UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE ‘TO BE OF USE’: CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN WOMEN’S POETRY OF WORK AND WORKERS A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By JEANETTA CALHOUN MISH Norman, Oklahoma 2009 ‘TO BE OF USE’ CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN WOMEN’S POETRY OF WORK AND WORKERS A DISSERTATION APPROVED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH BY _________________________________ Dr. Francesca Sawaya, Chair ___________________________ Dr. Dan Cottom ___________________________ Dr. R. C. Davis ___________________________ Dr. Jonathan Stalling ________________________________ Dr. Catherine E. Kelly © Copyright by JEANETTA CALHOUN MISH 2009 All Rights Reserved. TABLE OF CONTENTS ‘To Be of Use’: American Women’s Poetry of Work and Workers ABSTRACT........................................................................................................................ v CHAPTER 1 Introduction to “To Be of Use”: American Women’s Poetry of Work and Workers............ 1 CHAPTER 2 The Contemporary Long Poem as Working-Class Counterhistory ...................................55 CHAPTER 3 Class and the Ethical Lyric............................................................................................... 127 CHAPTER 4 “I’m From the 21st Century”: Third World/Wave Ethical Media-Poetics and Empathetic Consciousness in Poems by June Jordan and Lorna Dee Cervantes ...............................176 CHAPTER 5 Conclusion: Our Tale, of Our Tribe: Working-Class Solidarity in Poems, In Print, In Place............................................................................................................................. 223 REFERENCES................................................................................................................. 256 iv ABSTRACT ‘To Be of Use’: Contemporary American Women’s Poetry of Work and Workers by Jeanetta Calhoun Mish In this dissertation, I examine three genres of contemporary women’s poetry of work and workers: the historical long poem, the lyric poem, and the hybrid lyric- narrative; identify the poetic devices and imagery which are designed to generate an empathetic response; explain how the poems use empathetic response to engage readers in ethical contemplation; then explore the implicit and explicit ethical demands made in the poetry. This study of the poetics of empathy and ethics in contemporary American women’s poetry of work and workers is unique, on the one hand, in its grouping of writers, its emphasis on poetics, prosody, and formal structure rather than on theme, authenticity of representation, or authorial biography, and, on the other hand, in its intersection with aesthetics, and its critical appropriation of certain ideas from ethical literary criticism and from sociological, psychological, and cognitive studies of empathy. Additionally, this study’s concern with ethics places it within a growing body of contemporary scholarship on literature and ethics. The chapters of the dissertation are organized around categories of poetic genre: the long poem, the lyric poem, and the hybrid lyric narrative. In chapter two, I analyze how poems channel empathetic response toward ethical ends in historical long poems by Muriel Rukeyser, Chris Llewellyn, and Diane Gilliam Fisher. In chapter three, I analyze two modes of the ethical lyric, the family poem and the protean narrator poem, in work by Marge Piercy, Maggie Anderson, and Dorianne Laux. In chapter four, I explore how June Jordan and Lorna Dee Cervantes use a hybrid lyric-narrative form to create a dialectical poetic space within which the relationships between the individual and the world, the self and the other, the private and the public, are subject to an ethical interrogation. The conclusion opens with a short meditation on two recurring themes in women’s poetry of work and workers followed by a survey of the cultural work poetry does in working-class communities. In section one of chapter five, I offer a selection of women’s poetry that operates explicitly to hail other members of the working class, using empathy to create solidarity rather than to serve a class-crossing epistemological purpose. In the sec ond section of the chapter, I explore how poets put their poetries to work on behalf of working-class and underclass communities. Section three of the conclusion offers a survey of small presses and little magazines currently publishing working-class writing. v Chapter 1: Introduction— ‘To Be Of Use’: Contemporary American Women’s Poetry of Work and Workers I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again. — “To Be of Use” by Marge Piercy Overview Poets and poetry can be of use in the fight for economic and social justice. This manifesto, which I hold in common with the poets whose work is considered in this study, reflects an aesthetic sharply divergent from the mainstream of American poetry insofar as it follows the dictates of high modernism or New Criticism. However, for writers who perceive their work as existing outside traditional aesthetic boundaries, the idea that poetry can make something happen is not at all controversial or even audacious. The American proletarian and radical poets of the 1920s and -30s, American ethnic and feminist poets, and activist and political poets from many countries, notably those in Latin America and in Eastern Europe, have written and continue to write poetry intended to make a difference in the world at large. Women poets who write of work and workers, influenced by radical and proletarian traditions and by ethnic and feminist affiliations, are today continuing to write poetries that are often aesthetically designed toward the attainment of economic and social justice. In fact, Janet Zandy asserts that 1 one marker of working-class writing is that “Working-class texts are intended to be useful, to have agency in the world” (Hands 91). While engaged poetry, including politically charged occasional poetry, is enjoying a relatively newfound acceptance and critical approbation, few critics and scholars include the poetry of work and workers when defining engaged poetry, despite its often clearly polemical nature. In this study, I examine three genres of contemporary women’s poetry of work and workers, the historical long poem, the lyric poem, and the hybrid lyric narrative; identify the poetic devices and imagery which are designed to generate an empathetic response; explain how the poem functions as a script for ethical contemplation, then explore the implicit and explicit ethical demands made in the poetry. Where the poems in the chapters two, three and four generally rely on what Susan Keen calls “ambassadorial” empathy, in the last chapter, I will explore a poetry directed specifically toward a class-conscious working-class audience. The type of empathetic appeal at work in those poems is one that Keen terms "bounded strategic empathy" (142) and that I will refer to as the empathy of solidarity. The empathy of solidarity is foregrounded in poems written by working-class poets to and for working- class audiences, published by working-class presses and journals, and presented in working class communities. In the final chapter, I also report on the various means and resources available to working-class writers who put their poetries to use in working- class communities. 2 American Poetry, Theory, and the Working Class Although this analysis does not directly make use of Marxist theory, to speak of the working class and to theorize about poetry of work and workers is to bring to the fore ongoing debates about American poetry and (Marxist literary) theory. The great poetry debates, which have divided American poetry and poets since at least the early twentieth century, are formulated and described from many theoretical perspectives. To take one example, Mark Wallace identifies the “major networks of poetry production in the United States” as (1) “traditional” formalism”; (2)“confessionalism . associated with university MFA programs”; (3) “identity-based poetries”; (4) “speech-based poetics” such those associated with Beat poets and their followers, ethnopoetics, an New York school writing; and (5) the avant-garde (193). Wallace’s terminology highlights the notion that affinities of practice in and theorizing of American poetry are conceived of along both political and stylistic lines. Moreover, in contemporary theoretical practice, “speech-based poetics” and “the avant-garde” are often equated, enough so that in 2004, Tim Peterson asked, “If a central characteristic of avant-garde poetry is that it's somehow politically oppositional, then what do we call ‘political poetry’ that's not ‘avant-garde’?” The question so resonated with American poetry communities that it was presented to Marjorie Perloff during an interview two years later. Perloff reminds her interviewer that the political and the avant-garde “don't necessarily go together, and a lot of polemic political poetry is very traditional so far as form is concerned and not at all innovative” and that there is “no necessary relationship between the two” (Side). Perloff’s reasoned response, while admittedly historically 3 correct, belies the deeper ideological division the original question exposed. That the question’s frame equated the avant-garde with the political marks a theoretical division in U.S.