Trailer park poetics
Folk singer Oliver Anthony exploded onto the scene with “Rich Men North of Richmond,” a song bursting with enough workingclass righteousness that the Conservative Rich Men of Washington, D.C. somehow didn’t think it was about them.
Listeners trust Mr. Anthony because of how he looks, because of how he presents himself, and because of how he lives his life. We ascribe authenticity to working class values and to poverty — and to the blue-collar people who embody that existence. People stripped of all their trappings seem most authentic.
Singers and poets
To some degree, poets have a harder time accessing “authenticity” than folk singers. Poetry is now mostly seen as something academic and inaccessible, a recreation for the affluent and educated.
But poetry has a deep investment in the authentic, and in authentic voices. The American proletariat poetry movement has existed since the 1920s, and its politics are the politics of the working class, just as its values are the values of working people.
Poet Ryler Dustin takes up this tradition, writing about his childhood in the trailer park with the same verve, charm and plain-spokeness that defined poets and singers like Woody Guthrie, Kenneth Fearing and Huddie William Ledbetter (better known as Lead Belly). He has just won the University of Pittsburgh Press’s Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for his newest collection “Trailer Park Psalms.”
And while he does have a graduate degree in poetry writing, Mr. Dustin draws his inspiration from a different well. “Sometimes you find your truest self in the stories you tell,” he told me in a recent interview. “I’m writing about childhood memories that happened so long ago — and stories that I’ve consciously or unconsciously retold myself so many times, that I have to think back to what it is really encapsulating.”
Mr. Dustin’s poetry feels like a companion piece to “Hillbilly Elegy” or “Stand By Me.” There’s a rural charm and sense of danger lurking in “Trailer Park Psalms,” but it is exactly the perpetual threat of poverty and violence that make the pieces sing.
In the title poem, Mr. Dustin writes, “Bless us, Lord of corrugated tin, / of crooked windows held against the wind / with molddark duct tape, of roofs repaired / in rain that would not let up. / Bless us, Lord of all that patches, holds, / is good enough — plywood, foil, fast-dry foam, / my grandma’s hands that worked / our wood stove chimney back to shape.”
Music in the poem
“I try to find the music in the poem,” Mr. Dustin said. “I didn’t arrive by learning what assonants and consonants are, trying to pack in as many words with the same letter or the same sound. There’s a fluidity to [my work] that I learned more from slam [poetry] and hearing poets that were more musical than me.”
A friend of mine once called slam poetry “the country music of the poetry world,” and when I say this to Mr. Dustin, he doesn’t disagree. The point of spoken word poetry is to be unsophisticated and readily understood, without sacrificing depth of meaning in order to connect with the people in the audience.
When I asked Mr. Dustin if he considered himself a “folk poet,” he laughed. “That’s a great way to think about it — there is a singersonger quality to how I made this book. I ended up kind of finding the music, or sonic qualities, of a line as a way to kind of pull myself along through the things I wanted to show a reader.”
“I think it’s true that storytelling feels really present in the book,” he said. And isn’t that what singer-songwriters do?
Mr. Dustin cites many working class and blue collar poets as his influences, including the late Jack McCarthy.
“When I started reading at the local open mic, [Mr. McCarthy] had moved out west here and, and was showing up pretty much every week to read,” said Mr. Dustin. “His poetry was just spellbinding to me. He reminded me that I was overcompensating for my [working class] roots by being really focused on craft — I didn’t need to do that.”
Something freeing
For Mr. Dustin, going back to his childhood self meant disregarding the pretense of a lot of contemporary poetry, as well as his academic training as a poet. There was something freeing about going back to the trailer park where he mostly grew up.
“There’s a kind of beauty that I think I appreciate more than, or I see more clearly than, when I grew up here. It might be overcast but it’s also green all the time — there’s moss and ferns and everything looks kind of vibrant, but there’s always a sense of gray too. I come from all of that — it’s a part of who I am.”