I Want You Women Up Nort to Know

On "I Want Yous Women Up North To Know"

---

Constance Coiner

Asouth Olsen began her writing career, workers started pouring into the bachelor unions. New Bargain legislation included the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), and Section 7A guaranteed workers tile right to organize and bargain collectively. "Many workers," James Greenish observes, felt "the tide of history had finally turned" (fifty-fifty though the NRA was skirted for more often than it was enforced by the establishment of "company" unions and was alleged unconstitutional in 1935. Three major strikes of 1934 demonstrated the bang-up potential for working-class militancy. In February, 900 National Guardsmen failed to break a massive picket of 10,000 workers from the community surrounding the Toledo Auto-Lite plant. Significantly, the striking electricians lonely could non have defied the Guard. Their force came in sheer numbers, and those numbers came from other workers willing to join the picket in solidarity. The Maritime Strike on the West Declension, which involved Olsen directly, began in May. And in July, Minneapolis Trotskyists led the teamster strike that inspired Le Sueur's "I Was Marching," closing down the trucking industry and tying upwards the entire city.

Such was the dramatic setting in which immature Tillie Lerner, "fierce for modify," was writing. Equally much as a youthful zealousness and what I term the CP's "official certainty," this expanding unionization and increasing working-class militancy affected her writing. As noted in a higher place, Olsen has said of the '30s: "We believed that we were going to change the earth." As i might expect, then, Olsen's 1934 publications are more polemical, more alike to orthodox proletarian writing than her more recent writing. Their settings and subjects, for case, are standard for proletarian writing--atmospheric condition in a (garment) factory; the murdering of socialists by a fascist regime; an exploited mining customs; an arrest of Communist labor organizers; and a strike.

When Olsen was 21 and an active YCL member, her kickoff publication, a poem titled "I Want Yous Women Up North To Know," appeared in The Partisan (March 1934), a magazine of the West Declension John Reed Club. This poem grew out of a letter of the alphabet to New Masses (9 Jan 1934) from a Texas adult female, Felipe Ibarro, indicting the owners of the Juvenile Manufacturing Corporation who exploited workers--in this example, Chicanas--in the San Antonio garment industry.

Ibarro reports that Catalina Rodriguez, "in the last stages of consumption, works from vi in the morning till midnight," never earning more than three dollars a week. Ibarro adds that she no longer wonders "why in our city with a population of 250,000 the Lath of Health has registered 800 professional person 'daughters of joy' and in add-on, about 2000 Mujeres Alegres (happy women), who are not registered and sell themselves for as lilliputian every bit five cents." Ibarro reports that the Bedchamber of Commerce has dubbed San Antonio "Where Sunshine Spends The Winter" as function of its campaign to compete with Florida and California for tourists. "I don't know whether the tourists came," she adds, but "Capital came and let out the children'southward dresses for habitation piece of work."

Olsen'south basing her poem on Ibarro'south letter locates "I Desire Yous Women Upward North to Know" loosely within the genre of workers' correspondence poems (although Ibarro was not herself one of the workers, she knows the "bloody facts" considering she had "spoken to the women" workers). The Daily Worker identified Harry Alan Potamkin as the first to use workers' correspondence as a theme for poetry. Gilded, another practitioner of this genre, crafted poems from letters sent to the Daily Worker. The correspondence from Ibarro included many specifics--names, ages, wages. Olsen repeats many of these details in her poem.

. . .

Similar much reportage, this poem foregrounds key antitheses: the abstruse women upwards northward who accept the money to shop at "gimbels, marshall fields" versus the particular "maria, ambrosa, catalina," "down in San Antonio," "stitching these dresses from dawn to dark, / in blood, in wasting flesh." In the final two lines (taken verbatim from the terminal sentences of Ibarro'due south letter), the poem embodies the "official certainty" characteristic of '30s proletarian literature, while another line describes the Soviet Marriage every bit "heaven ... brought to earth in 1917." Like many Party members, Olsen believed in an American socialist future with the buoyancy Lincoln Steffens expressed upon his return from the Soviet Union: "I have seen the time to come and information technology works."

In the post-obit passage from the poem Olsen opposes herself to what she terms "the conservative poet" by moving abruptly from a parody of traditional lyrical poetry, which in her view would ignore or distance the reader from the plight of these exploited workers, to prosaically announcing their depression wages and their only available alternative for employment, prostitution.

. . .

Olsen parodies a long conservative tradition of "romanticizing" the worker while displaying the mental agility of the poet. Olsen could easily take had Wordsworth's "The Lone Reaper" in mind:

Whate'er the theme, the maiden sang
As if her song could accept no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o'er the sickle bending;--
I listened, motionless and still;
And, equally I mounted up the loma,
The music in my middle I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.

Olsen could likewise have been thinking of the no-less-condescending Yeats poem, "The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Eye":

All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and onetime
The cry of a kid by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart,
The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould,
Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong likewise great to be told;
I hunger to build them afresh and sit on a green knoll autonomously,
With the earth and the sky and the h2o, remade, like a catafalque of gold
For my dreams of your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my middle.

These are only two of many such examples from the bourgeois tradition at which Olsen's poem takes aim. An amalgam rather than a alloy of verse and reportage, "I Want You Women Up North to Know," is still at points sensitive to the richness and rhythm of linguistic communication. The complimentary verse class and the repetition of words and phrases may represent a debt to Whitman, while a bold central metaphor transforms the women into the wearable they embroider--that is, into bolt.

But the discomfort this verse form causes its readers is ambiguous. While the text succeeds in its intention to force us to face up the desperation and injustice of these garment workers' lives, it is also unsettling because information technology preempts our emotional and moral responses. It bludgeons us, its exhortatory language announcing a distrust that the reader will answer appropriately to the garment workers' suffering. The language announces itself, also, as "move" discourse, which in exercise turns back on itself, speaking to itself rather than to a general audience--that is, the already converted speak to the already converted in the special discourse of Converts. Because those who might have been persuaded are, in upshot, excluded by this discourse, the poem'due south intention is undercut.

Even so, in this first publication we already run across emerging in Olsen's writing a trend, which will later become dominant, that competes with her want for monological authorial and pedagogical command. In this "worker's correspondence" verse form, she gives others a voice, straining toward a collective form. The poem is a vehicle for the stories of exploited Chicanas, as Tell Me a Riddle volition be permeable to multiple oppressed voices. And in nascent grade, "I Want You lot Women Up Due north" prefigures Silences' maverick intertextuality. Olsen "yields the floor" Filipe Ibarro'south words as she will to dozens of other writers in the later text, and she allows Ibarro's words to conclude the poem, as she will requite the "final discussion" in Silences to Rebecca Harding Davis.

By Constance Coiner. From Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

---

Elaine Neil Orr

In her first published poem, "I Want You Women Upward N to Know," Olsen transforms history into poetry, and in so doing amplifies rather than romanticizes the debilitating effects of mass product upon the laborer. The poem depicts a mechanistic and capitalistic world in which the lives of many are sacrificed to a few. In the poem, women's mankind and blood are substitutes for thread and dye:

i want you women upwardly n to know
how those prissy children's dresses you purchase
at macy's, wannamakers, gimbels, marshall fields,
are dyed in claret, are stitched in wasting flesh,
down in San Antonio, "where sunshine spends the winter."

I want you women up north to come across
the obsequious smile, the salesladies trill
"exquisite work, madame, exquisite pleats"
vanish into a bloated face up, ordering more dresses,
gouging the wages down,
deliquesce into maria, ambrosa, catalina,
stitching these dresses from dawn to nighttime,
in claret, in wasting flesh.

The poem invites a Marxist reading. The dresses illustrate alienated labor, since the mothers' work is not for their ain children but for the mothers and daughters of the north, who in actuality purchase the fourth dimension and lifeblood of the mothers down south. The radical depersonalization of capitalistic piece of work suggested by Marx is clearly evident further in the verse form. "Maria, ambrosa, catalina"--workers--are the same woman, the same hands, fingers, the same labor, ultimately the same product. Similar "Catalina Rodriguez, 24,/ ... / last stages of consumption," they weave their own deaths. Their value is slight and arbitrarily set: "Three dollars a week,/ ii 50-five,/ seventy cents a week."

The poem was based on a letter by a worker, Felipe Ibarro, appearing in New Masses (9 Jan 1934). Thus, Olsen's voice draws from the many women who feel such debilitating work, through the vocalization of Ibarro, finally becoming the authorial "I" that opens the poetic address: "I desire y'all women up northward to know." The vocalism becomes a forcefulness of solidarity seeking to uphold the women whose work destroys them. Fused in Olsen'southward representational "I," the multiple experiences of the women stand up against the unraveling, dehumanizing and finally, deadly work created by a capitalistic market. Paradoxically, the voice seems to gain strength as the poem progresses even though the story of overwork told by the voice reveals greater and greater horrors. Unfortunately, perhaps, the voice adopts the declarative manner at the cease: "... I desire you to know,/ I tell you this can't concluding forever./ I swear it won't." More than powerful than the threat is the authorial "I" developed in the poem equally a plural voice of many women brought to written expression. This most unabashedly political vocalization, then, already points to the narrative perspective Olsen will develop in the more subtle fine art of telling stories from a perspective within the literary world of the work.

20-one or twenty-ii when she wrote this verse form, Olsen takes a disquisitional opinion toward the faith that appears to rob "Ambrosa Espinoza." She gives her pennies to the church, "to keep the priest in vino," "to keep [her] god incarnate." Given Espinoza'due south world, the criticism does not seem naive, but in retrospect the authorial insertion afterwards in the verse form--heaven "was brought to earth in 1917 in Russia"--does. What the poem suggests in our discussion is a redefinition of true morality, hence, of truthful spirituality, which begins in connectedness with people's actual circumstances.

The second poem, "In that location Is a Lesson," is another poetizing of politics, this fourth dimension European. The verse form is preceded past a newspaper extract:

"All Austrian schools, meanwhile, were closed for an indefinite period under a government decree issued to proceed children off the hazardous streets" (fifteen February 1934, San Francisco Chronicle).

The poem follows immediately:

Go along the children off the streets,
Dollfuss,
there is an alphabet written in claret
for them to larn,
there is a lesson thundered by collapsed
books of bodies.

They might be riddled by the bullets
of cognition
. . .
there is a volume written with three
thousand bodies that can never
be hidden,
there is a sentence spelled by the
grim faces of bereaved women
there is a message, inescapable, that
vibrates the air with voices of
heroes.

In the earlier poem, two materials coalesce; bodies and textile. Here the bodies weave a message of revolt against fascism. The verse form seems to point the dire but necessary costs of revolution. Yet the vision is cryptic, for the images, like those of the before poem, are haunting: "riddled past ... bullets," "grim faces of bereaved women," "deadly gas of revolution." The men'southward bodies stack in metonymic similarity, while the faces of the women, an paradigm we volition see again in Yonnondio, arm-twist the archetypal image of grieving woman.

The central transformation of the poem is the cosmos of language, and therefore, of a bulletin, out of decease and violence. Blood makes an alphabet; bodies are texts that tell of terror; faces of mourning write a sentence.

From Tillie Olsen and a Feminist Spiritual Vision. Jackson: Upward of Missouri. Copyright � 1987 past The UP of Missouri.

---

A shut reading lines from from "I Desire You Women Upwardly North to Know"

Lines 85-97 of Tillie Olsen's first published poem "I Desire You Women Upwards North to Know" comprise the climactic turning indicate of this poem, and the linguistic communication and form reflect this modify. Instead of being humble and disjointed victims who remain mostly anonymous, the workers are transformed into an aroused and unified grouping of distinct individuals. This shift in mood is accomplished past 3 devices: imagery, group, and capitalization of proper names.

The imagery in this passage helps turn the tone of the poem from victimization to anger. In addition to fire images, the overall language is completely stripped down to bare ugliness. In previous lines, the sordidness has been intermixed with cheerful euphemisms: the agonizing work is an "exquisite dance" (24); the trembling easily are "white gulls" (22); the cough is "gay" (25). Only in these later lines, all aesthetically pleasing terms vanish, leaving "sweet and �claret" (85), "naked� [and]�bony children" (89), and a "skeleton body" (95).

Another way this passage turns the mood of the poem is by using group and grade to link the workers together, both in
inference and appearance. Previously, each worker�southward situation has been treated as an isolated story, literally separated from the others by a blank line. However, lines 85-97 are crowded together without spaces, suggesting unity past the very appearance of the lines. All of the grievances are briefly repeated, then a sequence of "ands" binds the one-judgement recaps together. Still in spite of this sense of solidarity, each person�due south story is given its ain sentence with a menstruation boundary, subtly emphasizing their individual importance: solidarity is acceptable, but anonymity is not.

A concluding significant device in this passage is the utilise of capitalization. The proper names of the workers have been sporadically capitalized earlier in the poem, but hither they are all consistent and correct. Again, this is an emphasis on private importance, an insistence that each of these people deserves a unique name. The before all-lowercase names like "catalina rodiguez" (16) actually blend into the lines of poetry, suggesting crouching and obscurity, merely here the capital letter letters in their names stand out conspicuously from other words. Interestingly, although the personal names are capitalized, "christ" (96) is left in lowercase, similar to the previous treatment of "god" (57, sixty, 62). This dissimilarity with the capitalization of the worker� names implies that God and Christ accept failed the workers and are at present overshadowed by a budding self-conviction in the workers.

Lines 85-97 are a clear turning signal in the tone of Olsen�s poem. As mentioned, the earlier segments are written to exist
disjointed and uncertain, with the ugliness partially concealed past imitation voice of a "bourgeois poet" (21). Yet, as more than true details are revealed, this voice recedes and is completely vanquished past line 85. The bearding workers become more than and more than individual to the reader, peaking between lines 95-97. In addition, these lines represent the development of the narrator of the poem, the unnamed "I." Like the workers existence described, the narrator begins the poem in a state of anonymity, non "I" just "i" (1). However, this quickly switches to "I" (6), implying that he or she gains say-so and confidence to speak on behalf of the workers. Past line 85, the speaker has capitalized all the workers� names, raising them up within him or her in their authority to speak. Lines 85-97 thus become a launching point for the poem�south conclusion, empowering the narrator and the workers when they threaten that the abuse "can�t last forever" (99).

Online Source

---

Suzanne Lynch

"I Want You Women Upwards North to Know" takes on the authorial vocalisation of one who knows the horror of working in a sweatshop, of being migrant and of existence an unvoiced female. To the women upwardly North she introduces four women who, each in their individuality, dies silently equally a result of an exploitive capitalism. She presents the women up North as innocent sources of this capitalism. Seduced by the marketing strategies of unconcerned businesses, gullible women purchase into the rhetoric that "exquisite piece of work" and "exquisite pleats" make them exquisite women and exquisite mothers.

What is interesting in this poem is that although the speaker attacks the entire organisation of production and consumption, she restricts her comments strictly to female consumers. I tin can't help thinking that there is an implicit female cohesion working in the poem that drives the bulletin forwards and gives credence to her plea so that it does non fall on deaf ears.

At that place is something very gendered most each woman described. More than just women who work blindly, mechanically, through the night to the demands of a proprietor's vocalization, these women, in their individuality, fulfill roles and qualities typically associated with women. There is the delicacy of Catalina Rodriguez, the longing of maria, the maternity of Calalina Torres, and , of course, the sacrificing protection of Ambrosia. And although the worlds of these women represent something quite different from the worlds of the women up Northward, I think the recent struggle to gain national vox hints at the possibility of a female person solidarity that extends across grade lines so that "this tin't last forever."

As i who has phonation, and as one who is manifestly able to traverse the lines of class, the speaker understands the level of communication needed to address the women up North. She takes them piecemeal into the world of these working women, moving first through the Macy'due south, the Gimbles, the Marshall Fields, and gradually diluting the scene of department shop extravagance with silly "salesladies trill." Continuing in her dilution, she reveals the "bloated confront: then afar from the women's reality, who "order[due south] more dresses,/ [and] goug[es] the wages down," until the image finally "deliquesce[s] into maria, ambrosa , catalina/ stitching these dresses from dawn to night, in blood, in wasting mankind."

While in the globe of Calalina R, of catalina T for that thing, the speaker leaves her cautiously, calculating persona that has guided the Northern women thus far into a globe of poverty and corruption they would never accept known. Hither the Northern women encounter the unveiled reality of dying women unable to phonation their pain, their outrage, and their humiliation. The speaker speaks for them in controlled protest with a language that is both caustic and mimetic "This is the exquisite trip the light fantastic toe of her hands over the cloth and her cough, gay, quick, staccato like skeleton's bones clattering, in appropriate accompaniment fot the esthetic trip the light fantastic of her fingers and the tremolo, tremolo when the hands tremble with pain." Her point hither is obvious--how easy it is for u.s. to remove ourselves from another person's reality even when faced with verity. In truth, there is nothing poetic, nothing musical, and nothing artful near catalina'southward trembling hands. There is nothing artistic virtually the raveled wearable of Catalina's four children, yet somehow distance speaks for these women with a romanticized eloquence that displaces their pain and turns it into something palatable and saleable.

Through the voice of solidarity, the speaker attempts to educate, and to implore an understanding, not only of the hidden and voiceless women, simply of the contributions we make and can make as women subject to the manipulations of male commercialism.

Copyright � 2001 past Susanne Lynch

---

Cary Nelson

Tillie Olsen, who was then writing under her maiden name Lerner, wrote a poem based on a letter that had been published in the January 9th, 1934, effect of New Masses . . . New Masses published the letter nether the heading "Where the Sun Spends the Winter," a version of the slogan adopted by a Texas Sleeping accommodation of Commerce equally the motto for a tourist campaign. The letter of the alphabet describes the impossible lives of four women who survive by mitt embroidering children's dresses for a few pennies each. The author of the letter, Felipe Ibarro, may well take been a journalist or a social worker or perhaps simply an activist, then the letter is not the straight testimony of the workers described but reported testimony that is already self-consciously rhetorical. Nonetheless, information technology offers nonetheless one interesting version of this distinctive 1930s genre. Information technology is worth comparing the opening 2 paragraphs of the letter with the start three stanzas of the verse form. Here is the opening of the letter:

I want the women of New York, Chicago and Boston who purchase at Macy's, Wannamaker's, Gimbel's and Marshall Field to know that when they buy embroidered children'due south dresses labeled `manus fabricated' they are getting dresses made in San Antonio, Texas, by women and girls with trembling fingers and broken backs.

These are bloody facts and I know, because I've spoken to the women who make them. Catalina Rodriguez is a 24-year-former Mexican girl but she looks like 12. She's in the final stages of consumption and works from half-dozen in the forenoon till midnight. She says she never makes more than 3 dollars a week. I don't wonder whatsoever more than why in our urban center with a population of 250,000 the Board of Wellness has registered 800 professional `daughters of joy' and in addition, nearly 2,00 Mujeres Alegres (happy women), who are not registered and sell themselves for equally little as five cents.

Here are the opening stanzas of the poem:

i desire yous women upwardly northward to know
how those dainty children's dresses yous buy
at macy'southward, wannamaker's, gimbels, marshall fields,
are dyed in blood, are stitched in wasting mankind,
downward in San Antonio, "where sunshine spends the wintertime."

I want you women up northward to see
the obsequious smile, the salesladies trill
"exquisite piece of work, madame, exquisite pleats"
vanish into a bloated face, ordering more than dresses,
gouging the wages down,
dissolve into maria, ambrosa, catalina,
stitching these dresses from dawn to night,
in blood, in wasting mankind.

Catalina Rodriguez, 24,
torso shrivelled to a kid's at twelve,
catalina rodriguez, last stages of consumption,
works for three dollars a week from dawn to midnight.
A fog of pain thickens over her skull, the parching heat
breaks over her trunk.
and the bright red claret embroiders the flooring of her room.
White rain stitching the night, the bourgeois poet would say,
white gulls of hands, darting, veering,
white lightning, threading the clouds,
this is the exquisite trip the light fantastic of her hands over the cloth,
and her cough, gay, quick, staccato,
similar skeleton's basic clattering,
is appropriate accessory for the esthetic dance
of her fingers
and the tremulo, tremulo when the hands tremble with pain.
Three dollars a week,
two fifty-five,
seventy cents a week,
no wonder two thousands eight hundred ladies of joy
are spending the wintertime with the sunday after he goes down . . .

Olsen works with Ibarro's letter of the alphabet to draw out its drama and intensify the metaphoric power of the suffering information technology recounts. The title, "I Want Y'all Women Upwardly North to Know," fatigued from the letter, serves every bit a refrain line that becomes a image for North/South relations and for those who benefit, often indifferently and sometimes in ignorance, from economic exploitation. Olsen uses her own metaphors as well as Ibarro's, only her poem remains nonetheless an inventive extension of the original letter. Keeping true to Ibarro'southward wish to have women up due north understand the economical and social relations that are hidden inside the habiliment they buy, Olsen adds a passage describing a department store where the children's dresses are sold. Notably, all the same, the poem's most explicit challenge--a claiming built into the original alphabetic character--is non to the businessmen who hire the dressmakers or to the section store owners who sell them only to the consumers who buy them and thus fuel the entire fix of transactions. Olsen is not alone in focusing on how ordinary people'southward deportment help sustain economic exploitation--Kenneth Fearing, for example, often satirizes the way people'southward illusions reinforce the ideology of the market identify--just attacks on industrialists were certainly more common during the period.

The primary alter from Ibarro'southward text to Olsen's, as with most poems based on worker correspondence, is the generic shift itself, the move from prose to verse. This is a shift Olsen embraces, merely with uneasiness, as her endeavor to emulate (and thereby critique) a bourgeois poet'southward lyrical evocation of Catalina Rodriquez's dying efforts at embroidery suggests: "White rain stitching the night, the bourgeois poet would say, / white gulls of easily, darting." Equally Constance Coiner points out in her reading of the poem, Olsen moves "abruptly from a parody of traditional lyrical poetry, which, in her view would ignore or distance the reader from the plight of these exploited workers, to prosaically announcing their low wages and their but available alternative for employment, prostitution." But Olsen's poem is itself, as Coiner demonstrates, "at points sensitive to the richness and rhythm of language. The costless verse grade and the repetition of words and phrases may represent a debt to Whitman, while a assuming central metaphor transforms the women into the clothing they embroider—that is, into commodities" (163). Yet Olsen cannot actually cast out the imagined bourgeois poet's literariness without casting out her ain likewise. She would reject an obfuscating metaphoricity that substitutes fantasies of birds on the wing for hand movements that are actually painful. Nonetheless one could also accept the line equally jubilant a deft beauty in the midst of suffering. The poem in short puts forwards an argumentative dichotomy which the verse form itself simultaneously destabilizes and undermines, making the reader examine his or her ain relationship to the moral and political implications of figurative language.

Where Coiner and I differ is in how much weight we are finally willing to identify on the verse form's reflective self-consciousness near language and about the concluding event of its unwavering critique of edge capitalism. Coiner'southward conclusion lays out her doubts:

While the text succeeds in its intention to strength us to confront the agony and injustice of these garment workers' lives, information technology is as well unsettling because it preempts our emotional and moral responses. It bludgeons united states, its exhortatory language announcing a distrust that the reader volition respond appropriately to the garment workers' suffering. The language announces itself, besides, as "motility" discourse, which in practice turns back on itself rather than to a general audience—that is, the already converted speak to the already converted in the special discourse of converts. Because those who might have been persuaded are, in upshot, excluded by this discourse, the poem'southward intention is undercut (p. 163).

Yet the audience that Olsen has her doubts about—as the verse form makes clear—is the audience of consumers. Volition upper heart-grade consumers stop ownership these dresses? Near certainly non. The expectation that she cannot achieve those consumers is built into the verse form'south adoption of a revolutionary solution. Simply the revolutionary context of the poem is not so much armed insurrection equally information technology is the more utopian versions of merchandise unionism at work in the country simply as Olsen was writing. Equally Coiner points out, "equally Olsen began her writing career, workers started pouring into the available unions . . . their strength came in sheer numbers, and those numbers came from other workers willing to join the picket in solidarity" (160). The poem urges this sort of solidarity on sympathetic readers, including workers themselves, and does not seek a transformed upper eye class. Whether one admires the results is partly a thing of gustation, politics, form identification, and literary training. One may exist hailed or alienated by the poem's rhetoric and by the general rhetoric of 1930s revolutionary verse; in the case of either response, it is not a matter that can be objectively resolved, despite the temptation to turn our preferences into transcendent values . . . .

For all these reasons I find Olsen'southward verse form aesthetically and politically successful. The curtailed specificity of its account of exploited labor is persuasive and moving. The continuing existence of such sweat shops around the globe nearly 70 years afterward gives the poem continuing and long-term historical relevance. The poem'due south final homage to the Russian revolution may seem dated but its detailed story of the garment industry is as current every bit yesterday's news. A single witness's testimony near four women in ane 1930s city becomes synecdochic in four senses: these workers go representatives of their class, their suffering becomes emblematic of a whole range of values the culture should either resist or espouse, their time becomes a figure for economical inequities of long duration, and readers now as and so are challenged almost their complicity in an economical organisation and urged to reposition themselves within solidarity. The experience of working people thereby becomes a plumbing fixtures ground for all the ideological investments the civilisation makes in literariness, particularly in poetry. Finally, to make poetry out of working-class experience, to return to working people their own narratives (or narratives about them) in poetic form, is explicitly to overturn much of the class prejudice inherent in the civilisation'due south hierarchical view of aesthetic value.

In all of this Olsen is finer Ibarro'due south amanuensis in the domain of literariness. The get-go person in the title of Olsen's amplifies what she feels nosotros should know. Olsen thus draws out the structural implications of the underpaid work these women do and of the religious organized religion that helps keep them positioned as they are. Ibarro reports Ambrosa Espinoza's struggle to "pay rent for her shack, pay insurance, back up the Cosmic Church and feed herself." Olsen intensifies the ironies and adds an explicit anti-religious commentary:

but the pennies to continue god incarnate, from ambrosa,
and the pennies to keep the priest in wine, from ambrosa,
ambrosa clothes god and priest with hand-made children'south dresses.

Olsen also offers a more explicit revolutionary message. Espinoza's crippled brother, who lies "on a mattress of rags" and "dreams of some other world" does non quite know that an alternative world "was brought to earth in 1917 in Russia,/ past workers like him." Except for a slight rearrangement of the words in the start line, nonetheless, the last stanza (with its revolutionary hope) is quoted directly from Ibarro's letter:

Women up north, I want you to know,
I tell you lot this tin't last forever.

I swear it won't.

from Cary Nelson, Revolutionary Retentiveness: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left, copyright � Routledge 2001.

---

Return to Tillie Olsen

moserhurse1969.blogspot.com

Source: http://maps-legacy.org/poets/m_r/olsen/north.htm