The Poetics of Precarious Work in the Poetry of Fred Voss and Martin Hayes

Abstract

Introduction

In 1991 the poet Philip Levine published What Work Is. It won the United States National Book Award. In 1994, Levine’s The Simple Truth won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The poet and critic Richard Tillinghurst said of him, ‘since the early 1960s, Philip Levine has articulated in poetry the lives of the men and women who run the machines, punch the time clocks and work the assembly lines’.¹ This essay examines the work of Levine’s heirs, Fred Voss and Martin Hayes, through their poetic portrayals of the precarious lives of full-time machinists in south California, and gig economy couriers across Greater London.

In 1974, Fred Voss forewent a PhD to go and work in a machine shop, crafting metal into shapes for aircraft (often for combat). A decade later, Martin Hayes began working as a controller in a courier business, dispatching couriers in trucks, vans, cars, motorbikes, and bicycles across Greater London. Voss writes poetry about his machine shop colleagues in Southern California (who come from across the Americas), where the hours are long and the pay low. Hayes started writing poetry around fifteen years ago, about both full-time controllers and their supervisors, as well as the working lives of self-employed delivery drivers and riders. Throughout all of their collections, both poets describe the bureaucratic conditions they work under, and the constant balancing act such workers have to perform, just to put food on the table without losing their jobs or their minds.

Such workers have become expendable commodities, bumping along the bottom of a global economy with ever-decreasing safety nets, such as pension benefits or union representation. Through their poetry I examine a system where work is hidden away by constrictive and alienating capitalism, stagnant class mobility, and the predominance of a middle-class publishing industry, which largely ignores ‘work’ as a subject. I argue that being workers, witnesses, and writers in a disconnected worker-to-reader value chain, Voss and Hayes reveal the ongoing catastrophe of precarious work. They achieve this, despite an unreflective publishing industry and political class, slow in holding up a mirror to a world of work gripped by precarious times.

Writing as witness

I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcote, from the enormous condescension of posterity.²

In portrayals of people who lack power or wealth, whether they are workers, refugees, or the picaresque poor, a problem arises when the subject lacks agency: when they are spoken for, rather than spoken as. The poet Langston Hughes in his depiction of life in Harlem during the 1920s was criticized by black intellectuals for what they perceived as negative portrayals of African Americans to a white readership.³ In a review of Hughes’ newly published Selected Poems in 1959, James Baldwin said of Hughes, ‘I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts – and depressed that he has done so little with them’.⁴ Baldwin’s barb was based on his belief that Hughes writes outside of his subject, rather than inside, or as the subject. The ‘trick’ – he went on to say – ‘is to be within the experience and outside the poem at the same time’. Although this was complicated by the issue of racial politics, any portrayal of the working class has to overcome the problem of writing either horror stories, of poverty, dysfunction, and violence, or fairy tales of escaping to a more individualistic and ‘refined middle-class world’, often through higher education, the arts, or economic entrepreneurship.

The Polish-American poet Czesław Miłosz criticized a vein of poetry that divorced the poet from society, urging a poetic that was witness to history, which in his case was the dehumanizing effect of Soviet totalitarianism in Poland post-World War Two.⁵ He called it the Witness of Poetry, not ‘because we witness it, but because it witnesses us’, implying that because of his experience in Eastern Europe’s upheavals, he is both witness and participant.⁶ In Miłosz’s definition, Voss and Hayes are both witness and participant to the work. In their specific ‘private’ situation (a closed office or machine shop), they write their first-hand experience of workers who are on the precipice of poverty. Their poetry of the workers in effect pulls off Baldwin’s ‘trick’ of being simultaneously inside and outside the experience and people they are portraying.

There are periodic examples of working-class poets responding to their political and economic circumstances; these range from Afghan women writing landays in response to oppression by men⁷; the Affrilachian poets, writing about their life as African-American Appalachians⁸; and the ‘ranting poets’ who started in the 1980s and 1990s in the UK. John Cooper Clark and Atilla the Stockbroker were the most notable of this last group and are still gigging today.⁹ Collective efforts include Poets on the Picket Line who read poetry to picketing workers in London¹⁰; and the Red Poets of Wales¹¹; the Cry of the Poor anthology features poetry, short stories, life-writing, essays and art about what poverty is, who it affects, and what it feels like.¹² A more recent anthology, ‘Piece Work’ written by South Asian women machinists, follows the paths taken by these women as they migrated from India to the UK.¹³

Nonetheless, there are few collections of poetry whose subject is industrial or service sector work: notable examples in the UK include John Challis’ pamphlet on his taxi-driver father, The Black Cab (2017), in addition to his debut collection The Resurrectionists (2021), containing poems about meat and vegetable workers in London’s Smithfield Market; Yvonne Reddick’s The Burning Season (2023), with poems on her father’s work on an oil rig and in oil fields; Jane Commane’s Assembly Lines (2018) about the car industry her father worked in during the 1970s and 1980s; William Letford’s Bevel (2012), concerning his work as a roofer; and André Naffis-Sahely’s High Desert (2022), which includes poems on labour unions and disputes.¹⁴ In the USA, Martín Espada writes about the immigrant experience as well as oppression of Latin Americans by successive regimes. His poem ‘Alabanza: in Praise of Local 100’ is a tribute to the forty-three hotel and restaurant workers of the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in 9/11.¹⁵

Few poets who are known to work in industrial and service jobs write about their own working life. As told by Voss and Hayes, the pressures of keeping things together leaves little space for writing. This is compounded by the erosion of class-conscious readers who wish to learn from and utilize knowledge in their own area of work or activism. Critical to any poet’s work is having a publisher. Founded in 2004 by Andy Croft, in the north-east of England, Smokestack Books has been the foremost publisher and promoter of radical working-class left-wing poetry in the UK.¹⁶ After twenty years, Smokestack will cease publishing at the end of 2024. That mantle is now taken up by the socialist co-operative, Culture Matters (which similar to Smokestack Books has published both Voss and Hayes).¹⁷ In the USA, Blue Collar Review is amongst a number of online publishers focused on the working-class experience.¹⁸

The poetry of Fred Voss and Martin Hayes

As Martin Hayes’s poems show, couriers are the lifeblood (sometimes literally) of economies. The courier business is divided between full-time controllers, and self-employed van and bike couriers, stepping in for items that ‘absolutely, positively’ have to be there on time:

According to Hayes, the controllers are mainly English-speaking British people, as good English is required in administering the jobs to couriers. Couriers are all self-employed gig-economy workers. Those out driving vans come from all over the world (e.g. Nigeria, Somalia, Bangladesh), but mostly from Eastern Europe, and local South/East Londoners, who have worked the vans for decades. Motorbike couriers are mostly Brazilian and East European. Hayes says he does not know a Brazilian courier who has not got two or three jobs, including couriering, on the go at any one time.²⁰

Machinists, those who turn metal, first began to organize during the early industrial age in the eighteenth century, and make up the products and services for local and global markets, including the expansive market of weapons and carriers of weapons. This is strenuous and hazardous work, and only through hard-won protections have the hazards been managed.²¹ As seen in the referenced poems below, the workers of South California are a mix of white, African American, and Latino heritage.

Both poets’ jobs may appear miles apart in terms of what they do, but they have at least two things in common; they are both workers, not owners, and the work they both do is precarious; where there are no longer powerful organized labour unions protecting full-time jobs, precarity has bled into these types of labour. The workers work for the ‘machine’, the ‘system’. In Voss’s poems, employees may be making engine parts for fighter planes that drop bombs in Iraq or Afghanistan. In Hayes’s poetry, a gig economy courier may be dropping off a watch that a billionaire left at the gym, or equally transporting lifesaving blood to a hospital. Voss’s machinists and Hayes’s controllers work as employees, and like workers in other companies are entitled to any benefits set out in law or that the company cannot get away from paying. Such ‘permanent’ jobs, however, are on the wane.²² The couriers are self-employed gig workers, so are without guaranteed stable income, health insurance, sick pay, holidays, or pensions. The poems of Hayes and Voss consistently highlight the precarity of such positions with workers being made redundant, having no union representation, void of inflation matching pay rises, and ever-tightening working conditions and performance measures, and subject to the physical dangers of machine work or riding around London’s busy streets.

The two poets have written more than four thousand poems between them (Voss over 3,000; Hayes over 1,000). For the analysis underpinning this paper, I asked both poets to draw from their collections to send me up to thirty poems each, that they felt covered the span of themes in their work. Fifty-one poems were supplied, of which twenty-two are directly referenced, forming the basis of the analysis set out below. This is divided according to the themes of: poetic form, the workers, the body, management and bureaucracy, resistance and coping strategies.

Use of poetic form

Many of the formal features of poetry are absent from the poems of Voss and Hayes; there is no rhyme, no stanza breaks, no detectable poetic metre, and often no capital letters or punctuation. If you look at the poem through half-closed eyes to see the shape of black on white, it will seem chaotic: chopped lines with anywhere between one word and a full sentence. Voss has said his reason for such a spare poetic is because he does not want to do anything ‘stylistically’ which might ‘get between his subject and his reader’.²³ Yet on reading their poems (aloud preferably), the form carefully fits with the stop-start nature of the work; the lack of punctuation reflects the stark, stripped-back exposé of conversations and observations, as can be seen in the examples below.

Theirs is a narrative poetic, rooted in socialist values of community and liberty. The poems are more than anecdotes and stories, for ‘poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories […] Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or fearful’.²⁶ Hayes explains that he begins a poem by writing in prose, then breaks up the lines to countenance emphasis, a long sentence followed by a short punchy or sad one, or a series of one-word lines. Voss and Hayes also use anaphora. In the poem ‘I have seen men’, Voss repeats the eponymous term to highlight the constancy of such dysfunction but also his continued close proximity to it. In contrast, Hayes’s poem ‘5 am early-shift tube ride in’ uses the refrain ‘who are these men’ at the start of each stanza, as if he does not know these somnambulant men on their way to work on near empty tubes, but adds a twist to the final line by saying,

Both poets use metaphor and simile in a number of forms. Hayes employs a whole farmyard of animals, including oxen, dung beetles, moray eels, chained-up dogs. Hayes uses such metaphors as an evasive tactic, as a result of being reprimanded at work for writing poetry about the company’s employment practices. The then Chief Executive Officer referred him to Human Resources and a letter of warning was put on his file for ‘bringing the company into disrepute’; he was forbidden to write any more poems about his work. The company was subsequently taken over by a larger entity, and he has not had any problems since.²⁷ Voss often refers to machine shop tools as devices that act both negatively (e.g. parts for bomber planes) and positively (contrasting the precision of a machinist’s tools with the tool of obfuscation used in politics).

The use of data to describe working hours and working conditions – including the personal details of the workers, such as their age, gender, or ethnicity – gives a clear picture of the characters and scenes in which they carry out their precarious work. This is evident in the relations between workers, their own views on the world and work, as well as the industrial relations between them and management. This becomes most direct in the form taken by both poets, in being both witness and actor.

The workers

Prominent in their poetry are portrayals of men and women who have entered the workspace and workforce, and how that system has impacted on their lives. Voss writes about young and old workers in the machine shops he has worked in. In ‘The Timeless Wrench Brothers’, Voss compares his working life (thirteen jobs, five layoffs, forty-four years working) to that of Ismail, aged nineteen, using cultural references to show the age difference:

The reader gets a sense of time and its consequent change outside the workplace, but also how work brings workers of various ages and heritage together, despite future uncertainties.

Then there are differences in culture and ethnicity. In Voss’s ‘What is a Hammer to the Heart of a Brother’, a hammer is shared between the Mexican workers because of their historic poverty and political history of repression, revolution and solidarity:

In contrast, the white machinists have turned bitter and possessive because of what individualistic capitalism has done to them.

Voss further shows the alienating effect of the work. In the poem ‘Los Angeles’ (see above), many of the workers wear crosses, believe in God, go to church on Sundays, but because of the environment in which they live, through poverty, violence, and low wages, are close to breakdown, close to ending their life.³⁰ In ‘Grease Spots’, a worker hopes the US Air Force will make a ‘grease spot’ of the Iraqis in response to the Twin Towers crashes.³¹ Voss wonders, conversely, if their own government has made a grease spot of them, because the workers are barely able to feed their children and may never be able to retire.

In Hayes’s poem ‘Work’, the job never leaves the worker, not on their journey there and back, nor when at home. It is a constant, almost threat that if you stop thinking about it, somehow you will lose everything.

In ‘5am early-shift tube ride in’ Hayes reflects an image of robots in abeyance to their master.³² The workers are stripped of their identity, their personality: they are there simply to survive, pay housing, utility bills, food, and kids.

The main group largely absent from both sectors described by Hayes and Voss is women. In his forty years, Voss says he has never seen a female working a heavy machine.³³ In the USA, women make up less than 10% of machine shop workers, a static figure for more than ten years.³⁴ This is not unusual when looking across industrial labour, with similar data in construction, for example.³⁵ Voss says he has ‘seen women working lighter jobs such as shipping and receiving, buffing wheels, insulation, and one woman worked on a drill press. The Latina women in the Los Angeles area have a tradition of working beside the men when the work is light enough for them to do well’.³⁶

Women are more present in a number of Hayes’s poems, but even here theirs is a tale of bumping up against masculine misperceptions of their worth, and the low value of their caring role (both at work and home). In ‘what angels do’ (see above), Dolores, a female supervisor becomes the angelic embodiment, in her support of other workers: ‘the way she takes the new recruits under her wing/teaching them how to do this how to do that’. Such nurturing contrasts widely to the more aggressive approach taken by every other supervisor who ‘just screams at them/thrusts their fangs into their necks’.³⁷ When a junior female controller is reprimanded by a supervisor by ‘putting a rocket up her arse’, her mother calls in to complain, and it is then the male supervisor who is no match for

In Hayes’s ‘Miss Deshane Jackson’, a new worker, who has no alternative but to take the job, because of the need to pay for rent and food, is a very good worker.³⁸ The analogy of the machine appears (as it does in much of both poets’ work), when she is awarded a £20 Sainsbury’s voucher for employee of the month; her contribution is compared to how

Finally, in Hayes’s ‘a class act’ a woman takes over as a controller, ruffling the feathers of couriers who contact their supervisors to ask what is going on:

The women have to continually ‘prove’ themselves in the masculine environment, putting extra pressure on how they work. This pressure is added to when statistically women account for a higher proportion of domestic ‘caring roles’ than men, many of whom are kept out of the job market as a result.⁴⁰

The body

With the physicality of the machinists’ job, it is unsurprising that the effect on the body runs through many poems by Voss. In ‘Champions’, it is Voss’s sixty-fifth birthday, and the physical work is taking its toll. Using a boxing metaphor, he describes how the workers

In ‘Getting a Grip’, a grip contest between two workers on a hard concrete floor, is used as a metaphor for their plight. As they watch the contest, Voss asks a series of ‘maybes’ about the contestants’ inability to keep up payments on their house because of frozen pay, or maintain their marriage because they drink too much from the pressures of the job:

This dehumanization of workers is found in Hayes’s poem ‘Foxconn Suicide Watch’ (a reference to a spate of suicides in China, mostly during the 2010s).⁴³ Capitalism does this by taking away their rights.⁴⁴ In this instance, it is the right of a female worker to go to the toilet freely, instead of only being allowed during lunch and two ten-minute breaks. Comparison is made with workers in China and Bangladesh, thus illustrating the internationalization of exploitation.

In both Voss’s and Hayes’s poems, the use of numbers reflects the tight structure they work under, whether it be the precision of the machinist reflected in the 1/8^th- to ½-inch Allen wrenches, and 5/16^th- to 1-and-¼-inch crescent wrenches, or their targets, working hours, or pay:

Yet there is another dimension both poets use, that takes readers out of the office or machine shop. In ‘Getting a Grip’, Voss reflects on the opposable thumb, ‘closing/around diamond or throat creating a city or balling into fist and starting/a war’.⁴⁶ Here, the thumbs symbolize the dialectic process between worker and owner. Such a method places work in a wider context: a political, precarious one, where the boss has the upper hand, and the machines they make are used in war.

Management and bureaucracy

With ‘the screams of the supervisors’, Hayes creates the sonic atmosphere of the controllers’ office, and likens the supervisors to animals, with their noises compared to the lowing of a herd, the beating of a silverback’s chest, or the whimpering of a chained-up dog. This is a tactic of fear put upon the working process. Supervisors become moray eels, which monitor the screens like radars, checking on the performance of the controllers. Oxen make an appearance in ‘Ox confronting technology’, a satirical poem where tractors are brought in to replace them. The wily draft herd decide to apply for the job of tractor driver, but of course their bodies are not suited to such working practice. The initial reaction of these bovine Luddites was a fear the machines would replace their jobs, so they ‘lay in their leaky barns/nursing headaches/ashamed/and redundant’.⁴⁷

Voss echoes this in ‘pacing our cages’, where the CEO and his managers come to the shop floor to see how they can make the company run more efficiently.⁴⁸ Here, Voss compares his fellow workers to exhibits in a zoo, as the management is more interested in sizing them up, so they can rearrange their workspaces by drawing white lines on the machine shop floor. In ‘Some Day there will be Machine Shops Full of Roses’, the boss is asking Voss to increase his output by 10%.⁴⁹ He sits across from Voss in a crisp white shirt, whilst the worker is covered in grease. The poet wonders about the boss’s reading (has he read Marx, Homer, Sophocles, like Voss has?), making a point about the lack of cultural understanding in capitalism’s alienating process that includes the need for Voss to write about the experience.

Throughout all of these poems about management and control, the impact of work breeds helplessness and alienation. In this post-Fordist world, instead of the end of bureaucracy, there is layer upon layer embedded within the work: indicators of productivity, sickness, standards of performance (like Investors in People)⁵⁰ all add to the ever increasing need to be as efficient and effective as possible, without thinking of the bearing this has on the worker, and productivity itself. In the UK, a measurement, which echoes the ‘social murder’ of Foxconn workers in China, comes in the elevated number of male suicides. Figures available for the period 2011–2015 show the difference in risk in both the lowest-skilled (44% higher risk) and skilled workers (35%), compared to managers in all roles whose risk is much lower than the average; amongst corporate managers and directors the figure is 70% lower.⁵¹ In more recent figures, there were 150 deaths by suicide per annum of managers, directors, or senior officials, compared to 616 of skilled trades occupations, and 340 of process plant machine operatives.⁵²

The avaricious appetite of work to take over the life of the worker both neutralizes politicization (when there are no unions or workers’ councils) and radicalizes, where the worker may be open to populist inventions. This bleeds into negative attitudes towards democracy, with the voter disillusioned by a mainstream politics that ignores their concerns, leaving them liable to succumb to slogans such as ‘taking our country back’: in Voss’s ‘Grease Spots’ a worker has a ‘Proud to be an American’ sticker, which is ‘all he has’.⁵³ Any feeling of being ‘left out’ of the conversation by the state, the machine, the man, is an open goal to populist enticements.

Resistance and coping strategies

A poem each from Hayes and Voss displays the importance of humour as a coping strategy. Hayes’s ‘hearts bigger than the sun’ is a set of micro-portrayals of how each worker ‘has it’ (i.e. ways of coping), whether it be Antoine’s imaginary conversations with controllers, Ashley’s booming laugh, or Javed’s spinning dance as if in his favourite Bollywood movie.⁵⁴ In ‘Soul Washroom’ by Voss, the workers laugh at old Earl’s admission that he hasn’t ‘had a decent hard-on in years’, followed by the gallows humour of ‘I try to stay out of trouble but it keeps looking for me’.⁵⁵ Underlying all of this is the code of masculinity: how such talk is ‘as close as we can get to letting down our guards’. For amongst all the troubles they share, behind the jokes, the certainty of gruelling work awaits.

This strategy of coping runs through other poems, as in Voss’s ‘Laughter Lifeboat’, whilst at the same time there are poems of resistance and demonstrations of the unvalued. In ‘the men I work with’, Hayes says that none of the men have written great books, painted great pictures, nor composed symphonies yet ‘just by the act of living and carrying on being controllers/help keep the world up in the sky’.⁵⁶ Then, in ‘Ready to Go to Work’, Voss asks why politics cannot be as precise

Through jocularity and wonder, the poets’ work adds a humanistic value to the messenger and machinist, which puts hope in the pockets of resistance against the alienating effect of capitalism. Ultimately, the writing of poetry is also the way in which Voss and Hayes make sense of their work as a method of coping themselves.

The reader as worker and witness

The reception of Voss’s and Hayes’s poetry by fellow workers has been generally positive. Hayes has sold a number of copies to colleagues both in the control room and couriers themselves. However, those above him in middle management dislike Hayes’s poetry, and have used it to admonish and mock him when something goes wrong, asking him if he thinks he is better than others because he’s a ‘poncey poet’.⁵⁷ The machinists Voss works with found out about his writing when the Long Beach Newspaper featured him in 1990. Voss was so concerned about them knowing that he disguised himself in the pictures taken by the paper. However, his fellow workers found out and were delighted and honoured that he had written about them, and he has sold many copies of his various collections to them. Only one machinist was disappointed because Voss had not written about him, and another felt that writing poetry itself might somehow compromise his heterosexuality.

Publishing work

Whilst there is increased participation in the publishing industry, in terms of ethnicity, disability, and gender, the socio-economic category is less promising, with only 21% coming from a lower socio-economic background. Those who attended independent or fee-paying schools made up 19% of respondents to a 2022 survey of the UK Publishers’ Association, yet make up only 7% of the general population.⁵⁸ When the gatekeepers do not reflect the diversity of the population, working-class voices tend to be ghettoized, either by being ignored or when lucky enough to be bought up by one of the larger publishers, asked to write into the horror story or fairy tale category. This problem is compounded when, at the present time, the slow train of social mobility has come to a stop. The latest Common People report highlighted four main barriers facing working-class writers: lack of confidence and imposter syndrome; lack of peer support and industry networks; gatekeepers, influencers, and role models; and experience of inclusivity and diversity schemes.⁵⁹ These opportunities are out of reach for someone working in a full-time job on low pay.

There is a joke in poetry circles that goes, ‘I only got into poetry when I heard there was no money in it’. This applies to writers in general, where the average income from book sales currently stands at only £7,000 per annum, a 60% drop from 2006, and the top 10% of authors earn 47% of total income.⁶⁰ However, poetry has at least one advantage to other forms of writing – it is mostly ‘short’. Whilst a novel can claim up to 80,000 words of space, a poem of fourteen lines, or collection of 70 poems, takes up less paper or data. This allows for a sizeable set of free ‘independent’ poetry publishing; mutuality abounds with poets setting up sites so as to publish other poets, many of which will garner thousands of views online (on independent websites, but also on Instagram and TikTok) and are a great ‘step up’ for emerging poets, as well as readers, especially those with limited resources.⁶¹

In the UK, both Voss and Hayes have been published by Smokestack Books and Culture Matters, publishers with a focus on socialist and working-class poetry. Voss also has three books published by one of the foremost publishers of general poetry in the UK, Neil Astley of Bloodaxe Books.⁶² In a question I posed to Astley regarding poetry and work, he said, ‘work has never figured much in submissions or books I’ve published over the years, although during the ’80s and ’90s we did publish a number of poets from working-class backgrounds who wrote about family members or their wider community in relation to work’.⁶³

Without publishers opening gateways to writers there is no reader. Without the reader there is no witness beyond the writer, so the value chain (of worker ≫≪ witness ≫≪ writer ≫publisher, ≫reader) is disconnected and the impact of the work diminished, if not neutralized, beyond the circle of class-conscious readers of poetry, which is possibly the most niche of readerships. This is not a separate continuum, and as we identify Voss and Hayes as worker, witness, and writer, they are of course readers too, as are some of their work colleagues.

Conclusion

The belief that the world is more likely to end than the creaking market economy, sees the global political class invested and beholden to the imperatives of late capitalism.⁶⁴ Precarious work has spread out of the traditional ‘gig’ economy into the pores of full- and part-time contractual work. Workers have unstable incomes and careers, lower in-work benefits and post-work pensions. The poetry of Voss and Hayes exposes this development: insecure jobs based on ever stricter measures of performance, lack of due care for the mental and physical wellbeing of workers, higher costs of living unmatched by wage levels, and the blazing pall of environmental destruction hanging over the world. The poor track record of capitalism ‘cleaning up’ after the circus has left town continues apace, with the potential for greater levels of precarity.

Aged fourteen Philip Levine worked in the auto industry of Detroit (a city later bankrupted by the decline in car manufacturing), though he went on to teach. Voss and Hayes write portrayals of the menial/manual workers as Levine did. They continue to work in their respective industries and write about their experience and of those with whom they work. They pull off Baldwin’s ‘trick’ of being both inside and outside the work they do and the work they write about. Despair and hope run through almost all of the poems, which in the hands of the poet/worker escape the trap of vicarious horror story or fairy tale. Both show how resourceful, inventive, and comradely workers can be, even in such an alienating reality of what may be the ‘last’ capitalism.⁶⁵

Even though work takes up a third or more of our lives for forty years, there are few poets writing about what they do in all that time, and there are only scattered examples of working-class poets writing about their economic and social condition. The publishing industry is silent and/or ignorant in its demographic inability to see or value the critical connection of the worker as witness and thereby cutting off the worker to the reader. Without that link, working class writers continue to be ghettoized and unheard, as do the subjects they write about. In bearing witness as workers, Voss and Hayes are unrelenting in their poetic portrayals of their precarious labour, regardless of bosses and publishers who are the instruments and conduits of capitalist production and its exploitation.

Voss:

Hayes:

Footnotes