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Class Action
April 2008 E-news:
Class and Poetry
In this Issue
1. New Resource from Class Action; Class and Education
2. Felice Yeskel nominated for APA Leadership Award
3. Zoe Greenberg wins another prize!
4. Class and Poetry - Guest Editor Karen Weyant
5. Book of the Month: Trembling in the Bones
6. Featured Articles on Class and Poetry
7. Online Resources
8. Action of the Month
9. Take our Survey
10. Looking for a few good Macs
1. New Resource on Class from Class Action: Class and Education
Felice Yeskel, Class Action's Executive Director, recently guest-edited an edition of the journal Equity in Excellence in Education.
Felice's article "Coming to Class: Looking at Education through the Lens of Class: Introduction to the Class and Education Special Issue" frames the issue which includes:
Class Struggle in Higher Education, by Dan Clawson & Mishy Leiblum; The Dynamics of Social Reproduction: How Class Works at a State College and Elite Private College Author, by Maynard Seider; Double Jeopardy: The Compounding Effects of Class and Race in School Mathematics by Jae Hoon Lim; and Race, Social Background, and School Choice Options by Kimberly A. Goyette
Click Here to order the journal online.
2. Felice Yeskel has been nominated for the American Psychological Association inaugural Committee on Socioeconomic Status(CSES) Leadership Awards
The CSES Leadership Awards recognize the outstanding achievements of psychologists and friends of psychology who have made significant contributions to the understanding of socioeconomic status and the lives and wellbeing of the poor by:
- Promoting scientific understanding of the roles of poverty and SES in health, education, and human welfare;
- Developing approaches to the application of psychology that take into account the effects of SES on psychological development and well being; and/or
- Advocating for social policy that will alleviate or reduce the disparities between SES groups.
3. Zoe Greenberg, Enough director, wins another prize
Zoe Greenberg has won the Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival's New Filmmaker's Award, "for excellence in the world of film." Five filmmakers were featured in this New Filmmaker's Weekend, and Zoe was the youngest. Congratulations Zoe!
4. Class and Poetry: Celebrating Working Class Poetry during National Poetry Month
Picture this: The professor explains to the class that one of the required texts for the course is Working Classics: Poems on Industrial Life. As a student in this class, you think you’ve heard her incorrectly. Work? Poetry? Industrial? All parts of a same book title? You don’t really believe her until you buy the book at the campus bookstore and you flip through the pages. And it’s true. There really is poetry about the working-class world.
For people from working class backgrounds, this world of poetry is often a very foreign place; furthermore, educators (even those in college English departments) often are not knowledgeable of the world of working-class poetry. But this world does exist – from Pittsburgh’s steel mills, to the deep Appalachia coal mines to the lumber camps of the Pacific shore, working-class poets have sought to write about their world. Besides the number of contemporary poets who write about working-class issues, there are even collections of poems that explore important historical events in working-class history including Chris Llewellyn’s Fragments from the Fire and Mary Fell’s The Persistence of Memory (both contain poems about the Triangle Factory Shirtwaist Fire) and Kettle Bottom by Diane Gilliam Fisher (a collection that narrates the West Virginia mining wars in the early 1920s.) Finally, there are many anthologies containing working class poetry including the aforementioned Working Classics edited by Peter Oresick and Nicholas Coles and For a Living: The Poetry of Work, also edited by Oresick and Coles and Going for Coffee edited by Tom Wayman.
In April of 1996, The Academy of American Poets introduced the first National Poetry Month, an event designed to bring together educators, writers, publishers and in general, anybody interested in poetry to promote the awareness and love of poetry to the general public. And of course, working-class poetry should be part of this celebration.
5. Book of the month:
Trembling in the Bones by Eleanor Swanson
At first, flipping through the pages of Eleanor Swanson’s Trembling in the Bones is like flipping through a labor history book. Breaker boys drink coffee, work grueling hours, and spit like grown men. Husbands disappear into the dark seams of earth. Women scrub coal dust from men’s clothing on washboards. Even the infamous Mother Jones makes an appearance.
But Swanson’s book is not a history text book; her work is a collection of poetry capturing the stark, harsh and even violent world of the Colorado Coal Mines in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Read More...
6. Featured Articles on Class and Poetry
That Secret Code by Orman Day
Their childhood homes didn’t have shelves lined with leather-bound classics, but they made fervid use of their library cards. Their parents didn’t have the money to take them on European tours of museums and ancient architecture, but they learned that books would let them hike through the elephant grass of Hemingway’s Africa or study the wind-riffled waters of Loch Ness for signs of a huge, hoary snout, and a whip-like tail. Read More...
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Working Class Poetry by John Stringer
The large mass of poetry is written by people from the educated classes: what in England would have been called the upper-middle classes. As I have discussed earlier, the qualities of poetry involve considerable vocabularies, and a sense of parameters such as meter, cadence, internal structure, and so forth. Take a working-class child, educate it, and you produce an aesthete! Read More...
7. Online Resources:
The Academy of American Poets National Poetry Month
Center for Working Class Studies (Includes interesting lists of working class literature and poetry)
Persistence of Memory by Mary Fell (Fell’s collection of poems about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire)
8. Action of the Month
Working-class poetry is largely published by small independent presses with little or no financial support from universities. Many of them are nonprofits and need our support!
Go to our Action page for more information.
9. Take our Survey
How can publishers, librarians, and teachers make working-class literature (including poetry) relevant to you?
Submit a response here. Read other survey responses here.
10. Looking for a Few Good Macs
Class Action is growing faster than our supply of Macs can keep up. Interest in our work continues to bring increasing numbers of interns. Additional workstations are needed to help make the most of their talents. If anyone has a relatively-recent (G-4 or newer preferred) Mac in need of a new mission, please contact Sarah at 413-585-9709, ext. 201 or sreid@classism.org. Desktop and laptop models sought.
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