Poetry and People's History: Places We Called Home

Posted on June 20, 2011 

The Center for Working Class Studies 

http://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/

Poetry is not everyone's cup of tea, I know.  Modernist
poetry in particular has a reputation for being obscure
and self-obsessed.   But there is also a vein of
contemporary poetry that speaks powerfully to our
condition as a society, and much of it in recent
decades has come from a working-class rather than an
elite perspective.

Jim Daniels and Jeanne Bryner are exemplary writers
whose poetry is rooted in the everyday experience of
working people and written in ways most of us can
appreciate.  They convey the clear vision, emotional
connections, and truth-telling that good poetry offers.
 And in their most recent books they illuminate local
and personal histories of the times we are living
through.

Bryner's No Matter How Many Windows (Wind Publications,
2010) is the winner of the 2011 Tillie Olsen Prize from
the Working-Class Studies Association.   Working from
years of research into family history, she has pieced
together the stories of four generations of women - her
great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, and herself -
who made their lives in rural West Virginia and
industrial Ohio.

Daniels's From Milltown to Malltown (Marick Press,
2010) is a collaboration with fellow-writer Jane
McCafferty and photographer Charlee Brodsky, all of
Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.    Its
juxtaposion of documentary photographs with imaginative
writing it evokes Daniels and Brodsky's previous
collaboration on Street (Bottom Dog Press, 2007), which
won the WCSA's Tillie Olsen Prize in 2007.   Whereas
Street offers images, voices, and stories from across
Pittsburgh's neighborhoods, here the focus is squarely
on the town of Homestead, Pennsylvania - an iconic site
of labor history - and the changes wrought there by
deindustrialization.

When you drive across the high level bridge towards the
town, you look down at the former site of the mighty
Homestead Works of US Steel, built on two miles of
flatland in a bend of the Monogahela river.  This is
now home to The Waterfront, "a mega shopping center,
complete with surrounding town houses, a hotel, fast
food drive-thrus, upscale restaurants, and every
imaginable chain store." Along the access road towards
Costco,

Eight smokestacks rise above the carefully manicured
lawn

as if eager to perform, to spell out L-O-N-G-H-O-R-N

in symmetrical puffs of meat-flavored smoke

from the steakhouse nestled underneath these towering
relics from the mill.

At night, they're lit up artistically, though no plaque

explains history, no fire burns inside.

From Milltown to Malltown is divided into the two
sections indicated by the title, as Homestead itself is
divided.  This is not only a story of historical
displacement: from old world to new world.  The steel
mill has been replaced by retail development, but the
mill-town - with its houses, churches, bars, and
schools - is still there, albeit run-down and
underpopulated.  That old community and the new mall
confront each other across the dividing line of the
railroad tracks.

In the book's "Milltown" section, one photograph shows
a bank building with a portico of columns out front,
bearing a large "Available" sign and a realtor's number
to call, in case you're in the market for a grandiose
financial institution (7).  In another photograph,
"Window Shopping," we see storefronts and a shopper,
but the empty windows offer nothing to look at or buy. 
In the accompanying poem, the woman bundled in her
parka is "heading toward / some place that's open. /
Maybe even home."

Contrast this with the Victoria's Secret window in the
Malltown section, where a lingerie manikin seems to
offer other more exotic possibilities:

There should be a door on her plastic leg.

The door would have a nice brass handle.

You open it and guess what?

There is another world.

The longing for another world, and with it another
identity, seems to be what is now manufactured in place
of steel.  In "Future Residents Parking Only":

. . . the point is, I'd like to leave these parts,

drive to land I've never seen before,

wake up in the body of another,

begin again as someone bound for glory.

Waterfront shoppers and future residents are in the
market for a glory-land very different from that of the
train-travelers in the old song.  Whereas the steel
mill was a place of production, the mall is dedicated
to consumption.   Brodsky's "Malltown" photographs
present an entirely commodified landscape of endless
parking lots, unrelieved brick walls, identical trimmed
shrubs, among which restless shoppers perform the labor
of consumption:

Shopping's hard work, I don't care what anybody says.

Ask my back.  Ask the hard floor, the automatic doors.

Days indoors with an empty cart . . .

Why use poetry to explore the human meaning of these
historical changes?  Perhaps because poetry is itself a
language of transformation.  In Daniels's and
McCafferty's readings of Brodsky's images, by turns
witty and tender, these transformations are often
startling:  Abandoned shopping carts become cattle
grazing across the vast asphalt plains of the parking
lots.   A "House with Flag" is turned into a ship by
"kids / whose vocabulary is shaped by a desire / to be
elsewhere."  On a construction site, "The tree would
like to have a few words / with all interested parties.
 The sound / of machinery drowns out its whispers."  In
poems like these, though, we can hear them.

If From Milltown to Malltown illuminates a visual
record of urban change, Bryner's work, by contrast,
dramatizes private histories unfolding in the
rural-industrial spaces of northern Appalachia, where
mining, farming, and mill-labor go on side by side. 
She sees herself as "mining" the "connective tissue" of
her family, their relationships to each other and to
the places where they have made their homes.   No
Matter How Many Windows, although its gaze is more
interior and personal, also illuminates the larger
historical changes of rural depopulation and
outmigration to industrial towns, particularly as these
affect the lives of women.

The poem from which the book's title is taken,
"Bertha's Tenth Wedding Anniversary, April 21, 1908,"
sets the theme of indoor work:

A woman becomes a man's bouquet,

but it's a chore to keep flowers alive.

So much handling in a house

no matter how many windows.

There's never enough light.

The call-and-response poem "I Hear These Women Talking
to Mama, Backyard, Ohio Projects, 1958" shows much they
miss those country homes:

I want a real porch.  I want to see the stars again.

Amen.

Even for an hour.

Yeah.

Even if it's raining.

Lord, let the kids be outside.

Some of Bryner's women forbears left letters and
journal entries, but much of their history was
unrecorded or silenced, and she has used interviews and
imaginative recreation to give them voice, as suggested
in "Things Mama Learned the Hard Way":

I used to make up stories.  When I died

they burned them in a garbage can.

Maybe you could write a little bit

about my life, there was nothing to it, really.

Nothing, that is, unless you count the trials these
four generations of women lived through, including a
stillbirth ("l abor without pay"), an infant's death
while in the care of his young sister, a
three-year-old's scalding at the stove, a four-year
old's polio, another child's cerebral palsy, a father's
abandoning the family, a grown son's death working
construction, running booze for moonshiners, jail-time,
mental illness, cancer.

If that list makes the book sound like depressing
reading, it really isn't.  Bryner handles these events
without sentimentality, and her poems evoke the
strength it takes to make do, hold things together, and
look to the future.  There are also shining moments of
love and connection to celebrate and savor: a lost
child found on a neighbor's porch, a daughter reading
Wuthering Heights aloud, a new bookshelf, a picnic by
the waterfall, a pottery class, feeding lambs.  And
there is a wisdom that derives from deep experience:

Love is a country

and vows about forever a gate, the weakest part of a
fence.

If Daniels and McCafferty draw metaphors from playful
readings of Brodsky's photographs, Bryner's metaphors
emerge from the literal language of farming and mining.
 She uses images of digging in the garden and
underground to explain the poet's work of unearthing
and connecting.  The book's final poem "Chores" begins:

Before dawn, I get out of bed, lift my spade,

dig for something that lends grace or beauty

to the task of record keeping.

And ends:

I know the horses are gone, the farm house sags

And to live anyplace in this world is a risk and a
gamble.

On the evidence of the poems in both these books, it's
a risk and a gamble worth taking, with every new day,
even if we find ourselves living on the edge of a
malltown.

Nick Coles

Nick Coles teaches working-class literature at the
University of Pittsburgh.  He is the incoming president
of the Working-Class Studies Association.

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