What Work Is

Philip Levine envisioned himself as a poet of the working class, and “What Work Is” certainly attests to that mission. The poem’s title is itself a declaration of definition—it unabashedly states that the body of the poem will define “work” (Line 2). While the poem in its entirety builds a more complex definition, the question raised by the title is answered in the poem’s opening couplet: work is when “We stand in the rain in a long line / waiting at Ford Highland Park” (Lines 1-2). This definition of work is specific: it does not refer to work in the general sense, which can include any sort of effort whether paid or not (emotional work, for instance). Additionally, this definition excludes upper-class work, whether white-collar, intellectual, or artistic. Levine’s definition of work here is the hard labor undertaken by working-class Americans for the purpose of survival.

The poem’s moment of fourth-wall breaking bolsters this definition, where the speaker directly addresses the reader, saying, “if you’re / old enough to read this you know what / work is, although you may not do it” (Lines 3-5). Even if a reader of poetry is privileged enough “not [to] do” (Line 5) the employment-line hard labor Levine discusses, they are still a member of a world where that work is all around, supporting the reader in ways that cannot be missed.