The Poetry of Class Struggle

REVIEWS 127 THE POETRY OF CLASS STRUGGLE P.J. Laska, Songs & Dances. Prince, West Virginia: The Unrealist Press, 1977. 60pp. No price (paper). The struggle to write proletarian poetry is in the first place the active struggle to serve the working class and its allies by becoming a proletarian worker both as a poet and as a revolutionary communist. Without active, organized participation in the economic struggles of workers against their bosses (strikes, job-actions, etc.), and in their political struggles against the whole ruling class to overthrow capitalism and seize state power, proletarian poetry can never come into being. As a friend and comrade once put it, "What's important is the life, not the poetry: then the poetry will live." The implication being that all poetry is a reflection of the strengths and weaknesses of the politics of its author, whether they be reactionary, liberal, or radical. P.J. Laska's latest collection of poetry, Songs & Dances, is an important step forward in the struggle to write proletarian poetry. The first section sings "Where none will hear/ songs for the lost,/ songs for the deaf,/ songs for a severed ear." These are poems of the humanist revolt: the sighs, the cries, the drunken songs, the screams, and the unbearable, solitary silence "of the heart daily turning from human spirit to mechanical muscle as it adjusts to capitalist order". I was born in a coal camp, worked my days in the black damp by the light of a head lamp till I broke down with a chest cramp and died at the mine ramp no better'n a highway tramp. Pass that red-eye, Champ, It's gonna be a long, long night. As Laska realizes, the poetry of the humanist revolt, though necessary, by itselfdoes not serve the advance of the working class and its organizations toward revolution and sociaUsm, for it is the poetry of reform, of capitulation to bourgeois "democracy," of the peaceful road to sociaUsm, and ultimately of cynicism and despair. HistoricaUy, millions of workers have paid for such policies with their blood. Unconscious of class struggle as the driving force of historical development, aU the poetry of the humanist revolt can do is depict workers as passive victims, as objects, instead of as active history-making subjects. Any thought of workers' resistance, of class struggle, becomes an unreal dream, an Utopian vision, as in SONG FOR HOLLY GROVE: Forty or fifty came to the grave, drawn for their own reasons: family, daughters and grandchildren, miners, students and teachers, and those who stiU Uved around HoUy Grove near the mouth of Paint Creek, and who knew something of what happened here in 1914. Francis "Cesco Estep", his old Cherokee blood mixed with Scots-Irish, kiUed her by the midnight raid of an armor-plated train manned by thugs who machine-gunned the tents of the striking miners' famiUes. On top of a hiU they cut back jungle-thick roots and placed a wreath on his grave 128 THEMINNESOTA REVIEW over a market set long ago by the mine workers' Union. During the ritual I had the thought that struggle remembered throws a Ught on the present, where unity is an unreal dream and illuminates a vision framed with anger and blood that wiU someday blunt the pain of resentment, and atone for the slaughtered, the broken, and the maimed. What, however, is unreal about this poem is not the "unity" of the mine workers, but the poet's subjective perception of it (or lack of it). The truth is the mine workers' have a proud and-courageous history of militant struggle against every attempt by the bosses to divide them with their racism and crummy concessions. In the strike of 1977-78, the mine workers indeed showed the whole ruling class what the working class is made of-multi-racial unity and class soUdarity and militant resistance. Of course there were weaknesses, particularly in the seU-out leadership (and these are lessons being learned!), but in the face of soaring inflation and unemployment, and the upsurge of racist and fascist attacks against workers, the heroic strike of the mine workers has advanced the class-conscious...