The Justice Poetry of Miriam Tane

Abstract

In decade following its successful 1933 general strike, but from its beginnings 1900, too, International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) devoted considerable resources to its workers' education. (1) Perhaps most famously, ILGWU financed composer Harold Rome's Pins and Needles, enormously popular 1937 musical about exploited, defiant, and occasionally romantic women garment workers performed by ILGWU members themselves. The union also ran several education centers and around New York City, as well as a sprawling summer school complex upstate New York. At these centers, as Daniel Katz explains, ILGWU offered its workers classes English language, economics, art, literature, music, drama, philosophy, and And like many other AFL and, later, CIO union newspapers during this period, newspaper of ILGWU, Justice, routinely published stories and poems sent by its readers. The editors of Justice also nurtured a number of regularly appearing ILGWU poet laureates, including subject of this essay, prolific and talented Miriam Tane, who, between 1939 and 1946, would publish over one hundred poems newspaper. Though we know for certain, Tane's accessible and striking poetry probably found a sympathetic and enthusiastic audience among over 200,000 members of ILGWU and readers of its biweekly newspaper. Since then, however, like much of remarkable poetry published union newspapers throughout 1930s, it has met with an unqualified critical indifference. Tane's work would thus seem to have fallen into what Tillie Olsen, a contemporary of Tane, famously called darken literary history. These are not natural silences, Olsen insists, that necessary for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural; unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot (xi). Having battled those silences herself, Olsen is above all concerned with relationship of circumstances--including class, color, sex; times, climate into which one is born--to creation of (xi). In 1930s, Miriam Tane outwitted circumstances had silenced other writers of her class and sex and, to some degree, would go on to silence her creation of literature after 1930s. Her work, however, suffers from another kind of silence, related to which Olsen broadly calls the times, climate into which one is born: this case, a literary-critical climate that, from 1930s when Tane published her poetry until very recently, could not discern value of writing workers did manage to bring into being. In this article, I hope to break silence has attached to Miriam Tane's poetry. As such, I am less interested why Tane's poetry met with silence than starting a dialogue about poetry remains. As Cary Nelson argues Repression and Recovery, [F]or texts previously ignored or belittled, our greatest appreciative act may be to give them fresh opportunities for an influential life (14); those texts can gain new life, he continues, in part through an effort to understand what cultural work [they] may have been able to do an earlier time (11). My aim here is to do just that: to give contemporary readers a sense of Tane's range as a poet, sequence of topics she addressed, shape of her early career, and cultural (and political) work of her published poetry. To end, I offer a brief biographical sketch of Tane, followed by readings of some of poems published Justice between 1939 and 1946. Most of those poems restate themes of liberation and escape emerge her first published poem, Spring, though what one tries to escape from (sweatshops, cities, wars, and shopping) and how one tries to escape change with Tane and world around her. …