"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.

5 Places for Augmented Reality Poetry [US Edition]

Yesterday on Read Write Web, Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote a great article on the limitations of and obstacles to the emerging technology known as Augmented Reality. He explains it much better than I do, but in a nutshell Augmented Reality consists of lifting up your smart phone when you're in a particular place to see information from the internet imposed over the image of the place where you're standing.

Despite the barriers Kirkpatrick outlines, some Augmented Reality technologies already exist, most notably the much-heralded iPhone app Layar. With this in mind, I was thinking about the best places for an Augmented Reality poem to appear. Wouldn't it be great to lift up your phone and be able to read, or hear recited, a poem that was written about that spot? For today and tomorrow, I've compiled a list of the ten places that would do well to include an Augmented Reality poem or two: five in the US and five in Europe. Here are the five American locations:

1. The Place: The Lincoln Memorial
The Poem: Walt Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain!"

Every time I go the Lincoln Memorial, I make it a point to read both the Gettyburg Address and Lincoln's Second Inaugural, which are engraved on the memorial's walls. Wouldn't it be nice to have this poem, which captures the sense of loss due to Lincoln's assassination, as well?

"O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won..."

2. The Place: The Grand Canyon
The Poem: Maya Angelou's "On the Pulse of Morning"

Though this poem wasn't written for the Grand Canyon specifically [it was originally composed for Clinton's first inauguration], its exhortation of "the rock, the river, the tree" makes it the perfect companion to one of our country's most stunning natural landmarks.

"But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow."

3. The Place: Salem, Massachusetts
The Poem: Anne Bradstreet's "Verses Upon the Burning of Our House"

From one of the earliest American poets, Anne Bradstreet's touching account of the destruction of her family's home perfectly encapsulates the best of the Puritan sensibility. Anne Bradstreet was the wife of a Massachusetts Bay Colony governor, so Salem is the place where the house most likely stood and provides a simulation of the kind of sites Bradstreet would have seen daily.

"And, when I could no longer look,
I blest his Name that gave and took,
That layd my goods now in the dust:
Yea so it was, and so 'twas just."

4. The Place: Every supermarket in the state of California
The Poem: Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California"

"Howl" gets most of the attention, but this excellent poem by one of the great Beats was published at the same time. Ginsberg imagines himself following Walt Whitman around a grocery store, and it would be a great experience for poetry fans to walk along the aisles with the two of them.

"We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier."

5. The Place: Walden Pond
The Poem: Henry David Thoreau's Walden

Yes, Walden is not technically a poem in the traditional sense, but this Augmented Reality experience would be too good not to include on this list. Imagine walking around Thoreau's cabin on Walden Pond while calling up the author's exhaustive notes and meditations on the surroundings. Perhaps Thoreau himself would be displeased by the interference of technology at his sanctuary, but for Thoreau's readers and fans the addition would be a delight.

"The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."

There are hundreds more places in America for Augmented Reality poems like this. What do you think would be some good ones? Respond in the comments or send your suggestions to Twitter. And be sure to check back tomorrow for five more locations across Europe and their accompanying poems.

The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round: Poetry and Transportation

One of the things we try to do here at Paradise Tossed is dispel the notion that poets are somehow behind-the-times. People tend to imagine so-called "great" poets as stodgy old white men in smoking jackets, but that's just not how it works. Many poets are not luddites in the least, and the best way to demonstrate this is by showing how new technologies tend to show up in poetry pretty quickly. Case in point: last week's binary poetry. But another way that poets incorporate technology into their work is by showcasing a particular kind of transportation that didn't exist in the past.

My favorite example belongs to one of the oldest and whitest American poets, Walt Whitman. Though he spent a great deal of time writing about nature [Leaves of Grass, anyone?], he didn't shy away from choosing as a topic one of the most exciting new technologies of his day: the locomotive. In his poem "To a Locomotive in Winter," Whitman captures the zeitgeist by praising the train as a "type of the modern--emblem of motion and power--pulse of the continent". Here's the poem in full to consider.

If Whitman, of all people, can embrace something seemingly at opposition to the natural world, which he so loved, then poets have a powerful example of ways in which new technologies can be incorporated into poetry.

A contemporary example of someone who picks up the ball with this idea is James Grey. Here he is reading his poem "Muses Do Not Ride the Bus" with accompanying conceptual art:




Unlike Whitman's poem, which praises trains nearly unconditionally, Grey's poem takes a much different tack with the bus. He brings up exactly the question we're discussing: Can a banal mode of every day transportation, like the bus or the train, be a source of poetry? What makes this piece so ironic is that while insisting that "the bus is not for muses," the very fact that he's written a poem about the bus proves the opposite. The bus, for Grey at least, has become a muse itself: the source and object of the poem.

Poets don't have to limit themselves to discussing trees and bees and flowers, and they don't. Whenever a new technology comes along, something that changes every day life, you can be sure that a poet somewhere will write about it. Whitman and Grey are two great examples of poets who took modes of transportation and morphed them into the last thing you'd expect a bus or a train to be: a poem.