Working Class Redux

Once again, a favorite blog topic is making the rounds. I've weighed in before, but I'll do so again here. Most of the comments that follow are cribbed from Reb's comment boxes.
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I sometimes forget what a strange place I live in. In my neck of the woods, the only poets with any sort of public acclaim, perceived validity, etc. are "working class poets." Mind you, this has very little to do with one's background, or current occupation, but rather, how many poems one writes about factories, tree-falling, and so forth. If, like me, you come from a small town with working-class parents, but don't happen to write about it, you are not treated kindly by the "real poets." Folks like me are seen as somehow aberrant, enemies of poetry, enemies of the "common folk." Of course the "working class poets" hold comfy academic chairs and have soft hands.

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"Working Class," in my country, as an adjective applied to poetry, is inextricably bound with "plain narrative." What the soft-handed academics (who may have once spent a summer working in a Kleenex factory, or who visited Hawaii once to reconnect with "their people" but got full on Loco Moco and came home early) who write "working class" poetry assume is that the "common people" are also simple people and that they have no interest in poetry that isn't as straightforward and monosyllabic as a third-grade textbook. I'm exaggerating, but only very slightly. They write about "love" and other universals, but formally, they're suspicious of anything more radical than Phil Levine or Sharon Olds. And they are big on identity politics. I ran into some big trouble a few years back because my poems didn't have lumber mills and/or refried beans in them. Hey, that's the title for my next book: "Working Class Spic."