Last spring, a dozen members of the Worker Writers School workshopped a
poem titled “Instruction Manual.” The group meets monthly from September
to May in the offices of PEN America, a literary nonprofit with
headquarters in a very expensive part of SoHo. Mark Nowak, a poet,
playwright, and critic, started the workshop six years ago, recruiting
nannies, cabdrivers, street venders, and retail workers from local
organizations. “We usually find ourselves, as authors, in complete
control of the environment,” Nowak said, as he passed out copies of the
most recent draft. “We get to pick the words. This one’s different,
right? Each line is someone’s different experience or impression. It
blends together to give a sense of New York City at work.” “Instruction
Manual” is a collaborative poem made up of commands and orders each
writer had been given on the job. Members of the group add to the poem
via a shared document online.
They went around the table reading the poem aloud, trying to figure out
what to keep. Most contributions were short, direct: “Two fried
dumplings.” “Please go slowly, I’m pregnant.” “Put the Desitin on really thick.” They decided to make an
allowance for a couple of longer entries that spoke to the universal
condition of the overly demanding boss: “I may need you a week from
today, keep it open. I may not need you, though.” “I don’t think the
snow is that bad. Why don’t you take a cab and come?”
Another line read, “Can ya open the door for me? I’m coffee-impaired.”
Nobody understood this one, so they looked to Seth, a cabdriver, who
wrote it. He explained that a passenger balancing a cup of coffee in one
hand and a bag of bagels and a briefcase in the other had asked if Seth
could get the door for him. “I thought that was real cute,” Deborah, a
community activist, said. She sipped from a mug with “SONTAG” on the
side. “Coffee-impaired. I gotta use that.” Seth’s line stayed.
A woman named Christine wondered if they were doing the assignment
correctly. “I like the feel of a list poem,” she said, before pointing
at the lines on the page. “Some of them feel like questions, as opposed
to commands or orders.” Christine came to New York from Trinidad, in
1990, at the age of nineteen, and has worked as a nanny ever since. She
has been part of the workshop since the beginning, and she was
responsible for bringing in a lot of the women who attended. (She is one
of the leaders of the labor group Domestic Workers United.) She wore a
head wrap and a scarf in the full gradient of earth tones, and at times
it felt as though she was co-teaching the class with Mark.
If “Instruction Manual” was meant to convey their relative powerlessness
at work, Christine asked, did it make sense to include questions?
Doesn’t a question imply a degree of courtesy or politeness? She read
aloud a few entries that sounded like firm requests. “I work with
horrible people,” she added. “They’re very meticulous. They give orders.
‘Do this.’ ‘Take the children to the park.’ ‘Put this specific outfit on
the child.’ Those are orders.”
Nowak asked what others thought. The caregivers all agreed with
Christine. Nothing is phrased like a question in their line of work.
“You have no choice,” one of them whispered.
Alando, a young man wearing stylish plastic eyeglass frames and a
knockoff Kanye West cap, pushed back. “We’re workers. Even though
there’s a question being asked, I think there’s an expectation that
whatever is being asked is supposed to be done. A command doesn’t have
to be a direct order. ‘Can you do this?’ is the polite way of saying,
‘Do this.’ To make it all commands misses the way we communicate.” Nowak
nodded, as though this was the answer he had been looking for. He
returned to Christine. Maybe there was another way to think about it:
“Is it a question that you’re free to answer ‘no’ to?”
The group finished paring down the poem around three. Alando grabbed his
backpack and rushed toward the door; he was late for work. Everyone else
kept picking at the snacks, admiring the office bookshelves. I asked
Kele, a fifty-three-year-old street vender from Lesotho, if she had
always been drawn to poetry. She laughed. “I’ve always been drawn to
selling.” Now that she has more time, she appreciates the therapeutic
effects of this workshop. “I look at it as a gift. To have a place where
you can come and learn how to be in the world. How to write something
that is relevant to you.”
A good writing workshop achieves a balance between honest criticism and
fellowship. The feedback at the Worker Writers School was direct and
unrestrained, but everyone listened carefully to others’ stories about
their workplaces. Alfreda decoded the subtext of her data-entry job.
Seth broke down why it was senseless for cabdrivers to go out of their
way and run up fares. “Outside, people don’t accept you and your
realities,” Lizeth, a nanny originally from Guatemala, said. “I like it
here. I can say my meanest things.”
Christine agreed: “You get to cuss.” For her, writing represented “a
form of revenge.” She dreams of one day publishing a chapbook. Nannies
are very isolated, she explained, and when things aren’t going well with
your employer there’s nobody to turn to. She told me about the time an
employer asked her to read to the children from the family’s collection
of vintage—and racist—children’s books. So much gets pent up with
nowhere to go, she told me. “‘You’re making a big fuss about the baby
not sleeping,’” she shouted, imagining what she might tell an overly
worrisome parent. “ ‘Just lighten up! The baby’s gonna evolve.’ You know
how liberating it is to stand on the stage and enunciate that?” She
slowly smiled. “How big is that. When you can’t tell them. Your pen is
your friend. Your paper is your friend.”
This weekend, the Worker Writers School will host its annual fall open
house on Governors Island, with panels, readings, discussions about austerity and
activism, and mini writing workshops. Nowak’s students will read their
works alongside the Pulitzer Prize-winner Tyehimba Jess and Ken Chen, a
past recipient of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. A new version of
“Instruction Manual” will be projected onto a wall for people to read.
While the students I spoke to were excited by the chance to perform in
front of an audience, it seemed clear that such events were not the
ultimate goal. They were more concerned with craft, with process and
revision. Their poems reflected the contingencies of their own lives;
they would never truly be finished.
