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"POETRY SHOULD RIDE THE BUS":

AMERICAN WOMEN WORKING-CLASS POETS

AND THE RHETORICS OF COMMUNITY

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of the Ohio State University

By

Karen Kovacik, BA., MA. *****

The Ohio State University

1997

Dissertation Committee: Approved by

Professor Jeredith Merrin, Adviser

Professor Andrea Lunsford

Professor David Citino Adviser

department of English UMI Number: 9731655

UMI Microform 9731655 Copyright 1997, by UMI Company. All rights reserved.

This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Copyright by Karen Kovacik 1997 ABSTRACT

Critics in working-class studies have argued that the defining characteristic of

working-class literature is its “communal” aesthetic. My dissertation supports this

hypothesis by demonstrating how “communities” are enacted rhetorically in a diverse body

of poetry by twenty-one American women poets of working-class backgrounds. Drawing

on the work of such writers as Gloria Anzaldua, Loraa Dee Cervantes, Tess Gallagher,

Linda McCarriston, Doriarme Laux and Thylias Moss, I examine recurring poetic structures

that inform a class-based solidarity. Individual chapters focus on key cultural sites: home

and neighborhood; the laboring body; the “pink-collar” workplaces of office and restaurant; the cross-class environments of schools and universities; and the Triangle fire of 1911—a

landmark event in women’s and labor history. Embracing what critic Janet Zandy has termed an “aesthetics of relationality,” these poets offer class-conscious responses to major schools of American poetry, such as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry or the Black Arts movement, and adapt conventions like the dramatic monologue or blazon to foreground particulars of classism or racism.

My method is to situate readings of poems in the contexts of African-American,

Latino/a, working-class and women’s history. Yet my dissertation also builds on recent ethnographic work stressing the importance of involving research subjects in the meaning- making process. At my suggestion, a number of poets in my sample have contributed autobiographical notes on class, race, poetic practice, and the material conditions that have hindered or fostered their writing. The poets, bora between 1940 and 1960, all came from families supported by blue-collar, pink-coUar, or low-level service-sector work, and many were the first in their families to attend college. They’ve worked jobs as donut makers, gas station attendants, waitresses, and secretaries, yet currently 18 out of 21 hold advanced degrees and are affiliated with academia. Given their individual achievements, these poets could be expected to celebrate upward mobility in their work; however, they refuse to assimilate quietly into the middle class. Rather, they address ongoing struggles between woricers and management in the putatively “classless,” post-industrial era and challenge cherished ideologies of the “melting pot,” individualism, and equality of opportunity.

in To my parents and in memory of my grandparents

IV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My dissertation, a study of collectivist aesthetics in the poetry of working-class women poets, has taught me again and again that the work of a single author owes a great debt to the communities she inhabits. In this space, I would like to acknowledge all who have contributed the support—intellectual, material, emotional, and spiritual—that has sustained me at every stage of this project.

I would like to thank Patricia Dobler, Chris Llewellyn, and Stephanie Strickland, whose panel on “Women and the Poetry of Work” at the 1995 Associated Writing

Programs conference in Pittsburgh initially inspired this study. I am also indebted to

Stephanie Strickland for generously providing me with a copy of her bibliography on women, poetry, and work.

I’m grateful to Janet Zandy, whose groundbreaking scholarly work on working- class women’s literature and whose steadfast commitments to working-class people have provided me with models f^r my own cnMcism. R”th Forman graciously consented to let me borrow the title of her poem “Poetry Should Ride the Bus”; I use it here with her permission.

I would like to thank my adviser, Jeredith Merrin, for her many kindnesses: her willingness to believe in me and my work when I did not; her editorial scrupulosity; and her unfailing advocacy on my behalf. I would also like to thank Andrea Lunsford for countless valuable bibliographic leads, for help with grant applications, and for inspiring me with her enthusiasm and warmth. My third committee member, David Citino, also provided me with much encouragement, including a necessary pep talk when I was just beginning to write and delicious, easy recipes for frittatas and risottos!

I would also like to thank Professor Leila Rupp of the Ohio State Department of

History and Professor Linda Brodkey of the Department of Literatures at the University of

Califomia-San Diego, who wrote letters on my behalf for the Presidential Fellowship competition. I am very grateful to the Ohio State University Graduate School, which awarded me that much appreciated year off from teaching.

For helping me to overcome many moments of despair and self-doubt and for sharing in my moments of attainment, I am grateful to my ABD group, including Allison,

Amitha, André, Andrea, Bert, Catita, Cathy, Chuck, Hans, Jim, Joan, Josh, Kayla, Lee,

Linda, Louise, Phil H., Phil T., and Tony.

For sustaining conversations, often over cups of decaf coffee or tea, while sprawled on their couches or seated at their (or my) kitchen tables, I would like to thank

Ellen Damsky, Gosia Gabrys, Ceci Gray, Marge Kielkopf, Mary Malloy, Eleni

Mavromatidou, and Ellen Seusy. For offering me examples of how to work for political change both inside and out of the academy. I’m indebted to Yoshie Furuhashi, Ken Petri, and all of my fellow members of GESO-OSU. Marilyn Annucci, Susan Grimm Dumbrys, and Katherine Sullivan also offered valuable insights on class, language, and poetry, as well as the examples of their own fine creative work. Thanks, too, to members and staff of the St. Thomas More Newman Center, for spiritual support and guidance.

For providing me with stories from their lives and for offering to read individual chapters, I am very grateful to the women poets of working-class backgrounds whose poetry is the subject of this study. I’m especially indebted to Gloria Anzaldua, Jan Beatty,

Nancy Vieira Couto, Patricia Dobler, Mary Fell, Tess Gallagher, Dorianne Laux, Linda

McCarriston, Donna Masini, Patricia Smith, Michelle Tokarczyk, and Janet Zandy.

VI I would like to thank my parents, Pete and Fran Kovacik, for providing a literacy- rich environment when I was growing up and for encouraging me to seek an education beyond high school, even though the effects of that education sometimes made me seem a stranger. My sister, Linda Kovacik, offered much encouragement throughout the lengthy writing process. Thanks, too, for the many words of comfort and inspiration from the

California Swanks— Ursula and Karen. And for living up to his feminist ideals, for his homemade tostadas, moussaka, and gado-gado, for backrubs with oil of patchouli, for helpful bibliographic references and invigorating exchanges of ideas, and for his wit and emotional honesty, I am grateful to my partner, Eric Swank.

Vll VTTA

July 21, 1959 ...... Bora - East Chicago, Indiana

1981...... B.A., Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana

1990...... M.A., Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio

1990- 1...... Instructor, Lakeland Community College, Mentor, Ohio

1991- 2...... Poet-in-Residence, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin

1992- 3...... University Fellow, The Ohio State University

1993- 6 ...... Teaching Assistant, Department of English, The Ohio State University

1996-7 ...... Presidential Fellow, The Ohio State University

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: English

vui TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Abstract...... ü

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgments ...... v

V ita...... vüi

Introduction ...... I

Chapters:

1. Homes in Poems: Emphasizing Gender, Class, and Race ...... 9

I. I ‘Tending the Walls of Self-Definition”: Home as Gendered Space 11

1.2 “Doll Houses That Don’t Exist”: Homes Marked by C lass ...... 19

1.3 “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway”: Race, Redlining, and

“Urban Removal” ...... 24

1.4 C o d a ...... 29

2. A Poetry of Motion: Working-Class Bodies at W ork ...... 33

2.1 “That Sweet Seduction of Revulsion / Desire”: the Working-Class

Father Eroticized and Grotesque ...... 39

2.2 Translating Silence and Gesture into Language: Poet-Daughters and

ix Working-Class Fathers ...... 49

2.3 Blazons of Weariness, Rage, and Pride: Working-Class Women of

Color and the Poetics of Manual Labor ...... 55

2.4 Coda: Thickening Plots, Bodies of Knowledge ...... 64

3. Performing Presence: the Poetry of Pink-Collar Resistance ...... 74

3.1 On “Office Wives” and “Servers”: The Evolution of Pink-Collar Work

in A m erica ...... 77

3.2 Beyond Accuracy: Chris Llewellyn, Karen Brodine, and the Typographic

Sublime...... 83

3.3 Avoiding Typecasting: the Performance of Time Off...... 89

3.4 “20 % minimum as long as the waitress doesn’t inflict bodily harm”:

A Manifesto on Tipping ...... 93

3.5 Beyond Bravado: the Meditative Lyrics of Jan Beatty and Karen Brodine 97

3.6 Coda: the Importance of Textual Performance for Pink-Collar Poets. .101

4. Class, Race, and the Class: Poems About Schooling ...... 106

4.1 “Field Trips to the Mill” Versus “Red Wagons” ...... I l l

4.2 “Common Sense” Versus “Book Learning”: the Estranging Effects of

Higher Education ...... 117

4.3 Trouble in the “Knowledge Factory”: Working-Class Women in the

Middle-Class Academy ...... 125

4.4 Coda: Choosing Class Consciousness ...... 133

5. Contemporary Women Working-Class Poets on the Triangle Fire ...... 138

5.1 Invoking Holy Revolution: Religious Discourse in the Triangle Poems 141

X 5.2 The Patchwork Under Pressure: Politicizing the Cento ...... 152

5.3 Gendered Escape Routes: Domestic Service, Activism, Marriage, Death 158

5.4 Giving Arrogance and Corruption a Form: the Poetics of the Exposé .. 166

5.5 “Where are the words of fire for my generation?”: Fell and Llewellyn on the

Poetics of Cultural Memory...... 170

5.6 The Triangle Poems as Examples of Working-Class Literary Production 173

Epilogue: Suggestions for Further Research ...... 181

Appendix: Biographical Notes on the Poets ...... 184

Bibliography ...... 190

XI INTRODUCTION

poetry should ride the bus in a fat woman’s Safeway bag between the greens n chicken wings to be served with Tuesday’s dinner.... —Ruth Forman'

talking proletarian talks of higher rent two months behind, landlords who live on lake shore drive or over where the grass is greener.. ..

talking proletarian talks until one long awaited day— we P'"e tired of talking. — Ana Castillo^

In March 1995,1 experienced what African-American working-class poet Carolyn

M. Rodgers would describe as an “amen” response. The unlikely setting for this lightning bolt of insight and recognition was an academic conference in Pittsburgh, at a panel on women, work, and poetry. There, Chris Llewellyn, who had written a collection of poems about the infamous Triangle fire, spoke of the urgent need to recuperate working-class women’s history in poetry. Patricia Dobler, a poet originally from the Armco Steel community of Middletown, Ohio, read aloud a number of recent poems by white working- class women, poems that admitted the tensions of being both a working-class woman and a poet, that resonated with my own history. In that hotel drawing room in an American city closely identified with working-class politics, I first got the idea of writing a book on women poets of the working classes. To say I was excited at the prospect would be an understatement. I had spent nine dispiriting months working on a dissertation about

Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Jorie Graham— the uses of science in their poetry—and that project seemed lifeless. Although I couldn’t envision the final shape of the new book, I felt drawn to these working-class women poets— the forms and techniques they employed, the issues that concemed them, the impact education had had on their work, their levels of class consciousness.

Over the next few months, aided by a bibliography compiled by poet Stephanie

Strickland, I located dozens of poetry collections by women poets of working-class backgrounds as well as major anthologies and critical works that focus on the literary production of working-class writers. Cary Nelson, in Repression and Recovery: Modem

American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945 (1989), redrew the map of literary modernism to include the poetry of social protest and commentary that had been excised from the canon during the Cold War-inflected New Critical period of literary study at the mid-century. Nelson’s reclamatory work has inspired several fine recent studies of literary prose in the Thirties, among them Paula Rabinowitz’s Labour and Desire: Women’s

Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America (1991), Barbara Foley’s Radical

Representations (1993), and Constance Coiner’s Better Red: The Writing and Resistance ofTillie Olsen and Meridel LeSueur (1995). And since 1990, several major anthologies that foreground issues of class and poetry have appeared, including Janet Zandy’s Calling

Home: Working-Class Women's Writings, and Nicholas Coles’ and Peter Oresick’s

Working Classics: Poems on Industrial Life (1990) and For a Living: The Poetry o f Work (1995). In myriad ways, these books treating working-class culture and left politics convinced me not only of the need for more reclamatory work on the Thirties but also of the wisdom of examining a body of poetry written in the so-called post-industrial era—a poetry that portrays the struggles of working people with dignity and complexity, acknowledges class solidarity, and bears witness to the racial and ethnic divisions complicating class identity in America.

A number of trends, movements, and events since the mid-century make the post-

World W ar U era—and literary representations of it—particularly worthy of attention: the decline in manufacturing and growth of lower-paying service sector jobs; the rise in consumerism and mass communications; the emphasis on the nuclear family with its polarized gender roles; the decrease in labor power; the struggles for civil rights; the women’s movement; the colonial war in Viemam; and the increasing denial on the part of

American politicians that the working class exists. The poems in this book speak to most of these postwar phenomena.

Critics in the growing discipline of working-class studies have argued that the defining characteristic of working-class literary production is its “communal” aesthetic. My research supports this hypothesis by demonstrating how “communities” are enacted rhetorically in the poetry of 21 women working-class poets. Drawing on the work of such poets as Gloria Anzaidûa, Ana Castillo, Loma Dee Cervantes, Tess Gallagher, Linda

McCarriston, Dorianne Laux and Thylias Moss, this dissertation explores recurring poetic forms and rhetorical structures that inform a class-based solidarity. Indeed, far from subscribing to the stereotype of the poet laboring in isolation, the poets in this study, I have found, refigure the lyric as a multivocal, socially engaged form and forge connections with their communities of origin via the class-conscious rhetorics of their poems. Janet Zandy, anthologist and proponent of the growing discipline of working-class studies, has observed that “the foregrounded working-class T’ is never isolated, but crowded from within with other voices” (1995b: 6). Rather, Zandy believes, writers who stay connected to their blue- collar roots cultivate an alternative “aesthetics of relationality” (1990: 8). Examples of such

an alternative aesthetic abound in these poets’ revisions of forms like the sonnet or the

cento; in their class-based responses to major schools of American poetry, such as those of

the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. Black Arts movement, or confessional poets; and in

their adaptations of such conventions as the dramatic monologue or the blazon to throw into

relief particulars of classism or racism. Reading the poetry of these women from working-

class backgrounds, I was often reminded of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet Robert Greeley’s

famous dictum: “Form is content.” However, for these poets that dictum would be better

reversed: “Content is form.” Whether writing about the cultural touchstone of the Triangle

fire or about working-class bodies on the job, the subject matter of their literary efforts

politicizes whatever formal strategies they adopt.

In each chapter, I focus on a specific cultural site. Chapter 1 examines the working-

class home as a discursive space in which poets construct complex identities marked by

race, class, and gender. Chapter 2—with sections on the eroticized heterosexual male

worker, working-class women of color, and the substitution of gesture for speech—

establishes the laboring body as the foundation of a class-based epistemological and

aesthetic system. Chapter 3 describes efforts of poetic and political resistance by women in

such pink-collar jobs as secretarial work and waitressing. Chapter 4 looks at poems that

represent schooling and increased opportunities for literacy as both enabling and alienating.

And Chapter 5 explores recent poems about the infamous Triangle fire, a cultural

touchstone for this postwar generation of working-class women poets.

Because I am interested in the poets’ ways of thinking about issues of audience and

“community,” I depart from current literary-critical practice, which generally eschews

commentary by the authors under study. The current distaste for authorial input was

inspired by post-structuralist theorists, such as Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, who rightly disparaged earlier critics for fetishizing the author and for contributing to the “great man of letters” syndrome, which made for a narrowly canonical and personality-driven literary studies. Yet the poets in my study, however gifted, have not amassed the cultural capital of a Wordsworth, Frost, or Eliot: I have sought their contributions of interpretive and biographical materials not to claim some extraordinary authorial status for them, but rather to collaborate on constructing a theoretical foundation for discussing class, community, and poetry, which will not alienate them from their own literary production.

Indeed, in recent articles, working-class studies proponents have commented on the inadequacy of using so-called “high theory” as a tool for analyzing the literary production of American working-class writers.^ Tim Libretti notes that Fredric Jameson, perhaps the foremost American theorist to foreground class in literary interpretation, refers to not a single working-class text in The Political Unconscious. Roxanne Rimstead observes that

“the mundane and messy sphere of material struggle, class identification, complicity, and the complexity of life in the concrete world have not been able to emerge through the highly abstract language and theory of literary discourse—whereas these subjectivities are palpable in testimonies about the lived experience of class and poverty” (211). I have, therefore, responded to Janet Zandy’s call for an “intertextual rather than theory-oriented cultural criticism” by integrating readings of poems, historicizing materials, and information contributed by the poets (qtd. in Rimstead 211). This departure from conventional literary- critical practice builds on a recent foundation of qualitative and feminist research methods in such disciplines as sociology, composition studies, and anthropology; such methods seek to redress the power differential inherent in traditional modes of research and to minimize the distance between the researcher and the “object” of her research.

Of the 21 poets in my sample, three are African-American, three Chicana, and fifteen Euro-American.’’ Bom between 1940 and 1960, all originally came from families supported by blue-collar, pink-collar, or low-level service sector work, and many were the first in their families to attend college. Together, they’ve held jobs as donut makers, field workers, gas station attendants, waitresses, cooks, typesetters, and secretaries, and each

“performs” class in her poetry. Yet, although many of the poets have supported themselves

through blue- or pink-collar work, 18 out of 21 hold advanced degrees and are in some

way affiliated with academia. This is so because I have relied largely on book-length

collections and special anthologies of women’s writing. In other words, these poets have

established ties to the literary world, have some familiarity with the canonical poetic

tradition, and, in most cases, have participated in poetry workshops. Given their individual

achievements in publishing and higher education, these poets might be expected to celebrate

upward mobility in their work. Here, however, I am reminded of Janet Zandy’s memorable

comparison of the working-class woman writer to Lot’s wife, in that she must constantly

“look back” to her origins: “Transformation for the individual working-class woman writer

is not an evolution from a kind of brutish, non-middle-class state up and out into the

dominant culture.... In transforming herself, she is linked to a collective consciousness,

a class" (1990: 12). Refusing simply to assimilate into the middle class, these poets address

ongoing struggles between workers and management in this putatf cly “classless,” post­

industrial era; represent the dissonances among structures for reinscribing sexism, racism,

and classism; and challenge cherished American ideologies of the “melting pot,”

individualism, upward mobility, and equality of opportunity.

My identity as a white poet and academic from a working-class background has

both enriched and complicated my analysis. I initially came to the project, feeling a kinship

with some of the poets whose work I am including: Patricia Dobler, whose “Field Trip to

the Mill” suggests the awe and danger of those cavernous places that swallowed up many

of my relatives; Nancy Vieira Couto, whose “Living in the La Brea Tar Pits”— about the

overcrowding in tiny working-class homes—reminds me of my Uncle Tony Szymonik,

who slept in an armchair in the.front room because there was no other space for him; and Kate Daniels, whose “Self-Portrait with Politics” intimates how higher education—and poetry—can both connect and distance the working-class poet from her community of origin. Rather than calling attention to my “insider’s” knowledge of class—tliat which I hadn’t acquired from textual authorities— I have generally relegated such insights to the endnotes either from a lack of courage or from the supposition—correct, I think— that my stories and images of class difference would distract and detract from the poets’ own. Yet I have tried to write from the position of an interested observer who reveals a spirit of solidarity by virtue of the kinds of things she notices.

As a white woman in a racist society, I have had to resist the urge to smoothe over differences of race, region, or culture. Such differences often loomed large, most tellingly in the silences of white poets on issues of race. Those silences and the admonishing and instructive voices of poets and critics of color have challenged me to write more explicitly about historical experiences of difference both in this text and in my own poetry dealing with working-class issues. Race and gender, rather than being distinct from class, construct it. In this poetry, we frequently see images of workers in occupations segregated by race and sex—due to the historical proletarianization of people of color in America via slavery and internal colonization, first and foremost, and then via the ongoing exclusionary practices of workplaces and union halls. On the other hand, these poets offer evidence of some common struggles and aspirations despite differences of race, ethnicity, or region.

While I am sensitive to bell hooks’ admonition (1990) that there are some “spaces white

[critics] cannot occupy,” I continue to believe in a literary criticism and a multi-ethnic working-class movement that would move beyond the confines of identity politics (55).

To conclude this introduction, I would like to redirect the reader’s attention to the epigraphs. The excerpts from Ruth Forman’s and Ana Castillo’s work suggest something of the remarkable tonal range of the poems In this study. Forman, an African-American working-class poet from Rochester, New York, not only lent her poem’s title to this dissertation but also her exuberant vision of a poetry ordinary enough to grace the dinner

table or ride a city bus. The excerpt from Chicago poet Ana Castillo’s “ 1975” offers

something else: the expression of a frustration so profound that it is on the verge of being

transmuted into rage. Toni Morrison asserted in The Bluest Eye that “there is a sense of

being in anger. A reality and a presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.”

The poems in this dissertation represent the American working classes as neither invisible

nor quiescent, and in this era of downsizing and legislative assaults on the working poor, such an engaged, relational poetics, as Regenia Gagnier has suggested, can further "the dream of relations beyond indifference and domination” (27).

‘ Ruth Forman, We Are the Young Magicians, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993): 10. ■ Ana Castillo, “ 1975,” My Father Was a Toltec and Selected Poems, 1973-1988 (New York: Norton, 1995): 134-135. ^ Libretti, “Is There a Working Class in U.S. Literature? Race Ethnicity, and the Proletarian Litera^ Tradition,” Radical Teacher 46 (Spring 1995): 22-26; Rimstead, “Between Theories and Anti-Theories: Moving Toward Marginal Women’s Subjectivities,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 1 & 2 (1995): 199-218. ■* See Appendix for biographical notes on each of the poets. CHAPTER 1

HOMES IN POEMS:

EMPHASIZING GENDER, CLASS, AND RACE

Whether it is a tenement, a barrio, a ghetto, a neighborhood, the project, the block, the stoop, the backyard, the tenant farm, the comer, four wails, or hallowed ground, finding a place in the world where one can be at home is crucial. Home is literal: a place where you struggle together to survive; or a dream: “a real home,” something just out of one’s grasp; or a nightmare: a place to escape in order to survive as an individual.... Writing is also a way of locating oneself, a way of finding a home in an inhospitable universe. — Janet Zandy, Introduction, Calling Home

Literal or metaphorical, homes figure prominently in the work of most writers. Yet, as Janet Zandy's riff suggests, the cultural site of home is accorded particular weight in the writings of working-class women. The reasons for this preoccupation with home are various. In the culture at large, particularly in the Fifties and early Sixties when these poets were children, women were clearly identified with domestic space— as caretakers and as housewives. Although working-class women, especially women of color, could ill afford to subscribe to the stay-at-home “domestic ideal,” the television and magazines offered countless representations of spotless middle-class living rooms and of cheeiy mothers preparing casseroles or gushing over new appliances. Yet countering those widely promulgated images of domestic bliss were poems by such writers as Robert Lowell,

Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, which revealed the hostilities and anxieties of family life.

Plath, Sexton, and Adrienne Rich particularly emphasized the emotional neglect and outright violence that women experience at home. By suggesting the breadth of the divide between ideal and actuality, these “confessional” poets gave a certain permission to subsequent generations of writers to undertake similar exposes of domestic turbulence. The profound inter-generational conflicts during the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, and the women’s movement further called attention to the politicized nature of the putatively private sphere of home.

The poets whose work I discuss in this chapter—Ana Castillo, Lorna Dee

Cervantes, Nancy Vieira Couto, Patricia Dobler, Linda McCarriston, Donna Masini, and

Carolyn M. Rodgers— view “home” through an array of politicized lenses. Differences of region, or race contribute to their varied representations of domestic space. While all of the poets include some material markers of class in their work, some also explicitly call attention to aspects of working-class home life that are gendered or raced. I have dividea their poems into three groups: one that represents home as a site of gendered conflict or inequity; another that foregrounds material limitations, such as overcrowding and structural damage; and a third that focuses on racist zoning practices, including redlining or “urban removal.” Taken together, these poems speak to the dearth of representations of working- class homes not only in the dominant culture but also in women’s studies and in the poetry of working-class men. And writing about “home,” as Janet Zandy has suggested, becomes in turn “a way of locating [themselves], a way of finding a home in an inhospitable universe.”

10 ‘Tending the Walls of Self-Definition”; Home as Gendered Space'

Wage differentials between men and women, the reality of unpaid domestic labor, employment segregation by race and gender, the prevalence of domestic violence, the

“double shift” of working-class women who labor at a job and at home— these material

conditions, involving gendered imbalances of power, underlie poetic representations of

domestic space. By emphasizing patriarchal power relations, the poetry of working-class

women, white and Chicana, differs significantly from that of their male counterparts. In

prominent anthologies such as Working Classics and For a Living, it is the women poets

who consistently write about home with critical complexity, while the majority of the men

ignore domestic space entirely or engage with it sentimentally, erasing gendered conflicts

altogether.^ Tom Way man, a prominent working-class critic and poet, has gone so far as

to argue that poets of the working classes should represent the world of work

exclusively— the modes of production rather than the modes of dwelling— a practice that, if

accepted, would effectively eliminate a significant portion of working-class women’s

poetry.^ By limiting subject matter for poems, Wayman hopes to keep the focus on a

certain kind of class struggle that has been underrepresented in canonical poetry. Indeed,

there are risks involved when depicting gendered conflicts: working-class poets have been

branded traitors to their class and, in some instances, to their race for having dared to write

about such topics as domestic violence or alcoholism in the family. Yet glossing over such

conflicts forces women poets who have suffered as women to suppress their anger and,

with it, their visions of social change.

Nevertheless, in contrast to earlier generations of feminist writers, this group

represents differences among women. For example, Patricia Dobler, in “Consumers,”

offers a portrait of the relative prosperity and ease of some white working-class families

during the boom period after World War H, while emphasizing the emptiness and anxieties

II attending the domestic ideal and the consumer frenzy of that era. By contrast. Ana

Castillo’s “Saturdays” depicts the “double shift" of a Chicana factory worker and mother, on the job and at home. This factory worker has no access to the labor-saving appliances and consumer luxuries that the white family does. Furthermore, women’s responses to sexism, particularly to domestic violence, differ, given the support they receive and the choices to which they have access. Linda McCarriston’s “Dusk” looks in on a trailer home that is the scene of frequent violence by a man against his wife and children; what makes the poem particularly claustrophobic is the sense of entrapment not only within the tiny trailer world but in the space beyond it—the patriarchal courts, police, and church all conspiring to abet the violent husband and father by enforcing his authority. Loma Dee

Cervantes, in a series of poems constructs a mythos of a multigenerational Chicana women’s household, in which grandmother, mother, and granddaughter band together to build a home that allows them some comfort, beauty, dignity and freedom from male violence.

. A closer examination of Dobler’s “Consumers” and Castillo’s “Saturdays”—both of which represent the gendered division of labor within and outside the home—reveals instructive differences in life choices available to working-class women of different races and regions. Economic historians Teresa L. Amott and Julie A. Matthaei describe the greater economic opportunities for white families, including working-class ones, during the postwar era:

Wartime prosperity and the GI Bill made home ownership a possibility for many white families, and suburbs grew up around urban centers. By I960, one-third of the U.S. population resided in the suburbs, which were almost exclusively white enclaves. (Not until the fair-housing struggles of the 1960s did African-Americans and other people of color begin to gain entry in suburban housing developments.) White women in the suburbs spent substantial amounts of time on housework and child care.One study found that women actually spent more time on housework in 1960 than in the 1920s.'*

12 Because of the opportunities for white working-class men to earn a family wage in that period, European-American women, more than their working-class counterparts of color, worked less outside the home and were more likely to emulate the domestic ideal of housewife/mother.

Dobler, raised in the steel and paper milling community of Middletown, Ohio, focuses on the discomfort of female relatives as they accrue new possessions during the period of postwar expansion and consumption’/

Suddenly they were ail rich. Pickups bloomed with trailer hitches, outboard motors shone in the driveways. They’d convoy to the lake, swim and grill steaks until the men left for 4 to 12’s.

Daily, the women had something new to talk about, but the chromed machines purring in their kitchens and the strangeness of old rooms masked with stiff brocade unnerved them; frowning, they fingered drapes r.. carpets like curators. (24)

The inanimate objects e ude an ease and a radiance that the women themselves lack: the pickups “bloomed,” the motors “shone,” the chromed machines “purr[ed],” while the

“masked” and “stiff’ decorations cause the women to feel like curators, mere keepers of possessions, in their own homes. And although the families have acquired many of the trappings of middle-class existence, the husbands continue to respond to the caprices of working-class shifts at the mill. Thus, the women in the poem, understanding how ephemeral this new-found prosperity is, “pack fat onto bellies and thighs / as if preparing for a long journey on foot / through a frozen country, a journey / they would have to take alone and without provision.” The turn at the end of this poem recalls the peasant past of

13 the Central European immigrants who came to settle in the Midwest’s mill and mining regions. Those early deprivations of shelter, warmth, and food continue to haunt.

Sociologist Lillian B. Rubin, in Worlds of Pain, her 1976 study of white working- class couples, observed that wives consistently mentioned their husbands’ ability to work steadily when asked what they valued most about their men. “He doesn’t drink’’ and “He doesn’t hit me” were the next two most frequent responses. Rubin writes: “That this response is class-related is evident from the fact that not one woman in the professional middle-class families mentioned any of these qualities when answering the same question”

(93). Rather middle-class wives of that period took for granted their husband’s ability to provide not only necessities but comforts, as well. Rubin further acknowledges that for working-class women, “even when men are earning a reasonably good living, it is never

‘taken for granted’ when financial insecurity and marginality are woven into the fabric of life” (94).

In “Consumers,” Dobler represents the gendered division of labor—male breadwinners, female homemakers—without overtly critiquing it. Rather, she is emphasizing the insecurity that afflicts working-class women even in times of high employment. Ana Castillo’s “Saturdays,” by contrast, offers a sardonic portrait of a

Mexican wife living in Chicago in 1968, who holds down a factory job while catering to her husband. For her Saturday is no day of rest:

Because she worked all week away from home, gone from 5 to 5, Saturdays she did the laundry, pulled the wringer machine to the kitchen sink, and hung the clothes out on die line. At night, we took it down and ironed. Mine were his handkerchiefs and boxer shorts. She did his work pants (never wom on the street) and shirts, pressed the collars and cuffs, just so— (6)

14 Unlike the women in “Consumers,” this wife cannot afford new appliances and doesn’t have the luxury of leisure time. Both wife’s and husband’s wages are necessary to support the family. Furthermore, the sly enjambment between work and pants suggests a profound inequity in the marital relationship: “She did his work . . . ” Not only is the husband exempted from the “second shift,”* he is specially pampered by his hardworking wife. As the women around him iron, “he bathe[s], / don[s] the tailor-made silk suit / bought on her credit, ha[s] her / adjust the tie.”

Critic Norma Alarcon has commented that “irony is one of Castillo’s trademarks.

Irony often appears when experience is viewed after-the-fact or in opposition to another’s subjectivity.”^ Specifically, Castillo deploys ironic moves to assert a feminist subjectivity in a cultural context (whether Anglo or Chicano) that would undermine women’s agency.

Thus, in the second stanza of “Saturdays,” she adds a sardonic final twist:

“How do I look?” “Bien,” went on ironing. That’s why he married her, a Mexican woman, like his mother, not like they were in Chicago, not like the one he was going out to meet.

The wife virtually disappears in this stanza. Not even meriting a tag line, she is reduced to a rote response, a domestic gesture, a clone of mother, an alternative to the sexualized woman who is not suitable to be a wife.

While Dobler and Castillo emphasize the gendered division of labor in white and

Chicano households, neither attends specifically to men’s violence against women, as

Linda McCarriston, a poet from Lynn, Massachusetts, does in “Dusk.”® A class-based critique of patriarchy, McCarriston’s poem movingly dramatizes the isolation of a working- class woman whose husband physically and sexually abuses her and her children. “Who

15 first saw in houselights / a haven?” the speaker asks, for in this trailer home, “women pay /

for being women,” and “children / are winnowed, wheat from chaff.” The narrator’s initial

tone, expansive and biblical, changes when she describes a woman on the verge of being

raped by her husband,“in an armlock before her / bedroom door, her look a / cadaver’s.”

That sense of entrapment is amplified by McCarriston’s description of the heavy-boughed

trees outside the trailer home, which, as dusk comes on, take on the shapes of men in the patriarchal power structure: judges “gowned and learned,” “thick bodies of cops,” priests,

“other fellow elbow-benders.” The court, the law enforcement officials, and the church serve only to protect the abusive husband and father’s privileges of access and abuse.

Loma Dee Cervantes, raised in San José, California, also writes about domestic violence, though she emphasizes the solidarity among three generations of women in her

Chicana working-class family, rather than their isolation. Cervantes wrote “Beneath the

Shadow of the Freeway,” a long poem that celebrates a woman-centered household, to counter textbook stereotypes of Chicana women as docile and weak: “I was going to college and taking a lot of Chicano culture and sociology courses, and the whole notion of the family of the patriarch... I could not buy at all. It was not the situation of a lot of my friends I was growing up with.”® Set in a working-class neighborhood that has been bisected by fireeways—a common occurrence because of the Federal government’s privilege of eminent domain—Cervantes’s poem portrays three generations of women banding together against male violence and drunkenness.

The poem shifts constantly between the timeless imagery of folk wisdom and fairytales and the historically and culturally situated depictions of contemporary social problems, as in this description of the cooperative, matriarchal household in section two:

We were a woman family: Grandma, our innocent Queen; Mama, the Swift Knight, Fearless Warrior. Mama wanted to be Princess instead.

16 I know that. Even now she dreams of taffeta and foot-high tiaras.

Myself: I could never decide. So I turned to books, those staunch, upright men. I became Scribe: Translator of Foreign Mail, interpreting letters from the government, notices of dissolved marriages and Welfare stipulations. I paid the bills, did light man-work, fixed faucets, insured everything against all leaks.

Cervantes creates a dense, alternative mythology, in which the storybook roles traditionally

allotted to women are reinterpreted or expanded. Grandma is an “innocent Queen,” who

waters flowers in the windowbox and interprets the languages of birds, but she is also, the poem later tells us, the survivor of a twenty-five-year abusive marriage, who eventually left her destructive husband and built her own house with “cocky, disheveled carpentry.”

Mama is a “Fearless Warrior” with a blunt tough voice, as when she says of her mother,

“It’s her own fault, / getting screwed by a man for that long. / Sure as shit wasn’t hard.”

The granddaughter summarizes the lessons she learned from mother and grandmother in the related poem, “Crow”:

Women taught me to clean

and then build my own house. Before men came they whispered. Know good polished oak.

Leant hammer and Phillips. Learn socket and rivet. I ran over rocks and gravel they placed

by hand, leaving burly arguments to fester the bedrooms. With my best jeans, a twenty and a shepherd pup, I ran

flushed and shadowed by no one alone 1 settled stiff in mouth with the words women gave me. (19)

17 Women, in this vision of home, perform both traditionally masculine and feminine household tasks, and they are responsible for passing on the skills in carpentry, the gender solidarity, and the ways with words that will sustain the granddaughter. Literary critic

Carmen Ramos Escandon has noted the importance of home-grown varieties of feminist models within Chicana communities: “Contrary to the belief that North American feminism made Chicanas aware of their rights and strengths. Chicanas have consistently argued that the model for their role in the community and the source of pride in their own sex has come from their mothers and grandmothers.”' ' Cervantes celebrates that “source of pride” in the series of poems that tell complicated stories of gender, language, and resistance within a

Chicana family.

Given the fact that recent studies of household work indicate a persistent unwillingness by men to share the labor, given the prevalence of domestic violence, and given ongoing disparities of wages earned by men and women within the same ethnic group, home remains an important cultural site for working-class women’s literary production. While critics like Tom Wayman would showcase the industrial worker as the only representative of the working classes, poets Linda McCarriston, Ana Castillo, Patricia

Dobler, and Loma Dee Cervantes offer broader and variously textured images of working- class lives in their poems about home. As Kim Moody has argued, “The working class cannot be understood simply by the products it makes or services it performs. Rather, it is a complex, constantly evolving social formation.. . . [Tit includes not only its jobholders, but those who grow up in its homes and those who retire from the labor force...; in its ranks are those who work at home and raise its children.”'^

18 “Doll Houses That Don’t Exist”: Homes Marked by Class‘d

Across the street from the tiny apartment in Union City, New Jersey, where I spent the first ten years of my life was a factory. It was a short squat building of yellow brick, plunked between a concrete schoolyard and a two-family house. Occasionally, the door would be opened, and I could see within the gray darkness spools of white thread spinning. I knew that women’s hands kept those spools spinning, but I never saw them ... —Janet Zandy, Introduction, Calling Home

In the previous section, I suggested the contribution working-class women poets

have made to working-class (men’s) literatures. More than their working-class male

counterparts, these women poets exhibit a consciousness of gender inequities. In this

section, I turn to representations of the material conditions of such homes, such as

overcrowding and structural damage. Indeed, in their frequent invocation of the material

differences of working-class homes, families and neighborhoods, working-class women

also distinguish themselves from their white middle-class feminist counterparts. Unlike the

fey bohemianism of Adrienne Rich’s “Living in Sin”—a poem that explores with some

irony a middle-class couple’s attempts at slumming and the gendered conflicts that arise—

or Louise Gluck’s poems of bourgeois divorce in Meadowlands —in which husband and

wife argue over the furniture and the amount of meat to order for a party—the poems in this chapter testify to working-class lives in which money is always tight, the space feels too

small, and homes are often located in neighborhoods bisected by freeways or near toxic

waste sites. Common among working-class women poets of this generation is

acknowledgment of the interrelated nature of home and work. They depict parents as

19 workers, offer images of industry and other employers located in working-class

neighborhoods, and vividly evoke the physical privations (and often the creative domestic

adaptations) that arise when money is in short supply.

Nancy Vieira Couto’s “Living in the La Brea Tar Pits” employs a dinosaur

metaphor to suggest the overcrowding and competition for attention that occurs when an

elderly woman comes to live in her married daughter’s house. Donna Masini has a series of

poems about her family’s ill-fated move from Brooklyn to suburban Staten Island, where

they discovered that their new house had been built on a former swamp and was subject to

frequent flooding. Motifs of cold and hunger recur in Michelle Tokarczyk’s book. The

House I ’m Running From, and visual and olfactory images of local industries dominating

entire neighborhoods occur in poems by Loma Dee Cervantes and Jan Beatty. In Beatty’s

“Pittsburgh Poem,” an elderly widow carefully sweeps her concrete front yard in the

shadow of the city’s now barren J & L mill—“taking care,” the narrator tells us, “of

something invisible, the listless air, / her life.” These poems about home assert an ethics of

care and common survival even as they bear witness to the hardships of struggling for

work and maintaining a modest home.

The following poems make use of defamiliarizing techniques to render the material

living conditions of two working-class homes with a vividness that verges on the surreal.

In the first poem, “Living in the La Brea Tar Pits,” Nancy Vieira Couto, a Portuguese-

American poet from New Bedford, Massachusetts, offers images of intergenerational conflict.’"* Taking its title from the famous site of dinosaur excavations, Couto’s poem depends upon ironic understatement and an extended reptilian metaphor to suggest the awkwardness, tenderness, and hostility that arise in a working-class home when an invalid

family member comes to stay. “Living” is also, of course, about class, about a family that, unlike the middle-class or the rich, doesn’t pay other people to take care of its elderly. The

first section of the two-part poem descdbes a day in the life of a married couple who are

20 nursing the wife’s critically ill mother. The ironic narrator observes the elderly patient being placed by the picture window “of her son-in-law’s house... by the table with the lamp and bowling trophy. / The drapes sweep apart like fronds” (5). The house bears markers of working-class habits, tastes, and values and also of the era of dinosaurs.

The sick woman is a grotesque figure, a “brontosaurus” who watches out the window as “Volkswagens line up like M & Ms,” who “mangles a small piece [of steak] between her tough / gums”—“her taste,” the narrator tells us drily, running “these days to

Kellogg’s Com Flakes and baby cereals.” When evening comes, she’s wheeled to a different “window,” that of the TV, while the rest of the family eats in the kitchen. Her son-in-law, a virile, intimidating figure, eats the meat the old woman cannot, dominates the family with his loud talk, and competes with his mother-in-law for his wife’s time and attention. The narrator informs us that the TV is going bad, and the elderly woman can’t tell

“if there [are] four lovely Lennon sisters, or three”—a reference to Lawrence Welk, whose patriotic, American-dream family show was popular among white working-class audiences in the Sixties perhaps because that dream had proved elusive in real life. The peppy upbeat antics of the Welk ’fam ily” only accentuate the gendered, intergenerational tension in this home.

In the second scene, both mother-in-law and wife have become “extinct,” and the husband, himself an invalid, stares out the window at his neighbors’ “shiny new Toyotas.”

Now a dinosaur as well, he “wedges his fifty-foot frame into his favorite / chair, curling his tail over the armrest” and watches old Zorro remns— the show about an aristocratic

Spanish Robin Hood who robs the rich to give to the poor—unül “the horizontal hold goes haywire.” He is oversized, angry, and irrelevant—a “tyrannosaums,” the narrator tells us, who “thuds through life, / what’s left.” Now the conflict is between him and his adult children. He who despised his mother-in-law for being waited upon has become dependent himself.'^ That competition for attention and resources is movingly underscored by the

21 parallel circumstances of mother-in-law and son-in-law and by the transposing of dinosaur imagery onto an ordinary working-class home.'^

The idea of home as a physical and emotional space endangered by the very mobility promised by the ideology of the American dream recurs in a series of poems by

Italian-American poet Donna Masini, from Brooklyn, New York.” Inspired by her family’s move from Brooklyn to Staten Island when she was nine, Masini’s poem “Getting

Out of Where We Came From” chronicles the profound disappointment experienced by her family when their new house continually flooded:

In 1963 grease-soaked, shadowed, we ferried the harbor to a new duplex. The model home. Barbecues, mortgages. Where will we get the money? The bridge went up. The basement flooded. Up to our knees in water we bailed and bailed. In their yards the neighbors laughed and drank and shook their heads. Toe bad they didn 't know the house was built on a swamp. (69)

A related poem, “Home,” begins with an epigraph from Psalm 49: “Their inward thought is that their houses shall continue forever, and their dwelling place to all generations.” Read in the context of the entire psalm, which is about how the rich attempt to achieve immortality on earth by naming lands after themselves and bequeathing material possessions to their heirs, that verse is very much ironic: the home in Masini’s poem, anything but permanent; appears to be reverting to the marshland on which it was built. The parents’ efforts at upward mobility have instead occasioned regret and despair:

Water collected in that house. My father could not look at me. It became dense with us the wallpaper peeled, hung in long damp strips, the basement flooded the backyard sunk under the weight of rain. Storms, floods, the weather of childhood. ..(11-12)

22 Over time, the house assumes a kind of agency. The wemess of the house is personified as female, a haunting presence connected to women’s menstrual cycles and described as

“gravid.” If anything, it seems pregnant with revenge. “We had tampered with something,” says the narrator, identifying a motive behind the house’s punishing moisture. The family

members blame themselves for their misfortune.

But in this and related poems about the move there is the sense that Masini’s

working-class family, limited by income, and disconnected from the networks of power

and money of the upper and middle classes, were themselves victims. Masini has conceded

that “underneath the poem is the knowledge that there was never a way out for my family.

What they saw as a good move had its disastrous side.. . . Underneath the poem [was] the

feeling that my family was always sinking. We were soaked with it—all that lost promise,

all that despair, all that depression That destructive kind of rain. That kind of danger.

People who made the wrong choices or who didn’t have luck in the material way.”'® Both

“Home” and “Getting Out of Where We Came From” suggest the insidiousness of the myth of American individualism—if one works hard enough, one will achieve material success— for in the event of setbacks, one tends to seek only individual causes. Yet it is the

very promise of upward mobility available to individuals, combined with the alliance between government and business, that has rendered a working-class political movement

not viable.

The material conditions that render existence fragile for working people— the specter of unemployment, the difficulty of obtaining and furnishing a home—make the

American-dream notion of “home” intensely conflicted. Poems such as these, through their defamiliarizing techniques, dramatize the discrepancy between dream and actuality.

23 ‘Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway”: Race, Redlining, and “Urban Removal ,19

All brown all around, we are safe. But watch us drive into a neighborhood of another color and our knees go shakity-shake and our car windows get rolled up tight... —Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street

In their poems about home and neighborhood, white working-class women poets rarely write explicitly about race. No doubt this silence can be attributed to the “race- neutral” positions whites have historically occupied in a dominant cultural formation that regards people of color as Other. Such a racial hierarchy, as further chapters of this study will emphasize, has enforced a longstanding segregation in every arena of American life and has contributed to what historian David Roediger refers to as the “wages of whiteness,” the additional income and privileges whites reap because of their allegiance to their racial identity.-" Racist zoning and law enforcement practices, forced displacement, substandard social services, and marginalization in low-wage sectors of the economy are among the additional obstacles that working-class people of color have had to confront in segregated barrios and ghettoes. Historians Amott and Matthaei have detailed the living conditions that African-Americans, who had migrated from the South, encountered when they moved to Northern industrial cities:

Housing discrimination and the pressures of continued migration caused extreme overcrowding in Black ghettoes. Fires, rats, and inadequate plumbing characterized the housing conditions to which African Americans were restricted by zoning laws and racial covenants (agreements not to sell property to African Americans, Jews, and other groups) Children were exposed daily to gambling and crime on the streets as white communities drove commercial entertainment and vice districts out of their commimities to locations in or near Black communities. (169)

24 Later, even when anti-discrimination housing codes were developed after the passage of the

Civil Rights Act of 1965, blacks who moved to primarily white communities were nonetheless subjected to harassment and violence.

Chicano/a and Mexican neighborhoods, meanwhile, were razed or bisected during the massive “urban removal” of the 1950s in order to make room for interstate highways or public buildings, and hundreds of thousands of people of color were displaced:

In Los Angeles, for example, the San Bemadino, Santa Ana, Long Beach, and Pomona freeways were all built through the barrios. The people of Chavez Ravine, a Mexican neighborhood in Los Angeles, had to be forcibly removed when their neighborhood was handed over to Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Dodgers baseball team, for development. Mexican neighborhoods in Detroit, Chicago, and other cities suffered a sin^ar fate. (Amott and Matthaei 81-82)

City planners simply overrode any opposition raised by inhabitants of such neighborhoods, seizing the land via the federal government’s power of “eminent domain.” For Mexicans and Chicanos, such racist public policies recalled the American govemment’s seizure of

Mexican . id (now the southwestern region of the U.S.) after the Treaty of Guadalupe-

Hidalgo in 1848.

When we turn to the poetry of working-class women of color, we often see representations of home that foreground issues of race. Loma Dee Cervantes has written several poems— including “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway” and “Freeway 280”— about San Jose’s Mexican communities’ attempts to rebuild after “urban removal.”

African-American poets Patricia Smith, Thylias Moss, and Carolyn M. Rodgers, whose parents emigrated from the South, have all written about the overcrowding, crime, and inadequate public services in Black urban communities— and most important, race-based segregation or “redlining”— in the North. Smith has devoted an entire book. Close to

Death, about the limited life opportunities of black men in this country. Moss frequently depicts Southern Black communities during the Jim Crow era. Rodgers, in “47th &

25 Vincennes,” writes about Chicago children in the 1970s, trying to fly a kite on a glass- strewn street comer near one of many liquor stores zoned into the city’s Black neighborhoods.*'

Occasionally, a white poet will also address issues of racism in a poem about home and neighborhood. Patricia Dobler, for instance, writes about the conspicuous absence of blacks in “Steelmark Day Parade, 1961,” a poem that commemorates an annual ritual of neighborhood pride in the manufacturing community of Middletown, Ohio. When a visitor from Chicago inquires about the absence of African-Americans, the speaker admits:

[T]hey don’t exist in 1961. Even the word Black lies hidden in old wood houses, cooped in dim regions between the railroad tracks and the Pentecostal church, forbidden to make steel or wear the steelmark branded on the hardhats of the town’s blond men. (23)

The blacks are literally shunted to the margins—"hidden” away, “cooped” up, and

“forbidden” to do the same work as the town’s white men— and the poem dramatizes the obliviousness of the white ethnic working-class community to the fates of these “other”

Americans. It is only through an intervention from an outside visitor that the white speaker, an insider to the community, experiences a shift of consciousness.

While Dobler’s speaker positions herself at the center, Loma Dee Cervantes’s speaker in “Freeway 280” expresses her estrangement from dominant Anglo culture. After a freeway is built through a Mexican working-class neighborhood of San José, the residents, including the poem’s speaker, acknowledge both the irretrievable losses incurred because of the construction of the road and also the persistence of communal bonds despite the “raised scar” that is Freeway 280. Initially, the speaker lists all that was removed for the freeway to be built: “Las casitas near the gray cannery, / nestled amid wild abrazos of climbing roses / and man-high red geraniums” (39). The use of the diminutive “casitas”

26 suggests an elegiac affection for the small homes that were razed—a sentiment that is echoed by the metaphorical “wild abrazo” (embrace) of the climbing roses. One gets a sense of the care that residents took with their homes, their efforts to cultivate natural beauty despite the dingy cannery looming nearby. Clearly, a way of life has been disrupted.

Yet, in the next stanza, Cervantes describes the resilience of the organic—the fruit

trees and gardens of former inhabitants:

But under the fake windsounds of the open lanes, in the abandoned lots below, new grasses sprout, wild mustard remembers, old gardens come back stronger than they were, trees have been left standing in their yards. Albaricoqueros, cerezos, nogales. .. Viejitas come here with paper bags to gather greens. Espinaca, verdolagas, yerbabuena. ..

The vacant land beneath the concrete and steel expanse of the highway has renewed itself and become a community park. The use of the Spanish names for fruit and nut trees

(apricot, cherry, walnut) and for the salad greens and herbs (spinach, purslane, mint) is itself a choice of emblematic resilience and resistance to the constant encroachment by

Anglo culture.^^ The building of the freeway in the middle of a Mexican neighborhood no doubt felt like yet another colonization for the people who lived there, still another displacement in the name of “progress.” But the “wild mustard remembers.”

In the remaining part of the poem, the speaker draws a parallel between the replenished organic life under the freeway and in her neighborhood with her quest for growth and healing despite a strong sense of alienation from self and place:

I scramble over the wire fence that would have kept me out. Once, I wanted out, wanted the rigid lanes to take me to a place without sun, without the smell of tomatoes burning

27 on swing shift in the greasy summer air.

Maybe it’s here en les campes extrahos de esta ciudad where I’ll find it, that part of me mown under like a corpse or a loose seed.

The speaker’s perception of self and neighborhood turns on the word “extrano,” which can mean both “strange” (which is how Cervantes glosses it for non-Spanish speakers) and

“foreign.” In fact, the fields of the city appear at once wildly strange with their fervently regenerated life and alien beneath the “fake windsounds” of the freeway—thus resonating with the psychic and political context of internal colonization. The speaker’s struggles for identity grow out of her connection with and separation from this land, as emphasized by the final similes of death and potential growth.

Carolyn M. Rodgers’ “47th & Vincennes” adopts a similarly ambivalent tone when describing the Chicago comer where black children play. Rodgers captures the kids’ pleasure at play while at the same time conveying a sense of indignation that they have no safer and cleaner place for their games:

dark children running in the streets joyscreaming about a kite dark children clomping up and down on half heels no heels half soled shoes dodging chunks of glass joyscreaming about a kite , a kite that flies no higher than the two story liquor store (19)

The stanza that is so filled with the children’s sounds and movement—“running,”

“dodging,” “clomping,” and “joyscreaming”—culminates in the dead end of the liquor store.^^

28 The above poems of home and neighborhood speak to silences about the ghettoizing of non-whites, which are generally muted in the poetry of their white sisters.

As such, they testify to an experience of class, as Sally Alexander has observed, that “even if shared and fully recognized, does not... produce a shared and even consciousness.”'"’

Such poems thus constitute a crucial portion of the entire corpus of working-class women’s writings about home.

Coda

In her essay “The Home and Family in Historical Perspective,” Tamara K. Hareven traces the strenuous efforts of late nineteenth-century middle-class reformers to encourage white working-class women to conceptualize home as a “private refuge” where each family member would have his or her own space and where the wife would emulate the domestic ideal of ‘ministering angel.” But, as Hareven contends, working-class people considered the home “a resource that could be used for generating extra income, for paying debts, for staying out of poverty, and for maintaining autonomy in old age.... Even though working-class families were also committed to the nuclearity of the household, they frequently took in newly arrived immigrants. Privacy was less important than the flexible use of household space.The importance of relationships, both for economic survival and for emotional sustenance, is precisely that quality which the reformers failed to consider.^®

In this chapter, I have considered other ways in which contemporary American working-class women poets challenge the persistent dominant-cultural ideal of home as

“private refuge.” Like middle-class feminist poets and unlike many of their working-class male counterparts, they call attention to structures under patriarchy both created by and allowing the continuance of women’s ongoing devaluation. Yet unlike their middle-class

29 counterparts, working-class women poets more frequently testify to experiences of class- based difference, at times writing out of an alliance with men of the same race and class, acknowledging ways in which such men have themselves been exploited and oppressed.

(We will see more evidence of this solidarity in the next chapter, which includes poems about filial and kin relationships.) And among working-class white women and women of color there are racial differences as to how each group politicizes the notion of home. Yet

“home,” in all of these poems, is fashioned as anything but a private refuge; rather dwellings are subject to an onslaught of economic, cultural and historical pressures— whether La Brea Tar Pit, casita beneath the shadow of the freeway, or Staten Island house haunted by rain.

‘ The initial phrase is taken from the Introduction to Zandy’s Calling Home: “Recalling the struggle against the dirt and filth of povc'^y, they [working-class women] try to make of their small and modest homes, safe, clean places. The curtains are changed; the glass doors polished with vinegar; the front stoop swept. They tend the walls of self-defmition” (1). See Peter Oresick and Nicholas Coles, tàs.^Working Classics: Poems on Industrial Ltfe, (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), and their more recent anthology: For a Living: The Poetry o f Work, (Illinois, 1995). An example of sentimentality can be found in Oresick’s poem “My Father”:

I have respected him like a guest and expected nothing. It is April now. My life lies before me, enticing as the woman at my side. Now, in April, I want him to speak... {Definitions 8, italics mine)

Oresick has also written some poems about women and home that weave together issues of class and gendered critique in unsentimental ways. See “Anna Marie” and Agnes McGurrin” {Definitions 33-35). ^ See Tom Wayman, Inside Job: Essays on the New Work Writing, (Madiera Park, B.C.: Harbour Publishing, 1983), and also Julia Stein’s helpful essay that rebuts Wayman and argues for more diversity of form and subject matter among working-class writers, “Industrial Music: Contemporary American Working-Class Poetry and Modernism,” Women's Studies Quarterly 1 & 2 (1995): 229-247. Amott and Matthaei, Race, Gender and Work: A Multicultural Economic History of

30 Women in the United States, (Boston: South End Press, 1991). ^ Patricia Dobler, Talking to Strangers, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). ^ See Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home, (New York: Viking, 1989). Norma Alarcon, “The Sardonic Power of the Erotic in the Work of Ana Castillo,” Chicana Critical Issues, Eds. Norma Alarcon and others, (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1993). * McCarriston, Eva-Mary, (Evanston: Tri-Quarterly Books, 1991): 40-41. ’ See Wolfgang Binder, Partial Autobiographies: Interviews with Twenty Chicano Poets, (Erlangen, Germany: Verlag Palm & Enke, 1985): 44. Loma Dee Cervantes, Emplumada, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981): 1 1. " Carmen Ramos Escandon, “Alternative Sources to Women’s History: Literature,” in Between Borders: Essays on Mexicana / Chicana History, eds. Adelaida R. Del Castillo, (Encino, Calif.: Floricante Press, 1990): 204. Kim Moody, An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism, (New York: Verso, 1988): 336. The initial phrase is taken from Zandy’s 1995 article, ‘The Complexities and Contradictions of Working-Class Women’s Writings”: “[C]Iass and racial differences involve a different set of literary assumptions. Working-class women cannot slam the door on doll houses that do not exist” (6). Nancy Vieira Couto, The Face in the Water, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990. Couto has acknowledged that her father “deserves credit for the extended metaphor in ‘Living in the La Brea Tar Pits.’ . . . [M]y maternal grandmother came to live with my family after losing a leg to diabetes. (Later she had a second amputation.) Caregiving took much of my mother’s time and energy, and my father wasn’t as supportive as he could have been. I remember their having arguments in which he would complain that my grandmother was always sitting ‘like a dinosaur’ in the living room. I wrote the poem years later, after my grandmother’s and my mother’s deaths. (Ironically, my father is now a double amputee himself, having lost both legs to circulatory illness)” (letter to author 5). One working-class informant interviewed in Lillian B. Rubin’s Worlds o f Pain remembered that the feeiing of clausuophobia in his family’s home was heightened during cold weather: ‘There was so much violence in that house... I was just thinking, most of that violence happened in the winter time when we were crowded together in the house and couldn’t get out” (35). Donna Masini, That Kind of Danger, (New York: Beacon Press, 1994). Letter to author 13 June 1996. “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway” is the title of a poem by Loma Dee Cervantes; Chicano historian Rodolfo Acuna writes about the specter of “urban removal” that displaced large numbers of people of color from their neighborhoods during the 1950s when the interstate system was being built. See his Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, (New York: Harper & Row, 1988): 295-298. David R. Roediger, The Wages o f Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, (London and New York: Verso, 1991). ■’ Amott and Matthaei note the special hardships facing African-American working-class people: “Housing discrimination and the pressures of continued migration caused extreme overcrowding in Black ghettoes. Fires, rats, and inadequate plumbing characterized the housing conditions to which African Americans were restricted by zoning laws and racial

31 covenants (agreements not to sell property to African Americans, Jews, and other groups). . . . Children were exposed daily to gambling and crime on the streets as white communities drove commercial entertainment and vice districts out of their communities to locations in or near Black communities” (169). *■ Cervantes has said in an interview that when she wrote the poem, in 1974 or 1975, ‘1 really wanted to write bilingually. I felt I had a responsibility to, I still do” (Binder 50). Rodgers’ poem, originally published in 1974, would probably make reference to crack cocaine if written today. Quoted in Libretti, 24. Tamara K. Hareven, “The Home and Family in Historical Perspective,” Ed. Arlen Mack, Home: A Place in the World, (New York: New York University Press, 1993): 248.

32 CHAPTER!

A POETRY OF MOTION: WORKING-CLASS BODIES AT WORK

I did this thing a couple years back that’s sort of goofy—I put pieces of a poem all over my body.... I got a video camera and went out on the street on the South Side [Pittsburgh working-class neighborhood].... And I asked people to read me. I just wanted poetry to be out on the street that day. —Jan Beatty'

Bodies, Bakhtin tells us, are “material bearers of meaning”— fleshly vessels brimming with signifiers.^ But how such bodies mean is determined by the beholder. In their provocative study of European literary and cultural history, Peter S tally brass and

Allon White contend that dominant cultural groups tend to construct the “lower'’ classes as transgressive of societal bodily norms; in European literature, the peasant or worker is typically associated with excesses of appetite and the free indulgence of bodily urges.^ Yet the transgressive, while disparaged and repressed, is of course not without allure.

S tally brass and White find a “striking ambivalence to the representations of the lower strata

(of the body, of literature, of society, of place) in which they are both reviled and desired”

(4). While Stallybrass and White draw their examples exclusively from European cultures, numerous studies have translated the terms of their argument to other locations. For example, Toni Morrison’s elegant monograph Playing in the Dark explores the uses to which the (white) American literary imagination has depended upon blackness and black

33 bodies to define itself. Similarly, historian David R. Roediger, in The Wages of Whiteness, has persuasively argued that working-class European immigrant groups, such as the Irish or the Italians, displaced onto black workers their own ambivalence about the American industrial work ethic and cultural mores and expressed that mixture of hatred, frustration, and desire through minstrel shows (involving the white body in blackface) and racial violence.'* The commonality in all of these examples is the idea of a self-representation thrown into relief by the construction of the body of a simultaneously debased and desired

Other.

In working-class literature generally, the body is an important, if tension-filled, theme, given the privileging of mental over manual labor, “clean” over “dirty” work that has been in place at least since Plato. This pervasive cultural bias found yet another expression in a recent subscription flyer for the academic journal Lingua Franca, which addressed the following appeal to humanities professors: “What next? Are they going to make you empty your own trash?” The fine print explained that at a certain university, the administration had fired some custodial workers in a downsizing measure and asked faculty to clean up their own offices. Instead of protesting the dismissal of their janitorial colleagues, the professors merely complained about this additional “indignity” of taking out their own trash. This appeal might sound absurd, yet it makes explicit the implicit valorizing of intellectual over physical work that runs deep in the culture. For people who actually work with their hands, the bias against manual labor provokes a number of responses: shame (an internalization of the dominant culture’s values); reverse disdain

(whereby, for example, manual laborers disparage intellectuals for not knowing how to do routine repairs on their cars or homes); pride (in the ability to rebuild an engine, or sew a jacket with an elaborate shawl collar); and the desire for relief from exhausting manual labor. For those who do “escape” into more professional-managerial jobs—a process increasingly difficult for those who don’t have college degrees—there remains, as Sennett

34 and Cobb demonstrate, a lingering sense of guilt and unease, the feeling that they are imposters.^

The poems discussed in this chapter are filled with imagery detailing the tremendous physical strain on feet and hands, back and neck, caused by work in fields, factories, and domestic service. Yet in addition to manual labor’s toll on the body there are psychic costs, injuries to laborers’ dignity because of the connotations of moral opprobrium attached to physical work.* British historian David Lockwood’s commentary on prejudices against manual labor in 1950s England has relevance for this side of the

Atlantic as well: “Working with one’s hands was associated with other attributes— lack of authority, illiteracy, lowly social origins, insecurity of livelihood— which together spelt social depreciation.”’ For female workers and workers of color, that “social depreciation” is intensified; the segregation of the job market by gender and race insures that the lowest paid and low-prestige positions are associated with poor women. The example of domestic service is instructive here. As production became increasingly separated from living spaces for middle- and upper-middle-class families in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, women of those classes affirmed their status as ladies, as angels of the house, by shifting the mundane and dirty work of housekeeping to working-class women. As Phyllis

Palmer has argued, the white middle-class woman needed to rid herself of the association of “woman” with “sex, dirt, housework, and badness” by employing a woman unlike herself, often a woman of color, “whose very identity confirmed [her employer’s] daintiness and perfection.”® According to Judith Rollins, more recent employers of domestics often described their servant as less intelligent and less ambitious than themselves— otherwise, why would she be cleaning their houses? Sheltered by class and often race privilege, the employers couldn’t imagine that some of their maids were simply unable to find other work. Instead, they correlated the work with the extent of the worker’s character and intellect.

35 The poets under consideration in this study are caught in the crossfire of these cultural anxieties about physical work. For the most part college-educated, some with advanced degrees, they are nonetheless intimately familiar with the strain and monotony, pleasures and rewards, of manual labor. Friends and relations have worked in canneries, factories, and fields. They themselves have made doughnuts, worked as short-order cooks, cleaned other people’s houses, bussed tables, pumped gas, picked vegetables, typeset documents, and done secretarial work.® Their poetry, as we might expect, grapples with the contradictions inherent in such work: the satisfaction of a freshly mopped floor, say, coupled with the indignity of being under constant surveillance by one’s employer. Indeed, instances of ambivalence abound in the representations of bodily work and working-class bodies in the poems discussed in this chapter. In its suggestion of the multiple ways in which working-class bodies figure as “material bearers of meaning,” this poetry fills a significant cultural void, for, as Janet Zandy contends, “Working-class people practice a language of the body that eludes theoretical textual studies. [They] do not have the quiet hands or the neutral faces of the privileged classes— especially when they are within their own communities. The physicality of class difference, the use of the body for expression, communication, and as a substitute for abstract language... is rarely recognized”

(Liberating Memory 5).

This chapter examines how the group of poets examined here embraces, romanticizes, rejects, dignifies, eroticizes, and finally attempts to redeem the working body. While there is no totalized “working body” here, the poets invoke common themes and strategies to negotiate the cultural contradictions in which physical work is embedded.

First, the heterosexual father-worker is represented as both repellent and desirable. While such representations reproduce cultural anxieties about workers, dirt, and appetite— and thus are similar to the depictions of the “lower” orders, which Stallybrass and White cite in their study—they are qualitatively different in that the poets, in epideictic maneuvers,

36 identify themselves with that which the culture would deem loathsome. A second secdon

examines poems that portray the father as both silent and physically active—that is, using

the body “as a substitute for abstract language.” That poetic strategy raises questions of

mediation— how poets translate silence into language, why poems about terseness are or

are not useful— issues that imderlie this entire chapter. Essentially I read the trope of the silent worker as a way to throw into relief the language that is attributed to him in a poem.

The third section investigates how the centuries-old poetic device of blazon, generally employed to praise the feminine body, is reinvented by working-class women poets of color to catalogue the multiple streses and indignities the working woman’s body incurs on the job, while simultaneously insisting on her integrity. Finally, I conclude with an amplifying coda that explores how the imagery of working-class bodies gives shape to an epistemology that is inductive and grounded in the physical.

Before finally turning to the poems themselves, I want to clarify what I mean by

“work.” For the most part, the poems in this chapter present bodies that are engaged in wage labor, yet I don’t restrict the discussion to paid employment. I also include poems about working-class people performing routine tasks fo r themselves, such as Fixing meals or fiddling with a ham radio in the basement. W i^e labor may be profoundly alienating— given the routine, the threat of injury, the deskilling, the lack of autonomy. As a 33-year- old mechanic put it in an interview, “God, I hated that assembly line. I hated it. I used to fall asleep on the job standing up and still keep doing my work. There’s nothing more boring and more repetitious in the world. On top of it, you don’t feel human. The machine’s running you, you’re not running it.”‘° Labors performed for self and loved ones, however, fall into a different category. Sociologist Lillian Rubin noted that 75% of the working-class men in her ethnographic study used their leisure time to work on cars or household repairs: “For men whose days are spent at jobs that afford few personal satisfactions, little sense of mastery, these projects offer more than dollar savings. Indeed,

37 such after-work jobs may be the only ones they do that call upon them to use a wide range of skills and competencies, in which they can take initiative and exercise judgment” (186).

In my own family, both parents found pleasure in such “after-work jobs,” which in their cases were gender-specific. My father loved to tune up the family cars, and my mother sewed most of our clothes when we were growing up, taking great care in the selection of patterns and fabrics and sometimes surprising us with special outfits for birthdays or holidays. My parents still grow an elaborate kitchen garden every summer that supplies most of the neighbors with staples like garlic and tomatoes. While such tasks can be frustrating, they also afford pleasures unknown to people who don’t regularly “do” for themselves. Case in point: a General Motors executive whom I met at a wedding revealed a great enthusiasm for Corvettes. Every year, he would get two new GM cars, one a

Corvette, thanks to significant company discounts. Yet despite his professed fascination with the engineering and the power of the cars, he never looked under the hood. “Did you like working on the cars?” I asked, remembering my own father lying beneath the ’67

Chevy Impala. “Oh no,” he replied in a tone of astonished dismissal. His hands and fingernails, clean and careiully groomed, corroborated his remark. I have heard many jokes over the years about the alienation of American auto workers, but I maintain that this GM executive is more alienated still from the machines that he claims to enjoy, from the machines “his” workers build. In the next section, I turn to poems that feature very different men, working-class fathers identifiable by the “thick soot worms under [their] nails.”

38 ‘That Sweet Seduction of Revulsion / Desire”:

The Working-Class Father Eroticized and Grotesque

Underground by the oilbumers.. . he crawled into iron mouths hauled out fists of oily sludge. Could a man get trapped in there? Scars, creases where grease seeped in, never came out, thick soot worms under his nails, he rolled the hose from tanks to valves ladies, alligators curled in basements. —Donna Masini, “Nights My Father”

In an article about images of the London working class at the end of the nineteenth century. Gill Davies argues that a broad range of writers used ''gender as an extreme way of constituting class difference” for a middle-class readership: “When a (male, middle- class) writer looks for the most horrifying, degraded image of the working class, he chooses a woman.... The subhuman and monstrously physical are located in the people

(working class and female) who depart furthest from the (middle class and male)

‘norm.’”' ' Specifically, writers focused on women’s sexuality, their seemingly unrestrained appetites, and their orifices, especially their mouths. Davies elaborates:

“Descriptions of eating and drinking and transcriptions of speech frequently disrupt the narrative... The ostensibly liberal and neutral authorial stance conceals a preoccupation with body and appetite, a bourgeois fear of the ‘grotesque body’ of the working class”

(69).'' Davies’ observations constitute a useful frame for regarding the poems in this section, which portray working-class fathers as both grotesque and eroticized. Like the male, middle-class English authors of the late nineteenth century, contemporary American

39 poets Donna Masini and Jan Beatty use visceral images of gendered bodies— specifically, bodies of the opposite gender—to explore ambivalence about class and work. However, unlike the middle-class authors cited in Davies’ article, both poets identify with and have grown up in the working-class milieu of their parents, and their poetic representations suggest both an identification with and a distancing from their working-class fathers.

Davies articulated some of the reasons for the gendering of class difference by the authors he studies: anxieties about the potential “overbreeding” of the lower classes, about working-class women’s independence as signalled by their apparent rejection of middle- class gender norms, and about their alleged capacity for spreading disease. The cultural context of 1950s America similarly offers an explanation for the gendered “othering” that occurs in poems written by white working-class women who grew up during that period.

The postwar economic boom enabled a greater percentage of working-class men, mostly

European-American, to earn a family wage. Gender differences within the context of the family thus took on exaggerated importance with the stay-at-home mother a familiar presence and the working father somewhat remote, even exotic. Such differences were also inflected by class—especially for working-class men who worked in loud, dirty, dangerous places; because bookish daughters (as both Masini and Beatty identify themselves) were rarely allowed onto worksites, it was difficult to say exactly what their fathers did. The men would come home dirty and tired, smelling of the separate lives they led. The word that working-class children like myself lacked for that experience of our fathers and their work was “sublimity.” The men and their work, dirty and with the promise of danger, inspired awe in both senses of the word: admiration and dread.

Another cultural layer that deserves mention here is the impact of Roman

Catholicism, suggestive of a different quality of sublimity, on the sensibilities of Masini and Beatty, both of whom were raised in that faith. Their poems borrow a great deal from

Catholic iconography of heaven and hell, of the physicality of the mortified body, and also

40 of the sacramental transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.

Despite Catholicism’s prohibitive sexual morality that can easily be read as denying of the body (especially of women’s bodies). Catholic ritual is highly physical—the blessing of the throat on the feast of St. Blaise, the anointing of the forehead with holy oil in four different sacraments, the eating and drinking during the Eucharist.'^ And Catholic churches, more typically than their Protestant counterparts, display images of the battered Christ and of martyr-saints. Such iconography often has a secular, if not sexual charge: images of the pierced and bleeding St. Sebastian, for example, have long served as erotic emblems in homosexual subcultures. In general, the blurring of the sacred and the visceral in art and in the Mass gives a certain license to the Catholic-inflected writer’s erotic and literary imagination.'"* Thus, in Masini’s “Nights My Father” the title character is both an underworld figure-^filthy, guttural, sensual, animalistic—and a hero. Beatty’s “My Father

Teaches Me Desire,” which features the eponymous character at table, explicitly suggests that he, like a priest at the Eucharist, is simultaneously celebrant and cannibal.

. Masini’s poem, written from the point of view of an adult recalling her childhood experience of her father and his work, combines the typically associative storytelling mode of the child with an adult’s post-Freudian sophistication and understanding of class difference. “Nights My Father” makes rich use of subliminal sound devices—assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia—to depict the father, who fixes oilbumers, and his basement milieu as both disgusting and compelling. In stanza two, for example, the narrator tells us:

Underground by the oilbumers where the heat went dead he crawled into iron mouths hauled out fists of oily sludge.... Scars, creases where grease seeped in, never came out, thick soot worms under his nails, he rolled the hose from tanks to valves... (8)

41 The rhyming and assonantal series (creases, grease; rolled, hose; crawled, hawled) establish

what Barbara Babcock would call “the texture of the text”— suggesting, ambivalently, the

father’s physical vitality, the heroic and also sexual nature of his labor, and the filthy,

almost fecal milieu in which he operates, invisible and mysterious to the homeowners

whose houses he heats.

The narrator’s ambivalent relation to that masculine working body with its “soot

worms” and “fists of oily sludge” is rendered in the form of a dreamlike parable in the next

stanza. In the kitchen, by the glow of a “gold night light,” the daughter hears “something

... rattling through the silverware.” According to the dream logic of the poem, the intruder

in the silver and gold ambience of domestic space turns out to be a bear. The daughter

shoots, but instead of killing the bear, her bullet merely parts his fur and reveals her father,

“[h]is good suit pressed / but the hands stuck out: greasy hands, / so black the creases

darkened as he washed them.” The wish is not to annihilate the dirty animal, an interloper

in the household, but rather to cloak him in the uniform of bourgeois respectability. Yet that

attempt fails, for his indelibly filmy hands testify to his working-class trade.

Yet shame at the father’s grubby, disruptive presence is only one facet of the daughter-narrator’s response. Her father is also an underground hero, who has a yellow diamond stitched on his back, emblazoned with “ACE in big red letters.” The solitary dirty work he does to heat people’s houses in winter is cast in sexual terms:

He didn’t need anyone. He could do it alone. Boilers humming, clanging, air banging, heat building. There she goes, he’d yell, at the center of the earth, where the heat is, and rough hands, men’s hands. The way they touch. Warm men with rough hands cha-cha bossa nova the snoring comes from that place, low sounds the body makes. (9)

42 This passage, with its sound echoes and its associative logic, is Masini’s attempt to

articulate the child’s notion of gender difference, of masculinity, which becomes

inextricable from notions of men’s work. The intimate connection of the man with the

machine, gendered feminine (as machines often are by the men who work on them), is of

course likened to his being with a partner, his knowing just how to touch to provoke the

desired response. But masculinity involves more here than the suggestion of heterosexual

sex: it is texture, sound, dance; it is especially hands and the work they can do. Masini

extrapolates from a single father fixing oilbumers to a more general class-based erotic that

figures heterosexual masculinity—men as workers conflated with men as lovers—

integrating warmth, skill, roughness, noise, and a lack of squeamishness about dirt. In

fact, mess and noise, the hallmarks of his trade, are necessary components both of a

successful job and, by implication, of sexual satisfaction.

A corroborating expression of this working-class erotic can be found in Masini’s

“Who Giveth This Woman,” in which the narrator takes her sexual identity from her

father’^ profession: “I am ooze, silt, / 1 am the daughter of a man who dug grease / out of

the mouths of broken boilers / out of holes that didn’t heat.” Identifying herself in this way

seems both a point of pride and a dare—especially because, elsewhere in the poem, she confesses that she prefers a kind of lover different from her father (“the clean sort: elegant,

angular”). And when they make love, she becomes the basement boiler that she explicitly

dares him to sink into:

Go ahead. Dig in. I’m watching you. Sometimes I can’t even feel the rats crawling inside me, the fist digging, knuckling. Go ahead fuck the mother out of me. Did you know it would be such a filthy jo b ...? (31-32)

43 The speaker can be seen as a woman who loathes her body as the culture (including religion) teaches women to do. But there is a tone of bedroom bravado here that belies the imagery of self-disgust and the implication of her sexual passivity. The earthy sound echoes of “knuckling” and “fuck” and “mother,” the alliterative yoking of fucking and filth, give the speaker an aura of transgressive power. She is in the position to command. She wants the “clean, elegant, angular” lover, perhaps of a different social class, to participate

in her sexuality, her world, her class background, which she describes in graphic terms— rats crawling, fist digging, filthy job—as if to administer a test: if he can make love with

this part of her, he can, like a masculine Beauty with a feminine Beast, possess her entirely. It is at this moment that we see a crucial difference from the representations of

working-class bodies found in the texts cited by Davies and by Stallybrass and White.

While Masini in her poetry invokes the culture’s simultaneous revulsion and desire for

what Stallybrass and White call the “lower strata” (of the body, of society, of the

household), she locates it not only in the father, whom she depicts as a bestial, yet heroic

and desirable Other, but also in the self. In essence, Masini, in “Who Giveth This

Woman,” revises the trope of the bestial working-class woman by eliminating any distance between the narrator and the woman being observed.

Rhetorician Kenneth Burke would apply the term “consubstantiality” to the form of

identification we see operating in Masini’s poem—one which admits both likeness and difference. As Burke explains, “A is not identical with his colleague, B. But insofar as their

interests are joined, A is identified with B .... In being identified with B, A is

“substantially one” with a person other than himself. Yet at the same time he remains unique... Thus he is both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with another.”**

A similar effort to appear both “joined and separate” can be seen in Jan Beatty’s

poem “My Father Teaches Me Desire.” Using a mix of registers in her poem— lofty vs.

44 working-class, sacred vs. secular, genteel vs. visceral—Beatty mediates between class positions and between genders. The poem opens with the father seated “like a hunchback” at the particle-board kitchen table, fixing himself a meal of sardines and beer, a portrait of greedy sensuality that verges on the grotesque:

His left hand grabs the onion / the right slashes a fat slice / the right dips into the briny swamp of sardine / lifts one by the tail / down to the French’s / then plunges it headfirst into his cavernous mouth..

Given the violent verbs and fearsome image of the sardine plucked from its “briny swamp,” this description of a working-class meal might seem like yet another preoccupied

“with body and appetite, a bourgeois fear of the ‘grotesque body’ of the working class”

(Davies 69). But in the next twenty lines, Beatty does something curious with that image: she tries to naturalize it by switching the linguistic register to one that sounds casual and working-class and then also to elevate it, suggesting through hyperbolic, quasi-religious language that the sardine-eating is a sublime event, both dreadful and awe-inspiring;

[W]e’re livin’ now, baby, we are home— me watching my dad from the dining room, the grunt and slosh of it all....

What world is this? He’s God and brute, half quake / half precision, what kind of man can stare down the milky eye of sardine sans flinch, then sever its head with those same incisors he grew in his mother’s belly?

Barbara Babcock has suggested that “changes in channel or register make an implicit commentary... They are the [poet’s] means of establishing an implicit dialogue.” In this case, the “texture of the text” derives precisely from its ongoing attempts to mediate between high and low via shifts in register—concrete to abstract, Anglo-Saxon to Latinate,

45 profane to sacred. The father’s humble meal is simultaneously “just a meal,” a case-study in desire (“Once it starts you can’t stop it”), a mythic-heroic challenge (“stare down / the milky eye of sardine sans flinch / then sever its head”), and a sacrament. Indeed, the father is more than once likened to God: he is “a king of kings / in this six-by-six tabernacle,”

“the holy spirit of torque and focus.”

Like Masini in “Who Giveth This Woman,” Beatty redeems the initially grotesque image of the father eating by identifying his gusto and greed as desirable. Switching again to the working-class register, she says, “F m learning real good that the guy I want / to marry is the one who could do the worst / thing without blinking, the man who eats life / raw, the heads of things— and what else / wouldn’t scare him?” Again, we see an instance of a class-based erotic, visceral and uncouth but the stuff of sacrament—what Beatty terms elsewhere in the poem “that sweet seduction of revulsion / desire.” Here and elsewhere,

Beatty expresses the fierce wish that poetry can eliminate the distance between the college- educated daughter and the steelworker-salesman father. In an epideictic move, a ritualistic speech (like the language of a marriage ceremony that has the power to conjoin), the speaker assures her parent: “O father, o terrible primate, /I am one of you. Together, / we can skin the rabbit, stuff the apple / in the pig’s mouth.” The daughter-poet, via words, aims for a class-based consubstantiation with the father, which in actuality might occur outside of language entirely.

The shifts in register offer Beatty, like other working-class women poets from her generation, a means of mediating between the working-class milieu of her girlhood and a poetry readership that is largely middle-class. That process of negotiation, possible because of the daughter’s involvement with both home and university, is difficult because of the perceived distance between those two worlds. In an interview, Beatty remarked that her own father, suspicious of academics, regretted having sent her to college because, as he phrased it, “A woman who knows too much is dangerous.”'® While largely positive about

46 her experience at the university, Beatty admits that she had “a lot of conflicts in grad school about what was left out of our discussions. Working-class issues or the body never appeared.” For Beatty, the world of the academy is all “talk”—“from the neck up”— while the working-class world is closely allied with the body. As if to dramatize the resolution of this mind and body, working-class and middle-class split, Beatty concludes “My Father

Teaches Me Desire” with a flash-forward image of the daughter placing eyeglasses on her dead father’s face in the casket. Because the dead don’t need to see, the glasses might indeed suggest the father’s intellect, unremarked upon in the poem.

To conclude this section, I want to anticipate the charge that Masini and Beatty are writing less about class in these poems than about some Oedipal drama. It is true that, unlike the authors excerpted in Gill and in Stallybrass and White, Masini and Beatty are writing about family members and not about working-class people across town or on the other side of the tracks. Familiarity, as well as class sympathies, can mitigate contempt. It is also true that both are operating within a tradition of recent American women poets, such as Sylvia Plath and Sharon Olds, whose father poems are standard reading.^® In fact,

Masini and Beatty seem to have learned from poems like Plath’s “Daddy”—»ts dramatic shifts in register—and any number of Olds’s poems (including “Fate,” “Looking at My

Father,” and “History: 1 j ’)— in which she revels in the visceral, drawing parallels between details of her father’s body and her own.

Yet there are some crucial differences, which 1 argue are rooted in class identity.

Plath and Olds portray their fathers as abusively powerful, even fascist or monstrous:

Plath’s is likened to a Nazi, a devil, and a vampire, Olds’s to Mussolini. My point here is not that working-class fathers are necessarily less abusive or authoritarian than their middle-class counterparts, but that working-class daughters have more opportunities to see their fathers as lacking power, given the positions their fathers occupy in relation to dominant cultural formations.^' Indeed, Jane Gallop, in The Daughter's Seduction,

47 criticizes recent psychoanalytic theories for positing a “unified phallic sovereignty that characterizes an absolute monarch, and which little resembles actual power in our social, economic structure.”” And Carolyn Kay Steedman, a British writer from a working-class background, notes that in her neighborhood, fathers lacked the supreme sexual and legal power accorded to them in psychoanalytic treatments of patriarchy “sometimes because of the passivity of a father’s presence, sometimes because of his physical absence” (18).'’

Plath and Olds, by contrast, include mention of the father’s middle-class work as a way of attesting to his power. “You stand at the blackboard, daddy,” Plath writes of her professor- father, “In the picture I have of you, / A cleft in your chin instead of your foot / But no less a devil for that.” And Olds in “The Victims” describes the glee the family experienced when their alcoholic businessman-father was finally fired and thereby lost the many perquisities of his position: “We were tickled / to think of your office taken away, / your lunches with three double bourbons, / your pencils, your reams of paper. Would they take your / suits back, too, those dark / carcasses hung in your closet?” In Masini’s and Beatty’s poems, material markers of class and work—grease-stained clothes, a flimsy particle-board table— establish the father’s dominion as relative rather than absolute. In “Nights My Father,” the narrator even tells us that “When the harbor froze [my father] slept on the floor by his truck.”

Finally, while Plath and Olds both describe their fathers’ bodies with visceral intensity, neither depicts the father as doing anything.’"* The poems of Masini and Beatty, therefore, illuminate in a new way the thematic of the class-marked laboring male body.

They do so initially by portraying the father as Other via images of heterosexual masculinity centered in work, but then, through the rhetoric of the poem, enact what Burke would call

“consubstantiality.” They, like the poets whose work I will turn to next, dramatize the difficulty of using language to represent the inchoate, often gestural sign systems of fathers who do not make their living by working with words.

48 Translating Silence and Gesture into Language:

Poet-Daughters and Working-Class Fathers

My uncles share a habit they picked up from the Old Man: whenever they lose their tempers they bite their tongues. Today they nearly bite their tongues in two, hooking the teeth in the thick dumb muscle that jerks in their mouths like a bludgeon. —Patricia Dobler, “Family Traits”^^

Dobler’s poem dramatizes the the conflict between the use of verbal language and

“the use of the body for expression, communication, and as a substitute for abstract

language,” evinced by her working-class uncles at their father’s funeral (Zandy (1995b 5).

Anger, for these men, becomes translated into gesture. Spoken language is a crude weapon

against which they are seemingly helpless. The literal image of being tonguetied is a fitting

prelude to this section, which examines a common trope among women poets of working- class backgrounds: the silent father. Of course, laconic men are a staple of American cinema and literature across class lines; witness Clint Eastwood movies, Ernest

Hemingway novels, even Robert Lowell’s image of his dying Boston Brahmin Uncle

Devereaux Wilson. However, I am concerned here with how working-class men, with little time for leisure or study, are represented in their daughters’ poems as substituting physical gesture for abstract language.

These concerns raise the problem of mediation: for gesture to become verbal, language requires a translator. Poems about working-class bodies (and, at a further remove, the literary criticism of such poems) might indeed be inadequate to the task. Linda

Martin Alcoff is one of many recent theorists who has called attention to the inherent and

49 inescapable quandaries involved in the act of mediation— speaking (or writing) for others and even for oneself/^ Indeed, how to speak for others is a recurring dilemma for intellectuals in general, but for writers of working-class backgrounds, as Valerie Miner has suggested, the problem is especially keen because of the fear of “betraying” class “secrets” to a middle-class literary readership. That burden of mediation is encoded in the rhetorics of many of the poems in this study, sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly. We saw that difficulty enacted in Jan Beatty’s switching of registers (from earthy to elevated) in “My

Father Teaches Me Desire.” We see it in shifting rhetorical stances— sometimes within a single poem, such as Carolyn M. Rodgers’ “For Our Fathers”—in which the father is described in the third person, then addressed directly, then finally invoked in a sermon-like appeal to black poor and working-class readers to honor their fathers’ lived experience.^’

We see it also in the frequent employment of the dramatic monologue and its promise (or pretense) of unmediated speech.

The three poems in this section—Tess Gallagher’s “3 a.m. Kitchen: My Father

Talking,” Patricia Dobler’s ‘Talking to Strangers,” and Carolyn Rodgers’ “For Our

Fathers”—are engaged in the project of giving linguistic shape to the working-class father’s inner life on the basis of scant verbal clues. Each poet builds into her poem some explanation for the father’s terseness. Gallagher’s dramatic monologue features her father looking back on his life and realizing that his years of hard work have brought him very little meaning or comfort. In the intimate setting of the early morning kitchen, Gallagher has the father confiding details of his life to his poet daughter who has been to college. The poem is based on an actual experience, in which Gallagher, home from the University of

Washington, fixed her father bacon and eggs after he had spent the evening playing cards at the Chinook Tavem. Being in the university, says Gallagher, “changed my language. I spoke English correctly, but those emotional currents that lived in the way English was misspoken by my parents had a beautiful, true power for me.”’* In this poem, she chose

50 “to speak directly as my father so that his sound, his voice tone, his vocabulary and signature in tempo and nuance, even his silences would be present for everyone” (32).

Typically, Gallagher said, “he would answer in mono-syllables or simply take a sip of his coffee, a drag on his cigarette and look at you as if from a hopeless distance one shouldn’t even pretend to cross.” But on this occasion, Gallagher dramatizes the father breaking his customary silence even if it means ceasing to shield his daughter from the void in his life.

He “speaks” in clipped, staccato phrases, mostly describing his jobs and hobbies over the years, from his early life as an itinerant farmer in Oklahoma to his logging days in

Washington State:

For years it was land working me, oil fields, cotton fields, then I got some land. I worked it. Them days you could just about make a living. I was logging.

Then I sent to Missouri. Momma come out. We got married. We got some kids. Five kids. That kept us going. (31)

Characteristic of the father speaking is the absence of directly stated emotion but the richness of emotional subtext. To have “got some land” is clearly a point of pride. Indeed, the repetition of the verb “got” (“got married,” “got some kids”), while it might signal the father’s limited linguistic resources, also suggests his sense of attainment. Later, when he manages to acquire some “cheap” land near the water, he expresses the wonder of a plainsman who will never take for granted the pleasure of being by the sea: “You remember, we used to catch / six, eight fish, clean them right / out in the yard. I could of fished to China.” In a speech that features little adornment, that single hyperbole suggests the profundity of his awe.

Early in the poem, much of what he says is probably familiar to his college-age daughter. But after several cautious statements organized in four-line stanzas, her father

51 blurts out a lengthier, harrowing insight into how stressful his job was— he was responsible for making sure heavy loads of lumber and paper products being moved from dockside to ship were not dropped below on his friends:

I was driving winch. You had to watch to see nothing fell out of the sling. If you killed somebody you’d never forget it. All those year I was just working I was on edge, every day. Just working.

From a speaker who is guarded about expressing emotion directly, this passage stands out—both the admission of being on edge and the understatement twice repeated, “just working.’’ But just as quickly, the father closes off the subject: “You kids. I could tell you / a lot. But I won’t.’’ What is that silence about? Hopelessness, fatigue, alienation, the wish to protect children— especially a daughter in college— from that intimate knowledge of the falsity of the American dream. Gallagher summarizes: “What my father had experienced was that hard work led to more hard work, and he could easily see that those who had the advantage of education arrived by another, less wearisome path. He didn’t pretend to be satisfied trading his time for cash on the docks where he worked’’ (33).

The choice of the dramatic monologue allows Gallagher both to empathize with the father’s desperate attempt to find meaning in his life and to convey the toll his drinking and cardplaying had on the family, especially his wife:

It’s winter. I play a lot of cards down at the tavem. Your mother. I have to think of excuses to get out of the house. You’re wasting your time, she says. You’re wasting your money.

You don’t have no idea, Threasie. I mn out of things to work for. Hell, why shouldn’t I play cards? Threasie,

52 some days I just don’t know.

Gallagher’s father justifies his cardplaying in “his” words, yet the reader also what his absences must have meant to his family. The repetition of the nickname, Threasie, for a man who elsewhere comes off as laconic, suggests his affection for her and his desperation to reach out and persuade her as well as himself.

Gallagher undertook the project of translating her father’s silences, gestures, and halting speech into a poem for several reasons. First, she was concerned about the dearth of poems about working-class lives in American literature. “Giving my father poetically powerful speech,” she writes, “w as... an attempt to make him part of the country’s literature. It was to challenge the prevailing intellectual assumption... that only those lives which were ‘educated’ were worth dignifying in poetry or story” (32). She sees her dramatic monologue as less mediated than, as she herself suggests, Robert Frost’s “Death of a Hired Man,” written from the point of view of the man’s employer. Second, she believes that her father enjoyed entering “another realm where his life might touch people he’d never see or know” (35). And, finally, sharing such a poem with her father was a way of justifying her writing to a man who had assumed “his oldest daughter [was] wasting her life.” By showing him that poetry could include him and his work, she was attempting to cross a divide deepened by education.

While the laconic father in Gallagher’s poem chooses to escape his familial duties and the alienating qualities of wage labor by playing cards, the father in Dobler’s “Talking to Strangers” retreats both from his family and his job by working a ham radio in his basement. An after-work job, such as fixing and operating the radio, allows him “to use a wide range of skills and competencies,... [to] take initiative and exercise judgment”

(Rubin 1978 155). That sense of autonomy and mastery is important to the Middletown,

Ohio father in Dobler’s poem: “Bunched wires furred with dust may seem / to spring like

53 anarchy from the backs / of his machines, but that is illusion: he is in control, his hands

soldered the wires / and planted the tall antenna for catching voices.” Ironically, while the

father “suffered his family. / the stories of their lives” all afternoon, he “does not care // for

stories, he is interested in signals, / clear or faint.” He would much rather be “talking to

strangers.” Like Gallagher. Dobler both empathizes with the father and acknowledges the

distancing impact of his hobby on the family. The poem concludes with the image of “the

herringbone pattern of his voice / on the TV,” which the daughter watches from upstairs.

Although the father is under the same roof, his communications are unintelligible to his

family, his speech literally reduced to a visual pattern."®

Dobler hints at and Gallagher explicitly lists the aspects of manual labor from which

workers feel the need to escape: uniformity, conformity, lack of autonomy, even physical

danger. Carolyn M. Rodgers invokes similar themes as she depicts the psychic and

physical changes her father underwent when he, along with tens of thousands of African-

Americans, migrated from south to north earlier in this century. The Northern Migration

occurred for many reasons, including greater opportunities for work, higher salaries in

northern industrial cities, and a reprieve from the reality of racial violence in the South.^°

Rodgers’ lyrical description of that transition from south to north, rural to urban, focuses

not on the local economic causes of the migration but rather on its near-mythic resonance:

The wind blew my father from the south to the north. He came with a heart as deep and as wide as a tunnel— he came with a dream and a hope for a beautiful harmonious future. He came. Daddy was a prayer, a jitterbug hymn, and a collard / combread sweet potato / green country psalm.... (58)

Working in long Whitmanian lines, Rodgers strives for both an epic scale and a lyric

particularity. Her chronicling of that major social movement involves a description of the

effects of industrialization on her lighthearted, religious, and expansive southern father. In

Chicago, he “bought dogs not for love, but for protection.” He “learned how to be cool,

54 not country, to be stiff and serious and silent.” Rodgers compares him to a tree “with feet too big for computerized shoes,” an image that suggests both the standardization of urban industrial life and the father’s estrangement from nature. Bodily restraint, in this case, equals verbal restraint.

Hands and feet, their stillness or busyness, figure prominently in these poems by working-class women about their fathers as a counterpoint to the absence or presence of spoken language. The body “on edge,” the body subject to routine, the body threatened with physical danger, the alienated body: these silent stories, muffled by the culture, often not divulged by fathers to daughters, by men to women, become urgent occasions for giving voice. Despite the inherent power differential implied by the phrase “giving voice,”

Gallagher, Dobler, and Rodgers reimagine silence as a sort of speech.

Blazons of Weariness, Rage, and Pride:

Working-Class Women of Color and the Poetics of Manual Labor

we sell ourselves in fractions, they don’t want us all at once, but hour by hour, piece by piece, our hands mainly and our backs, and chunks of our brains, and veiled expressions on our faces, they buy. though they can’t know what actual thoughts stand behind our eyes. —Karen Brodine, from “Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking”

“We sell ourselves in fractions, they don’t want us all / at once.” Using a metaphor suggesting prostitution, the late activist-poet Karen Brodine bitterly conveyed the sense that she and her fellow workers—their intelligence and creativity discounted, their backs and

55 hands under tremendous strain—-were simply a means to an end for management. Her longest and most important poem, “Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking,” thus inveighs against that alienation of body from mind and argues for an idea of the worker as both sentient and dignified. The epigraph from Brodine’s poem also stands in somewhat ironic relation to the blazon literary tradition, which from its sixteenth-century origins, has been closely associated with the celebration of the female body.^‘ Those earlier blazons, written by male poets for noblewomen, characteristically offered extravagant praise of the woman’s eyes, hair, lips, skin, and breasts. Typically—as in Thomas Campion’s “There Is a Garden in Her Face,” which likens the woman’s complexion to “roses” and “white lilies,” her lips to cherries, and her teeth to “orient pearl”—the catalogue does little more than emphasize the woman’s physical attractiveness and elite status. Feminist literary historians, such as Elaine Hobby, Nancy Vickers, and Patricia Parker, have argued that the blazon reifies the notion of woman as property, as when John Donne, in his “Elegy XIX,”

“takes inventory” of his undressing mistress, referring to her as “my mine of precious stones, my empery.”^*

For readers familiar with Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” and Donne’s “Elegy

XIX,” the blazon might seem an unlikely choice for working-class women poets wishing to imbue their feminine subjects with a sense of dignity. Yet whether consciously or not,

Gloria Anzaldûa, Loma Dee Cervantes, and Thylias Moss employ the blazon to catalogue the multiple stresses and indignities the women incur on the job, while simultaneously suggesting their creativity and intelligence. The working woman’s hands and legs and back are inventoried not to titillate— nor, as Nancy Vickers has suggested in her remarks on

Renaissance poetry, to “extend the privilege or pleasure of seeing” to a voyeuristic consumer—but rather to suggest how her body has been commodified outside the discursive realm of the poem. Indeed, the following poems negotiate a crucial contradiction

56 in working-class women’s labor—a sense of pride in their work, coupled with an awareness of their exploitation— which Nanette Page has articulated:

Typically, working-class women work in jobs considered unskilled, usually with little job security, with low pay and few or no benefits... The work is often repetitive, tedious, physically demanding and, most of all boring... These women work because they need the money, but respect rather than sympathy is due them. They are not simply tied to wretched work conditions by economic need; most find a level of satisfaction in their work. Satisfaction may arise, in part, from their recognition of the contribution they make to their families’ economic well-being, but it is also often related to pride in doing a difficult job well, to meeting the challenges of quantity and quality of work, and to their awareness of their value as workers and women. Pride in their hard work and awareness of their exploitation in the workplace contribute to their active resistance to oppression at work.”

It is by attributing to those mute and exhausted physical laborers some sort of implied speech (a song, a prayer, the naming of places) that Anzaldûa, Cervantes, and Moss limn the inner lives of their working-class subjects. The poems in this section are also significant in their representations of jobs traditionally held by Latina and African-American female workers in a labor market segregated by race and sex. Through poems of the tomato field, the cannery, and domestic service, these poets raise a complex of issues affecting the women who work in such jobs, including sexual harassment, bosses’ control over their employees’ bodies, monotony, and the dual sense of the work as both undervalued and important.

Anzaldûa’s “sus plumas el viento’’—a tribute to Amalia, the poet’s mother, a longtime campesina—dramatizes the Chicana field worker’s endurance, fatigue, and resistance. Above all, we are left with an indelible impression of the physical working conditions in South Texas’s fruit, vegetable, and cotton fields because of Anzaldûa’s visceral description of the campesina’s body. Her feet are swollen, her palms are “thick and green-knuckled’’ from picking tomatoes, salt stings her “cracked mouth,’’ “roped knots” cord her back, a “burlap sack [hangs] wet around her waist.” She “husks com, hefts

57 watermelons, / [b]ends all the way, digs out strawberries.. . . / shifts 150 pounds of cotton onto her back.” There are no toilets in the Field, no running water. She and her fellow campesinos are working under a system, described by migrant advocate and volunteer physician Ed Zuroweste, as akin to “social and economic slavery.’”'* Indeed,

Diane Mull, Executive Director of Farm Opportunity Programs, noted in 1993, that “the life expectancy for a farmworker according to the Center for Disease Control is 49 years... compared to 73 years for the rest of the U.S. population” while the average farmworker family wage is only $6000 a year compared to $28,000 for the average U.S. worker (99).

Persistent sexual harassment is another characteristic of the slave-like working conditions in the fields. The main character of the poem describes with disgust the parasitic attentions of the white field boss toward a fellow worker: “Ayer entre las matas de mai'z/ ... Pépita

[lay] on her back / grimacing to the sky, / the anglo buzzing around her like a mosquito, / landing on her, digging in, sucking” (116).

The counterpoint to such bodily privations and humiliations is the suggestion of the campesina protagonist’s inner life, sketched in both English and Spanish. Part of her strength derives from her cleareyed analysis of the limited choices available to a Chicana field worker in South Texas: “It’s either las labores/ox feet soaking in cold puddles en bodegas / cutting washing weighing packaging / broccoli spears carrots cabbages in

12 hours 15 / double shift the roar of machines inside her head.” Or, she imagines sardonically, “she can always clean shit / out of white folks toilets—the Mexican maid.”

Yet, like her daughter-poet, she is a Chicanabricoleur, stringing “words and images together—song lyrics, memories of her own mother’s garden full of chuparrosas

[hummingbirds], hopes for a better life for her and her children— to sustain her and to resist oppression.^^ The harsh land, represented through her eyes, has a kind of brutal beauty: she describes the “obsidian wind”—black, opaque, hard— cutting “tassels of

58 blood” (feathers) from the hummingbird’s throat. That lyrical image suggests the campesina’s own song muted by her considerable labores:

She vows to get out of the numbing chills, the 110 degree heat. If the wind would give her feathers for fingers she would string words and images together. Pero el viento sur le tiro su saliva pa ’ 'tras en la cara.

The popular song “Sus plumas el viento,” with its suggestion of lightness (feathers in the breeze), offers an emotional and lyrical refrain against which the campesina’s heaviness and wistfulness can be sung. Earlier her hands had been described as “wounded birds,” and in the above passage, she wishes for “feathers for fingers”—fingers that would be graceful and light, fingers that would swirl and write like quills. But the south wind, as if to insult her, only throws her saliva back in her face. Yet the poem ends by redeeming the image of the “cut tassels” of blood from the hummingbird’s throat. As the ruby-colored feathers fall, “the hummingbird shadow / becomes the nav. ' of the earth.” Even the muted,

“shadow” song, borne of violence and overwork, is nourishing, sustaining. This ambiguous image draws from the contradictions in the campesina’s work and life—her bodily shame and fatigue, yet also her dignity.^®

>\Tiere does the poet’s consciousness end and her subject’s begin? In Anzaldûa’s poem, the blend of lyricism and critical politics that characterizes Gloria’s own writings is also attributed to Amalia. Loma Dee Cervantes, in “Cannery Town in August,” reserves the voice of resistance for a speaker—perhaps representing the poet herself—who is located outside the noisy and physically demanding environment of the factory. Essentially, although there is more distance between the speaker and the cannery workers than in

Anzaldûa’s poem about her campesina mother, Cervantes’s speaker attends with a

59 compassionate ear and eye to the cannery’s sensual dissonance and its effects on the workers:

All night it humps the air. Speechless, the steam rises from the cannery columns. I hear the night bird rave about work or lunch, or sing the swing shift home. I listen, while bodyless uniforms and spinach specked shoes drift in monochrome down the dark moon-possessed streets. Women who smell of whiskey and tomatoes, peach fuzz reddening their lips and eyes— I imagine them not speaking, dumbed by the can’s clamor and drop to the trucks that wait, grunting in their headlights below. They spotlight those who walk like a dream, with no one waiting in the shadows to palm them back to living. (6)

The lush sounds of the poem—the music of alliteration, assonance, and slant rhyme—seem ironic, given the recurring emphasis on the women workers’ lack of access to speech in the

“clamor” of the workroom and the “grunting” of the trucks below. The hypersensuality of the place—the aromas of whiskey and tomatoes, the peach fuzz irritating the workers’ skin, the bright colors of the fruits and vegetables being processed, even the “humping” sound of steam and machinery— demands the paradoxical responses of muting, of dimming, of becoming “monochrome.”” The poem’s speaker of the poem, while not a cannery worker herself, writes about the women with a deep physical and political engagement: “I hear...

I listen... I imagine,” she says. She is representing the bodily experience of cannery work— that sense of the mute body transposed everywhere on the dark, “moon-possessed streets” of the neighborhood— with only the poem itself “waiting in the shadows / to palm

[the workers] back to living.”

60 Cervantes’s “Cannery Town" occurs in the context of a significant body of work by

Latina historians, sociologists, activists, and literary writers on the physical stresses and labor activism of cannery workers. One such study, Vicki L. Ruiz’s Cannery Women,

Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing

Industry, 1930-1950, documents the large number of Mexican women in the industry, describes the communal “cannery culture,” and chronicles workers’ successful organizing efforts, which diminished only with the redbaiting tactics employed during the McCarthy era.^* Vividly, Ruiz chronicles the deleterious effects of cannery work on the bodies of workers. She cites a 1930s cannery employee, Marfa Rodriguez, who admitted, “When we got on the streetcar, everyone knew we were cannery girls. We had peach fiizz all over our clothes’’ (21). Emblematic of the social bonds that developed among cannery operatives,

Ruiz notes, was the practice of “more experienced workers encourag[ing] newcomers to protect their arms and hands from the itchy, irritating peach fuzz by sharing cold creams with them’’ (33).

In both Anzaldua’s and Cervantes’s poems, we have seen the use of the technique of blazon— the cataloguing of Latina workers’ bodies—to suggest the extremity of their working conditions and to offer a counterpoint to the poetic narrators’ expressions of empathy and respect. Cleveland-bora poet Thylias Moss adopts a similar strategy in a poem about her mother, who worked for many years as a domestic. The poem “She’s Florida

Missouri But She Was Bom in Valhermosa and Lives in Ohio’’ contrasts the homeliness of

Moss’s mother’s body— her feet “wide as yams,” her arms adorned with “elbow-length dishwater”— with the majesty of her presence. Encompassing an entire language system, a map of Ohio place names, mother’s body is marked by gender, race, and class:

My mother’s named for places, not Sandusky that has wild hair soliciting the moon like blue-black clouds touring. Not Lorain with ways too benevolent for lay life. Ashtabula comes closer, southern,

61 evangelical and accented...

She’s Florida Missouri, a railroad, sturdy boxcars without life of their own, filled and refilled with what no one can carry. (Small Congregations 100)

Moss’s mother, Florida Missouri Gaiter Brasier, bom in Valhermosa Springs. Alabama, participated in the Northern Migration of southern Blacks. For Mrs. Brasier, like many

African-American women of her generation, the move north meant a lifetime of employment in domestic service. Moss’s poem explores the contradictions in the domestic’s work and personhood. Named for two southern states, Mrs. Brasier experiences the northern version of Jim Crow in working one of the few jobs available to women of her color and her generation. But her first and middle names also suggest an expansiveness, an amplitude, that no snobbery or “matemalism” on the part of her employer can eradicate. While her ministrations to the needs of others might cause her to appear to be “without life of [her] own,” she is also described as a railroad, on which others, including perhaps her daughter, can cross to a life of greater ease.^’ The metaphors and place names describing Mrs. Brasier’s physical presence also suggest, of course, her unquenchable immensity of spirit.

The conspicuous references to presence counter the traditional “invisibility” of domestics. Judith Rollins, in her ethnography of Boston-area domestics, notes that employers often hold personal conversations in front of their maids and treat them as though they had no physical needs. One employer, having preset the thermostat to 60 degrees, proceeded to lock his maid in the house for two hours without any instructions as to how to adjust the heat. Yet despite (or perhaps because of) the demeaning treatment that they endure on the job, most domestics do not internalize their employers’ image of them.

Instead, observes Rollins, “domestics... see themselves, their lifestyles, their values, as distinct from and, in some ways, superior to those of their employers” (224).

62 In an interview. Moss once remarked that her mother “made it to the dean’s list of preferred housekeepers; she is a maid of honor.”^° The affectionate honorifics that Moss bestowed upon her mother outside of poetry recall the playful, yet pointed tone of the tribute, “She’s Horida Missouri.” Expressing a mixture of pride in her mother’s character and anger at some of the menial duties Mrs. Brasier was asked to perform as a domestic.

Moss concludes the poem with a riff on another Ohio place name, an affluent eastern suburb of Cleveland:

You just can’t call somebody Ravenna who’s going to have to wash another woman’s bras and panties, who’s going to wear elbow-length dishwater to formal gigs, who’s going to have to work with her hands, folding and shuffling them in prayer.

Moss’s angry catalogue of the labors her mother shouldered as a domestic is nonetheless not demeaning to her mother. Even though Mrs. Brasier has “to wash another woman’s bras and panties” and wears “elbow-length dishwater” rather than elegant evening gloves, she retains a dignity and a robust physicality. Named for two states, she appears greater than the Ohio cities whose names (and ways) are too narrow to contain her. There is something subversive about that final image of Mrs. Brasier working with her hands and, at the same time, “folding and shuffling them in prayer.” Although Moss doesn’t give us her mother’s point of view, she does suggest how Mrs. Brasier’s interpretations of her actions might differ from those of her employer.

All of these poems by and about working-class women of color use the device of the blazon to distinguish the diminishment of the labor from the dignity of the laborer. A statement by Patricia Hill Collins about Black women workers has resonance for other female workers engaged in wage labor “Work as alienated labor can be economically exploitative, physically demanding, and intellectually deadening—the type of work long associated with Black women’s status as ‘mule’. ... But work can also be empowering

63 and creative, even if it is physicaUy challenging and appears to be demeaning. Exploitative

wages that Black women were allowed to keep and use for their own benefit or work done

out of love for members of one’s family can represent work that is empowering” (48).

Indeed, in accord with Collins’ observations, the poems by Anzaldûa, Cervantes, and

Moss emphasize the gritty, demeaning, and physically challenging aspects of certain jobs

held by Black and Latina workers and, at the same time, the sense that these workers are

valuable and valued. In all three cases, the poets spin webs of language around their female

subjects to celebrate their integrity and to bear witness to their endurance. Compared to the

traditional blazon, this working-class, post-industrial version—written by women about

women—suggests women’s speech rather than their silence, their inner lives rather than

their outer beauty.

Coda; Thickening Plots, Bodies of Knowledge

I have indicated thus far some ways in which working-class women poets have, consciously or not, revised existing literary conventions for representing the bodies of

workers and / or women. In this chapter, I have focused exclusively on depictions of

workers that are not putative self-representations; in the next, I will examine poems of

pink-collar resistance, among which are a number of self-portraits. Yet before moving on

to a contextualized study of those service-economy poems, I would like to conclude this chapter with some insights that have remained submerged in the preceding discussion— that

bodies (or, more accurately, parts of bodies) can function as plot devices in poems about

work and can simultaneously suggest ways of knowing that derive from physical epiphanies. To illustrate more pointedly how these inductive, bodily epistemologies work,

I offer brief examples from three poems that grow out of experiences of injury, which all,

in some way, tell stories about identity and the experience of difference: Patricia Dobler’s

64 “Uncle Rudy Explains the Events of 1955,” Carolyn M. Rodgers’ “For Our Fathers,” and

Janet Zandy’s “Secret Gardens.”

Dobler’s poem calls attention to itself as part of a knowledge-building enterprise that is not restricted to an elite group. Its very title suggests an individual expounding on larger events with the authority of an historian. In Rudy’s account of 1955, the event that looms largest is an industrial accident that he witnessed (and barely survived):

We laid the last course of firebrick in the big 3-storey kiln when something broke upstairs.... Each man found another man’s hand before shutting his eyes, so we inched out that way— like kids, eyes shut tight and holding hands. Climbed the ladder, finally up to sweet air, the lime falling like snow and burning our skin all the way. ..(12)

The inductive chain of imagery of bodily peril—particularly the similes—illustrates Rudy’s emerging critique of his workplace. The brickies engage in atypical behavior for adult males in America: they grab for each others’ hands “like kids” after a bad dream. The hyperreal texture of this waking nightmare is underscored by the second simile, the comparison of the lime to falling snow, which suggests both lyrical beauty and a false sense of familiarity and safety. Uncle Rudy’s testimony, with its varied similes and understated images of fear, has at once the aura of particularity, of idiosyncratic speech, and a status that is more generalized, belonging to the survivor of an industrial accident.

This, too, is part of American history, Rudy seems to be saying.

Yet Rudy’s account of 1955 includes another event, one more private and quirky, of a rabbit being caught in one of Rudy’s traps. This moment in the poem functions as a kind of turn, at which Rudy begins to see himself as both victim and agent:

That was the winter I found a rabbit in one of my traps still alive.

65 The noise he made. “Quit it quit it quit it. Lord, just like a person. So I quit. (12)

The rabbit in his trap, shrieking “just like a person,” voices the hysterical panic that Rudy and his co-workers, bent on escape and fearful of breathing in the lime, could not express.

Although Dobler doesn’t say so explicitly, Rudy seems to sort out guilt and blame in a flash of identification with the trapped creature. With his power to rescue the agonized rabbit comes the decision to free himself from the job that almost claimed his life.’’ ‘

Also calling attention to discrepancies between ofTicial and unofficial versions of

“history” is Carolyn Rodgers’ “For Our Fathers.” Her worker-father’s homely feet,

Rodgers tells us,

kept daddy out of the wars and he was glad when he went for his examination he say the white man told him everything was wrong wid his feet they was in such bad shape, my daudy say he told the white man “ain’t nothin wrong wid my feets, except they ‘smart’ a lot they was bom hurting and tired and flat. cause they knows so much history.. . . ” (58-59)

Although its tone is light, the anecdote is clearly part of an African-American storytelling, meaning-making tradition that provides succor and a sense of tradition to its listeners. A contemporary African-American working-class griot, Rodgers’ father becomes a “historian for his clan,” a storyteller who takes “responsibility for teaching young people as part of their socialization and preparation for adult responsibilities.”^^ The moral of the story seems to be that irony and quickwittedness are invaluable when one is dealing with official

(white) power structures. Pretending to defend his feet—“ain’t nothin wrong / wid

[them]”— Rodgers’ father slyly convinces the recruiting officer that his feet, because of both heredity and “history,” are hopelessly unfit for combat. Despite the officer’s military

66 rank, Rodgers’ father sees himself as possessing a kind of intelligence that the white man lacks, for, as Wendy Luttrell has argued, “whites, who lack the knowledge of racism or who behave in racist ways [are labeled] as ‘ignorant’—regardless of their education, status,

income, or power—against blacks who ‘know better’”/^ The father’s shrewd response to the disparaging white recruiter is offered as a kind of parable to young black intellectuals,

who would dismiss their parents’ wisdom and struggles to survive physically and

spiritually. Adopting a hectoring tone, Rodgers reminds her generation that “Like rocks,

our fathers and their brothers came and sweated / in factories, prowled the streets for day

labor and pennies for their / expensive blood.” With regret, she adds: “And we grew loud

and bold and stupidly brave and taught / ourselves with Marx and Mills to call them weak

and useless, as the / holocaust of the sixties began. / We blamed them for surviving.” For

Rodgers, the bodily wisdom and experience of black working-class men offer lessons

unavailable in books.

Again and again, we see that body parts function as significant semiotic markers of

identity and difference. A final example from Janet Zandy’s “Secret Gardens” returns us to

the dilemma of multiple interpretations (or mediations) of a life. Zandy writes:

My mother had a mangled nail, an injured thumb that never mended, too small for a doctor, too large for time. She called it her witch’s thumb, a joke for children. At the end of a story, hidden beneath the folds of her apron, she would jerk it out like a happy ending.'*'*

In the context of the entire poem, the thumb functions as a crucial signifier in the

construction of the mother’s life. Other parts of the poem emphasize the hardships the

mother endured—how accidents of gender and class shaped her identity. “The oldest

67 daughter / and the best cleaner,” she was instrumental in raising her nine brothers and sisters. The manual labor that she did dissuaded her from what other people considered leisure pursuits, such as gardening: “When you spend so much time inside / battling for clean white space / dirt is, well, dirt / and digging in the yard / a leisure for another world”

(154). Writing from the perspective of a daughter who mourns the limitations that her mother experienced, Zandy nonetheless includes the thumb anecdote to suggest what her own grave-faced interpretation would omit: her mother’s playfulness. She then concludes the poem with a reference to those multiple readings of the life, acknowledging her own

“anger” and “regret” for the life her mother did not have but including a dream image of her dead mother, smiling, who reminds her: “I had a life.”

I hope that these suggestive poems and my discussion of them will lead to further investigation of working-class bodies and the literary texts in which they are represented.

The body as a class-marked cultural site, as a “material bearer of meaning,” is of inestimable importance to working-class studies, for as Zandy reminds us, “Working-class people practice a language of the body that eludes theoretical textual studies. [They] do not have the quiet hands or the neutral faces of the privileged classes— especially when they are within their own communities. The physicality of class difference, the use of the body for expression, communication, and as a substitute for abstract language... is rarely recognized.” What must constantly be negotiated are questions of mediation— which textual forms and genres can best be configured to get at the “physicality of class difference,” how to suggest the dignity of the worker who is engaged in bodybreaking and exploitative labor. To allow for a certain measure of authorial intrusion as well as to construct a separate subjectivity for the family member or fellow workers they are writing about, the poets under discussion here have sought out forms that denaturalize the act of mediation: the dramatic monologue; tlie multivocal rendering of a worker’s consciousness and bodily

68 experience, which draws on other genres (prayer, song, topography); the use of silence as a counterpart to both spoken language and physical gesture. Limbs and appendages

themselves become the stuff of story, and stories about the body constitute a way of

knowing—and of survival—that is not merely, as Jan Beatty says, “from the neck up.” Or,

as Donna Masini once remarked in an interview, eomparing herself to Wordsworth:

“Oilbumers are my daffodils.” In other words, representations of the body and of manual

labor function prominently as foundations of class-based aesthetic and epistemological

systems.

Moving from representations of others to those of self, my next chapter will discuss

poems of resistance by and about “pink-collar” workers, women in the feminized

professions of waitressing and clerical work. Specifically, I will attend to ways in which

these self-portraits challenge the dynamics of invisibility and paternalism that traditionally

mark relations in those professions. Here, too, the body as a “material bearer of meaning”

will make an appearance—the body that refuses to efface itself, the self-dramatizing body,

the voice that will not be silenced.

' Interview with author, July 24, 1996, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. ^ Thanks to Janet Zandy for pointing out this connection (Liberating Memory 14). ^ Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics o f Transgression, (London: Methuen, 1986). While Stallybrass and White focus mainly on prose and drama, there are many instances in canonical poetry as well— in the mock heroics of Swift and Pope, in Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence,” in Eliot’s The Waste Land, Part U, The Game of Chess, to name a few examples. ■* See especially Morrison’s discussion of the metaphors of race in Hemingway (63ff.); Roediger traces the struggle of disparaged immigrant groups to “prove” their whiteness by Othering blacks through such devices as minstrelsy and race riots. Post-colonial theory has provided ample evidence of analogous projections and displacements, beginning with Edward Said’s classic formulation in Orientalism. ^ Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries o f Class, (New York: Vintage, 1973). See especially the interview/portrait of Frank Rissarro: 18-28.

69 * As one achieves greater socioeconomic mobility, one has the luxury of bracketing off filth and, by extension, crime. Literally, the greater the income level of the neighborhood, the better the sewers and the less likely that a major polluter is in the vicinity. Also, one can pay others to do tasks that one considers demeaning such as cleaning the toilet or scrubbing the kitchen floor. See Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers, (Philadelphia; Temple University Press, 1985), for numerous examples of what the author describes as matemalism. a category of behaviors that confirms the mistress-servant relationship. ’ David Lockwood, The Blackcoated Worker, (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1958). * Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989): 138. ’ My next chapter focuses specifically on poems of “pink-collar resistance.” Lillian Rühin, Worlds of Pain:: 155. ‘ ‘ Gill Davies, “Foreign Bodies: Images of the London Working Class at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” Literature and History{\9ZZ) 14.1: 75. One particular salient example is from G. Gissing’s description of a working-class woman, Clem, in The Nether World (1889): “The sausages—five in number—she had emptied from the frying-pan directly on to her place, and with them all the black rich juice that had exuded in the process of cooking... On sitting down and squaring her comely frame to work, the first thing Clem did was to take a long draught out of the beer-jug;. . . It remained to cut a thick slice of bread—she held the loaf pressed to her bosom whilst doing this— and to crush it down well into the black grease beside the sausages.” A passionate exploration of this contradiction can be found in an essay by Catholic writer Nancy Mairs in Ordinary Time: Cycles o f Marriage, Faith and Renewal (Boston: Beacon, 1993). Mairs brilliantly outlines the paradox that a religion whose first premise is incarnation would become so tyrannical on issues of sexual morality, especially where women’s bodies are concemed. In interviews with me, both Masini and Beatty acknowledged the legacy of Catholicism in their lives and writing, though neither considers herself religious. Commenting on the poem, Masini remarked that “I could never really explain what my father did, and my imagination as a child had its own versions.. .. Other kids could say that their father was . . . a lawyer or teacher or worked in an office. My father seemed to have some kind of filthy, heroic job.... When an interviewer on a radio program mentioned Wordsworth and his inspiration and then asked about mine, I said. Oil burners are my daffodils.’” Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969): 20-21. “My Father Teaches Me Desire,” unpublished poem. '* Barbara Babcock, “The Story in the Story: Metanarration in Folk Narrative,” in Richard Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance, (Prospect Heights, 111.: Waveland Press, 1977). ” Interview with author, July 24, 1996. A number of the poets in this study have indicated an indebtedness to Sharon Olds: Jan Beatty, Dorianne Laux, Donna Masini, Linda McCarriston, and Patricia Smith. Beatty said of Olds, “She gave a big permission in terms of sexuality and voice” (Interview with author 26 July 1996). McCarriston also mentioned an affinity with Plath. See Linda McCarriston’s Eva-Mary for a terrifying portrayal of domestic violence and routine sexual abuse in a working-class family. Jane Gallop, Feminism and Psychoanalytic: The Daughter’s Seduction, (London: Macmillan, 1982): xv.

70 Carolyn Kay Steedman. Landscape for a Good Woman, (New Brunswick; Rutgers University Press, 1994); 18-19. Olds’s “Looking at My Father” {The Gold Cell, 1987), for example, offers merely a close-up portrait;

... I could look at my father all day and not get enough; the large creased ball of his forehead, slightly aglitter like the sheen on a well-oiled baseball glove; his eyebrows, the hairs two inches long, black and silver, reaching out in continual hope and curtailment; and most of all I could look forever at his eyes, the way they bulge as if eager to see and yet are glazed as if blind, the whites hard and stained as boiled eggs boiled in sulphur water, the irises muddy as the lip of a live volcano. ..(31)

Patricia Dobler, Talking to Strangers: 10. Linda Martin Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Other,” Who Can Speak?: Authority and Critical Identity, Eds. Judith Roof and Robyn Wiegman, (Urbana and Champaign; University of Illinois Press, 1995); 97-119. Rodgers, how i got ovah, (New York; Anchor/ Doubleday, 1975); 58-60. Tess Gallagher, “3 a.m. Kitchen; My Father Talking— Writing in Another Voice,” in Poets ’ Perspectives: Reading, Writing, and Teaching Poetry, Eds. Charles R. Duke and Sally A. Jacobsen, (Portsmouth, N.H.; Boynton/ C ocn 1992); 32. Dobler admits she worried about how her family would respond to her mediations of their stories; “My first full collection, Talking to Strangers, was read by my family and I was apprehensive at first, wondering if my using their stories .. would be offensive to them. Quite the contrary.... It was far easier for me to go home again than it would be for a poet looking critically at a middle-class family... . Their [positive] attitude toward book- learning was of great help to me, since I didn’t have to censor myself or the poems” (Letter to author, 1 Oct. 1995). An excellent, painstakingly researched account of the migration can be found in Florette Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 1900-1920, (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/ Doubleday, 1975). The “blason” entry of the Princeton Encyclopedia o f Poetry and Poetics (1993) notes that “Most blasons, like the one by [Clement] Marot that initiated the genre, celebrated some part of the female body, and by 1536 it was possible to gather many of them into an anthology entitled Biaisons anatomiques du corps féminin " (142). See Patricia Parker’s classic critique of the commercial ideology of the blazon in Renaissance metaphors of exploration and inventory; Literary Fat Ladies (London and New York; Methuen, 1987); 126-154. See also Elaine Hobby, “The Politics of Gender” in The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry: Donne to Marvell, Ed Thomas N. Corns (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Nancy Vickers, “Diana Described; Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry 8(1981); 265-79. ” Nanette Page, “Working-Class Women and Work,” in Women and Work: A Handbook, eds. Paula J. Dubeck and Kathryn Borman, (New York and London; Garland, 1996).

71 Page lists a number of studies (Hess and Ferree 1987; Rosen 1987; Sacks 1988) that explore the paradox of grueling work and job satisfaction. Zuroweste, a physician, described the many health problems that migrant and seasonal workers are prone to given their substandard living conditions, their exposure to pesticides, the lack of sanitary facilities in the fields, the prohibitive cost of health care, the inaccessibility of doctors in remote rural areas (48-51). Diane Mull, Executive Director of the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs, has listed the effects of all these structural deprivations on child farmworkers:

Even without parental consent, 10 and 11-year-old migrant farmworker children can be used as hand harvesters if the employer gets a waiver from the Department of Labor. No other child can do thaL A migrant farmworker child under the age of 12 can be employed on a farm that does not pay minimum wage if the child has a written consent from his parent... No other child can. A migrant farmworker child can work in agriculture more than 40 hours a week, even during the school term. No other child can. A migrant farmworker child can work more than a 40-hour week, but is not eligible for overtime pay. No other child c an .. . . And a migrant farmworker child 14 or younger can use knives, machetes, operate some machinery, and be exposed to dangerous pesticides, but no other child can.... The life expectancy for a farmworker according to the Center for Disease Control is 49 years. That’s compared to 73 years for the rest of the U.S. population (98-99).

Finally activist Dolores Huerta of the Commission of Agricultural Workers pointed to the racism and classism in schools that further disable farmworker children: “The administration of the schools is still very much white. And there’s very little sympathy for the problems that the children have, whether they be handicapped by language or other economic circumstances, the extreme poverty, the lack of adequate clothing, the lack of adequate nutrition (104). See Migrant Workers in the United States, Briefings of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, (Washington, D C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, May 1993). ” For a further discussion of the “makeshift” and “collage” sensibility often found in Chicano/a art, music, and literature, see Curtis Marez, “Brown: The Politics of Working- Class Chicano Style,” Social Text 48 (Fall 1996): 109-131. ^ I n a Dictionary of Literary Biography entry. Hector A. Torres notes Anzaldua’s facility for maneuvering within “opposing forces in her life”: “She talks about her mother being a nurse’s aide ‘who earned minimum wage, who did ... backbreaking work for nothing... . And the only thing she had to be proud of was the fact that she knew how to give shots and take blood pressure.... And so that was her pride, and the fact that I had gone to college, even though she never wanted me to go to college’. Anzaldua’s conclusion about her mother through that reflection shows her considerable ability to keep opposing forces in her life in dynamic tension” (10). Ruiz notes that workers developed special jargons and codes to refer to dimensions of caimery life: “By describing when an event took place by referring to the fruit or vegetable being processed at the time, these people knew immediately when the incident had occurred, for different crops arrived on the premises during particular months. For instance, the phrase, ‘We met in spinach, fell in love in peaches, and married in tomatoes,’ indicates that the couple met in March, fell in love in August, and married in October” (37).

72 (Cervantes mixes peaches and tomatoes, indicating either a different production schedule for that factory or an unfamiliarity with the typical production patterns.) Vicki L. Kwiz,Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987). See also Ana Castillo’s Massacre of the Dreamers (New York: Norton, 1995), which includes interviews with activists instrumental in waging a successful recent strike against the Watsonville Canning and Frozen Food Company, which tried to cut workers' wages and health benefits.The victory was won despite what Castillo calls “presumably insurmountable institutionalized opposition. In addition to the economic disadvantage of being women,... there were the added disadvantages of language, little formal education and social orientation, and sometimes lack of support from male partners” (56). The iconography of bridges and railroads plays an important role in African-American literature, in part because of Biblical images of “crossing over” and of the significance of the Underground Railroad, which enabled many slaves to escape. African-Americans who participated in the Northem Migration also largely traveled by train. See the anthology. Sturdy Black Bridges, eds. Rosann Bell, Bettye Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1979), for essays on mothers as bridges. See Gerri Bates’ entry on Moss in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 120, (Detroit: Gale Research, 1992): 220. ■** Dobler has acknowledged that the actual Uncle Rudy did survive such an accident at Armco Steel in Middletown, Ohio. “My family,” Dobler writes, “had no more close calls and accidents than anyone else, but the sheer numbers and seriousness of these incidents coupled with lousy safety standards made me furious... I needed to find a way to mediate this emotion and writing a persona poem gave me the distance to slow down and pay attention... emotionally” (letter to author 16 Oct. 1995). Writing in the voice of Uncle Rudy, Dobler supposed, would allow the reader to experience the terror in a more intimate way. The dramatic lyric also offered Dobler a persuasive means of protesting the “lousy safety standards” at Armco without reverting to overt polemic. Thomas Holt, ‘“ Knowledge Is Power’: The Black Stmggle for Literacy,” in The Right to Literacy, Eds. Andrea A. Lunsford, Helene Moglen, and James Slevin, (New York: the Modem Language Association, 1990): 92. Wendy Luttrell, “Working-Clas' Women’s ^'ays of ^"owing: Effects of Gender, Race, and Class,” Sociology of Education 62 (Jan. 1989): 42. In Calling Home, ed. Zandy: 153-154.

73 CHAPTER 3

PERFORMING PRESENCE: POEMS OF PINK-COLLAR RESISTANCE

In the theater of eating out, the waitress plays multiple parts, each reflecting a female role. To fulfill the emotional and fantasy needs of the male customer, she quickly learns the all-too-familiar scripts: scolding wife, doting mother, sexy mistress, or sweet, admiring daughter. Other customers, typically female, demand obsequious and excessive service—to compensate, perhaps, for the status denied them in other encounters. —Dorothy Sue Cobble (1991)'

Invariably courteous, gentle, cheerful, tactful, sunny, courageous, optimistic, she creates the atmosphere of the office.... [The secretary] is merely the channel for the message, and her own personality for the time being is lost in the impersonal act. At the same time, she never fails to perceive anything which would add to the convenience of her employer, never forgets appointments or other items of business interest, brings order out of disorder, and in general makes good deficiencies without seeming to notice them. — Sarah Louise Arnold (1910)^

74 Cobble and Arnold, while writing at different historical moments, both rely on theatrical metaphors to suggest how waitresses and clerical workers are called upon to perform their gender on the job.^ Vital to this gendered performance is what Ariie

Hochschild has called the “emotional labor” expected of women in service occupations: the nurturing of customers and co-workers, the swallowing of anger, the effacing of their own intelligence and personality/ Given this enforced ideal of what we might call work-force

“negative capability,” it is perhaps not surprising that so-called pink-collar poets— women who have earned their livelihood in the feminized, working-class occupations of waitressing and clerical work— would choose to write about their fields in a manner that is far from self-effacing. Indeed, the performances of gender and class that are seemingly built into female service workers’ job descriptions can be transformed into quiet subversions of the status quo or abandoned outright in acts of resistance. As Greta Foff

Paules has demonstrated in her ethnography of New Jersey waitresses, pink-collar workers sometimes opt for active forms of resistance in the face of mistreatment, such as insulting or arguing with customers.^ In a more subtle fashion, as Erving Goffman has stated, low- status workers, by remaining conscious that they are (merely) performing, can cling to “a kind of inner autonomy, holding off the ceremonial order by the very act of upholding it.”

While appearing to follow the conventional script, they can “insinuate all kinds of disregard by carefully modulating intonation, pronunciation, pacing, and so forth.”®

The poems I discuss in this chapter—written by waitresses, secretaries, and a data- entry operator—either subtly or explicitly challenge conventional images of pink-collar workers. Far from appearing invisible, replaceable, stupid, or subservient, the clerical workers and waitresses portray themselves and their co-workers in the following poems as idiosyncratic, intelligent, daring, and persistently present. Indeed, they foreground their individuality without, in most cases, abandoning a sense of kinship with other workers in their craft.’ In a culture like ours that privileges individualism over collective values, the

75 complex and delicate relations between individual and collective have been undertheorized.

In the service of this project, Bonnie TuSmith contrasts the negative connotations of the communal in individualistic North American culture with the model of “dynamic interdependence” in other cultures:

Community refers to the relatedness and dynamic interdependence of all life-forms rather than the stagnant, conformist vision that the term tends to evoke in a capitalist society. From a nondualistic perspective, the communal does not mean the negation of the individual. In fact... without a sense of individual self-worth one cannot attain true community with others. The ideology of individualism, on the other hand,. . . views the self as existing in a vacuum ... and self-interest as the ultimate value, (vii) *

Chris Llewellyn, Karen Brodine, Carol Tarlen, Lenore Balliro, and Jan Beatty convey this sense of “dynamic interdependence” in their poems of pink-collar resistance.

Llewellyn and Brodine, a secretary and data-entry operator respectively, do so by calling attention to the typographic medium of their work, using clerical puns such as “keyed up” and “justify,” altering conventional spellings, and experimenting with the visual appearance of their poetic texts. The accuracy and self-effacement that are the hallmarks of their jobs are challenged, as Goffman earlier suggested, by carefully modulated clerical

“insinuations.” Ana Castillo, Lenore Balliro, and Carol Tarlen assert their individual self- worth by performing exuberance and freedom during the rhetorical context of time off—

Castillo by pretending to be a film star in the office bathroom during a 15-minute coffee break, Balliro and a fellow server by shooting pool, and Tarlen by taking the day off from her San Francisco secretarial job to celebrate completing her Master’s degree in creative writing. Jan Beatty exposes the master-servant connotations of the gratuity system in her

“A Waitress’s Instructions on Tipping...” And both Beatty and Brodine have written

meditative lyrics on language, class, pink-collar work, and consciousness. Experiments

with typography and framing, revisions of poetic genres such as the elegy, and

76 explorations of the contours of language and consciousness enable these poets to reimagine

the class and gender performances stereotypically associated with their work.

Before turning to the poems themselves, I want to direct the reader’s attention to

how the feminized professions of waitressing and clerical work came to assume their current forms. In addition to remarking on similarities and differences in those distinct lines

of work, I will explore how feminization of those fields has shaped working conditions,

presented both opportunities for and obstacles to collective bargaining rights, and posed

challenges to the dignity of waitresses and secretaries.

On “Office Wives” and “Servers”:

The Evolution of Pink-Collar Work in Twentieth-Century America

How did the pink-collar occupations of clerical work and waitressing become

“pink”—that is, associated with women and remunerated accordingly? I take up that

question here, for the feminized and class-based nature of the above work categories has

attracted the attention of such poets as Balliro, Beatty, Brodine, Castillo, Llewellyn, and

Tarlen. Drawing on the research of prominent labor historians, I trace the factors that have

contributed to the gendering of clerical work and restaurant service Such a context, I

maintain, is invaluable for receiving the poetry of pink-collar resistance.

While today’s secretaries typically are working-class women, tum-of-the-century

American clerks tended to be middle-class men. As Sharon Hartman Strom has

demonstrated in her excellent history of twentieth-century clerical work in America, the

feminization and proletarianization of secretarial work can be traced to changes in office

technology, including the “rationalization” of work; patriarchal assumptions about women

and the value of their labor; and the inability (sometimes, unwillingness) of early twentieth-

century women office workers to organize themselves collectively.

77 According to Strom, the influential management techniques of Frederick Winslow

Taylor—Taylorism—responsible for the deskilling and routinization of factory labor to make it more “efficient," were increasingly being applied to office work, which in the jargon of the 1910s became "light manufacturing" (188). The main tenets of Taylorism— endorsed not only by management but also by Progressives and feminists who hoped that the new regime’s “objectivity” would remove class and gender bias from the workplace— insisted on a scrupulous accounting of workers’ time, on production quotas (number of letters typed per hour, say), and on deskilling, the focusing of a given worker’s attention on a routine and discrete part of the production process. The invention and widespread adoption of such office machines as the typewriter, the adding machine, and the dictaphone made possible such a division of labor.^ One prominent result of the rationalization of office work was greater managerial control over clerks—a development that encouraged men to seek other avenues of employment rather than subject themselves to the

“factorylike” quotas in the office. Women, by contrast, had little choice, since the professions and managerial positions were still largely closed to them (178).

Gender b’as—including the punitive logic of the so-called “marriage bar”—was certainly a major factor in the feminization of the office. Strom has observed that “the firing of women upon marriage or the denial of promotions and more responsible positions to them because they might might marry and have children... was used to justify these different [gender-based] labor systems, even though many women stayed on in office work for most of their adult lives” (8). Even college-educated women, who had rejected the other feminine occupations of teaching or social work, frequently discovered that the only jobs open to them were clerical. Working-class women saw “light manufacturing” as a means of escape from the heavy, dirty work of the factories. And as more men moved up and out of bookkeeping and clerking positions, employers found several benefits to the continued hiring of women, all predicated on the scarce job opportunities available to them: women

78 would work for lower wages than men; their turnover was relatively low; there was no need to promote them in the firm; and women’s acceptance of lower wages depressed those of men, as well (Strom 211). The linkage of lower wages, lower prestige, and men’s desertion of office work has continued through the present, although increasing acceptance of women into traditionally male-dominated fields since the 1960s has consequently precipitated the decline of middle-class women’s participation in clerical work.'” Gender stereotypes of women being “naturally” more detail-oriented, docile, and self-effacing further contributed to the feminization of the office. In the first decades of this century, female clerical workers were sometimes called “office wives” with the implication, as

Strom observes, that they “brought their sexuality to the office, where it could be evaluated by men, b u t... also... that women were there to take care of their ‘office husbands,’ to perform domestic housekeeping and organization chores, and to remain in subservient positions” (1-2). The above commentary applies almost exclusively to white women, for few women of color were able to break into the ranks of clerical workers until after World

War n.

Finally, the obstacles to collectively organizing office workers during the first half of this century resulted in the erosion of working conditions— including forced speed-ups and depressed wages. Strom has articulated a number of reasons for this failure to organize, including “the working-class connotations of unions, the hostility of the most dominant unions to women, and the middle-class origins (or aspirations) of many clerical workers” (9). Furthermore, the stratification of the office by gender, class, marital status and age made alliances difficult and led to individualist analyses of why women failed to advance; in the Twenties, for example, “[clerical workers] blamed the office flapper, the working-class clerk with a grammar-school education, or the women who left work to be married for the failure of business elites to take women seriously” (9). Thus, workers’ inability or unwillingness to organize, gender bias in the economy at large, and the

79 increased mechanization of the office all contributed to the feminization and proletarianization of clerical work in the first half of the twentieth century.

More recently, as Eileen Appelbaum has observed, the development of computer technologies has resulted in a kind of reverse Taylorism whereby clerical workers, far from being asked to perform isolated, routinized, quasi-assembly line tasks, are instead expected to manage multiple operations and technologies—resulting in what Appelbaum terms

“upskilling” and “downwaging.”' ' Common in both the industrial and the post-industrial paradigms is an implicit devaluing of the female clerical worker’s capabilities—such as an aptitude for language or the ability to work with the public—by the way the pace and quantity of her work are legislated from above. In her long poem, “Woman Sitting at the

Machine, Thinking,” Karen Brodine frequently alludes to the assembly-line nature of her work as a data processor. She and the other women in the room might well be seated at sewing machines in a sweatshop, so completely are their bodies regulated, so conditioned are they to “produce” as much as possible—except that they are feeding language through the machines rather than cloth. Language, the poet’s canvas, is also her employer’s commodity. Yet by making a poem in which she is agent instead of a mere conduit of someone else’s language, Brodine does offer a form of resistance. At least for the space of the poem, she neglects the “emotional labor” associated with pink-collar jobs.

Like clerical work, restaurant service was initially a male-dominated field. Before the twentieth century, women worked in private homes as domestic servants, while men tended to staff the roadside taverns and inns catering to travelers. Near the end of the nineteenth century, a boom in continental-style luxury hotels catered to the growing capitalist class; in the hotel restaurants, too, men— first black, then white—were exclusively employed because they were believed to offer those elite customers the most gracious service. Two main factors, notes historian Dorothy Sue Cobble, contributed to the feminization of restaurant work: “the commercialization of food service... and the

80 growing acceptability of women in this new public waiting work” (17). In the 1920s and

1930s, the growth of establishments catering to a working-class or lower middle-class clientele far outstripped that of fine dining locales. As these less expensive eateries sprung up, their owners sought to lower overhead costs by employing workers who would work fora lower wage: women (21). With the advent of Prohibition in 1920, some of the moral objections to women in restaurant service also fell away. In Cobble’s terms, “Victorian society demanded higher standards of morality from women than from men; women were expected to abstain from drinking, serving, or mixing liquor.. .. Without liquor many drinking and eating spots became more acceptable places for both female patrons and servers” (23). Yet although the strictures of Prohibition rendered restaurants less unseemly locales for women, the occupation of waitressing retained connotations of moral taint.

Employers selected women for their charm and attractiveness—“personality and pulchritude” as one restaurant manager put it (46).'- Cobble points out that “for waitresses, respectability proved elusive ... Sexuality was always a double-edged sword for [them] because its expression enhanced their earnings while lowering their status” (6).

Although the sexualizing of waitresses has traditionally been more pronounced than that of secretaries—they have been likened to mistresses or prostitutes rather than to “office wives”— it is clear that in pink-collar occupations, the attractiveness of women to their still largely male employers has been both a criterion for the job and a factor in lowering the status of the occupation as a whole.

As of 1920, men’s share of waiting jobs had dropped to approximately 50 percent, and by 1970, women staffed 92 percent of such positions (Cobble 3). Yet the

“engendering” of table service persists through the present, given the “sex-typing” of locales. Cobble notes that “although the type of waiting jobs classified as women’s work’ differed depending on the era or the region, the practice of sex-typing jobs was ever­ present Generally, waiters monopolized employment at higher-priced, fancier

81 restaurants requiring formal service... [whereas] women worked in tea rooms, drug stores, cafeterias, and coffee shops” (27). As with clerical work, the better remunerated positions have traditionally been awarded to men.

Yet in crucial ways, table-waiting differs from clerical work. The extreme sex- segregation of the restaurant industry, a stronger working-class identification among waitresses, and the tipping system have led to greater opportunities for collective organization, a weakening of managerial control, and resistance to the Taylorist mechanisms of deskilling that were implemented in offices and factories. Cobble has argued that the existence of all-female locals of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees’ Union engendered a strong sense of craft ownership and sisterly solidarity among waitresses. By the 1940s and 1950s— the decades in which union membership peaked—nearly 25 percent of all waitresses belonged to the union (3). During the first half of this century, waitresses campaigned for and, in most cases, achieved favorable legislation in the following areas; maximum hours and minimum wage bills, collective bargaining rights, the right to operate a closed shop, and greater racial integration among hotel and restaurant employees.

While clerical work in the first half of the twentieth century was often seen as a ticket to upward mobility for working-class women, waitressing held no such promises of middle- class cachet, not least because of its roots in domestic service. Those roots are still visible in the tipping system and the ethos of pleasing the customer. Historians differ as to the effects of tipping on collective organization, but they don’t dispute that gratuities offer servers a measure of autonomy from management because such a small percentage of the wait-staff s wages are actually paid by the restaurant (Paules 84). Furthermore, the efforts to accommodate customers’ idiosyncrasies, while often annoying, can actually militate against a routinization of service work. Greta Foff Paules, in her restaurant ethnography, has noted that “customers contribute to the chaotic nature of restaurant work by introducing an uncontrollable degree of irregularity into the service process.... As long as it is the

82 waitress’s job to minister to the unpredictable needs and tastes of her parties, she will need to innovate, to evaluate, to order and reorder priorities—to think” (83).

Although dissimilarities between waitressing and clerical work abound, the commonalities that pink-collar workers share have led me to place them under a single rubric. Indeed, many working-class women (and, given the downward mobility trend of recent decades, an increasing number of their middle-class counterparts) have found at least temporary employment in restaurant or secretarial work. The feminized service occupations, then, constitute an important cultural site for working-class women poets of this generation to reflect on issues of gender, class, race, status, and work. More than anything, their poems reveal an urgent wish to appear present— no doubt because of the gendered invisibility, emotional labor, and sexual objectification that have traditionally been realities of pink-collar work.

Beyond Accuracy: Chris Llewellyn, Karen Brodine,

and the Typographic Sublime

If we set aside for a moment such notions as “appropriate” office attire and a pleasant, self-effacing personality (to paraphrase Sarah Louise Arnold in the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter), we are left with two main criteria for evaluating clerical workers: the speed and accuracy with which they are able to (re)produce text. Any person who has applied for a clerical job, who has sought work with one of the many temporary agencies, is subjected to a timed typing (or word-processing) test, in which the number of errors is deducted from the number of words correctly typed. The sensation of speed-typing is nothing like the writing of this page of text. There is no time for hesitation, for editing— just the flash of recognition as eyes scan paper and funnel words from brain to fingers.

Such an experience can be profoundly alienating. In one section of “Woman Sitting at the

83 Machine, Thinking,” Karen Brodine, a data-entry operator, remarks on the irony that with

“all this language handled... the room is so silent[,] / everyone [is] absorbed in feeding words through the machines” (5).

Given the decontextualized stream of words that flow through clerical workers as they are typing, it’s not surprising that poets Brodine and Llewellyn have adopted some of the defamiliarizing approaches to language most commonly associated with the

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. Like many of the poets identified with that school, Brodine and Llewellyn call attention to the visual arrangement of their texts: playing with typography; eschewing conventional punctuation, sometimes to highlight syntactic ambiguities; and including non-standard spellings or seemingly deliberate “errors” so that, as in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, the “instrumental function of language is diminished and the objective character of words foregrounded.”'^ Like the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, Brodine and Llewellyn spoof conventions of official—legal or business—jargons that, when imported into poetry, sound stiff, redundant, or absurd.

A fragment from a Charles Bernstein poem, “Sentences My Father Used,” can illustrate how L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets use techniques of syntactic and linguistic estrangement to destabilize a sense of human presence:

Casts across otherwise unavailable fields. Makes plain. Ruffled. Is trying to alleviate his false: invalidate. Yet all is “to live out,” by shut belief, the various, simply succeeds which.

In this poem, Bernstein attempts to eschew the referentiality of language. Indeed, there is no clear human referent, except perhaps for the father in the title, yet the poem’s

“sentences,” fragmented and oblique, neither suggest reported speech nor provide a psychologically probing portrait. Rather, language itself is the subject of the poem— how we as readers can contribute a kind of sense despite Bernstein’s sentence fragments and

84 truncated clauses. Sound patterns assert themselves in this poetic text as they might in a

Shakespearean sonnet. The repetition of v in this brief stanza, for example, alerts us to the possibilities of regret, pain, and stunting in such phrases as “unavailable,” “alleviate,”

“invalidate,” and “ ‘to live out.’” Yet the imagery, specificity of voice, and emotional logic of more representational poems are absent here. That “illegibility within the legible”—to borrow the phrase of another L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet, Bruce Andrews—becomes an avenue for resisting the dominant culture’s intrusive linguistic conventions and contexts.'*

Unlike those poets, however, Brodine and Llewellyn make use of such defamiliarizing techniques not to deny claims of presence, but to enhance them. Chris

Llewellyn, in “In Memoriam: Carolyn Johnson,” also foregrounds the linguistic surface of her poem but for a different purpose: to assert the agency of a secretary who has died. The poem opens with a salutation, punctuated like a business letter:

Carolyn Johnson: you died two weeks ago. I am the secretary , sent to take your place. Your glasses and cupcakes are still in your desk and I write this with your pen. I am angry at your life. I am angry at your death, cause Carol I’m all keyedup and I feel it in my bonds in my tissues in my correctype liquidpaper brain.

The stanza moves from terse, informative, factual statements through un-businesslike avowals of emotion to a punning, idiosyncratic expression of tension and solidarity.

Although Carolyn Johnson is being replaced by another secretary, she has left material traces of her life, a palpable presence. To the new secretary, Carolyn Johnson represents the jargon and expertise that clerical workers share, but she is also a specific individual

85 who wore glasses and enjoyed cupcakes. When the speaker says she feels “keyedup” in her “bonds”—a substitute, of course, for bones—she is referring not only to reams of office stationery but also to the sense of being shackled and perhaps to her sense of solidarity or “bonding” with Carolyn Johnson.

The next and final stanza opens with more linguistic play and an increasingly

irreverent tone:

Say after breathin whiteout mimeofluid typecleaner thirty (30) years were you hi when you died? Glad you were cremated not filed ina drawer under watermarked engraved letterhead: Carolyn Johnson.

The middle-class norms of “professional” etiquette and language—a courteous, but distant

tone; the use of standard English; the avoidance of controversial topics—are being challenged here and replaced with sisterly shop talk. Llewellyn is also pastiching conventions of business writing, particularly the fetishizing of accuracy, as if the best way

to elegize a fellow secretary is to relax the strictures of spelling, grammar, spacing, and punctuation, by which she was bound everyday on the job.

The speaker then switches to a frenzied litany, no longer directed specifically to

Carolyn but to herself and to all surviving secretaries:

Reachout fingers on homerows deathrows of the world & touch home touch my face touch Carolyn’s ashes somewhere in Pennsylvania touch away machinated lives mere extensions of machines clicking tapping thudding tiny nails in coffin lids ticking clocks in mausoleumed officebuildings and deliver us from margins comma cleartabs...

86 space bar lock shift index return

The heavily enjambed lines and the absence of punctuation lend a stream-of-consciousness, onomatopoetic quality to Llewellyn’s angry dirge. Homerows, the keys where touch typists rest their fingers, come to resemble rows of graves, as the speaker considers the futility of Carolyn Johnson’s “machinated” life. Suddenly, the clacking of keys sounds like

“thudding tiny nails in coffin lids.” their “ticking” signifying nothing but another second closer to death. The abrupt swerve into prayer—“deliver us”—is followed by a litany of keys which, with the exception of the comma, leave no imprint. They represent movement—a life lived but not recorded. Llewellyn’s elegy becomes an act of revenge against the secretary’s silent vanishing. “In Memoriam” ends with a terse, punning appeal:

“return / return / retum: / Carolyn Johnson.”

In a similar vein, Karen Brodine interweaves the jargon of computer typesetting with images from her inner life in “Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking.” As with

Llewellyn’s mention of Carolyn Johnson’s cupcakes and glasses, Brodine includes sensual references to her own body in the poem—her rituals of coffee-drinking and lovemaking— as counterpoints to her routinized, mechanized stints at the keyboard, suggesting that her physical being is more than a medium for the transmission of text. Still, that sense of being a medium recurs in Brodine’s poem, and for her typesetting routine she chooses a language devoid of imagery, merely invoking the codes and commands:

Call format o five. Reports, Disc 2, quad left retum. name of town, address, zip. quad left retum. rollalong and there you are. done with with one. start the next.

call format o five, my day so silent yet taken up with words, floating through the currents and cords of my wrists..

87 The staccato rhythms and repetition of commands underscore the numbness and absurdity of Brodine’s work. Yet she contrasts the alienated and instrumental performance of her body on the job with its emotional and physical engagement when she’s making love with her partner:

Call file Oceana, name of town, Pacifica, name of street. Arbor, thinking about lovemaking last night, how it’s another land, another set of sounds, the surface of the water, submerged, then floating free, the delicate fabric of motion and touch knit with listening and humming and soaring. never a clear separation of power because it is both our power ___ a speaking together from body to mouth to voice. (5)

Here Brodine abandons the defamiliarizing form and content for a language that aims to be more representational: substituting images of floating and humming for the clacking of keys and the harsh sounds of commands like “quad left” and “execute,” and the idea of an intimate sharing of a “power” which relies on bodily “speech” for the sense of being under the power of the machine, which compels her to be silent.

Both Brodine and Llewellyn make use of defamiliarizing techniques in their poetry, similar to those of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, to testify to the business-writing conventions and the sublimity of office machines intruding upon the minds of clerical workers. But it is also important to them, as pink-collar workers, to assert a subjectivity that is often denied them on the job; therefore, they embrace a more transparently representational language that the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets eschew. To deny the relevance of content and context would mean acquiescing to the Taylorist ideal of the human motor.”

88 Avoiding Typecasting: The Performance of Time Off

With a hum & a shuffle she returns to the bunch drinking stale coffee...

And she’s singing “Isn’t She Lovely” on her way to her desk thinking of lunch when she has 30 FULL minutes: (the 2nd performance is always the best!) —Ana Castillo, “Coffee Break”

The previous section explored Chris Llewellyn and Karen Brodine’s representations of clerical workers-subjects as complex humans often threatened by mechanized routine. I turn now poems that depict p’nk-collar waiters at leisure. For waitresses who often eat standing up in the kitchen during a lull in the rush so as not to break “character” before their customers, time off furnishes a much needed respite from performance. For clerical workers who typically receive two ten-minute breaks per day and a half hour off for lunch, leisure and autonomy are indeed luxuries. In the epigraph above.

Ana Castillo’s “Coffee Break,” which features a secretary performing pop songs before a mirror in the office bathroom, is typical of pink-collar poems about leisure in that it frames the time off by contrasting it with workday routine. The most compelling way to write about leisure, the poets seem to imply, is to compare it with work.

89 Carol Tarlen, a secretary in San Francisco, wrote her poem ‘Today” to celebrate a paid day off after she earned a Master’s degree in creative writing while working full time.

The poem indulges in sweeping liturgical cadences, with anaphoric repetitions recalling the rhythms of the Old Testament, because, as Tarlen has remarked, “paid days off are rare and

miraculous and holy!”‘“

Today I slept until the sun eased under my eyelashes. The office phone rang and rang. No one answered. Today I wrote songs for dead poets, danced to Schubert’s 5th Symphony (which he never had time to finish), right leg turning andante con moto, arms sweeping the ceiling as leaves fell, green and golden, autumn in Paris. I sat in a bistro and sipped absinthe while Cesar Vallejo strolled past, his dignity betrayed by the hole in his pants, and I waved, today

and the dictaphone did not dictate and the files remained empty and the boss’s coffee cup remained empty [Fora Living 330)

Anything can happen on this secretary’s day off: the dead walk and the unsung earn

overdue applause. Yet, in the midst of the festivities, Tarlen acknowledges the limitations

of time in her songs for dead poets, in the example of Schubert dying before he could

finish his symphony, in the autumn leaves falling, in markers of a moribund modernism

(such as absinthe) and in Cesar Vallejo, the great Peruvian poet (d. 1938), who wrote

poems of anguish about human suffering and poverty. These meditations on mortality do

not extinguish the poem’s magic but rather lend an urgency to its sweetness. Meanwhile, in

the secretary’s absence, an eerie stillness has descended upon the office without her to

manage the machines. Of course, setting the voiceless dictaphone and the boss’s empty coffee cup to Biblical cadences only underscores the absurdity of the boss’s “helpless

husband” routine.

90 While Tarlen also mentions middle-class, individualist pleasures such as reading the

New Yorker and “nibbling croissants” in bed, she extends that private fantasy into a collective one, drawing on images of Christ caring for society’s outcasts and of a socialist utopia:

And rain drenched the skins of lepers and they were healed. Red flags decorated the doorways of senior centers, and everyone received their social security checks on time. (330)

Similarly, she writes that she “praised the sun / in its holiness, / led a revolution, / painted my toenails purple, / and meditated in solitude” on her day off—again inflecting individual indulgences with a collective consciousness. In the end, the leisure time does sound “rare and miraculous and holy,” not only because Tarlen has dignified it with rhetorical flourishes but also because her utopie vision extends to others.

Lenore Balliro, in “French Restaurant, 1982,” offers images of waitresses managing pretentious, heterosexist customers and then bonding homosocially after work in an urban pool hall. The disdain that servers often feel for customers is evident in Balliro’s terse description of the restaurant’s patrons:

We write down on a pad what it is they want, but we don’t let them see it.

They think we remember, so we let them.

They watch what moves under the black swing of skirt,

how the candles underlight the faces that lean to clear their plates. {For a Lii/ing 32)

91 Balliro observes the patrons sexualizing the waitresses, romanticizing them as they perform the humblest offices of service. But instead of feeling demeaned, the waitresses engage in subtle power plays of their own.'* This is in keeping with what Greta Foff Paules witnessed in her ethnographic study of New Jersey waitresses: “for the most part [the waitress’s] resistance is unseen, taking place behind a facade of subservience or behind the lines, out of sight of customers’’ ( 164).

The poem turns with a sensual image of the waitresses’ fingers dipping into tip jars with “slippery fingers,” as one woman invites her co-worker

. . . to shoot pool, far from Beaujolais Nouveau, anything from East Side or Ivy League. You invite me: to drink shots and beer at Mike’s 17 bar, downtown.. . .

The game is good, the sharp clack of those balls that we whack across Mike’s table. (32)

Clearly, the waitresses find relief from the uptown snobs in Mike’s gritty downtown bar, drinking boilermakers instead of “Beaujolais Nouveau” and indulging in a game of pool, that barroom sport of bravado and innuendo. Balliro concludes her poem with a more explicit image of sexual tension between the women: “We work the same shift. / And when we pass / in the aisles of our stations, / the small hairs on the back of our wrists / stiffen.”

This delicate frisson, like so much that passes among servers or between waiters and kitchen staff, is invisible to the customers.

For Tarlen and Balliro, poems about leisure time offer occasions to chafe against the strictures of pink-collar work and to dramatize piquant, if subtle acts of resistance. In the next section, I turn to Jan Beatty’s more blatant expression of a class- and gender-based resistance in her poetic harangue against bad tippers.

92 “20% minimum as long as the waitress doesn’t inflict bodily harm”:

A Manifesto on Tipping

The waitress can’t help feeling a sense of personal failure and public censure when she is “stiffed.” —William F. Whyte, “When Workers and Customers Meet””

When I first started waitressing, I would wait until the people were really long gone and then humbly pick up the tip. By the tenth year of waitressing, I was thinking, ‘T hey’d better fucking leave something good.” —Jan Beatty^^

According to historian Dorothy Cobble, International Workers of the World

(Wobblies) activists, in the early decades of this century, opposed tipping because they believed “it encouraged the receiver to ‘become servile, slavish, mealy-mouthed and beggarly’ and to succumb to the ‘easier way’ of loose morals” (42). Although originally condemned by Wobblies and Progressive Era reformers alike, the practice of tipping in

American restaurants has not only survived, but today accounts for approximately 50-66 percent of the average server’s income. Cobble and other historians of waitressing have argued convincingly that the now institutionalized practice of tipping has “militated against the achievement of a stable, living wage for the occupation as a whole,” “fostered individual entrepreneurship,” and “dampened the ardor for collective effort” (43). Yet, according to Greta Foff Paules, tips also present some benefits, such as enabling servers to maintain autonomy from restaurant management. Because waitresses typically receive such a small percentage of their income from the restaurant, they feel less beholden to follow restaurant rules that will obstruct or reduce their tip income.

93 Still, the tipping system perpetuates the idea of the server as a menial worker, since it is rooted in the practice of employers offering gratuities and gifts to domestic servants."'*

Paules observes that the historical link between private service and restaurant work encourages customers to treat the wait-staff in a patronizing and even degrading manner:

“Virtually every rule of etiquette is violated by customers in their interaction with the waitress: the waitress can be interrupted; she can be addressed with the mouth full; she can be ignored and stared at; and she can be subjected to unrestrained anger. Lacking the status of a person she, like the servant, is refused the most basic considerations of polite interaction” (138). Because customers perceive the waitress’s status as lower than their own and her financial need as great, they often believe she will be content with even a meager tip (36). Similarly, they sometimes offer the tip as a “gift” to enhance their own status, for as Judith Rollins indicates in her study of domestics and their employers, ‘To give is to show one’s superiority, to show that one is something more and higher” (192).

Or customers regard the tip as an “evaluative device,” which by its size suggests the customer’s approval or dismissal of the service (Paules 40-41).

Yet, waitresses tend to “invert the symbolism of tipping,” according to Paules. At the restaurant she observed, waitresses were known to refuse meager tips, one even throwing the spare change she had been left at the backs of exiting customers (37). Rather than feeling inferior at having received a small tip, the waitress locates blame in the customer: ‘The waitress and her co-workers may conclude that the customers in question were rude, troublemakers, or bums, or they may explain their behavior by identifying them as a particular category of customers. It might be revealed... that the offending party was a church group: church groups are invariably tightfisted. It might be resolved that the offenders were senior citizens. Southerners, or businesspeople: all well-known cheapskates” (35). In addition to positing varied hypotheses as to why they were “stiffed” in the attempt to assert control over an erratic process, waitresses frequently regard

94 customers as materials to be “processed” as quickly as possible rather than as influential benefactors whose whims must be unconditionally indulged (34).

It is in the context of “inverting the symbolism of tipping” that Jan Beatty’s poem,

“A Waitress’s Instructions on Tipping, Or Get the Cash Up and Don’t Waste My Time,” is best received. Brusque, unlyrical. and packed with commands, Beatty’s tirade, directed at customers in restaurants everywhere, challenges stereotypes of waitresses as meek, self- effacing servants who would do anything for a tip:

20% minimum as long as the waitress doesn’t inflict bodily harm. If you’re two people at a four top, tip extra. If you sit a long time, pay rent. Double tips for special orders. Always tip extra when using coupons. Better yet, don’t use coupons. Never leave change instead of bills, no pennies. Never hide a tip for fun. Overtip, then tip some more. Remember, I am somebody’s mother or daughter. No separate piles of change for large parties. If people in your party don’t show up, tip/or them. Don’t wait around for gratitude- . Take a risk. Don’t adjust your tip so your credit card total is even. Don’t ever, ever pull out a tipping guide in public. If you leave 10% or less, eat at home. If I call a taxi for you, tip me. If I get cigarettes for you, tip me. Better yet, do it yourself. Don’t fold a bill and hand it to me like you're a big shot. Don’t say. There's a big tip in it fo r you if... Don’t say, I want to make sure you get this, like a busboy would steal it. Don’t say. Here, honey, this is fo r you— ever. If you buy a $50 bottle of wine, pull out a ten. If I serve you one cocktail, don’t hand me 35 cents. If you’re just having coffee, leave a five.^^

Not once does the speaker bother to say “please” or “sir” or “ma’am.” Rather, she inverts the code of deference, suggesting that it is the customers who are so gauche, so déclassé, that they need to be schooled in the proper etiquette of being restaurant patrons, as when she chides, “Don’t ever, ever pull out a tipping guide in public.” Refusing the notion of the

9 5 tip as a “gift,” she instead regards it as her earned right. Therefore, she reserves her sternest rebuke for those male customers who make ostentatious displays of their generosity, who indulge in paternalistic cliches like “There's a big tip in it for you if.. or

“Here, honey, this is for you. ” Because cheap patrons of either gender sometimes forget that she is more than their personal servant, she reminds them, “I am somebody’s mother or daughter.”'® Unapologetically, she employs the jargon of her trade such as “four top” to communicate the waitress’s perspective on restaurant work— including the notion that tables and customers are there to be “processed.” More than anything, Beatty says that she wished to communicate in the poem what she often felt on the restaurant floor; “I don’t care how much money you make; I won’t give you your lunch if you don’t act right.” She adds,

“People would say, ‘How can you be a waitress? How can you take that much shit?’ [But]

I always felt that / decided the rules. I felt very empowered by waitressing.”

Not surprisingly, Beatty has received mixed responses to “A Waitress’s

Instructions.” After the poem first appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Beatty received a letter from a reader who said she had studied literature at Camegie-Mellon University in the 1940s and then dismissed the poem as being aesthetically deficient. “Who is she to tell me how to tip?” added that irate reader. Just as waitresses typically respond to inadequate tips by blaming the customer, Beatty answered this criticism of her poem with an ad feminam barb; “In my experience. I’ve found that bad tippers hate the poem.” ” Pittsburgh waiters and waitresses, however, respond favorably to the manifesto on tipping.

“Sometimes,” reports Beatty, “they come up to me on the street and say, ‘I work in this restaurant, and we have your poem up in the bus stand.

The favorable response to Beatty’s poem by restaurant personnel, the archival and work of Dorothy Cobble, and the ethnographic study of Greta Foff Paules suggest that the tipping system, whatever its deficiencies, has hardly rendered waitresses “servile, slavish, mealy-mouthed and beggarly.” While customers might regard the acceptance of a gratuity

96 as an emblem of servility, the waitress resists such an interpretation. Rather than accepting the customers’ right to evaluate her, she passes judgment on them. It is this inversion of the status quo that Beatty enacts in her poem.

Beyond Bravado; The Meditative Lyrics of Jan Beatty and Karen Brodine

The imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things. — Wallace Stevens'’

Pink-collar poets, like the insurance-executive poet cited in this section’s epigraph, are interested in “the music of what happens,” the shifting shapes “of a mind thinking”: clerical workers and waitresses are wrongly, if too frequently, presumed to be mind/ew.

Because of the other-directed nature of clerical and waitressing work, lyric sequences enacting interiority in the midst of social flux offer touchstones of sanity for pink-collar poets. Jan Beatty and Karen Brodine, in their meditative poetic sequences, dramatize the sensual process of perception—much as do middle-class contemporaries, such as Louise

Gliick—but their sequences, unlike Gliick’s, are grounded in a collectivist, working-class politics. As M.L. Rosenthal and S.M. Gill have shown, the “modem poetic sequence was developed all but unconsciously by poets in search of longer structures that would be both true to inner associative process and to the moral uncertainties and violent disruptions of the age” {Princeton Encyclopedia 728). Beatty and Brodine, in their sequences, view the

“violent disruptions of the age” in terms of heightened class stratification and racial segregation. Offering dystopic and utopie visions respectively, Beatty and Brodine depict the individual pink-collar worker relating to her co-workers—whether alienated from them or engaged in collective struggle. Such an exploration of the individual in community relies upon “the overall directive energy of movement—the progression, juxtaposition, and

97 interrelation o f... the lyric centers, dynamic shifts, and tonal notes” (729). It is this quality of movement— between inner and outer, the sensual and the political—that concerns me in my discussion of the meditative sequences of Beatty and Brodine.

The visual shape of Beatty’s “Awake in a Strange Landscape”—with every second stanza indented five spaces—suggests an emotional and intellectual balancing reminiscent of the strophes and anti strophes of Classical Greek choral odes. Skimming the first four stanzas, we see that the indented lines emphasize, summarize, or contrast with images in the preceding stanza:

Deep in my gut, large stones scrape each other to dust at night, rising into coughs until my mouth is white chalk in the morning.

Something has become intolerable.

I work as a waitress. Every day, rich customers, their fingers beckoning me like feathers.

The dishwasher empties trash in the back. (27)

In both instances, the flush-left stanzas favor imagery and suggestion, while the indented lines rein in that lyric impulse without impeding the movement of the poem. Rather, the poem feels like a duet, with both parts straining to voice the “something” that “has become intolerable”—an awareness of contradiction, of a class stratification so extreme that it disorients. Indeed, the two voices also mediate between the “floor”—the restaurant dining room furnished to attract middle-class patrons—and the kitchen with its chaos, excessive heat, and mess. The waitress must move between those two worlds many times during a single shift:

The fat woman wanted to order half of a grilled sandwich. I tell her we will have to throw the other half away. She says that’s okay, waving her diamond hands.

98 her Talbot’s bag at her side.

I am heaping trash on the dishwasher. He is still singing under piles of remains, wet cigarettes soaked with coffee, everything that is used. With strong black arms, he scrapes the blood- colored lipstick from wine glasses for three dollars an hour. (27)

While the waitress clearly disdains the obliviousness and privilege of the wealthy customer, she sees herself in a position of privilege vis à vis the dishwasher in the class-stratified and racially segregated restaurant kitchen.^® The dishwasher’s work carries connotations of carnage: buried “under piles of remains,” he scrapes “blood-/ colored lipstick from wine glasses” for a wage much lower than the waitress’s when tips are included. The line breaks emphasize the dishwasher’s associations with gore and filth.

Shuttling between the dining room outfitted with diamond-encrusted patrons and the kitchen with its waste-filled sink, the waitress does indeed feel “awake in a strange landscape.” The poem ends with her apocalyptic vision. After hearing other waitresses

“[talk] about how fat they are, / about working out, about spring break,” the speaker admits, “I don’t know how to tell them what I’m thinking. / I’m thinking of the taste of chalk in the morning, / I’m thinking that we are Americans, / lost steer crashing into landscape, / herds rumbling to some black sea” (28). A bitter parody of the Merrill Lynch television commercial featuring a herd of stampeding bulls to suggest a bullish stock market, Beatty’s poem offers images of an America led astray by capitalism, an America stratified by class and race, an America that lacks a historical memory, a banal America of buying and selling.^ ‘ Beatty uses the staggered arrangement of stanzas to create a lyric sequence depicting the restaurant, with its divisions and ills, as a microcosm of the society surrounding it.

99 While Beatty offers a dystopic vision of America, stripped of its democratic illusions, Karen Brodine imagines a socialist-feminist utopia in the “Rivera’s mural” section of “Woman Sitting at the Machine. Thinking.” Moving through the poem’s five stanzas, each with a different tone and rhetorical approach, is the idea that the language running through the bodies of clerical workers is a revolutionary force. The poem opens with an image from the Mexican moralist, Diego Rivera, of “women, rows of them / similar, yet unique.” Individuals, the female data entry operators, “bodies solid, leaning forward,” are nonetheless bound by collective interests, and language is their common means of resistance: “it flows through our hands and into metal,” writes Brodine; “they [the management] think it doesn’t touch us” (17). Yet symbolic but meaningful examples of linguistic resistance abound: a typesetter changing “man” to “person,” the speaker filing jobs under words like “union,” “red,” “fury,” “strike,” and “tiger.” These instances of linguistic challenges to the status quo prompt the speaker to question more broadly, “what if you could send anything in and call it out again?” Suddenly, she imagines working-class women in control of the technology that currently controls them. “[W]e could circle our words around the world.” she asserts, “like dolphins streaking through water their radar / if the screens were really in the hands of experts: us.” With this image of working-class women in charge of producing their own texts rather than reproducing someone else’s, the speaker builds to a final crescendo: “think of it—our ideas whipping through the air / everything stored in an eyeflash / our whole history, ready and waiting.” Rather than accepting the notion of pink-collar workers as mute conduits, Brodine’s poetic sequence emphasizes their both their individual and collective consciousness.

In both Beatty’s and Brodine’s meditative lyrics, we see the poets exercising “the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.” Through their dystopic and utopie visions respectively, Beatty and Brodine offer alternatives both to the images of a sleek, prosperous America dreamed up by the corporate media and of workers dispirited,

100 disorganized, and beleaguered by downsizing. By invoking disillusion and revolution, these pink-collar poets demystify the apparent normalcy and inertia that are obstacles to social change.

Coda: The Importance of Textual Performance for Pink-Collar Poets

This chapter opened with epigraphs describing the performances of deference and invisibility expected of pink-collar workers on the job. Just as waitresses and secretaries flout such expectations daily in restaurants and office buildings, so, too, these writers in their poems about pink-collar work offer textual performances of presence. To perform

“presence” demands both an attention to individual idiosyncrasy—often overlooked in workers who are regarded as replaceable—and to a collective consciousness of the inequities of gender, race, and class that permeate social relations. The uneven history of union organizing in pink-collar occupations notwithstanding, these poets testify to the sense that their struggle is not solitary. In their examples of poetic resistance to the

“typographic sublime,” Chris Llewellyn and Karen Brodine call for a sensual and politicized connection among women clerical workers in the face of domination by office technology. In textu„! performai.ccs of time off. Ana Castillo, Carol Tarlen, and Lenore

Balliro assert the autonomy and bravado that are denied them on the job. Jan Beatty, in her poetic manifesto against bad tippers, exposes and subverts the historical associations with servitude that inform waiting work in restaurants. And in their meditative lyrics, Beatty and

Brodine transform particular, idiosyncratic images of stratification and domination into a visionary poetics calling for social change. In this “post-industrial” economy, poems by service-sector employees such as these offer new paradigms for articulating a class-based politics.

101 Readers of contemporary American poetry, familiar with the heated ideological

clashes between L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and lyric poets, might be surprised to find

these women of working-class backgrounds, rather than professing allegiance to either camp, borrowing from the approaches of both. Yet it is precisely the simultaneous

assertion of individual and class that leads these working-class poets to select from an array of aesthetic means. In contrast to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets who efface the subject,

Llewellyn and Brodine employ techniques of defamiliarization to foreground the subjectivity of clerical workers in a mechanized workplace. And in contrast to lyric poets such as Gliick, who minimize social context, Beatty and Brodine situate their dramas of interiority in jobsites stratified by class and race. Literacies of the waitress and secretary, rather than any predilection for a single poetic form or approach, shape pink-collar aesthetics.

In my next chapter, I turn to representations of literacies of a different sort, specifically schooling’s promises of social mobility, its “savage inequalities,” and its goals of cultural assimilation.^' For working-class women bom in the 1940s and 1950s, the opportunity of higher education enabled them to become poets while often threatening their connections with communities of origin. Thus, the rhetorics of self- and class-assertion that are leitmotifs of this chapter will reappear in the next

' Dorothy Sue Cobble, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991): 2. ■ Sarah Louise Arnold, quoted in Agnes F. Perkins, Vocations fo r the Trained Woman: Opportunities Other Than Teaching. (New York, Longman’s, 1910): 203-204. ^ See Elaine J. Hall, “Waitering / Waitressing: Engendering the Work of Table Servers,” Gender & Society 7.3 (Sept. 1993): 329-346. Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: The Commercialization o f Human Feeling (Berkeley, 1983): 9-12.

102 ^ Greta Foff Paules, Dishing It Out: Power and Resistance Among Waitresses in a New Jersey Restaurant, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). Paules includes many lively of waitresses telling off customers. The following one is typical:

[The customer] jumps up, he pushes me out of the way, and he goes, “You just blew your tip! I'm going to have your jo b V .... I don’t take that.... I have to tell people off. When they’re degrading me personally, then I will tell them, “I don’t have to put up with your shit. 1 don’t have to wait on y o u .. . . You can leave’’ (qtd in Paules 131).

Erving Coffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967): 58. ^ Only Ana Castillo’s “Coffee Break” privileges the individual secretary performing in front of the office bathroom mirror over her fellow clerical workers. * Bonnie TuSmith, All My Relatives: Community in Contemporary Ethnic American Literatures, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). ’ Sonietimes the new technology itself was designed to dismantle an elite craft tradition. See Judy Wajcman, “The Masculine Mystique: A Feminist Analysis of Science and Technology,” \n Pink-Collar Blues: Work, Gender, & Technology (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993) for an example of how London’s Fleet Street highly skilled (male) compositors, who had mastered the difficult and idiosyncratic Linotype keyboards, lost control of their craft with the invention of photoelectronic composition machines with standard typewriter keyboards. Writes Wajcman: ‘There was nothing inevitable about this. Electronic circuitry is... perfectly capable of producing a Linotype keyboard layout on the new-style board.... In choosing to dispense with the Linotype layout, management were choosing a system that would undermine the skill and power bases of the compositors, and reduce them at a stroke to ‘mere’ typists” (36). Strom remarks on the classist nature of the feminist movement of the Sixties and Seventies: “Many of the political goals of the feminist movement, like affirmative action, had the most impact on the professions and other middle-class occupations to which middle-class women aspired. The ‘secretary’ was now the epitome of what the individualist woman hoped to avoid, yet the reality is that clerical work is still the employment that most women have” (405). ‘ ' Eileen Appelbaum, “New Technology and Work Organisation,” in Pink-Collar Blues: 75. '■ Racist notions of beauty informed hiring decisions. According to Cobble, employers in the 1920s— a boom time for women to be hired in restaurant work— “sought out waitresses who conformed to the white American standard of beauty... Most employers preferred white applicants almost exclusively. Some even followed the advice of management consultants who urged the hiring of a mix of ‘blondes, brunettes, and redheads.’ Few agreed with the New York City tea room proprietor who ‘installed colored women as waitresses’ in 1921 because of their ‘gentle sweetness, innate love of beauty’ and exalted spiritual qualities. Tea rooms, in fact, were somewhat unusual in that a ‘crew of colored women’ could as easily ‘complete the atmosphere’ as a corps of white women, since in the tea room setting the ideal waitress resembled the domestic in an upper-class home” (23) In an informal interview I conducted with two lesbian waitresses in Columbus, one, a server at a stylish Southwest-cuisine restaurant, complained that gay male waiters, rather than their lesbian or heterosexual female counterparts, were invariably preferred by the management. (She didn’t comment on the hiring of straight men, seemingly assuming that

103 they wouldn’t choose to work at that establishment.) But she said to her friend, a short, solidly built woman with a red pompadour who was hoping to get a waitressing job there, “Well, you’re enough of a boy. I think they’d love you.” In essence, while a non­ heterosexist standard of beauty prevailed at this locale, one where the patrons were famous for leaving generous tips, it still worked against female servers. '■* See Cobble, Chapters 3 and 4, for a detailed listing of union gains in different cities. In terms of race. Cobble notes that segregated locals had disappeared by the 1940s, and that black workers, in cities like Detroit, and Chinese and Filipino workers, on the West Coast, joined white workers on common picket lines (109). ^ “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry,” Princeton Encyclopedia o f Poetry and Poetics, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993): 675. Bruce Andrews, “Poetry as Exploration, Poetry as Praxis,” in The Politics of Poetic Form, ed. Charles Bernstein, (New York: Roof, 1990): 25. Chris Llewellyn, “In Memoriam: Carolyn Johnson,” in Calling Home, ed. Janet Zandy, (Rutgers, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990): 109-110. Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking: 5. I borrow that last phrase from Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Califomia Press, 1992). ■° For a Living, eds. Nicholas Coles and Peter Oresick, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995: 390. Waitresses and other restaurant workers use special lingo and abbreviations for convenience and also for maintaining their in-group. An example can be found in Paules’ ethnography. One waitress, explaining how she took good care of special customers, frequently transformed nouns into verbs: “I got my fifth-grade teacher [as a customer] one night.... I kept her coffeed. I kept her boyfriend coked all night. Sodaed.... I kept them filled up” (34). '■ William P. Whyte, “When Workers and Customers Meet,” in Industry and Society, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1946): 123-47. Interview with author. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “tip” as “a small present of money given to an inferior, esp. to a servant or employee of another for a service rendered or expected.” Jan Beatty, Mad River: 54. An earlier published version of the poem, which appeared in Oresick and Coles’ anthology. For a Living, contained the final line, “If you’re miserable, there’s not enough money in the world,” deleted in the Mad River version. Paules reported that waitresses tended to get better tips when their parents eat at the restaurant. One remarked, “I’ve never been stiffed when my parents have been sitting there.... They [the customers] see that outside of this place I am a person and I have relationships with other people” (133). Interview with author. Interview with author. “Imagination as Value,” in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, (London: 1960): 136. See Gary Alan Fine, Kitchens: the Culture o f Restaurant Work, (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of Califomia Press, 1996), for a discussion of the class- stratification in restaurants. Fine cites Everett Hughes: “Although cooking cannot makes the status claims of law or medicine, cooks, like lawyers or doctors, require an ‘alliance... with the lowliest and most despised of human occupations.’ In restaurants, this means dishwashers and potmen, who clean half-consumed meals and burned, caked-on food from

104 dishes and pots.. .. These secondary occupations provide employment for those who are not easily employable elsewhere; newly landed immigrants..., the mentally handicapped, the mildly mentally ill, and the physically challenged.. .. The restaurant provides a service for the American economy: providing what some consider human ‘refuse’ the opportunity to deal with culinary refuse” (95-96). Earlier in the poem. Beatty had written:

I work with people too young to remember Vietnam, or even Watergate. They speak in airy voices of becoming accountants, going into advertising. They say it must have been neat to live in the sixties. (27)

This section, in addition to many images of class stratification and racial segregation in the poem, contributes to a vision of an undemocratic, ahistoricial, and banal America. - 1, of course, borrow the phrase “savage inequalities” from Jonathan Kozol’s eloquent book of that title.

105 CHAPTER 4

CLASS, RACE, AND THE CLASSROOM:

POEMS ABOUT SCHOOLING

I think my ticket out was education.... My mother says I learned to read very early... anything I could get my hands on: bread wrappers, cereal boxes... Aside from some children’s books. Dr. Spock, Gone With the Wind, The Damon Runyon Omnibus, a couple of Reader's Digest condensed [volumes], we had no books in the house. I don’t even remember a bible, though I loved my communion missal. —Donna Masini'

My dad... was the magic in my life. He read newspaper stories to me at bedtime instead of bedtime stories. I became fascinated with bylines, and by the time I was in fifth grade, I knew that I wanted to be a newspaper reporter. He also penned these wonderfully comic, static poems, and I’m certain that’s where my interest in poetry began. —Patricia Smith^

1 had a lot of conflicts in grad school about what was left out of our discussions. Working-class issues or the body never appeared. — Jan Beatty^

106 I was attending a girls’ secretarial high school. Once I graduated, the hope, given my family and background, was that I could find an office job. Something clean and out of the factory. But instead—because the flames had reached me, licked my ankles and calves and set me ablaze and I now saw myself as not just one more Mexican in the multitude but part of a major historical shift [the Latino Movement in the Seventies]— I started to send myself to school... Although I liked to write a bit, my first loves were drawing and painting. However, negative social attitudes toward people of humble origins, as well as the institutional racism and sexism of the university, discouraged m e .. . . By the time I was twenty my creative impulses had been channeled into street-wise poetry. —Ana Castillo'’

Bom between 1940 and 1960, the twenty-one poets in this study slipped through what Patricia Dobler has called “the narrow window of opportunity” in higher education that opened in the late Fifties.* All but one earned a bachelor’s degree, eighteen have acquired advanced degrees, and nineteen have published at least one book.^ Without question, higher education has opened opportunities for manv of these poets, has provided them with leisure time for reflection, the chance to develop their craft, contacts with publishers, and, in some cases, incomes sufficient to support them comfortably. In addition to offering greater material comforts, education, in many cases, has helped shape the identities of these poets, bolstering their confidence and providing alternative ways to view themselves and their communities. Formal schooling has also allowed them greater access to books. Suzanne Sowinska, a scholar specializing in proletarian literature, has observed that “a deep passion for reading, which is intricately connected to notions of escape [and] survival,. . . is part of the reality of almost all the poor and working-class

107 women in academia that I know.”^ Indeed, many of the poets in this study, like Masini and

Smith, cited early experiences of reading and writing as first awakening their interest in poetry and constituting a kind of “escape and survival.” Ana Castillo vividly remembers writing her first poems at the age of nine on the rough yellow tablets her mother had brought home from the factory. Yet while literacy acquisition brings rewards— including sometimes the very language for conceptualizing class difference—the process of formal schooling can occasion profound disillusionment and a sense of estrangement both within the academy and from one’s family of origin. As first-generation writers and, in most cases, college graduates, this group of poets has been subject to the vicissitudes of achievement and anxiety described movingly by Tillie Olsen in Silences: “A phenomenon of our time, the increasingly significant number of first... generation of our people to aspire to the kinds of uses of capacity possible through the centuries only for a few human beings of privilege—among these, to write.... Marginal. Against complex odds.

Exhausting (though exhilarating) achievement Coercians to ‘pass’: to write with the attitude of and/or in the manner of, the dominant. Little to validate our different sense of reality, to he’o raise op'^'s own truths, voice, against the prevalent” (287-88).

In the preceding chapters, I discussed ways in which this diverse group of poets defied “coercians to pass,” validating a “different sense of reality” by choosing to foreground issues of class, race, and gender in poems about home and work. Yet because of education’s paradoxical power both to enable and to estrange, representations of literacy acquisition and schooling deserve special attention in a study of women poets from working-class backgrounds. In published poems and essays and in letters generously written in response to my questions, many of the poets indicated ways in which opportunities for mobility made possible through education and “being a writer” complicated their class identities. Patricia Dobler, now Director of the Creative Writing

Program at Carlow College in Pittsburgh, typifies the ambivalence expressed by other

108 writers about their class affiliations: “I identify with working-class issues, especially the downfall of the unions, but plainly because of my present work and how I live, I’m

middle-class.”

The ambivalence expressed by Dobler and other writers derives in part from a

loyalty to their communities of origin and from an understanding of the strucniral

mechanisms that reproduce class. Indeed, while some would see the educational and

literary attainments of these poets as legitimating the notion of America as a classless

society—one in which the daughter of a steelworker and the daughter of a stockbroker are equally likely to succeed—much counter-evidence suggests that in general education

actually reifies class stratification rather than levels it. Pierre Bourdieu, writing about the

French educational system, observed famously that when children from a lower

socioeconomic background entered middle-class schools, their lack of “cultural capital” often hindered their success.® Class differences, adds Canadian sociologist Jane Gaskell, often are marked in schools as “achievement and ability differences. Those who are less bright take vocational courses and get working-class jobs. Such is the IQ ideology... or the masking of cultural privilege through an ideology of unequal giftedness.”® In ea^y twentieth-century America, a rigid program of tracking and “Americanization” was

implemented by uroan public sciiool systems to immerse large groups of immigrants from southern and eastem Europe in the values of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture and to equip them for the increasingly mechanized routine of the facto ry .In his history of the

American urban working-class, Paul C. Violas argues that not only the implementation of vocational tracks in high schools, including part-time co-op education programs that actually took place in factories, but also the structuring of students’ leisure activities— playgrounds, school sports, and student governments—were conceived by both progressive reformers and corporate elites as means of controlling a heterogeneous school population. Since World War H, the system of funding public schools through property

109 taxes has further reproduced social stratification to a striking degree. According to Jonathan

Kozol in Savage Inequalities, children in poor urban and rural districts too often attend school in aging, deteriorating school buildings—coal-heated, leaky, overcrowded, unsanitary—and lack the current books, equipment, and supplies abundantly available in affluent suburban districts sometimes less than 30 miles away.' ' As differences between poor and affluent districts become more marked, opportunities for working-class and poor children to move up the occupational ladder through educational attainment appear increasingly remote. In urban districts, extreme racial segregation, due to white flight in the

Sixties and Seventies, has perpetuated a caste system of both class and color, where black and Latino children are allotted the fewest resources and accorded the scantest life chances.

The poets in this study, all from working-class backgrounds, are among those who have passed through the “narrow window” of educational attainment. Given their achievements in higher education and publishing, one might expect these poets to celebrate upward mobility uncritically in their work. However, what is striking about the poems in this chapter—all offering representations of literacy acquisition or schooling—is their passionate attention to difference, to inequalities subtle or savage. In poems about elementary schools, Patricia Dobler, Ana Castillo, Patricia Smith, and Dorianne Laux attend to particular epiphanies of difference—socioeconomic, racial, or resulting from experiences of sexual violence—by offering examples of schools’ collusion with industry, by ironically illuminating the white, middle-class bias of literacy and history lessons, or by contrasting students’ experiences at home and at school. Experiences of differences can be observed within families as well, when working-class women who have survived or even thrived in milieus of higher education—perhaps acquiring a more politicized consciousness of class or race—feel estranged from family members left behind. Kate Daniels and

Carolyn M. Rodgers offer poetic meditations on the struggles to maintain intimate connections with their communities of origin, white and black. And Michelle Tokarczyk

110 and Jan Beatty suggest the uneasy relationship between working-class women and the middle-class academy in poems emphasizing the cultural and material differences of students of lower socioeconomic status.

In a conversation with working-class writer Valerie Miner, Tillie Olsen remarked,

“We have something to give literature that is often not there.”'" Quite possibly, she was referring to what Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb have called the “hidden injuries of class,” which afflict working-class Americans whether they are downwardly or upwardly mobile. Those injuries derive from the myth that America is a classless society, from the lack even of a public language with which to conceptualize issues of class. And although discourses of race are more prevalent, the role of institutionalized racism in reproducing class among non-whites is often muted or ignored, as in the recent debates about ending affirmative action in the California state university system and elsewhere. Formal education, with its promise of mobility, plays an enormous role in perpetuating the ideology of classlessness even as it helps to replicate the existing structure. The poems in this chapter, while sometimes acknowledging the empowering effects of education, give voice also to the hypocrisies and inequities, the hidden injuries.

“Field I rips to the Mill” Versus “Red Wagons”

Suzanne de Castell and Allan Luke, in their essay on literacy in North American schools, question the notion “that it is possible to transmit literacy... as a value-free, context-neutral set of communication skills.” Rather, they demonstrate, “the context within which we acquire language significantly mediates meaning and understanding in any subsequent context of use.”'^ In this section’s poems, Patricia Dobler, Ana Castillo,

Patricia Smith, and Dorian ne Laux foreground the importance of context in literacy acquisition by emphasizing similarities between work and school or differences between

111 home and school. Through the personae of a Catholic nun who teaches working-class children; of non-white pupils; and of a white, working-class student who is a victim of incest—through what Adrienne Rich would call the “eye[s] of the outsider”— these poems critique the dominant cultural norms of whiteness, middle-class status, and patriarchal privilege, which are often transmitted unquestioningly in school readers and history texts.

Patricia Dobler, in “Field Trip to the Mill,” depicts a nun shepherding her class of

fourth-graders through the catwalks and caverns of their town’s largest employer. The trip

makes Sister Monica nervous, and she finds much to criticize:

“[N]o giggling no jostling, you monkeys! So close to the edge!” She passes out sourballs for bribes, not liking the smile on the foreman’s face, the way he pulls at his cap, he’s not Catholic. Protestant madness, these field trips, this hanging from catwalks suspended over an open hearth. (3)

Sister Monica frames her opposition to the mill directors’ practice of inviting schoolchildren

to the mill in terms of religious difference. Instead of removing his cap, the foreman merely

tips it in a gesture of courtliness that the nun considers inappropriate. Yet Sister Monica’s

observations about Protestant difference are also rooted in a working-class politics

presumably because so many of the workers in the mill, probably from southern and eastern Europe, subscribe to the Catholic faith.’"* Sister views the mill as a Protestant

“Hell,” in which “cranes clawing / their way through layers of dark air / grew leathery

wings and flew screeching,” and the molten steel poured out “liquid fire like Devil’s soup.”

The sublimity of the experience, which frightens Sister Monica, is meant to excite the

children, to initiate them into the mysteries of the place that will, ten years later, employ

them. Such field trips were part of working-class folklore in America. In addition to

funneling working-class children into vocational courses, schools often collaborated with

112 industry to bring students into worksites under the auspices of co-op programs and class trips (Violas 124 ff.). Sister Monica wants to distance herself from such a collusion—

“Industry and Capital and Labor, / the Protestant trinity”— and, therefore, “she trembles..

., the children clinging / to her as she watches them learn their future.” That final image movingly underscores the unequal opportunities that these working-class children will have in life; instead of visiting a park or zoo, they tour a steel mill on their class trip. By favoring

Sister Monica’s values over those of the mill’s management, Dobler offers an implicit critique of the work ethic and labor exploitation under industrial capitalism.

Similarly questioning dominant cultural values. Ana Castillo witheringly indicts the white, middle-class bias in Eisenhower-era textbooks by contrasting the suburban version of reality presented in a school primer with her experience growing up Chicana and working-class in Chicago:

R ed W agons

c. 1958

In grammar school primers the red wagon was for children pulled along past lawns on a sunny day. Father drove into the driveway. “Look, Father, look!” Silly Sally pulled Tim on the red wagon.

Out of school, the red wagons carried kerosene cans to heat the flat. Father pulled it to the gas station when he was home and if there was money.

If not, children went to bed in silly coats

113 silly socks; in the morning were already dressed for school. (My Father 5)

Castillo ridicules the primer’s stilted syntax and bland imagery of sunshine, driveway, lawn, and car. The children in her poem suffer from the cold and see their father pulling the toy wagon down the street just as Silly Sally does in the reader. That disparity Castillo underscores with ironic detachment, particularly when she describes the children in the freezing flat, layered in “silly coats / silly socks,” “already dressed for school.” What

Castillo, given her ironic approach, never states directly is precisely this: that poor and working-class children feel a kind of despair when they begin to understand the inequities of schools and their own life chances. In the same way, the children in Kozol’s Savage

Inequalities eloquently express their anger and sadness at such disparities. A 14-year-old girl from East St. Louis, Illinois, remarked, “We have a school. . . named for Dr. [Martin

Luther] K ing... The school is full of sewer water and the doors are locked with chains.

Every, student in that school is black. It’s like a terrible joke on history” (35). In response,

Kozol adds, “About injustice, most poor children in America cannot be fooled” (57).

Castillo’s sardonic disruption of an American primer demonstrates that sense of refusing to be fooled.

African-American poet Patricia Smith writes, in “Blonde White Women,” about responding to another cue from the dominant culture: the imperative to be white. Noting the abundance of ads for skin bleaches and hair-straightening products in the pages of Ebony, she remembers her schooldays as a working-class child in Chicago, wearing “a dull gray mophead” or her father’s white shirt on her head, pretending she was white with blonde pigtails: “Pressing down hard with my / carnation pink crayola, I filled faces / in coloring books, rubbed the waxy stick / across the back of my hand until the skin broke.”'^ The

14 violence of that gesture— the literal attempt to write her skin white— was partially inspired by a teacher’s rebuff:

In first grade, my blonde teacher hugged me to her because I was the first in my class to read, and I thought the rush would kill me. 1 wanted her to swallow me, to be my mother, to be the first fire moving in my breast. But when she pried me away, her cool blue eyes shining with righteousness and too much touch, I saw how much she wanted to wash.

She was not my mother, the singing Alabama woman who shook me to sleep and fed me from her fingers. I could not have been blacker than I was at that moment.

Like Castillo, Smith contrasts images of school and home. The white teacher, “her cool blue eyes shining with / righteousness and too much touch,” will never replace the black mother with all of her sensuous demonstrations of love—singing, feeding from fingers, shaking her daughter to sleep (a motion more volatile than rocking). The teacher’s rejection is juxtaposed with the mother’s unconditional acceptance.

In another context. Smith explicitly called attention to the whiteness of her reading materials as a child, which also inspired her wish to be white: ‘“Mary Poppins,’ 16

Magazine, MAD, and a series of teen books starring Donna Something-Or-Other, similar to

Nancy Drew but gutsier.” With a kind of snide humor. Smith describes how her reading practices influenced her early writing of stories: they “starred an obscenely popular teenager named Erica Donovan. She was white..., had gorgeous blue eyes (I didn’t), was homecoming queen, class president, valedictorian, head cheerleader (I wasn’t), had six extremely handsome, intelligent older brothers (I wished), two professional parents and a life of riches, fame and a wonderful husband in her future. (I’ve come close— got the

15 husband.) She was the me I wanted to be.” Smith adds, “Glad I got that out of my system early.”*® Like Castillo in “Red Wagons,” Smith makes use of a kind of self-satire when representing the early and painful recognition of class and racial difference.

A final example of difference can be seen in San Diego poet Dorianne Laux’s “What

My Father Told Me.” The speaker, a dutiful working-class child, has always done “what was asked.” She begins by listing some of her chores, and the list, though containing such ordinary tasks as laundry, dishwashing, and yardwork, bears connotations of violence and death: “The slack of a vacuum cleaner cord / wound around my hand. Laundry / hung on a line.... / 1 do the chores, pull weeds out back, / finger stink-bug husks, snail carcasses, / pile dead grass in black bags.” The speaker seems to be moving through these tasks in a trance. As matter-of-factly as she mentions the chores, she reveals her experience of incest:

“I do as I am told, hold his penis / like the garden hose, over the toilet / or my bare stom ach.. . . / His voice, the hiss of lawn sprinklers, / the wet hush of sweat in his hollows.” The repetitions of s and sh, voiceless sibilants, suggest the secret nature of the abuse.

The second stanza features the child-speaker at school, trying to integrate this experience of sexual violence into a standardized lesson about the (white male) American presidents and the white “settlers” conquering the west:

Summer ends. Schoolwork doesn’t suit me. My fingers unaccustomed to the slimness of a pen, the delicate touch it takes to uncoil the mind. History. A dateline pinned to the wall. Beneath each president’s face, a quotation. Pictures of buffalo and wheatfields, a wagon train circled for the night, my hand raised to ask the question. Where did the children sleep? (20-21)

116 The terse list of what counts as knowledge at school— a collection of “facts” that have little relevance to the child's life— resembles the earlier sequence of chores, in that the speaker sounds numb. The poem’s final question, which indicates the speaker’s hunger for making sense, for bringing together the two parts of her life that seem so unrelated, is a small harbinger of hope.

By calling attention to the contexts of literacy acquisition— home vs. school, work vs. school— these poets give voice to what Tillie Olsen would call tlie “silences” of the dominant culture, including the many “coercians to pass.” Far from choosing to pass,

Dobler, Castillo, Smith, and Laux explicitly call attention to power relationships and cultural differences in poems set in elementary schools. The next section, also examining disparities between school and home, presents poems by Kate Daniels and Carolyn M.

Rodgers, which explore how university-educated working-class women, both white and black, struggle with conflicting values systems—those acquired in college and those of their families.

“Common Sense” Versus “Book Learning”:

Higher Education as Both Enabling and Estranging

[Black and white working-class women] both distinguish between knowledge produced in school or in textbooks by authorities and knowledge produced through experience.. . . [They believe] that although schoolwise intelligence can enhance one’s life, it can also interfere with one’s ability to meet the demands of working-class existence;... themore schooling that one has, the less common sense she is likely to have.— Wendy Luttrell, “Working-Class Women’s Ways of Knowing””

117 In this section, I examine poems about working-class families— one white, one

black—in which tensions arise when a college-educated woman poet returns home to visit

parents and siblings who have less formal schooling. In both poems, the college-educated

speakers are treated with mistrust for having embraced school learning, and because they

have been educated they are believed to have rejected their communities’ values. In some

ways, they have. Yet both speakers struggle to find commonalities with their families even

as they give voice to their newly politicized ways of thinking. Kate Daniels, writing about

her white family, guiltily acknowledges her privilege (as a teacher of poetry) relative to that

of her forklift-driving brother and seeks explanations for the deterioration of their

relationship and the divergence of their lives. Although Daniels seemingly wants to avoid judging her brother, much of the poem is occupied with figuring out where he, despite all

his promise, went wrong, even as she also writes empathetically about his experiences of

alienation and his expressions of impacted rage. Carolyn Rodgers, in a number of poems

about her black family, tries to locate common ground between the politics and sensibility

she acquired in the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and her mother’s lived experiences

of classism and racism.

The Sociological literature is rich with stories about the estranging effects of higher

education.’® Among those accounts, Wendy Luttrell’s study is notable for its exclusive

focus on women. In interviews with 15 black and 15 white working-class women in adult

education programs, Luttrell found that both groups revealed ambivalence about

participating in higher education. In their communities, as the above epigraph suggests,

school learning was valued less than a “common sense” knowledge derived from experience, and the women defined such experiential knowledge broadly to include being

“smart” about people, raising children, knowing how to build or fix things, and dealing

with racism (39-40). However, the white working-class women gave only examples of

men when asked to define “real” intelligence. Luttrell states;

118 Not only did the white women value men’s common sense more than their own, they described the different ways that working-class men and women acquire common sense. White working-class men learn common sense... through a set of collective, work-related experiences, including apprenticeships, as sons or employees, or as participants in vocational training programs that teach them what m i^ t be called ‘craft’ knowledge... the ability to work with one’s hands and muscles.... Men acquire this masculinity and ‘craft’ knowledge not by nature or instinct, but through some public, collective experience. In contrast, working-class women acquire common sense naturally, as intuition. They describe this knowledge as simply a part of being a woman. (39-40)

The black women, by contrast, highly value the “real intelligence’’ of female relatives perhaps because of black women’s historical role in maintaining families—“swapping resources and child care and adapting to adverse economic constraints through extended kin networks and mutual support” (41). Luttrell’s findings on the racial differences among black and white working-class women can help illuminate Daniels’ and Rodgers’ poems on schooling and families. Daniels chooses to focus on a gendered conflict between her and a brother, suggesting, in her poem, a paradox that Luttrell found among white working-class women: that education simultaneously weakened their class identity and enabled them to gain power vis à vis working-class men. Rodgers’ poems, about a mother and daughter, imply that school learning by itself is incomplete if it hasn’t been inflected with the “real intelligence” of a black femnk relative.

Originally from a Richmond, Virginia working-class family, Daniels describes a conflict-ridden dinner in “Self-Portrait with Politics”:

At the dinner table, my brother says something Republican he knows I will hate. He has said it only for me, hoping I will rise to the argument as I usually do so he can call me “communist” and accuse me of terrible things— not loving the family, hating the country, unsatisfied with my life. I feel my fingers tighten on my fork and ask for more creamed potatoes to give me time to think.

119 He’s right: It’s true I am not satisfied with life. Each time I come home my brother hates me more for the life of the mind I have chosen to live. He works in a factory and can never understand why I am paid a salary for teaching poetry just as I can never understand his factory job where everyone loves or hates the boss like sod.

These are some of the "hidden injuries of class” that compound gendered tensions and sibling rivalries in working-class families: redbaiting, suppression of criticism, laborers’ suspicion of intellectuals, and intellectuals’ disdain or incomprehension of the life choices that factory workers have to make. Hurt, angry, and defensive, the speaker does not pretend to be noble. Like her brother, she is capable of the condescending sneer, the ad hominem attack, ridiculing the factory workers who “[love] or [hate] the boss like god.”

And there seems to be a whiff of self-righteous justification in her declaration that “my brother hatesme... for the life / of the mind I have chosen to live.” She has “chosen” such a life; he has not. “Self-Portrait” seethes with contradiction: simultaneously a statement of self-defense, a confession of guilt, and a coming to terms with the complicated nature of class identity and consciousness in America, this portrait is of the individual, not isolated in a gilt frame but rather in the context of a fractious, longstanding relationship.

Inwardly, the speaker keeps translating the personal, ad feminam qualities of her brother’s attack into structural terms. Instead of being “unsatisfied with my life,” she states that she’s “not satisfied with life,” meaning, as she adds later, with “a world that gave me / poetry and my brother an assembly line.” The disparity between her brother’s life and her own is the speaker’s obsession. She remembers their joint childhood, her brother’s promise, and their mutual affection:

He was so intelligent as a child his teachers were scared of him. He did everything well and fast and then shot rubberbands at the girls’ legs

120 and metal lunchboxes lined up neatly beneath the desks. Since then, something happened I don’t know about.... He moves things in boxes from one place to another place. I have never worked in a factory and can only imagine the tedium, the thousand escapes the bright mind must make.

The speaker, while aware of her privilege, doesn’t know what do with it. She tries to empathize with her brother, but to both of them her compassion feels like condescension.

This comes out clearly in a final comparison of past and present. As a child, her brother’s

“goal in life / was to be a d o g ,. . . we were forced / to scratch his head, hear the pathetic sound / of his human bark.” What had been a playful routine in which the brother feigned submission now seems an ironic portent of his future self, which is aggressive rather than meek: “he glowers / and acts like a tyrant and cannot eat / and thinks I think / 1 am superior to him.” The poem ends on an unsatisfactory stalemate with the speaker wishing her own children will have a more amiable adult relationship with their siblings.

The degree of awkwardness and animosity between brother and sister in Daniels’

“Self-Portrait” resembles that which Luttrell recorded among the white working-class women in her study toward men in their lives. Her respondents reported that higher education simultaneously gave them greater power in their relationships with working-class men and eroded their class identity. Luttrell elaborates on this painful paradox:

Schooling puts a strain on working-class women’s ties with the working-class culture—a culture that values commonsense knowledge and working-class men’s “real intelligence” more than it does book learning and mental work. Yet schooling is perceived as one of the few avenues by which working-class women can achieve upward mobility. Consequently, working-class women must seek legitimation from the same source that undermines their knowledge and sense of identity (as women and as part of the working class). Nevertheless, working-class women’s access to school learning and to white-collar jobs gives them an edge in the balance of power. If their common sense is inevitably valued less than is the common sense of husbands, brothers, or fathers, having schoolwise and motherwise intelligence is perhaps their on'y chance. (43)

121 Lois Weis, in Working Class Without Work (1990), suggests that in the post-industrial era the gender rift between white working-class men and women might be growing even more profound. In interviews with Midwestern working-class high school students, Weis found pronounced gendered disparities in the ways boys and girls spoke about dating, marriage, and family relations. .-Ml of the boys spoke of wanting traditional families, while every girl except one claimed to want higher education and significant wage labor experience so that they could be “independent” of men. In the absence of the high-paying industrial jobs that would allow men to retain their strict patriarchal control of the family or of a powerful labor movement, Weis hypothesizes that the New Right with its “pro-family” rhetoric might enjoy increasing popularity among white working-class men. And although the feminist movement has been largely a white middle-class one, Weis sees indications of a crossover appeal to working-class women. Daniels’ poem vividly evokes the emotional strains of the double bind often experienced by white working-class women who receive formal schooling.

. Carolyn M. Rodgers, a Chicago poet affiliated with the Black Arts movement of the

1960s, writes about the tensions between a working-class mother and her politicized, college-educated daughter in a series of poems appearing in how i got ovafu Like other poets in the Black Arts movement, Rodgers rejected forms that “might be conceived indelibly as ‘Eurocentric’ or ‘white.’”*’ She favors a vernacular verse, with lines broken to emphasize the give and take, call and response of impassioned dialogue. In the mother- daughter poems, Rodgers uses a long prose-like line and experiments orthographically with the rendering of black speech—techniques that drew criticism from other Black Arts poets such as Dudley Randall and Haki Madhubuti.'° Yet perhaps Rodgers’ explicit class politics and her tendency to valorize her mother’s old-fashioned storytelling wisdom over a strict black nationalist approach have also contributed to her relative critical neglect.

122 In the first poem of the series, the college-educated daughter, involved with black nationalist politics, comes into conflict with her religious mother who preaches tolerance toward whites and fears radical black movements:

she sd if she had evah known educashun woulda made me crazi, she woulda neva sent me to school (college that is) she sd the way i worked my fingers to the bone in this white mans factor! to make u a de-cent some- bodi and here u are not actin like decent folks talking bout hatin white folks & revolution & such and runnin round wid NegroEs WHO CURSE IN PUBLIC!!!! (she sd) THEY COMMUNIST GIRL!!! DON’T YUH KNOW THAT??? **DON’T YUH READ***THE NEWSPAPERS????? (“Jesus Was Crucified” 8)^‘

Both the white college-educated speaker in Daniels’ poem and her black counterpart in

Rodgers’ poem are redbaited by family members who fear the changes they have undergone at the university. Here, though, the impassioned arguing of mother and daughter is nothing like the suppressed tension of the white family. Reading books, meeting poets, and becoming involved with black political movements have intensified the young woman’s anger at and awareness of white racism, and she is struck by her mother’s naïveté—in her apparent belief in an unbiased press or in her praise of a white banker who treats her cordially when she’s making a deposit.

Yet the dialogue format offers some degree of legitimacy to both mother’s and daughter’s value systems, even as it favors the daughter’s witty ripostes; when the mother asks, “do u pray?,” her daughter admits, “sorta when I hear Coltrane. ” The mother, struggling to maintain a relationship with her daughter, is sensitive to the young woman’s anger but worries that it will keep her from surviving in a culture where oppression is a given; indeed, she acknowledges the way her own life has bound up in strictures of race

123 and class, as when she refers to having “worked my fingers to the bone / in this white mans factori.”

In “IT IS DEEP,” a companion-poem in the series, Rodgers compares her mother to a bridge that enabled her to feel protected and loved, to develop strong values, and to have access to higher education: “My mother, religious-negro, proud of / having waded through a storm, is very obviously, / a sturdy Black bridge that I / crossed over, on.”

Rodgers depicts her mother offering material comfort, emotional solace, and also criticism of her daughter’s “communist” lifestyle. The mother comes off as substantial, powerful:

“religiously girdled in / her god,” she “laid on my bell like a truck,” after having found the daughter’s phone had been disconnected. In some ways, the mother doesn’t understand her daughter’s life—the iconography of the “le-roi (al) cat” poster on the wall, the books the poet-daughter has written— but the speaker notes that her mother’s hardships that have influenced her own politics:

she would not be considered “relevant” or “Black” but there she was, standing in my room... not remembering that I grew up hearing her curse the factory where she “cut uh slave”. .. not remembering that I heard the tears when they told her a high school diploma was not enough. ..(11-12)

Rodgers’ poems illustrate the dissonances but, more importantly, the continuities that inform relationships across generations. Although different levels of literacy complicate the mother-daughter bond, there is still a good deal of mutual understanding and empathy—the mother’s history shaping her daughter’s politics; the daughter giving voice in her poetry to her mother’s otherwise uncelebrated life.

Rodgers’ representations of the dissonances and intimacies of this mother-daughter relationship recall Luttrell’s statement about black women’s frequent perceptions of “real

124 intelligence” or “motherwit” in their sisters, aunts, mothers, and grandmothers: “This ‘real intelligence’ is based on their ability to work hard and get the material things they and their children need and want” (41). Unlike their white working-class counterparts who disparaged women’s commonsense knowledge and favored white men’s “craft” knowledge, black women perceived themselves and their sisters as strong and capable, able to do everything “from solving family disputes to overcoming natural disasters” (41).

Rodgers’ and Daniels’ poems, read alongside each other, offer compelling representations

of the conflicts that arise when the college-educated poet, white or black, returns to her community of origin. The poems can also be read as gestures of yearning for connection

despite the estranging effects of education.

Trouble in the “Knowledge Factory”:

Working-Class Women in the Middle-Class Academy

We found that women academics from the working class clearly felt tom; they wanted to maintain their L- 's to their families, but wanted to fit into the academy as well. Often, they feared they fit into neither world. They were frequently uncomfortable with the language they used... And they were angry at being ignored or at being expected to be middle- class professionals, socially and economically. —Elizabeth A. Fay and Michelle M. Tokarczyk^^

While the previous section focused on tensions between college-educated working-

class women and their families of origin, this section examines ways in which two

working-class women poets, both with advanced degrees, expose the middle-class norms

of academe. Jan Beatty does so by pointing out the gaps between an academic’s scholarly

125 interests and his treatment of other people; her “As If That’s All There Is” seethes with an

“unprofessional” rage. Michelle Tokarczyk first challenges academic norms by mentioning the unmentionable—writing about herself as a PhD candidate who had had an abortion and been on welfare— and then reifies such values by both problematizing and embracing the

American Dream of higher education as the ticket to upward mobility. Beatty and

Tokarczyk explicitly draw attention to material and ideological markers of class difference in poems about working-class academics refusing to “pass” as middle-class, and

Tokarczyk also writes about the pain of attempted assimilation.

Beatty’s “As If That’s All There Is” offers a portrait of an egotistical academic, a devout disciple of the reigning orthodoxy of “social constructionism”:

Don’t ask me to ponder the shape of an old oak bench, or why in the sixteenth century things were as they were, as if that’s all there is.

I’m not so impressed with your studies as I watch you talk to a guy in the bar . and miss the essence of the conversation.

You are an oak table, your carefiil words a testament to someone’s craftsmanship. You hear only what you’re about to say next.

I know you’d caU essence a naïve concept, and laud the freeing nature of social construction, but I’m not convinced that’s all there is, as I watch you not tip the waiter, stepping in front of someone to make a point about ancient Greece. (26)

Beatty’s critique is both particular and generic—a questioning of norms of civility and an examination of what counts as knowledge. A colleague of Beatty’s at the University of

Pittsburgh reads the poem as “anti-intellectual” because, in his view, it posits a disdain for historical inquiry and cultural studies.'^ However, Wendy Luttrell’s “Working-Class

Women’s Ways of Knowing” provides another lens through which to view the poem:

126 Beatty is contrasting “schoolwise” intelligence with a “commonsense” shrewdness about people, derived in part from a consciousness of class difference. The academic in the bar is violating what for the speaker are important working-class codes of conduct: tipping the waiter, acknowledging the contributing “craftsmanship” of others, maintaining consistency between word and deed (i.e. “lauding” social construction yet not perceiving the constructedness of his own class bias). If Beatty is essentializing class here, she is doing so to shift the terms of the debate (much as she would by yelling “Hey!” to get the attention of unruly or insolent customers as a waitress). Because colleges and universities have traditionally been bastions of privilege, instances of class bias— condescending ways in which academics speak about workers or behave toward them—frequently go unchallenged.""* By saying, in effect, “In my community your ‘studies’ do not count as knowledge, and your behavior is unspeakably rude,” Beatty is asserting an ethical and epistemological paradigm that demystifies privilege.

Michelle Tokarczyk’s “Acknowledgments” also challenges the expectation that graduate students are exclusively from middle- or upper-class backgrounds by revealing material markers of a working-class background. Written after the poet’s Ph.D defense, the poem borrows from the generic expressions of indebtedness with which writers introduce books or dissertations. Instead of the customary roster of colleagues, mentors, and family members, Tokarczyk dedicates the different sections of her poem “to the services and people who helped me to become a woman who could get a Ph.D,” expressing gratitude

‘To free therapy for college students”; ‘To AA and others who helped me stop drinking”;

‘To legalized abortion”; and ‘To social services.” First published in 1990, in an era of bipartisan backlash against the working poor and people on welfare, Tokarczyk’s poem offers an eloquent appeal for more, not fewer services."^ In the “social services” section, for example, Tokarczyk writes:

127 There’s nothing good about aluminum chairs near a park where the homeless no longer hear of revolution.

Hours of waiting, hours of forms, tired tobacco breath: “Why’d ya lose that job, sweetie?”

Except without that room without those coupons you could not clutch milk, bread, eggs. You could not place cereal, rice in the cupboard.

You could not eat. (330-331)

Unlike writers who express gratitude for generous grant funding or editorial support,

Tokarczyk emphasizes more fundamental needs. The word “clutch” suggests a hunger so powerful that it would override the fear of humiliation associated with receiving public assistance. When she wrote this poem, Tokarczyk was an untenured faculty member at

Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. By publishing it, she chose to “come out” as a former welfare recipient, to stand in solidarity with people who endure daily indignities and red tape to consume a simple rneal.'^ As an academic and Ph.D recipient—two categories that carry some prestige in this culture—Tokarczyk is implicitly debunking common myths about people who receive govemment assistance: they’re lazy, they don’t want to work, they stay on welfare all their lives, they live extravagantly.^’ Tokarczyk also expresses solidarity with poor women who find themselves pregnant when she dedicates a section of her poem “To legalized abortion”:

In a white room in a white paper gown

128 they bled me red. At twenty, I sat recovering, turning my eyes toward the horizon I could not see. (330)

In these short, stark lines. Tokarczyk points out the bodily trauma of choosing abortion just as in the social services section, she emphasized the indignities that welfare recipients face.

Yet her purpose in both sections is to argue for the legitimacy of those services as choices for poor and working-class women.

In a second poem, “An Academic Fantasy,” Tokarczyk imagines holding a tenured professor’s position. Initially, the poem seems to offer yet another vision of moving out of and away from the working class:

I still have hope that one day after, please, not too many more years of teaching all day writing all night I’ll get that job... .

After all these years I’ll get tenure. I’ll never drink another cup of coffee. Never eat dried cheese while running down the street. My body will sway in the freedom of daily jazz classes. I’ll lie in a chair, feel the sun’s rays warm my eyelids...

I’ll have my own money, my own health insured, my own title will inscribe my own office door. I’ll fill my shelves with dusted books."*

129 From the poem’s title, a reader might expect a scholarly fantasy— the anticipation of a well- received book, the discovery of a manuscript. Yet the fantasy focuses almost exclusively on the body at leisure and on the acquisition of certain academic privileges: the possessive

pronoun “my” appears seven times in ten lines. However, Tokarczyk calls into question

this fantasy of assimilation in the poem’s final stanza:

That childhood crying unheated under an old winter coat of a blanket, closing my eyes to the muffled sounds of my mother’s cries, that childhood, those years expiated. They’ll see it. point to me, dream of me, the American Dream.

And I will tell them no, no. I will tell them dreams require sleep. (25)

Tokarczyk is questioning several elements of that American Dream logic whereby if one

works hard enough and becomes educated, one will “succeed.” The phrase in the final line

“dreams require sleep” underscores the notion that material d ep ri'. ‘ions are not conducive

to the kind of idealism promised by the American ideology of upward mobility. Can a

childhood of cold and hunger ever be “expiated”? Why work so hard that one dreams

exclusively of leisure? What about those who work hard and don’t succeed? What if an

individual prospers and her community falls away? Whose interests does the American

work ethic ultimately serve? And can one pay too great a price for success?

In the epilogue to the volume of essays by working-class women academics, which

she edited with Elizabeth Fay, Tokarczyk told a related anecdote about a conference she

attended in Hungary:

Many participants queried me about my obviously Slavic last name and wondered if I had any knowledge of Ukrainian. When I explained that it was difficult for my grandparents to pass down the language because they were illiterate, people at the conference were astounded. I was, one of them responded, an example of American upward mobility. Yes, in a way, I answered. But I never want to be

130 viewed... as a symbol of American success. I know the price of that success. And I don’t trust it. (315)-^

The “price of that success,” for Tokarczyk initially meant putting herself through graduate school by working in a low-wage, highly routinized job in New York’s garment district and living in fear that a power failure would spoil the food in her refrigerator (315). More recently, the “price.” she admits, has involved nothing less than a compromising of her working-class and feminist values:

Most academics would say that they are paid primarily to do research and add to the stature of their departments. Both the working class and women, however, more typically define work as that which benefits the community as well as the individual.... [L]ike many working-class women, I see myself as having a debt to pay back and a special understanding of the vulnerable (including students) who may need help. When you’ve faced the prospect of being out in the streets, it’s harder to walk past the people who are there. It’s harder for us to lock ourself in our studies and our libraries. And when we leam we must, as I have learned, we feel as much guilt as accomplishment. I have, I sometimes worry, “gotten ahead” because I have cut myself off from my family and friends. For the time being, I have closed off the possibility of any political or community involvement. I work for myself alone. (316-317)

While giving voice to working-class lives in her anthology and in her poetry, Tokarczyk, in her desperation to achieve the security of a tenured position—and perhaps to pass as a white upper-middle-class professional—went so far as hiring a Jamaican maid to clean her house, so she could devote herself to her scholarship and her poetry (311). The irony of having employed a domestic while editing a working-class anthology is not lost on

Tokarczyk. She is conscious that she has, in a sense, sold out to the individualist values of the academy, even as she problematizes such values in her scholarly and creative work.

Janet Zandy remarked in Calling Home that “for writers who were bom into the working class and aspire out of it through education or professional jobs, the connecting link back to a community is sometimes tangled or even lost. These writers come closer to a sense of what W.E. B. Dubois, speaking of race, called ‘two-ness,’ being in two worlds at the

131 same time and belonging to neither of them” (12). Indeed, such a conflicted “two-ness” can be seen in Tokarczyk's “An Academic Fantasy” and in her essay on class and commitment.

While I believe Tokarczyk is to be commended for her honesty in laying bare the disparity between her ideals and her practice, she herself, given poems like “Acknowledgments,” would have to agree that working-class academics can and do make other choices.

Jan Beatty, for example, has acknowledged that one way to make a bridge between her academic persona and her background is to “come out” as working-class on the first day of class, even though—and perhaps because—the students sometimes judge her negatively when she does so.^° Beatty, however, has ambivalence about Joining the academy on a fulltime basis:

I would feel really horrible if I taught in the university— I don’t have a real university job at this point—and I never made attempts to get into the community. [When I teach,] I bring in some poetry by homeless people; I’ve done some workshops at shelters. . . . I hope one day I can find some way to use poetry that would really be of use in the community. That thing of “being of use” is often critiqued as being a working- class unsophisticated way of looking at things, but I don’t care.. .. I really believe poetry can change people’s lives. You have to be able to eat first, but Barry Lopez says this great thing— that at its best the functional story allows people to reimagine their lives in a ways that opens the door for possibility. And I think poetry can do

The poems and personal statements by Beatty and Tokarczyk, which I’ve cited in this section, recall another statement by Janet Zandy about class, mobility, and writing:

“Transformation for the individual working-class writer is not an evolution from a kind of brutish, non-middle-class state up and out into the dominant culture.. . . Like Lot’s wife, the working-class writer must keep looking back” (12). In a way, though, Zandy oversimplifies the relationship between such a writer’s past and her prospective political commitments, when she says of such a writer: “In transforming herself she is liked to a collective consciousness, a class, which rejects bondage and lays claim to liberation and freedom” (12). As the examples from Beatty and Tokarczyk have shown, sometimes the

132 relationship between past and present, ideals and practice, can be fluid, recursive. But in other instances, the yearning for security and the hunger for individual attainment are too strong. In that latter case, the analogy with Lot’s wife might have a different implication: in looking back toward her working-class origins, the working-class woman writer, like her

Biblical antecedent, might freeze in place even as she attempts to move forward.

Coda: Choosing Class Consciousness

In an often cited passage, the British historian E.P Thompson remarked on the

“making” of the working classes: “We cannot have love without lovers, nor deference

without squires or labourers. And class happens when some [people], as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests

as between themselves, and as against other [people] whose interests are different from

(and usually opposed to) theirs.”^' Significantly, Thompson defines class in terms of relationship—the identification of shared interests and “common experiences,” as well as a sense of those “whose interests are different.” Class, by this definition, is somewhat fluid

and can include gendered, racial and ethnic commitments as well as relationships with others in or of the same socioeconomic category. Such a notion of class implies a choice:

whether or not to identify or affiliate with others. American labor historians have often observed that given the individualist work ethic, the promise of upward mobility, the myth

of the classless society, and govemment and corporate collusion to limit workers’ rights,

American working-class culture has traditionally been fragmented. David Hogan, for

example, asserts: “Compared to English working class culture, American working class culture is not as cohesive, thickly textured, or self conscious; it is more diffuse, fractured

internally, divided along regional, racial and ethnic lines; its repudiation of bourgeois

133 ideology less deep and incisive; its institutional infrastructure— trade unions, political

organizations, voluntary associations— less extensive and weaker.”^^

Given the “diffuse” quality of American working-class culture and given the

significant educational attainments of these women poets of the working classes, it would

not be surprising if they chose to write a very different kind of poetry, one uncritically

lauding movement up and into the middle class. At moments, as I have shown in my discussion of the work of Kate Daniels or Michelle Tokarczyk, upward mobility is in fact

presented as desirable, but ambivalently so because its costs—estrangement from one’s origins, the compromising of one’s principles—are so great. Generally, however, the poets whose work has appeared in this chapter have chosen to express a class-based (and sometimes race-based) allegiance. In their representations of elementary schools, Patricia

Dobler, Ana Castillo, Patricia Smith, and Dorianne Laux emphasized experiences of

Otherness— disparities between home and school. As Janet Zandy has observed,

“Working-class children wherever they grow up— unless at least one parent has had access to a formal education—will not be able to move from the language of home to the language of school without disruption.”^'* In their poems about college-educated working-class women, Kate Daniels, Carolyn M. Rodgers, Jan Beatty, and Michelle Tokarczyk, offer more complicated and contradictory versions of class identity. Rodgers and Beatty explicitly accord value to the epistemological and ethical systems that they acquired in their home communities. Yet Rodgers also seems to esteem some aspects of higher education— not the institution, but the cultural and political Zeitgeist— because of the consciousness- raising effects and the militant challenge to American racism. Tokarczyk expresses the desire to insulate herself from her class background in “An Academic Fantasy,” yet writes

in solidarity with the poor and working-class in “Acknowledgments.”

The ideological barriers to class affiliation are numerous. It is easy to succumb to writing, as Tillie Olsen said, “with the attitude of and/or in the manner of, the dominant.”

134 As the diversity of these poems about schooling attests, much ambivalence surrounds the topic of higher education. While their ideologies are not always consistent or unitary, most of these poets do challenge some of the more cherished myths about American society and emphasize instead the “savage inequalities.” In the next chapter, I turn to another instance of working-class women poets allying themselves with workers’ causes: the revisiting of the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire of 1911 in poems that function as touchstones of cultural memory.

‘ Letter to author, 13 June 1996. ^ Letter to author, 3 June 1996. Interview with author, 24 July 1996. ■* Ana Castillo, “Introduction,” My Father Was a Toltec and Selected Poems, (New York: Norton, 1995). ’ Dobler used that phrase in a talk delivered on women poets from working-class backgrounds, which she delivered at the Associated Writing Programs Conference in April 1995 in Pittsburgh. That notion of a “narrow window” has been somewhat corroborated by sociologist David Karen, who argues that between 1960 and 1975, total enrollment in institutions of universities and college more than tripled in the United States in part because of greater prosperity, increased opportunities for financial aid, and mobilizations by the civil rights and women’s movements (212). Since 1976, Karen demonstrates, a politically conservative “countermobilization” has caused the college enrollment of black students to drop, and rising tuition rates, coupled with cuts in federal aia, nas rendered higher education less affordable to students of a lower socioeconomic status (226). See Karen, “The Politics of Class, Race, and Gender: Access to Higher Education in the United States, \96Q-\9%6," American Journal of Education 99.2 (1991): 208-237. ^ This high level of formal education is remarkable also in light of the fact that nearly half of the poets— 10 out of 21 have children—and motherhood, as Tillie Olsen reminds us, has traditionally blocked access to higher education and to writing. ’ Suzanne Sowinska, “Yer Own Motha Wouldna Reckanized Ya: Surviving an Apprenticeship in the ‘Knowledge Factory,”’ in Tokarczyk and Fay: 152. * Pierre Bourdieu, “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction,” in Knowledge, Education, and Cultural Change, ed. R. Brown, (London: Tavistock, 1973): 71-112. (1 can offer an example from my own life. In my first college English course, the professor asked us to write a comparison-contrast essay on “any” subject; some of my middle-class classmates, 1 later discovered, contrasted different styles of architecture or the methods of painters Cézanne and Seurat, while 1 selected my subject from a popular late-Seventies TV commercial comparing Parkay margarine and butter. 1 earned a C-.)

135 ^ Jane Gaskell, “Course Enrollment in the High School: The Perspective of Working-Class Females,” Sociology of Education 58 (January 1985); 52. See historian Paul C. Violas, The Training o f the Urban Working Class: A History o f Twentieth-Century American Education, (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1978), for a still­ relevant, classic formulation of the collusion between corporate elites and educators in “Fitting” workers for the assembly line. " Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991). Kozol, for example, quotes the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on schools in East St. Louis, Illinois: “Martin Luther King Junior High School was evacuated Friday afternoon [in spring 1989] after sewage flowed into the kitchen. . . . The kitchen was closed and students were sent home” (23). '■ Miner, “Writing and Teaching with Class”: 85. Suzanne de Castell and Allan Luke, “Defining ‘Literacy’ in North American Schools: Social and Historical Conditions and Consequences,” in Perspectives on Literacy, eds. Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Kroll, and Mike Rose, (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press): 174. '■* Dobler herself is Hungarian-American. In her poem, “Steelmark Day Parade, 1961,” [she Chapter 1], Dobler refers to the scarcity of African-American workers in the town. “Blonde, White Women,’’Big Big 7a/L- 21. Letter to author, 3 June 1996. ” Wendy Luttrell, “Working-Class Women’s Ways of Knowing: Effects of Gender, Race, and Class,” Sociology of Education 62 (Jan. 1989): 33, 38. See, for example, Sennett and Cobb; Lillian B. Rubin, Families on the Faultline: Tokarczyk and Fay, eds., Working-Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory, and Carolyn Leste Law, ed.. This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices o f Academics from the Working Class. Princeton Encyclopedia o f Poetry and Poetics'. 24. Jean Davis, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 41: Afro-American Poets Since 1955, (Detroit: Gale Research, 1985). CD-ROM, 1997. Carolyn M. Rodgers, how i got ovah. Garden City, (N.Y.: Anchor/ Doubleday, 1975): 11- 12. Introduction, Working Class Women in the Academy: 1. Interview with author, 24 July 1996. Of course, not “all” academics treat working-class people rudely. But I have plenty of anecdotal evidence of class condescension that I have gathered simply because, as a Ph.D candidate, I am presumed by my colleagues to share their privilege. At an academic conference in Louisville, for example, a colleague who does work on gang narratives and her academic husband expressed dismay at the small working-class houses in an urban neighborhood— similar to the ones in my community while I was growing up. And I once got into a bitter argument with a Dartmouth-educated graduate school roommate over the men who were re-roofing our apartment building. It was a June day in Columbus—an unseasonable 100 degrees—and she complained because their pounding was “disturbing” her reading for general exams. Furthermore, she described the men as “lazy” because they took over two weeks to complete the job. This version of “Acknowledgments” was first published in Calling Home, ed. Janet Zandy (Rutgers, 1990). In 1989, an abridged form—with just two sections (one about free therapy, one about abortion)— appeared in Tokarczyk’s collection. The House I'm Running From (Albuquerque: West End Press, 1989).

136 In a letter to me, Tokarczyk remarked that her English department colleagues at Goucher have been “lukewarm” to her scholarly and creative work for a variety of reasons: “turf issues, class issue, jealousy” (23 Jan. 1996). See “Welfare Myths and Facts,'^Children's Defense Fund Reports (March 1995): 8. The House I ’m Running From: 24. Of course, “illiterate” grandparents could still teach their granddaughter the spoken language. Beatty tells about a student at Camegie-Mellon University who, upon hearing Beatty grew up working class, immediately asked her for her credentials. Beatty replied, “T il tell you about my credentials if you eare about credentials. Here they are.’ Then 1 added that 1 taught at Western Penitentiary, the message being ‘don’t mess with me because I’ve taught in maximum-security prisons, okay?’ 1 keep learning these lessons about class” (Interview with author, 24 July 1996). Interview with author, 24 July 1996. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (New York: Pantheon, 1964): 9. ” David Hogan, “Education and Class Formation: The Peculiarities of Americans,” in Michael Apple, ed.. Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982): 32-78. Introduction, Liberating Memory: 5.

137 CHAPTER 5

CONTEMPORARY WOMEN WORKING-CLASS POETS ON THE TRIANGLE FIRE

In the early years of this century, the Gibson Girl blouse (or shirtwaist), accompanied by a long skirt, was considered a staple of the stylish woman’s wardrobe— and the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, located in the Asch Building just off Washington

Square in the heart of New York’s garment district, was one of the largest manufacturers of such blouses in the city. A glance at the billowy shirtwaists on sale in the department stores offered little indication of the material conditions under which they were produced. Gasjets burned day and night in huge loft rooms full of sewing machines. During the most lucrative seasons, workers were expected to be at their machines 14 hours a day, seven days a week. Despite their long hours, shop employees rarely took home more than $6.00 a week, and they were fined for damaged goods and sewing-machine repairs. Such miserable conditions inspired a walkout by “waistmakers” at Triangle in 1909. Ultimately 20,0(X) workers from all over the city joined the strike—the largest labor uprising of American women at that time—because of energetic organizing efforts that targeted women from different ethnic and religious groups and because cross-class alliances like the Women’s

Trade Union League helped bail out strikers from jail and protested against police brutality toward picketers. In the end, the strikers earned some concessions. However, they didn’t manage to win improvements in the safety or sanitary conditions of their shops, and they

138 still had to purchase their own sewing machines. Worse still, not all employers signed the union contract. Many, including the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, refused to allow a closed shop and continued with business as usual.

A little over a year after the strike was settled, on March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Triangle factory. It was 4:45 p.m., the end of the workday, with some 500 workers present. Feeding on flammable fabric scraps and sewing machine oil, the fire was soon burning out of control. The Triangle Company had never had a fire drill, nor were exit signs posted in the languages most likely to be useful for its Yiddish- and

Italian-speaking workers. The Asch Building had only two stairwells—one very narrow— and one fire escape. On the ninth floor, site of the largest operation, one of those stairwell doors was locked from the outside, so management could better control the movement of the workers and keep out union organizers. The fire department ladders reached only to the sixth floor. Although the fire was brought under control in 18 minutes, 146 workers, mostly immigrant women, lost their lives. Twelve different ethnic groups were represented among the dead, though most were Russian Jews and Italians. Many died by jumping from the windows, the force of their impact so great that they tore through the firemen’s nets and crashed through the glass grating of the sidewalks. Others, fearing the jump and unable to find a safe exit, burned to death.

In the middle of the 1980s—a decade dominated by the anti-labor policies of

Reaganism—several women poets from working-class backgrounds sought to rekindle a spark of communal memory by writing poems about the infamous Triangle fire.' This essay examines the work of two poets, Chris Llewellyn and Mary Fell—their distinct yet complementary strategies for depicting the impact of the fire on the working-class communities of the Lower East Side, and their recognition of the multiple, often contradictory, roles of the historian-poet as archivist, activist, and artist. An important

139 context for receiving the poems, I maintain, is understanding the unmistakable parallels

between the decade of the Triangle fire and our own.

Chris Llewellyn, a self-described “labor poet” from a factory town in northwestern

Ohio, devoted an entire volume to the tragedy. Her book. Fragments from the Fire,

includes many dramatic monologues in the voices of garment workers and people

sympathetic to them, as well as a six-page collage poem that illustrates the fire’s impact on

the community of the Lower East Side. The multiple portraits and voices lend themselves to

a vivid, worker-centered account of the fire. In complicated ways, Llewellyn demonstrates

how racism, sexism, and classism are deeply woven into the fabric of this country dating

back to the founding of the republic. Many of her poems focus on the ironies of

historiography and the importance of history being written from a range of subject

positions—such as the monologue spoken by a black elevator man who notes that trendy

Washington Square, near the Triangle factory, was once a potter’s field and that George

Washington, for whom the square was named, reputedly sold a slave “for a bolt of cloth.”

. Mary Fell, a poet from Worcester, Massachusetts, uses motifs of smouldering and

fire to represent working-class lives in her book. The Persistence of Memory. In addition

to seven poems about the Triangle fire. Fell includes poems in the voices of Joan of Arc,

the wife of a coal miner, a child prostitute, a rag-seller— voices, as reviewer William Logan

remarked, “of women rendered mute by history” (13). Fell became interested in Triangle

through reading labor history, particularly Leon Stein’s account of the fire and its

aftermath. Like Llewellyn, Fell presents the workers’ experience from the inside out. Yet,

unlike the other poet. Fell prefers to create a compelling poetic texture through the juxtaposition of dissimilar images—some lyrical, some grotesque— rather than through the

construction of dramatic narratives. “All those ironies and all those images were just lying

there waiting to be discovered,” Fell has remarked.’ In “Asch Building,” she juxtaposes

the image of two lovers kissing farewell on a ninth-floor window ledge with “two faceless

140 ones... / folded neatly over the steam pipes / like dropped rags.” In “Among the Dead,” the speaker observes “a pair of shoes ... [and] in them / two blistered feet.” These careful pairings of survival and death, beauty and fear suggest the chaos at Triangle during and after the tragedy. Over the course of the seven-poem suite on the fire, the poet’s sequences of image pairs build in intensity, thus dramatizing her deepening immersion in that historical moment and in a worker-centered politics. The culmination of this engagement occurs in “Industrialist’s Dream,” a monologue in which a garment-shop owner offers grotesquely ironic images of the “ideal” worker.

Despite differences in tone and sensibility, Llewellyn and Fell both write about the fire and its milieu to evoke solidarity with the garment workers, to indict the capitalist class for its ruthless pursuit of profit, to make analogies between that earlier historical moment and our own, and to raise provocative questions about the role of poetry in the social transactions that create “history.” Both poets employ religious and sewing motifs as well as exposé testimony to inspire empathy with the women workers and outrage at the industrialists. In addition, Llewellyn uses the poetic cento, a collage form that seems appropriate for her weaving together of discourses that suggest or border garment workers’ lives. Finally, Llewellyn and Fell offer poems that self-reflexively explore the compelling and complex relation of the historian-poet to her subjects.

Invoking Holy Revolution; Religious Discourse in the Triangle Poems

Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who createst the light of the fire. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who didst make a distinction between holy and profane, between light and darkness, between Israel and the heathen, between the seventh day and the six working days.. . —Havdallah prayer

141 Both Mary Fell and Chris Llewellyn use Jewish and Christian discourse and ritual to emphasize the contrast between the secular, profit-driven milieu of New York’s garment district and the devout, community-based customs of the immigrant women who worked in the factories. There seem to be at least two reasons for the poets’ frequent use of religious imagery and language. First, evidence exists that tura-of-the-century activists of the Lower

East Side often incorporated such references into their speeches. According to former union organizer Sidney Jonas, Jewish sociahsts were fond of making references to the Book of

Isaiah, “with its warnings to the rich and haughty and its prophecies of judgment and cleansing” (qtd. in Orleck 27). Housewives organizing rent strikes and meat boycotts during the first decade of the century made frequent mention of Isaiah in their speeches

(Orleck 27). Second, the Triangle fire occurred on what for many workers was the

Sabbath—a week before the feasts of Passover and Easter. Factory managers often did not allow time off for religious observances, especially during the lucrative spring season. In her reminiscences about the Triangle shop, garment worker and union organizer Pauline

Newman recalled a sign on the elevator: “If you don’t come in on Sunday, you needn’t come in on Monday.” Indeed, there was no day of rest for the Triangle workers—neither

Saturday nor Sunday.

Both Fell and Llewellyn open their books with references to rituals of the

Havdallah, or Great Divide, that mark the transition from the Sabbath to the rest of the week. Llewellyn prefaces each of the five sections of her book with epigraphs having to do with fire, ashes, and justice, taken from the Psalms, the Book of Isaiah, and John; in this way, as Tokarczyk has suggested, the poet herself acts “as prophet, alerting the nation to its terrible wrongs.”^ The epigraphs work intertextually with other poems, especially

“Sacristan,” in which a young Catholic priest prepares sermons with Biblical allusions to fire in order to honor the “Triangle martyrs.” In all of these instances. Fell and Llewellyn

142 import sacred texts and rituals as a way of establishing a moral authority over a secular capitalist system that treats workers without human compassion or dignity.

Mary Fell's “Havdallah” functions as a revolutionary prayer that mourns the loss of the traditional, ritualized divide between rest and labor. The shape of the poem, in three seven-line stanzas, recalls the creation of the world in Genesis, with its injunction against work on the seventh day. The first stanza of Fell’s poem echoes traditional Havdallah prayers:

This is the great divide by which God split the world: on the Sabbath side he granted rest, eternal toiling on the workday side. (3)

The short lines slow the pace of our reading and encourage us to emphasize such endwords as “divide,” “split,” “rest,” and “toiling”—underscoring the holiness of the great divide between rest and toil. The second stanza swerves leftward with a pun on “revolution”: “But even one / revolution of the world / is an empty promise / where bosses / where bills to pay

/ respect no heavenly bargains.” The tone here is sharper, angrier, that of a modern-day prophet frustrated with the bosses unenlightened by any revolution, be it of the sun or of labor organizing to fight capital. The very word “bosses” implies a solidarity with the powerless, suggests also the “great divide” between labor and management.

The remainder of the poem transforms a common ritual for ending the Sabbath—the lighting of a dish of wine— into an incendiary prayer for social change:

Until each day is ours

let us pour darkness in a dish and set it on fire, bless those who labor

143 as we pray, praise God his holy name, strike for the rest.

The Triangle fire started near the end of the Sabbath. In contrast to that uncontrolled and unwanted burning, the lire in the dish represents a petition for greater control, greater autonomy from the bosses who force family members to “labor / as we pray.” It is the kindling of a spark of outrage, the striking of a match that stands in for a different kind of strike, which is as necessary and as important as offering praise to God. Fell politicizes the traditional Havdallah prayer by explicitly rewriting it to include mention of the overworked factory employees and to call for human as well as divine intervention in the struggle for social change.

Chris Llewellyn’s “The Great Divide” echoes the themes and motifs of the

Havdallah prayers alluded to in Fell’s poem but refers more pointedly to the Lower East

Side and the Triangle Factory itself. In her poem, images of the Havdallah rituals enacted in neighborhood tenements are interspersed with ones of workers laboring on the shop floor, unable to mark the conclusion of the Sabbath. “The Great Divide” opens with an image of the neighborhood;

Henry Street, Cherry Street, Hester Street: the new world turns toward old Jerusalem. Sunrays stream on the bearded father-singers standing beside a hundred rag-stuffed windows. (3)

Henry, Cherry, and Hester Streets each had vivid connotations to Jewish inhabitants of the

Lower East Side. Henry was the site of a famous settlement house founded by nurse Lillian

Wald, which provided some measure of relief—health care, food, and support to strikers— to the area’s indigent. Yet, relatively speaking, Henry was a more prosperous street than some of its surrounding ones, with townhouses as well as tenements, and, as Irving Howe

144 has noted, “with a somewhat more fluid mobility from generation to generation.”^ Hester, in Howe’s description, comes off both familiar and exotic, the quintessential “pushcart territory [where you could buy] shawls, bananas, oilcloth, garlic, trousers, ill-favored fish, ready-to-wear-spectacles. You could relax in the noise of familiars, enjoy a tournament of bargains, with every ritual of haggling, maneuver of voice” (257). Cherry, meanwhile,

was one of the poorest streets in the district and thus was frequently home to workers in the

ill-paying garment trades. According to the 1905 census, a three- or four-room apartment on Cherry Street contained 5.6 inhabitants on the average, and most households were

headed by a blue-collar worker. Writes Howe: “Of 118 heads of households, 52 can be

categorized as garment workers, 36 as other manuals..., and 15 are peddlers.... Living

with these 118 families are 92 boarders, some apartments containing as many as three. Of

these 92 boarders, 75 live with families headed by garment workers and other manual

workers; the boarders themselves do similar kinds of work” (142). Not surprisingly, the

New York Times roll of the dead lists several victims from Cherry Street.^ Llewellyn’s description of the area, though compressed, manages to convey a sense of the old world

rituals persisting in the new, as the “bearded father-singers” prepare to bid farewell to the

Sabbath. They are attuned to the natural order of daylight and sunset in a way that the

garment workers in dim lofts, who do their stitching, even during the day, by gaslight, are

not.

“The Great Divide” features four quatrains, each followed by a one-line antiphon-

like statement. The quatrains establish that sense of contrast between old and new, profane

and holy, while the one-line statements echo actual prayers or sentiments, such as “Chant

the ‘Havdallah,’ chant ‘The Great Divide.’” In quatrain two, the speaker refers again to the

bearded father-singers, the Hassidim, who “praise the Almighty for creating us a Sabbath /

that cuts one day away from the fabric of the week.” But she quickly switches to an image

145 of a different kind of Singer, the machine that revolutionized the garment trade and increased the already frantic pace of the work: “Bent over Singers, their backs to factory windows, / women and children stitch into sunset.” The third quatrain incorporates Pauline

Newman’s reminiscence about the elevator sign on Sunday and Monday work, though

Llewellyn edits the notice to include Saturday in the prohibition, thereby making it pertain to Jews and Christians alike, and to make the warning more pointedly ominous: “If you don’t show up on Saturday or Sunday, / you’re already been Fired when it’s Monday.”*

The final quatrain, by contrast, offers a lyrical image of the lighting of the ritual flame that marks the end of the Sabbath: “Each [of the fathers] strikes a sulphur-tip match, touches / the surface of the small wine lake.” The intimacy and beauty of the gesture, the sound echoes of s, ch, and k, nonetheless have to be read as a quiet foreshadowing of the impending factory fire, something that the image in the final antiphonic line hints at even more strongly: “Light in the windows, dividing up the dark.” The way the poem veers from tenement to shop floor and back again makes the reading of that final line deliberately indeterminate: as readers we are both at the windows with the father-singers and their

“small wine lakes” and with the women at the Triangle shop, poised on the sills, backlit by fire.’

The next and the longest poem in the book, “March 25, 1911,” is situated mostly in the factory, and as the fire heats up, Llewellyn increasingly interweaves religious imagery and language, both Jewish and Christian, with journalistic and eyewitness accounts to suggest the confusion at the scene; no single discourse or body of imagery is capable of representing that frantic intensity. “March 25, 1911,” functioning as an overture that introduces recurring motifs of the entire book, draws on different sources to provide multiple views of the tragedy—the statement of a proprietress of a cafe where the girls sometimes lunched, the story of two girls, Sophie Salemi and Della Costello, who died together (their narrative interpellated and put under pressure as the fire heats up), the voice

146 of a worker in the building, popular songs and fashions of the period, the testimony of a woman who survived the fire (Mrs. Yaller), the eyewitness report of UPI journalist Bill

Shepherd, as well as the novena-like prayers of Sophie and Della from the windowsill, where they are poised to jump, arms around each other, every prayer more desperate and angry than the previous.^

While the poem’s title anchors the event to a specific date, the first stanza, positioned like an epigraph, situates the fire in regard to numerous cycles: season of the year, day of week, pay period, religious calendars, time of day;

It was Spring. It was Saturday. Payday. For some it was Sabbath. Soon it will be Easter. It was approaching April, nearing Passover. It was close to closing time. (4)

Each of those terse initial phrases— “It was Spring,” “It was nearing Passover”—serves as a conclusion to at least three of the 26 subsequent stanzas as if to suggest that ordinary cycles, of time and meaning were ruptured by this tragic event.

The religious time-markers, imagery and language suggest that the profit-hungry bosses, in not providing adequate fire protection, had conunitted a desecration. In stanza

14, for example, the ninth floor girls find the door locked and the telephone dead. The force of the fire, “piling red / ribbons . . . backs [the] girls into windows.” To them, the room looks like “a smashed altar lamp,” the flames sound like “screaming novenas,”

“Soon,” the stanza concludes laconically, “it will be Easter.” In stanza 17, the trapped girls, already skeletons, stare permanently at the cloakroom window, which is likened to a “black crucifix.” The destruction of the sacred emblems of crucifix and altar lamp, like the interruption of liturgical calendars, is a way for the narrator to convey a moral indictment of those responsible for the fire.

147 That sense of indictment becomes even stronger as the fire heats up, driving the poem’s two martyr-heroines, Sophie and Della, out onto the window ledge. Arms around each other, their backs to the burning building, the young women look out over the city, imagining their death and praying angrily. Llewellyn positions Sophie and Della, neighbors from Cherry Street and adjacent workers at Triangle, centrally in the poem; they are iconic figures, representing the importance of intimate friendships between women at the garment factory, both emotionally and politically. Annelise Orleck, writing about women in the garment industry, has observed that the “majority of New York’s garment workers were little more than girls, and the relationships they forged with factory friends w ere... intense, melodramatic, and deeply loyal. They were teenage confidantes as well as factory workers, and they relied on shop-floor rapport to soften the hardships of factory life... .

For young immigrant women trying to build lives in a new land, such bonds were powerful and lasting. From these shop-floor friendships would soon evolve the ties of union sisterhood” (35). Orleck also acknowledges that certain women, such as Pauline

Newman, former Triangle worker turned union organizer, “captured the imagination” of garment girls in a more romantic sense. The friendship of Sophie and Della, as represented in the poem and in sources about the fire, also bears the hallmarks of romance, of a “love unto death.” In actuality, the young women did die with their arms wound around each other, and they shared a funeral. In the poem, the martyr-heroines Sophie and Della refer to each other as “our only sweethearts” shortly before their death.

Poised on the ledge, Sophie and Della regard the “crazy quilt of town.” They have become a holy alliance—already omniscient, capable of moving backwards and forwards in time and inhabiting the consciousnesses of others. In stanza 21, they imagine their funeral, their schoolmates singing in procession a strange and fractured hymn, the words altered by the pressure of the moment: "O Trinity of Blessed Light/Our Lady of Perpetual Help /Ave

Maria, Ave Maria /N ow and at the H our/ of the Tarantella” (8). Rather than the customary

148 “now and at the hour of our death" that closes the Hail Mary, the girls substitute the

“Tarantella," a lively folkdance from southern Italy that was popular at the time. Earlier in the poem, Llewellyn had described the sewing machine heads connected by belts as singing the Tarantella to suggest their rapid pace. The dance, with its quickening tempo and intensity representing the frenetic speed of the factory, invades even the equanimity of prayer.

In the poem’s final two stanzas, the prayers become more frantic, their language and syntax more fragmented and compressed;

Our Bosses of the Locked Doors of Sweetheart Contracts who in puffs and tendrils of silent telephones, disconnected hoses, barred shutters, fire escapes dangling in perpetual no help on earth in heaven. It was Spring.

The Lord is - -v shepherd green pastures still waters anointest heads with oil overflowing preparest a table—now our arms around each other we thread the needle where no rich man can go spinning the earth’s axle we are leaving in light. (9)

The Lord’s Prayer, the ending of a novena. Psalm 23, and the parable of the camel passing through the eye of the needle all collide in this frantic collage-prayer recited at the moment of the women’s death.^ The first three prayers resonate ironically here: all about God’s providence—as giver of daily bread, as bestower of perpetual help, as the shepherd who offers rest and comfort and anointing— they are invoked here to indict bosses Asch, Harris, and Blanck, who failed to provide safe working conditions and collected $445 for every

149 worker from their fire insurance policy.'" (Previous to this deadly fire, the owners of

Triangle had in fact reported seven other fires at their plants, a further indication of their

negligence.) " The sacred oil, with which the Lord anoints the heads of his faithful, is

here contrasted with the barrels of highly flammable sewing machine oU that were stored at

the plant. At the same time, the images of green pastures, still waters, and the prepared

table do seem comforting ones for these Catholic women on the verge of death. Unlike

their profiteering owners, Sophie and Della can pass easily through the eye of the needle

into the Kingdom of Heaven. With this twisted collage of prayers, Llewellyn invokes the

traditional Christian comfort of heavenly reward for the weary and lowly of this world, while still issuing a protest against “Our Bosses of the Locked / Doors of Sweetheart

Contracts.”

Llewellyn offers further revolutionary representations of Catholicism in

“Sacristan,” a dramatic monologue from the point of view of a sexton who is in charge of maintaining the priest’s vestments and the ceremonial equipment for the Mass.'" The poem opens .with a recital of the sacristan’s customary duties, noting the color of the vestments for different seasons and feasts, such as “red to commemorate death-/ dates of martyrs”

(56). The sacristan steers the conversation more pointedly toward the Triangle fire in the second stanza with mention of two martyr-saints who perished in fire: Joan of Arc, who died at the stake, and Lawrence who was roasted on a gridiron. (According to some sources, Lawrence, despite great suffering, managed to joke with his persecutors, “I’m done on this side. You can turn me over now.”) Aptly, many of the sacristan’s duties involve managing fire—trimming the wick of the sanctuary lamp, replacing candles, procuring “[f]resh charcoal, sandalwood / Incense for the censor.” Like the religious Jews in the poems by Fell and Llewellyn above, the sacristan seems to take comfort in rituals that control the elemental force of fire. Maintaining an attitude of mindfulness even during the routine observances of scrubbing and shining, he says, “Prayer is / labor. Labor is prayer”

150 and then acknowledges a personal connection with the Triangle victims; "I polish and pray / the names of my brother and the other shirtwaist / Martyrs so these holy ones may intercede for / us on earth.” By characterizing the Triangle victims as “martyrs,” by including them within the company of such illustrious saints as Lawrence and Joan, the sacristan is also accessing the more politicized rhetoric of union organizers such as Leonora O’Reilly, who had led the waistmakers’ strike in the preceding year. At an ILGWU rally shortly after the fire, O’Reilly, remarking on die ongoing dangers that faced garment workers in other shops, referred to the Triangle victims as Christlike “martyrs who died that we may live.”' ^

The final labor of the sacristan is to compose a homily “on the example of the beekeeper / who handles her charges yet is not stung.” This suggestive analogy, which can be understood in terms of the sacristan’s safe, ritualized handling of fire, also comments self-reflexively on Llewellyn’s own process and aim of composition. Like Llewellyn in her inclusion of four Biblical epigraphs to the text from Isaiah, the Psalms, and John, the sacristan creates a patchwork text by marking “any mention of fire or garments” and collecting those passages in a book.''* Like Llewellyn, the sacristan draws on that rich liturgical tradition, steeped in metaphor and parable, to comfort the troubled and to trouble the comfortable.

Despite the stereotype of religion as “the opiate of the masses” derived from the selective quotation of Marx, both Fell and Llewellyn in these poems suggest the radical rather than the quiescent potential of religious discourse and ritual. The language and imagery of the Havdallah prayers, the Book of Isaiah, the Psalms, and saints’ lives, the ritual in the home and the homily in the pulpit, become powerful rhetorical means for expressing solidarity with the workers, for indicting a predatory, profit-driven means of production, and for highlighting the clash between religious-communal customs of the Old

World and the stark individualism of the New.

151 The Patchwork. Under Pressure; Politicizing the Cento

cento (Lat. “patchwork”). A verse composition made up of lines selected from the work of some great poet(s) of the past.. . . [Centos] are now almost invariably humorous, the humor arising from the clever juxtaposition of famous lines into a new semantic matrix. — The Princeton Encyclopedia o f Poetry and Poetics (1993)

Derived from the Sanskrit word, hagara (patched garment), the cento seems a fitting

form for a labor poet writing about garment workers. Chris Llewellyn, however, departs

from the traditional uses of the form: her cento neither offers tribute to a “great poet of the

past,” nor involves an ostentatious display of wit. Unlike most examples of the form, her

“Survivor’s Cento” does not bring together famous lines of poetry, but instead combines a

moving array of quotations from primary and secondary source materials about the Triangle

fire. Llewellyn’s politicized cento intersperses a catalogue of the victims’ names throughout the poem and works in edited versions of statements by union organizers. New York Fire

Chief Arthur Croker, mourners, relief workers, FDR’s Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, and handwritten notes at the makeshift morgue on the Twenty-Sixth Street Pier, where the

many bodies had been hastily placed into coffins and arranged in rows under arc lights, so that survivors could identify their loved ones.

“Survivor’s Cento” offers a patchwork of sorrow and rage that can be read on

many different levels, depending on the reader’s degree of familiarity with the event. This

is the poem:

Survivor’s Cento

All through the day rain ever and again.

152 The quartet from the Elks Lodge sang “Abide with Me.” They lost both daughters, Sara and Sarafine. Last year I was one of the pickets arrested and fined. We were striking for open doors, better fire escapes. Freda Velakowski, Ignatzia Bel lota, Celia Eisenberg. You knew the families from the flowers nailed to the doors. That’s my mama. Her name’s Julia Rosen. I know by her hair. I braid it every morning. Now the same police who clubbed the strikers keep the crowd from trampling on our bodies. Sadie Nausbaum, Gussie Bierman, Anna Cohen, Israel Rosen. I know that's my daughter, Sophie Salemi. See that dam in her knee? Mended her stockings, yesterday. Box one-twelve: female, black stockings, black shoes, part of a skirt, a white petticoat, hair ribbons. I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came to talk good fellowship; Jennie Franco, Julie Aberstein, Joseph Wilson, Nicolina Nicolese. I found a pet mouse on the ninth floor, took it home, kept it for a pet. At least it was still alive. Our children go to work in firetraps, come home and sleep in firetraps. Day and night they are condemned. Ninth floor looked like a kindergarten. We were eight, nine, ten. If the Inspector came, they hid us in bins. Rose Feibush, Clotild Terdanova, Mary Leventhal. That’s one Catherine Maltese, and those, her daughters. Lucia, she’s twenty. Rosalie— she’d be fourteen. Those two are sisters. Bettina and Frances Miale. M-I-A-L-E. We asked the Red Cross worker how to help and she said bring books—Tolstoy, Shakespeare in Yiddish. Benny Costello said he knew his sister Della by her new shoes. Anna Ardito, Gussie Rosenfield, Sara Kupla, Essie Bernstein, reminders to spend my life fighting these conditions. Antonia Colleti, Daisy Lopez Fitze, Surka Brenman, Margaret Schwartz. One coffin read: Becky Kessler, call for tomorrow. The eighth casket had neither name nor number. It contained fragments from the Fire, picked up but never claimed.

Given the poem’s placement in the book, the casual reader will understand that different ethnic groups were represented among the dead, will probably remember tragic heroines

Sophie and Della from the overture-like “March 25, 19II” and Jennie Franco from the funeral poem, “At Rest in Greenwood.” Also, the preceding poem, “Funeral for the

Nameless,” explains that certain remains were charred beyond recognition. Beyond those cues, the casual reader can understand that parts of the poem describe how the dead were

153 identified by surviving hairstyles, clothing or jewelry. Most importantly, 33 victims are named in the poem, and the frequently mentioned relationships among the dead and the living help us to understand the magnitude of the loss, the impact of the tragedy on an entire working-class immigrant community.

Further readings of the poem make clear how “Survivor’s Cento” foils expectations of a singular lyric voice, especially one closely identified with the poet’s own, and suggest

the inherent and necessary difficulty of the historiographer’s project in this era of

poststructuralist skepticism. The poem shifts easily from third person to first-person

singular to first-person plural, then recites a brief catalogue of names, and then returns to

first person. Individual voices are honored in chorus, each blending into the next without

the boundaries of quotation marks. Often, the discursive elements feel incomplete, as if only a fragment were overheard— for instance, in line 3 of the poem, “they” has no clear

antecedent. As readers, we have to dwell in those silences or gaps of the poem, which expose the elusiveness of the past, the impossibility of re-constructing one single narrative of the Triangle fire from scraps of testimony. Paradoxically, at least for this reader, the

silences that stitch together those fragments of discourse are what propel the attempt to

know the past more completely. To say some of the lines aloud—“Last year I was one of

the pickets arrested and fined” or “bring books—Tolstoy, Shakespeare in Yiddish”— is to

place ourselves in a position of solidarity with workers desperate to improve the quality of

their lives. In other words, as Cary Nelson, whose own archival project set out to

“recover” the repressed radical traditions of American poetic modernism, has contended,

“A poststructuralist doubt about what can be known [comes] in conflict with a desire to

know and often with a sensation of having gained access to a past we had quite

forgotten.”'^

One way to understand the constructedness of Llewellyn’s version of the Triangle

fire, while allowing ourselves to experience even more deeply the emotions of empathy,

154 sorrow, and anger of the survivors, is to explore how she edits her source materials. Leon

Stein’s The Triangle Fire (1962), which offers a compendium of contemporary newspaper and magazine accounts of the tragedy, is a source that Llewellyn has twice acknowledged as indispensable to her own recreation of the event. Stein, a longtime ELGWU member and then editor of the union's magazine Justice, clearly sympathizes with the workers and distrusts management in his gripping, detailed narrative of the fire, its prelude and its aftermath.'^ “Survivor’s Cento” draws heavily on Stein’s ninth chapter, entitled

“Morgue,” which describes the efforts of panic-stricken family members, many of them immigrants with little English, to identify the bodies of loved ones. But while Stein presents a coherent narrative in more or less chronological order, Llewellyn scrambles brief excerpts from the chapter with references from Times' accounts of the fire and statements by union organizers Rose Schneiderman and Pauline Newman, found in Barbara Mayer

Wertheimer’s We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America (1972), a pioneering study of instances of race, class, and gender oppression in the workplace. The effect of this “scrambling” is to recreate the sense of chaos that no doubt prevailed at the makeshift morgue and also the attempts by organizers to shape that chaos into a rhetoric of continued struggle.

Still another way to read the poem is to find larger contexts for the names and quotations in “Survivor’s Cento.” Most of the names belong to people about whom Stein includes extended references or stories. Sara and Sarafine Saricino, Lucia and Rosalie

Maltese, and Bettina and Frances Miale, pairs of sisters, all died in the fire. Ignatzia

Bellota’s father recognized her by the heel of her shoe, Gussie Bierman’s parents said her corpse was robbed of jewelry and cash, Freda Velakowski and Sara[h] Kupla initially survived the leap but died later in the hospital. The bottom half of Sadie Nausbaum’s body was burned away, according to Stein (100).” Israel Cohen’s sister Esther identified him by a signet ring, while Joseph Wilson’s fiancee, Rosie Solomon, recognized him by the

155 ring and watch she had given him (103). Sylvia Riegler, who was afraid of heights, couldn’t jump with her friend. Rose Feibush, to the street below; she managed to escape down some stairs before tire blocked that exit (39-40). Anna Ardito and Gussie Rosenfield were the final bodies identified. It was after the burned body of Essie Bernstein was carried out of the morgue and placed into a hearse, that “a bearded Jew mounted to the top of a nearby stoop and intoned in the sad, angry voice and language of the Hebrew prophets:

‘Our poor children go to work in fire traps to avoid a life of shame. When they come home, they go to sleep in tenements which are also fire traps. By day and by night—they are condemned’” (148). Margaret Schwartz was the prime object of Kate Alterman’s testimony against Isaac Harris and Max Blanck, owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, on trial for manslaughter in the first and second degrees. Defense attorney Max D. Steuer, by picking at minor discrepancies between Alterman’s deposition and her testimony on the stand, managed to win for his clients a complete acquittal. Because many of the stories overlap, Llewellyn compresses them to a catalogue of names, multisyllabic, belonging to

Italians and Russian Jews, compelling if ephemeral markers of lives and of deaths.

In addition to the catalogue of names and the first-person accounts of relatives identifying bodies, Llewellyn includes edited excerpts of speeches by organizers Leonora

O’Reilly, Rose Schneiderman, and Pauline Newman as a way of further politicizing the polyphony of the cento. In a Times article published the day after the fire, Leonora

O’Reilly, a leader of the waistmakers’ strike the previous year, focused her attention on management’s practice of locking shop doors from the outside: “The girls are locked in while they work in nearly every factory. We exploited this fact when we declared the strike in the Triangle plant, and later saw it grow into the revolt of the entire trade” (“Doors Were

Locked” A-2). In the poem, that quotation becomes further condensed so that the ironic contrast between the strikers’ demands and their losses is more pointedly apparent: “Last year I was one of the pickets arrested and fined. We were striking for open doors, better

156 fire escapes." From most accounts, the strikers’ demands were actually more diverse, some of which were agreed to by management—improved wages, shorter hours, an end to the subcontracting system— but Llewellyn’s poetic compression highlights the need for further reform.

At the same time, quotations by Pauline Newman and Rose Schneiderman suggest that reform laws and middle-class reformers might not go far enough in rectifying abuses in the industry. Newman’s quotation describes the employers’ ruses for circumventing child labor laws. Schneiderman's speech, delivered at a memorial meeting sponsored by the

Women’s Trade Union League, a cross-class alliance, railed against the tepid “charity” efforts of some of the members and called for nothing short of a “working-class movement”:

I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. .. . This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 146 of us are burned to death. W e have tried you, citizens! We are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers and daughters and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable, the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily among us. Public officials have only words of warning to us— warning that we must be intensely orderly and must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse to back up their warnings.. .. I can’t talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way diey can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement, (qtd. in Wertheimer 312)

Schneiderman’s eloquent plea for more protection for workers, less for property, echoes throughout Llewellyn’s book and Fell’s sequence of poems about the fire. In the prayer poems, in the dramatic monologue from the perspective of the bourgeois jurors who voted

157 for acquittal, in the self-reflexive poems about labor poetry, in the exposés in the voices of industrialists, the fact that property is valued more than workers becomes the reason for re­ creating the Triangle fire in verse.

In “Survivor’s Cento,” history becomes something that reader and poet construct together from patches of discourse, fragments of imagery. The gaps and seams between pieces are themselves instructive: they call attention to the mediated quality of any historical record and the efforts of the historian-poet to serve as an advocate for the women workers whose complex lives have been reduced to traces in texts. They remind us of the fragility but also the cohesion of individuals in the collective, and they inspire us to stitch together still larger tapestries from the fabrics of testimony that Llewellyn cut away when assembling her cento.

Gendered Escape Routes: Domestic Service, Activism, Marriage, Death

- Recendy arrived, with little knowledge of the language, often from tiny villages, the typical garment worker was overwhelmed by the customs and pace of American urban life.

She had come to escape religious persecution or poverty, often both. But what awaited such immigrant workers was more hunger, as weU as high food prices and rents, low wages and long hours in factories. Most dared not give up their meager wages: even single girls tended to save some of their pay to help out relatives back home. Others immediately turned over their entire pay envelope to parents to support the family. There was little time for leisure or for learning the language. Some sought to escape through marriage, some worked actively to better shop conditions despite hostile treatment by management, others, like the Triangle fire victims, died on the job, and still others, managed to find other lines of employment. In this section, I turn to a series of Llewellyn’s dramatic monologues in the voices of women and girls whose lives were irrevocably altered by the tragedy at Triangle.

158 Taken together, the series suggests the compounding of gender and class barriers facing garment workers—the limited alternatives for immigrant women on the Lower East Side.

The first poem, “White Light,” draws on Sonya Levien’s 1913 Metropolitan

Magazine article about a longtime garment worker and union organizer from Russia, prematurely aged by the relentlessness of her trade but committed to her vision of a better life for workers.'* It is the only poem in the book that downplays the more radical elements of its source materials perhaps because Llewellyn wishes to focus on one theme of the worker’s life: her growing disillusionment with America as a “Golden Land” of opportunity and with marriage as a means of salvation from the garment trade. That theme is important because even a glance at the list of Triangle fire victims reveals that married women, some with children, had relied on garment factory employment to help support their families. Yet, while Llewellyn borrows freely from the woman worker’s “greenhom” colloquialisms and stresses how the frantic pace of getting paid by the piece has taken a toll on the woman’s body and her dreams, she edits out the speaker’s sustaining political commitments:

White Light

After Sonya Levien

It’s not easy to teach us union. Garment girls shift like sand, start too young in the trade, wait for

Prince Charming to take em away. When I arrived from Russia my cheeks like apples. And look now!

But talk about a dreaming fool! Me, thirteen in the Golden Land longing to work at Life and Love.

Be what you call a builder of bridges. I’d go back, show all Moscow a great American lady.

159 My first position: feeding kerchiefs to machine. First English sentence: “Watch your needle— three thousand stitches

A minute.” 1 was some swift kid in those days: seventy-two hundred an hour, eighty-six thousand pieces

A day, four dollars in the pay envelope— and that the busy season. For three months my pay was bread.

I yearned to earn wages, save my little sister’s passage, I was so lonely in America. Soon like the rest

I grieved at my machine, swore I’d marry any old man just to get out. One by one the others left to marry

But returned to Triangle. I saw my future in a white heat light no dreams could soften.

Phrases like “I was some swift kid” and “my cheeks like apples” occur in the original, as do the numbers of handkerchiefs stitched and the comment about the rudimentary literacy acquired on the shopfloor. Even that final moving image—“I saw / my future in a white heat light / no dreams could soften”—is a slightly edited version of a statement made by the

“Little Old Girl,” tlie garment worker on whom this monologue was based.'® Ending the poem on that image, a seeming premonition of the fire to come and a statement of eloquent bitterness, inspires sympathy for this worker worn out physically and emotionally by the hardships of American life.

In Sonya Levien’s article, the Little Old Girl does inspire our pity, but she also comes off dignified, confrontational, and shrewd. She responds enthusiastically to a

Yiddish orator’s appeal to women in the garment trades, but then confides to the middle- class journalist accompanying her on a round of speeches and strike rallies how difficult it is to organize young women in her industry: “You take them young, and all of life is

160 concentrated on the one day—the day they'll marry. ‘In a year or two I'll be married and away from this,’ they answer when you get them to talk seriously, and you can’t make them think of the other fellow’s kiddies or even of their own” (135).'° Her own ambitions as a young woman were not to be a “great American lady” but to “be as free to live as in

Russia I could only dream of.” Whereas in the poem, the speaker’s expressed intent to become a “builder of bridges” sounds like a further grandiose dream of upward mobility, the Little Old Girl in the article says, “I came here to be— what do you call it—yes, a builder of bridges— and then I was to go back to my people and show them how.” Her ambitions were not to display her success but to share knowledge.

Such an educational mission, implies Sonya Levien, is precisely what the Little Old

Girl was pursuing as she shepherded the journalist from rally to rally. At one street gathering, a union organizer is addressing a large crowd of women on the topic of how low consumer prices depress workers’ wages:'*

In big department stores, we are having the January sales of white goods, and grand ladies are buying the lingerie we make. Now is the time for us to tell them that whiletheir little girls are reading Alice in Wonderland ours are sewing buttonholes for the princely wage of one cent for thirty-six holes. Let us tell them that while tneir little girls are schooling and playing and sleeping, our little sisters are bending over machines fourteen, sixteen, and twenty hours a day. Let us tell them that it’s the labor of little children in the tenements and the sweatshops that make the bargains, and sells waists at forty-nine cents!

The lesson in class-based economics is something that the joumalist will incorporate in her article for consumption by a middle-class reading public. Shortly thereafter, the joumalist hears another speech, this time at the Labor Temple, delivered by the Little Old Girl herself.

In contrast to her private confidences about the difficulty of organizing shopgirls, she comes off dynamic and eloquent as she convinces her female audience of the importance of their contributions to history:

161 Girls, what have we to lose! We are humble in our demands. In return for our youth and our labor we want a little more leisure so that we may rest for the next day, a little more food so that we may live a few years longer, a little more joy that we may keep faith with humanity. You girls, you supposedly ignorant immigrants, untaught, unfed and unloved, you are the pioneers that are paving the way for a better race— with your last cent you are purchasing economic freedom for the scabs of our trade, with your lives you are paying for the freedom of those others who are too smug or selfish to know that they, too, are slaves.... You, the minute women of this age, unite and stand for a better world of womanhood!

This sermon on the necessity of feminine solidarity is well received; Levien reports, “The

Labor Temple was long in clearing.” Quite clearly, the personage on whom Llewellyn’s

“White Light” was based, while no longer dreaming of heterosexual romance, has found another dream, one that unlike marriage offers the potential of greater dignity, self- determination, and the opportunity for literacy and leisure.

Llewellyn’s poem “Stitcher” dramatizes the life of another garment worker, who finds new employment in domestic service after the fire. Despite the somewhat more pleasant working conditions at domestic jobs, many young immigrant women preferred factory jobs because the work there was less isolating and better paid— and less subject to the matemalism that characterized relations between maids and employers.^* The former stitcher in Llewellyn’s poem dramatizes her ambivalence about the new job. In the first three quatrains, the housemaid refers both to the impression the fire has left on her and also to the rituals of housecleaning that in no way recall the clatter and grime of the factoiy loft:

Now I wash the garments and some I starch. Stiff as grief

Or courage. The flat iron presses and gives shine. In the morning there are lamps to fill, globes wiped so light can shine through.

Windows thrown open for sweeping and dusting. . . (54)

162 The many instances of assonance, internal rhyme, and alliteration in the passage convey a sense of harmony. The overall impression is one of light, clarity, order: washing the garments seems preferable to making them.

Yet there is also the subtle implication of matemalism. In encouraging her maid to become literate in English, the employer is also inculcating middle-class values having to do with cleanliness and godliness. The mistress of the house seeks to uplift her maid by reading to her “scriptures or legends like Paramhansa the swan // Who could sup up milk, leave / water in the saucer.” This overly delicate vision of digestion—a white swan drinking a white liquid and depositing its “water” daintily in a saucer—is emblematic of the employer’s sanitized world.

The maid rebels against this cult of cleanliness in her nightly language study. We see that after the work of the day is finished— the routines of polishing globes and washing silk— the apparent order and calm of the earlier part of the poem are illusions. While the passive act of being read to seemed to lull the stitcher-tumed-housemaid, the active struggle of writing rekindles for her the anguish of the Triangle fire:

Evenings. Alphabet. Vocabulary. Grammar rote by gaslight sputter. Tonight I write this history into my copy book: Gehenna. Gehenna,

A word for garbage burning outside the walls of Jemsalem. The refuse of the city. Corpses of Criminals. Sacrificed animals. Holocausts of

Relics, regrets, evil memories released into smoke. (55)

The text that the housemaid produces, raging agaiiist a waste and destruction impossible to redeem, is clearly nothing like the pietistic legend of Paramhansa the swan. The heavy g and k sounds repeated in this passage are like deep guttural moans, and the word choices

163 contrast strongly with the earlier emphasis on light, cleanliness, and airiness. The act of writing forces the housemaid to re-live the trauma, which the daily household tasks and the dainty instruction by the mistress had managed to contain. The acquisition of writing, thus, appears to be a process both liberatory and anguished. A powerful tool for angry and sorrowed self-assertion, literacy names yet also inevitably displaces.

In this series of dramatic monologues about varied fates for the garment workers of

Triangle, the poem “Grand Street” is in the voice of a Lower East Side girl who apparently lost her mother in the fire."^ “Grand Street” features one of Llewellyn’s most remarkable metamorphoses of source material; she based her poem on the memoir of Sophie Ruskay in

Irving Howe and Kenneth Libo’s book. How We Lived: A Documentary History of

Immigrant Jews in America, 1880-1930. Ruskay’s cheery, somewhat nostalgic reminiscence becomes an occasion for Llewellyn to meditate on a child’s response to the fire.^’* The bulk of Ruskay's essay describes the games girls of her generation played, such as “potsy,” a sidewalk competition like hopscotch, for which one drew chalk boxes and hopped on one foot—an activity that inspired her mother’s disapproval: “She thought it

‘disgraceful’ to mark up our sidewalk with chalk for out lines and boxes; besides hopping on one foot and pushing the thick pieces of tin, I managed to wear out a pair of shoes in a few weeks!” The elder girls kept little brothers and sisters entertained with little cloth bags filled with cherry pits and with threats to withhold ice cream when the hokeypokey man came around (54). The girls didn’t play much with dolls because, as Ruskay notes, “we ..

. had plenty of opportunity to shower upon ... baby brothers and sisters the tenderness and love that would otherwise have been diverted to dolls. Besides, dolls were expensive.”

Llewellyn retains many of the details of the games— potsy, hokeypokey man, and the scarcity of dolls—but in her narration of events, the young speaker neglects to mention her mother until the dramatic turn at the conclusion of the sonnet-like poem:

164 Grand Street

after Sophie Ruskay

We lined the walks in chalk boxes, numbers. Played potsy with markers of tin. Or spinning tops, we’d only stop for the hokeypokey man who sold a slap of ice cream on a piece of paper for a penny. Papa complained potsy and dancing wore shoe soles through in just two weeks and told us not to leave our block. Still I skipped to

Grand Street to dream at the dolls in windows. Each splendid in real silk and lace. Blue eyes, golden hair. Their brass-bound trunks for travel brimmed kidskin boots and fur-trimmed bonnets. One Mamselle in ashes-of-roses held a pink parasol. At her feet, a white batiste shirtwaist was displayed. The kind Mama made at Triangle. Back before the Fire. (47)

Using a two-part structure. Llewellyn contrasts the simple amusements—cheap ice cream, potsy with markers of tin— to be found on the child’s home street (Ruskay lived on Henry) with the extravagant pleasures of Grand Street. Reading between the lines of the child’s detailed description of the glamorous dolls that she can only dream about, we are reminded of the tremendous class stratification in New York City: the child who has to worry about her shoes wearing Ol.. too quickly is admiring the kidskin boots and fur-trimmed bonnets adorning a mere doll. Another ironic contrast lies in the “ashes-of-roses” costume on the

“Mamselle” next to the white batiste shirtwaist; the delicate color nonetheless recalls the fire even before the speaker reveals that “Mama” worked at Triangle “[b]ack before the Fire.”

In this way, Llewellyn edits Ruskay’s upbeat memoir to foreground images of economic inequality and to suggest the significant impact of the factory fire on the lives of people, even children, in the community.

In these three dramatic monologues, we see Llewellyn manipulating her source materials to comment on the specifically gendered expectations and choices for working- class immigrant women. The promise of marriage as a release from bodybreaking labor,

165 the difficulty of organizing women, the segregation of certain trades by gender, the limited opportunities for higher education for women are all issues that a re-examination of the

Triangle fire raises. The breadth of these issues and the persistence of many such limitations today are reasons why the Triangle tragedy is an important historical touchstone, one that deserves multiple and complex representations.

Giving Arrogance and Corruption a Form: the Poetics of the Expose

I cannot see that anyone was responsible for the disaster. It seems to have been an act of the Almighty.... I paid great attention to the witnesses while they were on the stand. I think the girls who worked [at Triangle] were not as intelligent as those in other walks of life and were therefore the more susceptible to panic. —H. Houston Hierst, juror^

Shortly after the Triangle fire, angry cartoons appeared on the editorial pages of

New York’s many newspapers. One, in the Evening Journal, featured a dead garment worker lying on the shopfloor. Above her is the slogan, mimicking a classified ad,

“Operators Wanted: Inquire Ninth Floor.” (In actuality, owners Harris and Blanck wasted little time mourning: within a week of the tragedy, they had opened another shop on

University Place, where they again came under the suspicion of the fire marshal for having arranged sewing machines in a manner that denied workers access to the fire escape [Stein

204].) Another cartoon, in the Socialist Call, depicted a triangle with the words “RENT

PROFIT INTEREST’ on each of the sides, with a corpulent industrialist and a skeleton clasping hands in partnership over the lifeless body of a garment worker. ‘T his is the real

166 triangle,” the caption read (Stein 63). Both Fell and Llewellyn import some of that polemical wit into poems satirizing persons or institutions hostile to the garment workers.

Fell’s poem “Industrialist’s Dream” offers a grimly ironic view of the ideal worker from the point of view of the bosses;

This one’s dependable won't fall apart under pressure doesn’t lie down on the job doesn’t leave early come late won’t join unions strike ask for a raise unlike one hundred forty six others I could name who couldn’t take the heat this one’s still at her machine and doubtless of spotless moral character you . can tell by the bones pure white this one does what she’s told and you don’t hear her complaining. (8-9)

The short and often negative phrases in lines 1 through 10 read like a satirical job description, which prizes the stereotypical feminine “virtues” of docility and passivity. But the poem turns with mention of the “one hundred forty six,” who are characterized by the employer not as innocent victims but as troublemakers—in contrast to the one with “pure white” bones."* The grisly image of the loyal skeleton at her machine might strike some readers as overly polemical, yet when it is read in the context of management practices at

Triangle it appears less heavyhanded. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company did everything it could to maximize profits at the expense of the workers’ comfort, safety, and job security.

167 It even locked doors on the ninth-floor sewing-room loft to keep out union organizers, which meant that women working tliere on the day of the fire had to choose between jumping from windows or being burned alive. Fell has a way of pushing or tweaking images—the striking of the match in “Havdallah,” the blistered feet in “Asch Building,” the pure, docile worker as skeleton here—to maximize their intensity and irony, while not departing altogether from actuality.

Llewellyn prefers to structure her indictments of the system via narrative or ironic speech. She begins “Jury of Peers” with a roster of the middle-class men who sat on the panel in the trial in which Harris and Blanck were ultimately cleared of all manslaughter charges. It becomes clear that H. Houston Hierst, importer; Leo Abraham, real estate;

Victor Steinman, shirts, and Anton Scheuerman, cigars, are peers not of the dead workers but of the industrialists. The rest of the poem is an edited version of the statement by Hierst that functions as an epigraph to this section. Llewellyn has Hierst saying all of those things— the fire was an “act of God,” the “girls” were “less intelligent”— not once but several times, each time more garbled and less convincing than the previous:

I’ve listened to the witnesses and my conscience is clear. Harris and Blanck are pretty good managers. We’ve reached the decision that the type of girl you have at Triangle is basically less intelligent. Hell, excuse me. Your Honor,

But most of em can’t even read or speak English— and the way they live! They’re lots less intelligent than the type of female you find in other walks of life. I mean that kinda worker is more— well— susceptible to panic. Emotional females can’t

Keep a clear head they

168 panicked and jumped my conscience is clearly Act of Almighty God they jumped conclusion Your Honor owners of Triangle not guilty. (41-42)

The first stanza replicates Hierst's actual statement almost verbatim, copying even the syntax that favors declarative sentences. In the second stanza, however. Llewellyn intensifies the sexism and the classism of the original, using the sort of xenophobic language that is not uncommon in debates by anti-immigration polemicists and English- only proponents today. The repetitiveness and the self-interruptions of the speaker cause us to question his intelligence as well as his integrity. By the third stanza, coherence breaks down altogether, resulting in some ironic compressions. The many awkward enjambments suggest a speaker gasping for breath and uncertain of his next remarks. As Hierst is complaining that the women couldn’t “keep a clear head.” we have to question the clarity of his own thoughts. Like the women on the ledge, he also seems to be panicking. The line

“God they jumped.” read alone, conveys astonished horror, while “jumped / conclusion” is a compressed editorial comment by Llewellyn as to the kind of justice that was served. The runover lines “Your / Honor owners / of Triangle / not guilty” suggest the collusion between the legal system and the capitalists. In this sense, judge and jury and industrialists are all peers.

As a counterpoint to poems in the voices of workers, these poetic exposés serve to remind us of the united front between government and industry that was an obstacle to any advancement of workers’ causes. The industrialists discriminated against workers who belonged to unions or tried to organize one. City police loyal to employers harassed, beat up, and arrested strikers. Triangle owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were acquitted of all malfeasance by a jury of their peers.

169 “Where are the words of fire for my generation?”:

Fell and Llewellyn on the Poetics of Cultural Memory

I made sackcloth also my garment; and I became a proverb to them. — Psalm 69:11

Both Fell and Llewellyn conclude their poetic sequences about the Triangle fire with poems that explore the conflicting aims and methods of the historian-poet. These final poems raise important questions about poetry’s multiple guises—as Aristotelian mirror, as revolutionary call, as catalyst for social change, as conduit of cultural memory. To what extent, for example, should the poet insert herself into her reinventions of historical actuality? When should she edit or depart from her source materials? What aesthetic criteria should she adopt when writing about an event that has considerable potential for pathos or melodrama? What responsibilities does the poet have to be historically “accurate”? How are literary representations of historical events useful? These poems clearly side with the workers over the industrialists: can the poets be charged with writing “didactic” or

“polemical” verse? Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly. Fell and Llewellyn argue for a socially engaged poetry, but one still demanding, as Llewellyn put it, a certain “knowledge of poetry and technical skill” (Interview 5).

Fell’s approach— dream-like, lyrical, and imagistic—reimagines the funeral cortege for the dead workers and then seamlessly segues to the present in which the poet is guided by the tragic muse-figure of the nameless dead:

Cortege

A cold rain comforts the sky. Everything ash-colored under clouds.

170 I take my place in the crowd.

move without will as the procession moves, a gray wave breaking against the street. Up ahead, one hundred and forty seven

coffins float, wreckage of lives. I follow the box without a name. In it whose hand encloses whose heart? Whose mouth

presses the air toward a scream? She is no one. the one I claim as sister. When the familiar is tagged

and taken away, she remains. I do not mourn her. I mourn no one. I do not praise her. No one

is left to praise. Seventy years after her death, I walk in March rain behind her. She travels before me into the dark. ( 12)

In this concluding poem that pays tribute to the anonymous worker(s) who died in the fire.

Fell positions herself in an unobtrusive role, a member of the “gray wave” of mourners

“breaking against the street.” The poem revolves around tropes of plurality and lonymity.

Coffin 147 does indeed contain “no one”—the remains are nameless and thus probably belong to more than one person—and the poet-speaker, herself unnamed, claims the un­

familiar “as sister.” With these gestures of self-effacement. Feu seems to be reaching for commonalities among working-class women from different historical moments. Her adopted sister, like a guide to the underworld, shows her the way “into the dark”; that sister

is also a kind of muse and a stand-in for each unacknowledged worker “whose mouth / presses the air toward a scream.”

Llewellyn’s “Sear,” meanwhile, is a self-reflexive account of her process of composing the book—planting quotations, adding, revising, “arranging line-breaks,

versification,” consulting source materials. She raises matters of aesthetics and artistic aim

without resolving them. In stanza two, she quotes first Frances Perkins, an eyewitness to

171 the fire who later became Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor ‘7 felt I must sear it/not only on my mind but on my heart/forever" and then an anonymous mother '"When will it be / safe to earn our bread? " (68). “Their words,” Llewellyn emphasizes. “Yet some call

that schmaltz, soap-opera- // Sentiment, Victorian melodrama.” Many of her poems do contain elements of pathos or melodrama—the very notion of young women plunging out of windows to their death can be seen as sensational— yet how much is too much?

Llewellyn also questions her own stake in the Triangle project. In “Sear,” she

offers images of being haunted by the fire: “Riding / the subway, smoke fizzes in my ears

and / in my room, electric heater coils glow.” Despite, or perhaps because, of that level of engagement, she wonders how “[t]o write about them / yet not interfere, although I’m told

/ a poet’s task is to create a little world.” The poetry workshop cliche about creating “a little

world” nonetheless presses the important issues of how, when, and to what extent the poet should consciously manipulate her archival materials. Interestingly, Llewellyn refuses to

resolve the ethical, political and aesthetic quandaries that she raises about writing

“historical” poetry. Instead, she simply exposes the seams between effacement and engagement, direct quotation and poetic re-imagination. A self-described labor poet,

Llewellyn clearly reveals a loyalty to her garment-worker subjects but, at the same time, expresses uncertainty as to the extent she should involve herself in their stories and

function as an advocate on their behalf. The issue of rhetorical positioning is complicated

by the formal elements and aesthetic criteria, both enabling and restrictive, that the poet

brings to her subject matter. By holding in suspension all of these issues without resolving

them, Llewellyn involves readers in the messiness—and also the urgency— of writing

about historical actuality.

172 The Triangle Poems as Examples of Working-Class Literary Production

Like it or not. the foregrounded working-class “I” is never isolated, but crowded from within with other voices. At the core of working-class literature is the realization that the struggle cannot and should not be a singular struggle. —Janet Zandy. ‘The Complexities and Contradictions of Working-Class Women’s Writings”

Recent books reporting on the scene of contemporary poetry in the United States—

Dana Gioia’s Can Poetry Matter?, Mary Kinzie’s The Cure o f Poetry in an Age o f Prose,

and Vernon Shetley’s After the Death of Poetry—snggtst a preoccupation with the genre’s

relevance, marginality, and durability. Indeed, images abound of the poet laboring in

isolation, of the lyric poem as a monologic, elitist genre, and of the intended audience for

pc. ‘-y being exclusively other poets and academics. Yet the work of Fell and Llewellyn,

part of a large body of contemporary poetry by women of the working classes, challenges

those conventional notions. As the above epigraph from Janet Zandy asserts, these poets

believe in a multi vocal, engaged poetry that is committed to the people and history and

ways of using language that a middle-class publishing establishment has too often deemed

unliterary. In her important essay, "Writing with Class,” Valerie Miner includes a statement

by working-class writer, Stan Weir, on the anguish of those exclusions; “I once read .. .

about a Spanish prisoner who said that one of the worst tortures was not having a mirror.

After a while she began to think she had become deformed. That’s what happens to labor.

There is no mirror in the media about what we do” (29). Clearly, the poems of Llewellyn

and Fell offer much-needed mirrors of working people’s struggles.

173 Both poets evoke the earlier waistmakers’ strike and the fire itself to offer examples of class struggle across ethnic and religious lines. Fell and Llewellyn themselves cross such lines to give voice to particularities of struggles outside their immediate historical moment and ethnic/religious groups. Llewellyn’s favoring of the dramatic monologue is something she shares with earlier generations of progressive writers."^ One of the benefits of the monologue is that by offering an idiosyncratic representation of one speaker’s experience, it avoids the overly general polemics of the placard, while still having some claim to representativity. Cary Nelson, the foremost historian of American labor poetry, has argued that such monologues become “representative cultural texts, examples of workers’ experience that have at once the conditional authenticity of confession and the generality of types” (106). The complex representations of worker-subjects that potentially occur in the monologue can forge dynamic connections between literature and lived experience.

Fell’s more image-centered poetics dramatizes another way for the historian-poet to engage with lives and struggles beyond her own. Her “working-class I” is indeed

“crowded from within with other voices” and with images, too. The tropes of plurality and anonymity that she employs in a poem like “Cortege”—in which the poet-speaker merges with her nameless foremothers in the funeral parade for the dead women—are particularly moving and compelling. As Nelson has stated, poems offering “images of working-class suffering, discontent, and resistance certainly promote more awareness of the material consequences of class difference. Abstractions about democracy and justice are thereby articulated to specific social and economic disparities” (167-168). Yet in a literary establishment dominated by middle-class values, a poetry like Fell’s will not always be credited for its aesthetics of “relationality” (Zandy 1995b 8). Indeed, one reviewer of Fell’s book. The Persistence of Memory, wrote: “Her finest poems are those which relate to the struggles of others, using concrete images. She describes her own life in somewhat

1 7 4 superficial generalities” (Ratner 723). For that reviewer, a poetry that does not foreground the self is a noteworthy aberration.

In an interview, Chris Llewellyn explained the relevance of the fire to readers today;

“[SJince about 1980 we've gone through another big wave in immigration. And again you have a lot of women who don’t know English, have come from places where women’s lives and women's work are regarded as somewhat cheap, and they don’t understand things like overtime or minimum w age.. . . So feminists need to pay attention to history because it’s repeating itself’ (5). Indeed, in the 1980s, a number of social and economic conditions conspired to return sweatshop garment production to the United States: an

American president whose domestic policies favored unfettered corporate expansion at the expense of labor rights; the growing availability of cheap immigrant labor, particularly from

Asia and Latin America; increasing labor costs in Asia, due to rising wages and stronger currencies; and “the decision of American manufacturers to shift their production orders back to the U.S. as a cost-cutting measure” (Petras 92-93). According to sociologist

Elizabeth McLean Petras, who made a case study of sweatshops in Philadelphia, the new shops—located mainly in Eastern Seaboard cities and in California—closely resemble their tum-of-the-century predecessors. Late twentieth-century sweatshop owners, like their forefathers Harris and Blanck, also pay by the piece, resulting in illegally low wages. They target newly arrived immigrant women, some of whom labor for years as indentured servants to pay for their passage to this country, working long hours without overtime pay.

To lower overhead costs in order to compete with exploitative garment manufacturers abroad, they locate their operations in cramped, old, unsafe buildings. In Philadelphia,

Petras has uncovered sweatshops in aging factory lofts, Asian restaurants, garages, basements and apartments. The safety and working conditions in these “modem” shops, due in part to Reagan-era staff reductions of the Occupational Safety and Health

175 Administration (OSHA) and the Wage and Hour Division, are eerily similar to those at

Triangle in 1911 (Petras 105).‘®

Until the labor conditions that gave rise to Triangle are permanently eradicated in this country and abroad, the poems of Chris Llewellyn and Mary Fell offer important

cultural touchstones of rage and sorrow that can inspire readers, as Mother Jones famously

said, "to pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living."

‘ See Women's Studies Quarterly 1 & 2 (1995) for Triangle fire poems by Carol Tarlen, Julia Stein, and Safiya Henderson-Holmes, as well as a helpful contextualizing outline of labor conditions and resistance in the garment industry. See also “Shirt" (p.53-54) in Robert Finsky, The Want Bone (1990), especially:

George Herbert, your descendant is a Black Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma And she inspected my shirt. Its colar and fit

and feel and its clean smell have satisfied Both her and m e.. . ‘ Interview with the author, March 24, 1996. ^ Tokarczyk, “Of Epic Proportions,” Belles Lettres (SeptV Oct. 1987): 12. ■' Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers, New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976: 144. "M arch27,1911: A-1. * Howe, in World of Our Fathers, notes that some garment shop owners did allow religious Jews to keep the Sabbath—one of the factors that attracted Eastern European Jews to the needle trades. Howe also notes the incipient class struggle between German and Russian or Polish Jews: “Of the 241 garment factories in New York City in 1885,234 were owned by Jews, or more than 97 percent, and of these the great majority were unquestionably German Jews” (82). ^ After the tragedy, a number of rabbis were among those demanding an unbiased investigation in the circumstances of the fire. The Times (26 Mar. 1911) reported, for example, that “Rabbi Stephen Wise declared that he was willing to take no man’s word— especially no official’s word—about what the facts of the shirtwaist fire were.... [He said.I Tf this thing was avoidable I want to see those responsible punished. If it was due to some corrupt failure to enforce the law, I want to see that determined. And I do not tmst public officials to determine it for us. . . ’” (“Doors Were Locked” A-2). While Llewellyn focuses on same-sex “sweethearts,” Fell and Robert Pinsky foreground

1 7 6 the heterosexual romance of a man kissing a woman on the ledge before they both jumped, a story that was publicized by UPl reporter Bill Shepherd, an eyewitness to the tragedy. ^ Josephine Casey, an organizer for the ILGWU. also composed “picket prayers” during a strike of corset makers outside a factory in Kalamazoo in 1912. The workers would get down on their knees and say. “Oh God. Our Father. Who are generous.... Our employer who had plenty denied our request. He has misused the law to help him crush us.... Thou Who didst save Noah and his family, may it please Thee to save the girls now on strike from the wicked city of Sodom. Oh, help us to get a living w age.. .. Grant that we may win the strik e... so that we may not need to cry often. “Lord, deliver us from temptation” (qtd. in Wertheimer 317). Fell uses a similar, but more cynical trope in her poem "Asch Building”;

1 like the one on that smoky ledge, taking stock in the sky's deliberate mirror. She gives her hat to wind, noting its style, spills her week’s pay

from its envelope, a joke on those who pretend heaven provides, and chooses where there is no choice to marry air, to make a disposition of her life.

‘‘ Sltin, Triangle: 172-3. *■ Llewellyn was working as a secretary for the progressive not-for-profit group Catholics for a Free Choice when her manuscript was selected for the Walt Whitman Award. Stein, rriong/e.- 138. '■* These are the epigraphs in order of their appearance in Llewellyn’s text:

To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord; to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes... the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. —Isaiah 61:

0 Lord my God. thou art very great! Thou art clothed with honor and majesty, who coverest thyself with light as with a garment, who stretchest out the heaves like a curtain. —Psalm 104:12

1 made sackcloth also my garment; and I became a proverb to them. — Psalm 69:11

177 Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost. —John 6:12

Cary Nelson.‘"Facts Have No Meaning: Writing Literary History in the Shadow of Poststructuralism. College Literature 20.2 (June 1993): 11. While sympathetic to the workers. Stein takes a dim view of communist elements within the ILGWTJ and ignores the sometimes paternalistic gender politics of the union. See Orleck. for an account of how organizers in the garment industry—Pauline Newman. Rose Schneiderman, Fannia Cohn, and Clara Lemlich—were sometimes discriminated against, and. in Newman’s case, sexually harassed by powerful elements in the union. ‘ The New York Times noted that Nausbaum’s “ambition had been to be a schoolteacher, but that she was forced to leave high school and give it up in order to support her family. Her cousin said she had always felt the difference between the work she wanted to do and that which the factory life thrust upon her. and had been broken-hearted at giving up her ambition” (“27 More Identified” 2). Stein. Out of This Sweatshop: 134-137. A contemporary researcher, Annie Mac Lean noted that the hectic production requirements taxed workers’ nerves and aged them prematurely: “It appears in heavy eyes with deep dark rings, in wrinkled skin, and old young faces. The high rate of speed that must be maintained through so many successive hours is undermining the healtii of thousands of girls in the industry” (qtd. in Orleck 33). Orleck nonethless provides evidence that women were more effective garment union organizers than the men; “Skilled male workers in the shirtwaist trade had been trying to establish a unon since 1900. But after five years the union had managed to attract only ten members. The problem. [Clara] Lemlich [a waistmaker and organizer] told her male colleagues, was that women workers had to be approached by an organizer who understood their particular needs ao women.. . . [Y]ears later, one conceded that the failure of the first waistmakers’ union was due at least in part to their ham-fisted tactics: ‘We would issue a circular reading somewhat as follows: “Murder the exploiters, the blood­ suckers, the manufacturers.... Pay youi dues.. .. Down with the Capitalists!”’ Few women or men showed up at their meetings.” Tillie Olsen, drawing on an worker’s letter in New Masses, published a poem, “1 Want Y ou Women Up North to Know,” in a 1934 John Reed Club magazine. Partisan, from which 1 quote its opening and closing stanzas:

1 want you women up north to know how those dainty children’s dresses you buy at macy’s, wannamaker’s, gimbels, marshall fields are dyed in blo o d ... what it means, this working from dawn to midnight... for Catalina Rodriguez comes the night sweat and the blood embroidering the darkness... And for Maria Vasquez, spinster, emptiness, emptiness, flaming with dresses for children she can never fondle. And for Ambrosia Espinoza—the skeleton body of her brothers on his mattress of rags, boring twin holes in the dark with his eyes to the image of Christ... [qtd. in Nelson (1988) 105] ■■ See the helpful historical overview of the domestic service profession in the United

178 States in Judith Rollins. Between Women: Domestic Sen-ants and Their Employers. (Philadephia; Temple University F*ress. 1985). In World o f Our Fathers. Grand Street is described as having equal measures of notoriety and bohemian cachet. Certain underworld elements resided there, such as the infamous money launderer. Marm Mandelbaum. but there was also a small park, a library, assorted shops. Between Grand and Houston streets, east of Broadway, there were “thirty- one dance halls in a ninety-block district’’ by 1907 (Howe 210). Ruskay also comments on the limited higher education opportunities for girls of her class: 'There was no doubt about it, girls were considered inferior creatures. The athletic girl, the girl who would fearlessly decide on a career or even demand the right to study a profession, was still unknown.... Going to college was the rare achievement of a few hardy souls, but for most, it was only a dream” (54). ■■ Quoted in Wertheimer: 314-315. In actuality, many of the workers who had started the strike were quickly laid off by the Triangle bosses. According to the Times, most of the workforce before the strike was Jewish. “But after the strike ended [the] company, [District Attorney] Whitman was informed, refused to hire back any of these employes, preferring instead to hire Italians, Irish, and Americans” (“Quick Grand J u ^ ” 2). In Repression and Recovery, literary historian Cary Nelson includes examples of “worker’s correspondence” poems produced by such left writers as Mike Gold and Tillie Olsen. Culled from actual workers’ letters that appeared in labor publications, the poems functioned somewhat like dramatic monologues. Writes Nelson: “Given line breaks and stanzaic form, these workers’ letters gain symbolic cultural force, a literary status they would not have on their own, and potential longterm visibility” (106). An example of such a letter-poem is Tillie Olsen’s “1 Want You Women Up North to Know” [see note 23 above for an excerpt of that poem]. As an example of the strain on OSHA inspectors, given the magnitude of the sweatshop problem, sociologist Todd Gitlin writes that in New York City alone, “[the] state’s apparel task force inspects 1,300 shops a year with its 20 inspectors. Close to half have both labor and safety violations and thus can be considered sweatshops. Roughly one-third have blocked aisles or bolted doors” (M5). In a 1983 report, a New York City investigator described the “typical” garment sweatshop as follows: . . . Room appears to be about 20 x 30’. Rear door is closed tight and cannot be opened. Front entrance (and apparently the exit) is narrow and partially blocked by garment racks. Floors were littered with piles of garments. There is only one small window with bars...... There is no back door, but there are two side doors, one of which is blocked by a table, and the other one is hard to open . . . All windows are permanently barred. The shop has a time clock, but there are only four time cards, in spite of the 20 workers on the premises. The time cards have only a first name, and none have been punched (Leichter 26-27).

As consumers, we can put pressure on retailers who sell clothing produced in sweatshops through lobbying efforts and boycotts. For up-to-date information about sweatshop production and distribution, please contact any of the following: Stop Sweatshops: A Partnership for Responsibility, d o UNITE, 815 16th St. NW, Washington, DC 20006. tel. (202) 347-7417, e-mail: [email protected]: No Sweat, U.S. Department of Labor, Washington, DC 20210, internet: http:

179 //WWW.dol. 20v/dol/opa/public/nosweat/gcover.htm; La Mujer Obrera Program, P.O. Box 3975, El Pa'so,TX 79923, tel. (915) 533-9710; fax (915) 544-3730.

Poet Julia Stein and other Los Angeles area writers held an anti-sweatshop reading against Guess, the garment manufacturer, in February 1997 and found themselves the object of a lawsuit. Although Guess ultimately dropped the charges, the lawsuit suggests that poetry still has the power to frighten.

180 EPILOGL'E: SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

This study of women poets from working-class backgrounds—which focuses on themes and formal strategies important to them—is intended as a small contribution to the growing field of working-class studies. Writing about poems that have received little recognition, I found it difficult and even painful to emphasize some poets and issues at the expense of eliminating others. Working-class poetry deserves a huge encyclopedia-sized tome! Confined, however, by the parameters of a dissertation, I offer the following notes on related research areas, which I hope, in lieu of a standard conclusion, will furnish a

“commencement” to cultural workers interested in working-class lives and literature.

In my chapter on literary representations of working-class bodies, I presented a very brief exposition of significance of the mental / manual division. While others, including Marx, Mill, and Sennett and Cobb, have written classic treatments, there is room for more research both on the varied meanings of the body for working-class people and on the division between intellectual and physical labor, which runs deep in the culture. It is important, too, to examine literary representations of work by poets bom after 1960, who came of age in an economy that is grounded in the service sector more than ever. A related area of research is the burgeoning poetry performance scene in the United States— including the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York City and the Green Mill in Chicago— which offers locales for multi-ethnic, often multilingual urban working class writers to present their poetry live.

Indeed, while early studies of “proletarian” literature focused nearly exclusively on the writings of white men, much more work is needed on the literature of working-class

181 people of color, including Asians. Native Americans. Latinos. African Americans, and

Rlipinos. Tim Libretti, whose research combines a synthesis of Marxist and “minority" literary theory, argues for “conceiving class is a more complicated and historical sense," and doing so means articulating the “diverse and divisive" experiences of class (24). As an example of a departure from the Euro-American norm. Libretti cites Native American novelist Leslie Marmon Silko’s description of the Great Depression in h.&x Almanac o f the

Dead: “[Indians]” never even knew a depression was going on. because in those days people had no money in banks to lose. Indians had never held legal title to any Indian land, so there had never been property to mortgage... The Laguna people had heard something about the clrash, but they remembered the crash a year of bounty and plenty” (25). While

Libretti and others work mainly on fiction, multicultural working-class poetry remains a largely neglected area for research.

Because I wanted to emphasize commonalities and differences among a group of poets rather than individual attainment, I frequently limited my discussion of each to one or two poems. As I hope is evident from the few excerpts of cited poems, every one of these poets deserves more sustained treatment. Yet there are many more women poets from working-class backgrounds—older, younger, less fortunate in acquiring an education or publications—whose writing also merits attention. Regional and urban poetry centers, blues clubs, community and workplace literacy programs, alternative presses such as the

Working Classics / Red Wheelbarrow in San Francisco, and, once again, performance spaces offer venues beyond the book trade for locating working-class poets. (The bibliography in Janet Zandy’s Calling Home provides a helpful list of alternative presses and journals.) Similarly, all of the cultural sites I outlined in individual chapters could be expanded into booklength studies, as could others, such as sexuality or motherhood, that space limitations prevented me from exploring.

1 8 2 Much as literature by and about the working classes merits increased attention, such an involvement is hollow if it is not imbued with what Janet Zandy terms a “liberating memory." Borrowing that phrase from educator Henry Giroux, Zlandy uses it to signify that which is potentially transformative rather than merely “nostalgic.” A liberating memory. Zandy says, can “lead out to a more expansive understanding of class identity- practiced in the classroom, in political activism, in the shaping of culture" ( 1995b 5). My intent, in this book, has been to contribute to that “more expansive" understanding.

183 APPENDIX: BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES ON THE POETS

Gloria Anzaldüa was bom in 1942 on the ranch settlement called Jesus Maria of the

Valley in South Texas. At her father’s death when she was 15, Anzaldüa worked in the

fields as a laborer alongside her family—sometimes traveling as far as Arkansas to do so.

In 1969, she earned her B_A. from Pan American University, and in 1972, received her

M.A. in English and education from the University of Texas at Austin. She worked for a

year and a half as a high school teacher for the children of migrant workers in Indiana. In

1981, with Cheme Moraga, she edited This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical

Women of Color. Her book Borderlands /La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), a

powerful hybrid work of poetry, historiography, linguistics, and philosophy, explores

issues of identity, language, culture, and sexuality. A final book. Making Face, Making

Soul / Hacienda Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women o f Color, Anzaldüa

edited and published in 1990. Currently working on a doctorate in the History of

Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Anzaldüa is a lecturer

in Third World feminism.

Lenore Balliro, bom in 1954, has worked as a stitcher, assembler, shipper / receiver,

waitress, clerk, and display designer. Currently, she is a teacher / trainer and English as a

Second Language instructor in adult literacy programs throughout Boston.

Jan Beatty, bora in Pittsburgh in 1951, has held jobs as a welfare caseworker, a rape

counselor, and a nurse’s aide. She has worked in maximum security prisons, hoagie huts,

184 burger joints, jazz clubs, and diners. She won the 1990 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and

two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her book. Mad River, a

winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, was published by the University of Pittsburgh

Press in 1995. She earned a B A . from West Virginia State University and her M.FA from

the University of Pittsburgh.

Karen Brodine, bom in Seattle in 1947. was proud to have grown up in a household

identified by its radical politics. In the mid-Sixties, Brodine herself became involved with

feminist, gay/lesbian, and socialist politics in the Bay area, serving as an organizer for the

revolutionary feminist group. Radical Women, in 1979-81, and an organizer for the

Freedom Socialist Party in 1981-83. Brodine earned a BA. from the University of

California, Berkeley in 1972 and an M A . from San Francisco State University in 1974.

She authored two books of poems. Illegal Assembly (Hanging Loose Press, 1980), and

Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking (Freedom Socialist fhiblications, 1987). A

longtime computer typesetter, Brodine died of breast cancer in 1987.

Ana Castillo, bom in 1953, grew up in Chicago. In addition to her poetry collection. My

Father Way a Toltec. she has authored several novels, most recently So Far from God; a collection of stories, Loverboys; and Massacre o f the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma.

She has received an American Book Award, a Carl Sandburg Award, and an NBA grant for her poetry.

Lorna Dee Cervantes was bom in 1954 in San Francisco and grew up in San José,

California. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Emplumada (Pittsburgh, 1981) and From the Cables o f Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (Arte Publico, 1991). She has degrees from San José State University and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

185 Nancy Vieira Couto, born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1942, is of Portuguese

ancestry. Her parents met in New Bedford's textile mills, and then her father became a

bread salesman for Giusti s bakery, based in the same city. Her collection The Face in the

Water ('Pittsburgh, 1990) won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and her poems have

appeared widely. Couto holds degrees from Bridgewater State College and Cornell

University.

Kate Daniels, bom in Richmond, Virginia, in 1953, is the author of two collections. The

White Wave (Pittsburgh, 1984) and The Niobe Poems (Pittsburgh, 1988). Her first

collection won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. She is also the author of a biography of

Muriel Rukeyser (Random House, 1988).

Patricia Dobier, bom in Middletown, Ohio, in 1942, grew up in a steelworking family.

She is the author of two collections, Talking to Strangers (Wisconsin, 1986) and UXB

(Mill Hunk Press, 1991).She holds a BA. in political science from St. Xavier College in

Chicago and an M.FA.in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh. She currently directs the creative program at Carlow College in Pittsbiu-gh.

Mary Fell, bom in 1947, grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, the daughter of a city custodian and secretary. Her poetry collection. The Persistence of Memory, was a National

Poetry Series winner in 1984. Fell holds degrees from Worcester State College and the

University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and currently teaches creative writing at Indiana

University East in Richmond.

186 Tess G allagher was bom in 1943 in Port Angeles. Washington. She is the author of ten books of poetry; a novel. The Lover of Horses (Harper & Row, 1986): and a book of essays, A Concert of Tenses (Michigan, 1986).

Dorianne Laux was bom in Augusta, Maine, in 1952. and grew up in San Diego,

Califomia. She describes her family—with a stepfather-sailor and a moiher-nurse—as

“working-class yeaming to be middle-class.” Laux herself worked variously at a fast food restaurant, a donut shop, a gas station, and a sanitarium. She received a B.A. from Mills

College in Oakland in 1989 and is the author of two poetry collections. Awake (BOA,

1990) and What We Carry (BOA, 1994). She currently teaches at the University of

Oregon.

Chris Llewellyn grew up in Fostoria, Ohio, and now lives and works as a secretary in

Washington, DC, A self-proclaimed labor poet, her Fragments from the Fire (Viking/

Penguin, 1987) won the Walt Whitman Award in 1986, She has a Master’s degree from

George Washington University.

Linda McCarriston was bora in Chelsea, Massachusetts, in 1943 and grew up in Lynn, where she lived until 1968. Her poetry collections are Talking Soft Dutch (Texas Tech,

1984) and Eva-Mary (TriQuarterly, 1991). She holds an M.FA. from Goddard College in

Vermont, and was featured in the PBS television poetry series TTie Language of Life: The

Field o f Time with Bill Moyers. McCarriston teaches literature and creative writing at the

University of Alaska at Anchorage,

Donna Masini was bom in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn in 1954. The daughter of an oil burner repairman, Masini attended Catholic schools and then earned a

187 B.A. from Hunter College and an M A. in creative writing from New York University.

She currently is a workshop instructor with The W riter's Voice in New York City. Her first poetry collection. That Kind o/Danger (Beacon Press. 1993) won the Barnard

Women Poet's Prize.

Thylias Moss was bom in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1954. Her father worked as a recapper for the Cardinal Tire Company, and her mother as a maid. She is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Small Congregations: New and Selected Poems (Ecco.

1993). Her poetry has received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in

1994. Moss holds degrees from Oberlin College and the University of New Hampshire.

Currently, she teaches at the University of Michigan.

Carolyn M. Rodgers was bom in Chicago in 1945. The author of eleven collections of poetry, Rodgers has won many awards for her work, including an NEA grant and a

National Book Award nomination in 1976 for how i got ovah (Doubleday/Anchor, 1975).

Early in her career, Rodgers was identified with the Black Arts movement. She holds degrees Roosevelt University and the University of Chicago.

Patricia Smith was bom in Chicago in 1955. A popular performance poet. Smith has several times been a national poetry slam winner. She is the author o f three collections of poetry: Life According to Motown (Tia Chucha, 1991),Big Towns. Big Talk (Zoland

Books, 1992), and Close to Death (Zoland Books, 1993). She currently works as an arts critic for The Boston Globe.

Carol Tarlen was bom in San Diego in 1943, the daughter of a truck driver and a riveter.

Her poetry has appeared widely in journals and anthologies, and she works with peace,

188 labor, and homeless advocacy groups in San Francisco. With her husband David Joseph, she edits the periodical. Working Classics. Tarlen is a clerical worker at the University of

Califomia. San Francisco and is a member of AFSCME Local 3218.

Michelle Tokarczyk was born in New York City in 1953 and grew up in the Bronx and

Queens. With Elizabeth Fay. she co-edited Working-Class Women in the Academy:

Laborers in the Knowledge Factory (Massachusetts. 1993). and she is also the author a collection of poetry. The House I ’m Running From (West End. 1988). She hold a Ph.D from SUNY at Stony Brook, and is associate professor of English at Goucher College in

Baltimore, Maryland.

Janet Zandy was bom in 1945 and grew up in Union City, New Jersey. She has edited two anthologies. Calling Home: Working Class Women’s Writings (Rutgers, 1990) and

Liberating Memory (Rutgers. 1995). A board member of ROCOSH (Rochester Council on

Occupational Safety and Health), Zandy also teaches at the Rochester Institute of

Technology.

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