Martin Hayes reading poetry against an image of Fred Voss
by Peter Raynard
In the Spring of 2023, I answered a call out for articles for a special issue of the journal, English: Journal of the English Studies Association, on the subject of Precarity. Not being an academic I didn’t think I had much of a chance. But lo and behold, my proposal to write about the poetry of work in the poems of Fred Voss and Martin Hayes, was accepted. For the next six weeks I did nothing. I was stalled in a panic of imposter syndrome. I asked Fred and Martin to send me thirty poems each, that would form the basis of the article, which in of itself was a big task given that Fred had written over three thousand, and Martin more than one thousand poems. But within days, they provided me with what became my foundational material. Slowly thereafter, the structure and themes of the article came together. Over an eighteenth month period I went through numerous drafts and peer review but managed to come out the other side, intact.
Tragically, just before publication, Fred Voss died. You can read my tribute here. So I’d like to dedicate the article to him and his partner Joan Jobe Smith. I also want to thank Martin Hayes for his poetry, his valued friendship and general bonhomie, and finally to issue editors Professor Cathy Shrank, Dr Kate De Rycker, and Dr Archie Cornish for their support throughout.
Below is the abstract and conclusion. For a pdf of the full article, please click here.
The Poetics of Precarious Work in the Poetry of Fred Voss and Martin Hayes
Abstract
With over 70 years’ experience of menial/manual work combined, the poets Fred Voss and Martin Hayes are deeply embedded in the day-to-day life of precarious work. Their four thousand poems relentlessly explore and expose the ongoing catastrophe of such work as it has spread from the gig economy to more traditional forms of full- and part-time labour, a work hidden away by the constrictive and alienating effect of late capitalism.
They are both witness and worker, which is a doubly precarious position. I explore how a middle-class publishing industry largely ignores ‘work’ as a subject. I argue that Voss’ and Hayes’ writing exposes both the precarity of the just-in-time working practices in their day jobs, and the absence of any meaningful inclusion of industrial perspectives by ‘mainstream’ poetry publishers.
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. 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.
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.
