The American Blue-Collar Experience - Essay Example

His work, Hammers and Hearts of the Gods, sets to mirror the American blue-collar experience -- through his raw language and straight-forward manner. Fred Voss According to the Blue Collar, the American workforce had been divided “into blue-collar and white collar categories” to accomplish a much convenient analysis of the middle class (Clemens-Bruder 81). Analyses of these two working classes were widely used for obtaining relevant patterns among them that could be instrumental in delivering services or goods, whether from a public or private sector.

Fred Voss had since become part of this blue collar workforce, working as a machinist in various California-based factories (Voss “Interview” n.pag.). Evidently, the revolving subject amongst his works was his blue-collar experience -- the joys and woes that come with the manual job’s nature. However, majority of the themes carried a sense of ‘defeat and powerlessness’ which were according to Daniels, “a common sentiment in many work poems” (132). Furthermore, his friend Charles Bukowski wrote to him, “.

but we are more afraid of no job at all so we swallow the shit and abuse and pretend there’s something left of us after we walk out of there” (Malone 62). . ses and complex interaction with fellow workers -- none of these were spared in Voss’ collection of poems, the latest of which is Hammers and Hearts of the Gods. The Poems The Hammers and Hearts of the Gods is a collection of 43 poems; each claims the positive and negative parts of the job and describes life outside the factory, which was much related to the life inside it.

All of these themes paint the realistic portrait of the American blue-collar experience. Voss’s output-orientation is blatantly shared in almost every verse. For instance, verses from “Bukowski’s Doorknob” say how he wishes he could do something else with his output -- that ‘trumpet’s mouthpiece that Louis Armstrong blew;’ or contributing and marking his skill in the history -- like making ‘FDR’s aluminum braces’ (Voss Hammers 46). There is also this constant appraisal of his labor output’s value through phrases like ‘10,000 Dixieland notes’; the completion of dreams through his varying output: his doorknob to Bukowski’s book; his train’s wheel to Luther King’s success; and his tip of pen to mother and son’s reuniting (Voss Hammers 46).

This particular poem concludes how it all goes back to one’s hard work and skill: to “find his way back into a machine shop/to step up to a machine/that can cut stinking steel smoking in cutting oil down into the shape/of a dream” (Voss Hammers 46). This varying theme about one laborer’s output is a display of the dynamism common to most blue-collar jobs. Though some worker may hardly see it, the different things and the impact those things they make with their own hands and raw strength signify the influence they make everyday and its extent -- though they had to be confined in the factory’s four walls.

This confinement