Edgar Kunz’s “Tap Out” and “Fixer”

“Edgar Kunz, the author of Tap Out and Fixer, does not refer to himself specifically as blue collar, proletarian, or working class. Well-meaning others, such as mentor Edward Hirsch, do so, referring to Tap Out as ‘gutsy, tough-minded, working-class poems of memory and initiation.'”

Reviewing poetry is a delicate matter. It is crucial to separate the strands of author biography and the press’s angle of marketing from the poetry itself, as the latter sometimes get confused with an assessment of a book’s poetics as such. While there is a case to be made for a surge in “new Armenian American poetry” or “a breakout first collection by an Appalachian writer,” such categories, while flavorful in announcing a possible theme or emphasis, ultimately have limited relevance to a cooler assessment of a volume’s quality as poetry. Even less so in the case of a long-oversold category such as “working-class poetry,” which has successfully endured as a diffuse, quasi-economic badge of honor and “marginalized” meaningfulness. This latter is a rare sight indeed, given the economic state of the United States, in which increasing numbers of Americans, approaching a majority, can no longer afford rent or mortgage payments. Therefore, given its majority status, might one more accurately simply say “poet,” no adjective required?

To gain immediate insight into this longstanding phenomenon, one need only look into a special issue of the venerable World Literature Today, “16 American Working-Class Poets,” with titles such as “Redemption at Ray’s Grocery Store,” “The Bra Factory,” and “Why I Don’t Work Construction.” The first two authors are university professors, and like the third, also do not work construction. Are they then faux proletarians? Or simply former ones? Thus, working-class becomes a term of nostalgia, or merely a highly relative term as one enters middle-class life, more a barroom boast, than the unique daily reality of a protected poetic class. The topoi of struggle and overcoming the hard-knocks life become more a brand than a current reality. And hyper-capitalist America, based on its misleading and selective myth of the hard-won prosperity of the immigrant, loves this brand. It makes us feel good to see the little guy represent.

Yet it is legitimate to ask whether this is a good-faith proposition, and whether the romanticism with which it is imbued is leading to poetry of sufficient finesse and subtlety, or whether a plainspoken, down-to-earth vocabulary, often overpraised for its “spare” qualities, is doing modern poetry a disservice, in its tenuous claim to relatability and speaking intelligently to the hypothetical masses. Is one destined to be swept into the devil’s bargain of entering a Raymond Carver gestalt, in which the representation of everyday people, in the closest approximation of what they talk about when they talk about whatever they talk about, supplants all other considerations of style and genre? It is hard to read such writing innocently when it is culturally exalted to a categorical imperative.

This issue becomes even more complicated when it dovetails, as it sometimes does, with the Charles Bukowski School of Anti-Poetics, which has done much to encourage limited literacy and a wholesale lack of caring about formal elements, e.g., poetics, seeing the practice rather as a spontaneous outburst, the rawer the better, embellished by adherence and professed allegiance to the metaphysics of the gutter.