ABSTRACT
Even as the United States has become the most unequal industrialized nation in the West, with 1 percent of its citizens holding 40 percent of its wealth, it’s possible to watch American television and read mainstream newspapers for weeks at a time without once encountering the phrase “working class” (Lang and Tichi 9). The power of the American working class has been eroded, as well, because of globalization, union-busting tactics, and tax laws that favor the rich. Yet scholars and writers in the growing field of working-class studies have sought to remedy this cultural amnesia and to strive for social and economic justice for working people. Recent collections such as What’s Class Got to Do With It?, edited by Michael Zweig, and New Working-Class Studies, edited by John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon, have emphasized the centrality of class to our lives and offered nuanced new ways of defining “working class,” taking into account race, gender, ethnicity, geographical location, and access to political power. In this chapter, I make use of such an intersectional approach to class by examining how representations of American class identity and conflict persist even in the literary genre often perceived as the least revolutionary: the contemporary lyric poem.
