The poems of this work, in four voices, take the form of a cabaret and explore the women who worked as wage laborers in Weimar Berlin. The chorus, ethnographer’s notes, and coda poems borrow language from Sigfried Kracauer’s Salaried Masses, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Verso, 1998), an ethnographic study of wage labor in Weimar Berlin originally published in 1930.
I/Self/Woman in Berlin
1930
I wake, put on a silk slip, a wool skirt, and cut
past the building bombed to rubble
in the war. Ruin sculpts the air,
moth holed, like the medieval castle
without a roof I played in as a girl.
The treasury prints more paper.
My purse thickens. I sit at a table
and type—and last night’s gin
tastes like mulberries on my tongue.
My pulse at my temple flickers
like a copper butterfly,
and the moist morning
feels like another mouth—her
lips startling the back of my neck.
Chorus Played on a Victrola by the Ethnographer: Every Postcard Carries its Outgoing Stamp
One of my friends is pregnant.
They deny it. The men The boys.
Deny.
What floats on the surface of this?
*
I begin singing in a passable voice
breaking out of my cage—
the question is whether the image catches reality,
something creative.
*
We come to the city in search of adventure and roam
like comets with our small incomes.
*
I run away in my beret with the little point on top.
*
After closing time at home in my furnished room
I gulp down strong coffee then off and away—
Ethnographer’s notes: Resemblance
The fantastic sunset is real.
Red, yellow, and green tints—yes—.
A number of women
punch cards and write.
Heaven, what a scheme.
We slip in short breaks for ventilation.
A genuine oleograph is a print
textured to resemble an oil painting—
the whole system, marvelous.
If you suddenly fall
ill, you said, can someone take you-
r place? Yes. I
said yes.
Chorus Played on a Victrola by the Ethnographer: Treetop Calm
One glance and the director at once knows
no sound penetrates the room
hardly any papers on the desk
He points to diagrams colorful networks
of lines to illustrate the whole
I recall the days troops were on the march
the war lost Light signals
inform visitors at the door whether they should enter
or move on this treetop calm everywhere
in the higher spheres We enter a room—
countless booklets the sum
of functions performed a virtuoso
Coda: More than Any Film
O, weekend.
A hundred reports
of a factory do not add
to its reality.
Can the city
be reproduced?
Photographs of a hundred
views, the mosaic
of single observations?
I perform
mechanical tasks,
interchangeable,
private. But I am
no less a person.
