In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Afterword: Work and Silence What is poetry for? Should reading or listening to poetry serve the same function as hearing music does: to provide a mood-creating, -enhancing or -altering experience? Should poetry be an intellectual exercise, an opportunity for readers to sharpen or flaunt their wits by deciphering or guessing at obscurities , allusions, ambiguities, ironies, or omissions in the text? Are there other possible uses for the art? Those of us who came of age in the 1960s remember when poetry in North America was an influential cultural force, an integral part of the way people, that is to say, society, grappled with the issues of the day: the US struggle for black civil rights (poets Ishmael Reed, Etheridge Knight); opposition to the Vietnam War (Denise Levertov, Robert Bly); feminism (Adrienne Rich, Marge Piercy); and emergent Canadian nationalism (Al Purdy, Dennis Lee). Such engagé poetry was featured in newspapers, journals, and other publications devoted to these movements, and was often quoted or recited from behind microphones at rallies, meetings, teach-ins, be-ins. Here in Canada a new book of poems by Irving Layton or Dorothy Livesay or Earle Birney was a public occasion—sparking coverage in the public media, including even television , because the assumption was that poets could speak articulately to the nation at large about matters that affect our collective life. The longtime US folksinger Pete Seeger in a 2006 New Yorker profile mentions that his father—a folklorist—used to state that he was less interested in whether a song was good than in what a song was good for. With regard to poetry’s function, I agree with the elder Seeger. I have tried to create art that is useful to people engaged in striving for beneficial social change. I believe my contribution to poetry arises from my poems focused on my work experiences, augmented by my anthologies of, and critical writing about, poems by people depicting the effects on and off the job of their own daily employment. I find the new, insider’s, work writing an exciting development in the history of poetry—and by extension, literature: people accurately articulating in poems for the very first time in English what it is like to live a particular job, from cleaning houses to functioning as a corporate executive. Or people broadening and deepening a poetic response to occupations such as logging or the various fields of medicine—jobs concerning which a body of poetry already exists. I have argued that daily work—how it is organized, and its effects on both individuals and communities—is central to our lives. Work determines or 79 strongly influences where we live, our standard of living, how much time and energy we have during our hours away from the job, who our friends are, and a vast range of attitudes to personal and social issues, including the three themes often touted as poetry’s preserve: love, nature, and death. No human emotion is absent from the worksite, since a place of employment is where human beings not only gather but where they contribute for good or ill to the daily re-creation of the community. In my essays I describe why a literature—why an artistic culture—that does not regard and depict work as central to the human story is immature. Children and adolescents are in large part unable to consider work and its import: these young people regard work as at best a peripheral, not a governing concern. My argument is that poetry should not contribute to an infantilization of society. Where work is not understood to govern human activity, we have the tragedy of nations or peoples who after a bitter struggle to attain a measure of political democracy find that the freedom in daily life that the revolution promised proves to be an illusion: the workplace hierarchies, with their accompanying daily humiliations and oppressions, remain unchanged. Citizens who feel blindsided by their earlier failure to think about economic emancipation often lash out by adopting or supporting political extremism, plunging their society into civil war and/or dictatorship. Also, where work is not understood to be central to human life, a society can declare directly or by implication that people who do no productive work—entertainers of every stripe, for instance, including politicians, actors, athletes who participate in corporatized sporting events—are the community’s significant individuals. In contrast, those women and men whose employment results in the provision...

Share