How can we write to reflect those who create the technical means of rural life: the paper, radio, cinema equipment and the machines for printing books, newspapers and magazines, the halls and the theaters?

     So you see brother
     we learned to talk quietly and plainly ...
     This is what we want
     because we sing not to set ourselves apart
     Brother, we sing to become one with the people. •1

Dignity, word of honor, modesty, generosity and gratitude are principles dearer than bread itself to working people. The culture of the individual view of history is reflected in workers who go it alone, who are belligerent and abusive to their fellow workers.

The boss and the media direct us to see our life as the result of our own work, our own period, each separate from each other. The need for each other to support, to protect and to have dignity as workers contradicts this individual view of history. The more human we are the more we need each other -- we who are workers. Each of us has a boulder side to climb, each has small pleasures that are best when shared.

How did our grandmothers, our fathers some to think as they did? What happened to them and what were their times? Where are the monuments to our people -- slave, native, indentured and immigrant -- whose labor made the riches for the rich to give away? How did their accumulated experience affect our own direction?

     We will have to write the record
     of jokes that lift our feet,
     and old timers know-how
     easing our days.

     We know the generations
     of work-tired voices
     looking after each other,
     dreaming of a little more
     and hungry for respect. •2

The School of Modern Art and Poetry separates the artist from other workers and weakens both. It convinces artists of their own specialness and tries to place them above ordinary workers. It convinces workers of the uselessness of art and artists -- something extra -- not a necessity of life. We have been taught that only a select few can know the sound and meaning of art. If we write just for ourselves, poetry will not be a necessity of life in order to unite and to be stronger. When only the select few have the meaning and the sound, poetry becomes external to our life, something we can do without.

As one retired logger put it: "I'd respect poetry more if it respected me more." •3 Workers ofthen shrug poetry aside as romantinc, vague or gross. They pass by the culture of the garbage realism of defeat, the oatmeal mush of sentimentality and the deep wells of introspection.

Heartsick, bitter stanzas sometimes read in lonely taverns or cemeteries in want of a sympathetic audience are not meant to be useful to anyone but the writer. They mean nothing to the worker at the steel hearth about to be shut down or to the waitress or orderly at the end of their shift.

Poetry, at the same time it is universal, as language must be written to be understood by those who read it. The early literature of all people was almost entirely poetical. Oral literature, folk sayings, the chants of early hunters and gatherers -- all poetical in form. Poetic or heightened language almost always went together with music. It was with the development of society, or classes, that there began the continually different division of labor, music, novel, poems and so on. •4

Modern Poetry is often printed by the commercial press to sell items, ideas to make profits. It is the mystique of writing for one's self well enough to be printed and to become the property of the few who are in control of the presses. Poetry that goes beyond the constraints of this is labeled "political" and consistently rejected.

We need writers who:

Give hope for our children
growing up with destruction
etched upon their eyelids.

Show why we must be
sleepless, looking for
work in our dreams. •5

The stories of workers' lives are waiting to be told:

Drivers reaching out
as the air whistles
between shiny metal jobs...

Truckers moving wheat
across this country
tied together by radio
and their work. •6

There is the machinist sitting on his front porch, telling how his heart aches to know that none of his children will be able to won a home. Families are moving in with Grandma. A African-American woman minister says, "Justice is an eight-lane highway -- pick you lane, there's room for everybody and let's move together!"

In a poem, "One Eighth of a Country" I wrote about:

     Earth darkened with the blood of our people,
     where we worked with the short hoe,
     laid tracks, dug tunnels and built bridges,
     defended by the miners at Ludlow.

     Hovenweep masonry built a thousand years ago,
     the aspen, columbine and the pasqueflower,
     all could be baought with corporate dollars
     and the Golden Arches pay fifty cents an hour. •7

     While the oil pumps in Central America go
     up and down for the "Classic Coke" dollar. •8

Edna St. Vincent Millay's picture in words of the pyramids brings us closer to the workers of that day and age:

     See where Capella with her golden kids
     grazes the slope between the east and the north?
     Thus when the builders of the pyramids
     flung down their tools at nightfall and poured forth
     homeward to supper and a poor man's bed,
     shortening the road with friendly jest and slur... •9

Our children's children must know the story of our multi-national, multi-racial people's lives. they must see in art and literature the voices of Natve-American's fight for their land and culture; the struggle by African-Americans against slavery and for equality; the escape of immigrants from monarchy and feudalism; and the real lives of all working people uniting to make a better life for their children.

Waake I know my pain is small
but asleep is when the cuts get to me,
when all the dividers and ghosts
sneak into my bedroom
without my asking.

All the little lonelies and fears
dig fingernail slashes inside me...

My fellow workers turn the
damper down on the monster's fire
when they hang tough on the picket line...

they puch against me to hold me up...

While we organize workers to develop their creative skills, we need to fight for bills in Congress to put our people back to work. Transferring one percent of the military budget can provide funding for jobs, housing, public art, build more libraries and teach everyone to read and write. We must demand funds for the writing and recording of the history of the 90 percent of us who sell our labor. We need to re-establish labor schools for workers to polish their skills and bring out their works from storage.

Worker poets -- all the arts -- culture can help our labor movement
     win back what we have lost
     demand what we never had,
justice and dignity for all our children, for all our peoples.

•1 Ritsos, Yannis, The Blackened Pot (1949) in The Fourth Dimension. Translated by Rae Dalven. p.15, Boston: David R. Godine, 1977

•2 Lonnie Nelson, "Work Writers," unpublished. 1988

•3 From a conversation with Gordon "Brick" Moir, Seattle, Washington. 1980's.

•4 See the discussion of this concept in Christopher Cauldwell, Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry (New York: International Publishers 1937) pp. 13-15

•5 Nelson, "Brave Poets," San Fernando Poetry Journal 7 (1) (1984) pp. 37-38

•6 Nelson, "Westbound and Down," in What Keeps Us Going On, Juana Mangaoang, ed. (Seattle, Washington: Lonnie Nelson, 1983) p. 93

•7 Nelson, "One Eights of a Century," Roots and Circumstances, Juanagrafica Publishers (Seattle, 1986) p. 2

•8 Ibid. p. 2

•9 St. Vincent Millay, Edna, "Epitaph for the Race of Man," in Wine from These Grapes (New York: Harper & Brothers 1934) p. 67

•10 Nelson, "Mylanta Unemployment Dreams," in What Keeps Us Going, pp. 62-63

Exercises

Essay: Poetry & Life

Rewrite it Right

Guidelines for Critique:

Essay: Audience Need?

Marching Song

Guidelines for Critique