Jeffrey Jullich has been published in Shiny, Caliban, Pavement, College English, ACM (Another Chicago Magazine), Poetry, and elsewhere. He has poetry forthcoming in Lit, and book reviews in Rhizome. He was the horoscope columnist for VICE magazine and librettist for an opera called American Lit: Queer Theory (The Hawthorne-Melville Correspondence), which premiered at American Opera Projects.
How could a hypothetical post-modern poetry foreground the surrounding constraints of class, while still remaining "non-representational"?
A few broad generalizations hint at what class might be: there is general agreement that it has something to do with family, something to do with money, something to do with education, and something to do with work. It is in the last of these that poetry might find its real grounding in class, since poetry is a form of work. Ironically, the rigors of traditional, rhymed, formalist poetry displayed a stronger trace of the hand of the workman: the sheer artificiality of a canzone working off ten matched rhymes highlights a labor intensiveness which can disappear into the foreignness of a more abstracted avant-garde.
There is a sculpture by the artist Robert Morris entitled "Box Containing the Sound of Its Own Making." The viewer approaches a decidedly plain wooden crate, closed on all sides, to find that it is emitting a racket of hammering, sawing, and the incidental sounds of construction. Those sounds come from a tape recording playing inside the box, a recording of the accidental noise that went into building the artwork. Morris's sculpture may serve as a model for what a poetry with class/work origins incorporated into it might be.
A truer class/work-oriented poetics would find a way of accentuating the presence of the worker-poet. In two poems published in "ixnay #2," the Philadelphia poet Shawn Walker presents arrangements of an overall sublime or "transcendent" poetry ("silence being in a glass/bowl wherefore artist thou siren"), but beneath each poem, separated by a dividing line, she makes a diary entry-style accounting of expenses ("July 19, 1998 $6.21 @ 7-11, 38th & Chestnut $1.50 Philadelphia Inquirer"). The latter belies the overarching poetical rhetoric of the former, but also underscores the material (class) conditions of the poet-manufacturer responsible, especially owing to the humble or even "lower class" nature of the expenses ("$2.14 Doritos, OJ"). Possibilities such as these begin to offer instances of how a post-modern poetry might acknowledge the constructedness of the poem, and the role of the poet as laborer in a cottage industry factory of verse.