Millrat Poems By Michael Casey

 

Millrat

Poems By Michael Casey

25th Anniversary Edition

Loom Press

Amesbury, Massachusetts www.loompress.com

ISBN: 978-1-7351689-7-5

Review by Dennis Daly

Once upon a time multileveled manufacturing plants with attached smokestacks, called mills or factories grew like mushrooms around waterfalls and river bends. They attracted the able-bodied, both men and women, who sought financial independence and dignity. What these seekers found instead in this soot-filled urban culture was a rite of passage for some, a technological trap for others, and a graveyard or graveyard road for the unlucky remainder.

Humor often got one through the interminable repetitions and the real dangers of modern machinery and toxic chemicals. Michael Casey knows this and nails the details of mill culture in his classic collection of poetic narratives entitled Millrat, which is being republished this year as a 25th Anniversary Edition by Loom Press.

Casey sets the mid-twentieth century atmosphere perfectly by opening with driving while under the influence, a poetic vignette on drunk driving, a common experience, regrettably, for many teenagers of that era. His first-person protagonist is a know-it-all snot-nosed kid, cruising with his friends in what is probably his first car. The car slams into a blinking yellow light, as cars do when driven by snot-nosed kids, who believe they have the grownup world figured out. Casey concludes the poem with just the right amount of irony and gritty dialect,

I get out and hide behind but

by this time I can see the flashing lights

and it was really something

the police cruiser goes around the rotary

takes the exit I took

and comes right to me

I was alone all my friends split

and they get me for leaving the scene

driving under the influence

and being a minor in possession

all kinds of stuff right?

I asked the guy found me

How’d you catch me?

He said he followed the leaking radiator

It leaked after the crash right?

fifty million dumb cops in the world

and this guy

has to be a genius

Throughout the collection Casey positions poems based on company posters intended to boost employee morale and promote work ethics. They effectively deliver their pop psychologies with unintended wry humor. Some are just laugh-out-loud funny. The first of these the poet titles “Positivity Poster.” Here is the heart of the piece,

…just some old fashioned ideas

avoiding waste

pride of craftsmen

work as a team

the worth of experience

all these add to the unequalled quality

at wholesale value

that make our patrons love us so

the new old fashioned

textile business

everyone in the mill

the dye house anyway

reading this stuff

would think of only one word bullshit

you can guess

what wall these posters were on

and without any effort at all

you memorize them

and with some creativity and even art

you write crude phrases

and drawings on them

it was a lot like a team effort

Respect for authority did not jump out at one upon entering the mill culture, and veterans of this work force were even less likely to defer to the demands of a foreman or manager type, at least immediately. Everyone, except new hires, had figured out their place in this society and defined it by the time it took for them to comply with any despotic order conveyed from above. Casey explains this phenomenon in his poem foreman,

Walter walked over to Alfred

and asked him

to mix up the soap

when he got the chance

and Alfred said

sure he’d do it

when he got the chance

but he never did it

so Walter walked over to Ronald

Ron why don’t ya make the soap up

when ya through what ya doin

and Ronald said

fuck you Walter

of course

Ronald went and mixed up the soap

when he got a chance

Between the mill and the neighborhoods that surrounded the mill no clear demarcation existed. Both of these rough-and-tumble inner-city zones fed into each other. Some factories doing government work had hard security to separate the two, like the General Electric in Lynn. Others, like Casey’s mill in Lowell allowed a freer interchange. The poet details a result of this overlap in his poem, the night the fight with Bill happened. The piece opens this way,

that same night

after they beat up Bill

they came back

don’t you know

shithead was mad

because Ray broke up the fight

and so he brought back his gang

a bunch of them

clean out the mill

that’s what he said

I’m gonna clean out the mill

the second shift upstairs

and the dye house

hears all the noise

ands runs down and runs up

and those assholes left fast enough

through the doors

out the windows

Forklifts are not complicated to drive. In any case most company bigwigs assume that their employees have certain basic skills and need not be bothered by training. Of course, postulations like this are terribly wrong and monumental accidents follow. In his poem, forklift driver, Casey laments the havoc that one driver, who guns his vehicle into the elevator door, can do. He says,

do you know how important

that fuckin elevator is?

Gus is up there yelling all over

for yarn and this is holdin up the knitting room

the napping room and the whole place

gonna be backed up now

they tell me Gus is pissin and moanin up there

like he was pissin razor blades

Very few poets chronicle this essential part of our culture’s history, which many of us, or our parents, or our grandparents participated in. Poets who choose mill/factory life and that type of work experience as their subjects are very few indeed. Casey’s wry verse compositions delving into this blue-collar bastion enlighten and exhilarate. His use of local language is spot on. What Casey does, he does very, very well.