Swirling Voices: Considerations of Working-class Poetic Property

Year 1995, Issue: 2, 73 - 79, 01.10.1995

Peter J. Grieco

Abstract

The political and economic power of the working classes has only rarely and temporarily risen to a level of direct influence on the traditions that constitute literary practices as a dominant cultural form. It is therefore difficult to talk about a tradition of working-class poetry in a way that does not reduce it to middle-class terms, according to which it would be viewed as a Minor literature--almost as a culturally deprived literature--qualified by a few geniuses such as Whitman in America or D.H. Lawrence in Britain who somehow managed in their art to transcend their working-class status. Yet if we define the "working class," as I heard Nicholas Coles define it during a panel on Working-Class Literature at the 1992 MLA Convention, as "most of the people, most of the time," then we are compelled to recognize its relevance and the importance of discussing it as best as we can on its own terms. What I seek to show in this paper is the extent to which the terms which is to say, the dialogic manner of working-class poetry are also our own--for most of us, most of the time: For, although constituted in part by the relationships of its subordinant status, working-class poetry also presupposes within it our own answering voices, even as our own most intimate thoughts presuppose the answering voices of those others with whom we are most familiar in the daily conditions of our lives and histories. After discussing traditions of working-class poetry in English, I focus on two contemporary American workingclass poets, Peter Oresick and John Ventola.

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