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neuelib · 4 years

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MAY DAY POETRY PICKS

From the confines of a cramped rented room along the rhythms of machines growling. As statistics, as slaves, as ants, as lazy sloths. Our May Day Poetry Picks: poetry by and about the working class.

1. Ruminating life and death from a cramped rented room

Walking along the thin line separating life from death is Xu Lizhi’s poem titled “Rented Room”. Xu worked for Foxconn, a technology company based in Shezhen, China, one of the major producers of Apple’s iPhone. In 2014, the migrant worker took his life jumping out of his dorm window, one of the numerous suicide attempts by Chinese factory workers struggling with harsh workplace conditions while barely making ends meet.

The poem below was among those collected by his friends and published in the Shenzhen Evening News posthumously. It was translated through the Nào project.

出租屋 Rented Room

by Xu Lizhi

十平米左右的空间 A space of ten square meters

局促，潮湿，终年不见天日 Cramped and damp, no sunlight all year

我在这里吃饭，睡觉，拉屎，思考 Here I eat, sleep, shit, and think

咳嗽，偏头痛，生老，病不死 Cough, get headaches, grow old, get sick but still fail to die

昏黄的灯光下我一再发呆，傻笑 Under the dull yellow light again I stare blankly, chuckling like an idiot

来回踱步，低声唱歌，阅读，写诗 I pace back and forth, singing softly, reading, writing poems

每当我打开窗户或者柴门 Every time I open the window or the wicker gate

我都像一位死者 I seem like a dead man

把棺材盖，缓缓推开 Slowly pushing open the lid of a coffin.

2. Cutting the bullshit

Capturing the essential bullshit of all tedious, repetitive work, Jim Waters’ nihilistic take on the mundanity of work contains more numbness than anger. Statistics was originally published in Poems for Workers, an anthology showcasing poems for working class readers.

Statistics

by Jim Waters

I'm tired of listening to sun-shine talk, This pie-in-the-sky stuff, This travesty on patient toil;

Let the Jesus-screamers, The open-shop artists, And their ilk. . . Hook their fat necks over a flying emery wheel For. . . . eight. . . . long. . . . hours; And to the beat and whir of machinery,

Chant this:

"I work to get money to buy food to get strong, So I can work to get money to buy food and get strong.". . . Then, maybe, they will understand Why the church pews are empty, And men die for unionism.

3. Commuting from work in the rough hours

Ratri Ninditya’s poem “Ursula” is a raw, candid sensory journal of a coming-home-from-work trip any "poor, unfortunate soul” from and around Jakarta would deem familiar. We can almost feel the sweat dripping.

Read more from Ninin in her 2019 poetry book, Rusunothing.

Ursula

by Ratri Ninditya

di pinggir sudirman kau punguti kecoa-kecoa setengah matang. koyo berlubang sudah menempel di lehermu 1 minggu, dan kamu selalu tertidur di 76 dengan kepala tertempel di dada.

mau pergi ke mana, bu?

jalan raya beraroma minyak goreng, hujan asam, keringat sales unicef pantang menyerah. pernahkah tusuk gigi bekas siomay nyangkut di rambutmu karena dilempar orang dari atas jembatan? aku pernah. selokan itu tak pernah melaju lebih cepat. semacet malam jumat. mengalir di dalamnya wajah-wajah yang terlupakan, belum sempat diterimakasihkan.

mereka yang reyot sebelum kehidupannya sendiri dimulai. those poor unfortunate souls. this poor unfortunate soul. kita jadi tikus-tikus yang malu dengan jembrewi sendiri. makan, olah raga, makan lagi, lalu mati.

tubuhmu terbungkus botol plastik. transparan dan statik.

4. Marking inequalities and stark contrasts—with dignity

Contrasting one worker-related experience to another with prowess, Ernest Jones points at how workers are considered fitting for growing food and undeserving to eat them, how it is acceptable for them to make clothes and to not afford wearing them. This work is powerful as it captures Jones standing on his dignity through a declaration of his principles—”too low to vote the tax, too low to touch the spoil, but not to pay and kill the foe.” “The Song of the Classes” sings like a chant, emphasising on the burdens and expectations put upon workers with so much taken away from them to the point that they appear to deserve nothing.

Jones was a working-class male suffrage leader who was imprisoned in 1848 for his seditious speeches. This poem is also available in the Poems for Workers anthology.

The Song of the Classes

by Ernest Jones

We plough and sow—we're so very, very low That we delve in the dirty clay, Till we bless the plain—with the golden grain, And the vale with the fragrant hay. Our place we know—we're so very low. 'Tis down at the landlord's feet: We're not too low—the bread to grow, But too low the bread to eat.

Down, down we go—we're so very, very low, To the hell of the deep sunk mines, But we gather the proudest gems that glow Where the crown of a despot shines. And whenever he lacks,—upon our backs Fresh loads he deigns to lay: We're far too low to vote the tax, But not too low to pay.

We're low—we're low—mere rabble, we know, But at our plastic power The mould at the lordlings’ feet will grow Into palace and church and tower Then prostrate fall—in the rich man's hall, And cringe at the rich man's door: We're not too low to build the wall, But too low to tread the floor.

We're low—we're low—we're very, very low, Yet from our fingers glide The silken flow—and the robes that glow Round the limbs of the sons of pride. And what we get—and what we give— We know, and we know our share: We're not too low the cloth to weave, But too low the cloth to wear.

We're low—we're low—we're very, very low, And yet when the trumpets ring, The thrust of a poor man's arm will go Through the heart of the proudest king. We're low—we're low—our place we know We're only the rank and file, We're not too low to kill the foe, But too low to touch the spoil.

5. Confronting the pains of physical work in the intimate exchange between humans and machines

The ramifications of capitalist exploitation are real and most of the time physical. Through this poem, Xu Lizhi creates a narrative on work using the body—both workers’ and machines’—as a starting point.

On each line, as machines go to sleep, emotions disappear into dust, stomachs turn hard as iron, ore separating machines peel the skin, we witness a total, brutal, industrialist catastrophe involving the human body and machines, where it becomes hard to tell which from which.

最后的墓地 The Last Graveyard

by Xu Lizhi

机台的鸣叫也打着瞌睡 Even the machine is nodding off

密封的车间贮藏疾病的铁 Sealed workshops store diseased iron

薪资隐藏在窗帘后面 Wages concealed behind curtains

仿似年轻打工者深埋于心底的爱情 Like the love that young workers bury at the bottom of their hearts

没有时间开口，情感徒留灰尘 With no time for expression, emotion crumbles into dust

他们有着铁打的胃 They have stomachs forged of iron

盛满浓稠的硫酸，硝酸 Full of thick acid, sulfuric and nitric

工业向他们收缴来不及流出的泪 Industry captures their tears before they have the chance to fall

时辰走过，他们清醒全无 Time flows by, their heads lost in fog

产量压低了年龄，疼痛在日夜加班 Output weighs down their age, pain works overtime day and night

还未老去的头晕潜伏生命 In their lives, dizziness before their time is latent

皮肤被治具强迫褪去 The jig forces the skin to peel

顺手镀上一层铝合金 And while it's at it, plates on a layer of aluminum alloy

有人还在坚持着，有人含病离去 Some still endure, while others are taken by illness

我在他们中间打盹，留守青春的 I am dozing between them, guarding

最后一块墓地 The last graveyard of our youth.

6. Exploring surrealist cities (and selves)

Originally appeared in Subbed In, Bullen’s "City Exchange” set in Birraranga (Melbourne, Australia) is a surreal encounter with the city, without the self.

City Exchange

by Brianna Bullen

I order my eyes off Amazon, my spine off eBay and a cochlear implant straight from Coles. Falling apart in reverse has never been so seamless. We talk about moving to the city (permanently, in parenthesis: city as a homogenous w/hole because we can’t see the specific suburbs yet) but it’s crumbling in its own catharsis, a release from structure and history. I’m nostalgic, neurotic and in the process of learning semiotics, signifying nothing and searching for home and meaning in a postcard, the latest neurochemical upgrade and failed relationship. The advertisement on the high-rise for GMHBA glitches to a teaser trailer flickers to Coca-Cola: the duality of (hu)man. I take The Frankston line between Southern Cross and Flinders train rides my liminal stage where I can watch people yawn in the latest fashion and flick through a book page or two on the commute which won’t be remembered. I turn twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five Body machine the old biological clock running in analogue and cellular death. Not a teenager, or a young adult: am I a human yet? I now feel the cynicism I only used to perform now too apathetic to bother expressing the dissatisfaction in vogue. I flicker in industrial space, vague.

7. Condemning dreadful nine-to-five jobs

Disclaimer: It is never 9 to 5.

Letter to John Martin (1986)

by Charles Bukowski

August 12, 1986

Hello John:

Thanks for the good letter. I don’t think it hurts, sometimes, to remember where you came from. You know the places where I came from. Even the people who try to write about that or make films about it, they don’t get it right. They call it “9 to 5.” It’s never 9 to 5, there’s no free lunch break at those places, in fact, at many of them in order to keep your job you don’t take lunch. Then there’sovertime and the books never seem to get the overtime right and if you complain about that, there’s another sucker to take your place.

You know my old saying, “Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.”

And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.

As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can’t believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did?

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: “Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?”

They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.

Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are layed off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned:

“I put in 35 years…”

“It ain’t right…”

“I don’t know what to do…”

They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn’t they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait?

I just wrote in disgust against it all, it was a relief to get the shit out of my system. And now that I’m here, a so-called professional writer, after giving the first 50 years away, I’ve found out that there are other disgusts beyond the system.

I remember once, working as a packer in this lighting fixture company, one of the packers suddenly said: “I’ll never be free!”

One of the bosses was walking by (his name was Morrie) and he let out this delicious cackle of a laugh, enjoying the fact that this fellow was trapped for life.

So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I’m gone) how I’ve come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die.

To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.

yr boy,

Hank

An audio version is available here.

8. Asking difficult working class questions

From one of our favorite poets Gratiagusti Chananya Rompas is this poem asking difficult, working class questions. Set at a metropolitan mall, Anya describes the whole consumerist brouhaha as she verbalises the personal terror of discomfort lurking in the everyday.

Berada di Sebuah Mall Pada Suatu Akhir Pekan

by Gratiagusti Chananya Rompas

kadang aku perlu beberapa detik untuk memutuskan eskalator berjalan atau berhenti aku tak mengerti orang orang di depan dan di belakangku ingin pergi ke mana mereka berbaris berseliweran mendorong bayi bayi mereka di dalam stroller atau mengejar anak anak mereka yang sudah pandai berlari aku menggandeng anakku tangannya kecil dan lembut menuntunku membelah lautan orang orang yang tak kukenal itu

kadang orang orang diam tetapi suara mereka tumpang tindih dengan suaraku sendiri kadang orang orang begitu banyak bicara tapi aku tak mengerti apa yang mereka katakan beli selusin donat dapat potongan setengah harga kalau beli selusin donat? siapa yang akan makan begitu banyak donat di rumah? beli satu set alat masak dapat diskon 25% kalau punya kartu kredit dari sebuah bank tapi aku hanya perlu centong? beli semangkuk nasi daging lengkap dengan minum bisa beli boneka seharga 75 ribu? apa hubungan antara makan siang dan boneka? beli frozen yogurt small dapat 1 topping, medium dapat 3 topping, tapi large dapat 3 topping juga? beli makanan dengan kartu anggota bisa dapat satu makanan gratis tapi harus top up dulu tidak bisa pisah bill? yang gratis bisa yang paling mahal mbak?

anakku sayang, tolong antar mama keluar dari sini

dan di dalam mobil dalam perjalanan pulang mobil ini bergabung dengan mobil mobil lain seperti gorong gorong yang mampat

aku harus berkedip dua kali karena aku merasa permukaan jalan di jalur sebelah yang masih kosong terlihat mengalir seperti sungai yang airnya hitam.

9. At last—embracing rage

What’s a May Day poetry list without the angry verses? In “Canned”, Jim Waters exclaims in great fury a slogan we can all relate with—to hell with you!

Canned

by Jim Waters

To hell with you!

You ain't the whole earth,

Not by a damn sight!

You sneak around shaking your fat paunch shouting: "I'm losing money . . . hurry-up . . . pull-out. . . "Step-on-it!" . . , and you "can" anybody that talks back. I've seen your kind before—always losing money—Riding in limousines, showing off on the golf links, And talking open shop at the Union Club.

On Sunday you go to church and tell everybody What a nice employer you are. . . On Monday you go blue in the face cursing your men.

You can't bull-doze me!

To hell with youl

You ain't the whole earth, Not by a damn sight!

Bonus poems

We’ve added four poems to this post that were not included on our Instagram version of May Day Poetry Picks. “Self Inquiry before the Job Interview” by Gary Soto, “Coal Deliveryman” by Ramón Cote Baraibar, and ultimately another work from Xu Lizhi, “I Swallowed An Iron Moon”, just because.

10. Self-Inquiry before the Job Interview

by Gary Soto

Did you sneeze? Yes, I rid myself of the imposter inside me. Did you iron your shirt? Yes, I used the steam of mother's hate. Did you wash your hands? Yes, I learned my hygiene from a raccoon. I prayed on my knees, and my knees answered with pain. I gargled. I polished my shoes until I saw who I was. I inflated my résumé by employing my middle name. I walked to my interview, early, The sun like a ring on an electric stove. I patted my hair when I entered the wind of a revolving door. The guard said, For a guy like you, it's the 19th floor. The economy was up. Flags whipped in every city plaza In America. This I saw for myself as I rode the elevator, Empty because everyone had a job but me. Did you clean your ears? Yes, I heard my fate in the drinking fountain's idiotic drivel. Did you slice a banana into your daily mush? I added a pinch of salt, two raisins to sweeten my breath. Did you remember your pen? I remembered my fingers when the elevator opened. I shook hands that dripped like a dirty sea. I found a chair and desk. My name tag said my name. Through the glass ceiling, I saw the heavy rumps of CEOs. Outside my window, the sun was a burning stove, All of us pushing papers To keep it going.

11. Coal Deliveryman

by Ramón Cote Baraibar

translated by Craig Arnold

Like finding a bar of aluminum wedged in a bull’s jaw. Like discovering in a sea chest a short obsidian head. Like looking through a padlock and seeing an undeserved dawn. As impossible as all these, as melancholy and lonely, was it to see the green truck that with the punctuality of a sacrament delivered the coal each month. On the slope its strained heart would announce itself vociferously, at the brink of death, and it would stop in front of the house as if to deliver the agonizing news of the fall of Troy. And then a man, wrapped in sacking, would pitch his cargo, resonant and angular, into an orange-painted crate.

Like opening a Bible and finding three leaves of laurel. Like lifting a stone and remembering someone’s name. Like finding the same snail again a hundred miles away. As impossible as all these, as melancholy and lonely, would it be to find, fifteen years later, the same coal deliveryman carrying on his trade, bent from the strain, determined to show the heavens that a man might do that job his entire life, that he scraped in the mines, that he stole thread from his wife to sew his sacking, that he dreamed of infinite excavations, of tunnels, and that they might forgive him for not having done more than that.

12. I Swallowed An Iron Moon

by Xu Lizhi

I swallowed an iron moon

they called it a screw

I swallowed industrial wastewater and unemployment forms

bent over machines, our youth died young

I swallowed labour, I swallowed poverty

swallowed pedestrian bridges, swallowed this rusted-out life

I can’t swallow any more

everything I’ve swallowed roils up in my throat

I spread across my country

a poem of shame

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