The Factory and Beyond

To William Blake, factories were “dark satanic mills.” The priest-kings of capitalism chose to ignore the disparagements of the eccentric English engraver and the Industrial Revolution spawned the technological Triumph of the West. The United States, as the Firesign Theater put it, decided to “invite immigrants over and make cars.”

By now the U.S. has made plenty of cars, and lots of everything else. But, publicly, we chose to call attention not to manufacturing but to marketing--it requires cleverness and hand-shakes and you can do it wearing a suit. In our national mythology, Vulcan at his forge has been replaced by the Willy Lomans and Lee Iacoccas. Our televisions show a nation of go-getters getting over, with marketing the key to everything from romance to finance to eternal salvation. But behind all the hype is still the Product, and whether it’s an after-shave, a briefcase or a Moral Majority membership card, the chances are it comes from a factory.

“Factory” is also the title of a poem, a 1600-line song of praise to Bad Attitude on behalf of all the men and women who spend their lives inside factories while Madison Avenue transmutes their sweat and boredom into The Economy. An epic poem is a poem containing history, and history is the poem written by Time with our blood. “Factory” is history with the blood still wet.

Originally published in 1980 in the City Lights Pocket Press series and hailed by critics and poets --notably Alien Ginsbergas a major achievement, the poem now appears in a full-length volume, Last Words, by a poet who goes by the name of Antler. Antler was raised in and around Milwaukee, where (the poem opens):

Written in the ‘Whitmanic line’--long, sometimes prosy, free-verse lines of mostly spoken-style American language, meant to be read aloud--the rhythms of the poem’s 13 sections rise and fall like music.

In the mid-1800’s, Walt Whitman had great hopes for America. It would have been nice if he was right, but he wasn’t. Antler updates Whitman, fusing the roles of prophet and witness with social protest in a voice that calls to mind vintage Ginsberg. Yet the voice is Antler’s own--less Old Testament and more Midwestern working-class than Ginsberg: something like “Howl” and The Grapes of Wrath mixed together.

By turns ecstatic, furious, resigned, punning, informative, vengeful, paranoid, plotting, plodding and delirious, the poem’s cycles remind me of the inner life of a workday at any job that occupies the body and leaves the mind to its own devices. Every fear, hope, scheme, dream and despair known to humankind can run through a mind in one eight-hour day.

Antler exhaustively portrays these moods and mood swings. How did I get here, he asks:

“Factory” is encyclopaedic and fun. We learn the history of the can, the number of cans used in the world each year, that children who worked 12 hours in factories fell asleep with food in their mouths, how the poem itself came to be written, and why the poet has taken the name Antler. There are dizzying lists of all the products produced in factories, and towards the end of the poem the reader is even accused of looking ahead to see how many pages are left. The poem is prayer, incantation, confession, expose, curse and document. It bears witness to our rage and gives the cage of despair a good hard shake.

Many people associate poetry with Culture, and you know how much we all like Culture when it’s capitalized. Pablo Neruda sought an “impure poetry.” Kenneth Patchen, who didn’t see this world as a benign place, prescribed “a sort of garbage pail you could throw anything into,” to dispel poetry’s image as pretty, precious and rhymey. Antler has thrown everything in and come out with an impure masterpiece.

Antler offers no readymade answers, any more than Processed World does. But, like Processed World, he asks the right questions with humor and humanity and, pushing an important subject to the snapping point, breaks through in revelation.

LAST WORDS

“Factory” was written between 1970 and 1974. The remaining 63 poems in Last Words span the years 1967–1983, from the poet’s early twenties to his late thirties.

I remember thinking after first reading “Factory,” “What does this guy do for an encore?” In the sense that every writer writes the same book over and over, he does variations on a theme. Antler’s theme is the holiness of all life and the illegitimacy of any authority that denies this holiness.

This is a tall order, and some of the poems are more successful than others. Their length ranges from four lines to seven pages. One section, ‘Reworking Work,’ expands on the issues presented in “Factory.” “Dream Job Offer” is a playful fantasy of a job as a mattress tester in a department store window and includes the lines:

The poem seems to me a sophomoric joke, not particularly original, but carried out so well and unself-consciously that it works. It’s not profound, but relentless, obsessive. At its best, Antler’s exuberant relentlessness becomes profound.

Antler presents himself as a modern primitive, a mescaline visionary, a flower-sniffing backpacker; yet he knows not only what’s going on in the world, but in his profession: the poetry world. He knows there has been a swing in the direction of aestheticism and experimental language-oriented poetry. In “Your Poetry’s No Good Because It Tries to Convey a Message.” his response is blunt:

There is a stridency to his potent vision that is sometimes difficult to take. As with every book, every movie, there comes the moment when the work ends and we are thrust back into our own lives where nothing is simple: Where to from here?

These poems do not answer that question. They do give voice to things I’ve heard expressed countless times in countless ways: the technopeasants are restless. Antler speaks for hedonists, anarchists and brash believers everywhere when, in “Why No ‘Poet Wanted’ in Want Ad Column,” he talks back to the smug pragmatists and well-adjusted compromisers: