"Give Me Simple Laboring Folk": Poems About and For Workers

Happy Labor Day, one and all! My forefathers and countless others spent most of each day in places like the one pictured so that I could study something as esoteric as poetry. As a way of honoring their contributions, I'd like to share some poetry written about and for the industrial labor force that built the world on which we now rely.

The quote in this article's title comes from a poem by Thoreau, entitled Conscience. It's part of a short list of "Poems about Work" compiled by PoetSeers.org that includes a number of traditional poems that are worth checking out. Along the same lines, it's worth taking a look at Philip Levine's reflection on poems of work.

For a less canonical approach, there's a great collection of poems celebrating workers by Tracie Vaughn Zimmer entitled Steady Hands: Poems about Work. It draws inspiration from Whitman's "I Hear America Singing" while still maintaining a highly original voice and tone.

I'm most excited about a multimedia poetry project entitled The Peter Principle. This online collection of lyric poems by Jeff Lytle is based on the actual Peter Principle, which states roughly that eventually everyone will wind up doing a job they aren't qualified for.

Most of the poems are written "before or shortly after going to work," as Lytle says, but the project goes beyond exploring work as a theme. By using links and intertextuality to tie his poems to one another in a non-sequential way, Lytle takes to task the notion of a continuous narrative in his work or anyone else's. By providing visualizations and an audio clip of what I assume is the author himself reading the work, he uses all of the Internet's richness to his thematic advantage. You can find Lytle discussing his presentation methods in more depth here.

The site updates once a week with new work poems, and it's worth returning to even as just a reminder of what can be done with poetry in the contemporary technological landscape. That being said, Lytle's exacting verse, as well as the writing of the other poets mentioned in this post, is a meaningful send-up of what is admirable about the legions of people out there who work for a living.