Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry
Research assistance: Stacey Balkun, Festival Assistant

Joseph Millar’s poem “Work Song” begins “Love picks its way through the gravel ruts/leading into the job site, past the truck tires/exploded nearby…” The apparent incongruity of love entering such a place is not lost on Millar, yet the absolute clarity with which he states his case convinces us he knows what he’s talking about. This is the place for love, wherever “this” happens to be.

But Millar is no sentimentalist. The attention he gives to physical detail in the poem as he moves into the worksite makes it clear he is a dedicated realist. He never glosses over what he sees, nor romanticizes the working life. Nevertheless, his “Work Song” acknowledges the countless ways work itself, whatever work that is, binds us to one another, even if only for a few hours on the job. And behind the relationships forged by men and women engaged in challenging, even brutal work, are the countless relationships each one of them carries, the responsibilities to spouses and children that justify enduring the work itself.

In essence, all of Millar’s poems are work songs. There are the many that capture the physical and personal costs and rewards of hard labor. He sings of the very real pain endured by those who must use their bodies to earn a living, and the deep, mostly silent satisfaction at completing an arduous task, and the pride in having put in a good day’s work. Having spent decades doing blue-collar labor as everything from a commercial fisherman to a telephone installation foreman, he knows first-hand the life he describes.

But for Millar the nature of work is more expansive than that. There is the work of trying to be a good son, husband, brother or parent; the work of facing down your fears, admitting your mistakes and accepting your faults; the work of pulling up the courage from somewhere inside yourself to persevere in the face of failure and disappointment; the work of loving.

In Millar’s poems, there is the knowledge that love, too, is work. Like any work worth doing, it requires our attention, care and serious effort, and there is always a price paid for negligence. His poems are often about the difficulty of doing the actual work loving another requires. But they never waver from their conviction that this is work, and work of an essential nature if we’re going to be human beings.

“Work Song” is from Joseph Millar’s collection Overtime. His most recent collection is Fortune. To read two of his poems on-line, visit the Poetry Foundation website.

Please use the “Share your thoughts with us” box below to share other resources you may have found for this poet. In this way, we can build together a mini-wiki-encyclopedia on the 2010 Festival Poets.

Return in the weeks ahead as we continue to profile the 2010 Festival Poets.

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Starting next week and continuing into October, we’ll be using the Poetry Fridays blog to introduce the poets participating in the 2010 Dodge Poetry Festival.  Each post will feature brief profiles of one or more poets, with links to poems, videos, interviews, podcast, bios and anything else of interest we might find in our research.

More importantly, we invite you to join in the process of building these profiles by using the Comments section of each blog to link us to items of interest you might discover about these poets.  Teachers, especially those bringing students to the Festival, can make such contributions part of a research assignment.  In this way, together we can build our own mini-wiki-encyclopedia on the 2010 Festival Poets.

The late Stanley Kunitz once commented on the Festival’s great democratic spirit.  He was referring, in part, to its long tradition of having an amazingly broad, deep and diverse line-up.  The 2010 Festival continues that tradition.  So far, the poets who have agreed to participate include:

Be sure to follow us in the weeks ahead as new names are added to this list, and to meet the 2010 Festival Poets.

You can always view video clips of readings from past Dodge Poetry Festivals on our YouTube channel.