Late-Late-Fordist Poetics

When I was invited to be a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota this past spring, English Department Chair Paula Rabinowitz asked that one of the classes I teach be a senior seminar based, loosely, on the “poetry dialogues” I’d been facilitating between Ford workers at the closing St. Paul Assembly plant here in Minnesota and autoworkers at downsizing Ford plants in Port Elizabeth and Pretoria, South Africa.
As I planned the syllabus, I went back over the central points I forwarded in my critique of MFA-land, “Neoliberalism, Collective Action, and the American MFA Industry” as well as the propositions I’d made for alternative models: the CP’s John Reed Clubs, the “Talleres de Poesia” of the Sandinistas, the Johnson-Forest Tendency (C.L.R. James, Grace Lee (Boggs), and Raya Dunayevskaya), and others. The eventual syllabus included some of this work, additional readings such as Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, visits from St. Paul Ford worker-poets, and films such as Roger and Me and Travis Wilkerson’s extraordinary An Injury to One (I’d also wanted to show Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave but couldn’t get it in my hands in time).
The final charge on the syllabus was that students had to organize, facilitate, and document (preferably using iMovie or GarageBand or digital photography with accompanying sound files, etc.) work- and/or community-based “poetry dialogues.” Additionally, I promised students that since they would be leading workplace poetry workshops, I would as well (I’m still working on editing footage from mine, with clerical workers from AFSCME 3800 who went on strike against the University in fall 2007 and read their poems to the University community at the “Late American Poetics and the Politics of Exception” symposium).

I was really challenging the students to, in fact, de-construct and re-frame (think carpentry!) what they’d learned of “poetry” from being a noun (object) to being a verb (action)—what it’d been in its original configuration (and in the root meaning of the term). The results, I can say taking very little credit as I merely posed the challenge, were extraordinary. One student led poetry workshops between employees and management at a UPS facility and shot digital video of poetry happening in the back of UPS trucks being loaded overnight; another conducted her workshop with 3rd and 4th graders at a Native American after school program; one more led workshops at the Shakopee Women’s Prison and another at the VA hospital with soldiers returning from Iraq; one student-facilitator became the star of Minnesota’s Iron Range, leading his workshop at the Grand Rapids Public Library with former Range workers—he even got guest slots on local public radio to promote his event and write-ups in regional newspapers.
All these workshops were documented in unique forms: at the exhibition of final projects, students showed Powerpoints, DVDs of short digital films they’d made of their workshops, 8-10 minute radio programs (imagine something akin to “This American Life”), and so much more. I don’t know that I’ve ever been more impressed and moved and engaged by a class of student projects/papers in my two decades of teaching.
I hit the highway Monday for Alexandria, Minnesota, to facilitate another one of these workshops with Education MN, a union of 70,000 public educators. It goes without saying that I’ll blog about the poetry workshops afterwards. In an era that is seeing perhaps the most massive sweep of privatization of public resources in the history of humankind, I find myself less interested as a poet with whether “new movements like Conceptual Writing or Flarf are the correct responses for our time” and more and more vitally concerned with pushing the envelope on the poem as verb, as a simultaneously avant-garde and collective module in the larger transnational social-cultural-political movement “for humanity and against neoliberalism.” [And if you aren’t familiar with that last term, poets, here is the perfect place to start reading.]
More soon from Education MN, North Star Country, ’Sota.