I got my first paid job while I was still at school, working as a milk delivery boy in the suburb of Wollongong, an industrial city in Australia where I lived with my family in the 1980s.

I’d work three to four hours per night, three or four days per week, and received AUD3 per hour, plus benefits: two or three milk products (yoghurt, custard, etc), which I took home at the end of my shift or else drank while on the job. In those days milk was still primarily home-delivered in glass bottles with metallic lids.

My job was to carry a crate of twenty bottles at a time, deliver the milk to each house, collect any empty bottles and/or money left out, memorize the exact numbers of bottles I had delivered, and parrot these figures back to Al, the guy who owned the business and drove the milk truck. I’d be romanticizing things a tad too much if I were to say that it was backbreaking work.

Still, there were moments when, running full-pelt down an asphalt street in the rain with twenty full bottles of milk rattling around in my crate, that I could foresee a dramatic accident involving an unsighted car, a slick patch of road, or else a misstep onto an immaculately mown and slippery lawn, in which I might impale myself on a broken bottle, or else lose the whole crate.

In the end, the worst thing that happened to me was a kind of half-hearted dog attack, which I blew up in my mind to be much more serious than it was, and of which my family still takes great pleasure in reminding me to this day, almost twenty-five years later.

In 2005 I had the great fortune to be awarded a new work grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts. I’d been paid for my poetry before of course—a fifty-dollar cheque here and there—but the grant represented the first real payment I’d ever received for my work as a writer and poet.

With the aid of the grant, I spent three months writing my life in poems. I rented space in an office run by a group of architects, and every day I went in there and just started writing. By the end of the three months, I had written over a hundred new poems, many of which were nowhere near publishable. But one of them was about my job as a milk boy, or “milko.”

Milko

At the time, I recall, it was very important to me that I view my writing as work—and that, as a consequence, much of my writing should be about work: the processes of (post-)industrialization that I saw all around me; the minutiae of payment or the lack of it; the relationships between people working in monotonous or stifling conditions; interactions between employers and employees; and the things people do when they finish work.

Between 2001 and 2012, I performed a different kind of work, as managing editor of Cordite Poetry Review, an online Australian literary journal founded in 1996. The Cordite–Prairie Schooner collaboration was one of my last acts before handing over the reins to Kent MacCarter, who continues to expand Cordite’s readership through both the online journal (which recently released its 115th issue) and a print arm that publishes beautifully designed poetry collections.

I first met Kwame Dawes at the Struga Poetry Evenings in Macedonia in 2011, and I still recall the sense of excitement I felt when I realized we were both cricket fans, and fans of West Indian cricket in particular. When Kwame later contacted me to suggest we collaborate on a joint issue with the theme of “Work,” I agreed without hesitation. But the process of selecting the Australian works for this special collaboration entailed a lot more work than I thought it would.

I thought that I’d be able to go through the Cordite archives and cherry-pick at will from many poems about work and working. To begin with, however, even a simple keyword search for “work” yielded very few useful results. An initial scan of the poems published on the Cordite site between 2007 and 2011 also demonstrated that, in fact, not many poems were actually about work at all, and even fewer exhibited the kind of class-consciousness that I had supposed was abundant.

That being said, in the end I really just needed to work both a little harder and more creatively to find the poems for this feature.

Tom Clark’s “Why be a delegate?” was an obvious starter, with its allusion to Australia’s trade union delegate system and its underlying theme of participation and involvement in issues affecting workers.

Brendan Ryan’s “Factory Boys” is perhaps the most overtly ‘work’-related poem here, and its observations about the factory floor, in particular the kinds of relations that exist between workers, ring true for me: “as if opinions ever matter / when the stainless steel is piling up around you.” Similarly, Margaret Owen Ruckert’s “is there more to worry than lunch” is subtly humorous in its evocation of a pre-WWII lunchtime working world “with no phone, fax or email.”

Meanwhile, Jennifer Compton’s “Ex-Yugo” paints a delightful picture of what could be the former Yugoslavia, its final lines summing up the tensions between work and reward, in this case through the price of cherries: “And how delicious they are, small / and so sweet in a white paper cone, and so cheap.”

Ivy Alvarez’s “Curing the animal”, which was first published in Cordite’s 29th issue, under the theme “Pastoral,” and was later translated into Hangul as part of our Oz-Ko (Australia-Korea) special issue, drips with the brutality of butchering work, its startling perspective also commenting on the division of labor between men and women.

Liam Ferney’s “Millennium Lite Redux”, on the other hand, possibly speaks from a post-global financial crisis consciousness, in which the diary an unemployed worker on benefits (which at the time went by the ironic, Orwellian name of Newstart), is required to fill out becomes “a newstart fraud de art.”

M. F. McAuliffe’s “Epic, Untitled” riffs on “the idea of America,” which remains topical as ever, as do the poem’s last lines: “I don’t want a job. // I want a future.”

Benito Di Fonzo’s wry and downbeat “What For? (Epic Triad Version)” was originally published in the Cordite-Prairie Schooner collaboration as an audio piece, while in this print version only the first part of the poem, “Utterly, But Naked,” is included. The whole poem sings of the frustrations of menial and/or pointless work, and the futility of the “rat race.” In a perhaps more lighthearted vein, in “Aargh! It Is the Zombie Apocalypse! Run away!” Esther Johnson re-writes Tom Cho’s now-classic piece “AIYO!!! An Evil Group of Ninjas Is Entering and Destroying a Call Centre!!!,” whose title hopefully speaks for itself.

Last but definitely not least, Geoff Page’s “The Anthologist” comments satirically on editors and anthologizers in the contemporary poetry world. I couldn’t resist including this poem, if only for the fact that it expresses so well some of my own feelings about categorization and the editor’s “work of love.”

While it has not been possible to include all of the pieces published in “Work” in this print anthology, the original online version on the Prairie Schooner website also boasts a number of special features, including interviews with Derek Motion and Jennifer Compton on the subject of work and its relation to poetry, visual poetry and audio pieces. While compiling the contributor biographical notes, I also asked each poet to describe their typical day at work, if only to give Prairie Schooner readers an idea of the range of occupations undertaken by Australian poets and writers.

Finally, to accompany the issue, we presented eight artworks by London-based Australian visual artist Michelle Ussher. I’ve been a big fan of her work for a long time now, and it was especially pleasing to have this opportunity to showcase her distinctive style as well as her creative artist’s statement.

I trust that readers will enjoy the works selected for this special print compilation, and I encourage poetry lovers everywhere to seek out and appreciate the special creative work that went into both their production and reproduction. My thanks to Kwame Dawes and Marianne Kunkel for their enthusiasm and support in putting this special issue together in the first place, and to Siwar Masannat and Jessica Poli for inviting me to update my editorial. To perhaps misquote Tim Gunn from Project Runway, I sincerely hope we’ve managed, once again, to “make it work!”

January 2012/February 2025

This editorial appears in print in Prairie Schooner Vol. 99/2, which compiles a selection of works from the journal’s ‘Fusion’ series. An earlier version appeared in 2012 in the Cordite–Prairie Schooner Fusion issue, ‘Work’.