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Will Watson spent ten years as a steel mill production laborer before opting for academe. He has published essays in College Literature and poetry in Blue Collar Review and Bottom Dog Press' Working Hard for the Money.
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Published Fall 2006
 
lexicon
submarine BOP shop coke plant pig iron heat:
nouns, denoting work
workplaces and workers in basic steel production
as in Sarnowski worked submarine twenty years
but slipped into the pig
and we had to tap the heat
anyway, or you can sure enough get black lung
from working that coke oven
but they won't call it that
pickle line cold roll five stand batch anneal temper mill
tin line chrome line galvanize shear:
nouns, denoting work workplaces and
workers in a tin mill as in Chrysler Chevrolet Delmonte Star Kist
your lunch your wheels mine it don't matter
whether you work
there
or not
you still got some tin in you
Sparrows Point Youngstown Homestead Gary Works
Weirton Jeanerette Birmingham, extinct steel mills
as in, yeah i used to
work at Weirton 24/7, 365 for 20 years even Christmas New Years Easter
if i was lucky
but in the end
i wasn't
also see Black Monday
Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday, etc.
Golden Gate Empire State Sears Tower Eisenhower
Interstate overpasses, thousands of them, as in
everywhere, as in please please please don't pretend if you don't
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MR BOOKS
Critics at Work
ed. Jeffrey J. Williams.
Critics at Work offers a guided tour through the central, sometimes confusing and frequently controversial developments in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. The tour guides, however, are not distant observers but have been primary participants in those developments, and they report on theory, cultural studies, the literary canon, the recent focus on race, sexuality, and other identities, the state of the univerisity, and the role of the intellectual. Throughout, they consider the not always easy negotiation of politics and culture.
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