poetic labor project - winter 2013

7/29/2019 Poetic Labor Project - Winter 2013

1/25

1

MARY BURGERJEAN DAYJOSHUA CLOVERMARIE BUCKWILLIAM CLOUDTIM SHANER

RACHEL ZOLFJEN COLEMAN

Poetic Labor Projecthttp://labday2010.blogspot.com/[email protected]

Poetic Labor Project

Winter 2013


2/25

MARY BURGER has held many of the jobs portrayed by Lena Dunham on TV,but she has never been the daughter of an artist from Tribeca.

Laboradory

My parents grew food. They grew up growing food. Vegetable, animal. Myfathers family had a dairy farm. In a faded picture his father leads some neighborsin a barn raising. Bartering labor for labor. My mothers father was a carpenter.He built the church steeple that still punctuates their little town. Mygrandmothers kept kitchen gardens and flocks of chickens and relentlessly puttheir children to work on them. Growing food wasnt a stand against agribusinessor a symbol of the artisanal life. But it wasnt completely unrelated.

All my grandparents emigrated to the United States as children. They came withtheir families from the upper Rhine ValleySwitzerland and Luxembourg andAlsacein the late 19th century. These were farmers, craftspeople. Catholics.They left Europe because population growth and the spread of industrializationmade it harder to own a farm or to practice an independent trade. Because anti-Catholic policies and forced military service threatened their lives. They didntwant jobs in coal fields or steel mills. They werent likely to attend university.There wasnt much farm-to-profession mobility.

They settled in the midwest in communities of farmers and craftspeople like the

ones theyd left. And for about a generation, they carried on the lifestyle theydbrought with them. Their migration was as much retreat as exploration, maybe,though they werent anti-modern. They took to electricity and telephones andautomobiles and air travel and all the chattels of manufacturing as those thingscame along.

Theres a dim story from my mothers grandfather about taking part in frontiertimber harvestswhat amounted to the wholesale deforestation that preceded thesettlement of the midwestern states. The cleared land and harvested lumber laidthe way for the barn raising and church building of my grandfathers days, and the

cities and freeways and so on that would follow. In the scant remnants of mygreat-grandfathers story there is no trace of the aboriginal populations that hadbeen decimated before he got there. Before the forests were removed.

My parents when they married set up home a few miles from my fathers familyfarm. They ran an independent dairy for 25 years. It was a single link from farm totable: buying raw milk from farmers, pasteurizing and bottling it, selling it from


3/25

3

their storefront or delivering it in the early morning to front doors. They made icecream, which still gets loving reviews from anyone who was there to taste it.

Their business was commonplace. Every town in the midwest had a dairy. Theyended the business the year I was born, when corporate consolidation in the dairyindustry made it harder for an independent business to survive. The timing of thisseems wrong, I realize: my parents were working adults, with a business and evermore children, for decades before I was born. This elongated storyline is anotherfamily artifact, commonplace in my parents world but exotic or outlandish inmine. Like their parents and grandparents and doubtless every generation beforethem, my parents had as many children as biology allowed. They married in 1937and had children for 26 years, ending with me. My mother went through laborseven times, which is unremarkable only when compared to her own mothers 13.

After the dairy, my parents bought another business in a nearby town and wemoved there when I was six. One of the best things for me about this littlemigration was that the nuns in the new school didnt hit kids as much. Nobodyknew this was going to be an outcome of the move. I was just lucky.

My parents bought us boxed cereal and fresh-frozen vegetables and plastic-wrapped bread, and milk and ice cream from the consolidated regional dairy, andcountless other conveniences, because they wanted us all to have lives of less labor.More leisure. But still they grew a kitchen garden all their lives. My father coaxedhis rototiller to life every spring to turn the soil. My mother relished summer

tomatoes, sliced with a little salt.

Im taking the long way around. So long that it seems I may not get there. Tryingto identify the pivotal labors of my progenitors, as a way of understanding my own.If this mannered narration of a century and a half might stand in for myfloundering, flummoxing efforts to be a part of my time.


4/25

4

JEAN DAY has been paid to work as an amanuensis, waitress, member of ademolition crew, cook (short order and live-in), hospital attendant for mentallydisabled adults, administrative gopher, warehouse clerk, acquisitions manager,executive director (these last three at Small Press Distribution, where she happilytoiled for 14 years after finishing college), copywriter, teacher, marketing editor,and academic editoralmost entirely in the nonprofit sphere. For the last 18 yearsshes been employed by day as associate editor ofRepresentations, a scholarlyhumanities journal published by UC Press and administered through theTownsend Center for the Humanities on the UC Berkeley campus. Shes alsowritten seven books of poems, the sixth and most recent of which to be publishedis Enthusiasm (Adventures in Poetry).

Day Job

When Bill Cosby observed in 1964 that he started out as a child, he was working.Both of my parents worked. My mother as a teacher and my father as an engineerturned unwilling executive. At the end of the day they drank Manhattans, and Imcertainly a dividend of their first-world, postwar bounty. In college I (and everyother student at Antioch) worked alternate semesters, for credit, though weEnglish majors were a little hard to place. After that there were enough low-level

jobs in San Francisco for eager young graduates like me, and one didnt have towork too hard at them to support a second life as a writer on the cheap.

Thus began a long-nursed habit of divided attentions.

And competing impulses. The attraction/resistance to a through-line is practicallythe story of my life. In writing Im drawn to messes and motivated by enthusiasms.Im as interested in unmaking as making. Add recycling, and you have aperfect working systemuntil you try to make it a system. Do what you love,then, by definition, means the moneycant possibly follow (if only because weknow money refuses to follow this neat circuit). That is, in poetry Ive set myself ina groove where its unreasonable to expect serious compensation, if making poems

includes its own opposite and overflow, its own super-egotistical critique. Negativecapability may be unchampionable as a work ethic; in artthats another story.

If capitalism (the realist side of production and decay, about which I know far toolittle, absorb too much), is destroying individual lives, ways of life, species, thenones work in the present, whether vocation or hobby (as the IRS calls thenonprofessional pursuit of an art that doesnt pay) is undivorcible from its dark


5/25

5

movements. We are its specimen and side effect. The question forever raised iswhat resistance to its machinations would look like. Im not the person to ask, but,as implicated as anyone else, I (too) have been at work for the last couple of yearson a book in which the destruction of life as we knew it figures both topically andprocedurally. Everyones writing some version of this; mines called Late Human.

You might think of it as an exhortation to hobbyists (and species) to unite. Theidea that the certified professional has a greater claim to a good life is after all afiction of the money economy. As an English major (Garrison Keillors patheticwhipping post) without an advanced degree, I have admittedly wasted a few braincells finding myself Insignificant in Academia. If you had 29 bosses (the professorswho sit, in person, on the editorial board of the scholarly journal that employs meas its manager and editor, all of them at the top of their fields), you would too. YetI am and identify by day as a professional in my own rightthe University of

California payroll system concurs, and my membership in the UniversityProfessional and Technical Employees Union shores up the idea. Both comical andcomforting with its plosive p, professional has a whiff of the pedigree about itthat can be put to good use. Like Lucy in Peanuts, we could all do with a littleDoctor before our names. (Its my fathers favorite term for a jackass: Nice work,doctor!)

But I digress.

I came to the union late, but through that professional door: the recognition of and

by my daytime peers, and at last myself, that I perform a skilled job. Caught up in asurge of activism around the disastrous effects of privatization on UC in 2009, Isuddenly found myself ready again for solidarity and action, and the union was thelogical vehicle. (The Berkeley local had the infrastructure, the vision, and theleaders.) So, for much of the last three years Ive been involved in organizing myfellow administrative professionals (UCs term) for the right to bargain acontract. And with this accident of history, I seem to have acquired an expandedidentity: something somewhat more, I hope, than a pin, a t-shirt, and a hat. Mostof my life (since the wars in Latin America and Iraq, anyway) Ive been a lazyactivist; now not only do I always have an agenda but I also lately find myself

working overtime as a unionist in the fictions of another writer. This business isdecidedly meta, work for which I have no training and deserve no creditthough of course Im an easy shil for my alter egos exploits.

A favorite Seinfeld episode has Kramer (everyones alter ego?) working in a jobthat doesnt exist, for an outfit that didnt hire him. Loitering in a Manhattan officebuilding, hes sucked into a flurry of suits by the cry, Everyone in the conference


6/25

6

room, right now! and is then and there taken for one of the crew. As the bitprogresses, he goes through the motions (whining, You know this is my busy timeof year!) without the slightest consciousness ofor even interest inthe jobscontent. Its irrelevant; what he aspires to is the condition of his working fellowswho are, you know, TCB: taking care of business! His success is famous, iffleeting.

Scene: Kramer after work at a bar with the gang, cracking them up with thesidesplitter we cant hear but has them all in tears.

Where some of us poets with day jobs sometimes go to decompress (Brennans, inwest Berkeley, by the railroad tracks) has been a working-class hangout for decades.Its a bit exotic to us bourgeois and bourgeoises, steam table and all, but theres nobouncer to throw us out. They make a decent Manhattan.

Everybody comes from work.


7/25

7

JOSHUA CLOVER is a writer and political antagonist living in the Bay Area. Hehas monetized his poetry by becoming a teacher, sometimes.

Thanks for inviting me to contribute. As I warned you, I am sort of a skeptic, ormaybe its just that I want more, I always want more. It is already a lovely thingand I want to throw a penny in the wishing well for some further findings.

The thing I have loved about it is the ethnographic element. I remember readingStuds Terkels Workingin high school and finding many parts of it fascinating,while at the same time feeling ashamed of my failure to be properly proletarian (itwas at this time that I planned to refuse college and go work in a gas station, whichis more or less what I did for a couple of years). And hearing similar accounts ofwhat work means and how it feels, even especially the flat factuality of

it, from friends and peers and collaborators, is all the more fascinating becausethey are people I know, from milieux that I have the resources to parse. So I canfeel it all much better you know? better than a 14-year oldreading Workingcould. Anyway, I love that part.

The parts I want to go farther have to do with the relationship of poetry to work,and its specificity. That is to say, I could imagine the following scenario: I am acommitted Yahtzee player and I have a lot of friends who are committed Yahtzeeplayers, but we all suffer from different-yet-similar versions of this generalizedproblem, which is that we have to work to survive, and we also have these other

obligations having to do with social bonds and carework and so on. And all of thisreally cuts into our Yahtzee time. And so we commiserate, and puzzle over this,and rail against it, and one of the things we do is put together the Yahtzee LaborProject. And I can imagine having a very similar reaction: the Yahtzee LaborProject is a way for me and my friends to share stories about this problem thatmatters to us, and it is compelling to hear about, and helps us be a community, andsee each others struggles. All to the good.

Is there a fundamental difference between the Poetic Labor Project and theYahtzee Labor Project? The thing I want to imagine is that there is some real

relationship between the category of poetics (or poet) and that of labor more than the ubiquitous fact that labor, the labor of those without reserves, thelabor which is thus compelled of us, steals a lot of our lives and we seriously havebetter things to do. And I suspect this might be the case, that there might be waysto specify the relationship. But I am really hesitant around the ways this particularpuzzle often gets approached.


8/25

8

Some people say that the practice of making poems is a lot like labor, that they arestructurally or phenomenologically similar, and I dont really believe this. Poetry,not being compelled in that material sense, not being a source of value, will alwaysbe absolutely, qualitatively different from labor.

On the other hand, some people say that poetry is an opposition to labor, becauseit refuses to be useful in the measures of capitalism that it isnt only non-laborbut anti-labor, rifted with some slivers of real autonomy. I am not really swayed bythis position either, anymore than I am swayed by the idea of a gift economy orgoing off the grid. Poetry may not produce value but it is nonetheless entirelywithin the market, we do not escape those forces when we work on poetry. Wemonetize poetry in explicit ways, or implicit ways, or we do not monetize it and itresides in the sector of our lives that is not monetized, but which still must obeythe discipline of the market most obviously the discipline about how much time

you can spend on non-monetized stuff, be it poetry or Yahtzee.

So poetry really isnt labor, and it really isnt anti-labor. What then can we sayabout it, in relation to labor, that isnt just Yahtzee?

Im not really sure. But given the situation I have set forth, I dont think that poetrycan intervene in the situation of labor. I think that the relationship of labor topoetry is that you have to attack labor to free poetry from this set of problems. Andthat attack wont be poems. So for me the relation of labor to poetry exists inneither labor nor poetry but in a set of directly political practices that can undo the

present pseudo-relationship. When we speak of the Poetic Labor Project, if wespeak of anything beyond a community ethnography, we speak of total war onlabor.


9/25

9

MARIE BUCK has worked at various movie theaters and coffee shops, at aMichaels Arts and Crafts, as managing editor of an academic journal, and latelyteaches courses in African American literature, composition, and gender studies.She is the author ofLife & Style (Patrick Lovelace Editions 2009) and the chapbookAmazing Weapons (Scary Topiary 2011). You can find some recent work at TwoSerious Ladies: http://www.twoseriousladies.org/author/marie-buck/.

"The only problem, then, about proletarian art... is how to make it possible, how tomake life possible for the proletariat."

--Big Bill Haywood (qtd. in Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes inAmerican Literary Communism)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17yfqxoSTFM

I'm currently writing a dissertation for a PhD in English and teaching as anadjunct.

My dad worked for thirty years at the post office, sorting mail, mostly the nightshift. My mom would ask him how work was when he came home every day. Hewould always reply, "It was work."

My brother is an actor/bartender. We both have student loans and not a lot ofmoney. We both never wanted to spend most of our waking hours doingsomething mind-numbing.

Before I started the PhD, I got an MFA. The program was fantastic and my peerswere brilliant. The university was located in a very wealthy, artsy area of NewEngland. We all made things--poems, chapbooks, music. Our teaching load wasonly 1/1, and we could live (very frugally) on our stipends, or borrow a minimalamount of money to get by. We had a lot of time to make poems; the programbrought in poets from across the country; we spent all our days together, making

things.

I moved to Detroit afterwards, and the university that I am getting my PhD from isan unusual mix of research university and commuter campus. Detroit, as a place, isfundamentally working class--the city is built on industry, and even with a fairamount of that industry gone, the city remains, more than other places, builtaround factories. When people here make things, the things are often about how


10/25

10

Detroit is different from other places. Or the things that people make purport tomake things better--public murals to clean up neighborhoods, colloquia inabandoned spaces on the aesthetics of ruins. The Detroit poet Ken Mikolowski hasa poem called "Homage to Frank O'Hara: Why I am Not a New York Poet" thatconsists of one word: "Detroit." And then there is Motown. Detroit is notprovincial, so much as insistently self-reflective. This reflectiveness is, I think, asort of distorted or nascent form of class consciousness.

Some students here enter their first year of college with only rudimentary literacy.And most of them work, often full-time. Some show up to morning classes in theirwork uniforms, having just gotten off of a shift at a big box store. These are shittyconditions for learning and teaching. University resources that might amelioratesome problems--remedial resources for students failed by the corporatized K-12school system, scholarships, programming, and organizations for students--are

poorly funded or sometimes nonexistent, due to state cuts. Because the universityserves working class students, and a large number of students of color, itparticularly gets the brunt of state cuts.

I went back to the New England town where I got my MFA recently. I gave areading at an amazing space. Everyone was making chapbooks, starting presses,bringing readers in. The folks who were no longer in school were working,sometimes hard jobs that made it difficult to write and to persist in creating thisculture. But also there were street lights, "help wanted" signs, university resources,and public transit.

Big Bill Haywood--who was a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World andalso hung out with various modernist writers at Mabel Dodge's salon--said that artwas impossible to a Pittsburgh steel worker:

he does not live. He just works. He does the work that enables you tolive. He does the work that enables you to enjoy art, and to make it,and to have a nice meeting like this and talk it over.

When he said this, people like Mabel Dodge had access to art. And most people

did not. But since then Congress passed the GI Bill (in part to avoid another BonusMarch), the Civil Rights Movement desegregated southern universities, massmovements won (a small number of) African American Studies programs,women's studies programs, Latin American Studies programs. Most of us whomake art are able to do it because of such things, not because we're in the sort ofpositions that Mabel Dodge (heiress and patron) was in. This isnt to say thatpeople with all sorts of economic situations dont make artthey do. But if you do


11/25

11

it without access to knowledge, community, and time, youre doing it in spite ofconditions, not because of them.

We have, of course, slid into student loan-based indentured servitude and adjunctjobs that do not pay enough to live. And here in Michigan Right to Work has justpassed the legislature as the administration at my university attempts to get rid oftenure. Nonetheless, the majority of us who make art have access to knowledge,community, and time--to whatever extent we do--because mass social movementswon those things for us. (The graduate students at the university where I got myMFA had unionized back in 1990, and the union remained relatively active andmilitant when I was there--which allowed for us to write so many poems and go toso many readings.)

Friedrich Engels said that we must replace our current mode of production with a

socialist one in which productive labour will become a pleasure instead of being aburden. Most people who would like access to some sort of creative and/orintellectual community do not have it. What would it mean to win more? I loveour DIY poetry culture, being around people who are excited about making things,the cheer and thoughtfulness and curiosity that follows from people having accessto intellectual community--something that, unfortunately, is very hard to get inour culture and that is currently deeply threatened, since it's (unfortunately)largely tied to universities. What could we win, though? Imagine if everyone hadaccess to intellectual culture, could get engaged in whatever interested them (fromastronomy to pedagogical theory to fashion to documentary, or whatever) and

pursue it? Or could have a creative, non-alienated relationship to whatever jobthey do? As our poetry and intellectual communities face more and more attacksin the form of austerity measures (and therefore become ever more exclusive), thequestion remains how to win the possibility of art for ourselves and everyone whodoesnt have it.


12/25

12

WILLIAM CLOUD was born in 1997 in San Francisco, CA, the son of QuemaduraCloud and the poet Amina Calil.

My Life in the Tush of Goats

I've been reading and writing poetry more or less since I was an adolescent living astultifying existence in a small, central California agricultural town. Around theage of seventeen I formulated the ridiculously romantic notion that I would be an"artist" and conduct my outer, material life in a way that would provide me withample time to devote to following this pursuit. While my peers were attendingcollege, joining the military, or getting married, I decided to take any sort of joboffered as long as it would pay for housing, food, and time to devote to writing,

reading, and art making. At that time I had very little understanding of howeconomies work (or, most especially, dont work), nor did I see that unskilledworkers are expendable and most often get stuck with either low-paid employmentor no employment at all.

I've worked as a food server in a retirement home, a delivery driver (first flowers,then cookies, and lastly mail), library assistant, used bookseller, temp worker, anEFL teacher overseas (the first time I had health insurance... in a "developingcountry," no less), researcher/data entry, ghostwriter, and as a clerk for a majorgrocery chain. While employed for this last company I learned that "the public"

often see service employees as dimwitted servants to be mistreated, or worse,heart-and-soul representatives of a company that, among other practices, coercesemployees into working harder for less money. I mean, why else would you bebagging groceries and stocking shelves unless you were an idiot? I quickly grewweary of being expected to shake my corporate pasties just because a bag of chipswas purchased.

As for poetry and my work-life: calling oneself a "poet seems somewhatembarrassing in any situation outside a poetry reading, a creative writing program,or in the company of other poets. It isnt a badge of honor in the real world. The

only co-worker I ever told I was a poet happened to have been a disciple of a SanFrancisco poet in the early 1960s. Talk about lucky. I have very successfullycompartmentalized my life into "worker" and "artist and never shall the twainmeet. I just couldn't see the point in enthusing about The Countess fromMinneapolis to uninterested co-workers while unloading a semi-truck at 4:30 a.m.


13/25

13

At present I've been technically unemployed for over 2 years, but sometimes findwork as an "independent contractor." I regularly look for employment and docontract work as it comes available. Recently I've worked as a legal assistant,bookseller, and at an art center for disabled adults. Sometimes I do two jobs a day.I regularly apply for jobs, but I fear my resums end up in the hands of a shadyshopkeeper in Zothique. I hear there is a foot-high pile of them that she sells asrecipes for disasterto her fellow Zothiqians.


14/25

14

TIM SHANER works as a full-time part-timer at Lane Community College inEugene, Oregon and as a full-time part-timer at Umpqua Community College inRoseburg, Oregon. Picture X, his first full-time part-time book of poetry, will bepublished by Airlie Press full-time in 2014. With Kristen Gallagher, he edited Wig,a magazine devoted to poetry and art that appropriates the job, partly or fully, forartistic purposes (sans benefits). More from The Institute of Loafing can be read at:http://www.shampoopoetry.com/shampoothirtyeight/shaner.htm

from The Institute of Loafing

May 2, 2009From the New York Times

To the Editor:Re: Latest G.M. Plan Cuts More Jobs, Halves Dealers (front page, April 28)

Recent reports of restructuringdescribe a companythat hopes to find a newbetter life by closingplants. Investorsmay find comfortin these cutting measures

but families will sufferand communitieswill find sourcessuddenly boarded up.General Motors may do wellbut in its wake there areso many sad storiesthat must be told.

Gary Chaison

Worcester, Mass., April 28, 2009

The writer is a professor of industrial relations at Clark University.

The humans need an Institute of Loafing for precisely this reason


15/25

15

We too want a new better life by closing plants, but to the benefitof families andcommunities and people in general (sad stories and suffering, another matter)

The humansespecially the Americans, North, that is, but just south of Canada,who are addicted to the narcotic of doing and who are thus always and a day justdoing itneed others to say it for them, so they can say it for themselves, and savethemselves. Not only because many of the Americans, North, just south of Canada(SOCA), who have lost their jobs will have had little experience loafing, but moreso because little will have heard the case for loafing and will thus be less inclined toloaf knowingly, that is, to give themselves over to loafing, and not be mired downby the guilt trip of being redundant

Now, naturally, there will be those who criticize the Institute of Loafing for its lackof class-consciousness. It will be argued that it is all very well to tout the virtues of

loafing when you have a job, or you have the kind of privileged job, or situation,the would-be blogger has, never mind the ad hominem fallacy, but for those whoare out of work and, say, facing foreclosure on their house, or something like that,if, indeed, they were lucky (or unlucky) enough to have been allowed to borrowthe money to buythe housenothing down, your home, a kind of magicwhosemarriage is thus strained, due to how gullible you were (admit it) to have beensuckered into that transaction, the both of you, and so forth, for those humans,loafing is a luxury they cannot afford, not to mention the developing world, theworld in wait of development

To which, we at the Institute of Loafing, will have to develop a response, because,true, that is a good point

We will argue along the lines that the Institute of Loafing envisions a society inwhich loafing is inclusive, even if you dont want to loaf, where, as Paul Lafargueput it, the humans have the right to be lazy, (not that lazy is loafing), not tomention the right to the means to be lazy, many times over, daily, if there but bethe willjust do it (or, rather, the right to loaf)

Which is precisely where the Institute of Loafing steps in, as it will take some time

for the doers to exorcise the beastare we in a hurry?

#

The Breitenbush Hot Springs up the McKenzie River an hour or so from Eugenemay appear to be a kind of Institute of Loafing, but in my mind, from what I cantell from a brief visit, it is too filled with purpose to qualify as such. I would argue


16/25

16

then that Breitenbush is no Institute of Loafing. For one goes up there to cleanseoneself, both in body and soul, or, as they themselves put it, Breitenbush is apeaceful and safe atmosphere for spiritual growth, physical and emotional healing,and mental relaxation

So, they have massage rooms, and hot springs where you can get naked, andclasses in sexual healing, in yoga and meditation, in poetry and probably knittingwith some sort of spiritual bent to it, not to say Im knocking that, knockingknitting, and so on

Im not knocking knittingSome of my best friends are knittersIndeed, my daughter is a knitter

While all of thats fine, if youre into that sort of thingId go for the naked soakin the hot springs any dayI probably couldnt stomach the poetry thing, however,that kind of poetry, that is; the stuff that heals doesnt heal mebut overall, theresway too much activity, things to do, to qualify as loafing, though I would gatherthat they pretty much let you do what you want, including pretty much doingnothing, as if what you want is what you want, so long as you clean up afteryourself, so loafing may be possible there

as if what you want is what you want

But Breitenbush is a retreat, and while true, presumably one could, likewise, cometo the Institute of Loafing for a session, which, really, would consist of nothing,nothing but hanging out and, at best, watching others loaf, maybe talking to them,if you so wish

But the Institute, in fact, is not really a place, but, yes, a state of mind, but evenmore so a matter of praxis, and so, something one does daily, if possible, whereverone may be

Ill go over that at another time, having not completed it of course, sketching at it,at best, when the writing called after me just now, and I turned around and said

That, by the way, is in keeping with the poetics of loafing in so much as whatloafing teaches us is not to force things, not to get all stressed out over plans, evenif at the Institute of Loafing one has a fairly clear idea of what one is doing at anygiven time, the clear idea coming and going, of course


17/25

17

The poem was once a single paragraph, all the sentences crammed together, oneafter the other. But reading over it, I was feeling a little cramped and weigheddown, so I decided to open the windows

#

Perhaps the institute is a conceptual one, whose walls are made of paper at best,like Laura Moriartys paper spaceship, but which really is not confined to the page

#

For Badiou, the time of the fidelity to an event is thefuture anterieur: overtakingoneself towards the future, one acts now as if the future one wants to bring about is

already here (Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes 460).

This quote from Badiou explains The Dudes way of life in The Big Lebowski. If heis indifferent to the ridicule of the police officers when he tells them that he isunemployed, it is because The Dude exists in a post-labor world. In such a world,labor is not considered the be-all, end-all of human being. Rather, it is somethingone does or not, depending on the situation. (It may be necessary for some not towork, for example, work at a job; or: perhaps people could rotate in and out ofwork, like in a volley ball game: in for a stretch, then out for a stretch, givingeveryone the satisfaction of contributing to the society (getting in the game) and

ones local community while, at the same time, giving everyone significant timeaway from the task (job) on a regular (planned) basis, so that retirement isntsomething that happens at the end of ones life, but something that is interwoventhroughout ones life.) Its like asking The Dude whether hes done the laundry.The plot that The Dude is embroiled in is simply the laboring world intruding inon The Dudesfuture anterieur, hence the meaninglessness of it all. It is up to thelaboring world to catch up with him, that is to say, to turn their back on labor.Walters blanks, his heroic attempts to solve the plot, attests to the bankruptcy ofthe laboring society, as do the blanks of the other characters, from Jesusspedophilia, to Mr. Lebowskys fraudulent achievements, to Maudes artistic

pretences, to Jackie Treehorns pornographic empire, and back again to Waltersfaux Judaismnote that Walters more than willing to break with his day at restconviction when The Dude threatens to quit the bowling teamthis attests, inturn, to the fact that the Dude himself has been momentarily led astray in hisattempt to labor (that is, to solve the plot); the Dude, after all, is unchanged as acharacter by the end of the moviethe price to be paid for momentarily losing his


18/25

18

way: Donny; thats what the laboring society gets you, in other wordsyes, itsfunny, but

#

I want to take issue with the negative way public institutions are perceived by themode of radical critique fashionable today: Celebrating desertion and exodus, touse the terminology of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri . . . such critique assertsthat political action should withdraw from existing institutions so that we mightfree ourselves from all forms of belonging. Institutional attachments are presentedhere as obstacles to the new, nonrepresentative forms of absolute democracysuitable for the self-organization of the multitude. Yet such an approach foreclosesany immanent critique of institutionscritique with the objective of transforminginstitutions are perceived as monolithic representatives of forces to be destroyed,

every attempt to transform them dismissed as reformist illusion.

Chantal Mouffe,Artforum (Summer 2010) p. 326

And does this not doom nascent institutions like the Institute of Loafing beforethey even have had the chance to institutionalize themselves

I imagine, for example, if there were to be such a building, with the offices of thoseloafing about, if they cared to, that thered be things like Kafkas leg danglingthrough the hole in the ceiling

#

In chapter 19. Bulk Rate Permit of his Memoir and Essay, Michael disses onCharles for not working hard like everyone elsethey were working on publishinga book or something, I seem to recallbut acting like he was all involved in theproject, hanging out, taking advantage of everyone being there, mingling and

joking around, everyone working, but he alone loafing/minglingmessing around.While Michael has a point about this, at least according to his account of events,his criticism comes entirely too much from the position of laboring and not from

the position of loafing, where Charless action would be seen in a more favorablelight. In fact Michael admits as much when he writes:

The thing was, this kind of menial, thoughtless, rote productionwork was right up my alley. I had always, if not exactly enjoyed it,found it congenial. I suppose I must admit that I do still. It allowedme, I suppose, to believe that I was being productive while at the


19/25

19

same time taking up so little of my attention, such as it is, thusallowing it to freely range over whatever topic, fantasy, possibility fora decent line or phrase, or compulsive anxiety that struck my fancy. Iwas also sporting the bureaucrats eyeshade. That mid-levelmanagers officiousness was a pose I fell prey to often in those days.(74)

So, here they all are, gathered together to work on whatever, and Charles shows up,a bit late (as usual; Im embellishing, here), and instead of helping out on the actualwork, he bounces around chatting and making jokes, basically doing nothing. Yet,later, he acts like he was in on it, taking credit for being involved, etc.thats theimplication, right? Naturally, Michael gets miffed by that, as the task at hand is towork on publishing that damn book, sewing it together or whatever they weredoing. Folding and stuffing. Actually. I went and looked it up. Now, from a

laboring point of view, Michaels right: thats messed up that Charles is justcashing in on the thing, as if it was a social event. But, from a loafing point of view,Charles is entirely justified in his loafing. First, who knows, maybe Charles had justcome from his job, where, true, maybe he was loafing too, but then hes still on the

job and hence laboring. Actually, the event was on the weekend, so forget aboutwhat I just said. And perhaps Gottlieb had been loafing around all day and onlynow was arriving at work, even though its not, strictly speaking, laboring, laboringhas to do with making a living. Even if it wasnt this way, even if Im just makingshit up here, hypothesizing, where, with a little digging, I could arrive at the truth,so easily, having the book in my library, somewhere, even so, Charless loafing

would be entirely justified in that loafing often requires a bit of shamelessness,wherein one loafs while others labor away, loafing in the face of the laboring. Thatis to say, loafing means loafing in the face of the laborers. I mean, youre intolaboring anyway, right? I mean, you get off on all that, right? Did the work getdone? Yes, thanks to those of you who were laboring, like you. Yes, but the workactually has to get done and if everybody did what Charles (me) did, the taskwould never get completed. True, but I want to loaf and even when I loaf and youlabor, the work gets done somehow. I mean the task got done, right

#

from Card Chronicle:I liked my job once. Then I found out I had to show up EVERY day. Cards78

#

Twenty-First Material Confession (after Apollinaire)


20/25

20

We who want to work lessSay to you who want to work more:

Go ahead, make my day


21/25

21

RACHELZOLFisapoet.

In response, I think of Akilah. Akilah Oliver. She is never that far away. I think ofher body, transformed, alone, dead. I think of her words, rapture and ruptureagone timea calculated blue. Would she have died if one of her adjunct poetryteaching jobs had provided her with healthcare? Would her 21-year-old sonOluchi have died eight years earlier if one of her adjunct poetry teaching jobs hadprovided her and her dependant with healthcare? Some would call these rhetoricalquestions.

After Akilahs death in February 2011, the fight began in earnest to get healthcarefor adjuncts at Pratt, spearheaded by some who had known and loved Akilah. Atthe end of protracted contract negotiations, the adjuncts were given minimal

healthcare coverage, but in turn lost the right to employment security, as thenumber of permanent part-timers was capped. A Pyrrhic victory is the clich thatcomes to mind.

As I write this, I am back in Canada, no longer in Brooklyn. In a precariouslimited-term teaching job, but there is a living salary and there is healthcare. Thisis my first full-time teaching job, at age 43. Im sure people have already writtenhere about the pros and cons of poets teaching poetry, the stupefying stupidities ofthe academy, etc., so I wont go there. Suffice it to say it was easier to adapt once Irealized the universitys a corporation like everywhere else. Not much different

from my life before as a copywriter or documentary producer or bartender oroffice cleaner or crisis worker or retail worker or babysitter or newspaper deliveryboy. I do wonder whether I have made a mistake, though, enmeshing myself in theacademys impure suck. I havent written any poetry in over two years, since beforeEmily Beall, Rachel Levitsky, and I paid an Israeli locksmith 200 bucks to breakinto Akilahs Brooklyn apartment, so we could find her. Almost exactly a monthafter Akilah died, my dad died, while I was alone with him holding his hand. Wehad never been close; he suffered from mental illness, had no idea how to father.But somehow it was right to be there with him, that day. Akilah helped me be there,she was with me, an arriving guard of angels. Akilah embodied presence one of

the reasons her absence flesh memory is so keenly felt. Perhaps the task of thepoet, her true labo(u)r, is to be, and tofight, ec-statically, beside oneself and others.To the end, dust. Rupture and rapture.


22/25

22

JEN COLEMAN is a Minnesotan living in Portland, OR by way of DC and NewYork. She currently applies her skills as a factory worker, gas station attendant,dish washer, chocolate shaver, night stocker and school bus driver to her work asoutreach director for Oregon Environmental Council. Jen helps organize the SpareRoom reading series and writes with the 13 Hats creative collective.

It's okay to mourn what's impossible.

A therapist told me that once, when I wanted to conceive a baby with anotherwoman. First, to recognize that there is this thing that's impossible.And then, also, that it is, after all, what I want.

Poetry. Work.

***As a kid, I wanted to be a lawyer, a marine biologist, a welder, poet and an actress.Those "jobs" make it permissible to argue, explore, discover, weld, write, act andplay.

Then a "job" became selling time for what it will pay. The hiring manager at Targetlaughed at my job history Id characterized as "various unskilled labor. She hiredme to stock shelves from 10 PM to 6 AM.

One night, I had a box of 1,000 plastic bags, each containing a lantern mantle. Theslippery little bags had to go on a display hook one at a time.

Some poets compose in their heads. Stocking lantern mantles, I couldn't think of athing to think of.

***"I want"it pleadedAll its life

***

I'd like to believe nothing is impossible. Its wanting to believe that nothing isimpossible that makes the impossible invisible. I want my way around it, right upto the edges of it, without ever knowing it exists. It.

I wantwas chief it said

***


23/25

23

I worked in factories. Janitor, hotel maid, gas station attendant, dish washer. Idrove a school bus. I tried to write in the time provided by each jobs inefficiencies.I was tired.

At Holiday gas station, my workmates were fired for trying to guess winnersamong unsold scratch-off lottery cards. Another was fired when the till came up$200 short. I saw her later working at the SuperAmerica station. My weeklypaycheck was $200.

***When Skill entreated itthe last

At the three ring binder factory, not much happened. The break time bell was loud.The punch clock was violent.

Driving a school bus, a lot happened. Lives were at risk. I was paid seven dollars anhour: the most I'd ever earned.

***I can't stand stifled expression. Even the crudest suggestion in a narrative makesme weep. My sinuses are inflamed for hours after watching a romantic comedy.Usually it is stifled love, but it might be stifled anything.

A mailman prepares to express his philosophy, tries, is misunderstood, I melt.

In a predictable narrative, I am destroyed before the stifling happens. A mailmanprepares...forget it. I am melting.

And when so newly dead

I could not deem it lateto hearThat singlesteadfast sigh

***

I applied to graduate school to stop driving a school bus. How did I get in? Howdid I get funded? I still wonder. I loved it. I wrote a manuscript called The SchoolBus Murders. None of the poems were about work or school buses.

***


24/25

24

After graduate school, I was astounded to get a job at an environmental advocacynonprofit. I stayed 11 years. I remember an article in their copy of "DirectMarketing News" that advised against hiring creative writing graduates.

In my job, I use the same words over and over:Critical. Health. Action. Climate. Water. Toxic. Dollars. Strategic. Now.

My job was to write, but I found ways to argue, explore, discover, act, play,and ,once, to weld. I built a lower-case letter e costume. Seriously. I got paid. Itwas awesome. My job today is similar. People ask me to do stuff, I do it, they loveit. It's great. Its great.

***Andrew Joron suggests that, when poetry becomes work, it is a prison.

I want security, consumer choice and fungible social capital. I want everyone Imeet to understand how I sell my time, and to have an opinion about it. I havethose things.

That singlesteadfast sighThe lips had placed

***I've teamed up with writers and artists in a collective inquiry project called 13

Hats. I feel embraced by the "ekklesia" as David Brazil and Sara Larsen describe it:creatives who have "experienced the call, volatilized by its seemingirreconciliability with their worldly station, and therefore affined to those in whomthey recognize a kindred predicament."

But I don't feel volatilized. I am lazy. I tell myself I am free from ambition. I writeand read when compelled to. My poems work when someone reads them.

I am in mourning. What impossible is invisible here?

it pleaded

Or as Rod Smith writes in The Spider Poems:In my life o this life. yes, this one. o, it.***Once, in high school, I told my parents that Emily Dickinson's poems were"rhyme-y little poems from hell."


25/25

At the circuit board factory, clean-suits taped up the boards to expose only circuitsthat would receive electroplating. My job was to pull off the tape afterelectroplating. It was too loud to talk. Too consuming to read. Too boring to think.

***Toward Eternity

***My dad is a philosopher and laborer. Thomas Coleman. When he could no longerwork for wages, he turned to art full time: carving angels, from pine, with a knife.When Parkinson's and arthritis made carving impossible, he read Wallace Stevens,James Joyce, the Book of Mormon. He writes sonnets. Sometimes about how he ismore fight than cry.

He says everything is a story: science is a story, history is a story, the bible is a storyand all truths are different stories or the same story.

It has to do with story, and if you tell the story, and this is the way it is, this is notabout belief, this is not about possible or impossible. This is about action.

731"I want"it pleadedAll its life

I wantwas chief it said

When Skill entreated itthe lastAnd when so newly dead

I could not deem it lateto hearThat singlesteadfast sighThe lips had placed as with a "Please"Toward EternityEmily Dickinson

poetic labor project - winter 2013

Documents