Ted Berrigan already knew how. As Alice Notley says in her introduction to Berrigan's selected poems, "Ted came from a working class background and was very realistic about choices in America. You weren't poor if you had gone to college. On the other hand, you would not get certain kinds of poetic recognition in your lifetime if you had gone to Something State instead of Harvard." Or as Pierre Bourdieu puts it, "Cultural objects, with their subtle hierarchy, are predisposed to mark the stages and degrees of initiatory progress which define the enterprise of culture." A Working Class Avant Garde poetic would be the product of poems and publishing practices that would find itself on the bottom of that subtle hierarchy. But, dear Reader, Bourdieu comes to the rescue: Drawing on the historic practices of "the learned of all religions" and their "treatment of canonical texts," Bourdieu tells us that, "since the levels of 'reading' designate hierarchies of readers, it is necessary and sufficient to change the hierarchy of readings in order to overturn the hierarchies of readers."

In Marx, as in Reality, the Working Class is defined in relation to Capital as those who must sell their labor. In poetry this labor is often offered humbly to those who went to Harvard and not Something State. Here Working Class Avant Gardists can learn from none other than T.S. Eliot: "Can we regret...that Francois Villon did not choose to mix with more respectable society, or that Robert Burns did not have the same schooling as Dr. Johnson?" It might seem strange to quote Eliot, a man now condemned to centuries of fame as the librettist for the longest running Broadway musical of the 20th Century, to support a call for Working Class Avant Garde practices. But he basically got this one right. Villon and Burns didn't write for professors or other commissars. In other words, any Avant Garde that seeks approval of other Avant Gardes isn't Avant Garde (there are no Avant Gardian Angels).

On the SUNY Buffalo Poetics List not long ago, a Working Class poet [Kathy Lou Schultz] intervened in a debate on class and poetry and said in passing that she could "smell class." For this she was chastised by another listmember who seemed to assume that the WC poet was actually UC and thus looking down on the odoriferous huddled masses. I found the rebuke itself to indicate a distinctively privileged assumption, one that could only be made by someone with in-born access to the dominant class and who thus assumed that class differences were only manifested by those BELOW. Rank has its privileges. But several of us knew instantly that what the original poster meant when she said she could smell class, because we know that privilege has its rank.