In thinking about a poetics of class that knows itself, it's instructive to look at the history of feminist poetics. In the first place (if you could call the sixties and early seventies the first place), an innovative feminist poetics seemed to be disallowed. Feminism was content if you were going to make a feminist poem recognizable to feminists or to the avant garde. Formally innovative poems founded on radical politics took their cues from Marxist and socialist critiques which did not include sexuality, gender, or, somehow, class.

At the same time, as Joan Retallack points out in her essay ":RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM," "Textual traditions that have enacted and explored modes culturally labeled feminine have oddly – or, as we shall note, not so oddly – been practiced until recently more by men than by women....Perhaps one of the most remarkable things about our present time is that women are finally socially and politically powerful enough to undertake the risks of this ‘feminine’ challenge in their own texts."

I think Retallack answers Kathy Lou Schultz's question, "What's a working class poetic, and where could I find one?" Women did not will a brand new poetics into being, but claimed existing forms, recognized the feminism in them, and then elaborated on them. I'm describing a kind of territory war where the victor achieves recognition both from herself and from the larger writing scene (and with it a portion of psychic life on which to stage her writing).

When feminist publications like HOW(ever) started gathering innovative poetry already being written by women, I heard complaints that the women were not doing anything "new" formally. But they certainly were, because they brought feminism over the great divide from content to form. Once a critical mass of writing (and assuming) had been achieved, people no longer said that women were not making something new, and "suddenly" disjunct form could be feminist poetics.

I don't think I could look at a page of words and say, Oh, a working class form. A working class poetics must claim part of what is already there, apply it to the disjunctions and silences of class, and build a poetry that brings new meanings and new applications to innovative form. Can we look at avant-garde writing in the 20th century and recognize class as one of its sources?

It is an interesting moment to be thinking about class. Class inequities are more brutal than ever and yet all discussion seems to be silenced by a "mainstream" which is ready to give away zillions of dollars rather than depress itself by addressing homelessness and health care. Can this moment of silence also be a moment of power? I doubt it. If there is to be a poetics of class, it may be founded on the abjection and dissonance that inform genre-bending writing by, say, Lawrence Braithwaite, Camille Roy, and Dodie Bellamy. Are writers, perhaps unknown to each other, already creating a body of work? What do established working class writers like Tom Raworth or Eileen Myles have to say? Or writers who foreground race and class – Juan Goytisolo in Spain, Pierre Gyotat in France? Are there allegiances to be made?