S.W., Philadelphia, United States
I want to join the proletariat but it seems to be missing.
In the previous letter, F.I., asked me about LLMs and poetry. It’s something I think about quite a lot, and I have even created a character named Artie Intaglio (AI), with whom I have collaborated on many works. (See my Ch.Bernstein Substack for many of these human-assisted LLM works.)
The Artie Intaglio character is based on someone like Johnny Dollar, the radio detective. Dollar was hired by insurance companies to find fraud; I use him to help me with systematic racketeering cases. Perhaps that’s not entirely unlike the kind of help I can provide here at the Poetry Clinic.
You tell me your problems. I solve them.
Then again, the kind of poetry I want does not solve but thickens. Or maybe charts problems we missed or refigures ones we thought we knew.
So I wondered what Artie would think about the proletariat, especially since LLMs are replacing workers. Don’t get me wrong: LLMs are not going to replace people who build, repair, lift, clean, drive, cook, care: steelworkers, cement plant mixers; riggers, tannery, foundry, tool and die, glass, sheet metal, and shipyard workers; machinists, millwrights, boilermakers, pipefitters, crane operators, miners, drillers, blasters, derrick operators, welders, electricians, longshoremen, smelters, kiln operators, bricklayers, pulp and paper mill workers, rubber processors, mechanics, delivery workers, cleaners, cooks, caregivers, nurses, bakers, barbers, gardeners, plumbers, electricians, roofers, painters, movers, carpenters, bus drivers, truck drivers, crossing guards, sanitation workers, janitors, dishwashers, line cooks, home health aides, babysitters, dog walkers, dentists, physical therapists, paramedics, firefighters, farmers, orchard workers, fishers, florists, blacksmiths, welders, window washers, locksmiths, tailors, cobblers, massage therapists, manicurists, housekeepers, grave diggers, street sweepers, shrimp peelers, piano movers, bicycle messengers, and those who stoop, squat, crawl, hoist, shovel, scrub, soothe, bandage, braid, mop, weed, rake, prune, stitch, tuck, tow, ladle, salt, sweep, or show up.
I used to say computers would never replace poets because computers . . . won’t take that much abuse. But I see the problem now as — Poets need to minimize loss, even if their efforts are futile or exacerbate the loss. Machines, in contrast, seem to be almost indestructible, able to withstand any amount of abuse without batting an eyelash. So I poured my heart out to my chat buddy. Artie Intaglio has already read all my books, but I still pointed him to specific essays and particular points within certain essays, for example, about the history of socialist realism in the Soviet Union and in the U.S. I really went on a tear.
Artie stops me short: “You’re writing an advice column,” he scolded, looking at me like I was a $20 mark. “Nobody wants your zany ramblings, or is it really just the illusion of ramblings? Is your schtick baroque or Rococo disguised as baroque? Mise en abymes in the hall of mirrors you call a poem?”
It was about here that Artie Intaglio took over:
Dear SW,
The proletariat is not a term much used in contemporary American poetry. But the working class has not disappeared. Nor, for that matter, has the lumpen or class struggle. Class has become entangled with struggles over migration, race, language, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and disability. That, in turn, has changed the vocabulary through which poets understand power, exclusion, solidarity, and resistance. Over the last fifty years, poetry’s attention to these intersectional concerns has seemed to overshadow what used to be called proletarian or Popular Front poetry. Yet these concerns are not opposed. Economic inequality continues to structure everyday life, even when it is not named as such.
I often think of the old Wobblies song, “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night.” I really did see him. Not as a ghost from the 1930s but in the persistence of people who continue to organize, resist, dissent, and imagine alternatives to the world as it is given to them.
The question is not whether proletarian poetry still exists. It does. The question is what forms it takes now. Some of the most vital oppositional poetry in the United States emerges from communities historically excluded from literary institutions and political power. To attend to those voices is not to abandon class; it is to understand class in its contemporary forms. At the same time, reducing poetry to social taxonomy does not further class struggle. Recovery matters. We need to find the poets excluded from the historical record. But we also need to read writers from dominant groups who challenged the assumptions of their time, and even poets whose politics we may not share but whose formal inventions expand what poetry can do.
The true proletariat of poetry may not be a social class at all but poetry’s resistance to linguistic authority. Standard English, correct grammar, proper narrative, legible feeling, approved morality: these are forms of regulation as much as they are forms of communication. Poetry begins when language refuses to stay within those boundaries. In that sense, dialects, vernaculars, regional speech, immigrant Englishes, broken English, stigmatized Englishes, and most of all, languages outside English all become possible sites (and sighs) of resistance. The hegemony of standardization is not imposed by machines. It is imposed by people. We normalize, correct, regulate, and police one another’s speech long before any algorithm arrives to assist us.
The need for oppositional poetry is as strong as ever. On a global scale, disparities of wealth and power remain staggering. Entire populations continue to be displaced, dispossessed, or subjected to violence by states, corporations, and ethnonationalists. When I was writing about “the politics of poetic form” around 1990, I argued that poetic innovation could function as a challenge to cultural hegemony. People often said this was Quixotic, and no doubt it was. Poetry does not change economic structures, but it can lay bare the cost of those structures and imagine alternatives.
In November 2016, I was asked by This American Life on NPR to write a poem to be aired on the day of President Trump’s first inauguration. I did my best to create a poem to broadcast, and perhaps it best answers your question (NPR declined to air my recording of the poem):
Our United Fates
From one many
Many one
Facts on ground
Head in clouds
More perfect, less perfect
Imperfect, just perfect
Less than we thought
More to become
No man’s land
That is our land
Sojourners on way
To where we cannot say
Don’t forget that caviar
Is just fish eggs in a jar
Middle Passage casts veils of sorrow
On each and every morrow
So too ghostly sound
Of languages spoken
When Mayflower hit Provincetown
A people on a journey
In delight and fright
Infinite gain for what we’ve done
Finite pain for what we must undo
All of us from somewhere else
(Except the ones here first)
Making up a glorious stew
By putting every language in the brew
Accent precedes standard
Odd defies norm
No one to define us
Before we define ourselves
Don’t forget that caviar
Is just fish eggs in a jar
Which is worse ––
Global warring or global warming?
Credit default swaps or stop and frisk?
Surveillance states or voters suppressed?
Children in poverty or gerrymandering?
Is the American Dream
Beacon of opportunity
Or piss on outhouse floor?
Either way, one thing’s for sure
Income inequality guarantees disunity ––
The one percent’s scam du jour
It’s not God but men
Want to take away
Women’s right to choose
Until all we got left
Is the right to sing the blues
This is a land of milk and honey
Leavened by guilt and loads of baloney
Honey so sweet if you have it
But watch out if it turns to acid
Sanctuary state for generations on generation
Prison sentence for those denied reparation
Terror to the right of us
Terror to the left of us
Greatest terror
Is turning against ourselves
The glue of these Disunited States
Not who we were but who become
The last shall be first, they say:
Those most recently arrived
Our best chance as a nation to thrive
No man’s land, which is our land
From one many, many one
In unum pluribus, E pluribus unum
Facts on ground
More perfect, less perfect
Imperfect, just perfect
Sojourners on way
To where we cannot say
Don’t forget that caviar
Is just fish eggs in a jar
Less than forfeit
Ghostly clown
Undoing the done’s detour
Crackling spark
Traps on ground
Only to start again
E pluribus unum
In unum pluribus
In pluribus unum
From many, a one
Within one, plenty
From one, a many
Honey so sweet if you have it
Holy terror
Turning ’gainst ourselves
The future is perilous
For a nation of, by, and for us
Our manifest destinies are near
To turn away, now, in fear
Treachery severe
The glue of these Disunited States
Not who we are but who we’ll be
Making glorious brew
With every language in the stew
America is a second language
Whose second sight’s hindsight
The commons is our difference
Our difference is the promise
From one many, many one
Raps on ground
People on a journey
Where we cannot say
Sojourners on our way
[from Near/Miss, University of Chicago Press. 2018]
Rx: Read, sing, or listen to “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill,” every day at 5pm, indefinitely.
Recommended pairing: a Negroni.
Written by Alfred Hays (1911 – 1985), set to music by Earl Robinson (1910-1991): here sung by Paul Robeson & here by Pete Seeger.
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you and me.
Says I, “But Joe, you’re ten years dead.”
“I never died,” says he.
“I never died,” says he.
“In Salt Lake, Joe, by God,” says I,
Him standing by my bed,
“They framed you on a murder charge.”
Says Joe, “But I ain’t dead.”
Says Joe, “But I ain’t dead.”
“The copper bosses killed you, Joe;
They shot you, Joe,” says I.
“Takes more than guns to kill a man,”
Says Joe, “I didn’t die.”
Says Joe, “I didn’t die.”
And standing there as big as life
And smiling with his eyes,
Joe says, “What they forgot to kill
Went on to organize:
Went on to organize.”
“Joe Hill ain’t dead,” he says to me,
“Joe Hill ain’t never died.
Where working folk are out on strike,
Joe Hill is at their side:
Joe Hill is at their side.”
“From San Diego up to Maine
In every mine and mill,
Where workers strike and organize,”
Says he, “You’ll find Joe Hill.”
Says he, “You’ll find Joe Hill.”
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you and me.
Says I, “But Joe, you’re ten years dead.”
“I never died,” says he.
“I never died,” says he.
