mostly women, in slavery today.8 But Brady also, with deliberate crudeness, collapses distinctions between chattel slavery, indentured slavery, and wage slavery. Yes, there are many differences between inheriting human beings as property, and inheriting a position of structural privilege—but right now Brady’s poem is more interested in the similarities. To live ‘comfortably’ in capitalism, it says, is to be a slave-owner.
This rest of this introductory chapter maps some of the major themes of the collection, identifying dialogues across chapters, and offering some basic context and definitions. It begins with feminist approaches to work, looking at a variety of key terms such as reproductive labour, affective labour, and aesthetic labour; then touches on Marxian alienation; craftwork; publics and the labour of activists and citizens; corporeality and transcorporeality , colonialism and postcolonialism ; memory and performance; carceral labour; autoethnography; and precarity and postwork theory.
Manifold Labour
As Jane Commane writes, “work should be every bit as universal a theme as love, and yet too often it remains the unspoken, unsung business of our days.”9 The collection opens with Middleton’s “Show Your Working,” which mentions the “remarkable lack in modern and contemporary modernist poetry of explicit poetic treatments of contemporary labour conditions.”10 But there are plenty of exceptions. Middleton points to explicit accounts of industrial exploitation in Muriel Rukeyser’s US 1 (1938), Barry MacSweeney’s Black Torch (1978), or Mark Nowak’s Shut Up Shut Down (2004). To these we could add recent work in an investigative vein such as Alena Hairston’s The Logan Topographies (2007), Rita Wong’s Forage (2008), Frances Kruk’s Pin (2014), and Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women (2015), as well as more autoethnographic work such as Leslie Kaplan’s L’excès-l’usine (1982), translated by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap as Excess—The Factory (2018), Catherine Wagner’s My New Job (2009), or Karen Brodine’s Work Week (1977), Illegal Assembly (1980), and Woman Sitting at the Mach...