Odes to Anger
By Jason L. Yurcic
West End Press, 2009

Velroy and the Madischie Mafia
By Sy Hoahwah
West End Press, 2009

Blood Will Tell
By Craig Paulenich
BlazeVOX [books], 2009

Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise
By Julie Sheehan
W. W. Norton, 2010

Reviewed by Peter Oresick

The lack of revolutionary sentiment that has been the norm among workers in the United States is countered this year, astonishingly, by a new brand of revolutionary zeal—Tea Party rage. A CBS News/ New York Times recent survey claims that nearly 20 percent of Americans support the Tea Party movement. Yet the movement’s populist anger is largely white and male (according to these pollsters), over fortyfive years of age, Republican, and wealthier than the average Joe. So where is old-fashioned, multicultural, working-class wrath?

High-octane class anger and indignation is largely absent among the usual suspects: trade unionists, minorities, college students, feminists, and in both the “liberal” print dinosaurs as well as the new electronic media. It is also missing, not surprisingly, from most contemporary literature. I surveyed quite a few new books of labor poetry this year. Most engage directly with issues of class, but I found little fury. Craig Paulenich’s Blood Will Tell, for example, casts a wistful spotlight on his forlorn industrial heartland; Sy Hoahwah’s Velroy and the Madischie Mafia employs a wry humor to dramatize the Native American experience in contemporary Comanche country; while Julie Sheehan’s witty hero in Bar Book, a cocktail waitress, is an American every woman—smart but powerless, and abused by every man—in a perverse service economy.

Perhaps this is why Jason Yurcic stands out; he is the angriest young American poet that I have encountered in years and rare in his display of class-consciousness. A former boxer from New Mexico with a troubled past, Yurcic, a worker-writer who now pours concrete for a living, offers up a poetic antidote to the silence of the working class in his third collection, Odes to Anger.

His book is divided into three parts: “Odes to Anger,” consisting of six unusual renderings of that classical form, followed by “Meditations on Breath” and “Walking into My Mind,” two extended poetic sequences. “Ode to Society” (p. 4) begins:

I want to
Bash
Abuse
And batter you
Until you become
Nothing
Like you have
Bashed
Abused
And battered me.

In the book’s first movement, the Yurcic persona is a literal fighter. He flirts with drugs and gangs and jail. According to the jacket copy, his own father—after release from prison—was murdered in a brawl. “My culture/Is violence/One I did not choose” (p. 13). Yet Yurcic’s lyric rants are not always external jabs. He’s also full of self-loathing and self-doubt and rage about his personal failures to connect in a healthy way with his inherited traditions: Chicano, Native American, and Yugoslav. All of these cultures in modern America lead “to alcohol/Drug addiction/And pain,” (p. 13) he laments. Yurcic’s poetry here is raw, unstudied, and powerfully authentic.

The shift in “Meditations on Breath” is striking. Not quite a formal Eastern meditation, the thirteen-part poem is nevertheless an unflinching look inward, a study of the poet’s breath during a ten-day period. It is an attempt at soul-searching and confession and moral inventory: “I snapped car antennas from new cars, bent one end up, made a pipe to smoke crack . . . When I smoked meth in a broken light bulb and a hollowed-out pen, I stopped because the flavor of burning chemicals made it hard to taste my pain” (p. 26). Eventually the breath becomes a teacher or a small-voiced god for the poet, and it leads him to a sobriety and sense of well-being he has never known.

“Walking into My Mind” concludes the book’s three-part movement. This long poem offers a more mature Yurcic persona, now a single father, a working stiff in Albuquerque who pours concrete, who wears leather gloves, safety goggles, ear plugs, and sunblock in order to preserve himself for his children at least. The poem is also a fascinating reflection on his worker-writer practice and its transformative power in his life and in his community. He gives away his books to people—working stiffs like himself—who don’t read books. Odes to Anger is, as Simon Ortiz has written, “a working man’s blues” and, as such, I agree that they are blues heart-wrenchingly sung.

Sy Hoahwah is a member of the Comanche Nation of Oklahoma and a poet with academic training; he earned his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas. His debut booklength collection bears the strange and intriguing title Velroy and the Madischie Mafia. Who is Velroy? A young Comanche leader of a gang of local toughs. Where is Madischie? It’s a neighborhood of Comanche Tribal Housing in southwestern Oklahoma. That’s all that a reader needs to know before Hoahwah spins out—in mostly narrative verse—a riveting tale of contemporary Native youth. The book opens with a lyric portrait of the crew:

Velroy de-jays the séance-turntables,
spinning black water,
scratching out full moons
with red and blue curves of hip hop.
In the dance club, bodies are a collection
of sunrise songs in reverse.

Corey wears her cat-eye contacts
and no panties.
There’s a bathroom-stall
eagle medicine with Ecstasy
placed on the tongue.
She handles the lace like a
Kiowa church hymn.

The Madischie Mafia seeks power within local subcultures in usual and not-so-usual ways. In the poem “White Clay” (p. 25) Stoney, who deals peyote, takes on a rival gang inside of a WalMart store and earns his stripes:

Weeks later, in Wal-Mart, we made
fun of this Mexican gang

who were getting their haircuts.
The fight started,

Stoney went off down the cereal
aisle to prepare himself.

At the right time, he charged
and turned the tide,

killing the one called Taco Tom

and the Wal-Mart door greeter.

After that Stoney became famous.

Hoahwah’s craft as a writer is evident throughout this collection. His economy of language and his line breaks are impressive. Often his images are wild: “Quilt-size stampedes of tarantulas scurried across the road” (p. 31); or simply funny, as in the poem “Moment at the 2004 Miss Indian U.S.A. Pageant with Velroy: A Man Who Never Sees a Pretty Girl That He Doesn’t Love Her a Little.” Yet after the surreal or comic relief, Hoahwah zeroes in, time and again, on the debilitating effects of mass culture, and capitalism, in his tribal case study. Velroy’s gang may be descendants of the Lords of the High Plains, but it’s a gang that can’t shoot straight. His Native American teens and thugs aren’t quite ready either for the management track in the tribe’s casinos. Today the Comanche Nation numbers only fourteen thousand members. Hoahwah’s unflinching and often humorous look at Native American youth in this endangered community is an example of how working-class poetry can be accommodated without sacrificing political rigor or artistic craft.

Blood Will Tell by Craig Paulenich reads like an elegy to an industrial way of American life that’s slipped into the past. The book’s cover photograph is of the poet’s immigrant Slovenian grandfather, circa 1904, posing with his work crew at a factory. Each man holds a glass of beer and toasts the viewer. Welcome to our world of steel, they seem to say—no more Eastern European clodhopping for us. Let the good times roll: National Malleable, Youngstown Sheet, and Tube, Republic Steel.

Paulenich is a steelworker’s son and a professor of English at Kent State University. He hails from the western Pennsylvania quadrant of the Youngstown metropolitan area about seventy-five miles north of Pittsburgh. The moniker “Steel Valley” refers to the valleys of the rivers Mahoning and Shenango. The region is post-industrial in the twenty-first century and yet is still home to six hundred thousand people, but the project of Paulenich’s book is to look back, sometimes with nostalgia and celebration, sometimes with disgust (“Scab”), but always with respect for family and the value of work during the region’s heyday (“Bring Your Face,” p. 51):

On Number Five cluster
knuckles and sideframes and men.
A twenty-ton ladle
labors along the pouring floor,
iron mother lumbering among the flasks.
It kisses each with a yellow tongue,
showers men with spittle of steel.
They do not flinch from their work,
do not straighten their hunched backs,
fingers spinning straw to gold.

Industrial work poems are followed by poems of family history and, in some cases, of European history. The AustroHungarian Empire, which expelled so many of its Slavic peasants who came to form the core of the industrial workforce in Pennsylvania and Ohio, is the subject of “How It Happened.” It is a remarkable prose poem about the assassination of the Archduke by Gavrilo Princip in 1914. There are also poems of nature here and the working-class sport of fishing (“Allegheny Quartet,” p. 53):

We hooked something one afternoon
that pulled us downstream,
cement block anchor and all.
It never surfaced, though
the bamboo pole dowsed it,
and we knew it was there.
The river requires faith in nothingness
until the fish breaks the windowpane
of water.

The best of Paulenich’s work savors and sings of the quirks and idiosyncrasies of uncles and dead grandmothers. He curses those who opposed them: “Drink to their impotence,” he writes in “Scab” (p. 39). In the final analysis, Paulenich is more than a chronicler of industrial history. His poems question the value of the work that we all do. He’s a skillful poet and one of great heart.

Bar Book by Julie Sheehan is an experimental and ambitious collection of service work poems. Written in a playful, postmodern key, it is a book-length narrative sequence about a barmaid in twenty-first century New York City. The volume is comprised of poems, some lyric, but also of woven snippets from other genres: barroom anecdotes, recipes for cocktails, jokes, clever diagrams, prose excerpts from other books, and—most interestingly (for my money)—footnotes. Mostly these serve as a dramatic device, an aside, revealing the backstory of the disintegration of her marriage.

We meet the waitress’s husband-to-be in a footnote of a poem in the first section, “Lunch Shift” (p. 14):

1. The first time I waited on him, he ordered a Suffering Bastard, and another, and another. Then, could he have the grilled vegetables on rice, only as a salad, and with the grain somehow transubstantiated into French fries at no extra cost? Could he? By closing time he was drinking Black Bush and joking that my tip would double if only I’d kiss him . . . . We married soon after.

By the eighth footnote our narrator is pregnant and “hoisting cases of Amstel Light and garbage cans of ice right up until the point when I realized the sous-chef was interrupting his fricassee to help” (p. 33). These tensions in her work life and personal life fracture in “Swing Shift,” the second section of the book. Here her marriage is on the rocks. The demands of the toddler at home and the bar patrons at night test the limits of the heroine’s work ethic.

In the concluding section, “Night Shift,” things go from bad to worse, as evidenced in the opening stanzas of the poem “Whiskey Sour” (pp. 77-78):

Called in sick. Stayed home
sick. Could be the oysters,
that asshole behind the bar

a glob of Tuesday’s special
on Wednesday’s fork,
par for a nonunion joint

Could be getting dumped
over coffee. She never gets
coffee, I should have known.

Divorce papers are served, eventually. Even the couple’s young child, Marguerite, weighs in with an opinion on the breakup of this young family. The narrative arc of Sheehan’s Bar Book, though predictable, is witty, readable, well executed, and mostly entertaining. Its lack of class-consciousness, feminist or otherwise, is a bit disappointing, however.

So the lack of revolutionary sentiment continues in America among workers and writers. But I applaud these poets, who all observe the dictum of William Carlos Williams to write about what one knows firsthand; who offer us an insider’s understanding of waitressing and steelmaking and concrete pouring and boxing and even the work of hooliganism; who employ a literary language that is direct and energetic and idiomatic. I applaud the light they shine on their local conditions, the beauty, the comedy, and the strangeness. I applaud the light.

New Labor Forum 19(3): 49-50, Fall 2010
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095-7960/10 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.193.0000008