Karen Kovacik describes in “Between L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and Lyric: The Poetry of Pink-Collar Resistance” how a category of female poets has been largely unnamed and thus, ignored because of their refusal to restrict their writing to any one category.
Kovacik explains that a “group of working-class writers who borrow frequently from the aesthetic approaches of both of these divergent camps” (Chris Llewellyn, Karen Brodine, Carol Tarlen, Jan Beatty, Lenore Balliro) use a variety of strategies to counter the confining feminized scripts of their professions and to call attention to the female’s presence in the workforce (22).
The pink-collar professions mentioned here, clerical work and waitressing, are “feminized” because the employees are expected to nurture their customers and coworkers and behave in self-denying and subservient ways. These performances are countered in the poems when the speakers present “counter-performances” where the speakers then demand acknowledgment of their roles in the workforce (22).
This sentiment is most clear in Tarlen’s “Today” poem; the speaker is celebrating a paid day off after she has graduated with a Master’s degree. The speaker describes the workplace in her absence and emphasizes its “stillness” (29). The workplace is inefficient in her absence: “the dictaphone did not dictate / and the files remained empty / and the bossy’s coffee cup remained empty” (29). Here, Kovacik states these descriptions are set to “Biblical cadences” that emphasize “the mundanity of the speaker’s routine while elevating her role, making her appear omnipotent” (29). The boss is also cast in a negative, powerless light as he cannot even fill his own coffee.
Tarlen also casts the speaker’s individual activities in a collective fantasy; her speaker’s indulgences on her day off becomes a part of a “collective consciousness” within a socialist utopian vision (30). The collectiveness among pink-collar workers is emphasized most clearly in Llewellyn’s “In Memoriam: Carolyn Johnson.” The elegy for the secretary both humanizes the deceased and challenges “the notion that secretaries are interchangeable by giving its subject a name and describing some of her personal effects” (23). The speaker is moved to rage by the secretary’s, Carolyn’s, death. The language of the poem is not reflective of the professional language used or required by management; instead, the language reflects the “wise-cracking shop talk of a sisterly comrade” (24). The speaker then concludes with a call to action for both herself and all other secretaries. They are then linked as members of a collective and are remembered as individuals who are not interchangeable in the workforce.
The recent A Day Without Women event echo these poets’ voices. The event is meant to show the world the expansive impact women have on the world, on every person in every community in every industry. They day called for people to take notice of the waitress, the clerical worker. One of the most forceful poems Kovacik mentions is “A Waitress’s Instructions on Tipping or Get the Cash and Don’t Waste My Time” by Jan Beatty. The poem is a list of commands acting as instructions for the ignorant customers who “need to be schooled in the proper etiquette of being restaurant patrons” (32). Beatty refuses to view tipping as a generous offer, a favor, a bribe for sweeter service. Instead, she positions tipping as her earned right and “reserves her sternest rebuke for those male customers who make ostentatious displays of their generosity” (32). The response to her poem was overwhelmingly positive, especially from other service industry workers. Yet, Kovacik believes her poem would not have been received so positively by other critics because the poem is “one that dares to abandon ambivalence” (33).
Despite these poems’ relevancy, they are marginalized. These texts are rejected because of America’s “denial of class and the literary establishment’s inadequate terminology” (34). As Kovacik states, “Lacking a name, a category, one faces a perilous fate,” but she adds, “Surely, in a so-called ‘post-industrial’ economy like ours, pink-collar poetry deserves a literary category of its own and a criticism alert to its aims” (34). Instead of being mislabeled as either Language or lyric poetry or simplified as a poetry in between, these poetics should be given their own name.
Questions: What exactly differentiates Language from lyric poetry? How do these poets fit into either category? Why would these poems not be classified, yet previous poems about working-class conditions are? Does gender play a role in their marginalization?
I like that you tackle this discussion, Angela, and — probably because of my day job — especially enjoyed reading what I could find of Jan Beatty’s “Waitress’s Instructions on Tipping or Get the Cash and Don’t Waste My Time.”
You ask the question, “What exactly differentiates Language from lyric poetry?” From what I’ve read about the Language poets for this week’s class, there are some significant differences, perhaps form and structure (or lack thereof) being one of the most obvious. In his essay for this week’s readings, Steve McCaffery also says this: “[a] language-centered poem is the return of the poem to the people – a politicized poem, not a political poem.” He talks about the “openness” of the poem, which “invites participation” from the reader and “rejects the authority of the writer over the reader (148-49). He even notes that “L=A-N-G-U=A=G=E was set up to be a journal not of primary creative texts but theoretical conjectures and statements about poems and poetics” (145).
With that said, I’m unable to find Carol Tarlen’s poem “Today,” and can’t speak to how I think it might be categorized. And I’m undecided about Beatty’s “Waitress’s Instructions on Tipping or Get the Cash and Don’t Waste My Time.” Do we know if she even wanted to be categorized? You note that the “pink-collar resistance poets” (love that name) have been “largely unnamed and thus, ignored because of their refusal to restrict their writing to any one category.”
Ironically, I was thinking about this briefly earlier today. Must work fit into a category in order to be recognized and studied? Humans are so good at speaking in categorical terms. Are these marginalized poems a result of gender or a baselessness on behalf of scholarly readers who aren’t sure how to talk about them critically?
Why would these poems not be classified, yet previous poems about working-class conditions are? Must work fit into a category in order to be recognized and studied?
Does gender play a role in their marginalization? Are these marginalized poems a result of gender or a baselessness on behalf of scholarly readers who aren’t sure how to talk about them critically?
Echoes of questions. I would think, and I may be wrong, that poems and poets that are NOT classified into schools or major anthologies such as the ones we’ve experienced oftentimes become lost to history. You remember when I asked about all those New Critical poets the anthology entries we’ve read were supposed to be railing against? We’ve only seen like, two of those poems, and one of them was an early Lowell poem that was written before he went confessional.
In terms of gender, the poetry of women in the past may be lost to us for some time yet. We know Bishop and Plath and Levertov, but there have been many, many more women than we’ve come across thus far; their poems were written in a time when poetry was constantly changing content, shape, form, and purpose, and due to societal oppression, many women were not in positions to help the various schools grow or, worse, didn’t even make it to the writing or academic level of the women we have studied.
The thing also about which poems we read in school also comes down to time. Our amount of reading is comparable to other graduate courses, I think, but how many of the Dream Songs did we read? There’s a book of those. How many poems did we read by Ashbery? That dude writes a LOT. So in which class would you read any of the poems Angela mentioned in her post? Not that they SHOULD be forgotten or marginalized, but you see what I’m saying here. Where would you find them and in what context?