CATHERINE WAGNER's new book Nervous Device is forthcoming in September from City Lights. She teaches at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
I AM A POET AND I HAVE
one of the jobs that poets are supposed
to want at our moment in history. I work at a park-like sharecropper estate
called a university. I am not myself a sharecropper; I am an associate
professor of creative writing. I make $62,500 a year, wildly more than I made
when I was a sharecropper (I was one for thirteen years). $62,500 is supposed not
to be very much for my “rank,” and I am to be given a raise this year, partly because
I am underpaid in comparison to my colleagues locally and nationally. I asked
for the raise. I have decent health benefits, dental/mental, etc., and money is
deposited for me into a retirement fund every month. I also have access to
about a thousand dollars a year to travel to conferences, exclusive parties to
which sharecroppers can’t afford to go. I have worked at the park-like estate
for six years.
I work in one of the heavily used
mansion-like buildings that dot the estate. Every weekday I walk down the hall
past many doors. Behind some doors work my peers (tenure-line
teacher-scholar-writers). Behind other doors work the sharecroppers (adjunct
teachers, graduate teaching assistants).
The sharecroppers are inferior to me under
the terms of the hierarchy on which the institution insists, and which it
requires in order to continue to support itself (and me) as it did formerly.
The support to which the university and I have become accustomed is collapsing.
There is a terrible drought and a weevil. The drought we call a recession (although
recession implies recovery and the recession as it affects sharecroppers is not
going to end). The weevil is an infestation called student loans. It affects the
robustness of the plants grown on the sharecropper estate. When everyone has
cottoned on to the weevil infestation, they may begin growing their plants
elsewhere without the help of the sharecropper estate. Then the estate will
transform into I don’t know what.
In the meantime, when they are not out
in the fields, the sharecroppers work in ten-by-ten-foot rooms that each contain
three desks. The sharecroppers make $2400 per course (i.e., less than $20,000 a
year if they teach full time) with no benefits, no participation in governance
and no guarantee of renewal ($2400 is the national average paid for adjunct
labor). More than seventy percent of faculty appointments at US universities now
go to sharecroppers. Some
of the sharecroppers are my former graduate students. They hope that sharecropping
will lead them to a job higher in the hierarchy, a job like mine. While they
were still my graduate students, I tried to explain that the sharecropper
estate was broke and broken and that I was not sure myself how I had managed to
snag one of the few non-sharecropper jobs remaining on it. In response, they
shrugged and said that they loved teaching. The sharecroppers like making
plants grow; this is their agency and their participation in the life of power.
I am lucky not to be a sharecropper. Sometimes I feel a little ill walking down
the hall.
One day I was on my way to a meeting of
adjuncts and graduate students. The meeting was about adjunct and graduate
student labor conditions nationally and locally. It was an information-sharing
meeting, not a planning meeting, though there were hopes that ideas for concrete
activism might emerge. I ran into a friend who is an associate dean and told
him where I was going. With a half-smile he said, if working conditions improve
for the sharecroppers, your salary will go down and your teaching load will go
up.
He is right of course. I still wanted
to go to the meeting but I began to have doubts. I am a single mother with no
family or ex-partner living anywhere near. In addition to my mortgage and
groceries and house repairs and whatnot, I spend about $350 a month helping to
pay for my ex’s visits to my son and (during the school year) about $300 a
month on babysitting. My job and son keep me busy and I have little time for
activism or writing the poems that keep me sort of sane and which I must write
to keep my strange job and get “merit points” toward raises. If my salary went
down and my teaching load went up I would enjoy my son for even shorter
portions of the evening and I would write and think less. Perhaps I could find
some sort of communal living situation to compensate for the loss of time and
money, but that is unlikely in my village. Denise Riley said in the seventies
that single-parenthood is a conservatizing force
and though I fight that force in myself I feel its weight.
Nevertheless I don’t think I can handle
for much longer the way my stomach feels when I stroll past the sharecropper
doorways. I fantasize about giving my raise to a fund for sharecroppers and
thus guilting my colleagues into action; I fantasize about going on a hunger
strike; I don’t do these things and my stomach feels worse and I wonder what sort
of antacid I should take. Then I remember, I am already taking an antacid and
it is poetry.
One antacid I have tried was developed through
research that suggested poetry might somehow be able to be useful: to affect,
draw attention to, resist, the situation that is driving a wedge between the
adjuncts and me, the same wedge that is being driven between groups of people
in all industries. The research on which this antacid is based is unreliable and
maybe completely made up but sometimes I believe it anyway. Shelley wrote a
probably spurious defense of this research claiming that poetry’s efficacy is
invisible and beyond our time. Then he died before going up for tenure. Not
very many people buy this antacid because it’s a little bit embarrassing to
swallow it; but once in awhile new versions of it turn up in the drugstore.
Another brand of antacid was developed through
research that concluded that forces arrayed against the sharecroppers are
impossibly strong. For those persuaded by this research, antacid poetics serve as
a protective retreat or playground in which we can find compensatory pleasures
and understandings and from which we can view, with new eyes, the situation
that led to the necessity for retreat.
A third antacid ignores questions of
efficacy and realpolitik; when I take it, I am trying to write poetry that
remains as unknown to me as possible while I write it. My writing will always
reproduce the park-like infested trap, but maybe the reproduction will fit
together oddly and something will be different and a corner will emerge that
was not there before. My son explained to me that “one wall has a different
history from another wall, so a corner is an impossible place.” The impossible
place is the best antacid I have found, but like the other antacids it is a
placebo.
I forgot to mention one important thing
about the sharecropper estate: its fields. There, suddenly made equal (but
separate) the sharecroppers and I come to the head of a particularly rigid and
visible and occasionally fertile hierarchy: grades-based teaching. There we
can, from our unsettlingly different angles, talk about the hierarchy-turbines
through which the writers we read, and ourselves, and our students, are
rotating, and what they power.
Maintaining a field for debate, that’s necessary.
It is an excuse for universities. There is no excuse for the sharecropping
system, and there is no excuse for poetry and I don’t want to make one. I’m
trying to describe the part of the trap I am homesteading.
So what’s to be done.
A colleague and I are planning to ask
the University Senate to support a resolution that when raises are given,
adjunct laborers should get a share. (Their fee per course has been the same
for fifteen years.) I already know the arguments that will be arrayed against
us, which amount to “If we pay them more we will have to cut our
programs/salaries/etc.” and “They’re willing to do it for the money: there’s no
shortage of them.” We will reply, “True; but let’s notice that if we don’t
support the resolution we are electing consciously to participate in an
oppressive situation.” It will be a rather hopeless and symbolic gesture.
I fantasize about academic
sharecroppers organizing with contingent workers across industries, a category
(taxi drivers, seasonal workers in agriculture and tourism, truckers, office
temps, construction temps...) that has exploded over the last twenty years. Together
their power would overturn cities.
But for that to happen, academic
sharecroppers will have to tear their allegiance from the people who love what
they love, that is, they will need to understand that my job is funded by their
oppression, that there are more of them than there are of me, that they are the
shaky foundation on which people like me totteringly stand. There are more and
more of them and fewer and fewer of me.
