Transformation and Generation: Preliminary Notes on the Poetics of the Memphis Sanitation Strike

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From February to April of 1968, Memphis was a focal point of civil rights action, largely due to its nationally prominent sanitation strike. Labor tactics in Memphis insisted on connecting racial justice to workers' rights, thereby participating in a well-defined argument made by Black thinkers for centuries: capitalism and antiblackness are deeply imbricated sociocultural and ontogenic structures, working in tandem through the objectification of life under the guise of value.1 In demanding the right to equal wages for Black sanitation workers, as well as the rights to drive garbage trucks, to ascend the city sanitation department's leadership ladder, and to overhaul the intensely segregated public works department, Black Memphians unified labor justice and racial justice in the face of segregation's sociopolitical continuation, despite its supposed legal and juridical conclusion. In this way, the Memphis Sanitation Strike linked specific labor demands to a longer struggle for reparation and re-envisioned justice. Very important for Memphis, too, was the presence and support of Martin Luther King, Jr., especially his full, vocal turn towards linking antiracism with pacifism, labor rights, and the eradication of poverty. And, in the wake of King's assassination in Memphis, the city came to symbolize both locally and nationally the catastrophic persistence of antiblackness.

The Memphis Sanitation Strike was made up of an enormous coalition of educational, labor, cultural, religious, and political organizations, all of which sought an antiracist, pro-labor life in common. This coalition was assembled from masses: of people, of related languages and ways of thinking, of mutual political goals and complementary (or at least non-exclusionary) activist philosophies, of shared desires. Important to this process was the development of a striking language during — and as — protest. Most famous, of course, were the I AM A MAN placards that marchers wore on the picket lines, and which often functioned as mass, serial poetry during protests.2 The examples of striking poetry I focus on in this essay are not like these signs and their moving concrete poetry, however. The poems I work with here live on through their archival and remembered presence — unlike the signs and their visual, historic persistence — even as they create meaning through conventional poetic forms and the historical poetry of the Bible. Through my readings of verse poetry produced within the collective struggle of the Memphis Sanitation Strike, I propose a repertoire of linguistic gestures, lyrical postures, and formal expressions of mass strike that constitutes a specific poetics of the strike.I look to two poems in particular, one that was often spoken at rallies, and one that was written by an angry high school student in the aftermath of a brutal police riot against a protest on March 28, 1968.3 The presence of "The 23rd SLUM" and "Sanitation Workers' Prayer" in several different folders in the Search for Meaning Archive at the University of Memphis, as well as in archivally recorded interviews and recollections, shows that the poems' circulation generated a relational sense of poetics of protest during the strike. The poems are connected to each other through their religious and semantic registers, as both are satirical poems that condemn Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb. Working through religious and poetic discourses, the poems excel as critiques largely because they do not utilize a singular lyric speaker, but instead erect an angry collective voice that is both assumed and generated in each instance. In detailed readings of "The 23rd SLUM" and "Sanitation Workers' Prayer," I argue that the Memphis strikers and their supporters produced a justice-oriented poetic corpus through the techniques of transformation and generation. In this essay, I use transformation to mean each poem's formal and thematic engagement with well-known biblical texts, and I mean generation as a production of possibility to create both material and imaginative space for previously unconsidered meanings and contexts. Emphasizing the transformation of recognizable religious texts as engaged and interactive acts of community building, these poems powerfully generate a sense of political relation that takes an expansive, non-individuated lyrical form.

While specifically grounding these poems in the Memphis Sanitation Strike, I suggest larger implications for literary studies. The appreciation of nuance as a critical mode of attention means understanding meaning-making as a formally determined communal exercise, particularly one driven towards the somewhat compromised but still necessary idea of liberation. The two poems I consider are satirical and intersect powerfully with biblical scripture. The generative movement between satire and religious allusion within these poems opens up intriguing possibilities for lyrical position and form. Much of the poetry directly emerging from the strike was topical, openly political, and consciously building upon poetic tradition. Signifying on both the Bible and the state of Memphian politics symbolized by the city's segregationist mayor, Henry Loeb, the many poems and poetic acts of the Memphis Sanitation Strike represent a powerful intersection of politics and poetics.

Reading this intersection in the context of the Memphis Sanitation Strike requires working through an unapologetic yet sensitive formalism. Sensitive formalism works as an emotionally attuned reading exercise couched in collaborative meaning-making. It emerges from interpretive humility, which means listening carefully and intently to what the work of art can teach: what it says, when it says, where it says, and why it might be trying to say what it says. As I enact it throughout this essay, sensitive formalism takes seriously Alexandra Vazquez's description of "listening in detail," in which critical interpretation works by accepting that "one must be able to adjust to a different sense of time, be eager to go to unexpected places, remain open to being altered, ready to frame a project in the diminutive, and prepared to assume there is always some other way."4 For this critical attitude to work, "Openness seems to be inarguable condition. One has to go beyond reliable critical locations, listen a little harder, feel comfortable with flexible theories."5 The question, then, is whether literary criticism can be literary criticism without "reliable critical locations." Or, perhaps, whether literary texts contain some immanence or aura (in the Benjaminian sense) whose surplus generates a value that we must not reinvest to maintain our disciplinary formations, but instead use towards liberation from restricted systems of predetermined meaning.In looking at the potentials for collective lyrical sentiment and expression, I build on Theodor Adorno's observations about lyric poetry's dialectical containment of the individual and/as the social. Refusing to cede the power of lyric poetry to the concepts of individualized expression and the lyric speaker, Adorno insists that even at its most solitary and alienated, "this very lyric speech becomes the voice of human beings between whom the barriers have fallen."6 The Memphis Sanitation Strike poems I read in this essay stake their lyrical power and their poetic claims in the search for political justice; the position of the lyric, if it exists at all, becomes a collective enunciation. The implications are clear for critical interpretation, and I propose an analogy to other forms of organizing and action. We need to open ourselves up to the nuances of what we're reading, because this means understanding the nuances of our comrades, particularly as we work towards liberation. Clarity, in this sense, is mutually built, not expected or imposed; and it is, importantly, an imperative of both form and content.

As popular poems read privately and publicly during the strike, these works circulated a sense of collective ire, couched in satire. The first example — written by a high school student — is entitled "The 23rd SLUM," and clearly transforms the twenty-third Psalm, one of the most famous Biblical passages (fig. 1).7

Fig. 1. "The 23rd SLUM." Courtesy of the Search for Meaning Archive, University of Memphis Special Collections.8

Establishing the drama of the sanitation strike through the biblical chiaroscuro of the King James translation of Psalm 23, "The 23rd SLUM" also takes up some of the key metrical and syntactic resonances of that famous psalm. As a poem about faith and courage, Psalm 23 has long been a cultural and literary touchstone; thus, reciting and revising the "Psalm" into a "SLUM" posits the sanitation strike as a contemporary struggle with historical and cultural significance. The transformations between "The 23rd SLUM" and Psalm 23 reveal difference as a generative force. These alterations do not occur through mere reversal, context-shifting, or allusion.9 Instead, the transformations present an argument about race, religion, protest, and liberation, and these generative poetic moves certainly suggest the need for a critical heuristic that listens deeply to the work at hand — a critical labor that does not extract value in order to reinvest it, but instead reimagines what aesthetics looks and sounds like, and to what ends it might labor.10 As a political appropriation of a popular religious text, "The 23rd SLUM" reorganizes poetic value through the recombination of sacred and secular verse, and this accumulation of literary transformations voices collective rage against Henry Loeb, the police, and the racist labor practices that begat the Memphis Sanitation Strike in the first place.The poem transforms the biblical psalm's metaphorical language of faith into a site-specific semantic web, uncannily manifesting the original's abstract figurations with concrete action. "The valley of the shadow of death" is converted into "the valley / Of dirt and filth," which resonates with one of the redolent consequences of the strike: uncollected garbage piled on Memphis streets. The psalm's famous opening, "The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want," has been rendered "LOEB is my enemy. I shall not forget." Turning LORD into LOEB, while of course a cheeky barb unfavorably comparing Loeb to Yahweh, also significantly redirects the poem's apostrophe. Psalm 23 is a supplication to God, a request for courage; "The 23rd SLUM" is no supplication — it is a declaration and a demand. "I shall not want," as a statement of dependence and faith, here becomes "I shall not forget." The clauses of the original — connected by a comma — are transformed by separating the syntactic units into two clipped sentences that emphasize the line's poetic fury. Importantly, the functional pronoun in this poem is maintained — the speaking voice is mainly linked to the poem's "I" (compare this to the next poem's consistent "us" and "our"). However, the first stanza follows "I shall not forget" with "He maketh us march against him, / He leadeth us back to slavery, / He destroys our town, / He leadeth us to the path of misery." Turning to the collective "us" and "our" to close out the first stanza, "The 23rd SLUM" completes the semantic shift from LORD to LOEB, from individual supplication to collective demand. Unlike the deity of Psalm 23 (who "maketh me lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. / He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake"), Loeb does not produce solace or calm in the community. In addition to unfavorably comparing Loeb to Yahweh, the poem shows that Loeb's authoritarian responses to the strike must be resisted: though he might try, the mantle of power with which he cloaks himself is nothing more than a perversion of Yaheweh's restorative powers outlined in Psalm 23.

Crucially, the poem's critical direction works by keeping the action focused against Loeb. He is the poem's other — but not the desired other of a short love lyric or the sacred focus of psalmody. In this case, the poem's other is the object of ire rather than the object of supplication. Loeb has left the workers with no choice but to march: he leads not to green pastures or paths of righteousness, but "back to slavery" and "the path of misery." Strikingly similar to the Pharaoh of the Book of Exodus, Loeb narratively and poetically functions as a unifying external evil. The imprecatory action of the poem works against him, as does the combined semiotic force of the poetic language. In "Psalm 23," the speaker walks "though the valley of the shadow of death" and "will fear no evil: for you art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me." In "The 23rd SLUM," however, the corresponding lines read, "though I walk through the valley, / Of dirt and filth, I shall smell foul odors, / For Loeb is against us; / His cops and their gas shall not stop us." Using assonance to convert Yahweh's "rod" and "staff" into "cops" and "gas" (the Memphis police used military-grade Mace to assault marchers supporting the striking sanitation workers), the anonymous poet — a high school student, recall — names and condemns the tyrannical power held by Memphis's white power structure and wielded by Loeb and the city government. The sonic connection made — the rod and staff are the cops and gas — suggests power run amok, power that must be curbed.

The next stanza, "Thou preparest a noose to hang me / In the presence of my friends, / Thou anointed my head with lies. / My garbage can runneth over," almost straightforwardly reverses the corresponding lines from "Psalm 23." Yahweh's prepared table "in the presence of mine enemies" becomes a terrifying lyncher's noose, meant to hang the poem's speaker — presumably as a violent example — in front of their friends. There is no sanctuary for a speaker ringed by enemies. Instead, one is murdered among one's friends. Loeb's lies, in turn, viciously anoint the speaker's head, and the speaker's vessel overflows not with blessings, but with the noxious spillage of uncollected garbage. The poem's fourth and final stanza hardens the poem's concrete address to Memphis's present. In "Psalm 23," "goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life"; in "The 23rd SLUM," "picketing and looting shall/ Follow Loeb all the days of his life." The poet asserts the strikers' fortitude, as well as the righteousness of the struggle, by transforming the "me" of the Psalm to the "Loeb" of the "The 23rd SLUM." Additionally, "Goodness" becomes "picketing," and "mercy" becomes "looting" — playing (perhaps unintentionally) on the Latin merx-, which is the etymological root of both mercy and commerce — and "my life" becomes "his life."11 As the poem suggests, there can be no end to the struggle — not as long as segregated employment, antiblack violence, and police militarism remain the structuring forces of everyday life in Memphis. Fittingly, eternity is where the poem ends — the contradictory in/finitude of "forever" as a signal of conclusion, as well as an insistence upon endlessness. Unlike the psalm, in which the speaker "will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever," Loeb "shall burn in hell forever."The double underscoring of "hell" wrathfully emphasizes the poem's vengeful bent — we should not avoid the poem's enraged emotional field. This doubled gesture, small as it is, might be understood as a moment of inspired typographic nuance, or perhaps what Evie Shockley theorizes capaciously as innovation.12 Or, rather, what Anthony Reed calls the "unthought components" that purposively escape disciplinary boundedness or lyrical enclosure in experimental poetry.13 Fred Moten, seeking to describe the conditions of emergent emancipatory being within a matrix constructed of social life and social death, of citizenship and its (im)possibilities, suggests that criticism's attention to this sort of gesture reveals "New things, new spaces, new times [that] demand lyrical innovation and intervention, formal maneuverings that often serve to bring to the theoretical and practical table whatever meaning can't. Phrasing, where form — grammar, sound — cuts and augments meaning in the production of content, is where implication most properly resides."14 As a matter of phrasing and typographical emphasis, the entire final line of "The 23rd SLUM" "augments meaning in the production of content" as the anonymous young poet categorically condemns Loeb to eternal damnation in the Christian vision of the lake of fire. Especially given that this poem is a response to the March 28, 1968 police riot that broke up the enormous march to Beale Street, for which King, Jr. had flown into Memphis, the final line becomes a "formal maneuvering" that furiously asserts retribution for Loeb's violent, racist response to the sanitation strike. The virulent police response, which ended with dozens injured and one — a teenager named Larry Payne — murdered by a policeman, becomes the poem's central hinge: lines 8 and 9 ("For Loeb is against us; / His cops and their gas shall not stop us"), at the center of the poem, take us from the poem's alpha — "Loeb is my enemy. I shall not forget" — to its omega — "And he shall burn in hell forever."

The rage contained in "The 23rd SLUM" invokes civil and uncivil rage as a poetic muse. More than an ugly feeling, rage is putatively an anti-social feeling. Yet, in the case of "The 23rd SLUM," rage becomes what Moten argues "defies those dominant modes of description that are paradoxically subordinate to an assumed natural history that understands deviance as derivative positioning."15 In the case of the anonymous Hamilton High School student from Memphis, the poem becomes a virtuously angry condemnation of a vicious, antiblack society that continually enacts its murderous intentions both structurally (in the world) and specifically (in Memphis, 1968).16 "The 23rd SLUM" takes rage and converts it into a transformative poetic engine: the poem generates meaning by anchoring itself onto the poetic unity of Psalm 23, and also insists, by example, that this unity can be thoroughly undone and reconceptualized in order to address the material exigencies of the sanitation strike.

The second Memphis Sanitation Strike poem I discuss in this essay, "Sanitation Workers' Prayer," generatively transforms the "Lord's Prayer," as laid out in Matthew 6:9-13 (fig. 2). 17 As a transformation of the "Lord's Prayer," this poem perhaps seems straightforward. However, as with "The 23rd SLUM," the differences that emerge through the transformation of institutional prayer into protest poetry bespeak the occurrence of a potent, generative act. The author, like that of "The 23rd SLUM," is unknown. Yet the same religious background undergirds the poem — and this same religious anchoring gets undone, too, as the poem converts the Christian God into a more material presence.

Fig. 2. "Sanitation Workers Prayer." Courtesy of the Search for Meaning Archive, housed in the University of Memphis Special Collections.18

The "Sanitation Workers' Prayer" unmoors "Our Father" in two ways: first, it changes its addressee to "Our Henry." This mockery of Loeb, which rehearses a "King Henry" motif established by strikers during protests, frames Loeb as a tyrannical figure — though a petty one, much like that of "The 23rd SLUM". Indeed, "who art in City Hall" becomes a reduction of station, even if it parallels "who art in heaven." City Hall is no "heaven," and this is emphasized through the near-homophony of "Hall" with hell. Second, the poem's use of "thy" works through a bi-directional deixis. It is Loeb, of course, whose name is modified by "Hard-headed"; more importantly, though, "thy" points to the strikers. "Thy kingdom C.O.M.E., / OUR will be done,/ In Memphis, as it is in heaven." Heaven, it turns out, does exist in the poem's imaginary. It is a space of dialectically conceived justice, as the poem insists on underscoring an isomorphic relationship between the concreteness of Memphis and the abstractness of heaven. The stewards of this earthly "kingdom," the poem asserts, are C.O.M.E — Memphis' own Committee on the Move for Equality.19 The poem leaves open the suggestion that C.O.M.E. and "OUR" indicate different, albeit allied, entities. More importantly, the "Our" maintained throughout raises the question of whether the poem has a lyric speaker. As collective verse, presumably spoken aloud, does it signify a different set of interpretive assumptions and operations than a poem anchored to a single consciousness? In short, this "Sanitation Workers' Prayer" suggests that the purview of the lyrical — the presence of a speaker's desire, the addressee or object of apostrophe — might be a matter of multiple positions, rather than of the essentially solitary individual.

Indeed, I would suggest that to speak together is a lyrical action. "Sanitation Workers' Prayer" does not call an abstract "us" into being, but in its speaking, generates community through the presence of the "us." In enumerating the strikers' and protesters' duties — "our Dues Checkoff" and "our boycott" — the poem points to the necessity of collective action. A dues check-off maintains the financial viability of the union, particularly during a strike. A boycott cannot succeed without enough participation. Yet, the "boycott" of "Sanitation Workers' Prayer" parallels "our trespasses" against "Our Father," suggesting a violation of the established order. This violation — the boycott as a "trespass" — is willful and necessary, given capitalism's structuring of commerce as a sacred and protected social good. Additionally, unlike the "Lord's Prayer," the "Sanitation Workers' Prayer" does not treat forgiveness as an equalizing gesture or quid pro quo. Instead, forgiveness becomes a provocation: the boycott does not have to be forgiven, just as the police spraying Mace do not have to be forgiven. The boycott comes first, and the spraying of Mace follows as a violent reaction, and it's uncertain whether the police's chemical warfare has truly been forgiven by the poem's collectivity. Truly, who gives a shit if Loeb — the addressee of the poem — forgives their boycott? And, even if he does, their own forgiveness does not require forgetting that Loeb's militarized police force assaulted the protesters.In the third stanza, "And lead us not into shame, / But deliver us from LOEB," the addressee is C.O.M.E. The organization, in leading the strike actions and the protests, is placed in the structural position of God in "Our Father," but with accountability. C.O.M.E. is not understood as all-powerful, but rather as precarious and dependent on its members and supporters. GerShun Avilez, in his examination of the "disruptive inhabiting" contained within the radical aesthetics of Black nationalist art and poetry, argues that we must attend to "the purposeful adoption of political ideology because of its potential for progressive social analysis," and must also understand that "this adoption is paired with the active attempt to unhinge components of the ideology that threaten to constrain expressions of identity."20 C.O.M.E. was not aligned directly with Black nationalist politics, but Avilez's important point holds for the poem: a position is adopted and "paired with the active attempt to unhinge" the poem's point of view from absolute identification with any single political position. Indeed, the line "And lead us not into shame" functions less as a request than as a directive — C.O.M.E. is understood as responsible and accountable. This insistence on coalitional accountability as an active effort towards freedom embodies Christina Sharpe's question from In the Wake: "How can we think (and rethink and rethink) care laterally, in the register of the intramural, in a different relation than that of the violence of the state?"21 Turning on Sharpe's question, the declaration that "OURS is justice, jobs and / dignity" understands care as an alternative to the violence of the state and its antiblack civic institutions. The unnamed poet — whose poetry was, is, and shall be collective — understands a different arc of sovereignty, one that cannot ever depend on the state's antiblack vision of the world.

The poem's final lines remove "the kingdom, the power, and the glory" from the dominion of both Loeb and C.O.M.E. It declares, "For OURS is justice, jobs and / dignity" — they are no one's to give, no one's to administer, and no one's to control. In shifting the address away from the "you," the poem turns inwards, towards its constitutive communal voice. Indeed, playing on and revising the future-oriented finality of the "Amen" of the "Lord's Prayer" (which also appears at the end of "The 23rd SLUM"), the final line of the "Sanitation Workers' Prayer" shouts "FREEDOM!" Freedom is announced and inhabited in its announcement — it is both a promise and a presence. It is an enunciation of what is, not of what will be — it is, was, and ever shall be. As such, "FREEDOM!" is not a conclusion, but an initiation; not a summing up, but an invocation. This is a vision of poetic ending that refuses to be contained or constrained.

I would like to conclude by briefly considering another instance of 1968 poetry, published in June of that year: the final stanza from Gwendolyn Brooks's "The Sermon on the Warpland," from her collection In the Mecca. The poetics of the Memphis Sanitation Strike provide a persuasive, astonishing new approach to Brooks's poetry, especially in each Memphis poem's emphatic ongoingness, and each poem's use of religious knowledge to reach a broad audience. Brooks's final stanza similarly conceptualizes revolutionary desire as a fullness that is not yet sated, a political and theological completeness that is nevertheless interested in continuity and further extension. Accreting what must be built "with lithe love," the poem uses "with" to enumerate a list of metaphorical possibilities through which this love can appear:

Build with lithe love. With love like lion-eyes.
With love like morningrise.
With love like black, our black—
luminously indiscreet;
complete; continuous.22

The cascading metaphors, added upon the initial, modified love ("with lithe love"), multiply the forms of love: love "like lion-eyes," "like morningrise," "like black, our black." Acute, powerful, dawning, and expansive, love's final form is "like black, our black—/ luminously indiscreet; / complete; continuous." This final line unifies, but does not enclose, offering completion without absoluteness, fullness without boundaries. Ending with a richly contradictory image, Brooks imagines completion against containment — as generative and fruitful, energetic and "luminously indiscreet," and thus always open, always vibrant. Brooks's vision of love's completion as neither satisfaction nor self-justification offers a useful framework for interpreting revolutionary Black poetry as both transformative and generative.The visions of unclosed conclusion in "The 23rd SLUM" and "Sanitation Workers' Prayer" anticipate the "complete; continuous" sensibility of Brooks' "The Sermon on the Warpland." "The 23rd SLUM" ends with "Amen" after its angry, prophetic build up towards the proclamation that Henry Loeb "shall burn in hell forever." In "Sanitation Workers' Prayer," freedom is announced as both a blessing and as a demand, an origin and a collective declaration. "Forever and ever. / FREEDOM!" shouts out the human spirit from the page, with vindication. As a moment in a long struggle, the Memphis Sanitation Strike has been displaced by national narratives of mourning and trauma. To turn to the poetry and aesthetics emerging before, during, and after this catastrophe is, then, to listen closely to people who knew and declared the art of their protest, the truth of their lives, and the necessity of their desires. Freedom is not final or conclusive — it is both a desire and a position, not one or the other. It is not only an end in and of itself, but a means that achieves its ends (but never its end) by continuously transforming and regenerating the world in which it is formed.

Francisco E. Robles is an assistant professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where he is also affiliated with the Institute for Latino Studies and the Gender Studies Program. He has articles published or forthcoming in MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States and Twentieth-Century Literature, as well as a chapter in the collection Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Arturo Aldama (University of Arizona Press, 2020). Essays and reviews appear in Post45: Contemporaries, Killing the Buddha, SX Salon, and the New Mexico Historical Review.

In This Issue

Part 1

Introduction: Formalism Unbound
Timothy Aubry and Florence Dore

Good for Nothing: Lorrie Moore's Maternal Aesthetic and the Return to Form
Florence Dore

On Philosophical Imagination and Literary Form
Yi-Ping Ong

"Now can you see the monument?" Some notes on reading for "form"
Gillian White

Transformation and Generation: Preliminary Notes on the Poetics of the Memphis Sanitation Strike
Francisco Robles

The Sight of Life
Sarah Chihaya

Beyond Desire: Blackness and Form
Amber Jamilla Musser

Part 2

Form contra Aesthetics
Timothy Aubry

Zadie Smith's Style of Thinking
David James

Queer Formula
Joan Lubin

Formalism at the End Times: A Modest Account
Danielle Christmas

Furnishing the Novel, Feeding the Soul: Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Benjamin Widiss

Notes on Shade
C. Namwali Serpell

Afterword: Form Now: as Limit and Beyond
Dorothy J. Hale

References