Poems about class

I’ve been reading in the "Unlikely Stories" website (http://www.unlikelystories.org/ - check it out: it combines beauty, defiance, humor, and desire - makes you almost believe they aren’t inherently irreconcilable) and came across what to me is a very powerful poem, by a poet I didn’t know, Kurtis Kucheman. The poem an absolutely unvarnished, defiant, lively, contradictory yet empathetic portrait of a young woman in today’s unstable and screwed up America. (I love the line about not being able to buy pot "because she only worked full time" - that catches the flavor of our current economy pretty accurately.)

TERRY
im sorry i have to go to burger king now
walked across the street not using the cross walk
ate a hamburger at a bus stop
smoked cigarettes while running register
the customers made faces at her
in her spare time
smoked pot with her unemployed boyfriend
that would lay on her futon
and stare black eyed at the television
she had scars and tattoos
carving the word
whore
on her ass when she couldnt get pot
because she only worked full time
she would knock back huge bottles
of cheap wine
and listen to billie holiday
on her cd player while writing bad poetry
she wasnt going anywhere really
just living in her parents basement
almost thirty years old
with an unemployed man under her room
smoking her pot
here take a hit of this X
think we could rent a movie
so when she set her hair on fire
and walked up a street full of traffic
not too many were surprised
but when she went to work the next day
they were shocked
- Kurtis Kucheman

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I love this next poem by Charles Reznikoff. One weird feature of some great poetry is that it makes you ask yourself, why didn’t I write that? Which is another way of saying, the poet has caught your feeling pretty marvelously. Poems about class.are sometimes overlooked, but there are some sharp ones. If you don’t know Reznikoff, get one of his books. He writes simply, honestly, with great respect for his ancestors, and very spiritually, too. What a poet.

THESE GENTLEMEN ARE GREAT
These gentlemen are great; they are paid
a dollar a minute. They will not answer
if you say, Good morning;
will neither smile nor nod -
if you are paid only a dollar or two
an hour. (Study
when to be silent, when to smile.)
The director who greets my employer loudly
and smiles broadly, reaching for his hand and back,
scowls and glares at my greeting. Now I understand
why he managed to give me only his fingers
when we were introduced. Why do you go to such trouble
to teach me that you are great?
I never doubted it until now.
- Charles Reznikoff (U.S., 1894-1976)

* * *
Well, you’ve got to be in the mood to read Walt Whitman, I guess. The flowerly biblical language can get almost pompous and tiresome. But he’s a great one and we can’t let a few differences between us keep us apart. What he says about class society in this poem is eloquent and strong: "I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer'd and slain persons."

WITH STRONG MUSIC I COME
With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums,
I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer'd and slain persons.
Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?
I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.
I beat and pound for the dead,
I blow through my embourchures my loudest and gayest for them.
Vivas to those who have fail'd,
And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!
And to those themselves who sank in the sea!
And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!
And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!
- Walt Whitman (U.S., 1819-1892)

* * *
Look at this beautiful portrait of a working class family by Lewis Hyde. The silence in it makes me cry. Is it a sad moment in this family’s life? Or a memory the boy will treasure forever? Well, in my experience, it’s the latter.

SUNRISE AFTER WORK
Six a.m. and the body's hopeful fatigue as I come home from the nightshift.
Everything seems blessed with the coming sleep, forgiveness
thick in the air, like tufted, air-borne seeds.
I pass a family - a man and woman and their two children -
setting up their fruit stand for the day.
Every morning they park the truck on Somerville Ave. and sell fruit from the back.
The children are allowed to bargain and make change. At this hour
the younger son culls the soft ones from the Concord grapes,
then lays them gently in a box with waxy tissue paper.
The four of them work in absolute silence with the quiet swish of bus tires
and overhead the gulls going out to sea.
- Lewis Hyde (U.S., 1945-)

* * *
Gary Snyder’s justly famous "Hay for the Horses" reminds of Lewis Hyde’s poem. God, there's a gentleness and kindness in this poem, no?

HAY FOR THE HORSES
He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa,up the
Dangerous mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
- The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds -
"I'm sixty-eight," he said,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day that I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that's just what
I've gone and done."
- Gary Snyder (U.S., 1930-)

* * *

When I think of poets of class, I also think about musicians like Townes Van Zandt. Do you know his music? I’m listening to it as I write. It’s a rough balm, an antidote to slick overproduced money-worshipping commercial music. His homages to working people and the down and out.
Greg Brown is a little smoother around the edges than Townes Van Zandt, but he’s also got a nice sense of empathy with those who aren’t on the front pages.

* * *
This next poem (by the Irish poet Eavan Boland) starts out with a touch of rightous anger at us for forgetting our ancestors. We put them out back like old oil lamps we’re holding on to for some reason we’re not sure why. But by the end of the poem, we realize our situation today is not all that less desperate than theirs was when they first came to this country. By the end of the poem, we know how badly we need the old songs and the courage of our ancestors.

THE IMMIGRANT IRISH
Like oil lamps, we put them out the back -
of our houses, of our minds. We had lights
better than, newer than and then
a time came, this time and now
we need them. Their dread, makeshift example:
they would have thrived on our necessities.
What they survived we could not even live.
By their lights now it is time to
imagine how they stood there, what they stood with,
that their possessions may become our power:
Cardboard. Iron. Their hardships parceled in them.
Patience. Fortitude. Long-suffering
in the bruise-colored dusk of the New World.
And all the old songs. And nothing to lose.
- Eavan Boland (Ireland, 1944-)

* * *
I love this portrait of a young woman by David Budbill. What extraordinary understanding, observation, and especially, empathy, in this poem. (It reminds me a bit of the first poem we looked at in this posting, "Terry" by Kurtis Kucheman.) Maybe I love this poem especially because it reminds me of the community my wife is from - Camden, New York. Beautiful, hard-working, spirited women. Budbill’s entire website (http://www.davidbudbill.com/) is wonderful, even, like Unlikely Stories...hopeful! which is not a word I use a lot - I highly recommend a subscription to his email newsletter, the "Judevine Mountain Emailite." Budbill is a direct, simple, powerful, poet yet also also spiritual and humorous - an American zen, I guess. He’s a hard-to-characterize poet, a quality I really appreciate. Get to know him.

BOBBIE
For years Bobbie drove the pickup truck to Morrisville
every day to sew the flys in men's pajamas at a factory
down there. When you spoke to her about the job,
she'd blush and turn on her heel like a little girl.
She was good. The best one down there.
It was piecework and she was fast.
She quit the sewing when she and Doug went to farming.
Bobbie is beautiful, or could be.
Under thirty years of work and plainness you can see
her body, see her face,
those definite, delicate features
glowing.
She strides like a doe.
In spite of two brown teeth
her smile is warm and liquid.
Last summer she cut off a finger in the baler,
paid her farmer's dues.
Now she holds her missing finger behind her when she talks.
She's got something new to blush for.
- David Budbill

* * *
Maybe we should finish with a poem by Robert Creeley, who has just died. With its social observation, this is really not a typical poem of Creeley’s. But its sardonic, deadpan, blunt, bitter music is his. This is another poem that’s so good and so close to what you already felt, without quite realizing it, you say to yourself: thank you for writing it for us, Robert. See ya round the universe.

AFTER LORCA
for M. Marti

The church is a business, and the rich
are the business men.

When they pull on the bells, the
poor come piling in and when a poor man dies, he has a wooden
cross, and they rush through the ceremony.

But when a rich man dies, they
drag out the Sacrament
and a golden Cross, and go "doucement, doucement"
to the cemetary.

And the poor love it
and think its crazy.