"Filled with Longing and Rage": On Brendan Joyce's "Love & Solidarity"

Brendan Joyce | Love & Solidarity | Grieveland | 2020 | 91 Pages

I first read “Love & Solidarity” as a blurry EPUB on my phone, in spare moments snatched from my shifts at one of America’s largest retail chains. This is not, as I understand it, the typical way people read poetry today. The whole art form, after all, has been gentrified to hell and back, the phrase “working-class poetry” reduced to a quaint anachronism, if not an oxymoron. But working-class poetry is precisely what Brendan Joyce writes, from his workplace to mine—and if that makes him an outlier in today’s literary world, it’s also part of what makes him so damn good. 

Written over the course of 2019 and 2020, “Love & Solidarity” attempts to capture the experience of those chaotic years from the perspective of a restaurant worker struggling to get by. It’s basically autobiographical—Joyce was that restaurant worker, when he wasn’t wrangling with the American unemployment system—but the poems embody the experience of an entire class of citizens, beyond any one individual. “I am filled with longing and rage / I filled an ashtray and a page,” reads a key couplet, and that’s the credo the book lives by. Longing for the world that could be, and the lives we could be living; rage against the bloodthirsty capitalist machine we’re stuck with instead.

Right from the collection’s start, Joyce’s hostility towards the literary establishment—the journals, the foundations, and the paymasters behind them—is clear. “Genius is a nazi word / Just remember that / when they give you all that money,” he writes. This could seem like mere punk braggadocio, but there’s a thoughtful critique behind it. It’s no accident, after all, that poetry has become so disconnected from the lives of working people. Since the outbreak of the Cold War, influential literary groups and institutions with government support have discouraged “political” writing from an aesthetic standpoint, dismissing it as propagandistic hackwork; in its place, they’ve emphasized introspection, and the poem as a means of reflecting the poet’s individuality. Fuelled by federal dollars, “Show, Don’t Tell” and “Art for Art’s Sake” became mantras, and we’re supposed to believe it’s pure coincidence that these tenets of so-called “good” poetry happen to also make it harder to write about social movements and conditions on the ground. In recent interviews, Joyce has pointed to Eric Bennet’s Workshops of Empire as an influence. The book tells the history of this government-supported literary agenda beautifully—if you have the stomach for it.

In opposition, Joyce taps into a much older vein of proletarian poetry. More than many of his contemporaries, his writing holds echoes of Carl Sandburg—himself a former bricklayer—describing Chicago as the “hog butcher for the world,” or Robert Pinsky’s memorial for the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Every anonymous hand who’s ever scrawled a rhyme on the breakroom wall is here in spirit, their ghosts resonating through the book’s pages. In the poem “house,” Joyce levies a withering salvo against the elite MFA program and its navel-gazing offspring, demanding an explicitly political poetics:

Of course I want to live 
in the world of ideas

unencumbered 
by the velocity of objects

& the strange equations 
of the body

(my mom’s new hip cost her
more than her house)

of course I want to disappear
into the safety of the subjunctive

lay my body down into language
slip into its warm bath after a busy shift

[...]

of course I want to be excellent
at aestheticizing this carnage

of course I want to love you
with few distractions

but listen

there’s no such thing as love
as long as the ruling class lives

This is the closest the book comes to a mission statement; it’s also one of its most perfect couplings of “longing” and “rage,” each blending into the other in a single, fluid motion of lines. Dispassionate, apolitical art is a luxury, it says, for those who can afford it. If you wanted a reason why this collection might be worth reading, look no further. 

“Love & Solidarity” is also a document of life during COVID, and here, too, it excels. Like most things, the pandemic breaks down along class lines, and while plenty has been written about the trauma of lockdown, few of the most prominent writers have actually had to fear for their lives on a daily basis. There’s a difference between the experience of being safely tucked away in your home, ordering DoorDash and opining about the tragedy of it all, and standing in the viral crosshairs as a food worker. Joyce writes evocatively about the latter, in poems like “Petit Bourgeois Kitchen & Lounge,” where he deploys some of his most playful imagery: “I am a busboy. / I velociraptor through / the jovial herds of swine”. The mood turns dark in other poems. One, untitled, reflects on the thoughtless violence of the liberal-minded diner, who imagines that he’s doing a social good by supporting businesses: “we / looked on from the kitchen / saying ‘these people are killing / us & they’re proud of it.’” The threat of sickness and death is never far from these poems, a simple fact of working life, and it lends the collection an honesty and intensity that’s vanishingly rare these days. 

Equally, though, this overhanging threat has its opposite. These poems want to live—truly, free of bosses, banks, and the drudgery of wage-labor–and this is the “longing” half of the equation. At times, the book approaches this theme with a vulnerability that’s genuinely touching, as in this short poem written at the height of 2020’s protest wave:

I’d like to sit with you
on a porch when the sun is
out & not talk & just read
in two wicker chairs
when the children sing songs
of the banks falling because
they did & we were there
& there’s no hiding anymore
but listen
they’re singing right now

There’s a tantalizing glimpse here of a way the world could be, one that’s being held just out of our reach. There’s a tension, too—hopeful, afraid to hope, hoping anyway—that sits at the heart of today’s anxieties. Much of the art of the 21st century has been grappling with questions of irony, and while “Love & Solidarity” has its wickedly funny moments—“Maybe we should eat the cops or wipe our asses with them,” Joyce muses on seeing an empty grocery store under guard—it ultimately lands squarely on the side of sincerity, honestly feeling and wishing for the things it says. In a world of the too-cool and the post-post-modern, it’s not afraid to care. 

In keeping with this quality of poetic non-irony, these are also poems of place, with quintessential images of Cleveland strewn around the collection like discarded Browns jerseys. Joyce thinks a lot about gentrification, both in poetry and physical places, and it’s always with a mix of anger and remorse. With the restaurant and hospitality industries sitting at the center of Cleveland’s latest phase of self-styled transformation, the text drips acid when it speaks of the “miraculous intervention / of various celebrity chefs” that allegedly hold the keys to the city’s salvation. What it needs saving from, exactly, is the implicit and more troubling question. In the year of the George Floyd uprising, the answer has a lot to do with race, and Joyce weaves that subtext throughout, writing “my hands have been conscripted / into the work of blanching my neighborhood.” Perhaps this is one of the meanings behind the name of the book’s press: Grieveland.

There are some minor slip-ups here, thought it may be debatable whether they can actually be called flaws. Joyce is visibly proud of the anti-cop poem “even the moon,” printing it on the back cover of this paperback edition—and he’s right to be. The text that appears here has been edited from the version that first appeared in Protean Magazine, severing the last two sentences and adding staccato periods to the line that remains. For what it’s worth, I much preferred the old draft, which packs just a little more punch, and this change could suggest a young writer second-guessing his first instinct after the fact. At the same time some of the longer poems have a tendency to ramble, losing the tight focus of the book’s early sections; of my favorites in the collection, no poem is over a single page. There’s a pendulum in motion between too much editing and maybe not enough. 

Taken as a whole though, “Love & Solidarity” is exceptional. It has plenty of layers beyond the ones mentioned here: poems about addiction, about love and sex, about mourning. The poetic voice plays adroitly with its own masculinity, mixing lines about sawed-off shotguns and cigars with moments of real tenderness. It’s an incredibly rich text. At the same time a few poems, like “public”, seem to exist mainly to deliver toilet jokes, but that’s fun too. It’s worth remembering, as well, that Brendan Joyce is terrifyingly young, having just turned 30 in the past year. His best work is almost certainly ahead of him, and for my money, he’s one of the most exciting poets alive.