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• W348814097 abstract "... and feels the long breeze cool his and forearms, wet now with the good sweat of hard work. --B. H. Fairchild, Work, Art of the Lathe (1998) ALTHOUGH WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS tells us in The Circus Animal's Desertion that the masterful of his poems Grew in pure mind, reminds us memorably that those images began in A mound of refuse or the sweepings of street and that the poet's ladder of aspiration started the foul rag and bone shop of the heart (347-8). Perhaps, then, it should not surprise us that poets, even before the Romantics idealized the laboring classes of which they were not part, are often inclined to celebrate the blue collar worker. What distinguishes recent examples of what I will call blue collar poetry, however, is that the poets draw heavily on personal work experience, albeit limited and sometimes distant in time from the writing of the poems, or on the work experiences of relatives, usually their parents. Moreover, as hasty survey of Bureau of Labor statistics will inform us, this celebration of the hourly wage-earner comes at time when the future of blue collar laborers (farmers and ranchers, clerks of all sorts, sewing machine operators, machine operators, textile workers, typists and word processors) looks dim. Employment projections for nurses, teachers, retail salespersons, and service workers look bright (see Occupations with the Largest Job Decline, 2004-14 and The 10 Occupation with the Largest Job Growth, 2004-14, www.bls.gov). Accordingly, when I encounter the work of such poets as B.H. Fairchild, Philip Levine, Dorianne Laux, Gary Soto, Tess Gallagher, and David Wagoner, I find myself wondering whether theirs is not poetics of labor nostalgia, eulogies, perhaps elegies, for hard work? Before inquiring into few blue collar poems, however, I will survey the poetic history of the subject in the United States, notably as it relates to three issues: (1) the romanticizing or sentimentalizing, at times even the moralizing, in poetry of labor and the working life; (2) the poet's potentially stereotypical representation of the working man or woman; (3) the nature of the poet's self-presentation (or representation, if you will) as worker, and particularly as former worker, distant in time from being on the job, of being, in effect, deskbound in his or her white collar world, and presumably susceptible to the almost inevitable nostalgia of the memory of things past. What I have in mind here is sort of time-warp, to leap quite brazenly from the first half of the nineteenth century to the latter half of the twentieth, fudging just bit into the twenty-first century. While other American poets may have sung the glories of sweat and hard labor before Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's canonical Fireside poem, The Village Blacksmith, first published in the Knickerbocker Magazine in 1840, it remains in many ways the paradigm. Once memorized, compulsorily, by public school students across the nation, the poem languishes today, as does Longfellow's once Colossus-like reputation. Familiar as it may yet be, the poem merits quick review. poem begins memorably (and if you happen to be over sixty, perhaps even memorizably): Under spreading chestnut-tree village smithy stands: smith, mighty man is he, With large and sinewy hands: And the muscles of his brawny arms Are strong as iron bands. (18) In the second stanza we are informed that his physical strength does not constitute the sole grounds upon which we should admire the blacksmith, for His brow is wet with honest sweat, and can look the whole world in the face because he owes not any man. We encounter, then, not-so-subtle and quite familiar philosophical or perhaps political message here: hard work builds character. In the third stanza we are told that the sound of his hammer is reminiscent of a sexton ringing the village bell, and if we fail to catch the religious point here, Longfellow makes it obvious couple of stanzas later, where we find the blacksmith at church with his boys, listening to his daughter singing in the choir and thinking of how her voice sounds like that of her deceased mother, Singing in Paradise! …" @default.
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• W348814097 date "2010-06-22" @default.
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• W348814097 title "American Poets and Blue Collar Work" @default.
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