For Labor Day, two poems (Brecht, Piercy) about jobs that degrade. But the poems themselves offer solace.
Tag Archives: Work
Celebrate Work? or Complain about It?
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Pirate Jenny's Song", "Secretary Chant", Bertolt Brecht, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, Kurt Weil, Labor Day, Marge Piercy, Threepenny Opera Comments closed
A Blacksmith Poem for Labor Day
A Seamus Heaney blacksmith poem for Labor Day.
Crusoe and the American Work Ethic
A Pakistani student looks at Americans and notes their obsession with time. One can see that same obsession in Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe.”
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Daniel Defoe, Dickory Cronke, Max Weber, Pakistan, prosperity theology, Protestant work ethic, R. H. Tawney, Robinson Crusoe, Time Comments closed
A Poem for Labor Day
Monday – Labor Day I can think of few poems that better capture the spirit of Labor Day than Daniel Pinsky’s “The Shirt.” I love how it moves seamlessly—I use the adverb deliberately—between the craft of labor and the conditions of labor. Sometimes we see a lovingly described piece of clothing, sometimes we hear about […]
Langston Hughes on the Dignity of Work
Langston Hughes understood working men and women as well as anyone, as his poem “Brass Spittoons” demonstrates.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Brass Spittoons", analysis, Labor Day, Langston Hughes Comments closed
“Find Work,” an Answer to Every Grief?
Rhina P. Espaillat captures the ambivalent nature of work in the poem posted for Labor Day. It can be ennobling but too much emphasis on it can rob us of our humanity.
Work Makes Us Soar, Money Not So Much
In her novel “Leaps fo Faith,” Rachel Kranz helps us understand what work means to us. Citing Marx, she notes that work helps us express our essence but that, when it becomes part of the cash nexus, we find ourselves alienated from it.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged class struggle, Labor history, Leaps of Faith, Rachel Kranz Comments closed
