Poem: Philip Levine

The news on the unemployment front, like a great deal of what we read and see on TV, has been growing grimmer by the day, and the social conditions behind it are certainly grimmer still. Several people I know well, friends and relatives, have lost their jobs, and others are struggling to make ends meet. Alongside the weak job market, other signs of the economy's sickness are evident everywhere: plummeting home values and rising foreclosures; the appearance of Bushvilles; the collapse of the commercial real estate market; personal bankruptcies resulting from people's inability to pay debts; and on and on. These are only a portion of of the social crisis the country faces, and conditions are as bad or worse overseas. We're officially at 8.9% unemployment, though the reality is probably far worse, which is the worst things have been since the recessionary period around 1983. That was the year I graduated from high school, and one of the reasons I'm able to look back on that period without nostalgia is because, despite my fond memories of particular aspects of being 17 and 18 years old, my perception of the national situation was clear-eyed. In case you don't recall, in 1983 the ur-right winger, Ronald Reagan, was in office; a claque of extreme conservatives were frothing in their new government positions; the Cold War still raged; the AIDS pandemic was steadily increasing, with little attention for the federal government; the crack epidemic was picking up steam, and the concomitant drug war and buildup of the penal system were underway; the US was meddling in a war in Iraq (against Iran, no less, while secretly funneling money from Iran to right-wingers in Central America); and on and on. While I, though penniless and the child of a working-class background, was heading off to college and what I hoped would be a decent future, I was quite aware that things were terrible for others. The lack of jobs, particular for the poor and working-class, for black people, for Latinos, for undereducated whites, was a pressing national concern, which the GOP exploited brilliantly. It would be 10 more years and another recession (along with a young and conservative Democratic president) before the country really turned around. I hope it does not take that long this time, though the underlying conditions do appear to be worse than they were in 1983, or 1993.

That said, I've been thinking about poems dealing with work and labor, and in particular poems I have not posted before (thus excluding "Those Winter Sundays") and one came immediately to mind: Philip Levine's "What Work Is." I first came across this poem when I heard Levine read it on public radio; I believe this was after the eponymous collection had won the National Book Award. That would have been back in 1991 or 1992. I remember tearing up when he got to the end of the poem, I was so verklempt, and I sought out his work, which I was utterly unfamiliar with, right away. About five years later, when I was in graduate school, Philip Levine was teaching a poetry workshop that I was unable to take, but he would sometimes sit in the graduate poetics class I audited (which did not, unfortunately, cover his work), something I've never seen another "famous" poet do (he knew the professor, but even still, it rarely happens), and I kept saying that I would introduce myself and praise his work, but I never did muster the courage. I got to hear him read his work live around that time, though, and when I got his autograph in my copy of What Work Is, I offered my little valentine. Here's his poem, which could have been written last week, about what occurred last week.

What Work Is

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is--if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it's someone else's brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, "No,
we're not hiring today," for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who's not beside you or behind or
ahead because he's home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you're too young or too dumb,
not because you're jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don't know what work is.

Copyright © from Philip Levine, What Work Is, New York: Knopf, 1992.

Weekend Notes

I saw today that President Elect Obama is backing the laid off workers who've staged a sit-in since the beginning of this weekend at the Republic Windows & Doors plant (here) in Chicago. The roughly 300 employees were told on Tuesday that because of financial problems caused by Bank of America's cancelation of a line of credit, they would be let go by the end of the week, which was last Friday; one problem is that they didn't receive severance or benefit pay. The article implies the union is working to resolve the issue, while the owners of the company are engaging in shell games and not responding to media queries about what's going. Local politicians are condemning Bank of America, which is an easy target since it's one of the few remaining banking behemoths, although it's doubtful that such posturing will have any effect. Meanwhile, the protesting workers are wondering when they'll get their pay and what will they do just as the holiday season is rolling around. Any bailout coming for them and the hundreds of thousands now out on the street?

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To add insult to injury, the parent company of the newspaper to which I'm linking, the vaunted Chicago Tribune, for decades the Second (now Third) City's leading, conservative paper, is on the knife's edge of bankruptcy. As in, it could come as swiftly as this week. The Tribune Company's owner, Sam Zell, took the company private for about $8 billion, an insane amount even factoring in the portfolio's sterling pieces, the Chicago Cubs, and the major league baseball temple, Wrigley Field, neither of which he can unload right now, and repeated decimating waves at the company's various units, including the Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, and the Tribune paper itself, haven't brought in the fantastical revenue needed to service the debt. As I wrote to some correspondents earlier, "the media entities under Tribune control are like those insects that are devoured from the inside out, leaving the appearance, though sickly, of being alive, while being utterly hollow on the inside." Well, not completely hollow, but they're getting there, and we can certainly thank greed and deregulation, alongside the technological challenges the newspaper industry is facing, for hastening these events. At this rate, the nation's second and third largest cities could find themselves with one less major newspaper by January 1, 2009, if things continue on the track they're on now.

(On yet another point, this grim news about the publishing industry came out last week. As James Schuyler once wrote, another day, another dolor.)

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On a completely different note, I found Marc Lacey's New York Times article on the muxe, transgender/gender-queering people and related social matrix in Oaxaca, Mexico, both fascinating and a bit confounding. Confounding because the article proceeds as if, despite the wealth of material on gender and sexuality among indigenous peoples and a great deal of work on global performances of gender and sexuality, and despite the extensive contemporary discourse in gender studies and queer theory, there were little context whatsoever beyond the notion there are gay people, there are straight people, and there are some men who don't exactly fit either category but many of them dress up like women, consider themselves women, assume important roles in their community and are mostly and widely accepted, yet how do we define them according to the very fixed rubric of gay/straight? (Of course the word "lifestyle" has to enter the picture!) Etc. I say this not to criticize Lacey so much as to note that for the umpteenth time I'm registering the vast gulf between how things are discussed within academe and outside it, here in the putative newspaper of record. What might an article that were graspable by most readers yet that took into account contemporary discourse on gender and sexuality look like? How might it read so that anybody could read and engage in and with it, and how might academics, and non-academics open up conversations even more to make this happen?

“Thalía,” who was named princess the night before at a vela, or community celebration, for the muxes, waits for a parade to begin (New York Times, Katie Orlinsky)

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I was going to write about how I've been baking bread of late, and how it deepened my appreciation first for anyone who does this regularly, for homemade food and cooking, for the felicities of the Internet as an archive and resource, for the simple and profound joy you can derive from successfully accomplishing a task of this sort, for C's marvelous examples as a cook, for my ancestors who had to do this sort of thing with far less at hand, for the delight of finding another way to be thrifty, for finding a way to take my mind of the mounting stacks of material to be read and my own glacially proceeding writing projects, and for the ending of Raymond Carver's famous story "A Small, Good Thing," which I regularly teach and which, despite its evident exemplary status in the contemporary, American realist canon, still carries a faint whiff of the ridiculous with its suggesting that devouring freshly baked bread might create an affective, emotional and social bridge between a grieving couple, parents who've lost their only son, and a crank of a baker whose isolation has led him to behave in an unconscionable way. But then, I made and baked and ate this bread--C. had already done so a number of times--and I realized that Carver might be on to something. I'm not saying that freshly baked bread is the best offering to patch up a broken friendship or any other sort of inimical situation, but the smell of the bread coming out of the oven, and the taste, with just a little butter, or olive oil, or olive tapenade, is enough to calm even pretty severe personal tensions. Or at least I thought so after this last loaf came out of the oven. It really is delicious. Since I've heard that a few readers enjoyed the mulled wine, I'll post a recipe for the bread soon. I need to try it a few more times to make sure I've got it right, and then I'll post it here. A photo, though, of the penultimate loaf: