In recent years—not least because of the crisis of academic labor and the transformations in working conditions in our own time—literature’s relation to work has been examined with new urgency. Katie Kadue’s Domestic Georgics reframes early modern poetry as a labor of domestic reproduction, while Peter Riley’s Against Vocation locates the late nineteenth century as a moment of emergent “distracted” labors that present an alternative to vocation. Yet there is a risk here. In refusing poetry’s traditional status as a protected form of non-work—a uniquely unalienated form of labor—do we risk reducing poetry to yet another work, a labor among labors?
What happens when we turn our attention, instead, to poetry’s attunement to life outside of work? This panel dwells with poems that treat those activities squeezed into the margins of the working day: the demands of care and reproduction; unemployment and the rhythms of life lived in the disappearance of industry; but also forms of rest, leisure, and refusal that promise a life beyond work.
Our panel begins with Margaret Ronda’s paper, “Unemployed Time,” which examines the temporal forms of texts by Mark Nowak and Tongo Eisen-Martin as investigations of the economic and experiential tempos of deindustrialization. These writers explore what it means for life to become ungoverned by the protocols of waged work through poetic methods of apostrophe, parataxis, and caesura. Ronda reads these works in conversation with key accounts of capitalist time in relation to these works’ contexts of Rust Belt layoffs and deindustrialized Black urban life. This paper underscores these poems’ ambivalent descriptions of the equivocal political contours of unwaged life.
Kristin Grogan’s “For Best Work” considers the relationship between craft, reproductive labor, and non-work in the later poetry of Lorine Niedecker. Niedecker’s turn to craft names her exclusion from literary institutions and her embrace of homemade forms of creation and distribution. But craft is also a practice of rethinking poetic labor, and orienting it towards the post-work life of retirement. Grogan focuses on the material forms of Niedecker’s homemade books, and on the textuality of the poems themselves—their minimalism and formal restraint, slant rhymes, and delicate handling of tone. Repositioning Niedecker within the feminist turn to craft practices in the 1960s, Grogan argues that Niedecker’s “homemade” late poetry develops an anti-work ethic that prizes restriction, non-imposition, and restraint.
Sarah Dowling’s paper discusses Marxist poet Kay Gabriel’s “Kissing Other People or the House of Fame,” which is composed from a year’s worth of her dreams. The poem situates itself in the zone outside of work, in the realm of sleep. Sleep is a “barrier” to capitalism and its 24/7 temporality, according to Jonathan Crary. But sleep is also regenerative; our capacity to work depends upon it. Dowling’s analysis demonstrates that the form and rhythm of Gabriel’s poetry arise within this dialectic, while also showing that sleep involves a practice of working through, in the Freudian sense. It enables processes of reencounter, remediation, and transformation—that is, dreams. Gabriel’s poetry shows how in sleep we undertake activities of world-making and of meaning-making, although these are diminished and rejected in waking life.
Sarah Ehlers’ paper focuses on poet, ceramicist, and educational theorist Mary Caroline (M.C.) Richards to outline an anti-work poetics that emerged in the midcentury US at the nexus of feminist craft, avant-garde art, and experimental education communities. Richards uses ceramics to define a poetics free from what she calls “external tyrannies.” Ehlers show that, while Richards romanticizes pottery as a form of unalienated labor, she also draws on ideas of materiality and temporality implicit in ceramics to develop a feminist poetics that exceeds the romantic horizon she operates within. Ehlers argues that Richards’s turn to pottery at Black Mountain College—amidst personal and professional crises—enable thinking about the tenuous role of creative work within and outside contemporary educational institutions.
**These papers will be limited to 12-14 minutes each to ensure ample discussion time.
**This panel gathers together four women who are experts on modern poetry. We represent a geographic diversity--our institutions are located in California, New Jersey, Texas, and Ontario. The papers themselves consider poets from a diversity of positions and perspectives with regards to race, gender, and sexuality.