Working Class Poets: From Whitman to Fairchild
B.H. Fairchild’s Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwestpresents itself as
poetry for the blue collared, the steel worker, and the prairie dweller, a
celebration and affirmation of the bored, beautiful life of America’s
mid-section bound up with a vulgarity that constitutes the richness of
human experience. With its attention to geography of the banal and the
construction of the individual through memory and time, Fairchild’s poems
echo a tradition of heralds of the working class that came into existence
with nineteenth-century American poet, Walt Whitman.
Working in the transitory period between two oppositional movements in
American art, the shift from focus on the transcendental to a commitment
to representing “authentic” life, Whitman emerges as the “father of free
verse” and weaves together the spiritual and the mundane. Whitman’s most
recognized work, Leaves of Grass, was an attempt to connect with
America at her most genuine, including both virtue and vice, but it was
also a response to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call for a true American poet,
the “genius in America… which knew the value… and saw, in the barbarism
and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods” that
peopled the epics of the Greeks.
Both Fairchild and Whitman are dedicated to singing what Emerson called
the “poem” of America from within. Fairchild, however, takes it one step
further by situating poetry in the literal Midwest to illustrate the
innermost part. Fairchild takes Emerson’s advice not to “fill thy brain
with Boston and New York,” or with “wine and French coffee,” lest the poet
cease to find beauty and “wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods.” In
the preface to an early publication of Leaves of Grass, Whitman notes,
“The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as
he has absorbed it.” While Fairchild ventures from Paris to New York, it
is always the Kansas dust that obscures the lens.
Still, neither collection is an out and out praise of a recognized ideal
America; both poets admit and emphasize, if not embrace, a certain
crudeness and rigor. Both collections of poems operate in the space
between a lofty salvation and the hard and fast dirt and toil of the
working world, and illustrate a struggle to reconcile spirituality and
material life. In poems like “A Song for Occupations,” Whitman writes: “In
the labor of engines and trades and the labor of the fields / I find the
developments, / And find the eternal meanings.” Fairchild pits the
welder’s hard “rod to iron” against the soft world waking “once more into
the dream of Being” in “The Welder, Visited by the Angel of Mercy.”
The same anxieties about time and preservation, bound necessarily to an
idea of any form of salvation, surface as a unifying theme in both
collections of verse. In “Prayer to Columbus,” Whitman’s “I know not even
my own work past or present, / Dim ever-shifting guesses of it spread
before me” finds its echo in Fairchild’s meandering streams of memory. In
their respective histories and times, both Fairchild and Whitman call into
question not only what it is to be an American, but what it is to be an
artist, a member of the working class, or both.
But perhaps most importantly, they ask us what it means to be a human in a
race against time that can never be won, with a system of memory that will
never be sufficient to preserve that “carnival of the gods” playing in the
“lonely waste of the pinewoods.”
--Savannah Stephenson
