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  • Contemporary Working-Class Poetry:Lots of Light, Very Little Heat
  • Peter Oresick (bio)
Odes to Anger By Jason L. Yurcic West End Press, 2009
Velroy and the Madischie Mafia By Sy Hoahwah West End Press, 2009
Blood Will Tell By Craig Paulenich BlazeVOX [books], 2009
Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise By Julie Sheehan W. W. Norton, 2010

The lack of revolutionary sentiment that has been the norm among workers in the United States is countered this year, astonishingly, by a new brand of revolutionary zeal—Tea Party rage. A CBS News/ New York Times recent survey claims that nearly 20 percent of Americans support the Tea Party movement. Yet the movement's populist anger is largely white and male (according to these pollsters), over forty-five years of age, Republican, and wealthier than the average Joe. So where is old-fashioned, multicultural, working-class wrath?

High-octane class anger and indignation is largely absent among the usual suspects: trade unionists, minorities, college students, feminists, and in both the "liberal" print dinosaurs as well as the new electronic media. It is also missing, not surprisingly, from most contemporary literature. I surveyed quite a few new books of labor poetry this year. Most engage directly with issues of class, but I found little fury. Craig Paulenich's Blood Will Tell, for example, casts a wistful spotlight on his [End Page 100] forlorn industrial heartland; Sy Hoahwah's Velroy and the Madischie Mafia employs a wry humor to dramatize the Native American experience in contemporary Comanche country; while Julie Sheehan's witty hero in Bar Book, a cocktail waitress, is an American everywoman—smart but powerless, and abused by every man—in a perverse service economy.

Perhaps this is why Jason Yurcic stands out; he is the angriest young American poet that I have encountered in years and rare in his display of class-consciousness. A former boxer from New Mexico with a troubled past, Yurcic, a worker-writer who now pours concrete for a living, offers up a poetic antidote to the silence of the working class in his third collection, Odes to Anger.

His book is divided into three parts: "Odes to Anger," consisting of six unusual renderings of that classical form, followed by "Meditations on Breath" and "Walking into My Mind," two extended poetic sequences. "Ode to Society" (p. 4) begins:

I want toBashAbuseAnd batter youUntil you becomeNothingLike you haveBashedAbusedAnd battered me.

In the book's first movement, the Yurcic persona is a literal fighter. He flirts with drugs and gangs and jail. According to the jacket copy, his own father—after release from prison—was murdered in a brawl. "My culture/Is violence/One I did not choose" (p. 13). Yet Yurcic's lyric rants are not always external jabs. He's also full of self-loathing and self-doubt and rage about his personal failures to connect in a healthy way with his inherited traditions: Chicano, Native American, and Yugoslav. All of these cultures in modern America lead "to alcohol/Drug addiction/And pain," (p. 13) he laments. Yurcic's poetry here is raw, unstudied, and powerfully authentic.

The shift in "Meditations on Breath" is striking. Not quite a formal Eastern meditation, the thirteen-part poem is nevertheless an unflinching look inward, a study of the poet's breath during a ten-day period. It is an attempt at soul-searching and confession and moral inventory: "I snapped car antennas from new cars, bent one end up, made a pipe to smoke crack… When I smoked meth in a broken light bulb and a hollowed-out pen, I stopped because the flavor of burning chemicals made it hard to taste my pain" (p. 26). Eventually the breath becomes a teacher or a small-voiced god for the poet, and it leads him to a sobriety and sense of well-being he has never known.

"Walking into My Mind" concludes the book's three-part movement. This long poem offers a more mature Yurcic persona, now a single father, a working stiff in Albuquerque who pours concrete, who wears leather gloves...

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