2 hours ago
2
01.29
When we look up at stars on break
we see only stars behind
the exhaled Milky Way
of Bobby’s Golden Virginia,
ways to navigate shift patterns,
nothing seismic or anything approaching
truth; for us stars mean only night shift,
insanity of depth,
the slow individual seconds
during which the dotted starlight
doesn’t burn fast enough.
05.29
It was wee Gail’s seventieth birthday
last week and she has a special
seat to sit on all shift
and her hands are old at the task,
old at working the tricks that come
with having laboured
in the same place for so long
and she’s making light work
of sifting defective ring washers
from those within tolerance and
her bench could be a grand piano,
her patch of floor a stage,
and, in another life, it is.
In plastic, a book-length poem cycle by the Northern Irish poet Matthew Rice, the time-stamp titles ensure that clock-watching is an experience readers share with the narrator and his fellow workers through their 12-hour factory night shift. Whether Rice is observing the enforced machine-order of the production line, evaluating his own thoughts about cinema, music and literature, or empathising with the other workers, each individual short poem is a cherished fragment of perception seeking a moment of freedom from the tyranny of its time-stamp. The two pieces I’ve chosen are exactly four hours and more than 20 poems apart; distinct in tone and structure, each registers awareness that the potential of the individuals concerned, as a collective or singly, is frustrated by their socio-economic position.
The workers in 01.29 are on a break, but their star-gazing is presented from the limited and immediate perspective in which the nearest stars are tobacco-sparks, “the exhaled Milky Way / of Bobby’s Golden Virginia”. The Milky Way leads only to earthbound “ways to navigate shift patterns”. Imaginative or intellectual speculation is forbidden by the laws of factory routine that the workers have had to internalise.
Fully aware of that limitation, the speaker keeps possibility tamped down, while simultaneously acknowledging its power. The phrase “insanity of depth” inscribes the dizziness a free-spirited mental navigation of the cosmos might risk. The speaker and his colleagues are necessary conspirators against visions, star-gazers from the depth of despairing realism. While the poem insists on “nothing seismic or anything approaching / truth”, it acknowledges that the denial falls far short of human “depth”. Stars, increasingly distant, mark time like the numerals on the digital clock but infinitely slower: whereas the sparks released from “Bobby’s Golden Virginia” are all too ephemeral, “the dotted starlight/ doesn’t burn fast enough” for the night-shift workers.
In the second poem, the speaker focuses on a single worker, “wee Gail”, and, by the second line, although her 70th birthday was “last week”, the present-continuous tense is seemingly established: “she has a special / seat to sit on all shift”. Her seat may be connected to the friendly recognition of her birthday, but, more likely, she habitually occupies a particular bench-space for ergonomic reasons, in line with company regulations. The image of the seat is rightly left for the reader to form – and then to transform.
Centrally placed, a single line of monosyllables illustrates the one-dimensionality of Gail’s service “in the same place for so long”, but the resumed triplets have her “making light work” of it all as she skilfully performs her task, “sifting defective ring washers / from those within tolerance”. The poet-speaker, too, makes light work of the romantic, celebratory turn after “and” at the end of the third triplet, when the ensuing pause instigates the vision of deft-fingered Gail as, perhaps, a concert pianist. This wouldn’t be impossible “in another life”. Even here, Rice is almost curbed by realism. Somehow, he succeeds in lifting that heavy shadow cast by “another life”, dissolving it in the glow of what feels like genuine admiration and genuine affirmation.
In an endnote, Rice pays tribute to an 1830 book by the French philosopher, Jacques Rancière, Proletarian Nights: The Worker’s Dream in 19th-Century France. In Rancière’s vision of socialism, labourers desire, and have the potential for, freedom from their work. Rice addresses the mental and physical costs of the labour treadmill, and, as a poet and son of a poet, he is haunted by the concept of repressed creative potential in others. The poem about “wee Gail” is a particularly direct and moving expression of that vision.
The fulfillment of Rancière’s ideal looms close to us in the age of AI, with the decline of human labour at even the white-collar level, and in production lines’ replacement-staffing by robots. Freedom for self-fulfillment will be available, in theory, but how will it be inscribed and allocated by our institutions? The many questions will be tough to solve. In the meantime, the poems in plastic both honour and transcend their traditional factory setting, and remind us of how much there could be to gain in the dawning digital era.
