Title: Temporary Worker Rides a Subway
First published: January 30, 2004
Description: "In Temporary Worker Rides a Subway, Mark Wallace presents two long poem sequences that explore and question contemporary language surrounding money and work. Using a widely varied set of poetic forms. Wallace creates a poetry of comic outrage to highlight the inconsistencies and absurdities in contemporary notions about the degree to which money and work provide reasonable measures of the value of people's lives." "The first sequence, "Boys At The Guns," uses a combination of determinant "chance" techniques and authorial intervention into those techniques to turn the language of high finance against itself and into poetry. "Boys" concerns the November 1998 leveraged buy-out (LBO) of the RJR Nabisco Corporation, at the time the largest LBO in history and perhaps the high point of the Wall Street and corporate environment of the 1980s, an environment that profoundly changed American culture. Filtering the language of business through an Edward Lear nonsense alphabet and other systematic distortions, it breaks down the supposed narrative coherence often used to describe this frenzied business environment and ends up reveling in the irrational nonsense of money." "The second sequence, "Temporary Worker Rides A Subway," turns away from the environment of the financial elite and focuses instead on the environment of the financially marginal temporary worker, shuttled from job to job like a deployable resource. "Temporary Worker" presents a constantly shifting set of poetic forms, games, and systems that reflect the maneuvering involved in the temporary worker's daily struggle for a livable existence in a stultifying corporate world, enmeshing him in language and social circumstances full of fragments, absurdities, conflicts and nonsense that passes itself off as sense. Poetry becomes a way of responding to the kinds of language that attempt to turn human beings into productive resources at the cost of their self-respect and autonomy."--BOOK JACKET.
Subjects: Poetry (poetic works by one author), Visual poetry