1. The image of men and women doing physical work is one that is greatly appealing.Focus on a type of work and familiarize yourself with the setting where it is performed, the people who perform it and the language that is used while it is performed. This will be necessary in order to seem like the author is authentic, that he/she knows and has experienced the work that he/she is talking about.
2. Much work poetry depicts the working life as difficult but ultimately ennobling.It suggests a persevering human spirit in the face of daunting circumstances.
3. Essentially, though, the work poem is about the men and women who do the work, not the work itself. The work is a metaphor for the kind of people that are doing it. In this way, the work poem can serve to describe individuals or groups of people. For this reason it is often commonly associated with poems about community life.
4.Sometimes the poem is about the realtionship between the workers and the people who benefit from the work being done (as in Patricia Dobler's "Field Trip to The Rolling Mills") and the judgments they make about the work.
This assignment is worth 1 point.
Examples:
1. Overhand the Hammers Swing: Poems of Work
• The Orange Bears—Kenneth Patchen
• The Whistle—Yusef Komunyakaa
• The Women Who Clean Fish—Erica Funkhouser
• Field Trip to the Rolling Mills, 1950—Patricia Dobler