Poetry of the Commonplace

The Politics of Work Poetry

Jan 28, 2009 Brenda Ann Burke

Themes of power, conflict, personal fulfilment in the workplace and everyday life--these provide inspiration for writers who focus on people's daily realities.

Rather than considering political questions at the level of the larger society, or looking inward to the psyche for raw material, such poets are concerned with the challenges ordinary individuals must face to survive.

A writer in this mould is Canadian Tom Wayman who states that his "poetic aim [always] has been to provide an accurate depiction of our common everyday life". In particular, Wayman is a pioneer of work poetry, which expresses "the actual conditions and effects of daily employment". Because people have no choice but to work if they are to remain independent, Wayman considers that his poetry is helping to build an "adult" literature, in contrast with the plenitude of writing on the "unlikely lives" of people (such as the rich, and outlaws) who can be unconcerned with money.

Wayman believes that in daily employment "we live our productive lives...as free lance serfs". Though focusing on the everyday, he is able to provide comment on the politics of work and power in an industrial society. "Most of us at work have no significant control over what happens to us, over who gives orders, over the organization of production, over the distribution of wealth our labor produces, over the social uses of what we create".

This approach to poetry is in contrast to artists concerned with cultural identity and to those following in the footsteps of the New Critics , who focus on formal technique rather than the message. Wayman comments that he intends his poems to reveal "the complications of our everyday existence, rather than newly-created difficulties or mysteries generated by language or poetic form".

Bukowski and the Dark Side

Another writer who mined reality for material was American Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), remembered by some as "the poet of Skid Row". Bukowski wrote about the soul-destroying nature of work, but also about women, horseracing, relationships, the raw communities that were the context of this angry, hard-drinking artist. On the Bukowski website Linda King describes him as "a mass of sensitivities, egotism, uncertainties, confidence...humor, talent".

Perhaps Bukowski's greatest gift to the poetry of everyday life was to give voice to the terrifying aspects of individual human experience. King relates a time when "the unknown enemy was coming out of the walls....[The poet} couldn't sleep...and shadows spoke. Spirits stood around the bed watching us".

Corporate Workplaces Built on Poetry?

In his book The Heart Aroused (New York: Doubleday, 1994), poet and organisational change consultant David Whyte is less concerned with expressing life as poetry than with using poetry to create a healthy work environment. Such a setting would be characterised by "a rich flow of creativity, innovation and almost musical complexity" and would make possible "the soul's wish, to have power through experience, whatever that may be".

Whyte encourages corporations to make possible the expression of joy in the workplace, and also to recognise the darker side, the "Dionysian dynamic", when people are confronted with "everything [they} were afraid could be true about existence". One of the lessons he draws from poetry is that this "fiercer wind...seems to be an energy without which we cannot appreciate the gift of the light-filled, ordered world".

Adopting a theme of renowned American poet Saul Williams (who writes of the deeply held human belief in the spoken word as a kind of magic that can make things happen), Whyte emphasises the importance of being able to speak out at work. "The voice emerges literally from the body as a representation of our inner world....whether or not we try to tell the truth, the very act of speech is courageous because, no matter what we say, we are revealed".

Interface Between People and Enviroment

What reality-focused poets such as Wayman, Bukowski and Whyte have in common is finding the material of poetry in the interface between people and their environments. "Political" questions are answered here, and perhaps less so by ideologies. Whyte compares the qualities required of such writers to the concept of "sensibility" used by Romantic poets: that is, "the power of appreciation for things as they are".

The copyright of the article Poetry of the Commonplace in Poetry is owned by Brenda Ann Burke. Permission to republish Poetry of the Commonplace in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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