While the possibility of a radical poetics as a form of resistance against systems of racial

and sexual oppression has long been explored, the possibility of poetry as a form of resistance to capitalist oppression has received little critical attention, perhaps because art itself is viewed as a luxury which the poor cannot afford. While there have always been poor poets, working poets, and poetry about poverty, there has been little work done to identify patterns which connect the varied forms of “poor poetry” or any serious attention given to the question of whether poetry can offer up a genuine form of resistance to class oppression. In this limited and brief survey of the modern landscape of what might be called a “poetics of class resistance,” I attempt to illuminate the way poets, most notably poor poets who work can be described as experimental or nontraditional, subvert and resist the realities of late-stage capitalist oppression. Pairing several theoretical frameworks with creative texts written outside of the academy, I provide a brief imaginative framework to investigate if/how experimental poetry, conceived of as a unique form of narrative, can enable class resistance. In this work, part essay, part inquiry, and part exploration, I focus on the ways in which poetry differs from other forms of narrative representation by resisting the identity framework and the need to compensate for one’s own existence through various forms of confession and self-exploitation. I will also touch on the ways

poets resist the tyranny of time and integrate the body into the text to create radical works which question the authority of the capitalist state.

 

Investigating the possibility of a poetics of class resistance, one runs into many

difficulties of definition similar to those encountered by feminist theorists in search of something which may be called “women’s writing.” Is “poor poetry” poetry by poor poets? Poetry about poverty or social class? Poetry about work and working? Poetry that explicitly condemns exploitative economic systems? Poetry that seeks to create new possibilities which will arise in their wake? For the purposes of this essay/proposition the answer is yes. Yes, and more. If it is to truly be called revolutionary, the poetics of class resistance must be expansive in definition and in praxis. Borders, walls, and dichotomies are the stuff of the State and the bourgeoisie; “poor poetry,” if it is anything, is poetry of radical inclusivity.

 

More important than the discussion of what low- or working-class poetry is or might be,

is the discussion about what such poetry does, though of course the two questions are in fact one in many ways. In Marxist terms, revolution is not possible without the development of class consciousness, an endless project that involves the sharing between individuals of grievances against capitalism and the developing awareness of oneself as a classed body able to participate in a collective class struggle. Since narrative plays a key role in shaping identities and perceptions of oneself and others, it seems reasonable to suggest that poetry has the potential to articulate classed experience in a way that can lead to class consciousness and eventually to collective class struggle. As noted by many scholars (Adair, Prins, Crimmins) narrative representation of the poor (and other marginalized groups), by the poor themselves or by others, allows for a depth of knowledge to be revealed that cannot be fully realized through quantitative or empirical research.

 

In their essay “Poverty and Storytelling in Higher Education: Telling the Missing Story of

Ourselves” Vivyan Adair, Paulette Brown, Nolita Clark, Rose Perez-Cotrich, and Shannon Stanfield note that “storytelling…allows us—as poor, single mother students—to create crossing points where we transgress boundaries, reinventing ourselves, and sharing enlarged, plural views of human experience, and meaning” (135). For these writers, narrative accounts become a sort of constructed space wherein writers, co-writers, listeners, viewers, and readers meet, share experience, and leave somehow changed by what they have heard and shared. For Prins and Crimmins, narratives and narrative research allow for a less reductive view of intersectional identity formation because they allow subjects to perform “narrative enactments” which are not restricted to a categorical view of identity based on naming (Prins 277), and because they allow “researchers” to speak “with, in solidarity, and nearby” Others, rather than for them (Crimmins 17). Whether narratives are produced solely by “Othered” individuals, including the poor, or are

produced in tandem with “researchers” or in coalitional groups, it is clear from these readings that narratives have a unique power to break down boundaries and enable speaking subjects to resist easy categorization, and further, they allow us to share experience and to engage in a process of continual self-making.

 

However, as is noted in all three of these texts and others, stories also have the power to

cement ideological constructions which mark the poor as disorderly, pitiable, and abject.

Dominant narratives about the poor reduce them either to deplorable, undeserving creatures beyond help or to tragic victims which can be “fixed” or “redeemed” by the welfare state. Even when speaking about ourselves, poor people fight constantly against the urge to construct narratives which play into these ideological constructions in order to redeem ourselves as deserving subjects in the eyes of the state. This “self-exploitation” comes at great personal cost as it forces speakers to compensate for our own existence by reliving trauma as a means to gain recognition or aid, and by positioning ourselves as one-dimensional subjects who fit into narrow categories of the “deserving” or “undeserving” poor.

 

Marxist literary theorist Fredrick Jameson further elaborates on and complicates both of

these dimensions of narrative representation in “The Political Unconscious,” positing that

narrative is a “socially symbolic act” which is reflective of the social, political and economic

forces out of which it is made, and most essentially, of the mode (or modes) of production of the time of its creation. Literature, posits Jameson, cannot be adequately accounted for or interpreted in isolation form its political and economic context. Further, he notes that any individual text can be “rewritten” in terms of “antagonistic dialogue of class voices.” (Jameson 70). Thus, though the hegemonic “voice” of the ruling class is present in all texts, it always speaks in relation to the voice of the opposing, marginalized, or “silenced” class. Thus, it is possible to speak of narratives as both productive of and resistant to the dominant mode of production. Taking Jameson’s theory into account, we can theorize not only about how texts may be interpreted in relation to systems of production, but how they can be created and shared as subversive acts which resist the hegemonic ideology of the ruling class.

 

From this understanding of narrative as a zone through which class consciousness can be

articulated and class resistance can take hold, I move now to an analysis of poetry as a specific form of narrative representation, production, and reproduction which has specific and unique potential to be read and understood as an “antagonistic dialogue of class voices.” I argue that poetry, and experimental and performative poetry in particular, functions differently from other forms of narrative as a site in which a speaking subject can articulate their class position and call for class struggle while resisting hegemonic structures which reify the ideology of the ruling State.

 

In her poem, “Things No One Knows,” Wanda Coleman notes how her days, months, and ultimately her life are controlled by a capitalist ordering of time. She writes,

“overcome by the stink of mildewed wash, i have

been three months behind in my rent for thirty years. My

countrymen do not love me. even my lines have

lines. we are getting old in a city where the old are

invisible. i have nothing new to eat and barely five minutes

to use the jane. and less time than that to revisit my

father’s grave” (lines 1-7).

As Coleman articulates in her poem, capitalism robs us of time we would otherwise spend living life; eating, using the bathroom, visiting our parents’ graves; it robs us of the time we might spend writing poems, leaving us, as Coleman says later in the poem, to “die poemless and to be cremated in state ovens” (lines 32-33). And yet, Coleman’s poem is aware of its own impossibility. In articulating how capitalist oppression operates in her life, Coleman is able to begin to resist it. Here, both the voice of the ruling class and Coleman’s voice, the voice of a poor black woman, are present, pulling constantly against one another. Even the end of Coleman’s poem is ambiguous, presenting a vision at once hopeful and nihilistic, as she writes “i expect my ashes/to be scattered like pollen, to take wing on the wind/ like buddhaflies” (lines 33-35).

 

In their (Soma)tic poetics, CA Conrad attempts to actively resist the capitalist tyranny of

time which Coleman’s poem merely articulates. The word “(Soma)tic” is a combination of the Indo-Persian “soma” referring to drinks made from psychedelic plants that enabled one to encounter the divine through ritual, and the Greek “somatic’ referring to the body. Conrad (soma)tic poetry rituals which involve practices such as eating only one-color food for a day or sitting outside during a thunderstorm as a way to come to writing, are designed to situate the body within the present moment, without concern for profit, usefulness, or productivity. In these rituals the poem is written in several stages as one transposes through note taking the particularities of embodied experience in the present moment. By redeeming the body as having a right to exist beyond the confines of exploitation as a conduit for creative practice, Conrad resists the system of capitalism on the cellular level, insisting on a “poetics of uncooperation for all the brutal strategies built to sustain capital gain” (Conrad, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon 161).In the below quote, poet CA Conrad displays how their “(Soma)tic poetics” present a unique possibility for resistance to capitalist exploitation and control of bodies. They write,

I come from factory workers, people who work long, exhausting days. The factories disturbed me as a child because everyone seemed so unhappy, and I wanted another kind of life as a writer. Very early I observed how my family became extensions of machinery at their jobs for most of their waking hours, and the toll that took on their emotional and spiritual lives. To cope, they developed a technique of tuning out the present at work, keeping their minds in the past, or thinking about the future. The problem is they cannot easily switch that off when going home. My (soma)tic poetry rituals are designed to locate myself inside an extreme present as a way of resisting these techniques, learned from my family, of living life being depressed about the past or anxious about the future. To anchor myself in the present, my body is essential to persist in feeling the time I am

living while writing. Each ritual is a choice to be and remain present. (CA Conrad in TANK) 

Here, CA articulates how capitalism functions to control, exploit, and order bodies,

acknowledgement of which allowed them to come to class consciousness and to create a praxis of embodied poetics which resists capitalist commodification of bodies and of time. Conrad’s (Soma)tic poetics reaffirms the body as a source, not of surplus labor value, but of creative and revolutionary potential. The reaffirmation is made all the more powerful when seen alongside the hegemonic system which it resists, that of capitalist exploitation of bodies, which Adair articulates in her article on the classed body. As Adair notes, for Marx and Engels, the body is “both the means and the object of labor” (The Classed Body in the Sociological Imagination 1656). Bodies under capitalism are exploited for the surplus labor value they produce for the capitalist, and are in the process are maimed, deformed, and mutilated. Further, as Miya Tokumitsu notes, “the (capitalist) obligation to profit shapes our experience of time” (2). CA’s family members, because they were forced to formulate their days around the needs and interests of the capitalist, were kept from participating actively in the present moment and from living in their bodies.

 

CA’s poems are displayed alongside a description of the (Soma)tic ritual out of which

they were conceived, resulting in a final creative object that carries with it the bodily history of its creation. Approaching systems of oppression and resistance to those systems from within allows the poet to both observe and write about the deprivation created by capitalist greed while opposing it at the same moment. The two opposing “voices” noted by Jameson, are here almost imperceptibly blurred; one cannot locate the voice of the oppressor without discovering alongside it the voice of resistance. In “(Soma)tic 6:Aphrodisios” Conrad comments on this play of “voice” directly. During the ritual, one holds a penny, (copper being the metal of Aphrodite) under the tongue and meditates on “the best Love you’ve ever had in the world.” Then, the poet picks up pen and paper and writes about poverty, writing “line by line about starvation and deprivation from the voice of one who has been Loved in this world” (Conrad ---23). The resulting poem “Shovel Gives in to its Name,” is explosive, illuminating both the depths of suffering caused by capitalist oppression and the embodied possibilities that lie beyond the capitalist system. They write,

We cannot train

ourselves to feel less

a silent

misuse of the ordinary until this

moment cannot stand

on its own…

emptying pockets slower

does not bring us to a

new sense of

where we left off

aggravate over our

dumb scratch

the dead can

I promise you (Conrad ---25-26).

Essentially, Conrad also intentionally blurs the lines in their poetry between self and other. In the above quotation the voices of the dead blur with those of the living, nature invades the constructed and the constructed world seeps into the natural. The subject is collective (us) rather than confessional (“I” in Coleman’s poem). Time and space here are creatively productive rather than economical. In both form and content, Conrad’s poetry presents a radical reinvestigation of the potential of narrative to unravel dichotomies and capitalist ideology. It is a personification of the vision for poetry articulated in Audre Lorde’s “Poetry is not a Luxury” in which she suggests that

We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. (Lorde 1).

The poetics of class resistance involve intensive and disciplined attention to the aspects of

existence (the body, rituals, needs, and emotions) which capitalism seeks to make extinct. For, as Lorde notes “ within structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional

dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive” (1). This essay has merely scratched the surface of what such poetry has to offer a world debilitated by late-stage capitalism. There is much work that needs still to be done if we are to uncover the myriad of ways that art can act as a primary and necessary mode of resistance and social change. I would like to leave off then, where I began, with poet Wendel Berry’s call for a new poetics which ushers in a new form of living. So friends, go out and “every day do something that won’t compute Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor” (Berry, lines 13-16).