Andre Le Mont Wilson: “I work as a backup personal care attendant five days a week at a program for adults with disabilities. Usually, I avoid telling people or writing poems about this aspect of my job. One day, as I was assisting a man in the restroom, he asked, ‘How long have you been doing this?’ I gave an evasive answer, ‘A quarter century.’ He said, ‘If I were you, I would be gone by now!’ His conversation so unnerved me that when I went on vacation to Mexico, his question repeated in my ear. I wrote my first villanelle because its repetition of lines mirrored how the man’s question echoed in my head.” (web)
Laurie Uttich: “At fifteen, I started what would be a ten-plus-year ‘career’ in the service industry. I’ve been a florist assistant, a server, a cocktail waitress, a bartender, a catering assistant, a donut shop worker, a ‘bar cart girl’ at a golf course, and other jobs. I typically worked one or two jobs regularly and then picked up a third when I needed more money. After getting my first ‘real’ job as a copywriter, I continued to work at various service jobs to pay off my student loans (and cover the rent). I don’t know who I’d be without spending so much time under the scrutiny of men (and sometimes women) who first tried to decide if I was attractive enough to hire … and then, later, by men who were customers and often intoxicated. I think about that girl back then and when I imagine my younger self behind a bar or squeezing between two tables balancing a tray, I see myself so clearly as prey, my face frozen into a smile. I suppose the easy response is that being a part of these environments made me a feminist poet, but that’s oversimplifying it. I was always an observer, but being in a situation where it feels as if anything could happen—and you’re supposed to be friendly right up until the second it turns into something else, and who knows when that will be?—shapes how I view situations and how I address them in my work. In prose, I’m always couching reflections—‘not all men’ and that sort of thing. In poems, I just swim in the emotion of the moment and I don’t worry about any global conclusions a reader might make.” (web)
Fred Shaw: “When I first punched into work at Papa J’s Ristorante at sixteen years old, how could I have known I’d still be working in the service industry 32 years later? When I started studying for my MFA, I struggled to come up with ideas for poems, as it seemed my peers could write effortlessly about their personal lives while I hadn’t yet felt comfortable doing so. My mentors turned me on to Phillip Levine, James Wright, Robert Gibb, and Jan Beatty, each of whom celebrate ‘what work is’ (to paraphrase Levine) and show that all jobs are worthy of examination and praise. Since then, I’ve set out in my own way to humanize and recognize those often-faceless members of the service industry, who sustain us in our times of hunger and celebration.” (web)
Grant Quackenbush: “I’ve been working in the service industry since I was seventeen years old. I’m now 31. Mostly this has involved working as a bus boy or dishwasher in restaurants. During that time I began to write poetry and eventually got my MFA last year from Boston University. But now, after having gotten my MFA, I’m back to working in the service industry: I’m bartending at a hotel in Tribeca. Working in the service industry has affected my poetry by making it more raw than the average poem. I also try to use common speech and punctuation, and strive to make my poetry accessible rather than opaque and academic.”
T.R. Poulson: “I am a UPS driver, and every day I struggle to find balance between work and writing. But I wouldn’t give it up for anything. My communities of writers provide support for my writing, but it is my blue-collar world that provides inspiration for what to write about. Though I rarely write directly about work, it’s in everything I write: reimagined versions of my customers, my coworkers, the settings I would never discover if I did not do what I do. Covid-19 has changed so many things. I find myself writing about my customers’ dogs—because they are what’s keeping me sane.”
Andrew Miller: “The poems I have submitted to Rattle’s issue on service work are—for the most part—reportage, and this means that when I look back over my early work-life (perhaps all of my work-life!), I see how it is filled up with what my old teacher, Philip Levine, would call ‘stupid jobs.’ Work as a suburban teenager or young adult in the California of the 1980s was not, for me, filled with dignified labor. My employment history (that modern appellation for the list of jobs that constitute a lifetime) was filled up with jobs that left me feeling I was infinitely replaceable. And I was. Service work guarantees that. No shoe salesman or cashier is irreplaceable. The name tag pinned over an employee’s left breast certifies to this fact; it is something that can be unpinned, the uniform transferred like a faded tabula rasa to the next man or woman who will fit it. So it was that I worked graveyard shifts in a liquor store, reading Ancient Greek literature in translation for my college seminar class; worked in a rat-infested movie theater lacing up the previous season’s releases to empty theaters; worked filling glasses of cheap champagne for the concessions stand at the Fresno Civic Center on Opera Nights; worked selling TV advertisement for time-slots on television stations when no one was likely watching. All of that is perfectly true—or true enough, and most of it is adequately reported in my poems. What is missing is the certainty that once I had left those stupid jobs, there was someone else who took my place as though I had never been there at all. If I could make a succinct dedication at the top of all these poems, it would be for the employees who have replaced me. These poems are for them.”
Craig Kenworthy: “I spent several years working as a cook, a waiter, a hotel bellman and a front desk clerk. I learned the high value of providing small joys to people, leaving me with the knowledge that those little jewels and small truths we seek in our poems are always worth fighting for. Plus, I dealt with college football fans, exotic dancers and their fans, and, worst of all, rollerskating conventions. Once you’ve done that, rejections aren’t as hard to take.” (web)
