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Matthew Rice’s Plastic — structured as it is around the minute-by-minute clock-watching of its labouring cast during a twelve hour factory shift—is perhaps the most realistic poetic depiction of industrial work since Philip Levine’s seminal What Work Is.
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Rice’s speaker is well-read and companionable, and under no illusions about Guy Debord’s Situationist credo ‘ne travaillez jamais [never will I work]’. In one particularly memorable image, he imagines these words graffitied onto a wall becoming slowly subsumed and ‘eroded’ back into the fabric of the city. In another, he recounts a colleague’s potentially life-altering accident and injury:
the tool unhooked and finally tipping,
all one ton of which Johnny Cope
takes upon himself to catch,
his crushed wrist and hand
from which, at 21:07,
blood escapes.
But Plastic is by no means some mere drudge’s journal. It as much a document of the moments that punctuate the in-between space of shift work as it is a rote description of labour itself. Rice’s hours are filled with daydreams, doodles, snatches of song, conversations, bathroom breaks, contraband books, cups of coffee, cadged cigarettes and, yes, finally the ‘bagging and tagging’ of the job itself.
Bagging and tagging
plastic table latches
for aeroplane seats
my hands are each its twin
and my copy of Gawain
is contraband beneath
the frosted-out skylight
Watch: Growing the Poem with Matthew Rice
One can’t help but recognise a kind of universal constant that speaks to the reality of capitalism as a whole. No matter your field, no matter your job, we all continually test the limits of our freedom within the confines of our workaday routines. What makes us human, in other words, isn’t merely our ability to generate value for somebody else, but the moments we carve out for ourselves that gesture toward dreaming, imagination, creativity:
I think about this
even when I’m not dicing chicken breast
in the factory canteen.
Some might question the wisdom of writing a poetry collection that adheres so closely to a singular concept. Poetry, after all—perhaps more than any other artform—is about showcasing mastery over a variety of techniques. It tends to favour an author’s ability to ventriloquise promiscuously, ranging from one topic to another like an erudite dinner guest.
To those critics, I say that the strength of Plastic lies precisely within its narrative control. Taking its cue from the likes of Dawn Watson’s We Play Here and Stephen Sexton’s If All the World and Love Were Young, Rice’s book should be seen in the context of a Northern poetic renaissance; one that makes of Belfast what literary modernism made of Paris.
It’s Monday tomorrow, it always is when dreams are alarms.
Any successful piece of art begins by announcing its limitations before working to convince its audience that it has followed its own set of rules. Be it a book-length poetic exposition of a factory night shift, a painting, a sculpture, even a mass-market paperback about two rival hockey players engaged in a secret relationship, whether the initial premise appeals beyond the caprices of its creator is irrelevant. What counts is that the terms of its compact have been met and on the evidence of Plastic, it can even be made beautiful.
Plastic is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions
