For National Poetry Month I purchased poetry books that had been on my 'wish list' for some time.
I was interested in reading several poets with Detroit roots and who had written about Detroit.
Although I am not a native Detroiter, my family moved to Metro Detroit in 1963 when I was ten. My father found work with Chrysler in Highland Park where he was an experimental mechanic.
The poems in Made in Detroit by Marge Piercy are very accessible. The early poems recall an impoverished childhood: "rummage sales were our malls," "the furnace had been fed coal," "we survived on what no one else wanted." In another poem, she recalls job hunting, warned by her mother, "just don't put down Jew."
Her title poem, Made in Detroit, is forceful in language.
My first lessons were kisses and a hammer.
I was fed with mother's milk and rat poison.
I learned to walk on a tightrope over a pit
where snake's warnings were my rattles.
Her poem Our neverending entanglement struck home, for I had written a similar poems after the death of my mother in 1990.
We mourn our mothers till
we ourselves are out
of breath. That umbilical cord between us, never
really cut no matter how
hard we tried in adolescence
to sever it.
I was older when I tried to sever the tie to my mother, but always in returning home I felt diminished back into the girl she still saw in me. With her death, I realized I was more tightly bound to her than ever.
https://margepiercy.com/bio
The poems in Philip Levine's book The Last Shift are also accessible, "human centered poetry" as the Forward states. He writes about growing up and working at the Hamtramck Chevy Gear & Axle.
In an article about the book, Thomas Curwen of the Los Angeles Times wrote,
...Levine’s poems — with their pictures of the industrial Midwest animated by despair, yearning and love — suggest a more troubling truth. The working class has always been hard to see because seeing would mean confronting the struggle of their lives, a struggle of race, inequity and inequality.
“I think the writing of a poem is a political act,” Levine told an interviewer in 1974. “The sources of anger are frequently social, and they have to do with the fact that people’s lives are frustrated, they’re lied to, they’re cheated, that there is no equitable handing out of the goods of this world.”
My father never worked on the line, but I had an uncle and cousins who did work in assembly plants in the 1970s and later, and my husband worked as a welder for two summers at the Flint Buick plant during college breaks. Levine captures the experience for an earlier generation.
...Remember
at eighteen, brother, at Cadillac
Transmission how no one
knew what we were drilling holes into or why except
of course for $3.85
an hour.
More Than You Gave is filled with images that were very real to me."An ordinary Tuesday in ordinary times," he mentions psoriasis, which my mother suffered from. And notes "the teenage Woodward Ave. whores;" one once tried to get into my dad's truck while he was waiting to pick up a work friend. And White Owl cigars, my dad's brand in the 1960s. "It could be worse," he writes, they could work "at Ford Rogue where the young get old fast or die trying."
I recall the obligatory annual school trips to the Rouge River forge, described by Levine:
One spring day
the whole class went by bus
to the foundry at Ford Rogue
to see earth melted and
poured like syrup into fire.
A Dozen Dawn Songs, Plus One looks back across "2,000 miles and fifty years" and ends,"Oh/to be young and strong and dumb/again in Michigan!"
And in Godspell he writes, "A lifetime passes/in the blink of an eye/ You look back and think,/That was heaven, so of course it had to end."
And in the final poem, The Last Shift, he sees the Packard Plant in the moonlight, the 1903 Alfred Kahn complex that spread over forty acres. After it closed in 1999, and scrappers stripped it, the Packard Plant came to symbolize Detroit's decay.
Levine was Poet Laureate in 2011. Read more about Levine's poetry and the Gear & Axle factory at https://detroitartsculture.wixsite.com/detroitstudies/chevy-gear-and-axle
*****
The poem I wrote after my mother's death appears below
A Mother's Love
would finally free me.
No more hand- me-downs, no more
the worried call to see if I was home safe,
no more being a child.
I was wrong.
For in your dying, mother,
I am imprisoned more deeply than ever.
I am made, finally and again,
completely thine, like the baby
you loved beyond all understanding.
Your continual habit of giving
made me want to shake free.
It is the discomfort of those loved
too dearly to bear.
It is the knowledge of never being
good enough to deserve it.
And so I discover I am not freed,
but bound more tightly in the cord
of your love.
