6 Contemporary Poems to Read This Labor Day
From “the Great Resignation” to “quiet quitting,” there have been a lot of new terms popping up recently that describe (and moralize) how people are reevaluating their relationship to capitalism and the value of their labor.
As American working-class poets have voiced for generations, labor inequity is tightly woven into the identity and landscape. In fact, one of the few things in this world actually older than poetry is exploitative labor. Since it’s almost Labor Day, we’re highlighting 6 poets and representative poems that will encourage you to punch capitalism in the dick. Along the way, you’ll learn about the American proletariat poetry movement, what Labor Day is all about, and how working-class artists continue to do the hard cultural work that supports us all.
The revolution that started as a parade
Labor Day, celebrated in the U.S. and Canada, falls on the first Monday of September, and was designed to honor working-class people and promote the work of labor unions. In many other countries, May Day serves a similar purpose.
DID YOU KNOW ❔
May Day was co-opted by U.S. labor activists in 1863 from pagan Beltane traditions to honor international workers’ rights and limit workdays to 8 hours. It’s an official holiday celebrated in 66 countries, but not the U.S., where it started.
While for some Labor Day simply marks the end of summer, it emerged in the late nineteenth century (during the height of the Industrial Revolution) out of the organized labor movements in England, where increasing attention was being focused on the thousands of people from vulnerable populations who were dying every year from poor working conditions and long hours. Inspired by the UK activist movements and labor strikes, unions in New York threw a parade in September 1882, to celebrate unions as a concept and the hard-working people comprising them. Workers gave up a day’s wage to attend, and more than 20,000 people came out, which meant they weren’t laboring for others. It was a celebration of historic proportions that sent ripples through the capitalist workforce system.
Soon, unions in other states hosted September parades, and within five years, several states declared Labor Day official state holidays. After twelve years of radical parade shenanigans, President Grover Cleveland signed an act establishing Labor Day as a federal holiday in 1894. It is estimated that this year more than 40% of businesses will remain open this Labor Day, and the vast majority of staff members on the clock will be those from within the working-class—the people who are meant to be honored by the holiday.
What is working class poetry?
Nearly every consideration of working-class literature begins with the same question: “What do we mean by ‘working-class?’”
I take a cue from Working-Class Women’s Literature: An Introduction to Study when I understand the term to refer to people who sell their labor for wages, who create in that labor and have any “surplus value” they create taken from them to benefit others, who have relatively little control over the conditions or products of their work, and who do not hold positions where their own experience of their own working conditions are given authority to affect policy. The term considers income, social status, and the kind of work being performed. A working-class job could be manual labor, like construction, or it could be a desk job, like data entry. What all the jobs have in common is a lack of power over the labor being provided and its future.
By extension, working-class poetry is poetry that focuses on work, accurate representations of material and social conditions of working-class life, validation of working-class culture, resistance to existing power structures, and rejection or critique of the standard middle-class narrative of upward mobility, oftentimes created by and for people who claim membership with the working-class. Working-class poetry plays with language and often uses vernacular, code-switching between languages, and exalts the rhythm of everyday speech.
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
The American proletariat poetry movement
The proletarian poetry movement, or political poetry, developed in the U.S. in the 1920s and 1930s and gave voice to class-conscious perspectives, often serving to register a snapshot of the daily lives of people not widely represented in poetry or overtly calling for political change. The movement paralleled the Harlem Renaissance at times, and poetic forms included emulations of the imagery and structure of African American slave work songs as well as lyrical modernist poetic form. Major poets of the movement include Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Horace Gregory. The movement went on to inspire icons of the 1960s and 70s U.S. music scene like Janis Joplin and Bruce Springsteen. While the movement has received little attention since the 1940s, these contemporary poets are keeping its traditions alive.
Working-class poets to read!
A recent article in The Guardian shares a study that finds the number of artists and creatives from the working class has shrunk by half since the 1970. The study also found that people who grew up in professional families were four times more likely than those with working-class parents to be in creative work. We know there’s a strong relationship between who makes programming decisions and what perspectives get shared, validated, and compensated within that programming. The decline in working-class artists suggests new factors in art gatekeeping today that are being naturalized as part of the process, and we artists are given the message that this is simply how things are done.
I think these boat-rockin’ poets would disagree.
1 “Wages” by Kathleen Helen
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Learn more about Kathleen Helen here ↪
2 “The Monster” by Luis J. Rodriguez
Learn more about Luis J. Rodriguez here ↪
3 “Bread & Roses” by Hakim Bellamy
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Learn more about Hakim Bellamy here ↪
4 “Steel-Toed” by Rain Prud’homme-Cranford (formerly Goméz)
Learn more about Rain Prud’homme-Cranford here ↪
5 “Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100” by Martín Espada
Learn more about Martín Espada here ↪
6 “Adjunct Blues” by Brian Fannelli
In Celebration
Poets give voice to the truths that some of us feel in our gut. Some of these truths are so stark they make us wonder why no one is speaking them, or crying over them in public, or screaming about them between fever punches.
These poets affirm for us that yes, American capitalism is heartless, is bound to American racism, is tethered to American patriarchal rule, and continues to wage war against working people to protect those who live off the labors of those who work.
Thank you to these poets who help us to acknowledge and work to change that truth while doing so from inside a system designed to discredit our gut feelings, if not our very existence.
Fuck you, capitalism. Happy Labor Day, poets!
This article was published on August 28, 2023. Written by:
