Poetic Labor Project

NOVEMBER at the POETIC LABOR PROJECT

2011-11-28T07:19:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-28T07:18:00.002-08:00

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.

During this time I was also in and out of the tail-end of my addiction, and I sometimes made extra cash by transporting smallish amounts of heroin for a ragged tout named Tim (who subsequently died of an overdose behind the do-it-yourself car wash on Potrero and 17^th [v]) to various characters around the city – an elderly motel attendant in the Marina, a ghostly lawyer in Noe Valley, etc. When I think of my current precariousness in the ivory-basement, I am inevitably forced back into reflection on the more extreme precariousness of that time in the thriving informal economy[vi], driving a car with a cracked axle over the bay bridge, praying I wouldn’t get pulled over or careen into a minivan, hoping I wouldn’t end up like Tim, who was on the run from a speeding-ticket-turned-arrest-warrant in his hometown of Seattle, dogged by the exiling shame of this contingency and by some dumbfounding psychic wound from early childhood that needed persistent anaesthetizing.

Meanwhile I was doing a lot of writing, imagining that an MFA in playwriting might be a good way out of the knot [vii] of bio-anxiety my life had become. I got over my addiction, trained to be a yoga teacher, sharpened my self-presentation, and stumbled my way back into the creative class by landing a job as assistant editor at a mysteriously funded literary journal operating out of a little office near the ballpark, which paid me an actual salary. I worked there for a year or so before getting fired because I seemed too dour. But by that time I was teaching early morning yoga classes in a short-lived studio in Oakland, and the machinery of MFA applications was already underway. I had been attempting to write plays, but it always came out as fiction, so I applied to some generously-funded programs, got in, and went to one.

Two more stipended years in the psychically complex pleasure-pastures of east-coast experimental literature where the vines and orchards hung heavy with endowment and where I formed many unrealistic expectations about the ease and stability of teaching thanks to the Brown undergraduates who had received SWAT team-style training towards their places in the cultural economy at Exeter and St. Andrews. Then I found myself back in San Francisco looking for a job as a teacher. I sent my papers around and got an interview at a commercial art university. I was shocked by the wage—I had to give up bars and any hope of having a fashion sense to afford my labor-lifestyle—but it was what I wanted to do and there was very little oversight and: if it rained pearls, who would work? They offered me 5 classes right away.

I will summarize the next six years of my labor out of a suspicion that it could be easily imagined (and lived a few times over) by many who may have read this far:

—aborted, confusing attempts to unionize adjuncts with a few other dispirited teachers;

—revelations of my institution’s shadow-existence as the second largest real-estate holder in the city of San Francisco and the fantastic wealth of its Pac-Heights socialite owner;

—teaching 5-8 classes a semester, so that strangers sometimes approached me to ask: “aren’t you the guy that teaches eight classes?”[viii];

—fielding the narrative fantasies of oceans of students with bonafide dreams of pop-culture glory, including many, many young veterans for whom Hollywood had been a lover and confidant during unquiet nights in tents in Iraq and Afghanistan. One solemn woman from Oklahoma wrote obsessively of how she had been driven into suicidal depression by her job firing off twenty-one gun salutes at over 3000 army funerals, and how she had once been molested by Donald Rumsfeld. This semester I have been advising an acutely articulate middle-aged man who worked as a military contractor in Pakistan and in the CIA’s black sites in Germany and Afghanistan. We take walks around the financial district after class and he hisses his fears about the fate of this nation, the blood-retribution he knows gathers in swarms. He wants to be out of the country, he says, when it comes down. For the last fifty years we have been terrified of a nuclear bomb being set off within our borders, he says, and now we’ve pretty much guaranteed that to happen . . . by acting psychotic in every corner of the world. In response to my cautious urgings to continue writing about his experience he says, I know. . . I know how fun it is to kill. I know how well it pays. That’s what I know. Why should I try to make that insight worth something?

And then, a week later he sends me this email:

I came here (to this school) to make a film about my experience. It sounds

pathetic, but I decided how to do this, and it is with comic skits.

A friend and I are making comic skits about the war, contracting,

secret prisons, the USA, three letter agency people, and we are

going to put it on the internet and sell it. I expect to be on the

cover of the New York Times the next day. Not that I want to be.

Film is the way to reach people today, for it to go global. Comedy

is the way to tell them the truth. People want distraction and

mildly sadistic entertainment. I am lacing it with my avalanche of

moral condemnation.

It makes me bigger and not smaller. I don't want to be in the role

of the angry guy who wrote a book. I would like my funny videos to

be played in the secret prisons, and have everyone chuckle, etc.

I can make money off of it, enjoy doing it, reach a lot of people,

scorch George Bush's ass, and heal myself, all at the same time.

All of the little sheep addicted to their little machines... I

want to make those little machines work for me.

* * *

There’s more of course, earlier jobs, more recent ones. There’s the story of coordinating a small and baffled community art project in El Salvador while the community was (is) being convulsed and turned in on itself by dams, trade agreements, and climate change as if by an outbreak of some geopolitical form of kuru. But I’d like to return to the more impersonal issue of shipping containers, the cargo ships that haunt our port like movable mausoleums packed from wall to wall with the carcasses of commodities. Who or what expects me to hold them in mind? Who or what imagines that there is a place in my language for weight, for backbreaking loads that seem so alien to the perpetual motion machine of representation, like lug-nuts in the crème caramel? Who has the notion that I might know what to do with stuff’s intrusion into the symbolic, like a spore, threatening to determine the very possibility of utterance, to make language’s mantle spongy with the fruiting bodies of material, so that the two grow into a thing at once too specific and too large, and my own neurochemistry seems to buckle under the tonnage—what I recently heard called ‘the empirical sublime’—and yet the terms I have to think this with float in a sweet sciency brine. Who asks? Marx, one might say, that bearded figure who spoiled what could have been a fun and profitable century by asking why aren’t we having real fun.

But I do imagine I’m having fun for a moment as I march with a few hundred others from New Montgomery St. down to the Federal Reserve where the Occupy SF camp is happening. This is the first week of the occupations. And even though the long, nauseating history of San Francisco seems to live in that musky crook where the counter-culture meets the techno-capitalist, I will accept whatever vibe inflects this resistance, because at this point I am willing to take what I am given of spirit. From across the street, though, a middle-aged man yells: Get a job! Get a job! Get a job! Get a job! and it’s not fun. He is red-faced, temple veins bulging. A woman yells back: It’s Saturday!

And it is often Saturday, Saturn’s Day, Day of the Strong-armed father, Cronus, Time-man. Does he give us time or take it away? These weighty, respectable men and women (the police) and their ideological captors seem set on taking it away again and again, with the offhand grabbiness of a parent liberating a cigarette butt from his toddler’s mouth. Who would have guessed that stillness and a continuous togetherness in public space would prove so terroristic? Anyone could have guessed, especially the 1.6 million US homeless people (including 150,000 veterans), whose facticity as material beings, whose strange, historical unwillingness to learn to use the Scholes-Black equation to price derivatives or to use Gaussian copulas to engineer collateralized debt obligations, whose inability to neither purchase data streams from Bloomberg nor feed them into mainframes for the purposes of statistical arbitrage are like silt bars in the enforced liquidity of capital, that river of phantom agreements that is said to be necessary to keep commodities afloat above the impossible stone of the world.

[i] This is from I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, by John Lanchester, 2010.

[ii] Google’s algorithm is said to be the single most valuable piece of intellectual property in the history of humankind.

[iii] Sociological literary theorist

[iv] I exemplify exactly what I criticize, here.

[v] Note: read the fifth review down (David S.) on this link.

[vi] What did I learn from this time: that poor addicts do hard labor. They do some of the heaviest lifting, the most extreme multi-tasking, to keep the furnace of bourgeois morality packed with fuel. What would become of capitalism if there were no symbolic wounds? Addicts do the difficult work of converting the currency between real wounds and symbolic ones. They do it with unconscious affect, which is instrumentalized to the point where it becomes an extra organ. It is an organ that is in turn converted, cell by cell, into a running, abstract tabulation of affect, against the background noise of social systems—legal, financial, familial, biological. Believe me when I say it is hard work to rent out your unconscious affect to the hyper-diversified investment bank of bourgeois morality. It’s hard enough just to familiarize yourself with the equations that balance the sums of affect with the demands of world-systems. It is true that this sort of labor does not produce anything recognizable, hence the injunction to become a ‘productive member of society.’ Many who enter into this labor force do so at infancy.

[viii] One of my colleagues actually teaches twelve classes every semester. To me this man is the Flexible Personality personified, a heroic, uncomplaining maniac. He is still technically part-time, since thirteen classes, at thirty-nine in-class hours, is still one hour shy of the forty hours required for full-time. We all know, of course, that prep-time doesn’t count. Why should it? I could prep in my sleep! We should be paying them for the privilege of being allowed to prep! I find it deeply nourishing.

RONALD PALMER

2011-11-28T07:18:00.001-08:00

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.

Part 2/

CORPOSELF: when the robot glances away—as if contemplating the daily frustration of a mentally ill patient— I become the singeing inside, my robot he is sometimes caught cringing on the pre-programmed content.

Robot’s stealthily woven words make me daily into monster, a monster I never deserved. His comportment invokes ownership of thought, of tone,

{Not only intellectual property but think about what we’re giving away to Google, Facebook, even LinkedIn and youtube or Xtube dot com.}

PoetSelf: I’m in a danger of enthusiasm, a new euthanasia sinking into my person of the year

He’s kissed up with fear. {We’re giving our mom away like butter

to a pen of hot little piggys.

I risk everything to sing at dawn. If I go on in Beckett’s fashion. If I’m going to be honest about how I transcend queerness as a mom.}

PoetSelf: No. Erase this.

Reject as “too weirdly intimate and bizarrely self-effacing, I’m too embarrassed to even re-read this” admitting as a professor I felt superior

yet ultimately degraded in my temptation to eroticize the students—desire always on display even if inverted in dark matter desire plugs the air, at least with the ones who make the desks nervous,

yet rarely emanate pheromones for more than a week, because the child inside the performance keeps leaping forth to challenge the creep in you,

and it’s never 20/20 when you realize: petulance will get you nowhere.

There was this chillingly handsome hockey play and I did find myself crotchgrazing but who hasn’t? come on sometimes it can hit the ceiling with the absolute and ultimate fantasy when the scent of him near me leaning over his paper might have scent me swooning to prison. I don’t even miss him. I guess I wanted to make students think what I thought

Was necessary to think. But was I trying to make them better people? Sometimes. Mostly they were numb kids who didn’t even want to listen, except for that one in one thousand pair of eyes that shine when they listen at you, and inside you’re like: “wow this one’s going to become something special.“

I sell myself as surveyor, as talking meat? The person who prays forever

freaks out and shoots his parents.
I love when I love stuff, Kevin says, hanging his twin hat on either side of the copper curtain rod. Two men and a dog equal family. Reject: reject.
PoetSelf: Dear Poetry stop trying to make me feel bad for not being inclusive: that's not my gruff, a grifter trying to be so human it hurts. Look on the inside of the leather strap for the euro size, apple eyes, you with the cum in your hair. I'm so hubby hungry I want to Jill myself into ghoul.

And then there came the teaching-to-the-test type of thing (try writing when you’re staring at the ceiling too worried about which student thinks you’re cool and which one thinks you’re a total pretentious douche bag

for strutting around with your cock bouncing around inside the green silk pouch

of your white striped, Adidas sweatpants.

All that combined with the fact that the Vice President and over arching Dean

of the college are/were myopic and are/were reductive with regard to their demands, in fact their edict, that we as professors should put our own intellectual fingerprints on the students in other words teach them how to think like us,

a phenomenon sprinkled over my attempt to transcend queerness in an academic institution {postlust pornaddicts want to know: how does your madness drive your egolibido?} would drive any thinking person insane.

CORPO:SELF vs. PoetSelf: My current gig is no less farcical and I think that’s what a job is: a period in which the soul becomes robot and leeches all humanness into a jar carried between the lungs, collecting symbiotically an urgency that bursts

erratically into being

at least within this first decade of the 21^st century—decade of terror burns in infamy. And I think I’m at least half to blame. Gnashing and gnawing on a pseudo fame like it means something more than offering a finer curator of one’s own erasure. I tweet things like: This is not about my other. distraught I internalize the killer the way bread dissolves in red wine

AND:

I’m getting the blinking yellow square

does that mean it's still trying?
Counternarrative: There there, tragic hero.

AND:

What happened to the Mexican Dream

lilt levels out the evil playing field
Imaginary ancestry

AND:

Listening to China waiting
Is my hobby
I love a homey lobby.

AND:

Big ups to my queer brothers & sisters living in fascist homophobe driven Uganda, what about them civil rights violations mrs Clinton?

AND:

Lurker poking playing pocket pool
with my symphony, a car parked at a curb
In a park where I’m waiting for a verb

To arrive buoyantly
Pornocidal maniacs

wear down the path to righteousness. This is the plague of transparency.

AND:

An economy of thought: go spend some more money, honey.

As in multiply me mentally

for the best part of this century,

I heard about my dissection of self as other,

compartmentalize my sexualself into a guilty savior.

I give in; imprisoned I give up. I’m impressed by my terror of failure, of having (at age 45) to move back in with my 72 year old parents.

Ultimately I chose the corporation over a life wallowing in my own celebratory academic’s staid compliance within the thought hoarders of tomorrow. (My mother included.) I’ll let you shine if you let me blow it all to nonsense.

Neuroscience medications and the memorization of the competitive landscape of each product’s information sheet, this seizes me when I’d rather be reading Paul Celan or Jack Spicer who thrill me mostly because of how confounded I feel

when thinking in their pictorials

and perhaps that’s what I’m really seeking. To Step up to a level cerebral fluid

swarming in my synaptic clefts,

potentiating a dopamine component

to being confounded I’m sure, a priori

or fleur-de-lis,

whatever the shucks you want from me. I’ll give it.

CORPOSELF: Incessant self-analysis with an interest in matching the tone and pace of each customer’s ‘segmentation’. That’s how we differentiate which robot we become. Give me some smart and I’ll give you some chum who thinks you really like him. Give me some diary about publishing being pointless and I’ll keep wondering weather or not this even means anything to ward off the mute point in our lives that keeps widening.

As I hit 45 and continue to fear moving back in with my hoarder mother who’s made a cave of emotion out of my childhood home. I’m never alone

as they say when I’m with my iPhone. Freakishly content with my Chinese assembled gadget.

The corporate scientist asks, Is it drugable? Well we’re in phase 3 clinical trials so we’ll know in about a year. He’s a Corpus Casanova. He rides off on a supernova.

Whatever dude. I’m the contradiction jerking around inside my own pretending.

Poet: Self vs. CORPOSELF: A dialectic post-mortem a spirit jump inspective.

Micro, truncated sonnets can be my Tweets: sonnetweets:

1. most chaotic deterrent (agent for helping forget our terror and loneliness)

2. funniest inherent (peculiar to inherit a new form from technology and oddly counter intuitive, broadly corporate like a colony of wasps trying to survive, thinking “I’ve thought that before” then moving on because a little pink door shut off that corner of your brain.) I can see how Hart Crane went insane with this always-pounding-decision between money and ownership of thought. In his case I’m convinced he was thrown from the shift no matter how desperate he was an ego like that just doesn’t give in that easily. “At least now he’s free” people say about death but I’m not convinced yet. Why because we like you why because it’s the simplest question why because what am I doing here? Why because you are the imposter bear who dresses himself in the morning and combs the golden gate park for answers in her wounds in her hair in her buses and bushes in her scent of jasmine and earthy eucalyptus in her cinnamon spotted owls that soar from opinion to dominion made of pine and now all the kids say never mind story or selfhood or personal narrative but otherwise without the net of its light blue silk falling all over the bedroom all over your furry shoulders, {the bear is happily jagging but no it’s not my bear, an imposter bear in green funning at me I see him pulsing through the fog running at the seashore, my imposter bear.}

3. neurotransmitter observant {it’s possible we seek and inspire our own neurotransmitter level or balance our need for a matching synaptic speed of a lover or a mother or someone we live with, otherwise it’s self prescriptive and we cling to some monkey who mimics our circuitry. I guess it’s just a semi-fancier way of saying you get what you stay for.}

4. pre-formative client relationships {I already know what you like and I’m going to give it to you good. I already know what your favorite drinks are, it’s in the cloud on your personal history, likes and dislikes not to mention your prescribing habits. I’ll swoop down upon the incremental patient and you’ll prescribe more because I say so. We’re like the lemon-flavored mafia.}

5. We float above your window, forever pacing with your ego. I love to become what you love, I’ll bring you burgers rare with melted gruyere and fries of the side with a seltzer and a chocolate chip cookie,

6. DELIVERED WITH DARING, I DROP IN A PHRASE WHILE HE’S STILL FEELING HUNGRY, IS IT REASONABLE TO CONSIDER, DOCTOR? AND I REMEMBER TO FOLD IN A PHRASE ABOUT EMPATHY. READING BEHAVIOR IS MY JOB NOW. MY MIRROR IS SPLITTING WITH ALWAYS OTHER, AND NEVER THE HERO, AND “THIS IS NOT ABOUT MY OTHER”!

7. heteroclite’s impotent stamp on everything I know (Letterplay; two characters inside the self, a corporate and a creative make an oxymoronic life during the North American urban development phase of pre-melt San Francisco written under derision of puppy panic during the Blue Angels display over our Richmond District apartment and this after a morning of puppy Kylie dashing after her blue rubber Frisbee.) Selling is really just bringing out the safe child in someone and making them feel pretend love because pretend love is like erotic pictures to men who can pretend so well they feel love from a movie. Because pretend love is so convincing to the neurotransmitters, the chemical cocktail that floods the nucleus acumens is no different from being listened to as if someone actually cares, using active listening, echoing the concerns of the target patient, target doctor, in fact sometimes even repeating the statement back to the target/viewer/doctor because especially when what we say is repeated back to the robot he feels the warmth of compassion. That’s why psychopaths are so charming; admit it baby, you’re a robot already.

MARGARET RHEE

2011-11-28T07:18:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-28T07:17:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-07T12:34:00.003-08:00

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!

BRIAN ANG

2011-10-28T10:25:00.000-07:00

Brian Ang's Labor Day talk "Poetry and Militancy" was published by Lana Turner, and can be read here.

LINDSEY BOLDT

2011-10-28T10:16:00.003-07:00

Lindsey Boldt lives in Oakland and commutes to San Francisco and Sausalito to work as a teaching artist with elementary and middle school aged people and as an editor with The Post-Apollo Press. She is also co-editor/publisher of Summer BF Press with Steve Orth and contributes her labor to Writers Bloc and Occupy Oakland. Chapbooks include "Oh My, Hell Yes", "Overboard Rampage" and "Titties for Lindsey" (forthcoming). Her first book, Overboard, is forthcoming from Publication Studio Press.

-Introduce self
-Tell the people what I do for work: teaching artist
-Difficult to decide what to focus on today so I decided to talk about a place in my life where the topics of day converge most dramatically: poetry, activism and work, which for me is in my work as a teaching artist.
-Read a poem from Ulloa-Po! and from Marin Juvenile Hall Anthology

So, those poems sort of blew me away and still blow me away whenever I read them. I want to say first that when it comes to “teaching” poetry, there isn’t much teaching going on. You don’t have to teach kids to write poetry really, because you don’t have to teach kids how to be imaginative, or inquisitive or observant--all qualities that poets tend to possess and for the really brilliant ones, how they express they’re unique kind of genius. One of the things I’ve learned from being a teaching artist is that poetry is not a specialized realm of esoteric knowledge harbored, cherished and protected by a small group of believers.

I’d like to let you all in on a line of questioning that I often preoccupies me. I don’t think it’s necessarily a very productive line of questioning, but it happens. It begins with me considering the state of things: When we are in the midst of an incomprehensibly high stakes global crisis, when our rights are being pulled out from under us by increasingly obvious slight of hand, when I’m never sure if I’ll have work, when some of my students parents are either already unemployed or live in fear of becoming so, when some of my students live in a near constant state of chaos threatened by violence, neglect, indifference, and the very real prospect of and expectation that they will end up in prison.

Why teach poetry? If I really want to help youth today why not teach civics or radical political history or farming or environmental science instead? How can I justify my presence in their classroom? How can I communicate the importance of poetry? What do I, a privileged girl from Washington State, have to teach or inspire in my students? Would they be better served by someone from their own neighborhood? Someone who came from a similar background? Would my students respond better to and gain more from a different kind of artist, say, a different artist? Does my style of writing, my aesthetic communicate or perpetuate a culture of oppression? What do my students really need to know to survive? What tools can I give them?

And then I try to relax, try to remind myself that poetry saved me, that it has been essential to my survival in no small way, so there must be something to it. Then, I try to tease apart a mess of emotionally laden memories, patterns of judgment and guilt, etc. and figure out what it is about poetry that is special, that is important, useful, essential, that lets me give it and myself a break. I come back to the qualities I mentioned before: imagination, inquisitiveness observation and also reflection. These are important skills.
skills. They won’t show up on any standardized test, but without them nothing can change.

Certain things have been made concrete for me through teaching that were only ever abstract. The fact that I know the work of very few poets of color well enough to confidently bring into a class and even fewer poets of color personally, has been made very clear, and the more I try to do something about it, the more I realize how much work I really have to do.

So, as the school year ramps up, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I can do this year in my personal life and in my poetry and journalism classes. I spent a lot of the summer reading, learning, and talking about current and historical radical politics, community organizing and radical pedagogy. I feel afraid about a lot of things. I feel unsure. But I also feel excited about experiments i.e.:

-Bringing the Black Panther Party 10 pt Program to a middle school classroom and asking students to write their own version.
-Performing/having a day at the beach on a BART platform
-Bringing a section of narrative from Karen Tei Yamashita’s I-Hotel to an elementary school creative writing workshop and hoping the students there will find something in it to relate to.
-Performing the qualities of imagination, inquisitiveness, observation and reflection in my role as poet, teacher and within a role that feels new even though it was my first, the day I was born in the United States, that of a citizen.

JACKQUELINE FROST

2011-10-28T10:16:00.002-07:00

Jackqueline Frost has worked as a frame maker, a movie theater ticket taker, in clothing boutique sales, as a waitress, as a Easter bunny rabbit, landscaper, jewelry fabricator, oyster shucker, teaching assistant, legal research analyst, barista, and other occupations in the underground economy.

Five Minutes of Raw Notes on Oyster Shucking
And the Libidinal Economy of the Young Girl

When I moved to California from rural southern Louisiana, I was twenty and I found a job opening animals. Using a specialized knife, I split the hinge of the shell, cut the animal away from its connective muscle and people watch. Symbolically, the association of oysters with female genitalia in relation to act of shucking, is compounded by the sheer physicality of the work and its overt sense of danger. This configuration expresses me an object in reversal, as the dialectic presupposes that there are those who shuck and those who get shucked. But this reversal becomes complicated by my position within the industry of service as a young woman whose social function trumps the danger of that labor, at the point that flirtation becomes directly quantifiable in terms of cash. In so far as sociality is the most valuable commodity on any market, service work for the young girl consists in consuming consumers, via the enterprise of seduction. I profit the Spectacle in that my body’s activity aligns with the “mechanical operation” of a commodified relationship. How can we reconcile the fact that, as Tiqqun notes, “Seduction is an aspect of social labor, that of the young girl,” when seduction, it turns outs, is the only available site of participation in a society wherein all my actions are conditioned by the consumption of my image as young and female and generically so. In this process, I acquire the “obligation of addressing oneself to a certain segment of the sexual market in which everything resembles everything else.” So while standardized emotions are emptied like a purse into the bank of a body that I call mine and begin accruing interest, I can wonder at the pornographic character of an economy in which young girls, like me, are produced and sold.

The awareness of my proficiency at converting human interaction into living currency, and my self-aggrandizement as a conduit of charisma, signifies my own complicity with myself as a “the bearer of the most advanced spectacular ethos.” Interestingly, to bring this relation into being, I DO nothing. Obviously my “doing nothing” produces a special kind of surplus value within the libidinal economy in which the ideal of participation as activity that connotes voluntarism is logically foreclosed. As Erin Morrill writes in Pornologue, “I wanna don’t wanna wanna don’t wanna want to be your exhibition provocation.”

It is in this the service industry mimics the socio-sexual fabric, or, the matrix of relations that constitute notions of attraction and reciprocity are always already interpolated within the market of commodities known as human love. And how frightening if we concede to the notion that “Human relationships mask commodity relationships that mask human relationships.” In servicing, the young girl experiences no other agency but to ventriloquize the pallor of life where money’s sensuality evidences. The labor of seduction and the seduction of labor become intertwined and then tantamount. And love in its most abstracted sense is what we wager for a body of work from a body that works. Would a general strike in the libidinal economy, a removal from the sexual market, leave the young girl to suffer the tyranny of what it would mean to become radically liquidated? As we know from Ovid that “Poverty has nothing with which to feed its love.”

I can only wonder at what it would be like to see the world without the eyes of a commodity, in the sense that my personality is legible only to be exchanged against kinds of material wealth. The generic desirability of the young girl is produced by human relations that have more market liquidity than cash in hand, in their ability to meet immediate wants and needs. And the appeal for sex appeal to appeal for value generates a type of non-payment wherein we receive ourselves back as a wage, when sex appeal is coded by the Spectacle as its gift. I am interested in resistance to “gifts” given without consent, and ultimately, in the meaning of consent in a capitalist hegemony that requires my consent in order to substitute its interests as the interests of all young women. From here I propose that this consent be put into question with the same urgency that we are drawn to what we love, and it is drawn to us.

Works Cited

Tiqqun. “Raw Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl.” 1999-2001.
http://zinelibrary.info/tiqqun-theory-young-girl-full. 7 September 2010.

BILL LUOMA

2011-10-28T10:16:00.001-07:00

Bill Luoma works as a developer in the mobile software industry. He is the author of Some Math and Works and Days.

Days& Works

My Lap

Touch

Romplr

Virtual

Paranormal State

MELISSA MACK

2011-10-28T10:16:00.000-07:00

Melissa Mack does research on publicly-funded social service programs. Singly or collaboratively, she has written many many reports that she often imagines housed in the bowels of the federal departments for which they were written, in unmarked crates a la the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. To make money, she has also hung out ("provided training to") women on welfare, had a paper route, hung out ("supervised") developmentally disabled sex offenders, sold vegetables, hung out ("counseled") with court-involved pregnant and parenting teenagers, and weeded.

September 4, 2011

Dear Poets and Laborers,

I’m away because of a work trip to Washington D.C. to feed the machine of government. I do contract research on publicly funded employment programs for a U.S. Department which shall remain nameless, speaking of the occasion of this Labor Day, yet so far from satisfyingly.

I grew up inside a military industrial evangelical complex the only way I figured out how to deal with was to follow the rules—politeness, selflessness, financial responsibility—and cultivate an inner life I didn’t tell anyone about. But the inner life is as penetrated by The Complex as the outer one (as St. Paul, Giorgio Agamben, and many others have noted), and all unawares I kept mine contained, clean, heterosexual, and imaginative only in so far as it related to attending closely to weather and to practicing a secretly catholic devotionality that kept my heart soft. My paintings looked like Lionel Richie songs, and my animism applied only to the woods behind my various suburban houses. Why am I telling this story?

“And the word of the Lord was precious in those days; there was no ‘breaking forth vision.’” I Samuel 13:1

Well, obviously, that’s not true anymore.

Anne Carson says, “Mere space has power.” We’re here, aren’t we? And there are such a proliferation of heres these days. (e.g. huge swaths of the Arab world, the streets of Oakland, that darling occupation in Vienna where they made the youtube dance joint video about hand signals that facilitate collective conversation).

In The Time That Remains, Giorgio Agamben’s commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Agamben talks about division. The division he’s interested in is Paul’s division of Jew/non-Jew. But I want to think about the division between poets and laborers—which recalls the penetration of “the complex” into the human interior because the reason we are gathered today is that we are all both poets and laborers. But there is an external division too. We’re here and a lot of other people aren’t. They’re rusticating or computing or fighting wars. It isn’t “us and them” that concerns me. Just, my sense of alarm is growing that huge portions of my vital energy are poured into a job that is not my Real Work. I want to be here with you all the time—in all the iterations of that “here” and “you” that exist—doing that Real Work. Which of course is a false division, since having to go to my office most days of the week for most of the day is a reality I can’t ignore. But Agamben. He identifies in Paul an idea of a messianic (for our purposes, read that as revolutionary) division of the law’s division of people (for Paul, into Jew and non-Jew, for me/us, into poet and laborer). I don’t have time to explain it in detail, but such a division renders a remnant. (Agamben calls it a dialectic with three elements rather than two: Jew, non-Jew, and non non-Jew.)

The division of division renders a remnant that prevents the law’s divisions from “being exhaustive.” Which to me means our identities as Poet and Laborer aren’t exclusive. Though we are exhausted.

Agamben also talks about Paul’s idea of the messianic (revolutionary) calling that is “the revocation of every vocation [read: worldly condition], released from itself to allow for its use.” Which I take to mean, I’m still a social scientist. If I now have two vocations, poet and laborer, well, let them both be revoked and rendered inoperative except insofar as they can be used to joyfully rock the casbah. Let them render us a remnant, “hittin’ our rackets like tennis players,” as MIA says. We do our jobs, we work to undo the world in which we have to have the jobs we have. Also most of us make poems.

Here are some remnant, revocational activities I especially like these days: Sex. Potluck. Reading and thematic and political and writing and radical ladies groups. Moots like this one. The making of music. The making of poems. The doing of actions. The saying of spells, the reading of signs, the close attention to the formation of sound in the mouth, into words, into cries of ecstasy or rage or grief. The insertion of the body into spaces ostensibly public until you realize the cops in riot gear have it surrounded and are closing in. Radical generosity meaning the pooling of resources, the sharing of housing, the making of texts and books, the bringing of one’s inadequacy, the willingness to participate in struggle wherever we find it, the making of friends.

I’d really rather walk across lawns in the dark, watch the light change, make love, meet all strangers in mutual gazing, or not, and have that be safe, have that be productive activity. I don’t think it’s too late for that, exactly. But just like how I have to bill my time in tenth of an hour increments, I have to tithe my time to struggle too. To self- and community-educating. To acting out in the presence of my employer and fellow employees. To clothing myself in remnants from the clothing swap. (Thank you, whichever lady—Lauren, was it you?—offered that cute royal purple puffed sleeve sweater with the lavender seed-pearls sewn on the front and marks of mending here and there. I wore it to address The Department.)

SEAN LABRADOR Y MANZANO

2011-10-28T10:15:00.003-07:00

Love’s Labour’s Lost

Ever critique the empire in these positions: push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, self-destructs, 59-Chevies?

After my first year of college, I was restless, impatient. I knew I wanted to document “the military,” “the cold war,” “The Spanish-American War,” “The Philippines-American War,” “WW2,” “Vietnam,” “Beirut,” and “Afghanistan.” But I didn’t know in what form or shape. I took on my stepfather’s challenge, to know REAL work. I enlisted.

This path is rooted in the military base library, my day care. My parents gone for hours, returned at closing. Having exhausted children’s lit, I explored military history, anticipated the course of future wars. (So when 9/11 happened, I was not surprised.)

I wanted to be a journalist, always wanted to write for the Stars and Stripes—but I tested too high and qualified for bubblehead—Nuclear Submarine Sonar Technician. But I didn’t see myself listening for anomalies hundreds of feet submerged. I went to bootcamp unfortunately in winter north of Chicago. I wanted to embody the physical and mental indoctrination experienced by so many of my fathers, uncles, and cousins, alas the snow.

Imagine, marine bootcamp in Full Metal Jacket for an approximation of my experience.

Before, I appreciated my family’s military service voyeuristically. War films. No one talked. My stepfather, a Vietnam Vet, and I sat quietly through bootlegged VHS tapes. I was 10 watching Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter. My stepfather warned, how I will understand these movies and their context when I was older. Gallipoli had a profound influence. Accepting the futility of the infantry charge against a trench. In many dreams I ran towards bayonets and machine gun nests. Waking up wondering if I could do the same in real life. Jump on a grenade to save the many. My childhood films were “Romantic.” Then Saving Private Ryan set the standard for gruesome.

Having critiqued my experience enough, I endured the Navy 8 months, leaving on a “failure to adapt.” The military psychiatrist loosely translated: I should be in college, and was eager to speed my return to the civilian world.

9/11 happened in my last year at CAL. My first conversations at the Free Speech Movement Café afterwards were about re-enlisting, but this time in the Army. I’d call the recruiter every other month. But I feared the previous “Failure to Adapt” in the navy would be an obstacle. In 2002, I went to SFSU for the MFA. I was the only student in my workshops writing insistently about the War. Then the invasion of Iraq led me to finish the MFA at Mills College.

What was I supposed to do for gainful employment? My resume has travelled the world. From the Bay Area to as far as the American University in Kurdistan.

How was I to pay off student loans, or child support? Where was my Bailout?

When I was 10, I collected Soldier of Fortune magazine. In one issue from the 80s, a picture of a mujahedeen child soldier cradles an Ak-47. He was stoic. My family has a history of children in War. My mother was a refugee in her own country. Other pictures--children maimed from Soviet mines. I wanted to be there. Why couldn’t I be a child soldier? At the rifle range, I was sharp within 100 yards..

So these images from my youth, and the desperation of unemployment, finally pushed me in to the Army recruiters office in Alameda. I was resigned to learn a “strategic language” (like Farsi, Urdu, Arabic) or to disable IEDs. I psyched myself to kill. For 8 months I waited for my re-entry file to be processed. For 8 months, I wrote for McSweeney’s about the anticipation becoming a Poet on the Ground. I did pushups and sit-ups. I imagined killing people, how easy it would be in the right frame of mind. Applying transference. If the Dept. of Education wanted its money back, then the Dept. of Defense must put a weapon in my hand. The eerie and most exhilarating part of reenlistment, I was expecting to sign my name to a $250,000 life insurance policy, and naming my son as beneficiary.

Then karma intervened.

Now, I am beginning my 2nd year teaching English, Poetry, World History, American History, Government, Economics. (And echoing Jackie Frost, last year I taught my high school students “The Libidinal Economy in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield.” Likewise “Marxist Buddhism in The Matrix Trilogy.” And I teach Gardening. At a Buddhist School.

I am trying to understand the meaning of this karmic intervention. What I must do in return for such Providence. So this book/this conversation, Conversations at the Wartime Café: a Decade of War 2001-2011 was produced. So I host a monthly MFA Mixer in the City. So I get people to write on subjects as Suicide to Stockholm Syndrome. So I teach my students how history is a record of violence. How Compassion is an end to history.

MICHAEL NICOLOFF

2011-10-28T10:15:00.002-07:00

Michael Nicoloff has worked as a temp, a legal assistant, an unpaid intern, a liaison for orchestral conductors, a copyeditor, a writer's assistant, and (currently) in inventory at an educational nonprofit. Work of a different kind has appeared in 6X6, TRY!, The Brooklyn Rail, The Recluse, and elsewhere.

I want to talk a little bit here about my working life, my writing life, and the self-images that come out of our relationships with others. I can pretty much tell you right now that I’m not going to reach a well-wrought conclusion, and while I’m hoping this won’t devolve into just a catalog of questions and anxieties, I’m going to risk that in the spirit of collaboration and hope that something here resonates with enough of you to add to the conversation. So to begin: Most recently I’ve been working for an educational nonprofit in Oakland, at a job that started as a two-day temp assignment and then didn’t end. From what I wear and the office-building location, and the administrative assistant job title, too, this could easily be any one of the business-casual clerical jobs I’ve held before and that I’m sure plenty of you have too. But it’s different for me in that rather than being tethered to a desk all day (though there is some of that), I’m working primarily in packing and shipping, which means I’m working primarily with my hands and am on my feet to the point that I might actually want orthopedic shoes. I build a lot of marketing samples containing educational pedagogy, using a variety of plastic sleeves, multicolored printed labels, and lidded boxes, which I in turn pack up in larger boxes and stick with labels from UPS, the US postal service, and, rather rarely, Fed-Ex. I am, like, the best with bubble wrap.

Now, I’ve chosen this job, and gone from temp to permanent with a salary bump and benefits, because it affords me certain opportunities. I do like the people I work with, and it’s also nice to work for an educational company whose philosophy, which is based around learning as a social act, is one that in broad strokes I actually agree with. But the ultimate reason it works for me is that there’s a significant portion of my day in which I work independently and in silence, performing rote labor that taxes my mind and creative abilities in just a limited way. That independence and silence in effect gives me “free airspace,” and so I listen to whatever range of music from the library, radio shows, and university lecture courses I can get my hands on. (I am perpetually looking for more, so if you have any recommendations, please make them.) It’s become a sort of boss-sanctioned form of de Certeau’s “wearing the wig,” of seeming to do the work one is paid to do while in fact re-appropriating that time for personal use. The fact that my supervisors are aware of it hardly makes this into some kind of sneaky blow to capitalist hegemony or whatever, but it does allow me a space in which to educate myself, and what I’ve realized is that given the limited number of jobs I’m qualified for, one of the biggest factors for me in choosing one job over another is how much of an opportunity I have to claim that kind of space for my own activity. I have the feeling that I’m not the only one in this room for whom this is a consideration.

I’m going to pause, though, on an image one might make out if you stood far back from these details of my job and then added an equally generalized image of my home economic life into the mix. Okay, so—in that image you’d find me working on what amounts to an assembly line from 9 to 5, then returning home to meet my partner, who has not been working at a “day job” per se, and the young man who is for lack of a better term my stepson. We often have a meal together, then play, read, and tuck him into bed, after which I collapse into a comfortable chair to engage in my “leisure” activities. I’ve tried to play it up as much as I can here for effect, but to spell it out, what this looks like is one of those “masculine provider” scenarios—that supposedly historical, ultimately illusory domestic state that’s become an archetypal tableau in the received knowledge base of many Americans. Now, step a little closer to this image of my economic life and we can pretty swiftly call bullshit for a number of reasons both monetary and otherwise, the glaring one being that my partner is in graduate school. After many years of working in a dead-end administrative job to support her son and barely getting by, she’s now being trained for a line of work that could prove both personally fulfilling and lucrative, and she’s putting in more hours of work into school than I do into my 9-to-5 job. Once she’s out of school the plan is for our roles to switch, for her to work and for me to return to school. But right now, her income as a student and mother provides a make-or-break portion of what pays for our living expenses.

There are plenty of other ways this image could be deflated with actual facts, and yet I know both she and I struggle with this image’s cultural weight. Take, for example, that moment, you know the one, when I come home after a particularly relentless day and just want to be released of all responsibility, to not have to cook or do any life maintenance, and to have my stepson entertained in another room while I read books or write or space out. It’s a scenario that working folks of any gender might envision and desire—go to the job, get the work done, come home, “disappear.” But it’s quite disturbing to feel that as a male person but at the same time to couple that feeling with the knowledge that there’s a discourse out there, you know the one, that places male-performed, “public,” monetary-income-earning labor at the top of the totem pole, with the corollary that once that male retreats to the domestic sphere he’s entitled to some r-e-s-p-e-c-t—that, in other words, his status as the earner allows him to control whose needs take priority. It’s in those moments that you can gain some uncomfortably experiential evidence of how gendered one’s relaxation can be. And you also get to feel the fear that in spite of however deeply you think you hold values of gender equality, and however hard you try to live those values, that one’s working life, the effects it has on one’s body and psyche, might be subtly pushing the shape of your everyday life in the other direction. It makes me, for one, approach my downtime with a degree of ambivalence.

There’s a logic in this that would state that poetry writing requires downtime, and that since I feel ambivalent towards relaxation, I must feel ambivalent when in the moment of writing poetry. And that living with another poet, a female poet with a lot of labor to perform herself, makes it difficult to want to take creative downtime in the moments when she’s doing work that maintains our shared home life. The way I’ve put it here feels too simplistic, but there’s nonetheless a thought in here I might want to trace out—especially knowing that she’s felt some of the same difficulty in taking that downtime when it’s me who’s doing the home life maintenance.

But for now I want to add another archetype to the mix, one I’m going to in a lazy, problematic shorthand call the “political avant-garde writer.” This is, of course, that individual who seeks after radical aesthetic strategies, for personal pleasure and as a mode of enacting a politically oppositional culture, but believes also that these aesthetics need the teeth of a more macro-level radical politics. That’s another image that I think can easily be complicated and deflated, but like the masculine provider image above, it’s one that’s in circulation, and one that I believe we often measure ourselves in relation to—and, often or not, feel that others are measuring us against as well. This isn’t something that needs to be done overtly very often, or done by very many people, to have a sort of disciplining effect. One’s life situation and responsibilities can change over time, one can get a little older and be more enmeshed in workaday getting by, only to abruptly notice at some or another reading that new people have appeared who, at least on the surface, are younger and sexier, with better ideas and more time to write, and whatever the degree of their political activity, have produced an image that’s cooler and more ideologically pure. It’s kind of weird to find myself saying that at age 30, I know, and I’m not going to exclude myself from this either, because I know that I can be and probably have been that cooler and more ideologically pure looking poet to someone else.

But the point is that regardless of the truth value of either of these archetypal images I’ve mentioned, received knowledge places these archetypes in tension, and while negotiating our relationships to this tension and overlap is one of the things of being human, it’s nonetheless a challenge. In other words, regardless of the specificities of a person’s real life, the images of “avant-garde artist” and “traditional masculine provider” don’t really go together, and much as we’d like not to articulate ourselves and others in terms of these images, as I’ve said, I think it’s still pretty common to do so. And this makes it very difficult sometimes to reveal the very messy details of one’s life in the labor sphere to the part of one’s life that’s in the poetry sphere without fearing being categorized as a certain degree of non-entity. To take a similar example, many of us, myself included, like to think that we’re pretty accepting of the human variety we come across, but what exactly would we do with a kind of left-leaning, aesthetically radical Dana Gioia type who works in, like, finance? I can’t see the outcome being social shunning, but I’d bet that person would feel like they’d have to sequester that portion of their life from public view just to get by socially. I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. I’d rather see that person’s experience be welcomed, because I’m sure they’d be aware of at least some of the contradictions they’re negotiating, and because the knowledge they’d bring to a political/cultural conversation and the input they’d in turn receive could, I think, lead to some pretty transformative learning experiences for all those involved. Feeling like one has to keep portions of one’s life at the margins seems like a poor method for fostering effective, truly rooted community, political or otherwise.

But beyond addressing our imagined friend in finance, I wonder about what else could be done to dissolve some of the self-image-policing that goes on and to limit the power of this “avant-garde poet” archetype has in us downplaying some of the vital details of how we spend our lives. I actually think that last year’s Labor Day Conference and the conversations that came out of it lent themselves to this kind of dissolution. I know that many of us who were there felt that in the wake of it we were more comfortable discussing our iffy-feeling day-to-day realities—particularly where our money comes from, and the trickiness involved in how we structure our time. And so I guess I’d like to see more of this kind of exploratory conversation, because in it there’s the possibility of pluralizing the conceptions of what being a “political avant-garde writer” looks like, in terms of how one lives but also in terms of artistic output—in form and subject matter, yes, but also in terms of process, and in sheer amount of that output. As I’ve gotten just a little bit older, I know I’ve faced the frustration of not being able to find the time and energy to write in the way that I used to when I was in my early 20s, where I’d sit down and work for hours. I think maybe it’s time for me and for anyone who’s felt the same way to let go of that frustration a bit and instead find processes and forms of creative output that mesh with our everyday existences, regardless of whether that ends up looking like what we think a poet’s process and product should look like. I mean, I think finding processes that fit one’s specific circumstances is what we’re all doing anyway, but I’d like to see that articulated not as a deviation from the ideal but as a basic fact that guides our ever-evolving work.

JILL RICHARDS

2011-10-28T10:15:00.001-07:00

I teach comp, mostly to freshmen. The next class that I keep planning, that keeps getting put off, is entitled, “Women, Modernity, and Revolution.” The title is pretty self-explanatory. But today I want to talk about one section of the course and the way it speaks to problems in contemporary protest movements. The section considers representations of social revolution as narrated by a young girl. My texts are the graphic novel, Persepolis, the film, Pan’s Labyrinth, and the young adult novel, The Hunger Games. I want to talk about these texts today (somewhat distantly) because they all present, in various ways, a very specific fantasy. All of these works use a young girl as a narrator because she offers a seemingly neutral, purely spectatorial viewpoint. Children are not expected to be political actors, so here is a subject that does not have to take a side. For the child, merely observing seems to be a natural, even a neutral position. These texts suggest that only bad or dead parents would not work to maintain this stance of neutrality and inaction until age 18.

However, in both these texts and in real life, the nimbus of “adulthood” surrounding either side of age 18 is a little confusing. Protective, panicked, outraged, or exasperated responses to militant political action often use the figure of the child—who cannot know her own mind, or foresee the consequences of her action—as their primary rhetorical stage. This often has nothing to do with the specificities of age 18. Some of you may remember an email that a prominent Berkeley professor wrote last year, complaining that the undergraduates involved in the occupation movement were always coming to her asking for help, always expecting her to defend them against the university. Or you may remember the complaints after the freeway protests, that anarchists were leading unwitting children unto the freeway (three juveniles were arrested, but not taken to jail; their parents were called). Finally, some of you may remember one strain of negative reactions to the Oscar Grant riots: the concern for the safety of Oakland’s children (not just in the riots, but also presumably sleeping in their downtown Oakland beds).

And I’m sure you are all aware of the student protests in Chile right now. You may or may not be aware that the student protest movement in Chile has a longer history. I lived there in 2006, and want to speak about my experience then to provide some ground for a more detailed discussion. Five years ago, students in the public and private school systems went on strike across Chile. Students occupied their schools. The largest, most prestigious universities got the most press, but smaller high schools and private schools were also occupied. According to La Tercera, more than 500 schools were on strike. More than 350 schools were taken over by the students. This led to a general strike that included high school teachers, truckers, and other worker unions. During this time, I was mostly in Santiago. The second-largest city in Chile, Valparaíso offered more of a dance party occupation, or Santa Cruz-esque, atmosphere.

On the days of the general strike in Santiago students had barricaded the area near the University of Chile’s main campus by pulling dumpsters and trashcans into the middle of the street and then setting them on fire. This worked for some time to protect the crowds and the looters from tear gas and water canons. I want to note that adult, middle class Chileans—the Chileans that I was living with and working with at the time—were scandalized, just shocked! that Chilean police would use tear gas and water canons on “mere children.” But this reaction only confirms the thing that I want to emphasize here –that the masked people setting the trash cans on fire, and breaking the windows downtown, and looting the stores, were the very young students, the junior high and high school students, not just 18 plus adults attending university. The students that I spent the most time talking to that day were thirteen and fourteen. In many parts of the crowd, very few people had reached their full, adult height. I’ve never seen a black bloc before that was composed of so many short people.

The protests in Chile now—what is now being called “Chilean Winter”—have a wider target, and are no doubt composed of some different students, though the photographs and news reports suggest that the population is still very young. However, in each case, both the actions of the students—and the police response to these actions—produced a kind of panic that is, I think, perhaps more easy to critique when it occurs in other political terrains. The language of this panic made me think of No Future, a book by Lee Edelman. The book is about a strain of homophobia that gets excused by the familiar refrain—“we must save and protect the children,” from the gays, in Edelman’s account. The book argues that this sentiment leaves us perpetually deferring political action, and political change, as one generation of children after another grows up. But this language of panic arises around the coupling of “the children” and militant political action as well, though it is less talked about, and though today’s youth may have more experience as political actors than many of their older, critical peers.

It is hard to talk about ageism and not sound like a jerk, I think. You end up creating these categories that don’t fit people, their beliefs, or their experiences. Nevertheless, I think it needs to be talked about, especially if, like me, one works with eighteen year olds every day, especially at a moment when a good chunk of the student protest movement in America consists of teenagers, not all technically, legally “adult.” I want to be able to talk about working with these political actors, not shepherding them or showing them the light. Chile then or now is certainly not the only instance, but it serves as a rebuttal of sorts, from the younger students and political actors in our midst. I think we can safely assert that they don’t need us, or anyone else, to save them.

WENDY TREVINO

2011-10-28T10:15:00.000-07:00

Wendy Trevino has worked as a Summer Recreation Leader with at-risk and special needs youth; a LSAT Instructor and Site Director for The Princeton Review; a House- and Pet-sitter in Iowa City; a Teaching Assistant and Creative Writing Instructor at UC Davis; a Guest Services Attendant and Development Intern at the California Academy of Sciences; and a Writing Consultant for SFJAZZ. She currently works as a Grant Writer at the Homeless Prenatal Program in San Francisco.

The “We” of a Position

I started writing this at 6 this morning, after 5 hours of sleep, after a night of doing nothing, after a couple of hours talking on the phone with Lauren Levin, after a day of seeing a very disorganized friend off to Kuwait, where he will teach for two years in order to have a free place to live and pay off a fraction of his grad student loans.

I started to make a list of things that have happened, beginning with “global financial crisis” & ending with me standing here in Oakland, reading something about labor, writing, and fighting. Without even trying to include everything, I ran out of steam by the time I got to the third instance of “looking for work” and the first word of students occupying UC buildings.

I started to respond to a piece that Stephanie Young so generously sent me, a piece that included a piece of something I’d said about working with people that are hard to work with, people you might not like all that much or at all, people you might not know. How it is still possible, how it is already how most people work every day in jobs they wish they didn’t need. How it reminds me of my family, a very large group of people that includes people who just appeared in a field to work one day. How it isn’t a family in the traditional sense. How it includes a kid named Taco, an orphan who would ask for tacos from other field hands, a kid the barrio my mother grew up in took in. How it includes a woman my mother met working in the fields and her son and another woman who took care of me as a child. How it includes the neighbors my mother lived with when she ran away from home at thirteen as much as a [woman] my mother recently met on a flight to New York. How the support these people have given each other is financial as well as emotional. How in continuing to support each other XXXX.

I started to think about my father picking cotton as a kid and the hierarchy of the fields. How poor whites and Mexican-Americans got first pick. How undocumented workers went in second, and African-Americans picked last. How my father said getting first-pick made him feel special until one very hot day, in Lubbock, during a break, his family went looking for water. How none of the white people in town would give them water. How on their way back to the fields, a truck of African-American farm hands offered them some. How they didn’t even have to ask. How my father says we’re all living like that—not even knowing who our friends are. How my father passes for white until he speaks. How a farmer and his wife, in College Station, told my grandmother they would adopt my father and raise him as white when he was four years old. How the men who hired my father at XXXX in the seventies laughed and said they were meeting the requirements of affirmative action with a man who “talks like a Mexican but looks white.” How, when my father tells this story, he doesn’t even seem mad.

I started to worry that what I was writing was dealing too much with identity without dealing with it. I remembered why I hesitate to talk about these things. Because what I am trying to say is that we should really think about who our friends are. What I am trying to describe is what is described in Tiqqun’s Call as “the ‘we’ of a position.” A “we” that includes people we do and don’t like. A “we” that includes people we haven’t met yet and people we will never meet. A “we” that sees the hierarchy of the fields and calls bullshit without being dismissive of its bullshit effects. A “we” that is aware of other fields.

I started to worry that I would cry reading this in front of a room full of people I respect and am just getting to know. Mostly because I read what I’d written to Dereck, my partner, and he said some of you might cry. I started to consider having Dereck read this and worried about the effect a white man, an adjunct professor from a working class family might have on the text. A white man whose grandfather grew up on a Choctaw reservation, moved to Arkansas and bought land because it had once been illegal for Native Americans to cross the Oklahoma border into certain parts of Arkansas. I wondered which option I would worry about, then do anyway.

I wanted to talk about how I started slowly to see this “we.” How I had been looking for work, then working six days a week and all that time reading. Reading Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, thinking about envy, asking, “To what extent do homosocial group formations rely on antagonism?” Reading Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery and the Philosophy of History, thinking about the British slave ship Zong. Reading the first chapter of Marx’s Capital for the nth time, listening to David Harvey’s podcasts. Reading Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, engaging in an argument about Social Networking Sites, weak intimacy and collective action in because poetry is not enough, a “secret” group on facebook consisting of me, Brian Ang, Tiffany Denman, Joseph Atkins, Jeanine Webb, May Ought, Erin Steinke and Dereck Clemons. In a cubicle, an unpaid intern, arguing on facebook, with people I do and people I do not often see, arguing “I’m not sure the weak intimacy that characterizes even strictly fb relationships is so different than that of the intimacy characterizing most work relationships or relationships between peers, and while it is true that relationships are implicit in collectivizing and while propinquity remains a determining factor in whether one participates in a particular collective action, I think it’s a mistake to think people have to be on intimate terms with each other prior to collectivizing / in order to collectivize.”

BRIAN WHITENER

2011-10-28T10:14:00.002-07:00

Brian Whitener has worked as a sports photographer, dishwasher, music reviewer, adjunct, and in a prison. His most recent projects include False Intimacy (Trafficker Press), De gente común: Arte, política y rebeldía social (Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México), and Genocide in the Neighborhood (ChainLinks). He edits Displaced Press.

We live in a world of experience, of worlding, no longer (just) a world of representation. What I mean by this is that “experience” (in quotes) or work on the realm of the possible (which shapes the actual), on “being” (in quotes) itself or worlding, has overtaken prior cultural formations predicated primarily on representation and “breaks” with (prior) representational schemes. One banal example (of many) could be the last Bjork album which is distributed across multiple platforms, more an environment (an operation on the virtual) to be lived, moved through than an “album,” (of photos, of “representations,” of discrete pieces of aural structures) as if Satie’s music had become not just like the furniture, but had wanted to become the walls, light, and time as well.

If the classical figure of early twentieth century capitalism was the street-walker, who directly sells their body as a commodity, one figure of labor today is the camgirl, who sells an experience, access to a psyche, likes/dislikes, personal information, who creates and sells (not just) a body, but a worlding (not yet a “world”). If the classical figure of early twentieth century capitalism (ironic emphasis on the repetition) was the worker, who sells their labor power, one figure of “labor” today is the redundant surplus briefly integrated into the circuit of production only to be then discarded, shunted beyond the edge of the human on the other side of an ontological gap, into another world, desaparecido, which is another worlding, equally dark.

If the classical figure of early twentieth century war was shell shock, which outed as fatigue and disconnection, the figure of war today is post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition that is located somewhere between the mind and body, between matter and spirit, that draws a new line between the material and immaterial; that is, one that acts neither on the body (discipline) nor the mind (ideology) but on a (new) total complex. In the medical literature, no one can figure out how to treat these new forms of trauma as they sometimes out as physical, sometimes as mental (can we conclude then that it is neither? But rather a new line, a new “body,” a new demarcation between the virtual and actual?). Look at all the traumas around you: natural disasters, crimes, wars. Where do they come from? Is it crazy to think we live in a world that is being disciplined by new forms of catastrophic experience, by trauma. Meaning that both the category of what counts as a trauma has been amplified and that more potent vectors of application have been created, making us exposed at every turn to sensations that used to be reserved for the most far off battlefields (as the “shocks” of WWI were coterminous with the rollercoaster, the animated cartoon, cinema). Note that the term catastrophe only takes on its current meaning (mathematically) in the 1950s and then (more generally) with the onset of financialization: catastrophic risk (a black swan, a risk that cannot be foreseen, the catastrophic event realized on the vector of trauma). We live in an all or nothing world, a world of no return.

Turning to “our” world, a literary world: Have you noticed that no one is celebrating the 100th anniversaries of literary modernism? Is that because there’s nothing to celebrate, because we find ourselves in the same tragic position of individual souls facing a systemic crisis? Or because we live in an “intensified” world following a different vector, one of worlding, trauma, and moves to new forms of innervation, and not representation, shock, and the bodily apparatus of cinema? Is what has been called chaos cinema, post-continuity cinema (the end of classical Hollywood editing in blockbusters like Transformers) a symptom of the end of one bodily apparatus of cinema and the slow invention of another that prepares a new mind/body unit (a new line between the material and immaterial) for trauma, for the loss of the prior referent?

Literature’s strongest links remain with representational and anti-representational schemes (two sides of a single coin) and the bodily sensorium attached to the apparatus of the book. The question is not how to leave behind “representation” but rather how to connect literature’s devices, knowledges, and affective relationships to an edge that would match the new problematic of experience, of worlding, of trauma, of this new line between the concrete and abstract.

We don’t have much time today, so allow us to speak in images, as if written on walls: Through the waters of history cuts the prow of a ship known as financialization, on one side is inscribed “war,” on the other “communization.” To not out as war, literature must find ways to connect with the latter.

IDA YOSHINAGA

2011-10-28T10:14:00.001-07:00

Ida Yoshinaga has worked some crazy-ass jobs in tourism, fashion, television, law, education, journalism, feminism, and finance. But mostly, she's a recovering academic, the first in her immediate family to attend college, and three decades later, still inexplicably addicted to the university. She writes on colonialism and language in US-occupied Hawai'i, fantastic fiction and genre theory, and transmedial narratology in comics and film."

Labor Day Hawai`i 2011

Furlough Fridays, Furlough Fridays
Saved money for the people of Hawai`i:
Once a month, publicly funded, "lazy"
State workers were forced to take unpaid leave.
They said taxpayers heaved great sighs of relief—
Freed from the pricey burdens of community—
Schooling, social work, traffic safety,
Affordable housing, food and environmental
Regulation, and other jobs so easy
No doubt private firms could do 'em
(They said), practically for free.

Furlough Fridays—grand management experiment
By our ex Governor, a gift to Republicans
In states across the union. But her test was
Anti-union—which collectively organized
Government office clerks, schoolteachers,
And other public employees—in garbage,
Transportation, public health—could clearly
See. And fought. But my union, of college
Faculty, more white and male than brown
And yellow, in which we Asians and Hawaiians
Comprise a struggling minority, this
Collectivity of the brightest minds at the
State's flagship research university,
Got their comparatively sweet pay raises
Bargained with her, got divided & conquered
From their public union siblings—
Stayed silent when our janitors &
Secretaries & other campus colleagues were
Furloughed straight out of affordable lives.

Furlough Fridays: our mid-2000s gift from Hawai'i
To Wisconsin, Minnesota, other states with histories
Of strong labor struggles, teaching Republican leaders
That if you prime a group of elitist, self centered,
Racist public workers, you can keep cutting their
Budgets, make them beg for scraps, and not only
Will they say yes please may I have another, but
They are only to happy to repeat
Long colonial histories of racial dispossession,
Gender oppression, and I-got-mine greed.

Furlough Fridays!

STEPHANIE YOUNG

2011-10-28T10:14:00.000-07:00

Stephanie Young lives and works in Oakland. She is a full-time administrator of graduate programs and part-time teacher of poetry at Mills College. Previously she could be found executive assisting, sales analyzing, shelving mass market paperbacks, cleaning houses, and selling cookies. Her most recent book, with Juliana Spahr, is A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism.

Something about Sheila de Bretteville crying about money in Lynn Hershman Leeson’s documentary film Women Art Revolution.

Something about Sheila de Bretteville crying about the feminist art movement’s focus on women’s exclusion from systems of power, rather than identification with others who also lacked power, also lacked money.

Something about the moment when several of us started crying about student loan debt at the Department retreat.

Something about how I started crying in therapy about everything I seem as yet unable to give up, and couldn’t stop.

Something about willingly giving up the individual body’s privilege: as white, of a moderate income which both allows and requires that I travel most days with moderate docility the paths laid out by ATM machines, highways, places of business and institutions. Something about willingly placing that individual body in the way of arrest or even direct injury by the state, as an experiment in identification with bodies marked otherwise, bodies vulnerable to regular interruption, harassment, arrest, detainment, imprisonment and murder by the state.

Something about heroic regard for this particular experiment in identification.

Something about militancy in the U.S. right now as an art project, acts of imagination in the wake of state repression, in the wake of COINTELPRO, something about imagining a future of being on the street together, if not yet on the street together as in Chile, if still outnumbered by riot cops and cameras.

Something about the swagger of one art project’s dismissal of other art projects.

Something about splitting off material from emotional care.

Something about something Wendy Trevino said at the Durruti Free Skool meetup a few weeks ago, something about being able to work with and care for people who one dislikes, or feels irritated by, or ambivalence towards. I remembered this as being able to work with and care for people who one hates. Probably because I have been obsessed with that Tiqqun book The Terrible Community: “…a post-authoritarian power apparatus. It apparently does not have a bureaucracy nor some constraining form. But to produce so much verticality within the informal, it must resort to archaic configurations, roles handed down that still survive in crowded caves of the collective unconscious. Thus the family is not the organizational model but its direct antecedent in the production of informal constraint and the indissoluble living bond of hatred and love.” The euro family euro critique.

Something about the family Wendy talked about, the family that extends, on a plain, without so much verticality. Working with and caring for others who one dislikes, or feels irritated by, or ambivalence towards. I need to say that the family Wendy talked about is a specific example located near or on or beyond the U.S. Mexico border.

Something about Etel Adnan’s To Be In A time of War.

To be the panic of constant information.

To be hurt, distrustful, competitive, envious, angry.

To be singing in the car, my heart’s a stereo, it beats for you, so listen close

To be THEN YOU ARE STILL THE ENEMY. To be unsure of everything, unable to ask for or take it back with force. Are the wetlands everything? To wish the wetlands back as difficult as anything else, necessarily my own death and yours.

To somewhat falsely oppose decomposition and insurrection.

To be post-camp messianism on the one hand, labeling everything else reform or collaboration with existing structures on the other, just, dangling there. Unsure of everything.

To be intimidated by the debt collector. To seek assistance from a non-profit.

To be ashamed of one’s self.

To be full of desire and fear.

To be making art projects. To be making art projects together.

“Every miscarriage is a work accident.”

To be Claire Fontaine, to be dismissive of Claire Fontaine, to find Claire Fontaine somehow useful. To pivot and grind. To frottage with Claire Fontaine.

“The return of the repressed threatens all my projects of work, research, politics. Does it threaten them or is it the truly political thing in myself, to which I should give relief and room? (…) The silence failed this part of myself that desired to make politics, but it affirmed something new. There has been a change, I have started to speak out, but during these days I have felt that the affirmative part of myself was occupying all the space again. I convinced myself of the fact that the mute woman is the most fertile objection to our politics. The non-political digs tunnels that we mustn’t fill with earth.”

SEPTEMBER AT THE POETIC LABOR PROJECT

2011-09-30T12:58:00.000-07:00

We are excited to share a new round of responses. Our September edition features Kristen Gallagher, Dan Thomas-Glass, Ariel Goldberg, and Monica Peck. To download a pdf of all three, please click here.

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

ARIEL GOLDBERG

2011-09-30T12:50:00.000-07:00

Ariel Goldberg has worked as a babysitter, a door to door salesman, artist assistant, hebrew school principal's assistant, the country's best yogurt server, photo transporter, and teacher. Recent publications include the chapbooks Picture Cameras from NoNo Press and The Photographer without a Camera from Trafficker Press. More work is online at www.arielgoldberg.com

Quasi-symmetrical Limbs Attached to a Whole Body

I

The jobs I supposedly want are the ones where art and work are not in a dynamic war over time and energy but operate as quasi-symmetrical limbs attached to a whole body. Like in Maggie Nelson’s book The Art of Cruelty, she keeps referencing her class called The Art of Cruelty. Perhaps this looks better than it is, but it seems like a gift. In order to wrap her head around what to say about artists and writers she’d mention in her book, they became part of a syllabus.

In a fit of inspiration and life transition, I’ve decided to invent a class called Writing as Photography that will frame my artistic obsession. It could be for photographers, or writers, or people not identifying as anything. This class can be formatted to a quarter or semester schedule. It could even be just a daylong workshop. It’s flexible. I should mention here that I don’t have a book length work published. And I'm pretty young. Maybe Maggie Nelson would tell me all about how teaching her class that shared the title of her book was hard work and she never wants to do it again. How teaching an invented class still wouldn’t get me a contract longer than a semester or health insurance. But I figure I should just go for this.

I’d like you to read a draft of my syllabus. Pretend like you want to hire me when you read it. Keep in mind that I’ll go anywhere to teach. I have six years of classroom experience. I can diffuse bad attitudes, as well as explain grammar, which may not seem relevant but is. I feel passionate about how seating arrangements create situations where people feel they are challenging hierarchies inherent to institutional environments. Here it is:

The objective of Writing as Photography is to consider how and when language can replace cameras. The premise of this class is a response to how photographs are haltingly ubiquitous, as well as agents of change in our consciousness. The relationship between language and photography will be explored not as symbiotic but as in conflict. The invisibility of watching without a camera will be employed.

The assignments for this class will explore various poetic forms for language to replace photography. These forms include:

The Letter

The Caption

The Press Conference

The Annotated Inventory of Photographic Detritus

The class time will be both seminar style and critique. Just as photos of our contemporary landscape often include people taking pictures, we will consider how people photograph to perform an action, as opposed to produce a printed picture. We will examine types of photographs that appear in our lives daily, and types of photographers. You can choose to write in any supposed genre or hybrid form. The final assignment will be a portfolio of writings from the weekly assignments, or a directed project.

Discussions will be centered on these themes:

Impulse, consumer markets, and dematerialization

The myth of the photographer as hero and the contested ethics of Photojournalism

How to look at art photography when everyone is a photographer

Reckoning with Photos that Depict Loss

Readings will include selections from:

Towards a Philosophy of Photography and Into the Universe of Technical Images by the philosopher Vilém Flusser

The Journalist & The Murderer, by Janet Malcolm

The Photographer: Into War-torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders, by Emmanuel Guibert

The film Born into Brothels, directed by Zana Briski

The Civil Contract of Photography, by Ariella Azoulay

Slide lectures will focus on Gustav Metzger, Ehren Tool, Oreet Ashery, and the text fields on photo sharing websites.

The class will also take trips to heavily photographed places to watch photographers and photographs.

II

When I try to make a narrative out of it, my job history reflects a string of disillusioned attempts at how I can make money doing something that will help me be a better artist. Standing up in front of people and practicing something, or attempting an explanation, became attractive because it felt like performance art. I formed this conceit when I was determined to be an autodidact performance artist, shortly after a very expensive BFA in the obsolete skills of analogue photography and English literature. At this time, I also decided to decline an offer to become a New York City Teaching Fellow, a full time job as a public high school teacher that came with a free masters in education. I decided I wanted to really be an artist.

Just trying to put art first by filling my schedule with unstable part-time jobs was only possible because of my fancy education and the ability to live on a low-income. I didn’t have any debt. My whole family saved so I could go to a “good” college. I was incredibly lucky to get this undergraduate degree without any loans, and my family did it as if there was pride in buying this thing. Does how my family paid for it matter? My grandfather’s savings from a frugal life as a garment worker and war reparations from the German government paid for most of it. Then it was my dad working as an accountant, my mom as a social worker, and my brother dying when I was a kid. Even though he died at eight, I still feel like I got double what I deserve.

If art was valued in this country, if that work of mine was less invisible, then maybe I would feel like I’ve done something with the investment my family has made on me. I feel like what I write or perform (I don’t photograph that much for many reasons, one of which is because it’s really expensive) barely translates outside of esoteric groups of supportive people, who are also artists and writers. I'm grateful for these groups of people, but I don’t think being an artist should be so hidden. The argument of course is that art is purer and in defiance when underground or removed from the economic system. That we must struggle. But I think artists (and I mean writers too) should get money, should be funded more, in all sorts of ways. Just because this is idealistic, and comes from a place of privilege, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t believe in it. Because it shouldn’t feel like the only artists who are justified are the ones with mainstream exposure.

When I began to teach, keeping a room quiet felt impossible. I started in a religious Jewish High School, but I never wanted to figure out how to discipline people. So I learned how to teach English, the language. I think in part because that’s how my grandparents first survived in this country. There are also more jobs for teaching English. Depending on how low paying or homophobic¹ the environment, I’ve teetered on burnt out teacher at what feels like too soon.

Why have I kept on teaching, I wonder. How much I despise offices doesn’t seem like a real reason. I’ve worked at TCBY and a residence for pregnant teens in foster care. The odd job that’s felt the most glamorous was when I worked the door at Party Hole, a queer club that my friend who deejays hooked me up with. I would make about the same amount in one night than I did in my 3-hour college level composition class at The Academy of Art. Recently I did that weird thing of editing the letter of recommendation an old boss wrote for me. This Photographer I worked for as an assistant mentioned, of all things, how I was such a varied artist because I drove a truck for a farmer one summer. We sold apples and cider. I had the driver’s license in a group of Tibetan men.

I don’t romanticize teaching; it is just my messy, imperfect skill. Everything is invented or tested, with lots of room for mistakes. I don’t think I could be so imperfect at an office job. Classrooms are comfortable for me because I’ve always been this nerdy good student, eager to please, eager to work hard. Theoretically, to work in education was also a way to be near some value of knowledge. This is a sad and hard thought to hold, because, like art, the U.S. seems to actively work at devaluing education.

This week in the mornings I taught English to Haitian Youth Ambassadors through my longstanding job with the YMCA’s New American’s Center. Probably because it was only two classes, in a packed schedule they had in disaster relief trainings and tourism, they seemed like the best students’ ever. The gratitude was palpable. When we talked about the differences in education here and there, they told me they don’t know if they’ll get into college because so many schools have collapsed and haven’t been rebuilt. When I asked them to write what they want people in the U.S. to know about Haiti, they said not for us to think that it’s a poor country. Multiple students wrote they want us to know about their artists.

For the rest of the week I subbed for a multi level free English class in the basement of a church. I would take a long break at 1pm and head to my friends’ studio where each time I’ve visited New York in the past year, they’ve given me a set of keys, and I sit at a table surrounded by materials for sculpture, painting, and collage. On days I taught two classes I didn’t go to the studio. Other days all I could muster was a nap. Lately I’ve felt tired. I can hardly write at home. I need to go somewhere. I tend to panic at cafes. My writing is a form of survival. If I don’t write at least in my journal every day I feel like I am going crazy. I am trying to get close to a final draft of an essay “on the states of queer art” that I’ve been writing for a year and the deadline is, like, now. And critical writing feels like a form of punishment sometimes. That essay is called The Estrangement Principal.

I can barely get work teaching English to immigrants in New York because of recent budget cuts reeking of discrimination. I never even got a job interview in California for teaching immigrants, probably because my certification is not accredited, and it is not a Masters. I have an MFA, also from an expensive school, which my parents have helped me begin to pay off loans from.

Most often, I'm employed as this ambiguous thing at the end of a huge purchase International students make. And I usually get the job because I’ve been doing it long enough. Whenever I teach language school style classes, which have a constant flow of coming and going, students bring their cameras to their last class. They come out of pockets or hang from wrists, clanking on the cheap tables. I once had a student take my picture because they couldn’t believe I was their teacher. They wanted to show their mother how young I looked. I feel so uncomfortable in this reoccurring picture, which of course I sort of enjoy, because it makes that energy dump feel useful.

¹1 I wrote an essay on being a queer teacher, in response to questions students wrote, for a PFLAG lecture at the Language School I worked at for 2 years. http://www.arielgoldberg.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/thequestions.pdf

KRISTEN GALLAGHER

2011-09-30T12:41:00.002-07:00

Kristen Gallagher is an Associate Professor of English who specializes in Creative Writing at City University of New York LaGuardia Community College. She received a Ph.D. from the SUNY Buffalo Poetics Program in 2005. Her first chapbook, Operator, used documents, materials, and information from her job as a call center operator. She was co-editor for a five years, with Tim Shaner, of WIG: A Journal of Poetry and Work. She is currently co-editor, with Chris Alexander, of Truck Books (truckbooks.org) and her book We Are Here came out in 2011. She lives in Queens.

My Emails for This Week

Number of words written for professor job this week: 2408
Number of words written related to Poetry outside of school: 278
Number of Exclamation Points: 38

That's a very helpful message. Thanks! KG OH! So is it in E-242, as the poster says, or in the Little Theatre? If it's in E-242, then I don't think we have quite as much worry about audience! Tho we should still get the word out asap if we want quality participation. Hi All, I agree with Chris that we should use Rosemarie's Room and have an intimate chat over free snacks. I think asking students to go out to the Diner will end with us losing them. We have to make sure Rosemarie's Room is available. Just FYI, it always says it's reserved every Weds 9-5 for administrative use, but the truth is that it's almost never actually needed. Lenore is the person who gives the go-ahead on use of that room Wednesdays, so it may be useful to email her soon if we decide to go with the Rosemarie's Room idea. Also, I think we should send a "Save the Date" email to the English Department ASAP, then re-send a slightly more targeted version of that email to the current creative writing instructors. People need time to plan. I'd hate to resort to that thing people so often do--which is at the last minute beg people to bring their classes--then you get a bunch of random students who don't quite know what they are seeing and any number of them chat and text and move around through the whole thing. KG Hey, I am giving a paper on OCT 27. Should I apply now or after? Does it matter? Did I already miss the fall deadline? Thank you so much for handling all the massive amounts of committee emailing and minutes typing and everything. Aside from making my life easier (!), I think it's great that you are visibly taking the lead on these things. It's important to have your name associated with highly valued things. Now we need to find you some kind of college-wide stud-level contribution so you can get promoted asap! As a matter of fact, I wonder if you and Carrie shouldn't think about pursuing an articulation for our CW track with somewhere...Queens? Brooklyn? Let me know what you think! That is considered VERY valuable college work. Hi Lizzie, I have two pretty good not-so-good first drafts of applications/personal statements. Here they are!! zoiks, we have an administrator's meeting that day. i'll see what i can do. Hi Phyllis, Gail, Sue, and Sandra, Each of you spoke about something substantive at yesterday's meeting and as the minutes-taker I'd like to know if I represented your words in a way that feels right to you. If you have anything to add, or even want to correct my grammar or ponder my word choices, please share. These things happen fast, so I may have missed something. I'd really appreciate anything you have to add. Attached. Have a great weekend, KG It looks like this Sunday walk is not going to happen for us because of this panel I am slated to moderate. I really really wanna go on these walks, so keep me in the loop. It just looks like this panel may be more complicated than I realized, and I'm a bit nervous about carousing renaissance style, getting high on turkey legs and all that, and then being ready to moderate well. I am TOTALLY BUMMED about missing you guys tho!!!!! It sucks. Now it's me who has a scheduling problem. A conference I'm presenting at has scheduled my panel on Friday 10/28 at 9 am. The only flight from NYC to where I'm going leaves on 10/27 just around the time of our seminar. Could we try rescheduling a meeting for 10/20 or 11/10? Sorry!! Are you sure? that would be great! We should probably alert the group? Hi Marisa, After meeting with Paul this morning, Arianna Martinez and & I are charged with doing a large scale assessment of the Urban Studies program and would like to meet with you at your earliest convenience to figure out exactly what we need to do. We're anxious to get the ball rolling. Please send us some times that are good for you for next week, if possible. Thanks, and looking forward to working with you-- KG How about Wednesday 10/5 at 4 pm? Thanks Marisa! I am almost there! I basically scrapped my first idea, then wrote an entire second thing, then scrapped that. I am now doing a statistical analysis (wink wink) of my time. I do think I can have it to you by Thursday night. Would that work for you? School is actually canceled Weds and Thurs, so this time there really should not be interference! Dear Ann, We've attached our revision to the curriculum for the Creative Writing Track of the Writing and Literature Major. Here are the changes we made: 1. Eliminated Liberal Arts Cluster requirement to accommodate the new additional Natural Sciences credit 2. Moved HUA167 Introduction to African Art from a required to an optional Humanities course 3. Eliminated ENG/HUC238 Screenwriting from Humanities to minimize ENG999 English Blanket Credits transfers 4. Eliminated ENG235, ENN240, ENG268, ENG/HUC272, and ENG280 to minimize ENG298 Special Topics conflicts (since only one class may transfer as ENG298, and additional classes in this category revert to ENG999 English Blanket Credits) 5. Eliminated ENG205 to minimize ENG399 Special Topics conflicts (since only one class may transfer as ENG399, and additional classes in this category revert to ENG999 English Blanket Credits) 6. Restructured English electives to require Creative Writing Track students to take a genre course (ENG260, ENG265, or ENG270) Please let us know if we've made any missteps! And thanks again for your help in this process. Cheers, Chris and Kristen Hi Ann. We were just reviewing the original articulation agreement, and it seems like York left out a group of courses in the Social Sciences category. Here's the Social Sciences category as it appears in the articulation agreement:

> Social Science: 9 credits
> SSY101 General Psychology 3
> Select one of the following courses:
> SSH101 Themes in American History to 1865 3
> SSH102 Themes in American History Since 1865 3
> SSH103 Western Civ from Ancient to Renaissance 3
> SSH104 Western Civ from Renaissance to Modern 3
> SSH105 World History from Ancient Times to 1500 3
> SSH106 World History from 1500 to Present 3
> SSH110 East Asia Civilization and Societies 3
And here's the group that was left out:
> Select one of the following courses:
> SSA101 Cultural Anthropology 3
> SSE104 Introduction to Macroeconomics 3
> SSP101 U.S. Power and Politics 3
> SSP250 Political Ideas and Ideologies 3
> SSS100 Introduction to Sociology 3
Would it be okay for us to go ahead with the agreement as is and make the students choose two courses from the list of SSH courses to fulfill the requirement, or do we need to correct the error so that the SSA/SSE/SSP/SSS courses appear in our curriculum and then run it back by York? We are concerned that they will not be able to get this done in time for the next Curriculum Committee meeting. Cheers, Chris and Kristen Hi Everyone, Just a reminder, our next meeting will be 10/13. We also need to reschedule one of our dates from 10/27 to 10/20. It's my fault. I double booked against a conference presentation. I seriously apologize for the scheduling drama! So our meeting dates for Fall are: 10/13, 10/20, 11/3, 11/17, 12/1. Let us know if you have a problem with this new date.Kristen You are sitting on the cusp of C plus / B minus. I expect you to revise. You have some good ideas, but the writing really needs work. It feels like a first draft. Remember to engage the recursive process--get on to your main point right away, stay on it, keep circling back to it, and keep going over your writing looking for fullness of detail, adequate transitions from idea to idea, and detailed follow-up commentary and explanation after quotes. You have one week to revise. DUE Monday, 7 days from tomorrow, on your blog. Good Luck! Just the one I handed out at the very end and forbid you to read. Off the top of my head, the 7th is a Weds, right? That shld be good. And I'm happy to meet the doula any time. I have no current plans for January. Not teaching, no conferences, no readings. So I shld be ready to go! Yay! Kevin and Eric! On Nov. 1 in the after noon I will be presenting on Creative Writing at LaGuardia: our new major that begins in spring, the club, and our upcoming events. I think Laura may have already asked you to show up on behalf of the club, but we've also been invited to have a couple of you read your work. Are you up for it? KG Let me figure out how long we have and then you pick whatever you want to fill the time. Thanks Irwin! This is actually very helpful. That's totally ok with me. But since it isn't due til Tuesday, you can have more time if you like... It's not sad, it just wasn't indicated anywhere in what you sent me, so I didn't know. Just FYI, nothing was due today. Last class (this past Tuesday) the thing due was a piece of your choice: either the page or the bed or the bedroom. Last week I asked people to turn in a writing they did just wandering around LaGuardia. Next Tuesday (next class meeting) the thing due is either the apartment or the apartment building or the street--choose one. It's a good basic start, but you have to work on getting concrete description. Here are my ideas for how to improve this: 1. Don't use passive voice. When you say "green grass is seen" there is no actor in this sentence. Who sees? And since it turns out that it isn't grass after all, but weeds, this whole part of your piece should slow down and lay out exactly what you perceive and in what order. What exactly happens that you thought it was grass but then somehow realize it is not grass? For example it might go something like: "When I look out the window, I see a field of green grass surrounded by sidewalk. There is one tree in the middle. This open green space seems a welcome place to write, so I head out of my house, around the corner to check it out. But when I arrive there I realize there is no grass at all, just weeds, dirt and cigarette butts. I am so disappointed. I look around for somewhere else to go and realize there is nowhere to go except the McDonald's on the corner, or back home." Give us the blow-by-blow account of exactly what gives way to this scene unfolding in your experience. 2. Stick to the facts. This is a concrete description of a space. What exactly does the gate look like. Color? Shape? size? what is it surrounding or leading to? Gates do not sing. And how can anyone possibly know what strangers feel? You can only know what you feel. So never assume what anyone is feeling, but show, when you actually have the evidence to do so, behaviors, movements, expressions, etc., that will lead to your reader perceiving the feeling you perceive as you look at this scene. Your job here is to re-create a scene in words, so that a reader will perceive and feel what you perceived and felt when you experienced that scene in the first place. 3. Where are the stone pillars exactly? What makes you say they seem designed for sitting? Can you show me what they look like? do people sit on them? Show me what you see that leads you to this conclusion. Show us the evidence. 4. I think the line "The front porch __two chairs vacant of bodies yet still manage to seem in conversation as they point to each other" is the best one in this piece. It paints a clear picture, and you don't make assumptions or generalizations. I really like how your phrased it, and it gives a really great feeling to read it. I like these empty chairs facing each other! Strong work! 5. An example of an assumption that doesn't fully reach our goal of description would be "the creatures that seem to not care for the railing." In stead of telling me they don't care, show me what they are doing that leads you to this conclusion. What kind of creatures are they? Alley cats? What are they doing? Through an exact description of their behavior, their movements, their expressions, etc., you can create a feeling of their not-caring...or is it really not-caring that they exhibit?? as you look more closely and find the words to convey exactly what is happening, you may find yourself shifting in your understanding of what is happening. Sometimes as we look more closely, we find they all our first assumptions were wrong, and only then are we beginning to truly SEE. 6. The last few lines are getting closer to real description, but I'm sure you can add more detail and fill this whole piece out more. Remember what I said in class: the length requirement for all these pieces is NOT a word count or number of pages, but to be EXHAUSTIVE. We require an exhaustive, detailed account. No stone shall be left unturned/undescribed. Write til your hand hurts, observe til your brain and eyes are so exhausted that you pass out. 7. Overall, I really feel like it would help to know where you are. Just tell us. I'm not geting a clear picture. Is it an apartment building? Something about all these pillars and creatures makes it seem like an old manor or an old library or a haunted house. Good luck! 10/9 shld work for me. Check this out: Scientists at UC Berkeley have figured out how to make videos of images from the brain, so that a video can be made of whatever you have dreamt based on tracing the activity in the visual cortex. What a exciting future we have! http://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clips-from-brain-activity I'm sure they'd go viral. As you've probably discerned by now, we can't make it to Beacon with you. But we really really wish we could have!! We've never met Cheryl and would love to meet her and also learn more about her work. But we're swamped with craploads of our own non-art work. And it's turned out to be such a nice day, too. I really wish we could be out there with you guys instead of grading papers. I hate grading papers more than just abt anything. I think I'm going to hire some young poet to start doing my grading for me. Maybe Kareem needs a job? Argh. Wish we were there... KG John! Hi! I told you on the phone this summer I'd come to a training but I seem to have not written it down! Ah summer... Can you remind me what day/date I signed up for? And maybe also what the other day was that was an option, just in case I've since screwed up and cross-scheduled the day and time I originally signed up for? Sorry for the blankout. KG Hi, No, *I'm* sorry for not keeping better track of my situation! But of course reminders are always helpful. I'm really sorry I missed it. Last year I had off in spring for research release, but this year I am hoping to do way more union stuff. I will be at the rally Monday, so hopefully I'll see you there! KG Hey I recall you said you blurbed him? do you have a copy of his book? maybe even a digital one in your email you cld fwd me? i'd like to try to prepare a little for next weekend! kg

MONICA PECK

2011-09-30T12:41:00.001-07:00

Monica Peck lives in San Francisco and works in San Jose.

on the clock

things i want to write about for the poetic labor blog

gender discrimination in the workplace, esp. re non-normative gender being told that i can “get away with wearing anything” the non-productive vs. the productive vs. anti-productive, esp. re being an artist art i’ve made at work, i.e. clip art comics, poems, ppt. “movies” horrible art i’ve been paid to make on the job: a musical mash-up of the wizard of oz & the loma prieta earthquake, poems about facial expressions for preschoolers, a poem for an ex-boss that she published under her daughters name in an ad post-it note fetishes using a grant to be anti-productive and a drag on the economy, i.e. not make commodity art, but converse in a leisurely way or wander or day dream or “research” or cruise how i wrote my first poem at my first job on the clock at st. anne’s church about chewing gum the various ways bosses have kept track of my time & “their” money: spread sheets, charts, clip boards, time sheets, sign-in logs being scammed when looking for work: the western union scam for a tutoring gig, the ice cream truck scam, the postal worker classified ad scam bleeding on the job: performing “worker” while having brutal menstrual cramps eating on the job, esp. the logistics of various workplaces: teachers’ lounge politics, cubicle lunches, and the politics of “shared” food in corporate zones unions spontaneous work signage, i.e. passive-aggressive notes, esp. in bathrooms being asked to “compose” bathroom signage re: flushing it all down work drag making magic totems to protect from mean co-workers and abusive bosses, esp out of the office supplies at hand: thumb tack & dry eraser shaman dolls morale boosters and fake morale boosters, i.e. corporate office art & kitsch vs. a view of a beautiful tree inappropriate/illegal job interview questions that sought/implied/assumed socio-economic class, race, gender, ethnicity, marital status, health, or other personal background info or are otherwise memorable for how uncomfortable they made me feel:

why do you like children what is your favorite book how would you react if someone said, “fuck you” are you a vegetarian how would you handle a difficult parent did you have trouble finding parking how did you get here do you feel comfortable driving a truck how often do you eat yoghurt is anyone in your family a lawyer do you have any children can you lift forty pounds do you mind getting your fingerprints checked do you mind getting a TB test what brought you to san francisco how are you with money what interests you about mobile technology have you ever worked with dry ice can you cut an onion do you have an allergy to bleach when can you start do you have your own computer do you have access to the internet do you know how to type have you ever done a mailing can you answer the phone how did you hear about this job what do you like to write about are you and [current employee] friends would you be willing to do a partial trade are you a “real” teacher do you have a cell phone can you help me get a good grade can you fit thirteen boxes in your car can you write quizzes do you have cash register experience are you familiar with microsoft office how are you with the public have you read mencken’s “the joy of monotony” can you pull it out with the root can you make a decent chowder

queer resume: an interesting oversimplification

this is a list of all jobs (in reverse chronological order) and approximate wages per hour taking into account actual hours worked for salaried position and including tips for service jobs, followed by my age, whether or not i was “out” on the job, and my gender presentation.

job title, wages, age, “out-ness” and “gender” presentation

adjunct lecturer: 25, 35, out, queer
lab experiment subject: 25, 35, out, queer
babysitter: 15, 35, out, queer
focus group participant: 75, 35, out, queer
private tutor: 25, 34-35, out, queer
mock juror: 30, 35, out, queer
teacher: 25, 34-35, out, queer
house sitter: 2, 34, out, queer
graduate teaching assistant: 15, 33-34, out, femme
administrator: 35, 32-34, out to some co-workers, femme
writer: 35, 30-32, out, queer
vegetable delivery driver: 15, 30, out, queer
teacher: 35, 28-30, out to some colleagues, queer
assistant teacher: 17, 26-28, out, queer
bookstore clerk: 13, 26-28, out, queer
associate editor: 25, 25, closeted, queer
editorial assistant: 12, 24, out to one co-worker, queer
electronic cartographer: 10, 24, closeted, queer
sprout farm laborer: 10, 23, out, queer
artist model: 20, 23, out, queer
cook: 10, 23, out, butch
coat check person: 25, 23, out, butch
book clerk: 8, 23, out, butch
ice cream vendor: 10, 23, closeted, butch
cartoon editor/ad sales: 1, 22, out, butch
baker: 8, 22, out, butch
dishwasher: 8, 22, out, butch
cashier 8, 20-23 out, butch
cooler freezer stocker: 7, 20-23, out, butch
farm laborer: 5, 19-21, closeted, butch
archive assistant: 5, 18-19, closeted, femme
teacher: 20, 18, closeted, femme
book editor: 10, 17-18, out, queer
lab assistant: 10,16-18 out, queer
actor: 30, 13-16, out, femme
busker: 4, 15-18, out, butch
receptionist: 4, 14, closeted, femme
drill press operator: 5, 12-13, closeted, butch
babysitter: 2, 8-12, closeted, femme
weeder: 1, 7, closeted, butch

DAN THOMAS-GLASS

2011-09-30T12:41:00.000-07:00

Dan Thomas-Glass lives in Albany & works in Palo Alto. He is a teacher, communications director, & department chair at a progressive all-girls middle school. He & his wife Kate, along with their almost-three-year-old Sonia, just welcomed baby Alma into the world. He is the author of 880, Seaming, & Total Noise: Language Poetry, Hip Hop, & Urban Collapse. In spare fragments of time he edits With + Stand & The 30 Word Review. You can find recent poetic labor at http://danthomasglass.blogspot.com

[Drive] [to] [Work]

Freeways are our cathedrals. I sit in awe, marvel at the scope, feel the impossible majesty of capitalism’s moving so many bodies through space. I sit in my car, in awe. We bought a new car, one moved through space in a line to assemble, a history of capitalism’s moving so many bodies in the movement down that line to assemble our new car that I sit in, in awe. Our new car is assembled to consume “natural” gas, so I sit in awe in a special lane on the freeway for HOVs PZEVs & ZEVs so I can get home faster. I am in the front row of the cathedral, we bought this proximity, I atone for the 90-mile roundtrip daily sin by buying this indulgence. I sit in awe, in proximity to capital’s glow, thinking of the dead bodies poured into the Great Wall, what bodies under this pitch & gravel. What majesty.

Where I live there are many poets. Where I work there are many venture capitalists. I traverse this distance in awe, daily, so as not to forget this distance. Or this proximity. In awe. Awe comes from an Old Norse word that also meant terror or dread. We retain these meanings in awful. I am in terror & dread. The Old Norse speakers traversed the North Sea in terror & dread to rape & pillage & then live among the Angles & Saxons & Jutes, & because of that traversing Old English lost its gendered nouns & various other trappings & so a car is not a boy car like other European languages because those Vikings spoke the Old Norse/Old English version of Spanglish which in its simplification did not include a gender for a noun like car. So in my genderless car I traverse this distance in awe but my driving is not genderless.

Did you know it is very expensive to live in the Bay Area? It is very expensive. We are waiting for our second daughter to be born & because we have decided it is important to us for one of us to stay home with our young daughters I drive to work. I am a school administrator as well as teacher now so that we can afford to live here at all. We decided my wife would stay home with our young daughters which was an easy decision because it resonated in the echo chamber of our world, in a compound modifier like stay-at-home which was gendered female. This was an easy decision to make because of this resonance. My wife works (when she is not a stay-at-home worker) in non-profit management & development & I am a secondary school teacher/administrator, so our “earning power” is very proximate. The decision for me to drive to work in awe was one we both felt very comfortable about & our feeling comfortable with it was not genderless in the way that my driving is not genderless.

In these gendered decisions in this language on these freeways I sit in awe & marvel & my poems are about these things: movement & family & the yawning proximity of this awe to all of us. What majesty.

* WORKING * WRITING * FIGHTING * : SEPTEMBER 4 in OAKLAND

2011-08-31T15:15:00.001-07:00

The Poetic Labor Project Presents :

*** WORKING *** WRITING *** FIGHTING ***
A Gathering on Labor, Art & Politics
this Sunday, September 4, 1pm to 6pm
at the Niebyl Proctor Marxist Library
6501 Telegraph Ave, Oakland, CA

This labor day weekend, please join us for a convocation on the intersecting themes of writing, work and activism.

Confirmed participants include : Brian Ang, Jasper Bernes, Lindsey Boldt, Chris Chen, Chris Daniels, Jack Frost, Owen Hill, Tim Kreiner, Melissa Mack, Sean Manzano, Michael Nicoloff, Steve Orth, Margaret Rhee, Jill Richards, Wendy Trevino, Dana Ward, Brian Whitener, and Laura Woltag.

We'll meet for presentations at 1pm, have several panels interspersed with breaks, take a break for dinner, and then those who wish can reconvene for a facilitated collective conversation on the day's themes.

This event is free and open to the public. Please distribute this announcement as widely as you see fit.

Any questions ? Write to David Brazil at dzbrazil@yahoo.com.

Hope to see you Sunday !

Love & solidarity

2011-08-23T09:18:00.003-07:00

We are extremely excited to share a new round of responses at the Poetic Labor Project's blog. Our August edition features Scott Inguito, Erica Lewis, Stefani Barber, and Robert Mittenthal. To download a pdf of all three, please click here.

As always, we're so inspired by these responses, and many of the other exciting forms of community action that have transpired this summer. Please send us any projects and resources that you think we ought to include in the blog library. Perpetual thanks to Andrew Kenower for hosting.

And thank you for your interest and solidarity - see you in September!

SCOTT INGUITO

2011-08-23T09:18:00.002-07:00

Scott Inguito paints, writes, teaches, eats. He lives in San Francisco where he paints, writes, eats. He travels to San Jose, where he teaches writing at San Jose City College, and eats at Falafel Drive-in. He, and a cast of loons to be determined, will be performing his play, Trying to Create Intimacy with a Narcissist, at the &NOW Writing Festival, UC San Diego, October 13—15, 2011.

$10 an hour in The Salinas Valley, Greenfield, California

I remember that I used to think that $10 an hour for labor was a lot. Maybe I still do. Just the other day a painter I know, just before leaving the large warehouse where we share studio space with many others, said, “I’m leaving now to go work for $10 an hour.” I believe she meant it sarcastically, but a large part of me jumped at the thought that that was a healthy sum. I remember wondering if I’d ever make $10 an hour. I worked in a restaurant directly out of high school, topping out at just under $9 after five years. I often wondered if I’d ever surpass that mark. I didn’t expect to, and didn’t really have the cultural or educational capital to figure out quite how to do so. I thought that maybe college might have something to do with breaking past the $10 an hour limit, but didn’t have the external resources available, nor was I avidly searching for them. Today, $10 an hour still seems a rightly sum; it’s a handsome number, the zero giving it fullness.

After working the restaurant job, about the time I had decided to go back to community college, I was looking for work, hoping to find something for $10 an hour. My dad had been working a non-union construction job in the Salinas Valley of California. His friend who was living in Gilroy, California doing job-site management had hooked him up. So my dad hooked me up, and I had a non-union construction job starting at $10 an hour. This was in the summer of 1995 after a particularly bad El Nino season. That was the year that a lot of the Salinas Valley's farmland flooded. The Salinas River had eaten away at banks, broke open levees, and even shut down US 101 for a brief spell. If you had driven that stretch of US 101 between King City and Salinas at that time you could see water covering all the crops of onions, garlic, celery, broccoli, cauliflower that you usually see stretching to the foothills on either side of the valley.

The job site was on a farmer's land where the Salinas River had blown out a riverbank that abutted the farmer's property. The river had washed sand, silt, mud, and grass all across his farmland, so it was our job to transport much of that in dump trucks and build up a new embankment. The operation was this: the skid steel loader loaded the dump trucks with the sand and debris, and then the dump trucks would transport their loads to designated areas. A bulldozer had pushed together sand and mud into a series of two sand bridges for the dump trucks to navigate into and out of the river bed.

We were told that we, along with three other guys my dad had been working with on another job, would each have a dump truck to drive. The job was simple: drive into the river bed, crossing the two sand bridges, set up next to the skid steel loader while it loads your truck, then get back out of the river and dump your load in the designated spot. I jumped into the truck, an A40 Volvo Articulated Dump Truck, six large wheels each the size of a VW bug. I had no experience driving the enormous truck, but neither had my dad, and he had explained some of the ins and outs of driving it to me; he had done that same job on another site. He had warned me the bouncing around in the cab was tough on internal organs, so I had brought a “kidney-belt” for my midriff from my motocross days. He told me to be sure to strap myself in real tight before setting out. I studied the owner’s manual for about 15 minutes. There were few words, just large pictures with directions, graphics reminiscent of crash landing directions on airplanes.

I started it up. It was like driving a large Uhaul in that it was bouncy, and the brakes worked quite well. The foreman, who I had been introduced to earlier, eyed me with a blank stare, giving me, to my mind, tacit understanding that I would be training on the job. I had been assured by a few of the guys there, including my dad, that I could pick it up. I started out on my first pass into the riverbed, heading toward the first sand bridge to cross over and down into the riverbed. Previous passes from from the other dump trucks had left deep grooves in the sand bridge, as well as loosened the overall structure. As I drove across, reaching about halfway, the sand bridge gave way to the right, tipping the dump truck and causing it to slide sideways down the side of the collapsing bridge. I pushed on the brake pedal, pumping it maniacally. I was in a harness, so when the dump truck came to rest on its side, I was left hanging in the harness. It all happened in a few seconds, and I don’t remember hearing anything except a roaring engine, then a kind of silence as it slumped sideways into the sand, silt and mud.

I climbed out of the dump truck, circled around its sunken edge and found everyone standing around its underbelly in silence, staring at what looked like an exploded ordnance, which I quickly realized was the enormous drive train that had exploded into shards of tangled metal. After about ten seconds, which felt like thirty minutes, the foreman, Tony, asked the job site mechanic, “How much you think that part is?” The mechanic, taking his hat off and wiping his brow, said, “ten thousand about.” After about another ten seconds of silence, the foreman asked the job site mechanic, “Where we need to get the parts from?” The mechanic thought for beat, put his hat back on, and said, “Sweden.” Another ten seconds of silence. There was a short discussion about the sand bridge, how to shore it up, and a warning to others about crossing the sand bridges. The foreman told everyone to get back in their trucks and keep going, explaining the job was probably set back another three weeks, probably costing about $250,000.

It was true that the sand bridge had been weakened, and that if I had had a few passes at trucking out mud with success, I probably would have been fine. But the humiliation of exploding the drive train of a million dollar dump truck was the push I needed to tell myself that that kind of work wasn’t for me, wasn’t my calling, and that even though it was $10 an hour, it wasn’t worth nearly killing myself or someone else.

My dad’s friend, Larry, who had hooked us up with the work, told me later that that stuff happened all the time, and that the week earlier someone had driven a scoop loader into one of the tires on one of the dump trucks, exploding the tire. It cost $3000 just to replace. That made me feel a little better. But I never really wanted to go back and try driving heavy equipment again.

**

Last week I was talking with the new Dean of Language Arts at the community college where I am a full-time English Instructor. I was explaining to her the image that I have of what it means to teach English Composition at a community college in California, especially in an urban area (San Jose in this case). I explained to her that after teaching composition in the Bay Area for seven years, the most apt metaphor I have is that it feels like crashing an airplane in slow motion that lasts sixteen weeks. After about teaching three years I gave up the fact that the plane would ever take off, learning that taking off is not really the point. The point is to learn how to crash the plane well. Or better, to learn how to comport oneself while it crashes, to be vulnerable, to open oneself to the students so when the plane is going down—it goes down every single time— some of them will say to themselves, “I'm following that guy out of this mess.” In short, as I learn to trust myself more, some of the students trust me more, and there begins teaching. I haven't really moved on much from that experience of crashing the dump truck, except that now I do it in slow motion in front a bunch of strangers. And I get paid more than $10 an hour to do so.

ERICA LEWIS

2011-08-23T09:18:00.001-07:00

erica lewis is a fine arts publicist in San Francisco. She has worked in public relations since college, in Chicago and the Bay Area. Books include collaborations with artist Mark Stephen Finein, camera obscura (BlazeVox Books) and the precipice of jupiter (Queue Books); a new solo chapbook project is forthcoming from Ypolita Press.

When I first received the invitation to contribute to the PLP, my initial reaction was “no.” In my “real world” job, this is one of the busiest times of the year, and if I chose to write something, it would not be my finest work. I just did not have the time to be witty or do research, or write what I really wanted to say the way that I wanted to say it. Because my work schedule was killing me. Which leads me to write about my old friend balance, or rather, the fluctuating balance between work life and writing life. What I give up on both ends of the spectrum to maintain a semblance of equilibrium between the two.

-------

My writing and work life are endeavors that I try to keep very separate. Not mixing the two has been my way of maintaining a pseudo-balance between “day job” and “artist.” I am very guarded about that line, although a writer friend reminded me recently about a time when that line was severely blurred. She asked if I still wrote poems on a notebook in my lap while I drove to work, recalling years ago when my morning commute was really the only time that I had to myself and my thoughts. I had forgotten about that. That was – quite literally - a dangerous time. I mean, who tries to write while driving down 280?! My work life has changed quite a bit since then. It is still a constant struggle to maintain a balance, a true separation, between work and art. I still work a lot and have fairly little “free” time, but, happily, I am in a place where I can say no, I no longer have to write in my car.

-------
I am a theater publicist. What, in the old days, would have been called a flack. I work for money publicizing theater companies, dance companies, circus troupes, and their various stage productions. I write press releases, art direct photo shoots, and work with the media – theater critics, radio hosts, tv reporters, bloggers, et al – to place stories and ensure reviews of my theater’s productions. I have had the opportunity to work with some amazing performers, directors, playwrights and journalists; I’ve also had my fair share of dealing with numerous “egos” and “crazies.” I’ve been doing this in the Bay Area for about 10 years. And I’m good at it. Really. Two years ago, SF Weekly voted me the best theater publicist in the Bay Area. But I am also well aware how all consuming my day job can be; technically, I am always on call. Staying on top of things, no matter what time it may be, is one of the things that I am known for. There is the occasional 5am text from a reporter. The sleep-rousing phone call on my day off from a publication looking to fact check. The neurotic actress leaving voicemail after voicemail about info she let “slip” to a reporter. Or, helping a critic on deadline, in the middle of the night, who happened to leave their press materials in the restroom of the theater they are on deadline to review. I wake up in the middle of the night with anxiety about getting my theaters coverage in the ever-shrinking world of newspapers and arts reporting. I go to sleep thinking about the list of pitches I have to send the next morning, who I haven’t heard back from, and who I need to check in with. I am well aware that my workalcoholic tendencies intrude upon my artistic life. It’s hard to switch from one mode to another. I don’t get out nearly as much as I should. I am way behind on my reading. Sometimes I’m just too mentally and physically drained to even think about writing. I’m not complaining; these are just the facts. The fact is I have taken to sleeping with a stack of books beside my bed, poems of people whose writing I admire, those that I don’t stay in touch with nearly as much as I would like, and those whose work just makes me “feel better.” I am a big fan these days of writing that makes me “feel” better.

-------
Whenever anyone at my day job asks about my life as a poet I am rather shocked. I am also loathe to really answer them about my life as a poet because in my mind it crosses the necessary divide between personal and private, what I want to share about myself as an artist with the people I have to work with on a daily basis. Conversely, few people in my immediate artistic community know what I actually do to make money. My poet friends just know that I am “always busy” or always “have a show.” I always feel that because I make my money in the fine arts world that it’s wrong to talk about it in detail with my art world friends. I have also found that it takes a fair amount of explaining to both groups about what I do in my professional life and what I do in my artistic life. For the people in my writing community, what they really need to know about me is more or less on the page. For the people that I work with, what they need to know about me is pretty much what they see everyday – someone who is reliable, and organized, and who will take your call at 5 in the morning. Sometimes the two worlds unexpectedly collide, like on the day I found out that a poet who was reading at an event I was hosting the following weekend was also the print broker for the theater I was working at; he literally stood in my office, right in front of me, for a good 10 minutes without recognizing who I was; I could tell from the look on his face that it just didn’t compute that I existed outside of the poetry bubble, and frankly, I was just as surprised to see him standing by my desk. I don’t know how I would react if someone from my day job randomly showed up one of my poetry readings.

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Three years ago I quit my stable and fairly well-paid position at an agency to strike out on my own. I had a solid part time job as an in-house publicist for one theater company and a few freelance clients lined up. The idea was to work fewer hours, thereby freeing up more time for writing and other artistic endeavors. Cut to the present and I find myself working almost as many hours, if not more, than before I quit my job, with fewer benefits and less time to write! While I do have flexibility with my hours and what some would say a luxury in working mostly from home, and more freelance clients than I originally anticipated, there is way more stress and responsibility attached to my daily work life now that it's my name on the letterhead, so to speak. I sometimes question why I’m still doing this or whether or not I still love what I do as a publicist in the arts – this was my dream job and it glittered, and now, after 10 years, some of that glitter has worn off, to be quite honest. After all this time, it’s only natural to feel a little bit jaded. But, this job is also what allows me to continue to write the way that I write and to grow in my writing practice – to buy the books and music and magazines from which I pull influences; the opportunity to experience (for better or worse) the innermost thoughts and behind the scenes practices of some of today’s up and coming and established writers, journalists, and theater artists. In a way, I feel as if my writing has become more focused and spontaneous, perhaps more emotional, because of all of the changes and challenges of my day job. So, when I think about it, and I often do, I tell myself that I should never regret the decision I made to leave my agency job, to have taken that leap of faith. It’s been difficult emotionally, financially, and artistically, but it has also been rewarding.

ROBERT MITTENTHAL

2011-08-23T09:18:00.000-07:00

Before the continuous pouring process changed everything, Robert Mittenthal spent a summer in a steel mill working a number of jobs with impressive titles, including: assistant nozzleman, slagger, hooker and head hooker. He also worked as a janitor, dishwasher, library clerk and bookstore clerk prior to beginning a long career in the legal industry as a paralegal and litigation support person. His new book, Wax World, is just out from Chax. He blogs from Seattle at http://rmutts.blogspot.com

Day and Night – Night and Day

Day and night, night and day, why is it so 
That this longing for you follows wherever I go
 In the roaring traffics boom
 In the silence of my lonely room
 I think of you  

Day and night, night and day
 Under the hide of me
 There's an oh such a hungry yearning burning inside of me 
And this torment wont be through 
Until you let me spend my life making love to you

OK – I’m not really here to talk about how Sinatra powerfully translates Cole Porter into swoonsong, but about how Jacques Ranciere’s Nights of Labor might help articulate the problem of labor in a way that forces us to think, that induces us to take a risk.

I've been reading Ranciere's La Nuit Des Proletaires, a history of “nights snatched” or reclaimed “from the normal round of work and repose.” The workers’ frustration was with the time sunk maintaining “indefinitely the forces [of their own] servitude… the humiliating absurdity of having to go out begging, day after day, for their labor in which one’s life was lost.”

Ranciere's archival project details the dreams and busy nights of French workers in the 1830s, who were “dreaming and living the impossible: the suspension of the ancestral hierarchy subordinating those dedicated to manual labor to those who have been given the privilege of thinking.”

The grievances of these workers were not just about working conditions and pay. They were looking for a different kind of emancipation. They were “doubly and irremediably excluded for living as workers did and speaking as bourgeois people did.”

Ranciere does something difficult; he questions the purity of proletarian concerns, which he argues often seeks out a wicked third party to expel, just as Plato expels the sophist as undignified, as “undestined for [philosophizing] by nature...” But there is no need to equate occupational and mental capacity. The emancipation to be pursued should conquer the useless – to take time to go where we’re told we shouldn’t go.

In Nights of Labor, Ranciere restricts himself to thinking with the workers via their archival texts/traces. He doesn’t presume to think for them, that is, he tries to keep his own intelligence out of the picture; he resists the urge to compare, to explain, to critique. This is consistent with his subsequent and more widely known book, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, in which he argues for a presumption of equality, and against explication in education, rejecting the master-student dyad.

Back to the contemporary problem of Day and Night, i.e., how to productively “struggle to ‘do two jobs,’ that is, how to make artworks and earn a wage to support ourselves”?

To cope with my Day job (as a “litigation support” person in the legal industry), I have tried to partition or protect my Nights, in effect I’ve attempted to lead a bifurcated life. I rarely talk about my nightlife during the day, and vice versa – though both lives are seasoned or infiltrated by their other.

This social bifurcation is perhaps a failed attempt to create ala the Saint-Simonians: “a different space for [our] lives as workers… restoring … the dignity of [our] nature which is sunk in the twofold servitude of work and the quest for it…”

The process of specialization, which divides jobs to make the worker more fungible, and/or eliminates jobs altogether, has led us toward the realm of so-called affective labor. We find ourselves in a situation where Day always has some purchase on the Night.

Nightlife isn’t all it’s cut out to be. The danger is no longer that you will merely take the job home, it's that the job has already taken you home. You know you're in trouble when you solve a work problem in your sleep, or while laying sleepless in bed.

To quote Steve Shaviro:

“Hardt and Negri are … right to assert that the extraction of a surplus — which is to say, ultimately, of profit — has now extended well beyond the factory, to encompass all areas of social life, and that this means an increasing appropriation, not only of surplus labor-power, but also of what Marx called “general intellect,” or the accumulated knowledges and capacities of human life as a whole — including things like habits, everyday practices, forms of know-how, and other potentialities of human (and not just human) “life” in general.”

We’ve become entrepreneurs of ourselves. Trapped between performance measures and ‘personal’ operating plans. There is a frightening new transparency in the culture of the Day. Affective laborers are asked not just to accept the law of the market but to internalize it, to think the same way as the owners extracting profit from our labor. We workers must increase productivity to maintain our employers profitability and competitiveness, else the entire business may fail. The dominance of “market” as an arbiter in all forms of economic and social life seems nearly complete; it’s accepted as a force of nature, a kind of gravity.

Worker-consumers now identify more efficaciously with lifestyle choices and preferences than via economic or social class. The individual is now “free” to commodify or repackage himself – via the very products the individual consumes or prefers. There is a sinister echo here with how we are forced to participate in a labor market; that is, we are likewise forced to participate in this social tagging or construction of a “self.”

The desires of worker-consumers have been very successful pandered to -- via both product and political marketing. Perhaps Jenny Holzer got it right with her aphoristic: “protect me from what I want.” But what alternatives are there to setting ourselves up to wait for ‘need’ to reemerge as dominant over ‘desire’?

Ranciere calls Platonic Marxism a discourse that has been co-opted by capitalism, imprisoned in its own circular system that has to stand-by – waiting, hoping that something will happen, that the conditions for the new will emerge. Ranciere says it “hides itself in the inverted image” and is built on the same presumption of incapacity and inequality. You can’t because you can’t. Ultimately you are left stultified, impotent to escape.

One interesting line of flight from this waiting is to follow Isabelle Stengers’ suggestions in her brilliant article Introductory Notes Toward An Ecology of Practices. How to construct or invoke social technology of belonging, to leverage that which attaches us and/or obligates us to think and act in new ways, i.e., as part of the practice of belonging to this social nexus or practice.

Or as Frederick Jameson suggests, we need “to think the break,” rather than a “picture of what things would be like after the break.”

“The formal flaw - how to articulate the Utopian break in such a way that it is transformed into a practical-political transition - now becomes a rhetorical and political strength - in that it forces us precisely to concentrate on the break itself: a meditation on the impossible, on the unrealizable in its own right. This is very far from a liberal capitulation to the necessity of capitalism, however; it is quite the opposite, a rattling of the bars and an intense spiritual concentration and preparation for another stage which has not yet arrived.” (Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 232-3)

We can attempt to induce collective thought. Not tearing down but respecting others practices, presuming the equality of others – which doesn’t mean we should expect manifestations of intelligence to be equal. Different intensities of attention will generate unequal results. We need to pursue the problems that force us to think. But to identify what activates us is no easy task.

To quote Leninology: “Be unrealistic, demand the possible!”

STEFANI BARBER

2011-08-23T09:17:00.000-07:00

Stefani Barber moved from the West coast where she was born, raised, & cultivated, to New York in 2006 to pursue a career in journalism. She now works in broadcast news as an associate producer, researching, booking, wrangling, writing, shooting, and editing. Her work has appeared most recently in Aufgabe #9. A chapbook, non eligible respondent, was published by TAXT press in 2006. Her work also appears in the Bay Poetics anthology (Faux Press, 2006), The Capilano Review, and Step Into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature (Wiley, John & Sons, 2000), among other publications.

Coincidence of something primal— the primal scene witness then fear— new York city

demands— an empty vessel / overflowing with oneself

& this was lost in the transition— from the one coast to the other— the one idea of oneself— to the other—

or was it a burial— this thing that I hoped would someday break the surface— the work in the meantime stamping—

A flight again, & the people there— I tell myself, this is the poetry of experience— believing all of this to be written somewhere—

(the dirty blue notebook almost forgotten & with half a mind to leave unremarked— its hiding place under the airplane seat—

because what I do— the harder I work at it— begins to take on that function— bridging—
confounding— the foreign landscapes— & people’s ways of being— forces a different self—  to surface—

(is still a choice that has drained me— the best hours spent in pursuit of my material survival— & not the other kind— where I work for “free”—

invest in something— whose return is mostly intangible—

impossible to shake off— to reposition my stance— look inside at space—

Take those quiet hours— own them—  
without fear—  

(I create a special morning — but that time of day — is not mine    

We are people— we are like birds

& the little books of verse on the train— in that, no different than the religious
at first it was strange to read this way— I believed the act requiring solitude— some control 
over one’s circumstances— but that’s not how it’s done here—

so in the din— among the religious— little books of verse carve out—

songs from branch to branch, beside the highway— breasts of crimson & olive—

this is a beginning, a way inside, which becomes a way out, & to connect— 
because being unmoored— exacts such a cost— one that somehow, seems easier to pay— 

but when the little creatures land—

at the kitchen sink— long foreign drives—

banishing morbidity—

seated with my candles burning—

I know you can. I love you.

Is the time to be free.

2011-08-17T10:28:00.001-07:00

Dear Friends,

We're about a month shy of Labor Day 2011--and what a year it's been for worldwide considerations of repression, labor, economics, and politics! Last year, we convened in Oakland for two events, to consider as a community questions of art, work, and politics. Those incredible presentations and critical conversation immediately afterwards have led to many further considerations on the Poetic Labor Project blog, and many conversations in real living rooms, bars, etc. since.

This note serves as a call for anyone who might be interested in collaboratively organizing an event for this Labor Day. It's our sense that these issues remain important for our community, and obviously have become critically responded to around the world this year, from the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, to the cities burning in England as we speak.

If you're interested in helping and/or presenting at a gathering this year (which will be held on Sunday, September 4th, from 1:00 p.m. until 6:00 p.m. at the Niebyl Proctor Library in Berkeley), please write to plp.labday2011@gmail.com. All are welcome and encouraged to be in touch, and please save the date!

JULY AT THE POETIC LABOR PROJECT

2011-07-26T09:29:00.000-07:00

We're so pleased to announce that responses from Kit Robinson, Brian Kim Stefans, and M.C. Adams with Camille Roy are now posted on the blog. To download a pdf of all three, please click here. If you'd like to join our email list, please write to labday2010@gmail.com to receive a monthly notice when new content is posted to the blog. Finally, if you've got a more extended set of thoughts than fits in a comment box, please feel free to send those along any time.

Thanks to our amazing respondents this month, and as always to you for your solidarity!

M.C. ADAMS W/ CAMILLE ROY

2011-07-26T09:10:00.002-07:00

M.C. Adams has worked in the software industry since 1985. Her employers have included Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and a number of start ups. She has extensive background in languages, compilers, grammars, translators and other software development tools. She is the founder of Beelucid Software.

Camille Roy is a writer and performer of fiction, poetry, and plays. Her latest book is a collection of poems and prose called Sherwood Forest. It is published by Futurepoem.

Landslide Brought It Down
A ground level view of the American economy

by M.C. Adams with Camille Roy

I'll start by going back to the spring of 2003. I was walking down an apartment building hallway towards the door of a technology startup called Friendware. I had a feeling of assurance. Behind that door I believed lay my next job. Despite the fact that none of 35 mid-career professionals in my recently completed Advanced Java class had gotten a job, I believed I would get this one.

I was right. The glib follow up would be, It went downhill from there. But getting the job was a little bump on a downhill slide which was already in progress. Just days before, another member of my class had taken me aside and whispered that at the thriving small company where she had worked for 15 years, business had just evaporated. Gone. She was laid off and her prospects were dismal.

So I opened the door to Jack Porterfield's apartment for the interview knowing that some sort of economic turn had started. I was unsettled, but more curious than afraid. I had no clue that the way events would ultimately shake out would shock me to my shoes.

Jack had a recently issued patent and high hopes for a new product based on it. My assignment for him was a side project which was supposed to earn operating income as he crafted the first release of a technology that he had been working on (with breaks) for probably seven years.

At first there was just one other employee (a secretary, whom I'll call Stephanie) and we worked in his apartment which was high on the northern side of a building on Broadway. It was furnished in basic startup style: Office Depot tables, a dirty wall to wall carpet, workstations. But it had a view that swept from the Golden Gate to the East Bay hills. Given that it was a job, I had some perfect hours there. Sea breezes flowed through the room and I could look up from my desk and watch sail boats leaning with the wind. The air over the Golden Gate held an intense yellow sparkle of sunlight reflected from the water. One day a window in the adjoining elegant art deco building was open and for hours a large filmy curtain undulated in the wind.

As it was Jack's apartment and he was the boss, we settled into his rhythm – insights and plans, laced with jokes. “Excuse me if I'm yanking your chain...” he'd begin. One day I was working on an awkward technical corner case when a chat from a sex worker popped up on my screen. 'Hey Jack sweetie call me...' etc. Jack saw this and told me flatly that he loved prostitutes. I felt apprehensive. Was this the sort of boss confession that would lead to unwelcome asides or even advances on female staff? No - Jack was too cool for that. He just liked prostitutes. He had a little engine of liking that filled the office. He loved his ex-girlfriends (who called frequently) and his many friends and talked story about all of them.

Do you want to picture Jack? He was rotund. Fleshy and pale, with dark hair, thinning on top. About my height and age. His grin was easy and made his lower lip stick out. He was from New York. Strong accent. In his younger skinnier days, he went to the same dance club I did, back in the 80's (the I-Beam).

Some interesting things about Jack: he had written a couple of novels. He was one of the first 20 hires at a major tech corporation (Sun Microsystems) and he walked out of that job with stock options that at their maximum were worth 100 million dollars. (Sob story: he didn't cash in anywhere near that.) He was also part of another company that had gone public. As these things are scored in Silicon Valley, this was an excellent show. To start off his career he had gotten the highest score in the country on the computer science GRE. And he'd earned a Ph.D when he was only 21.

For most tech entrepreneurs, there are at least a few bright flashing indicators of techno genius. Jack was only unusual in that he told us about them. How gabby he was!

But a boss is not a friend. He paid me a third of what I'd made only a year before. A third! When I argued with him, it seemed there just wasn't any more money. It was that or no job.

And, along the way, there were more signs of economic disintegration.

A few months after I started, Jack hired Howie Lee on a technical marketing contract. The interview took place behind a closed door but after Howie left I heard Jack on the phone bragging to a former colleague.

“Why should I outsource to India or China! I just hired an American with a Masters in Computer Science, for a little over double minimum wage with no benefits? Plus – he's got contacts!”

Why, indeed. Salaries were plummeting all around. I felt lucky to be employed – although Howie did not seem to feel that way. After a few weeks he quit Friendware.

At home I began to surf the web trying to figure out what was going on. I discovered the columns of Stephen Roach, who at that time was the lead economist for Morgan Stanley. He had a column in a newsletter for big clients, where he laid out all the shiny new profit making opportunities. He described one of the major new opportunities as the 'Global Labor Arbitrage.¹ This boiled down to offshoring American jobs to low wage and low regulation locales, and then pocketing the savings as higher corporate profits. He documented that this was happening rapidly, not only for manufacturing but for insurance claims processing, legal services, and even corporate technology research and development labs – the top of the American value chain. This newsletter had tables of data for job cuts in America while centers, labs, plants and so on were opened overseas, to robust hiring. The numbers were in the tens of thousands, for individual companies (such as IBM). There wasn't a peep about this data in the mainstream press. No newspaper bothered to do the research, and the corporations were careful to keep this massive job transfer under the radar.

Roach at that time had misgivings. (He has since gotten with the program and written off the USA, in favor of China.) He said that this new profit play, the 'Global Labor Arbitrage', implied the end of something important, which I had also never heard of. This thing he called the 'Great American Jobs Machine'. This term seemed to be well known in certain circles. I learned that in these circles it was regarded as the secret ingredient that all along had been making the country function. Who knew. We didn't need good schools or nationally funded health care or well funded unemployment insurance or re-training, etc. We didn't need a European safety net because we had this magic Jobs Machine. It enabled us to assimilate immigrants, provide upward mobility, and, with a lot of rough edges, support 'The American Dream'. If our 'Great American Jobs Machine' broke down, there would be trouble, fretted Stephen Roach.

He was advising the corporate employer class to, in essence, go gently as they left the United States. Instead of just turning out the lights, they should sponsor re-training, or something. I had an uneasy feeling of recognition. Chicago, when I was born, was throbbing with manufacturing, with miles of flaming smokestacks and many hiring halls. From my neighborhood I could see the so-called Largest Steel Mill In The World. When I left, manufacturing was rapidly departing, shedding unions as it headed for Southern right-to-work states with lower wages and benefit costs. It is hard to describe the depressing feeling of growing up in a deeply entrenched economic decline. The chill has a particularly penetrating quality. There's a rising tide of shabbiness. Broken windows, even in schools. Gangs become more entrenched and violent, as the economy withers.

There is a narrative that goes along with this kind of economic abandonment. It consists of a flurry of reasons Why You Are Not Worth It. You are: Too expensive! Too many benefits! Not flexible! Not educated enough! Over educated! Too old! Too young! We don't like you! You smell icky! The content varies but the message is snide and weirdly unanimous, as the press assumes the role of echo chamber for the board room. Abandonment forces into view the fundamental nature of capitalism-as-adversary. So when I originally chose a skill to train for, I picked one that I thought would be in a fortified position. I wanted my work to be incomprehensible to most people. Highly technical. Making me harder to replace. I figured this would give me a measure of security, decent pay and benefits, the whole bundle.

And it had been a great ride for 17 years. For 12 of those years I worked in a lab with high levels of expertise, commitment, and stability. It was the kind of place where you could take graduate computer science classes at Stanford on company time, paid for by the company. At one point I even had one day off a week to write poetry (I earned this through high productivity). Some employees called it the 'Happy People' company (a.k.a. Hewlett Packard). The corporate culture was apolitical and imbued with a faith in founders and free enterprise. Despite my engrained skepticism of these things, they seemed to work. The deeply agreeable environment produced clear and effective technical communication and problem solving. Strong egos were mostly neutralized in the overall niceness. A colleague of mine, an immigrant from a country of hard politics and lively all nighters where conversation and vodka flowed freely, complained about our American shallowness. “You go to a cocktail party here. And you are not allowed to talk about politics, sex, religion, or death. What can you talk about? There is nothing to talk about!”

In retrospect this shallowness seems like an American form of innocence.

The facility where we worked was big. It was off the 280 Wolfe Road exit in Cupertino. There were many very large buildings and many very large parking lots. It took me nearly half an hour to jog around it, during my lunch break. There was a huge amount of work concentrated there. During my interview I was shown the fab (chip fabrication) labs. People in white safe suits moved like ghostly robots behind thick panels of glass. These facilities soon departed for cheaper environs but the software and chip design labs and technical marketing offices expanded over subsequent years into new buildings in what had been remaining patches of an old orchard. The jack rabbits dashed around in confusion as they lost habitat until I didn't see them anymore. I was sad about the jack rabbits but there was an ease to the sense of a rising tide. We were all doing well and it remains overall the most decent place I've worked.

By the time I worked for Jack, I had been gone from Hewlett Packard for six years. The world outside my highly functional corporate cocoon continued to surprise me. I learned that people wanted to extract value from my skill set while paying me as little as they could get away with. The relation was extractive. I was the resource, like aluminum. Hewlett-Packard was very interested in developing its staff, but this was hardly universal, I learned. This creates conundrums. How freely do you offer your expertise to the people who are paying you for it? Sometimes staying silent or writing incomprehensible code actually increases your value in these extractive relationships, because they can't get rid of you as quickly. They must struggle to extract the value they need. It turned out I was not good at these calculations. The habits of openness and helpfulness that had been explicitly inculcated at the beginning of my career at Hewlett-Packard were too strong.

This issue came up as I was working for Jack. He had taken what I thought to be a wrong technical turn. I explained the issue in depth. I told him what I thought should be done: scrap the existing work, start over (it wasn't too late) and I showed him a different technology that would make the work easier, more extensible, and less fragile. I offered to do it, quickly. He nodded indifferently. I wasn't sure I had gotten through. It turned out I had given him so much information he felt he could do the work himself. I was laid off.

With my new free time I continued to investigate the queasy economic moment. I began attending meetings of laid off tech workers. These were dispiriting gripe sessions mostly. Young hipster types tossed their longish hair and looked indignant that a movement was not available to them. The political apathy and centrism of the corporate workplace had worked its enervating magic on us. It was like floundering in jello. The only people who wanted something like a union were out of a job. I felt sorry for the older guys were might never work again. Some were facing bankruptcy, loss of their homes, kids dropping out of college because tuition money was needed for the bills. Most often whether you plunged or tread water had nothing to do with merit. The music stopped, and those who happened to have a chair were fine.

I learned from the papers that 40% of the tech jobs had disappeared, and that this was the biggest job loss in any community since the Great Depression. Deep pervasive silence greeted this information.

After a month or two, Jack emailed me. He wanted me back, at that incredibly low wage rate, of course. Fine with me. Once back I found that he had gone in the direction I had suggested and made a bit of a mess. I needed to clean it up and finish it. There was also some work that I could do that involved his patent.

While I was gone, the economic downhill slide had manifested in Jack's digs. Gone was the fabulous view. The new Friendware headquarters was a plain and functional apartment with no view and bare floors. It was near Japantown. Stephanie was still there, now looking anxious as she tipped around in her sandal heels which made clicking sounds on the wood floors. Jack was muttering about running out of money.

I kept my head down and plowed through the work, which was going well. Jack's talking story in the office continued. I learned why Jack had not released the technology based on the patent a few years earlier. Boom: tumors. He had gotten sick. One day tumors burst out everywhere, he told me. As he was in his early 40's this was totally out of the blue. Like many (most?) entrepreneurs striking out on their own, he carried no health insurance. He had to let everybody go just when he had a major client about to sign his first big contract. His remaining capital all went to cancer treatment, and now he was a million in debt.

A million! I couldn't imagine it.

The project I was working on soon had its first users and things seemed to be going reasonably well. I wondered to myself whether he had counted on more demand. There was some demand, but it didn't seem like enough to be the fountain of capital that would support the other technology, the one based on the patent, which he had not yet released.

As my project would wrap up soon, I began to contemplate my exit, or my negotiation strategy: which would it be? On the one hand, the patent work seemed interesting and I thought I could make a contribution. For that project, he was more interested in a technology sale than he was counting on building a company, which made it seem that there might be a payoff for me if I stuck around for a little while. And if I couldn't work that out with Jack, the levels of disloyalty and instability which seemed to be coursing through the field made me consider starting my own company. To build my own house, as it were, as shelter from the storm.

Then Jack obtained some funding from an 'angel investor' – not a lot but it encouraged me to negotiate for a real job with stock options.

Jack was firmly negative. There was no wiggle room at all. I left and started my own company.

I would check his website every couple of months. I was curious about the progress of his business – wishing him well despite feeling a little tug of resentment. After skipping a few months I checked it and realized it hadn't changed since my previous visit. Suddenly I felt dread. New companies with new products have constantly changing sites, to trumpet good news, to provide updates and new releases.

I searched for his name. This was probably in April or May of 2004. I quickly found an obituary, dated February, 2004. There was no information in it about the cause of death.

I wondered if his cancer had come back. If so, death had come incredibly fast. Then I recalled a comment he had made which was so outside of my frame of reference that at the time it slipped by me. He said, apropos of nothing I can recall, “If this company doesn't work out, there is nothing for me.”

I had met an ex-girlfriend, but forgotten her name. I knew she was getting a PhD in Computer Science, and I remembered the university. Their list of doctoral candidates jogged my memory and I emailed her: what had happened to Jack? She replied right away. When it became clear that the business would not make it, he committed suicide, in those cheap digs that were the last headquarters of Friendware.

In 2005 one of Jack's many friends put up a memorial website (home², about³, photos⁴).

Part 2.

That's such a discouraging story.

It's a sad story.

You're sad.

Yes.

So how do you shift gears and get on with the rest of this? There's a lot more you want to say.

I'll get there. I'm building my fuel pile. You know how I like to blow things up. But first the story about Jack reminds me of what happened to Oluchi McDonald.

Son of our dear friend, the brilliant poet and teacher Akilah Oliver.

Let's go back to March, 2003. Oluchi had severe gut pain. But his health insurance had lapsed (temporarily). So when he was taken to the ER at a private hospital, they refused to treat him. The crap hospital that accepted him (since closed down) kept him for many hours untreated and even without pain meds. After seventeen hours he died in his own vomit. Twenty years old.⁵

Completely treatable condition, right?
Yes.

An utter tragedy.

Yes. Also the product of a depraved system.

...But we continue. We're in for the long haul.

So a question formed in my mind. It's the basic question, the one that mutates or cracks or balloons according to current conditions. And that is, what the hell is going on?

I began to investigate our queasy health care moment. A study on the impact of lack of health insurance on American health had just come out, done by the very best people (The Institute of Medicine of the National Academies). It found that about 17 thousand people died every year directly because of denial of care due to lack of health insurance.⁶ Direct causation. Oluchi was direct causation. Indirect causation – such as Jack's suicide as a result of health care debt – would give you a much higher number.

So that 17 thousand would include Oluchi but not Jack.

Right.

Jack is part of that much bigger number.

Right.

I felt weirdly relieved at the horrible statistics. There was a presidential election coming up and I expected that the Democratic candidate would address it. Change is slow but acknowledgment that it's needed is the beginning, right? So I waited.

Waited. For the war hero to take a stand. Was the issue even mentioned in the campaign?

No.

Why not?

Good question. Over the next few years more studies came out: some said 45 thousand died every year⁷, another said we had an extra one hundred thousand dead every year.⁸ Lots of dead Americans. Over a decade or so – up to hundreds of thousands! Meanwhile we are over in Iraq killing Iraqis by the hundreds of thousands and taking thousands of American casualties supposedly because some Saudis killed 2,985 Americans on 9-11. If Arabs kill Americans they can't catch a break.

And life goes on. My brother in law was trying to start up a restaurant in Florida. He worked extremely hard, getting it ready as fast as he could. No money coming in. Doing the work himself. And that meant he had no health insurance. So when he got sick, he put off going to the doctor. He ended up in becoming critically ill with acute pancreatitis and was in the hospital for a week. This put him into tens of thousands of dollars in health care debt and he had to declare bankruptcy. There have been long term chronic (and expensive) consequences of his tardy medical treatment. He had to give up on the restaurant before it ever opened.

Life goes on, indeed. At least he didn't die!

We're lucky about that.

The economists have a notion of freedom which flows from what they call 'efficient markets'. Freedom means the market can do its work without restraint. This notion is highly convenient for the those whose deep pockets fund our political parties. They can suck the country dry, deny health care to their workers, and offshore jobs by the tens of millions, all in the name of freedom.

They've hijacked the word.

Free markets. Free trade. Free enterprise. The word used to mean the freedom of the individual to live in a republic of laws based on democracy. Now it means the freedom of the rich to do whatever they want to the rest of us.

I still don't get it. Tens of thousands of Americans have been dying every year due to lack of health insurance. How does this just not register?

Obama did address it, give him his due. Once he gave a speech where he forcefully connected a scheme for national health insurance to the basic moral dictum, I am my brother's keeper.

Which is a fine principle whether you are Christian or not.

Indeed. Then he never mentioned it again. Instead the whole rationale for a new system shifted to bending the cost curve, or something. Policy ping pong.

Meanwhile there was a different energy at the bottom of that campaign. I know because I was there. I went to a several day long organizing caucus for national health care insurance and it was packed. We spend a whole day talking story about health insurance.

A quiet woman in her fifties shared with us that she had gotten cancer after working in a corporation for over twenty years. Health insurance covered her treatment for awhile, but she was disabled for several years and became unemployed, uninsured, and unemployable. She could not afford the medicine or treatments for her condition. She was just waiting in terror for her cancer to come back. Everything about her seemed solid and dignified except the fear in her voice.

And there was a man in his early 30's who looked beautiful, healthy. He was working around the clock on this campaign without telling anyone that he had a fatal condition and could die at any time. When he told us he was uninsurable he burst into tears.

It was an incredible weekend. There was this outpouring of story and energy. Afterward people did their little organizing projects but nobody at headquarters was interested. These workshops were organized by Obama people but they weren't interested in the driving this content into the health care campaign.

The moral case for changing the system was never made forcefully to the American people.

When you don't make the argument, you can't win the argument. The moral case ending up being argued by the Tea Party, who claimed that in the future a new system might possibly include health rationing 'death panels'. For that reason we shouldn't have a new national health care system at all, ever. Also, of course, any sort of national system would hurt our precious freedom.

The irony could kill me.

Yes it could.

Let's check. Since Hillary Care failed in 1993 some studies suggest 300,000 extra deaths and other studies bring us closer to 2 million.

I wonder whether the new system will ever be implemented. It seems the Republicans would do anything to kill it.

Maybe they'll steal an election!

Ha ha. Very clever. But why are you going on and on about health care? Aren't you supposed to be writing about labor?

They are the same, in a way. The deep indifference to American health is mirrored by the decay in our job market. No one makes a moral issue of it, but it is degrading the welfare of tens of millions. I've seen it get worse and worse, and incredibly, it doesn't seem to register.

Why doesn't it register?

You keep asking me that. Part of the reason is this. Our political system (including the media) is now completely consumed by kissing and licking and slobbering on rich butt.

One of those things that once you get an appetite for, you can't live without.

Seems that way. Heroin for the politicos.

How can we get the political class to lose its taste for slobbering on plump and buttery rich buttocks?
Slobbering and kissing and licking. It's a complete package.

I've got an idea about that but it comes at the end. Analysis first! Let's talk about what happened at the Happy People Company.

Hewlett-Packard.

Yes.

I bet they don't call it the Happy People Company anymore.

No they don't.

As you can imagine, since I worked there for twelve years I paid some attention to what was going on. Four years after I left they got a new CEO, a woman. You may have heard of her. Carly Fiorina.

Firoina. Yes. She eventually ran for Senator in California. And she was chief economics adviser to McCain.

Chief economics adviser – what a joke.

An old friend of mine whom I went to school with – I'll call her Ellen – was still at HP. We had started there at about the same time. Ellen's path was in technical management and she was very good at it. Ellen is decent, very smart and capable, and works well with others. She fit in well with the values of the company and her progress up the ranks was steady. Her verdict on Firoina was positive. She was appreciative of having a woman at the top. Just to see what that was like, in meetings and so on.

It's heartening. The way women and minorities can and do get ahead in this country.
Isn't it. We're special that way.

Eventually Ellen's tone changed. It seemed things at HP were not-so-good.⁹ Of course there were a number of very public conflicts that roiled HP through these years. But Ellen was not enthused about the environment inside the company. It was hard for me to understand. I was a member of the technical staff in an era when HP was very serious about developing and keeping the engineering talent. So I couldn't recognize what Ellen was talking about. Still, Fiorina said something in a speech that made me wonder. The gist was: Americans had better get with the program. Because there's no such thing anymore as an American job. Her term for offshoring was “right-shoring”.

I remember that quote was used against her when she was running for Senator. It helped defeat her, I believe...

Yes. When people know what's really going on, they don't like it.

The next time I saw Ellen I was shocked by her news. She had gotten fairly high up in technical management, and had found a good location for herself in the company hierarchy. But she was leaving and gleeful about it. She was snatching an early retirement opportunity offer. She said she was getting out with some extra cash before they had a chance to lay her off. When her manager looked at her in disbelief and said, I can't believe you are taking advantage of this, she chortled to herself. It was one of those private victories.

I realized then that HP must be shedding its technical people – including the very best. A shocking thing to do really, for an engineering company. You would not believe how much expertise a good experienced technical person has. If you are outside the field you can't appreciate this. It was mind boggling to me that HP would take an ax to itself in this way, but by this time I had started to read Roach about the Global Labor Arbitrage, so I had a context for it. Because of course HP was opening labs overseas, especially in India and China. Where the cost of labor was cheaper.

Then HP acquired a new CEO – and he was even worse than Fiorina. Mark Hurd.¹⁰ The most amazing thing he did, that I knew about, was slash two thirds of HP Labs. This was the most advanced research and development part of the company. Slashing costs and increasing profits made him wildly popular on Wall Street. To me it seemed so dumb it must be a joke.

But this is all about Hewlett Packard. One company, a technical company. Companies make mistakes all the time and it means nothing for the wider economy. I bet all those smart people who left or got laid off found good jobs.

The more you learn, the worse it looks. American companies have created millions of jobs overseas as they have cut back here and HP is just a part of that pattern.¹¹ Specifically big American companies cut their work forces in the U.S. by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million.¹²

I was astonished when I found out what had happened in manufacturing. As factories became more productive with fewer people, over the last four decades, they have made more products with fewer workers. But the total number of people employed stayed close to constant – there was a very slight decline. Starting in 2001, American manufacturing employment plummeted. Wow.

Another story that wasn't covered in the news. Had manufacturing jobs returned to 1999 levels, there would be 6 million more jobs in the U.S. today.

Although everybody noticed that most everything they bought was now made in China.

There was uneasiness about that but no good information. Did you know that the USA lost 40% of its manufacturing jobs in the last ten years?¹³ That is a major collapse.¹⁴ It happened after Clinton and Bush greased the skids to get China into the World Trade Organization (WTO). That, disaster, ironically, happened on September 10, 2001. No one noticed because of what happened the following day. But the collapse started then. WTO membership made it easy to replace products made by Americans with products made by Chinese, and the savings went into corporate profits and CEO salaries.

How do you get soaring inequality and job scarcity? Take the actions which will create soaring inequality and job loss.

Exactly. Then act surprised.

Actually there were a few people who had been part of the problem, knew exactly what was going on and who spoke out against the status quo. For example, Andy Grove, who started Intel.¹⁵ But largely, the silence has been deafening.

Yet again.

The deal is, if you can make money through the Global Labor Arbitrage, you are going to do it, unless there is some countervailing power. Unions are an example of a countervailing power, but our unionized sector is small and shrinking.¹⁶ So a huge swathe of our economy and workforce is in the process of being abandoned. The corporations are pulling up stakes.¹⁷

Another example. China has been manipulating its currency for years now, keeping the yuan low. Unlike the dollar, their currency is not freely traded; the central bank determines the exchange rate and they choose a rate that keeps their exports cheap. Many knowledgeable people think it is undervalued 20 to 40 per cent. This should be an unfair trade practice. By lowering Chinese costs, it's increased offshore outsourcing of American jobs.¹⁸

But our government does nothing. The first move would be to label China a currency manipulator and no one had done it. Neither the Republican not the Democratic administrations.¹⁹ ²⁰ ²¹ It's the slobber problem again.

Slobbering and kissing and licking on that rich butt keeps them from protecting the interests of the American people.

Exactly. Corporations want to cut American jobs, and our government enables that. It's a strip mining mentality and ethics. Now it's not just West Virginia, or the Rust Belt. It's pretty much the economy of the nation as a whole.²²

So you don't think our job market is going to recover.

No I don't. I also think wages are going to continue to go down, along with benefits.²³

Something occurs to me, that suddenly strikes me as pretty ironic.

What's that?

We have employer based health insurance, just when employers want to dump us.

A bit of a problem, that.

It's a huge negative for American entrepreneurs. It even has a name: the Golden Handcuffs. Many would be entrepreneurs are stuck in the corporate world and can't strike out on their own (creating jobs for others in the process) because they can't get health insurance except through their corporate connection.

Here is something I don't understand. If this was all so clear, why didn't the smart economists in the Administration know what was going on?

You mean, why didn't Obama's people know that jobs were going to be a problem?

Yes.

That is a mystery. What happened to the American Jobs Machine? It's like a family car that someone took an ax to. Now it is hardly drivable. Was it so hard to notice that someone was axing the family car? They've been working hard at axing it for ten years. Look at what's been damaged: IT, insurance, manufacturing, R&D, back office, call center, on and on and on.

Anyway, it was obvious to me. I was outraged and dismayed by their choices. I think the conventional wisdom is exactly what has gotten us into this morass, and Obama picked advocates and architects of the conventional wisdom. I think he's pretty much governed, with respect to the economy, just as Mitt Romney would have done. The bad ideas have bipartisan support. Of course lately the Republicans have gone off the deep end and Romney is now practically a leftist among them (and trying hard to avoid his moderate record).

It didn't have to be this way – but the seeds were planted long ago. I think the single most essential factor is the crushing of American labor and the withering of unionization. That started in force in the 70's. Note that we have the triumvirate 'Free Trade – Free Market – Free Enterprise' but freedom to unionize is hardly mentioned anymore.

We criticize other countries on human rights grounds when they don't permit independent unions, but hey – we hardly have unions as all. That right there is a powerful indicator of American unfreedom.

Look at Germany. They went through the same financial crisis, and their unemployment rate climbed to about 9% , but it has fallen steadily and is now lower (at 6.1%²⁴) than before the crisis, and still declining. Ours is over 9% and climbing again. What's the difference?

Yes. Tell, please.

There are very strong German unions and they are powerful enough to have a seat at the table.²⁵

Imagine that.

Yes. Action was taken. Lots of different actions. For example, companies cut hours rather than jobs.²⁶ For one reason: power. Germans workers have power and American workers don't. We don't even have indignation on our own behalf.

What I want to say to the unemployed is: You don't have a job because of the scam-what-I-am of American capitalism.

There is one big problem with what you're saying.

What's that?

Tech is booming! In Silicon Valley, companies are poaching on each others employees. Google raised salaries 10% across the board. There is so much recruiting going on – Google even interviewed you.

What do you mean – 'Google even interviewed you'?

I made a funny.

Ha, ha.

Anyway -the fact you don't take into account that tech is booming makes you sound, well, out of touch or something.

I sound cranky and washed up.

Kinda.

Maybe I am cranky and washed up. Maybe today is the day I became cranky and washed up. Or was it yesterday? Last week?

But seriously. This boom has some of the attributes of a skank.

...That probably sounds odd. But it has sketchy characteristics.

Like a bad neighborhood?

Not exactly... It's like this. The entry jobs have been outsourced, mostly to India. When I got into the field, there was a huge conveyor belt from all the local universities into good jobs. Now, if you're entry level, you better be Ivy League. No tramps from San Francisco or San Jose State need apply.

You were a tramp from San Francisco State as I recall.

Right. And proud of it.

Do you think that Google et al cares that the State of California is destroying its public higher education system? I don't see any signs of it. And they are notorious for hiring only graduates of the Ivy League.²⁷ You know what that means. You have to be born and bred into the elite – probably the child of an Ivy League alumni – to get a decent job out of college.

I think the fact that we have high level engineering segment here overshadows how sick the market is.

Apple is a good example of how this current success actually demonstrates the problem. Do you remember the site off of Wolfe Road where I worked at Hewlett-Packard?

Vaguely.

Huge site. Lab after lab. Sort of plunked down in this suburban neighborhood of Cupertino. It took me nearly half an hour to jog around it. Thousands of HP employees worked there. As they expanded, taking up more and more of an old orchard, the jack rabbits dashed around the parking lots in confusion and then finally vanished.

Oh yeah. You were sad about the jack rabbits.

Well that site was completely emptied by HP's offshoring of jobs. And then HP Labs, in Palo Alto, was chopped by two thirds. So the pathetic remnants of HP's Bay Area workforce huddled together in the old HP buildings in Palo Alto, and the Wolfe Road site was vacant.

Apple came along and bought it. They are going to do a really cool Apple style thing with Wolfe Road: one building, partially undergound, underground parking lots, and lots of restored open space and woodlands. A really big part of the site will be open forest.

Fantastic.
The jack rabbits will come back! We can all celebrate that.

I feel sure something is wrong with this picture.

Several things. Apple is a great example of the new economic model for American corporations: American design and offshored manufacturing. Guess what?

You're going to tell me another thing I don't want to know.

Indeed I am. Suck on it.

Apple actually contributes to the American trade deficit.²⁸ So much of their production chain and value chain are offshore, that just the iPhone contributes about 1.9 billion dollars a year to the American trade deficit. Apple's profit margin on iPhones is 64% - they could easily afford to manufacture in the USA and employ Americans, if they were willing to lower that extremely high profit margin even a little bit.²⁹ So they are a symptom of our trade problem, not a solution to it. Also if they produced in the USA there would be lots of jobs created. Probably at least tens of thousands.

But that's not all. There's a seriously creepy thing about Apple which somehow isn't widely known. They are an abusive employer, associated with poisoning and suicide.³⁰ ³¹ We are such suckups for their products that their hipster cred is not diminished.

I can't take this anymore.

Of course you can. It's called reality. You take in loads of it, every day.

At the end you were going to say what could be done. Have we finally gotten to that point?

Oh right. My idea is everyone's idea, all over the world. It's what they're doing, over there. Greece, Tunisia. We can do it too. It's not easy, but it works.

Give the mofos a message they have to understand.

Your Chicago roots are showing.

Born and bred. Seriously. All you need to do is shut it down: Washington, Sacramento, Wisconsin. A blockade. Mass not virtual movement. Bodies on the line. Nobody cares about riots or takeovers of university administration buildings. So shut down the government until it represents the people. Insist on democracy. Make them go cold turkey...

...On their licking & slobbering.

Right. Make it real. Make it hurt.

I grew up with that, so it doesn't seem so strange to me. Maybe we won't need to go there – maybe things will just 'get better'. Does it look that way to you now?

No.

I agree. So imagine – what are people going to do, if it doesn't get better? If it gets worse?

On that note – well, there's lots more to say, but not now.

Yeah. I need a break.

Agreed. Let's say good night.

Night.

G'night.

____________________
¹ href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/22/opinion/22roac.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/22/opinion/22roac.html
² http://jackporterfield.org/index.html
³ http://jackporterfield.org/about.html
⁴ http://jackporterfield.org/photogrid.html
⁵ http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/6936
⁶ http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2003/Hidden-Costs-Value-Lost-Uninsurance-in-America.aspx
⁷ http://www.factcheck.org/2009/09/dying-from-lack-of-insurance/
⁸ http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/27/1/58.abstract
⁹ http://www.signallake.com/innovation/CarlysWay030405.pdf
¹⁰ http://fumh.blogspot.com/
¹¹ http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-economy-rd-20100913,0,3957503,full.story
¹² http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704821704576270783611823972.html
¹³ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-johnson/china-springs-the-trap_b_681855.html
¹⁴ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/manufacturing-collapse/2011/06/01/AGTFhSGH_blog.html#
¹⁵ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-01/how-to-make-an-american-job-before-it-s-too-late-andy-grove.html
¹⁶ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/04/AR2011030406264.html
¹⁷ http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/12/art4full.pdf
¹⁸ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/08/china-u-s-trade-a-big-outlier/
¹⁹ http://www.zerohedge.com/article/tim-geithner-refuses-brand-china-currency-manipulator-again-says-yuan-rate-impairs-china-inf
²⁰ http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=ahdeoAfmllx4&refer=asia
²¹ http://www.asiabizblog.com/u-s-economy/treasury-secretary-paulson-china-is-not-a-currency-manipulator/
²² http://www.thomaspalley.com/?p=71
²³ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/opinion/04krugman.html
²⁴ http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/06/unions-and-unemployment
²⁵ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/business/economy/08leonhardt.html
²⁶ http://seekingalpha.com/article/218576-unemployment-rates-u-s-vs-germany
²⁷ https://www.quora.com/Google-Recruiting-Retention-People/Does-Google-hire-people-exclusively-from-top-tier-universities/answer/Brandon-Smietana?_escaped_fragment_=n%3D40#!n=40
²⁸ http://www.fastcompany.com/1710368/how-the-iphone-widens-the-trade-deficit
²⁹ http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/12/iphones-trade-deficit-problem
³⁰ http://www.allroadsleadtochina.com/2010/05/27/you-cannot-build-a-brand-on-a-foundation-of-an-abusive-supply-chain/
³¹ http://www.allroadsleadtochina.com/2010/06/13/what-did-apple-and-foxconn-do-wrong-everything/

KIT ROBINSON

2011-07-26T09:10:00.001-07:00

Kit Robinson worked as a cab driver, teacher’s aide, mail clerk, poet-in-the-schools, legal proofreader and jury trial reporter before beginning a three-decade career as a corporate communications professional. He is the author of Determination (Cuneiform, 2010), The Messianic Trees: Selected Poems, 1976-2003 (Adventures in Poetry, 2009) and 18 other books of poetry. He lives in Berkeley, where he works as a freelance writer and plays Cuban tres guitar in the Latin dance band Bahía Son.

Get a Job

The question of the employment of the poet has interested me almost from the beginning. My “Taxicab Diaries,” from the summer of 1971 in Boston, was the first thing I had published in Barrett Watten’s This magazine. My serial poem “The Dolch Stanzas” was written in 1974 while I was working as a paraprofessional teacher’s aide at a San Francisco elementary school. Like work of mine to come, “Dolch” made use of the material of the workplace, in this case the Dolch Basic Sight Word List.

A few years later I wrote “Casual Blues” while working as a seasonal clerk at the Oakland Bulk Mail Center. This longish poem was built from stanzas depicting the production floor, written during breaks or while hiding near a window with views of the container port landscape outside. In my spontaneous recording of sense data in real time I was somewhat influenced by Larry Eigner. But I added a programmatic layering effect. Based on each written stanza, new material was generated using a “diagonal” reading technique – first word first line, second word second line, etc. – to form new second- and third-generation stanzas. From these materials the final poem was constructed.

In the 1980s, when I entered the computer industry, the material of the workplace, its language as well as its (other) social formulations, became regular components of my writing practice.

In some ways all of these uses of jobs in the service of writing were perhaps a way of answering a larger questions: how does a poet deal with having to get a job?

Charles Olson: Poet, get a job!

Ted Berrigan: Good Friday you die on the cross, and Easter Sunday you rise from the dead and everything is glorious and wonderful, and then Easter Monday you have to go out and get this job.

I recently became a practicing musician for the first time since my student and post-grad slacker days when music was a form of daily life. My music community today reminds me of the various groups of guys I knew in the 80s and 90s through basketball. Both groups cut across age, race and class lines, with people from all walks of life, as the saying goes, with the added benefit that many of my new music friends are women. In my band Bahía Son we have a jeweler, a teacher, a scientist, a business person, a lawyer, a psychiatrist, a postal manager, a retired administrator and a freelance writer.

Of course, despite the occasional gig we are not professional musicians. The pros live by gigging, touring and teaching, in various proportion. But even many professional musicians also have day jobs. Hence the expression, “Don’t quit your….”

For my musician friends, a symposium on music and jobs would be inconceivable. The time would be better spent on practice. But for poets it seems an unavoidable question. Why?

I think it is because, deep down, we poets resent having to do anything but write. Isn’t that enough?

I read recently that Bob Dylan’s life was transformed at age 14 when he heard Elvis Presley’s “Mystery Train.” “When I first heard Elvis’s voice I just knew that I wasn’t going to work for anybody, and nobody was going to be my boss,” Dylan is quoted as saying.

Ted Greenwald: I be my own boss

But there is another reason for our fascination with jobs, and it has to do with the teaching profession. The evolution of university creative writing and literature departments has created a poetry industry in which the poet can have a viable career and, assuming obligations to teaching, administrative duties, conference participation and publication, even be financially rewarded for her work. The job also comes with some down sides, not least of which is the current conservative assault on liberal education at every level. But to those of us who toil outside the academy, a profession that valorizes poetry, even with lip service, looks pretty attractive compared to those in which it can only represent a conflict, or at best a colorful sidelight.

At the same time, we are aware of distinct advantages for us as writers to remain outside the academy. Otherwise, how could we accept having to work so hard to avoid it, right?

But what then? Some stick to their guns. These are the pure poets. The more heroic pay the price of poverty to uphold the honor of the poet’s art. More power to them! Others depend on spouses or family money. Nothing wrong with that.

For the rest of us, well, we’re no worse off than the amateur musician. We have our opportunities for la perruque, and then there are the pleasures of labor itself, which are not inconsiderable if you are able to do something well. Most work involves helping others in some way, if only others like oneself who are similarly engaged in the dynamics of the workplace.

Poetry helps no one. Least of all ourselves. We pursue it anyway, and this anyway is our bread and butter. It propels us on our way, forward into the mouth of time and finally down the gorge of history. It’s nice work if you can get it.

BRIAN KIM STEFANS

2011-07-26T09:10:00.000-07:00

Brian Kim Stefans worked as a pizza maker and line chef in college, in the warehouse at the Strand Bookstore, as an administrative assistant at the Hair Club for Men, in telecommunications at MoMA, and from then on (after a stint as a graduate student), at a hodgepodge of administrative and temp jobs until landing at Fodor's Travel, where he worked as a database administrator on what would have become (if we knew what we were doing) the predecessor to Google Maps (ha!). He then became the web editor/programmer at the CUNY Graduate School, a part-time job with benefits, where he worked for seven years. After receiving his MFA in digital literature at Brown, he worked as an assistant professor of English/New Media at Stockton College, a state liberal arts college in south Jersey. Presently he is an assistant professor of English at UCLA. Information about his books, videos, programs, graphic design and whatnot can be found at www.arras.net.

My attitudes toward work are probably most shaped by my diabetes, which has not enabled me to live without healthcare. I’ve never been an adjunct teacher, a freelance web designer (at least full-time), etc., and have generally relied, prior to my job as a professor, on a regular daily schedule to help me keep my health in order. On a more philosophical level, I’ve never wanted to be dependent, or beholden to, anything like a grants or awards system, largely because it seemed to me, after the controversies of the 80s around such artists as Robert Mapplethorpe and Karen Finley, that it made much sense to rely on the opinions of judges, especially those associated with the government, to finance your work. Of course, there isn’t much of a grant system for poets anyway, but I tend not to apply for grants for any of the other artistic activities I engaged in.

My first job out of college was at the Strand bookstore. I then became part of the illustrious generation of Bard graduates to get a salaried job at the Hair Club for Men. It was there that I learned word processing, how to create spreadsheets (in something called Lotus 1-2-3) and work with a database. These skills gave me some mobility; I eventually got a job at the MoMA working in the telecommunications department in the basement, which was a great thrill for this O’Hara nut. I then attended a Ph.D. program in English at the CUNY Grad Center and moved back to New Jersey, but left it when I realized that it was largely training for professorships (and not a revolutionary intellectual hotbed which I guess I was seeking). In the late 90s, the internet was just rising – I was meeting folks with liberal arts degrees like my own who were earning what seemed like lots of money programming HTML. Since I had programmed computers since I was 10, I tried to learn C++ and Java and whatever else was out there with the hope of making some money, and also exploiting these new technologies for art.

My general advice for poets in New York is to get some desk job that you can learn very quickly so that, after a few months, you are able to do your own thing on the boss’s time. The other bit of advice is to keep learning new things, especially technological, as the skills are very general but applicable in many places. Maybe it’s my diabetes, or a conservative strand in my sense of the “daily,” but I don’t think a 9-5 job, with its melancholy pedestrian rituals, is that bad, especially in a great place like New York. It seems to me a little dangerous to have a truly fulfilling job, or even “career,” while you are trying to develop as a poet. I was never very creative or ambitious in my job choices when I was younger, and I think that kept me quite free to exercise my creativity elsewhere. As you get older, of course, things change: your youthful excitement at finally being out of school, finally being a practicing artist, meeting tons of new people and generally dreaming about your great literary future gives way to the reality of friends moving away, other friends moving up the economic scale, family dying, the economics of your city pricing you out, your own work getting lost amidst the constant influx of younger, more ambitious and more hip, artists, the possibility of getting too old to learn new skills, etc. What you do for work then acquires some greater spiritual importance.

I’m in the position right now of having a job that is really great. I’m teaching digital literature, new media theory and poetry at UCLA. I don’t think of my teaching as a “vocation” in the way one who had trained to be a professor might, so I didn’t go into it with any more desire than not to screw up, and to make it as interesting for myself and students as possible. Now that I’ve been at UCLA for two and half years, I’m quite eager to make the intellectual and artistic community there, and in Los Angeles at large, a place that continues to attract outside writers and artists. I’m still trying to teach myself new tricks, often in the service of my teaching and art, but also simply to have a back-up plan. I always had a lingering fear that the bottom could drop out at any second. Many in my family are presently unemployed, including siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, and I’m in the rare position of being the guy with the steady job after so many years of waywardness. I’m a little embarrassed that I’ve not, this far along, ever really been able to help out except to offer a spare bedroom on occasion.

I don’t have any terribly philosophical insights into what it means to be a poet in the academy, or what it means to be a poet who works or doesn’t work. I’m from a pretty working class background, not to mention an immigrant background, so whether or not to put in your hours was not something you had the luxury to think about (and culturally, it was considered noxious). I spent a lot of time at a very crappy job in New York because I was too depressed and uninspired to send out resumes – depression is a greater enemy to me than work! – so I don’t recommend that, but having the basic stabilities, along with good friendships, should be quite amendable to writing poetry. I felt quite claustrophobic in suburban New Jersey when I was a lad, so have made it a habit to disappear into imaginative enterprises which, if anything, were intended to take me elsewhere; I supposed preparing for this sudden leap into a transformed future has also kept me on the look-out for something new to learn in case the present just collapses. That’s about it.

JUNE AT THE POETIC LABOR PROJECT

2011-06-21T09:31:00.004-07:00

We're so pleased to announce that responses from Dolsy Smith, Mary Austin Speaker, and Tom Marshall are now posted on the blog. To download a pdf of all three, please click here. If you'd like to join our email list, please write to labday2010@gmail.com to receive a monthly notice when new content is posted to the blog. Also, if you've got a more extended set of thoughts than fits in a comment box, please feel free to send us those as well.

A special thanks to Andrew Kenower for PDF design and hosting. Thanks for your interest and solidarity - see you in July!

T.C. MARSHALL

2011-06-21T09:31:00.002-07:00

T. C. Marshall was educated at Rolando Park Elementary, Oak Park Elementary, Monac School, Sunkist Elementary, Foster Elementary, Lewis Jr. High, Hoover High, UC Berkeley, UCSD, Simon Fraser University, Naropa Institute, San Diego State University, and UC Santa Cruz. Now he educates others at Cabrillo College and writes. He invites responses to his e-mail address: ToMarsha@Cabrillo.edu, or through Facebook where he may be found under the name Thomas Christopher Marshall.

HONOR LABOR

For the sake of spurring further discussions, I will take off here from two slippery moments of impulse: one, my first hearing about PLP from Steven Farmer over nouveau VietNamese food; and, two, from the “Jobs are jails” sentence quoted by one of the original contributors in a larger borrowing from a friend. These impulses were, I think, both toward the same end even though one was a positive misunderstanding and the other was a dialectical angle of indirect opposition. I’d like to think both may have been what I’d call “creative mis-takes” à la Philip Whalen’s funny pointed mis-hearings like “adipose muchachos, compañeros de mi vida.” I hope you will indulge me a bit as I adopt a voice that imagines itself speaking. In the long run, I will answer PLP’s six questions, maybe raising a few more along the way. I look forward to any form of Q&A. Dialogue is the natural dialectic.

Talking with Steve, I took the original question to basically be: “What does your job teach you about your work?” Once I saw some of the original talks and the response pieces, I thought I might have gotten that question wrong; still I asked myself: “What would this look like if I did it according to that question?” That was my positive possible misunderstanding.

My dialectical indirect bouncing off of another impulse came from reading one of those talks. In that talk, a poet offered an idea from a friend that "jobs are jails." I made a leap glancing away from this interesting idea because it seems to me that maybe jobs are more like schools, not in the most positive sense but in the way we can learn from them. My own experience as a student and as a teacher tells me that schools teach mostly in ways obliquely angled off of what is “required” or called for in standard ways. It’s not in what our bosses require of us or the standards they apply, but the very fact of requirements and standards can teach us a lot for our writing. Our jobs can show us a lot about the structure of the world in which we do our work. A job of any kind puts you in relation to things and people and a system of values: this in itself is an education—that it exists, that is, this system in each job a little different but there. Jails are just a power racket cog in such a system, depersonalizing. Any job webs out wider than that, and you can make it show you stuff.

I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak from a position that gets lost too often between the university academics who get the podium fairly often through conferences and publications and the wide assortment of otherwise working poets who have presented so far at last year’s conference and on this blog/site. I work as a contract instructor for a community college district. I have a contract that emphasizes a load of teaching units, a load of office hours, a set of “shared governance” obligations, and participation in a structural hierarchy administering a hierarchized structure of educational achievement. That is not just a casual list; it is my attempt at a concise full description of the factors that rule my job. That list is the beginning of my “what it would look like” answer.

What a job is about, mostly, is expectations, and a job is a good situation for learning about expectations. At my job, it is what is taken for granted as expectations that has enlightened me a little. We are expected to fulfill our contractual obligations regarding hours in the classroom and office, paperwork on paper and not, taking a position in the hierarchy, and taking part in the systems in place. But there are unstated expectations too. We are expected to help students learn. We are expected to have expectations of them. We are expected to act as though the whole thing can and does work. We are expected to act as though we believe that we have academic freedom and that it is being fulfilled in the systems in place. As with any job, a moment of stopping and looking can provide an outside perspective. As with any job, once you have taken this break, the whole game of expectations becomes a farce. A farce is not not worth playing out. That’s where what I call the “gas” factor comes in.

“Gas” stands for “giving a shit.” I see that we are prevented from fulfilling all those expectations by the structure of expectation itself. My own expectations have revealed to me what I have to call the “unteachability” of my students; this is their sense of certainty, of knowing already just like the bosses do. Instead of tossing up my hands or my lunch, I meet this with a dialectical complement of teaching “uncertainties.” I have the good luck and the tough luck to get to work on writing itself with them. Their certainties about who they are and what they know provide a resistance that is both good and tough. I then get to act as if I care to help them overturn their over-determined individualisms. Held within the system, still I try to create assignments with requirements to see meaning as being built, in flux, momentarily determined, not hard wired, never forever. I play this inside the farce of the larger play I’m paid to be part of, and it gets me gassed.

The other thing that gives me energy and even ideas for my works is what my students teach me. They inspired me to succumb to Facebook and to find a way to let its form teach me what I could write there. I saw that FaceBook would allow me to post a “status” statement or to “upload a photo” and add a comment on it. I saw that these choices were both strategies of illustration: I could tell how I am doing OR I could show something and tell you about it. Having been through a thirty-year history of toying with illustration as the relation between words and photos (by doing slideshow poetry readings at D.G. Wills Books in La Jolla or printing poems on postcards or any number of other tricks), I saw an opportunity here. I started writing pieces where one rule for composition was that there had to be a photo that responded off from something in the lines, that it itself acted like a line does in the best Ted Berrigan poems—that it both “fit in” and go somewhere else, somewhere new.

I found some more guidance in thinking about putting these pieces on my wall as an inverse form of filling in the space where I was asked to “say something about this photo.” One rule for these poems now is that they be dependably readable for any one of my Facebook friends. Another two come from my students’ ways of thinking and reading, too. They have shown me that they are oddly numbed to image, probably from living in a world with so much of it that it has become what words already are for so many people, transparent. They are also transparently dependent on the concept of “person” as a crutch; so, these poems start with perception rather than person, though they let it in as a place to sit down now and then. From all this, I have composed a book called Post Language, all made out of posts from my Facebook wall. It will appear as a blog book one of these days, avoiding the paper page.

That idea came from a goofy play on a couple of truths from my students’ lives. Working with my students led me to see that one of the most important things for them is getting away from treating the world around them as Mom & Dad. Another big thing is that tests and textbooks suck wind. Looking for the humor in this, I decided that I could talk about tests in terms of the Documentable Achievement Deictic thingie (D.A.D.) and that the textbook fit in with this when I saw that poetry also held onto a security blanket that could be called the Marketable Object Manifestation thingie (M.O.M.). Perhaps, I thought, I could get away from M.O.M. and help them get away from D.A.D. too.

My job has shown me that people have forms they inhabit and that you can’t simply talk them out of those in most cases or maybe even never in any case. They must be e-duc-ated, led slowly out from where they are through what they already know to what they hadn’t yet thought of, to the new or at least to the looser. Both students and my colleagues command and subtly demand such a respect for what they think they already know, and sometimes, often times, they won’t budge unless it is along the bridge of what they think they recognize. “Illustrativity” is just one of those things. There is a whole world (rather strongly represented on FaceBook) that depends upon it, just as Cabrillo College depends on its structural hierarchies of administration and its structure of what it calls education. The poets’ answer is, “Look; it doesn’t have to look like that.” But to get to that work from the job is the proverbial trick. I suggest that we can do it by taking the energy that exists as something like an electrical resistance within the job and its forms; I have tried here to describe how that works for me with the needs and tensions in the charge I have been given.

That energy creates the space where I nervously await the shut down that inevitably comes, from an attitude, a need for a grade, a term termination, whatever. I think my answer to half dozen questions lies right there. The form of my work comes right from my job of meeting people in this space. The constraints of my job life are the energeia of my poetic life. The classes I confront (and I mean social classes, no joke about school classes here) are really just two: the sure individualists who corroborate their own positioning by the haute bourgeoisie and the aristo-owners, and the structural collaborist who sides beside labor by building. One has made the known; the other makes thinking. It gets shut down eventually, but we will have gotten to give a shit along the way. These two classes are the same among poetry readers & listeners. I work with that. I work at a college too. You would have to say that I am not “institutionally unaffiliated”; however, inside the institution I strive to be. Financial reality requires me to stay there. I dig the “wig,” and flip it. In the poem, I collaborate with what I can expect the readers to think they know; I work simply with that. I trick us both into stealing something from our own unsureness though. I let the poem close, and maybe they walk away thinking they know something, even something new. That’s OK. The moment, though, was there when they didn’t know for a moment while they had to think their way through a turn of phrase, a repeat of a word that shows it different from itself, an image that is not quite illustrative, for example. They labor.

DOLSY SMITH

2011-06-21T09:31:00.001-07:00

Dolsy Smith is a librarian in Washington, D.C. He writes regularly but doesn't publish much. At present, he is enjoying three months of research leave, working on a book about academic writing as lure and discipline.

As an academic librarian, I am blessed with one of those “day jobs” that all the time seem less and less plausible: a job with adequate salary and benefits, job security, professional standing, and a forty-hour week that neither swells with overtime demands (like much white-collar work) nor drains one’s waking hours of their vitality (like manual labor or many service jobs). As a librarian, I enjoy the privilege of doing “knowledge work” not immediately recouped for capital - teaching, research, and writing - although the saturation of the university by the managerial unconscious continues apace.¹ But unlike my friends and colleagues on the faculty, who pour themselves through the sieve of those intellectual activities to find only the desperately small residue of institutional recognition and rewards (positive evaluations, publications, conference appearances, occasionally a raise or promotion), my “day job” is such that I manage to keep a good part of myself in reserve. Perhaps more important for my lucubrations than having time for them is being able to dedicate a mental space: a private space apart from the circuits of performance and reward. For the past several years, keeping my poetic work private has been the precondition of my doing it at all. I worry, of course, that past a certain point this approach proves self-defeating, but at the same time, I can’t seem to make plans for the work itself - apart from planning to make time for it amid other obligations and solicitations.

I am happy with my choice of career, and I do enjoy my job, even though there is something about it residually unsatisfying. This dissatisfaction doesn’t stem simply from its status as wage-labor, nor from its disciplinary character; after all, writing poetry is a discipline I can escape into at the end of the day. To put it a bit abstractly, the soul of work courts power and possibility - the very modalities of poeisis - but managed work pits those modalities against necessity and control. I have been thinking lately a lot about the concept of information, which we in the library profession use to talk about the work we do. It seems as though, from the librarian’s point of view, all the products of intellectual and creative activity - all works, in other words - should be reducible to this one common and universal substance, amenable to algorithmic principles of organization and storage - amenable, in short, to the logic of control. In a fascinating essay, John Guillory points out how much of the writing of modernity falls under the heading of informational genres: genres whose intent is not to persuade, imagine, or reveal, but merely to document or report: to render transparent to those in authority the activities of labor, or conversely, to convey to labor the decisions of management and the designs of capital.² In other words, as JoAnne Yates argues, these genres of writing make possible the extension and ramification of managerial control on which the modern organization depends.³ I think the distinct lack of pleasure (or lack of possibility for pleasure) that attends writing in modes like the annual report - apart from their blatantly ritualistic character - has to do with the fact that the intention of these modes is, as Guillory notes, profoundly anti-rhetorical. Although they do not, of course, succeed without rhetorical resources, one knows, composing in them, that their institutional function, their raison d’etre, prescinds from that dimension of language that gives language its rhetorical power: from its being as material, personal, intimate, affective work. And so these genres of writing mirror the situation of organizational labor writ large, which is performed under the compulsion to ignore the feelings that attend its performance. Managerial structures demand that we cloak affect in efficiency - a disembodied rhetoric that proclaims the perfect justice of the code.

Again, I feel fortunate in that I can muster a certain amount of passionate investment in my job. Professionalism permits a sense of autonomous responsibility (over against the expectations of management), and I do often find myself passionately engaged, when working with students, arguing with colleagues about pedagogy, etc. Nonetheless, the passionate and moral commitments that work serves and inspires are not the same feelings that abide in work and that, from moment to moment, condition its performance. For the most part, the passion that I can muster on behalf of my job feels different from the pleasure I take in writing poetry. At issue, perhaps, is the work of time itself. As passionate investment, work looks toward the future as means to ends. As enjoyment, work appears as an end in itself - if the word end lends itself to what vanishes upon its presupposition. It tends to fill time, “as a glass may be filled not just to the level of the rim but slightly above.”⁴

Of my own poetic work, I would say that it amounts to a long, slow struggle to let language overflow the presence of my self-control. It is useful, perhaps, to distinguish control from constraint: the latter is arbitrary, extrinsic because chosen, and generative; the former is necessary (because internalized), intimate as my own reasons for doing anything, and repressive. Control manifests itself in my writing as an appetite for meaning and as a drive for self-expression, where these terms suggest the representation of moral or aesthetic truth, but also as the tilt toward any larger set of purposes to which I might subscribe the work. It is manifest, in short, as an urge to justify the work, inhabiting effort and devouring it from within like the larvae of a wasp, that gnawing self-doubt that can chew on an incomplete sentence for hours inside its fragile paper dwelling.

To emancipate the affective character of work seems like an admirable undertaking in any domain, not only in art. If it starts there, well, maybe it’s because art, as tradition and social practice, sustains traces of that character - of those characters, rather, flocking to efface themselves, in which is written down our inadequacy and our despair.

¹I borrow the phrase from Donna Strickland, "The Managerial Unconscious of Composition Studies," in Tenured Bosses, Disposable Teachers: Writing Instruction in the Managed University, ed. Marc Bousquet, Tony Scott, & Leo Parascondola (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004).

²John Guillory, “The Memo and Modernity,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (2004).

³JoAnne Yates, Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1989).

⁴Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: U of California P, 1980).

MARY AUSTIN SPEAKER

2011-06-21T09:31:00.000-07:00

Mary Austin Speaker is a poet, curator, blogger, book designer, and teacher. She founded Triptych Readings poetry series in New York, blogs for the Bryant Park Word for Word series, and is currently an art director for HarperCollins Publishers. In August she will begin teaching composition and work as a freelance book designer.

A few weeks ago, I gave notice at a job where I have been paid more than I have ever been paid in my life. For the past twelve years, apart from three years off to complete my MFA in poetry, I have worked as a book designer at a major publishing house. On Monday of this week, my upcoming departure was finally made public, and two of my colleagues were laid off in addition to my own position being eliminated after my departure. When I informed the publisher for whom I work that I was leaving, he was disappointed to see me go, but encouraging and happy to see me pursuing my writing in earnest.

Everyone I work with has agreed that this is a good time to leave the business. Ebooks are beginning to eat away at print budgets. Corporate publishing might be imploding in their rush to make cheaper and cheaper books. "All books should be free!" said a friend recently. I flinched, and saw the book industry vanishing in the same digital act of disappearance as the music industry. Yet I'm inclined to agree, and take some solace in the fact that the book-as-object is gaining in value as quickly as the book-as-information is losing it. Letterpress shops are becoming increasingly common. Small presses abound. Quality seems like it's beginning to matter again. Artistry. I have made my living working on objects—inexpensively made printed books— that are becoming increasingly less valuable, but as this happens, my conception of value is beginning to change anyway.

When I was 23, I became active in my company's union, a local of the United Auto Workers Technical and Professional sector. The collective bargaining agreement covering about 350 employees was about to expire, so I joined the negotiating committee to renegotiate our contract. This was the same year that the MoMA workers (members of our local) struck and picketed. The economy was flush with tech-boom dollars, and our paltry wages had come to seem antiquated. When I argued that our labor was worth more than we were being paid for it, I was told that people work in publishing "for love." Love as a currency deliberately used by one of the largest media companies in the world was a disturbing notion. But to some extent he was right. We work in publishing because we like the air— there is a shared value system at work that recognizes the worth of writing. But we are ultimately making a product declining in value, we are made to be more and more productive with little compensatory rewards, and this gets more and more heartbreaking the more you're doing it "for love." I resisted the proclamation that love should be an adequate compensation for wages we felt we were owed. We received, in the end, significant raises. We felt triumphant, though we were still paid relatively little.

Years later I would find myself setting a line of type by John Ashbery, or designing Werner Herzog's film diary, or working late into the night with Patti Smith as she fretted over word choice, and I would think, "I can't believe I get paid to do this. I would do this for free." They were rare moments, but they cast long shadows. And I was paid well to do that work. In love and in money. Each are valid currencies. But I think it's appropriate to designate certain spheres for those currencies to be acceptable as payment. Poetry operates in an economy that is barely monetary. Its currency is much more abstract— an alloy of music, seduction, relevance, performance, artistry, hype, bravado. Some of it might be love. That is what has started many a press.

I am looking for an economy that understands value to have many iterations, money being only one among these. In a few months, I am moving from New York to Iowa, where things are much cheaper, and I have more room to be naïve, or at least experimental. I have never gone off the beaten path before— always I have been employed by a major corporation or living on fellowship at a university. In the fall, while my husband attends graduate school, I will enter a new economy, and I expect to be paid in love as much as in money. I am already grinning stupidly when I read about the course text for Argumentative Writing, the comp class I’m teaching in the fall at the local community college in Iowa City. To teach argument! To discuss corporate responsibility and the abstraction of family in class with full-grown adults!

When I was hired to do this, I received an apology regarding the pay. I know that full-time adjuncting is not a sustainable kind of employment for me, but a class here and there is enough to keep my enthusiasm up and my energy focused on a service that I think is necessary, helpful, important. This is part of the economy of labor that I would like to recognize more: What is necessary? What is helpful to create a world I would like to live in? What kind of labor can draw me closer to the kind of community that I want to be a part of? What kind of work can provide the most fertile ground for writing poems and making art? Working full time in the service of others has not, thus far, been terribly fertile ground for this— the poems arrive, but the sustained attention required to put together and publish a book is always cut short.

I expect my values will change over time. Already I feel a bit conflicted about teaching. Am I diluting the negotiating power of full-time staffers by offering my occasional services? Should I value that concern above my own need to do good, worthy work; or the education of full-grown, dedicated adults, who might become more responsible citizens as a result of my labor? Where, ultimately, is my labor most valuable? Who is responsible for the value of labor? These are questions I would love to see explored by others.

I will need to eat, of course. And have health insurance. For that I will lean on my husband as he has leaned on me. For other expenses: thrift, invention, freelance. I am young enough to afford to do this. I have no children and no debilitating medical conditions. I realize this luxury, and the luxury of mutually supportive partnership. And I feel beholden to exploit these things, these two years of no expectations, for the brief time it's available to me.

2011-05-25T10:11:00.000-07:00

We're happy to present our 3rd round of responses: May's contributors are ter Braak, Bhanu Kapil, and Dana Ward - to download a pdf of all three, click here.

If you'd like to join our email list, please write to labday2010@gmail.com to receive a monthly notice when new content is posted to the blog. Also, if you've got a more extended set of thoughts than fits in a comment box, please feel free to send us those as well.

We are pleased and grateful to be part of a larger conversation around poetics and labor. Lately, we've stumbled across some pretty amazing projects: Amber DiPietra and Michelle Puckett's new working class reading series, the SFMoma conversation around Shadowshop, Mark Nowak's recent Harriet posts.

These and others inspired us to start building a sidebar of links on the PLP blog as a "Poetic Labor Library." If you'd like to send us resources to include in this library, we'd be much obliged.

A special thanks to Andrew Kenower for PDF design and hosting. Thanks for your interest and solidarity - see you in June!

-Brandon Brown, Steve Farmer, Lauren Levin, & Alli Warren

BHANU KAPIL

2011-05-25T10:02:00.000-07:00

Bhanu Kapil lives in Colorado, where she teaches at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and maintains an integrative bodywork practice. Her most recent book is humanimal [a project for future children] from Kelsey Street Press.

A Poetics of Labour

1. How do you navigate your employment life and your poetic life energetically?

As soon as I step over the boundary of Naropa's campus, I put it out of my mind. If something particularly intense happened -- an insitutional crisis or interaction -- I give myself until Route 66 to let it circulate in my mind. When I cross the intersection of Highway 287 and Route 66, that's it. I don't think about it anymore. Much the same thing unfolds after a bodywork session. When I cross the threshold of the room in which a session has taken place, I forget what I learned or knew. This is complicated in cases where, for insurance purposes, I have to write up my SOAP notes. In those cases, when I have finished the notes, I wash my arms to the elbow with salt and hot, then cold, water. And when I close the door to the space for the night, I turn around and bow to it. At the end of classes, too, we bow out. It is simple bow. We meditate, then I indicate the bow by saying: "We end with a bow to the space between us, which is the space of writing and the writing to come." The energetics are about sealing these spaces, perhaps because what unfolds inside my work environments is invariably volatile, interesting, and intense.

2. How does your employment life relate to poetic form in your own work, or in poetic work generally?

From bodywork, I derive a language of the nervous system -- of the carapace of fat, light and electricity that surrounds or packs a nerve -- and I apply this to the sentence. The sentence, in this formulation, becomes a site for memory processes and pathologies, but also speed. The speed at which something might pass from one site to another, below the level of conscious reflection. From the work with the fascia, I derive the "diagonal line" as the axis of release, a phrase I also encounter in the post-colonial essays of Gayatri Spivak. In classrooms, I encourage my students to work upon this diagonal, and to translate between the flows of a body, and a text.

3. How do class relations play out in the poetic sphere or how do they appear in or affect your poetic work?

They played out for me in England as almost zero access to arts administration culture. The arty world. In the U.S., I don't read as working class - race stuff, too, is different - and so bypass what might otherwise circulate around my body as a member of a class. Or race. Is this true? In my writing, I return, inexorably, to the world I am from. Currently, I am writing a novel of the race riot, set in Southall and Hayes, the working class area of north-west London I lived in; a part of London that perhaps someone from another part of London would not call London. For example, I once went with my friend Mickey Cooke to his guitar class, and we went back to his friend L.'s flat. Turns out L. was an EARL. L. was a bit flirty. I went to the bathroom. It had white shag carpeting and lightbulbs around a mirror above the bathtub. When I came out, L. and Mickey were drinking Pimms and Lemonade, but it was time to go. I said: "Nice to meet you. I have to go." L. said: "What part of London do you live in?" I replied. He said: "That's not really London though, is it?" I left and waited for a bus. It was a double decker bus, the old-fashioned kind with an open deck. As the bus pulled away, L. came running along beside it in the traffic. He shouted: "When can I see you again?" But I still felt ashamed from his remark and did not respond.

4. Contemporary working and living conditions and their effect on writers. (Vs. other times, other locations).

House with garden and chicken coop. $800 mortgage, though I live an hour out of town. Gas money. I cannot afford to live in Boulder: $1900 for a two-bedroom apartment. I support myself, my mother (recently emmigrated from India), and a ten year old son on my salary from Naropa University, which was, until recently, in the 30s, but is now in the low 40s. My home is also the family home for my sister, who is completing a degree at CalArts. I supplement my income by working in a low-residency program at Goddard College, but Naropa is about to require that we do not "moonlight," presumably so that we can be more present on campus, which would support retention. I also work part-time as a body-worker. For this reason, I try to enjoy my work and take as much pleasure in it as possible, and to make it into something that nourishes my writing. I try to live a creative life every day because I do not take holidays or have a private space of any kind. How does this affect my writing? If I was not a single parent/care-giver with one to three jobs, perhaps I would be a South-east Asian novelist!!! But I am not. I am not a novelist. I think part of becoming an experimental writer was that it was a mode that allowed me to think about, collate and theorize fragments. What makes life liveable for me is the daily happiness afforded to me by the stability of my home, and the kindness of my neighbors. I also feel very nourished by my encounters with other writers, in places that are not, typically, the place where I live. I try to live a life of daily adventure, and to appreciate the freedom to write or perform towards the race riot scene, something I can't imagine doing, or having done, in the UK or India. (Though perhaps I'm wrong.)

5. The stance of the institutionally unaffiliated artist or intellectual in relation to the academy.

I was unaffiliated. Now I am affiliated. Sometimes I fantasize about being unaffiliated. This will have to wait until an Argentinian businessman on a skiing trip to Colorado falls in love with me and says: "Bhanu, I want to build you an adobe house in the hills. But I'm allergic to cats. Brenda will have to go." Also, the places where I teach -- two outrider or alternative writing schools -- don't have much money or funding, so -- I don't know about how much of an academy I am a part of. Perhaps I am deluded on this point; perhaps that is a ridiculous statement. Yes, I think it is. I have the privelege to choose my stance. What else? I rarely talk about writing with my core faculty colleagues (we don't have tenure at Naropa); but rather, with writers who are, in the institution, "staff." This is a diffcult one. Am I corrupt? Yes, I am corrupt if I am a part of an institution that has practices I don't agree with, especially as they affect staff. That are dodgy or inequitable in some way. I am corrupt if I don't protest them. Anne Waldman has been a mentor to me in this regard, though on some level, if I lost my job through an anarchic resolution, I then worry about my mum. I am her immigration sponsor, so I have to have a stable job. This is a strange country. Health care, immigration status and economic forces converge upon the question of affiliation. As for my status within the academy itself, nobody seems to care what I do. I feel a great creative/experimental freedom at Naropa, for example, which balances the crap pay and the need for financial stability. I say it is crap pay, but it is really not. It is pay. It is about ten times more than what my uncle, an electrical engineer, earns in India. Also, let's face it, if I lived in England, it is almost unfathomable to imagine being a professor of any kind. I am so grateful to this country for the gift of intellectual and practical work: teaching experimental writing. And the writing of it too.

6. Additionally, we are interested in specifics of everyone's job or trade that might be invisible to many.

At Naropa, I drink tea in the biodynamic green-house on campus, then lie down next to the strawberry bed. In my massage space, when a client leaves, I do a back bend over the table. At Goddard, I film Douglas Martin climbing a tree. I fall over in the snow. I walk into the surrounding woodland with a drum, at dusk, for Shiva Pooja, which no-one sees. To prepare for a facial, I gather rose hips from the foothills and mascerate them to a fine paste; I mix this paste with cream. During a reading, I see the violet outline of an accompanying presence, and sometimes, I feel the awareness of an ancestor turned upon me in the room.

DANA WARD

2011-05-25T10:01:00.002-07:00

Dana Ward is a poet & works (gratis) as a full time childcare provider for his daughter Vivian. They go to malls & parks together in Cincinnati, OH. You wouldn't believe some of the weird & interesting things they've seen in the mall lately, wow!

Under the urn cork, confetti

From Things The Baby Likes (A-Z)

Delirium Tremens: I worked at a liquor store in coastal Maryland when I was nineteen. My boss had worked there since he was nineteen, &, because he fondly remembered the privileges bestowed on him by his boss he allowed me to not only buy bottles from the stock but more extravagantly to run up a tab, which meant every night, since I was young I longed for sugar, I’d settle on a pint of E&J or Southern Comfort, & an airplane bottle or two of Yukon Jack, the latter I'd pour into a fountain Mellow Yellow & nurse on the long commute inland, getting home by nine or so half drunk to find Brandon painting or reading or looking out the window, at which point we’d share the other bottles, talking some, or working in our rooms. Mornings at the liquor store some of the regulars would come in with a look of pleading shame in their eyes, dt’s flaring badly, & we'd try to make jokes to deflect the abjection but it was like being an apothecary, all of the colorful bottles in the sunlight.

Quitting Your Job: On my last day at my previous job I was given a watch stopped at 4pm (“Quittin’ Time”), as a farewell gift. It’s beautiful to be in possession of a broken clock that’s right not only twice a day but always, or more precisely, never, with an intimation of always. I have it on the windowsill beyond my computer & I move my eyes from the face of that watch to whatever I’m doing on the screen, just as I once flashed my eyes from the screen to the working clock above the office door.

Winning the lottery: There must be some kind of Marxist numerology one could employ to uncover a secret yet meaningful ratio between the current price of gasoline & that day's lottery jackpot. Their physical proximity on gas station signs suggests a deeper, occulted significance, some mathematics of extraction, risk, fantasy & labor, which, if discovered, might turn out to be the phantom denominator long thought to have been scribbled beneath Debord's famous graffiti "Never Work". Examined by experts in 20th Century insurrectionary forensics, the ink in which this ancient graffiti was written has been revealed to be the same ink used to print lottery tickets today.

ter BRAAK

2011-05-25T10:00:00.000-07:00

This iteration of "ter Braak" speaks out of a political need to stay private, a "contra-literary" need to establish a defiant anonymity, and a private, personal need to function from discreet "subjectivities." Not to be altogether confused with the genuinely original Dutch critic M. ter Braak, who chose a brave, self-determined form of physical termination in 1940, just days before the Nazis were coming to fetch him for resistance against their regime. This iteration believes, or hopes, that if both the reader and the author are thoroughly subtracted from the proverbial equation, possibly a different (or at least differently satisfying) writing can be actualized.

I know a fellow who got in a big U-Haul Truck packed with 17 years of "California" and actually drove almost his entire existence and his whole cat Frankie O'Hara back to western New York in 1999, not necessarily to study under Robert Creeley at SUNY Buffalo and get his Ph.D union card, but maybe to work as a golf pro for a couple of years. He ended up relocating quite precisely in the exact spot from which he had escaped 20-plus years earlier when he had previously removed his body from the suffocating parochialism of small towns and gone off to college in Florida, then to graduate school in hippy wine country Sonoma County, CA. Indeed, he ended up right back where he had begun becoming aware of where he was (in cultural time and space) and how much his perspective could change what he saw outside and how much others' perspectives from outside may altogether obscure what one sees inside or out as well as inside-out. He ended up right back in a fucking factory, surely exactly what he had most assuredly and, he had been convinced for several years, permanently left behind, thoroughly abandoned, thoroughly and distinctly turned away from, for his entire adult life. Wowie!

He's been there for ten years. Works in a cubicle, possibly Cubicle 22. He's still not sure what's his number. Hasn't figured OUT how precisely he would locate the exact latitudes and longitudes of such endlessly tropical brown, grey, light grey, dark gray, medium grey, dark gray twists of local color and universal nexuses he's been designated yet. Much to be said for functioning as a fully expatriated non-Nationalisticalist who GOT IT early in late teens, that is, how many nine lives a Rosy Crucifixionist, a “Ghandi with a penis," or any other cosmodemonic and really quite angelic beat_read free spirit in a completely invisible set of mindsets can bring to a workplace and subculture. First of all, well, the "mirrors" that one dull manager after another surrounds us with, Sir, they will indeed force us to become invisible, as they cannot reflect very much, if anything, that is truly real about one's own true light. They can reflect back merely what they are capable of seeing and understanding, and it's far removed from any borders of their own sanity defenses. At the same time, those very limits prescribed by such mirrors force the reflection object to manifest even greater or more concrete inner subjectivities, for the reflection object, himself (in this case), does nonetheless repeatedly feel the holes in his own several mirrors formed by relentless attacks on a dignity that refuses such monstrous alienation and degradation.

Fortunately, any body and his or her sisters can keep a small writing tablet in a private pocket and scribble potentially public notes to reconstruct every concrete block, stain, sheen, spot, and crevice of material, physical objects nobody sees and feels when locked in the far toilet stall at the south end of some Romanticist’s Stalag 17 but here more aptly, simply named Building 17 for twenty minute intervals. There, the whole world is literally within arms' reach and no supervisors can look over somebody's shoulder to espy whether anybody is revising the eight poorly written and ill-edited "Software Installation Procedures" said supervisor gives done subordinate to revise because said supervisor, lacking even rudimentary writing skills, cannot write them himself/herself; it just takes too much time or too much patience, and best of all said supervisor’s done subordinate works with those operating systems and applications on a daily basis, and bestest of all, done subordinate actually taught 50-100 sections of Freshman Composition in a previous career that was much more flexible in terms of self-determination, even determining when it's time to take a powder and make an inventory of the toilet paper dispensors all said and done back in Building 17 or Stalag 17, either/or.

Factotum-22 also gains great freedom in an 8-5 (or every other week 7-5) Information Technology "day job" in the factory by embedding somebody’s writing even more securely right under the company's nosiness. Quite in matter of fact directly assigned to create and edit documents, including web pages, for the company's Auditing Systems, it's really a quite, quiet, and small matter, via the immaculate invisibility of transparent fonts, to blend into the more obscure documents all kinds of poming too dense and impenetrable for even the Language writers to appreciate, much less recognize as "Poming." Of course, yes, surely it's written in all manners and forms of computer and networking jargon and behind the surface appearance of ostensibly technical data of the HTML pages that render yet something else altogether, underneath there, in little pockets of "Comment tags" neatly or haphazardly encoded in java scripts and the eighth or ninth page of the crew's cascading style sheets, there it is, an entire playground nearly permanently inscribed right beside the company's bottom line legers and legal documents, yet essentially eternally invisible. There one can register remarkably crude, direct, and quite challenging chess-game-long logics and logistically superior attacks on the government that the company owns and on the actually relatively few underwhelmingly conscious executives in the company who control that ownership or find such ownership, unwittingly or criminally, gratifying. And nobody will ever know that it's even there unless they really, really must, and then Factotum-22 may well reveal it to them eagerly and gladly, but for now, it's just relaxing and sleeping there, pretending to be comatose, as it probably needs to stay there awhile.

But this is all terribly smarmy and phony. Let's be real! The workplace can be tirelessly, genuinely alienating for writers, but so what? Who are they, anyhow, some spoiled bunch of buffoons who've inherited not only wealth but some kind of delusion that "the World" (for "the World," choose from your own abilities to make and create such a concept," Reader-X) owes them "a Living." No law against what goes on inside one's mind, though, and if one has to steal away to the waterclosets like any other average Joe/Lulu, Sir -- to jot things down or otherwise reflect on what one really thinks meaningful -- so be it. If one has one's work done, and if one can in fact "multi-task" quite well, and most writers/"dreamers" have taught themselves to daydream since Kindergarten, what's wrong with writing a book or two or three on the so-called “company's time” that is left over from THE COMPANY'S TIME SAVED because one has gotten one's "work" done with greater efficiency and speed and conscientiousness than the professional and accomplished delegators alluded to above can muster and for which they get "the big bucks" though they DO little more than assign unloved win-win labor to their subordinates. Yeah, maybe it's a factory, sure, it is, but even Persig observed that one can begin with a brick in the wall and travel light-years and eons and galaxies without straying from that initial, nominal 10 mm mortar joint which circumscribes such lush English bond between Capital and Wobbly-head. And pomers just "talk to walls," anyways, usually walls that reflect blank slates, but that the pomer wants to turn into a big house of mirrors in order to feel secure and happy in life.

LARRY KEARNEY

2011-04-25T10:42:00.000-07:00

Larry Kearney was born in Brooklyn in 1943. Publications include Dead Poem (White Rabbit), Five (Tombouctou), Kidnapped (Foot), Oz and Damaged Architecture (Smithereens), Streaming (Trike/O Books), Passion, Transmission, and The Only Available Substance/Please Keep My Word (with Sarah Menefee) from Worm in the Rain Publications, a personal press through which he has published a large number of titles.

Jobs

Lathe hand, Kearney Engineering

Draftsman, Kearney Engineering

Brooklyn Public Library

Postal worker

Poet

Architectural model-maker

Machinist, Franklin Machine Works

Power Room installer, Western Electric

Postal worker

Editor, Sierra Club

Landscaper

House painter

Knife-case maker

Bookbinder

Truck driver

Manager, David Wold International

Ghostwriter

Desktop Publisher, Nadja

Correspondent, Latin American Trade Finance

Teacher, New College

Teacher, Dunham Academy for Gifted Students

My father was working class independent. In the thirties he’d organized a strike and while everyone had supported the action, no one turned up on the line. He was a tool and die-maker and designed and produced numerous machines for Naval Research and the chemical thermometer industry, among others. He ran a one man shop, except for me, and in bidding on jobs filled out forms that asked whether he had five hundred employees or less.

He was disappointed that I didn’t want to go into the business, and felt I had a certain talent for it. I could have pointed out that the books he read to me, and the stories he told me, and the fact that he once sat on the side of my bed in the dark and told me that he’d always wanted to be a writer and live in San Francisco, had something to do with the way my mind was. But the topic never came into the open, and he acquiesced gracefully to what I chose to do.

When I say he was working class I mean that as a complete definition. He had no desire to move up in social status. All he wanted to do was be the best at what he did and be paid for it appropriately. He found that being the best at what he did, and solitary, didn’t automatically translate into appropriate pay. As a matter of fact, it was something of a drawback. He struggled all his life with the middle-men, and the glad-handers.

He was literate, and particularly well-read in history, and he once told me that the reason he didn’t argue politics with the people in our building was ‘you can’t argue with people who don’t read.’

After making a pilgrimage that involved climbing a hill on her knees in the rain to reach an officiating priest, his mother had died at their home in Galway. He was nine then, and an altar boy. He never went to church again. He was sent to live with an aunt in Gourock where he was persecuted daily as a Paddy, and where he finally escaped into a torpedo factory during World War One where he worked as a thirteen year-old lathe hand.

As a teenager, he traveled around Ireland with a fair, putting up and taking down the tents, and in his early twenties, he went to England then shipped out on a United Fruit Company steamer. There’s a confusion of passports from the time, with subtly different names on them, and my impression was always that he’d had to get out of England fast. On the way back from Central America, after a bout with malaria, he jumped ship in Delaware and took a job at the Wiimington Hotel, where he was a table captain.

He met my mother in Brooklyn where she’d been living for four years after her arrival, with family, from Glasgow. She was seventeen, and her father had been a welder and steam-fitter in the Clydeside shipyards.

The whole of my father’s political perception, and he never told me anything that didn’t turn out to be absolutely true, was in, “They all talk about how they care about the worker and all their patriotism, and they wrap themselves in the bloody flag, but everything we’ve got we had to fight for and as soon as they get the chance they’ll take it back and kill anyone who gets in the way. They’re the same people, Lawrence, and don’t ever forget it.”

What he gave me was an abiding love, and a built-in bullshit detector, and a standard—a view of the world quite apart from any notion of upward mobility, or tugged forelocks. There was room in his world for the arts (he took me to see Renoir’s The River, and Olivier’s Henry V, and Powell’s, the Red Shoes when I was five and six and seven). and laughter, and courtesy. He offered me the world, such as it was.

Things got tough in the late sixties, and he was working longer and longer hours. The war in Vietnam enraged him, and he became president of the local democratic Club and turned it toward Gene McCarthy. He marched with my mother in DC, where they got tear-gassed for their presumption.

The world as it was and will be, and the power of those who cared about power, created the conditions that prevailed and ate his life entirely, finally. He died in ’74, poor and very sick.

He gave me a solid place from which to view the world, and a solid sense of what you needed to do, no matter what your job, in order to see things accurately and behave as a gentleman. He believed in that, gentleman, and to him it meant someone who will never choose to damage you for his own gain.

In the evenings, when he sat on the edge of the bed talking, every nuance and meaning and choice of phrase was imbued with who he was—working class and independent—and everything that’s kept me alive against considerable, self-inflicted odds, came out of those evenings.

There was, too, an occasional, mysterious and aloof savagery in him. I could feel it floating somewhere. What it said to me was “If it slighted me, I’d burn down the universe.” and I understood it somehow, instinctively, as the prop that was holding up his kindness.

I’m very much like him though not nearly as good, and I work as hard as he did because I owe it as part of a simple, working-class contract.

To pay attention, and not be taken in, and to do what you do as well as you can, you know?

APRIL AT THE POETIC LABOR PROJECT

2011-04-20T14:16:00.000-07:00

We're so pleased to announce that responses from Amber DiPietra, Steve Benson, and an anomyous contributor are now up on the Poetic Labor Project's blog. To download a pdf of all three, please click here. We're grateful for these responses, which continue the conversation around poetics and labor that was the subject of the gatherings in the East Bay last Labor Day. As part of our commitment to continuing that conversation, please stay tuned for monthly updates with new content.

We want to open the space to as many people as would like to join - your comments and provocations are welcome. If you've got a more extended set of thoughts about any of the new writings, or the original presentations archived from the event, please feel free to submit those to: labday2010@gmail.com. A special thanks to Andrew Kenower for designing the PDF and to Dan Thomas-Glass for original artwork. Thanks for your interest and solidarity!

ANONYMOUS

2011-04-15T09:59:00.000-07:00

from five o'clock: SLOPE's daily weather report for March 2011
Labor, Poetry & Professionaliztion: pastiche of journal entries

I am thinking about professionalization, labor and poetry. How the counterpoint echos off each of these. Yet, these caverns find themselves pressured together, by little quakes, by life’s demander/s and other bandits: These are the attempts to crumble them into fluidity. If this essay had a title it would be: stealing time.

I work four jobs: part-time permeates every move I perform. Today it is sunny and almost too hot, a reprieve from the rain dumping on this coast and my hair and the news is reporting on radiation floating. I worry about getting sun stained; I wish I had my lover’s skin; I realize the privilege in this thought, which also feels.

Part-time afterschool program coordinator, part-time administrator, part-time poetry editor, part-time bartender and part-time lover. I live 300 miles away from my lover. The inability to dedicate myself to anything drips off the walls of these caves onto my skin, which can’t help but absorb. Yet, dedication (investment) is what I seek in each job. The economy of investment, its exchange, makes it beautiful between lovers, but despondent on a large scale and rarely beautiful at a job. Though, these jobs do want to be a part of this beauty, even if they are subject to the same imaginary-dollar-house. It is this nuance and intention that causes my feet to trip over themselves, that causes me to over-invest and therefore, under-invest in each cave. Like when you write/ read something so determinedly good that it renders its opposite as clearly as the intended essence. I realize that failure also feels. I picked these positions because they were the best to me and the best for me. “The Best” is a vague qualifier, as lazy in practice as it is in writing or use.

Are my caves the best because they allow me to funnel my unrelenting need for labor into a category of professionalization, a need resulting in my class and upbringing? A need which connects me to disparate family? Did my class and upbringing fool me? I am not special in thinking this and my generation is not unique in feeling it. I have had fourteen jobs since I was 14, which is also when I started working. It’s like that Tee-Shirt made in Hawaii or somewhere: “QUIT YOUR JOB/BUY A TICKET/FALL IN LOVE/ NEVER RETURN”

I started reading a piece that told me ellipses were an ethical gesture because they indicated a missing text. This creates a culture that is embarrassed to use the text, I thought. Culpability must also extend past my writing into a utility driven self-reflexivity. Yet, I create permissions. Permissions we create. What I am trying to say is that culpability can, and perhaps should, be the fluid that forges the flood: the flood that cleans or damages anyone’s caves. Perhaps, the damage will be to those houses of professionalization, labor and poetry.

aside: These are not the houses that my grandparents lived in, and they are not real. A table because I put my hand on it and call it a table. No, the houses of professionalization are the breeders of imaginary money. They operate in imagination as well and often at a faster pace than the artist. And none of this has to do with a poet I am publishing in my next journal needing to flee to Japan to repair her home and my wanting to write to her endlessly about her journey: the selfishness in that.

For the latter of the two houses (labor and poetry), I carved poetry into a laborious endeavor. This might qualify as a success in my life. Therefore, I can write without the guilt of privilege convincing me my imagination did not deserve such luxury. However, with four jobs, I have to steal time to do this; I avoid walking home under dumping rain and grabble with the dump truck that is my liver now. I wrote a poem today when pulling over on the side of the freeway on way home from work. The exit was called “Fish Ranch Road.” What happens off of “Fish Ranch Road?”

This does not mean the writing before (or under) this sign was “the best,” only that it occurs/ed. It doesn’t even mean that what I am writing now is even good. It only means that it happens with using my hands, performing a physical action over and over, so that process develops into a laborious one that forges intimacy between the endeavor of writing and the writer or me. By the time the poem enters the landscape of the computer, it engages again with the anxieties of its facade, and the process of writing begins to wither much like the enraged orchid on the kitchen table, disillusioned by her image.

I cannot reconcile (my) poetry and (my) professionalization, and maybe I am also disillusioned. I’m not sure I have time to take care of myself. A woman at my afterschool program calls me “The Machine.” And, though others have, I do not curse myself or my imagination for inhabiting The Bar space, along with these other positions. They put mirrors behind the bar so the patrons can see whose coming up behind them and so the bartenders can watch the patrons when they turn to pour a whiskey. Where I live even the bar-bandits have degrees with poison ivy on them. In those places that I’ll never be able to afford to live, the ivy is just a little greener. The Bandits are everywhere

Here is the best description of a hangover I read aloud this weekend while in California. I read it to my lover, who made me apple and mascarpone crepes and drank a breakfast beer. From Roberto Bolaño’s Monsieur Pain:

I woke with stiff limbs, an unrelenting ache in my neck, and a frightful hangover. It was eleven in the morning and a glassy dust was falling, or rising, through the gap in the roof. The warehouse was quiet; the junk was stubbornly guarded by an aura of neglect: objects banished from the realm of human concern—even the light seemed to shun them. It was not hard to find the door; it had no handle and opened onto a gravel-strewn courtyard with abandoned flowerbeds on either side. The morning, the sky’s crown, seemed to be falling apart. Which was comforting, in a sense, since I was in a similar condition. To the left I noticed a metal door, which was shut. Beside it was a little wooden box, which seemed to have been waiting there for centuries; I sat down on it. I took a deep breath. Images of previous hours—escape and disappointment, dreams and delirium— tumbled through me. It’s finished, I thought aloud, the carriages bound for nowhere are finished. The sky over Paris, though clearer than the day before, seemed more sinister than ever. Like a mirror hanging over the hole, I thought. But we could never know for sure. An indecipherable tongue. I urinated against a wall, profusely. I was tired; I felt wretched, alone, and confused in the midst of a labyrinth that was far too big for me. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t tell whether the sky was shaking or I was.

Like the Talking Heads I hate people when they aren’t polite. Learning how to move impolitely—stealthily—is what professionalization is; it is learning the moves so well that by being impolite you appear polite! Our mastering of maneuvering and the maneuvers themselves are what make one good or bad at moving within profession they embody. We learn these moves so thoroughly that we succeed or fail at them on grand scales within the interior landscape of our selves, which go onto generate the imaginary numbers that appear online in our bank accounts. These successes and failures are what cause me to claim that money is imaginary. A claim of this sort could be construed as threateningly condescending to the class that I inhabit and those on much lower class rungs. However, by eliminating the symbolic concept engendered from the paper-cotton-money, I would just take and give what I wanted. I would exchange and trade without the need to participate in those symbolic trades that further detach me from reality and from other living beings, making us all easier targets for the bandits.Because of all of these threats, poetry somehow created or suffered from the generation of a poetic infrastructure within the shelter of the university: the academic teaching-poet was formed. However, there are not enough university positions to hold us all, and why should we be so privileged to fight amongst ourselves for such shelter… Am I being ethical? I hope the gesture is at least.

At the most, I want to imagine existence as a poem. This is what I wrote during Andrew Joron’s talk at the 2010 Labor Conference in Oakland. I agree with Joron and the person (lost to my notes now) that he quoted: “Jobs are Jails.” They involve coercion against our wills and poetry operates against coercion’s imperative. I believe in the benefits of labor, and that labor pulls one out of the selfishness and privilege that the self can develop and is often encourage to develop in America, while your uncles are out back burying thousands in the backyard. I believe in the process of writing as an act of labor. Thus, the rambling here explores the cave of a poetic position as well: one where we can choose how to focus our robust exploration and need to perform such labors. Work is necessity and Poetry is Freedom. I steal time not only to love the way someone speaks to me in the morning hours but also to write poems out of the corners of my eyes, the static climbing off me.

AMBER DIPIETRA

2011-04-15T09:56:00.000-07:00

Amber DiPietra works as a poet, a disability advocate, and a somatic writing teacher for folks in the disability community--not necessarily all in that order.

Please imagine the proceeding sections as non-linear, rounded confluences—my relationship to work/poetics as Venn diagram. For me, there is no longer any real separation between the various kinds of work I must do and my poetics. This is both a beneficial alignment and a chiasmus of energies. Fractal symmetries that sort of shove into each other while trying to surface.

Please click here to listen to an audio version of this contribution.

work-work

The short answer to “What do you do?” is, “disability advocate”. Though, often, it is easier to respond with, “disability service provider” because people can interpret that as case manager or social worker and that makes sense to them. The longer, more accurate answer, is that I work for the Independent Living Resource Center in San Francisco, where I am absolutely not a social worker (via the old model of managing someone else’s choices and determining abilities based on bureaucratic qualifiers). Independent living centers exist nationally in most major cities. They are government-mandated, largely government-funded nonprofits that serve as places where people with disabilities can go to get information about resources, such as assistive technology, support groups, accessible arts programs, alerts about proposed legislation impacting disability issues. ILCs are where people can get help with navigating social services like personal or in home care, low income housing options, employment accommodations, etc. My work also requires me to keep up with the politics around healthcare, genetic testing, civil rights and technological innovations.

It requires me to be a constant communicator—either via phone, in-person, or increasingly, via social networking—since one of the biggest issues facing people with disabilities is the divide that still exists in terms of social integration. But most of all, this work requires me to sit with people and envision outcomes. People come to me with a mass of reality and their language around it—a new diagnosis or years of living with nagging, stupid issues that crop up. Things like: “landlord won’t let me have a ramp and now three steps keep me prisoner in my apartment”, or “I need to take Goldie to class on my shoulder because she can talk to the voices while I take notes for my exam”, or “I go to job interviews and as soon as I walk in the door with my white cane, the interviewer sounds plastic”. Primarily, mine is a job of collaborative making. A kind of peer counseling poiesis. I listen, co-brainstorm, share stories about folks in similar situations. I take the language that is given to me and give it back to the person who has come to see me—either by offering a way to prioritize around the issue, reframing options, or simply emoting in a way that is authentic and carries new momentum.

freelance-work

As a “peer mentor” at my independent living center, it is hard to know how much or how little to do, how best to facilitate a space for the client’s envisioning process. Especially when we are stand together against such gaping holes in community support systems. There are appeals to file, requests to fill out, bureaucratic languages that must be worked within. Then I go home and I swirl these interactions around in my head for days at a time, trying to hit upon some creative suggestion I can offer in each individual situation. This “taking it home with me” is not really required as part of my paid work, but it is the part that makes me a poet within the context of the work. I have wanted to push that impulse further and I have wanted to combine my paid work as an independent living center worker with my work as one who writes poems. I have also wanted to bring in body-work, the hardest most basic work. I wanted to create a single space to function as a poet, a body-worker and a disability advocate, so I have been experimenting with Write To Connect. A creative writing class for folks in the disability community.

body-work

I ran out of cartilage over 25 years ago and all of my bones, including the vertebra in my neck, have been grinding to a halt since then. I am 32 years old. I have bone spurs, tendon impingements, and frozen joints. If I want to maintain any freedom of movement for the next, hopefully, several decades, I must work every day, slowly, tediously, to keep some modicum of space between my internal moving parts. This means undoing the time spent working by swimming, sitting in warm waters, lying down, making dull circles with ankles, shoulders, wrists, etc. It also means massage, acupuncture, and energy work. And Art workouts! (This embarrasses me, to go into all this, because I feel like I have said this stuff on the internets before. I am kind of phobic about being repetitive, because being repetitive in writing seems to mimic somatic constriction I experience all the time. However, it also tends to loosen gently, methodically, which is absolutely the point.)

All of this body-work requires a huge amount of money, time, and attention. I give far less of any of these resources to the body-work, than I give to other types of work. That’s because I get bored, because it is invisible, because it feels indulgent, because it leads me into claustrophobic self-narratives about the nature of how I do or do not move, because it seems simple and I haven’t figured out how to plug my somatic machinations into my writing in a way that is totally interesting and accurate. I think a sure bet is to find a way to offer the body-work to others. To have an energy work practice I offer out of my apartment, for instance. Currently, I’m confused about the apprenticeship process for that—and how I really feel about it as a fair exchange. If you know of an energy worker/poet who could help me legitimize this for myself, please send me an email. Most days, I want to be a practitioner of some unquantifiable transformations for and with others, more than I want to be a poet.

social- & domestic- work

Sicilian and Spanish immigrants by way of Cuba, people who are cigar rollers, nurses, hair dressers, musicians, waiters, bartenders, grounds keepers, actors, house painters, appliance repairers, and sales reps for cigarette vending machines, wine and beer—these are my family. Most of them with incredible genes that have them looking smooth, tan and athletic into their 70s. They’ve worked hard all their lives so I could stay home, in Florida, in their houses, and write poetry. If I had wanted, I could’ve done that. Or, my family cajoles, “You could rent a little place in the cool neighborhood where the gays and the arty people are redoing the old shotgun houses”. And be my very own Ybor City Thoreau—with family to do the laundry and cooking.

But, I chose “to haul ass outta Florida” as my grandfather Chino put it. And since I have asked so much of my family—it is a lot for them to have accepted, emotionally, culturally, me putting 3,000 miles between us—the least I can do is fly across the country a few times a year. I don’t make very much money working at a disability nonprofit (especially in a time when politicians want to cut funds that will allow people with disabilities the basic freedom of remaining in their own homes, outside of institutions). With the money I make, I save up to buy plane tickets home, to see my family. That’s always my goal. Not money for writers’ retreats or conferences or whatever. This is ironic for two reasons: 1) my family would buy my tickets and 2) I chose to spend an inordinate amount of money on academia which I then abandoned. That is to say, I used the excuse of “needing to go to grad school for creative writing” in order to move out to San Francisco.

The riddle for both are as follows: I felt like my family (many of them did not finish high school) would never let me leave Florida if I didn’t use grad school, an obscure and irrefutable idea, as an excuse. I also felt incapable of work, an MFA was an expensive way of stalling. Which actually feels like ultimate dumb assery to me, the grad school thing (but it is also the way I met magical friends). To me, work was physical labor, which I always saw my family doing. Watched them doing when I, a14 yaer old with locked shoulders, had a hard time even dressing myself. I got an MFA, but then decided being a creative writing professor had not enough to do with the peer mentoring work that needed doing, the kind of work I now do at the independent living center. Because by the time I had finished my MFA, I had also discovered the disability community. As for using the majority of my tiny savings for tickets home, that’s about emotional debt (how my family let go while remaining present to fall back on) and a sense of honoring their work, much of it blue collar, by trying to match it with my own.

I think of Chris Daniels, in his talk for Labor Day, saying “I see labor as an attribute of human behavior which transforms reality. You make a chair, you’ve transformed reality. You work as a clerk, you take a pile of paper here and move it there, you transform reality. You teach for a living, hopefully, you want to transform a human mind, you want to help someone transform reality and in your work you are — hopefully — transforming reality.” My little brothers are struggling, back in Florida, to figure out what kind of new experiences they want to have. They are doing badly in school because we don’t come from a studious culture. It is no longer clear to me what to tell them. My experience—a disability advocate/poet that left for SF—is a total anomaly. I want to do more work for them, help them transform their reality, but I am not sure where to begin. Especially if transforming means discarding cultural foundations.

poetry- & sleep- work

In her Lbaor Day talk, Sara Larsen describes the time she spends under the San Francisco Bay, rapid transiting toward capitalism. I think about how much better I would be doing health-wise if I had stayed a small arthritic Hispanic girl in Florida, Thoreau style, soaking in the Gulf of Mexico with my abuela to help me out. In SF, I spend more time commuting, under the sea, than rehabilitating in it. It will always be too fucking cold for me to swim here.

I fantasize all the time about being able to have sex, conversations, swim/ambulate and connect people in my sleep. This is why I write poetry. It is a little like being able to do that. I love what Andrew Joron said during his Labor Day Talk about being a surrealist, about dreaming while you are awake. It makes me understand how I could possibly join work and sleep. I need to sleep at least 10 hours most nights to keep my joints from totally stiffening up. Sleep fees like productive work; my friend Lexi Brayton says, “sleep is emotional research”.

There is a desire for the continuous, to be a single fluid element. For there to be no mess. (There wasn’t space to elaborate on domestic-work in this talk—the part of me that, as a disabled woman with a bit of the super crip syndrome, has a need to keep very clean floors. So that I know I can. Absurdly, with splintered ankles, four cats, and dwelling in close proximity to the Tenderloin. How DOES she do I do it, they ask? A boyfriend that sweeps and mops! Love as economical exchange—a whole other subject on the spectrum of work. I should add that he is also not insulted by my longing to converse and have sex while staying asleep. And that he has recorded this podcast.)
Poetry is messy. It is filtering bits of mica or raking the flats for a resonant tone. It is Sisyphus stuff, as work-work is often compared to. The labor it takes for things to elapse in time. I move in small circles, trying to find clearings and new energies. Work-work, freelance-work, body-work, poetry- and sleep- work align in the moments outside time, real time. Which is not trying, but dreaming. Awake, together with great fervor and to much use.

STEVE BENSON

2011-04-15T09:50:00.001-07:00

Steve Benson teaches himself and willing subjects whatever he notices he's learning, day by day. He's written orally, on paper, and otherwise, under a number of discrete and indiscreet conditions.

Working for myself, in collaboration

I’m a licensed psychologist. I work in an office I rent in a small town. As a psychotherapist, I’ve been variously and spontaneously hiding less, getting more real in it, including not knowing, in the moment, what anything means or what it’s good for. My client and I have hopes, but these are subject to change. So it’s close in some ways to how I work as a writer. Both situations let me be sincere and ethical. I get to decide how candid to be and when and how and why to say what I might later regret.

I get to try out roles and sides of myself, interact with diverse real and imaginary interlocutors, and explore my attention to language in its dynamic and uncertain action. I sometimes think of theories and precedent ideas associated with experience or reading, but I don’t have a stable plan or a rationale for making one. There are ways I limit or block myself, which generally have to do with trying not to be tiresome, disrespectful, or hurtful. I get to care, and there are experiences of learning and intimacy I wouldn’t find any other way. The more serious and earnest I find it, the more fun it is.

I couldn’t feel as resilient, I wouldn’t have as much fun, I wouldn’t experience my own integrity or invention anywhere near as much, if I weren’t self-employed. I could make lots more money in a hospital or a city job, with my degree, but the scale and role I have here allows me to recognize passion and happiness sporadically every day. I limit professional working hours to about 40 a week. I don’t let the business grow. In my sixties, I don’t expect to retire; I’ll have two children in college later this decade. My independence allows me to treat people as equals and to improvise my orientation to whatever I decide to say or do.

In my experience, this job is “artisanal,” in the meaning Andrew Joron applied to work, in his Labor Day 2010 talk – unquantifiable – qualitatively evaluated – and it’s ephemeral, like performance work, leaving only “the record” as document of what’s transpired. Like the “proletarian” Andrew describes, I have “nothing to sell but [my] labor,” one of activating relations through speaking and occasional writing. I have control over what happens to the profit I am making and lots of say over my working conditions: this is precious.

My father’s work was all in the advertising industry in Manhattan. He was gone 12-14 hours five weekdays and often holed up in the study working Sundays. He seemed pressured. Excessive smoking and drinking led to death by retirement age, debility and lost income before that. He missed out on relationships with his children. His career set a negative precedent we have variously reacted against.

I take time off work for my kids or for health care appointments, not to write. Time for what does something consequential with writing happens most in chunks, when they’re away with their mom or when an externally imposed deadline gets me to work in the evenings or while they play with friends. Evenings after work I swim laps half an hour away or go to various meetings and events in the community (like the peace and justice group, parent groups, a men’s group). Once I’m home I’m cleaning my apartment, answering emails, following internet leads, and taking care of personal business until I make myself get into bed. I’ve been building a long work a few minutes at the end of each day in bed.

As a dad, I do things with my kids when they’re with me, weekends and one school day afternoon. At the office, my professional work suspends my practice as a writer and as a parent. I am always a father, and I am always a writer, no matter what I’m doing or thinking. “Psychologist” isn’t so inherent; it engages some inherent aptitudes and commitments.

I mention money and class with clients more and more—theirs, mine, and others’, but rarely with clients I see as affluent or financially secure. I don’t think I do mention it in the work of writing, either, except when explaining why I’m reluctant to travel for readings, performances, or conferences unless I can recoup travel expenses through getting paid. I want to find ways I can challenge these avoidances. Recouping the income for time lost from not meeting with clients is usually out of the question. Both kinds of work are break-even, financially, for me. My professional job covers my work and family and personal expenses, and my writing work doesn’t even cover the expenses that go into producing it. I am happy with this situation, though it doesn’t make any sense, and I have an increasingly grim attitude about property and capitalism.

This kind of job doesn’t help me to read more poetry, poetics, and so on. But I may be doing just what I have to do to do my own best work, and to keep myself afloat, as a person in this society, as well as economically within this system. Twenty-five years ago, I wished I could work at nothing but my versions of art, a writer, an artist, but I saw no way I could support myself alone at that. A lot of writing has not got done. Maybe less is better. It’s slow: in this I see choice, as well as flow.

I avoid doing readings or promoting my writing in the small town rural region where I live and am a therapist. I’ve been learning not to be so secretive about it, the past few years, but I’m reluctant to contaminate my client base with reflections on my status or value as an artist. I don’t want to be a model, a hero, or a dramatic scenario for clients, aside from how we might realize this through the dialogue we make together. Our conversation is the work.

MARCH AT THE POETIC LABOR PROJECT

2011-03-16T14:52:00.000-07:00

We're so pleased to announce that responses from Anne Boyer, Tyrone Williams, and Lara Durback are now up on the Poetic Labor Project's blog. To download a pdf of all three, please click here. We're grateful for these initial responses, which broaden the conversation around poetics and labor that was the subject of the gathering in the East Bay last Labor Day. As part of our commitment to continuing that conversation, please stay tuned for monthly updates with new content.

We want to open the space to as many people as would like to join - your comments and provocations are welcome. If you've got a more extended set of thoughts about any of the new writings, or the original presentations archived from the event, please feel free to submit those to: labday2010@gmail.com.
Thanks for your interest and solidarity!

~ Lauren Levin, Steve Farmer, Alli Warren, Brandon Brown

ANNE BOYER

2011-03-16T14:51:00.002-07:00

Anne Boyer is a single mother who works three jobs in the ivory basement, or for at least two of these jobs, the sub-sub ivory basement. She lives in Kansas.

FOR LABOR

Because I decided to get as many jobs as I could and work these jobs in between sleeping and eating and caring for my child, I wanted, also, to build muscle and then more muscle, eat lean protein, and lose all intrusions of language or imagination or whatever it was that distinguished a poet from anyone else. This is not the first time I had to quit like this, but with all of these jobs I could eventually begin to see my hamstrings. I learned to do the reverse prone jacknife, and though later I understood it was a question of "How much poetry can I remove from me?" at the time it was a question of numbers, each hour accounted for in a notebook devoted to the accounting of hours.

In that my life consisted of working many jobs and taking care of a child and eating protein without any reading or writing, my life was not that different from the lives of many other people except that sometimes traces of an earlier life would appear in the form of people wanting things from me. I resolved to give them nothing. I barely gave them no. I learned to do my deadlifts with one leg behind me straight high in the air. I was always wanting balance challenges, like the twenty pound bicep curls with one foot tucked against my knee.

There were a few nights I would feel sorry for myself and cry about capitalism and what it had done to us, but not too many nights. Some nights we would go to the strip-mall bars of these old suburbs of the gentrifying city, and in these bars the people who worked too many jobs and also took care of their children and did not read too many books sang songs by Shania Twain and Destiny's Child.

I could not even stand in the bruised world yelling "It's a bruised world!" Was this some kind of macro-nutrient imbalance? Who knew?

*

I had a dream about the labor conference. I hadn’t been invited to speak and don’t know why, then, I was speaking there, but stood up in front of you and said, "Now imagine that once every seven years one Tang drinker gets to sip on the orange juice. Imagine being the one who is always being promised the orange juice. Imagine, sometimes, they even let you pour them their juice." This was a “provocative model” and “highly efficient de-professionalization” -- and I realized even then I couldn’t keep talking about Tang-life but couldn’t stop, could also not start to say what I meant or finish it. It was a graceless dream, or a dream in which I had been graceless, and afterwards I woke up and wondered if I had been reading from someone else’s notes.

*

I had never even thought of trauma as a trauma, perhaps because that word seems to be used by a kind of despised class to indicate the disappointment they feel that they are not able to have exactly everything that they want. I don’t even want what I want. What delicious possibility is inherent in the world of those who do not have the everything of the few, who do not have to make one false choice, then the next, traumatized always by the stakes of mere taste, by the terror of an incorrect move among the serious, spectacular minutiae?

After the second night of hemorrhaging I promised in an email “I will not let myself die” but still almost did. Even my boss said out loud what was killing me. It would have been perfectly literary if I had let myself die there on the bathroom floor asking for no help and afraid of the cost of the hospital. I had two choices and bleeding to death or losing all my money was too much symmetry. The bills later shook in my hands, shook on my lap, as if they were a kind of wind-up terror toy. The project of devaluing had made me, as a concept to myself, almost entirely expired. Once I got out of the hospital, my daughter said “humans die easily,” and I told her that “yes they do,” and also, “no they don’t.”

*

One has slivers of the self-directed life. I can give you the exact days and months and years: two days here, in a city I might never see again, or one month, there, thanks to that. At first, a pie chart, then something else: there is a brute in these rooms and apartments and duplexes and trailers and shared houses and single-family houses. The brute is not human, but like a bear, if a bear were a shadow, and ten times bigger than any figure I let myself imagine. This brute like a shadow and the bear not like a human is named survival-life. The brute is always saying something, is always paraphrasing Hannah Arendt, is all-like give me the labor of your body, not the work of your hands. There are children who fall asleep every night in that bear's arms. My favorite arts are the ones that can move your body or propose a new world. What at first kept me enthralled wasn't justice, it was justice-like waves, and a set of personal issues, like aestheticizing and the limitations of reading lists before the digital age.

I read my Epicitus until I realized I had enough, already, of the corrective imagination of a slave. People told me, of themselves, my whole life has been that brute. I’ve never figured out how to write about anything, like narrative is allergic and analysis is violence and discursion is betrayal. I’m sure I don’t know how I fit in here, but if you look for “all life into survival and all survival into life” I am something like the third hit down.

Poetic Labor Project

NOVEMBER at the POETIC LABOR PROJECT

CHRISTIAN NAGLER

RONALD PALMER

MARGARET RHEE

LAURA WOLTAG

OCTOBER at the POETIC LABOR PROJECT

BRIAN ANG

LINDSEY BOLDT

JACKQUELINE FROST

BILL LUOMA

MELISSA MACK

SEAN LABRADOR Y MANZANO

MICHAEL NICOLOFF

JILL RICHARDS

WENDY TREVINO

BRIAN WHITENER

IDA YOSHINAGA

STEPHANIE YOUNG

SEPTEMBER AT THE POETIC LABOR PROJECT

ARIEL GOLDBERG

KRISTEN GALLAGHER

MONICA PECK

DAN THOMAS-GLASS

*** WORKING *** WRITING *** FIGHTING *** : SEPTEMBER 4 in OAKLAND

SCOTT INGUITO

ERICA LEWIS

ROBERT MITTENTHAL

STEFANI BARBER

JULY AT THE POETIC LABOR PROJECT

M.C. ADAMS W/ CAMILLE ROY

KIT ROBINSON

BRIAN KIM STEFANS

JUNE AT THE POETIC LABOR PROJECT

T.C. MARSHALL

DOLSY SMITH

MARY AUSTIN SPEAKER

BHANU KAPIL

DANA WARD

ter BRAAK

LARRY KEARNEY

APRIL AT THE POETIC LABOR PROJECT

ANONYMOUS

AMBER DIPIETRA

STEVE BENSON

MARCH AT THE POETIC LABOR PROJECT

ANNE BOYER

* WORKING * WRITING * FIGHTING * : SEPTEMBER 4 in OAKLAND