NOVEMBER at the POETIC LABOR PROJECT

We are excited to share a new round of responses at the Poetic Labor Project. Our November edition features Christian Nagler, Laura Woltag, Margaret Rhee, and Ronald Palmer. To download a pdf of these responses, click here.

As always, we're inspired by these responses, and many of the other exciting forms of community action that have transpired this year. We are pleased to continue to contribute to the rich and expanding discussion. Please send us any projects and resources that you think we ought to include in the blog library.

Thank you for your interest and solidarity.

CHRISTIAN NAGLER

CHRISTIAN NAGLER lives in San Francisco and has worked as a paperboy, a ranchhand, a library page, an intern at a mental hospital, an ESL tutor, a personal attendant, a sub-legal delivery person, a managing editor, a yoga teacher, a freelance writer, a dancer, a community arts organizer, and an adjunct professor of fiction writing and art/social practice.

I am camping at the northeast corner of Occupy SF, trying to fall asleep while the cars scream by on the Embarcadero. I am thinking about the conversation I had a few hours earlier with the man in the next tent, Ed, who is here because his house in Vallejo foreclosed this spring. He has a German shepherd puppy sleeping in his lap; he talks about his daughter in Virginia, and his ex-girlfriend who left him because of his drinking, which he has now overcome.

I can’t sleep. I’m accustomed to quiet and dark. I lie awake thinking of something I read: that when the sub-prime mortgage bubble burst over the span of four days in 2008, the movements in the market were 25 standard deviations away from the mean several days in a row. Probabalistically, this means that these market events should have happened just once in the time between now and the moment the universe began times a few billion[i].

So: low income people in Baltimore and Detroit and Albuquerque and Fresno and elsewhere being afforded the social, numerical legitimacy to afford houses—in the cognitive systems of the financiers—was quite logically the least likely thing to happen in any possible universe. I am growing accustomed to these vignettes. Will I ever have a house? I think. Do I want one? What is a house?

                                                *            *            *

A few months before, I was riding the transbay bus across the bay bridge. I ogled the Oakland port system, the red and blue and green containers arranged in perfect grids on the landfill concrete like time-released capsules in an automated dispensary at the Eli Lilly plant, awaiting vacuum-packing, wrenched open daily to scatter their contents into the tiny, contested squash-courts of manifold synapses. I look at the colossal cable-cranes bearing aloft the twenty-ton things as if airlifting patients from one rationalist purgatory into another near-identical one, stacking them twelve-high and a hundred-across on those barges that are like globalism’s proper gurneys. The names: Hanjin and Evergreen and APM-Maersk are like gigantic Lawrence Weiner pieces that materially slide all over the plastic-frosted seas and aren’t just dematerialized concepts to be reproduced again and again on gallery walls and in Phaidon monographs.

Looking at those barges, I went back momentarily to my Midwest agrarian-populist family roots and had this thought: it’s all fancy-pants, all this language about immaterial labor and cognitive capitalism and affective labor and the reputation economy and the experience economy and the economist Jodi Dean’s idea that we should all get health insurance for using Facebook since the injunction to communicate incessantly with each other about our various projects and moment-to-moment states is an inter-subjective assembly line and the algorithms that make it all work are our foremen, and the baffled alienation that results is the blooming, frustrated fury of the proletariat; that the new golden phallus around which the dance of value-production twirls is relevance ranking[ii], so that if we participate in mediated meaning-making in any form—especially if it is performance-enhanced in any way by today’s metrosexual grandchild of the adding machine—then we can count ourselves historical subjects of that great primitive swindle that broke the collective heart in two sometime between the ages of Homer and Zola.  

No, no, no, I thought, ogling the port, it all seems like a theory hatched out of nervous exhaustion, like Hippolyte Taine’s[iii] idea of the minor aristocracy:

well-bred people, who, cut off from action, fell back on conversation and spent their time tasting the gravest pleasures of the mind.

No, no, I thought, it’s like George Sorel warned[iv]: that a prime illusion of the bourgeoisie is the faith that our mild discontent can be/has been/will continue to be theorized, and is thus made useful.

No, I thought, despite our thriving micro-trade in logorrheic fantasies we are still as sands in the hourglass or dust in the wind of industrial manufacturing, and much of the fragility of global-techno-capitalist systems and the militant diligence with which they are defended has to do with the necessity of moving very heavy and unwieldy objects vast distances over the surface of the earth. We are still Victorian gentle-persons suffering fits of hallucinatory neurasthenia from the complicated scent of sweat on the bodies of neo-coolies who keep the imperial commonwealth intricate with stuff.

This was, clearly, a few months before the general strike in Oakland, before the march on these ports.

                                                            *            *            *

There is a feeling I get, some days, after teaching narrative storytelling —that immaterial labor par excellence—for eight hours at a stretch in basement rooms in the financial district.  An itchy feeling that makes me paranoid I might have bedbugs but then on second thought seems to issue from some overtaxed, scabrous bulb of my cerebral cortex. It is a feeling that leads me to entertain a dramatic sort of thought: what if I am the abject embodiment of the immaterial labor economy?  Now, I’m trying to understand what that means, that sentence, I sometimes wake up with it, sometimes in a panic, and now when I look at it, it looks narcissistic. Cute, even.

For the past six or so years, I’ve been—like so many—teaching writing and art at various institutions of higher learning around the bay area. The work is at turns sweet and stultifying; Oh, people! People, people, people, people, people. All day long people, people and more people! And myself with all their names in a ledger. So many people that in the evenings I am almost grateful for the hypnotic riddle of personal-isolation technologies, forgiving of their profit margins. People who take out student loans that are predatorily leant to them by a subsidiary of Goldman, Sachs, people who navigate the bureaucracy of veteran affairs so I can tell them to write stories with or against their will. I track the value of their zombie/vampire/free-style rap/romantic fantasies in EasyGrade ProÒ as if I’m hedging currencies on the Forex market.  I have no stable contract, of course, and I rely upon the mercy of administrators coupled with my own good-behavior and faith in my robust physical health (no insurance) to keep me going another semester.

It wasn’t always like this. Right out of college I went into a PhD program in English at Johns Hopkins, where I had something like a $20,000/semester stipend (inconceivable!) in a city where $175 a month for rent is not unheard of due to the market-inconveniences of a 200 year old war between poor communities, police, and institutional forces, as popularly depicted in TV shows like The Wire, which I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch for fear of getting too immersed in the past. While at Hopkins, I bought a used 1982 Jeep Cherokee, and when it needed new tires I brought it to a crumbling tire-repair store that was said to have once been the home of Frederick Douglass. Once I ate dinner at a Hard Rock Café built on the exact spot the first slave ships docked in the US, so I heard.

How was Hopkins able to pay me so much for spending most of my time in Student Labor Action Committee meetings (we were organizing for a living wage for laundry workers); doing drugs; and sitting in my street-salvaged Ikea armchair writing about trans-historical threads between Mary Rowlandson’s 15^th century captivity narrative and contemporary accounts of alien abduction, or Archie Comics and the Post-war Nationalist Symbol of the Impotent Adolescent, or William Bartram’s 16^th century botanical travel logs as precursor to the American porn industry, or queer readings of expeditions to the North Pole, and other such seemingly market-unfriendly formulations? Well, it turns out that Hopkins’ proximity to the Pentagon supplies it with a steady river of capital (you can go to graduate school there in the Department of Homeland Security Studies, or History of Military Technology, and I once spotted Paul Wolfowitz strolling across the red brick, Federal-style quad), a river in which I naively bathed, though not happily, considering I developed a slight addiction to heroin, which would prove pivotal to my future career choices. When I look back on this time I sometimes think it was complicity’s contagion and not my own suburban somatics of imagined inviolability that led me into that bromide-punk-ghetto womb-narrative. Who could say?

Back in Berkeley over summer break, I found myself psychologically unable to return to Baltimore. So I moved into a cheap room in a collective house in Oakland run by erotic masseuses cum cult-members and answered a Craigslist ad for a job in Berkeley taking care of a paraplegic man (whom I’ll call Jon) for $10/hour under the table. The work was not easy – I was totally untrained – and it involved a lot of heavy-lifting, much contact with vulnerable bodily processes, and negotiation of incomprehensibly convoluted power-dynamics. I got along tolerably well, though, with my boss, who was a former Black Panther and LGBT and disability rights activist, and I had some nice moments reading aloud with him from Krishnamurti on his electric bed while he drifted into a time-release-Fentanyl-patch induced slumber. The maintenance of his fragile existence, however, depended on the small pension he received, as well as the occult whims of the insurance company (they might decide, for example, that the new type of $300 catheter tube was not covered.) When there were emergencies—which was nearly always—there was often only enough left over to pay me half, or even a quarter, of what was owed.

I sometimes asked for help from my parents. The company my dad worked for had just been bought by Merck, thus splitting his stock options, tripling his financial resources, and rendering him nearly high-bourgeois overnight. But when I was unable to endure the Oedipal privilege of that, I sublet my room and slept in my car for three weeks, returning to my room periodically to retrieve books, which I would sell to Moe’s to pay for gas. I could have stayed in Jon’s tiny guest room, but I decided against it out of fear of conscripting myself into round-the-clock unpaid labor.

RONALD PALMER

RONALD PALMER lives in the Richmond District of San Francisco with his partner Kevin Rolston. His first poetry collection is titled Logicalogics (Soft Skull, 2005) . He graduated from NYU's program in creative writing (MA, 1993) and also from Binghamton University (Ph.D., 1996). A chapter from his porn thriller, Prick Queasy, is forthcoming from Summer BF Press.

The Reluctant PharmaWhore


          Ronald Palmer's first real job, besides mowing lawns and chopping wood for his neighbors, was working summers as a mental health worker in the mid 1980s at the now defunct Fairfield Hills State Hospital in Connecticut. At the age of eighteen, he worked along side night nurses in a locked ward with adult patients suffering from schizophrenia and bipolar disease. (Also subbing occasionally on a separate ward for “shell-shocked” Vietnam Veterans who had gone “berserk”; in hindsight, this was only about a decade after the veterans had returned from the war.  Back when a decade felt like an eternity.)

          His first career plan was to pursue a Ph.D./M.D. in psychiatry, so it's mildly ironic that now, 25 years since his first job as a Mental Health Worker, he is a drug representative for a global pharmaceutical company calling on psychiatrists as customers.

Between 1988 and 2000 he worked as:

·      a dish washer in a pizza place in Portsmouth, New Hampshire

·      a counselor in a group home for abused foster children in San Francisco

·      a model/extra in national commercials such as Diet Coke and the defunct MCI

·      a room service waiter at The Mayfair, a fancy upper east side hotel in NYC

·      an advertising traffic coordinator for a Japanese Advertising Corporation called DENTSU on 42nd street in midtown Manhattan

·      an assistant executive at J. Walter Thompson, an advertising company

·      a tutor and instructor at Manhattan Community College for the COPE program for parents in the NYC welfare system

·      a teacher of creative writing at NYU, Binghamton University and Framingham State College during which he moonlighted at Barnes and Noble Bookstore on weekends to supplement a 33K contract salary for a 4X4 teaching load.

·      An international professor of writing and reading seminars for students seeking an M.A. degree in teaching, a position that flew him around the globe from North Africa to Poland, from Bolivia to Costa Rica, Panama to Morocco all during the year in which he enjoyed (what amounted to a writer in residence) a fellowship at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in The Netherlands.

2000-2010:            

A decade's journey from a post-doctoral stint in the Netherlands to a senior sales specialist position in the world of Big Pharma:

          In the summer of 2000, Ronald Palmer landed at his parents' house in Connecticut, broke and depressed, without any savings and without any job prospects. He took to reading in his bed while overhearing his parents’ blaring television set. To his absolute delight, a few months after repatriation, he got a job as a corporate writer (Free Water! A cubicle of one’s own!) at a corporate moving company that handles employees transferring to positions overseas. The job offered him health insurance, a salary and a gym membership, all of which afforded him the opportunity to move out into his own apartment (with a college friend in Harlem) and ultimately propel himself into a decade long career as a salesperson.

          He became The Avis Guy and sold corporate contracts of Avis-Rent-A-Car all over the Bay Area Peninsula to emerging companies like Google, Netsuite and SanDisk. Eventually he became the #1 salesperson in the country for Avis. (People in stupors pretend to know what they're doing.) Recruited by Pfizer, he sold Viagra for three years in San Francisco before the 2009 layoffs and luckily landed at their arch nemesis, Eli Lilly, to sell Cialis to the same doctors/customers in San Francisco.

Proprietary and Incendiary : {THIS IS NOT ABOUT MY OTHER}

Ronald Palmer’s place of birth: at the top of the stairs of a two-story house near the railroad tracks on Richmond Hill Road in New Canaan, Connecticut on Thanksgiving Day on November 27^th, 1966. There was no hospital in the town at the time.

A Play in Two Parts.

{hear simultaneous thudding sounds of Compliance and Ethics

bouncing like rubber balls, one pink, one blue, from the ground of sticky cement.}

Part 1/

CORPOSELF: I am the user. The user presents with co-morbid symptoms typical of the postlust era {Internet vs. intellect} with tidbits of the customer casino.  I am in a state of postlust, porn pills, Viagra and Cialis, fill my trunk. All the doctors want free samples, some of which they actually share with their ‘patients’.

A creeping out of the target HCP (Health Care Professional) with an irksome, presumed intimacy that would creep out any priest, conflated with a false sense of ownership. A creeping in… of thought infecting a library of antibodies, my antibodies. My office is an interchanging waiting room that revolves around San Francisco, California. In the morning I’m in the Castro, in the afternoon, Chinatown, at dinnertime, I’m at a big pharma function in the Financial District. I eat so much I make myself sick with cream and kobe beef and oysters and butter cookies and chocolate and wine and espresso. I shit myself on the car ride home; explosive diarrhea when I make it to my toilet.

PoetSelf: will you falsely identify the gene in question {or positive as it might be to be identified}

PoetSelf: will you pluck out the writer gene, the queer writer gene, the wannabe queer writer gene like a bullet from my chest? How to negotiate being a pharmawhore with the fact that all I want to be is a writer. Even if I’m a bad writer. Even if I’m a “Bad-with-Children” type of queer who’s Blood’s-no-Good for the RED CROSS. This is where my post-queer (only out Pfizer rep on the West Coast) isn’t as clean as it should be.

There’s a queer corporate tension that eclipses my motives to survive, a ghost of my queer always following me, daring me not to return to my 72-year-old parents house. Begging me to hold on to the farce of a six figure position until the entire industry tilts over the patent cliff, capitalizing on a feeling of nausea, of vomiting, of diarrhea, of the tiny orange spiders crawling out of my nose in dreams, digging under my eyelids. The ghost of my queer finally gets me to admit that I hadn’t been properly prepared to be a tenure track professor. Of finally finding that I hadn’t been prepared to feel, anything, especially a failure with only one book a decade after the infamous MFA.

CORPOSELF: YES s/he is the doctor/customer/viewer and s/he is stunned into supposition— (as a best practice)

because I am listening so intently, s/he feels loved—

victim entranced in the subordination of power, s/he literally cannot move.

That’s my premise, jovial comportment with a hint of sparing-daring.

This leveraging of one’s emotional intelligence can often lead to my starting point; my aborted thesis. I’m interrogating xer/her/his buying signs while weaving a dramatic closing question to create a ‘positive tension’ with my premise.

{before I even believe it myself, I’m quantifying the rate of relapse}

Which amps the situation into a need for an emotional exchange even if it’s a promise to change a belief, a behavior, instead of adjunction with a dopamine agent maybe my handshake will turn into a lifetime prescription

especially when s/he is still chewing while treated to a belly full of expensive beef.

Let’s stop stomping around and dance, said the pornaddict, choking on his middle-aged guilt.

PoetSelf: Work has always been torture for me. I have sought out work that I love which is daydreaming in a car looking at the waves at Ocean Beach. Which is masturbating to emergent forms of marine pay per view porn, which is walking around unshaven in a hipster baseball cap with surf company logo in a stupor of my own making.

Full disclosure: a dialectic of madness, a postmortem spiritjump: I am your imposter bear. Tripped up by the hipster mystique, I embrace my own oxymoron. The contradictions begin with dharma of big pharma:  two of the biggest in the industry: Pfizer and Lilly: wish I wouldn’t have to be so shy, I could fry for this.

As my poetself and corpoself strangle each other for time and energy, my poetself asks my corpoself: is publishing my own ‘work’ pointless?

I had Motherwell nightmares about enormous black lemons rolling my off a chopped-off earthquake highway for a very long time. Sometimes the dream revisits me and I turn the black lemons (the size of cement trucks) into pink lemons that burst into a thousand pink bunnies and they tackle me giggling, taking turns nursing on my nipples.

That is the question. Moot or Mute? Egolibido R Us.

Postlust, in my baggage of sadness I jerk off amid the unraveling of this new century. I’ve heard the words Al Ki Da more than love ya hon. Especially from my TV.

[Or a radio of anti-matter prancing and posturing as microsonnets: sonnetweets.]

CORPOSELF: I suppose I want to admit that WORK IS A FARCE THAT KEEPS GIVING. WORK IS MY S:LFIMPOS:D DUTY TO ASSUME THE POSITION OF SELFTERROR>>>>>>>>>I am the opposite of bravery.

PoetSelf: What if our galaxy rejects our history?

And I’ll sip a lime green iced tea and write a movie in two pages and observe a hummingbird dipping into the rhododendrons below my window.

CORPOSELF: A digital rectal exam is really the only way to investigate the prostate, maybe even predict early onset BPH. If I conflate the worlds I feel less schizophrenic. My twin is concerned about her anti-psychotic. Her hands are starting to shake during her hospital presentations.

So I do a WEBMD search and find the long-term effects can worsen attention and produce cognitive dwelling (I mean dulling) but when I go off them I can stop crying at work,

She says.

And I’m silent on my cell phone sitting in the front seat of my company car, a 2011 burgundy Ford Fusion, facing Ocean Beach. I watch four crows chase away a stand of seagulls thinking my life is this black hole of sadness or something dramatic like that yet comparatively, people especially Americans say this: “well comparatively we’re better off as Americans.” But are we? I’m totally stumped over that one. As I write this OccupyWallStreet protests take over the globe. I just found out on Twitter that protesters in Oakland had to be rushed to the hospital with broken hands after being arrested. I feel guilty all the time. I’m afraid almost all the time.

IN A WORLD WHERE WE’VE BEEN TAUGHT THAT WORK MUST BE A S:LFIMPMPOS:D TERROR OF OUR OWN PERPETUAL MAKING: I memorize the product information on competitive products.  I have the Epocrates APP. I must increase my scientific knowledge so that the customer trusts me more. I must bring passion for the molecule alive with me voice in a strained elevation. I need to create action by injecting positive tension into the interaction. I tried stimulants to up the ante but they only made me more skittish and scanty when I’d shoot it would hit the opposite wall of my little green S:LFIMPMPOS:D dungeon.

The guilt I ate served to puncture the punctum. I punted this prankster who sprouted his jetsam. I love the picture of me when I was seven posing on the fireplace with my sisters like a little hustler in training or a vamp vamping around without feeling. Wrapped in a black and brown, leopard print robe, I mean: who was I kidding?

PoetSelf vs. CORPOSELF: Is the new form of sonnetweet driving you crazy with inspiration? A: yes.

Is the micro-truncated sonnetweets system of pulsing Jedi {inculcation if hiccuuping joy, a letterplay in two chapters: contra’s diction of malice vs. joyless?}

Or more precisely:

{unpacking the proxy, an incendiary whiteness. A stewing witness

to the masses, I attempt to transcend queerness –‘out at work’ I’ve learned from experiential knowledge simply opens an invitation to objectify and fetishize my erotic practice, yet possibly also opens an even exchange if initiated with levity

with questions like: so are you the top or bottom, JP Marriott, INDIANAPOLIS October, 2011 and to be honest I’m a pervert anyway an inverted invitation to open the opportunity to ask my female cohorts: Do you enjoy anal? Do you and your husband have rip roaring jack-hammering anal sex? {Gulp red wine, everyone guffawing} I mean do you use a riding crop on your husband?)

And I use this unparalleled, corporate farce of compliance into an implicit condemnation, which I think is a grander way of deepening the offense, (more appropriately cruder) a croquet unpacking the witness over the pre-sliced, orange-glazed chicken breasts that nobody has to pay for, or rather everyone must pay for, because it’s a corporate expense.}

Expense accounts reign in the land of pain medicine and anti-depressants, but one eats the guilt, bingeing on billionaires to boot, truth is the blockbuster molecule goes off patent this month, investors fear they can’t play fake

I happen to do false exceptionally well. I fake it so it feels like dwelling in the moment of this add/mission: is a whore to achieve a likefulness? [ballooning contagion, not hiv but more like alogia or aphasia]

a kind of tender kinesthesia that I’ve developed on the company’s dime:

to win me, your listener, is to become my voice plus three.

MARGARET RHEE

MARGARET RHEE has worked as a clerk at a clothing store, journalist, the West Coast Web Editor for Back Stage Magazine, organizer, teacher, go-go dancer, research assistant, babysitter, and for the past five years: project manager of a PAR project out of the SF jails, for the past three: doctoral candidate in Ethnic Studies at the University of California.

For poemas, she co-edited the chapbook anthology, 'Here is a Pen: An Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Asian American Poets' (Achiote Press) and is the managing editor of 'Mixed Blood,' a literary journal on innovative poetics and race, edited by C.S. Giscombe. Her chapbook Yellow/노란/
노랑/Yellow was published by Tinfish Press in 2011.

A Short Note:

The academic industrial complex and the prison industrial complex, as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney write in “The University and the Undercommons:” “The slogan on the Left, then, universities, not jails, marks a choice that may not be possible. In other words, perhaps more universities promote more jails. Perhaps it is necessary finally to see that the university contains incarceration as the product of its negligence.” How does the academic industrial complex perpetuate silence—from undocumented students, those from the working class, silence of the ‘undercommons.’ The prison industrial complex  keep people in, the university keeps people out. The university is not innocent.

Thus, when included, you are expected to maintain a joyful narrative of entry to higher education. The university silences where you come from, there is no space for contradiction, we are happy students, happy teachers, happy well acclimated workers. The university grows fat upon silence(s). Yet, the consciousness that Gloria Anzaldúa writes so much about, (and in this discussion of labor) reflexivity of class/backgrounds, from all positions of the university machine remains crucial. Thus, this paradoxical bind for subversive academics is necessary, to even begin to fathom reimagining the university.

Transformation of the university

requires

the language and tactics

of poetry.

A Poem About Work

Here my world is created     through books

How to unpack them

Make disappear      my girlhood horrors

Not so different from    my mother’s    and my own

I try to sprint away     into   worlds of

Paper and ink

I try to understand   but its all so confusing to me

Because it makes itself over    and over again

And because the more I know   the lonelier I become

The second time I went on a plane    the first time by myself

Was for poetry   Landing in Virginia

I knew all at once    My world was so very small     I desperately wanted to remake it

Maybe like God with his hands       Creating Adam and Eve

With dirt, sun, and creatures all around

A graduate student once told me, I wasn’t cultured or interested

Because I didn’t know who the Ayatollah was

It’s not that I don’t want to know, it’s just that I haven’t traveled much

I regret telling him   Because I don’t think he really could understand

That there is a lot I don’t know

My father at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard

On a ship that would never move

A ship that broke his back

He showed me his hands

And taught me what it meant to be blue collar

He pulled at his workman shirt, and in broken English

Told me I must grow up to be white collar

To never work with my hands.  To not have my back break

To sail on ships that move fast across the ocean

And into lands far away

My mom’s hands are thick & calloused too, gruff from holding

Wigs and dollar bills in a store she works at in Watts

She’s worked at a dry cleaners and Lucky’s Supermarket

She says a job is just a job  and sometimes, she

Doesn’t recognize her hands anymore.

She says, you shouldn’t study so hard

Because her friend in Korea was at the top of her class

Then she married bad and now she cleans houses.

My hands are calloused from holding pens

My back aches from slightly hunching over daily

Taping on mechanical keys

I realize all together how much I am

Grateful for my books and how much I hate myself

My dreams are so thick that I can’t hold them

In my palms. And I can’t swallow them either.

But in them, my father is sailing and my mother is not working, and

they are very happy.  It’s quite simple.

Except the map leading to the end of a dream

Is not only impossible but sometimes unimagined.

You must marry well, my mother says, then

You won’t be like me. You won’t have to work at all.
------

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney "The University and the Undercommons: SEVEN THESES"
Social Text Summer 2004 22(2 79): 101-115

http://www.scribd.com/doc/51113513/17/Stefano-Harney-and-Fred-moten

LAURA WOLTAG

LAURA WOLTAG has worked as an organic vegetable farmer, garden educator, lentic ecologist, writer at a mountaineering magazine, product representative for annie's cheddar bunnies, product representative for amy's goddess dressing (which really burns your eyes if you happen to stare at it for more than an hour. sayin'.), waitress (x4), barista, tutor, custodian, and horse stall cleaner. She currently works for a non-profit and is starting a native plant/ edible gardening/landscaping business with a friend. She aspires to be an herbalist, someday. She very much loved Brenda Iijima's Labor Day response & is thinking this is going to be her Brenda Iijima Labor Day Response Year. Her attached image is also informed by the work of the psychic anarchist sanskritists, with whom she also works -- you know who you are.

OCTOBER at the POETIC LABOR PROJECT

Greetings, friends!

For the month of October, we are posting some of the fabulous work presented at this year's Labor Day event in Oakland. At that event, organizer David Brazil set the scene with how much had happened between the first Labor Day event and the second: how much gathering, thinking, and political work.

So, let's say it again: a great deal has changed, in a very short time. With Occupy Wall Street, San Francisco, Oakland, Atlanta, San Diego, Philadelphia, and on and on as backdrop, we feel that we're holding hands with you in public space. And we see these writings as part of that energy - present and most welcome. Please read on for our October edition, featuring Lindsey Boldt, Jackqueline Frost, Bill Luoma, Melissa Mack, Sean Labrador y Manzano, Michael Nicoloff, Jill Richards, Wendy Trevino, Brian Whitener, Ida Yoshinaga, and Stephanie Young.

To download a pdf of this edition, please click here.

Thank you for your interest and solidarity - see you in November!