Image courtesy of Wiki Commons
By Paul Michael Durivage
When a poem puts a tool in somebody’s hands, I want to know whether the person knows how to use it. That question comes from more than twenty-five years in precision manufacturing. It is also a question about character. A practical mistake can reveal embarrassment, a relationship or the beginning of an education. Technical language need not interrupt a poem’s human subject. It can establish it.
Fred Voss begins ‘Whippoorwills and Welding Rods’ with a worker who needs to learn how to use a file. The speaker’s literary education has not prepared him for the shop. A foreman’s correction gives the tool a social setting: somebody observes, somebody is exposed as inexperienced, and knowledge passes between them. I read the file as an instrument of admission into an unfamiliar community. The poem makes the difference between knowing about something and knowing what to do with it emotionally legible.
That opening resists a familiar shortcut in writing about work. Put a hammer beside a worker and the reader may supply strength, honesty and hardship without asking what the worker actually does. A badly used file interrupts the symbol. The person has to become capable before the tool can perform the reassuring cultural role we have assigned it.
Walt Whitman’s ‘I Hear America Singing’ offers an illuminating comparison. In this nineteenth-century poem, occupations arrive with their characteristic activities. A carpenter measures, a mason prepares or finishes work, a shoemaker works at a bench. The poem’s people appear able to inhabit the tasks that identify them. Their separate activities contribute to the larger sound the opening invites us to hear.
The attraction is obvious. Work that might be overlooked becomes audible. Someone at a bench belongs within the poem’s account of the country. The carpenter’s place does not depend on becoming a general or a legislator. The ordinary activity is sufficient to warrant attention.
Yet the form also settles certain questions before a reader can ask them. The short poem is interested in a chorus of distinct voices, rather than in the process by which a beginner learns a trade. It does not follow an apprentice making a mistake or a worker disputing a rate of pay. Those absences are not a discovery that Whitman secretly wrote a different poem. They help define the kind of attention this particular poem offers.
There is a question of recognition for the reader, too. Can I distinguish the activity named from the idea of useful labour that I have brought to it? Whitman’s compact occupational portraits encourage both responses. The occupations remain distinct, while the larger design gathers them into a collective affirmation. A reader can appreciate that ambition and still notice how quickly a working person becomes representative.
Voss’s other poem, ‘Waiting to Run a Raindrop Machine’, begins with machinists leaving their equipment to look out through an overhead door. Their competence cannot produce the rain they need. The move towards the doorway changes what the workplace contains: the workers share attention to something beyond production. The title imagines a machine where there is none. I read its frustration as practical knowledge encountering the limits of control. The workers’ capacity to make things has not made them independent of the living world.
The comparison matters because “worker” can become an explanation that prevents further looking. It can imply an attitude before a person has spoken. A poem can restore differences that the label erases. The new worker and the experienced one have different things at stake. A person who can solve a difficult practical problem may still be unable to solve the condition on which the day’s work depends.
I do not need every poem about labour to become a lesson in operating equipment. Excessive procedural detail can obscure a person as effectively as a grand symbol. The useful question is what the chosen detail changes. Does the reader understand a relationship more clearly? Does the action establish who has authority, who needs help or who is carrying responsibility?
For writers, this offers a demanding standard of specificity. Naming a material is a beginning. Showing why someone notices that material is more revealing. A reader outside the trade should be able to follow the consequence without consulting a manual. A reader inside it should have something to recognise beyond a decorative technical noun.
That is also a way of taking workers seriously as readers. We bring knowledge to the page, and that knowledge can notice an evasion. We can recognise a task while disagreeing with the meaning an author gives it. We can enjoy Whitman’s invitation to hear ordinary occupations and want a closer account of an individual voice within them.
The poems stay interesting when that conversation remains open. A workplace is a place where people learn, depend on one another and confront limits. Letting those relationships enter the writing gives the tool something more exact to do than stand for a worthy kind of person. It lets an action reveal somebody.
Works Discussed
Fred Voss, ‘Whippoorwills and Welding Rods’, Culture Matters, July 25, 2023
Walt Whitman, ‘I Hear America Singing’, Leaves of Grass, The Project Gutenberg Ebook 1322
Fred Voss, ‘Waiting to Run a Raindrop Machine’, Culture Matters, May 1, 2022
