Ariel Yelen. I Was Working. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024. 64 pages.


 



            Ariel Yelen’s debut collection I Was Working opens with an irony that sustains the book, a hyperbolic approach that comes from looking closely at, and speaking, the literal. This is perhaps the poet’s task in its most fundamental expression—in a certain poetic tradition, the poet chisels at the everyday in order to turn it into something we’re seeing for the first time. For Yelen, this enterprise is deeply ironic, not least because she dedicates not one, but several poems to poking at the Sisyphean condition of being a poet in a world, a country, that is committed to a mythic notion of productivity, worshipped daily at the revered altar of the cubicle, even as the cubicle itself is “cut in half” (13).

            Forgive me for poorly imitating the sarcasm that marks Yelen’s book, but it’s totally infectious and articulates a desperation felt under Productivity’s demands that is not formally expressed anywhere near to the extent that it is commonly felt. It is itself a desperation that demands hyperbole in order to at once understand, fight, and sustain oneself under working’s conditions.

            The speaker of the opening, eponymous poem, a poet-worker, is a hyperbolic figure—they have adopted capitalist productivity to a fault, at the expense of their human experience outside of work. This poet-worker has four literal jobs, which serve as stepping stones for fifth and sixth jobs, until “I decided to quit // everything but work,” from which “platforms continued / to make themselves available” (3-4). The voice of the poem verges on the automated or procedural, algebraic in how it describes the gradual shift from work-life balance to just work balance, in which the struggle to work in order to afford the time to enjoy life is made simpler by complete surrender to Productivity by removing the “life” part altogether: “No one said it’s okay. It wasn’t / okay, thus my work flourished.” Productivity is based on the surrender of the human to serve it continuously, to no other end, and for its own sake—in this equation, work begets more work.

            Through these poems, Yelen identifies not what a late-capitalist Western culture says to its people about its values, but what that culture does to its people, what its relationships and conditions mean for daily life when actually lived. Such conditions are so normalized that it is striking to read, in the opening poem, Yelen’s forthrightness, which comes out almost cartoonish and inflated (“After much consideration…I decided to quit everything but work). It doesn’t sound like a real person, but by saying the feeling out loud, truth feels surreal, at once both literal and hyperbolic. You can hear the automaton fighting to be human and the human fighting to be automaton. That tension is funny, horrific, distressing, and paradoxical. It is a specific feeling you get when work, or lack of work, is stressing you out so much that it occupies you completely, and then you run into someone you sort of know who asks you how you’ve been. They are smiling politely as they ask, even though you can safely bet that they are feeling the same push and pull. “I’m fine,” you say. You are each other.

            In the following poem, “I’m depressed to only now have discovered,” Yelen accesses a common (for poets, at least) sentiment: “Imagine if I’d discovered [this great poet] earlier, I’d be rich / Oh! the poems I would not have written, inspired / by reading her…” (6). The poet considers resignation from the ‘work’ of being a poet, both “inspired” by discovering the new poet and aware of how work carries us into fantasy, into conditional and additive logics of if I do x, then surely I will be y. The poet’s sense of futility is expressed in the past conditional tense “would have,” denoting a time and place of potential that renders the present as a sealed cage. They missed their chance. Flirting with a fear rarely addressed so directly, Yelen expresses the nihilistic tendencies provoked by narratives of success that are out of step with reality, but that we supposedly must work towards: “the desire to write / would drain from my body / in service of us all / and I would move on / to making money…” (6).

            The amazing irony of this poem, though, is that it is a poem in spite of itself. It is a poem wishing it hadn’t been written, almost willing itself not to be written, but can only do so by being written. The irreconcilability of this double self-rejection is maybe the poem’s most powerful expression of emotional paralysis as much as the determination to resist that despondency. The speaker wishes that their expression was immaterial because of a conviction that it is already immaterial in the sense of useless, but it is only in so doing that the expression becomes material. To desire unbecoming becomes and the poem is therefore become.

            The two-facedness of experiencing the work environment at once as hyperbolic and literal, the incredulous amidst the quotidian, recurs throughout the book’s first of three sections, where the conditions of work provoke both what the poet is forced to accept and what the poet knows to be a lie: “The poet wants money / The problem is she’s thinking”; “The view from the office so stunning it’s propaganda”; “Holes are good to have / We insist”; and an instructive: “…be careful not to lubricate the truth / Let beauty commute you.” “Let beauty commute you” is one of those lines I don’t fully understand but feel. Experience beyond the rational is important for the poetics of I Was Working, as the hyperbolic irony arises from a frustration with what seems to be an irrational organization of life. At times this is expressed with sarcastic whimsy, as in the poem Prayer for tax season:

May I pay my taxes

with the ease of one thousand

cherry blossoms raining

down, May publicity efforts

fail to show us the truth,
leaving us to figure it out… (15)

Yelen’s speaker’s irony is a result of a system in which success is always just beyond what your work can achieve. Under these terms of diminishing returns despite increasing labor, work in this world is the only way to conceive of achieving, or even approaching, success.

            Such direct contradictions peak in the final poem of the first section, Bodies and Signs in Time. Yelen asks open questions about the invisible spaces of solace created by Productivity, spaces that we hope to be working toward but never reach and whose fantasy is necessary for the ongoing nourishment of Productivity.

           

What I mean is, to be able to love each other requires that we not

stay together in physical space, but rather disappear

from one another daily to construct a kind of something

that allows us to, in free time, love each other.

            The “kind of something” that must be constructed bears the weight of this routine separation that allows the value of connection to, in Yelen’s word, “appreciate.” But it must happen at a distance. The more we try to close that distance from the loved one, the ostensible reason for which the worker is working, the less material the connection can become. It’s an equation that doesn’t add up—a lie, but one that the demands of modern livelihood depend on telling successfully.

            The poet continues:

With things as they are, we only know what we’d do without

the constant building. Or is it that we only do what we can in the air

pockets where it’s not (which isn’t much if you’ve fantasized

about what we might do without it).

Possibly, though, the two states of being might’ve merged—our

dreams taking the form of the negative space… (21)

            Yelen observes the disembodiment inherent to basing your current life on the premise of potential life, deferring the pursuit of what is truly desired to a time and space where it might be more practical, having ideally worked and planned enough for that time and space to materialize. That time and space is the product Productivity sells as if it was its very byproduct. The reality, though, is much simpler and more infuriating: the more time you spend doing one thing, the more time you spend doing that thing.






Yelen wrote the poems in the second section, a sequence titled In Free Time, either during her commute or at her work desk, with the constraints of five syllables per line and five minutes spent writing. The poems in the section are the poet-worker’s attempt to manage a creative practice within the quotidian demands of their work life. You can feel formal, material constraints pressing in on the four walls of these short, conversational poems, constraints that imitate the pressures affecting the poet’s free time:

Thank goodness people

Come here and thank god

They leave at some point

Praise be there’s a seat

Oh no it’s taken

Great it’s open now

Scrolling through the news

But my phone screen stops

Picking up my thumb

News of death and war

Everywhere except

A couple places (25)

            In the space of twelve five-syllable lines, the few open spots on the train during a commute become the few spots on the globe, on the algorithm, where atrocity is not happening. The constraint produces a flat tone that trivializes these concurrent events within the poet-worker’s experience, events which, though concurrent, are not expected to belong to the same register. Their significances are vastly different and they share little in terms of theme, but they reach the same quotidian status as a result of the constraint of the commute and thus of the poem. It expresses the absurdity of the necessity to accept a life practice that the poet also knows to be a lie, as in the book’s first section. The forced trivialization of one’s values is a hallmark of alienation—being forced in our “free” time to accept rules we didn’t agree to or don’t understand, forced to substitute actual meaning and moral alignment for what a career purports to provide.

            “In Free Time” is by turns funny and harrowing because of this forced equivalence of experience. Quality, à la Pirsig, is buried beneath a routine that renders time and space ambient, and the poet-worker trains themself to spend their emotional energy frugally as a means of self-preservation. Attention also comes to the fore, but is ambient. The poems are being written both through and in spite of the external pressures, and in spite of routine’s insistence on Productivity above all else. Insofar as they are an expression of the conflicting effects of the workplace on the poet-worker, these poems are works of solidarity, reaching out through the dullness toward others stuck in similar loops of disillusionment. It is the limitations imposed on Yelen’s writing and its identification with those limitations that allows it to sing in its particular, ironic way.






            In the third section, like the first, hints of the lyric are promptly abbreviated by workplace and consumer turns of phrase, along with details of the poet-worker’s material reality, like a treat dangling on the end of a thread in front of a hungry but dispassionate dog’s snout. Repeatedly, successive lines shut off Yelen’s attempts to even conceive of a possibility outside of the poet-worker’s present conditions. The push and pull is visceral to read, as in the poem I miss the feeling of being free and connecting the dots: “Like the whole world was conspiring to show me myself all along / While running out to get a kebab on 23rd.” 

            Somewhat of a thematic reprise from the very first poem, as well, is the destruction of the poet-worker’s identity within transactional environments and relationships. The difficulty for the poet-worker is that they are conscious of this destruction as it is happening. In the same poem as above:

The push to know

The push against knowing

You were weeping freely at the foot of the source

I saw you of course

And I say you at the water fountain, thinking

That to ensure smooth operations, fire the conflicted self

Luckily they accept venmo” (47)

            Undercutting the lyrical “fire the conflicted self” with “luckily they accept venmo” expresses the abrupt but tonally flattened way consumerism annihilates the self: it happens quietly, in normalized, repetitive transactions, punctuated by the minor relief when we know a mediocre service will be performed for us by likely another poet-worker, just so that both of us can, at some point, break into the projected time we’ve spent so much time creating. Where Romantic poetry might characterize self-annihilation with epiphanic, wide and winding verses, the self’s lyrical fire somewhere on a mountain in the nineteenth century, Yelen’s treatment is neither so generous, so explanatory, nor glorious. This is the soft mercilessness of the contemporary workplace, what and how it asks its employees to endure. Depending on what you believe comprises a person’s internal life, to “fire the conflicted self” is to fire the self entirely, both its potential and its inherent, reified contradictions. 

            I Was Working explores the ditches in which the need for justice, dreams, and love, and the need for food, shelter, and water—are forced into false competition with another. Like oil hovering on top of otherwise clean water, Yelen’s literal-as-hyperbolic emerges from that brutal dialectic. Yelen’s poems are a cross-section of a poet-worker’s experience over the course of a day: thin and alternating gradations of desire and necessity.








            In “Erotics of Being a Self,” dreams adopt the same dimensions as the dreamer’s life beyond the dream, meaning life and the dream occur in tandem, though separately. They cannot blend, but exist as alternate versions of one another. One is forever material, and the other is forever not. The “self” in Yelen’s poem, the conflicted self that struggles against the impersonality of a work life, uses dreams as immaterial succor, narratives to sustain other narratives: “Full of symbols and questions, you wander unresolved / Attached to ideas of the self / That maintain ideas of the self…” (62). But even dreams draw on that same premise of potential life, that same abstraction from which work gains its value and seductive sheen, that ad agencies rely upon to sell others’ wares, packaged in a shared narrative of ideas about how life could be. Yelen refers to the life into which dreams extend as “Big Future,” branding the future as an industry which peddles such immaterial merchandise as fear, or as the poem on the previous page puts it, “We’re living longer // but we’re more afraid— // fear of / fear…” (61). These stories are only convincing so long as we fear their likelihood, so long as we fear the terms in which we are given them. The fear is, unfortunately, mesmerizing and self-fulfilling. It is also, however, legible, and is therefore resistible.

            Through the final poem, “Carrying It,” comes an awareness that an alternative choice can be made, though the choice is scary, just as “Big Future” has designed it to be. “Big Future” cultivates indecision and self-doubt: “Living with others, and sensing / them—and though determined not to invent / what it is they’re thinking and feeling…” and “there’s the weight of knowing / you may be wrong…” (64). The poet-worker begins to identify with the “not rightness” that they know and feel. But to let go is too frightening. Fantasy is safer. Irony, especially through indecision, is painful, but it is validating, self-perpetuating. Solidarity between workers is at once necessary and, in this ironized world, might also feel totally dubious. The poet-worker is this state of being caught between. The literal and the hyperbolic mesh.

            “Carrying It” ends the collection with a variation on the final gesture of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”: “…it’s possible / you’re carrying something / for no reason, but that to put it down / would be to change your life” (64). Yelen’s echo of Rilke intimates that life must be changed, but that we are shackled today by “would.” In the “you” there’s “me,” in the “life” there’s “death,” and in the “would,” “fear.”