Matthew Rice’s book-length poem plastic is set over the course of a 12-hour night shift in a factory near Belfast which produces plastic table latches for aeroplane seats. The Northern Irish poet worked in such a factory to support himself while undertaking a part-time literature degree, during which time he wrote a first collection, The Last Weather Observer (2021); plastic is the result of a subsequent PhD in creative writing. Divided into 75 sections headed by timestamps – running from 19:57 through 08:00, plus a prologue and epilogue – the poem forms a sustained narrative with a single speaker, a version of Rice, though each section, usually no longer than a page, also reads as a self-contained poem, varying in form and often shifting in register and tempo. Its epigraph, taken from Jacques Rancière, poses ‘the question of maintaining or transgressing the barrier that separates those who think from those who work with their hands’.
Finding little fulfilment in nightly submission to the factory, plastic stands apart from classic pastoral and Romantic idealizations of labour – it bears closer comparison with the industrial poetry of the Calfornian poet Fred Voss, who, in an inversion of Rice’s trajectory, left academia to work in factories, and Philip Levine, who wrote about working in the Detroit auto industry. Rice leaves the precise nature of work at the factory relatively murky, however. We know it is repetitive, that the speaker operates a machine which ‘beep-beeps the birth of another plastic aeroplane part’, that sometimes there is knifework or machines need fixing, that it can be dangerous; not long into the shift, a co-worker is injured by falling machinery (‘his crushed wrist and hand / from which, at 21:07, / blood escapes.’). This nocturnal diary is ultimately more occupied by the relationship between poetry and factory work, how the former is shaped by the latter, how the latter is infiltrated by the former, and the social relations between the two.
Throughout, brevity of expression often lends itself to poignancy, as in the seven-line 00:00, which asks ‘how does one account for loneliness?’, or the eight-line 20:01 which paints a warm, idyllic picture, ‘a shaft of morning sun / warming his fleece’ before tragedy, ‘they found him hanging / at the first klaxon.’ Rice is attuned to the flashes of beauty and novelty in this utilitarian space designed to produce identical objects – his gaze resists the monotony of the shift, noticing ‘the peacock-tail / of sparks Billy’s grinder conjures’, the ‘pumpenvalve trail’ of a snail in the carpark or a crisp packet dancing in the wind.
The factory-worker’s mind wanders, even as he remains ‘tethered to the machine’. Unfolding during the hours when most are asleep, the poem seems to follow the fluent yet obscure logic of dreams. In the REM hours of 4am, Rice takes the reader from the Alps to the blue eyes of Paul Newman, back to the plastic-moulding machine, then to the medieval hero Sir Gawain imagined as a child. Here the plasticity of the title comes to bear, evoking not just the material of the products but also malleability and artifice. The segues are strange but not jolting as we follow the speaker abroad, into the past, across other media and languages, even as the time-stamps – which give the impression of constantly checking the clock – keep us tied to the factory shift.
The night-dreaming that occurs in plastic is also more materialist. Rice draws on Rancière’s Proletarian Nights: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (1981), which quotes a locksmith named Jérôme-Pierre Gilland, who in 1849 dreamed of another vocation: ‘I would have liked to have been a painter. But poverty enjoys no privileges, not even that of choosing this or that fatigue for a living.’ Like the French carpenters and tailors, shoemakers and typographers of the 1830s and 40s documented in Rancière’s study, the speaker in plastic harbours ambitions of escaping the factory and becoming a poet. Rancière’s archival research sought to show workers were not helplessly ‘caught in the mesh of ideology’ nor ignorant of the laws by which they were dominated, but fomenting ‘revolution’ through the daily acts by which they took ‘back the time that was refused them’ – ‘the time to discuss, write, compose verses, or develop philosophies’. For Rancière the worker who is truly dangerous to the prevailing order is the one who can break the barrier between ‘those who carried out useful labour from those who pondered aesthetics’.
‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in supply-chains’, Rice riffs at the start of 22:22, ‘with an option to go hungry, or find another factory / to feel the same in’. The words play on the way factories are production lines, not just of latches but of workers, homogenized by mechanized labour, which erodes individuality and even humanity – there are references throughout to cattle, rats, pigeons and even ‘humanoid robots’. The speaker is alert to the disjunction between manual labour and the vocation to which he aspires. A doubling pattern is introduced at the start of the night shift: ‘my hands are each its twin’. The hand which chamfers plastic edges with a Stanley knife has its double in the hand which holds a ‘contraband’ copy of Gawain. This doubled self is echoed later, when the speakers describes how ‘I rehearse each shift / to justify myself to myself’. A rehearsal is something one repeats, but it is also something you do in preparation for the real performance – as though to suggest Rice’s factory work is not his real work but only the prelude to, the material for, the poem we are reading. Yet there is also a suggestion that the factory work is the ‘real’ work that ‘justifies’ his poetry.
This relationship is also worked through at the level of language. At one point, the speaker underlines how the factory-worker’s experience does not lend itself to traditional symbolism: ‘for us stars mean only night shift, / insanity of depth’. Other sections assume a florid lyric register verging on pastiche, as when the speaker describes the ‘fugacious O’ of a whistling colleague’s lips; ‘O for noise cancelling headphones, / O and that podcast I forgot to download’ – the archaism emphasising the discrepancy between factory and poetry. Yet elsewhere its language is aesthetically generative: 3:02 is compromised of factory ‘lexicon’ (‘cavity, barrel, latch, button, cycle’), 23:46 muses on different words for ‘the metal dust churned up / by the steel cutter’ (‘shavings’, ‘swarf’ or ‘chips’). Can the factory be represented by typical forms and vocabulary, or does it require its own?
Early on the speaker recalls his interview for the positon: ‘when I uttered my own name, / the awareness of self, / as if I hadn’t earned the vowels, / rang strange in my head’, suggesting the factory alienates him from himself. In another section, lines beginning with ‘I’ are scattered across the page, evoking a fracturing of self. The ‘I’ is identified by what he does and wears rather than what he thinks and feels: ‘I uniform’, ‘I mirror’, ‘I clock in’, ‘I obey’, ‘I stand’, ‘I lie, I lie’, the repetition implying both prostration and deception. The sense that the speaker is engaged in some kind of performance – whether as worker or as poet or both – reinforces the split between working and thinking. Can you be a poet in a factory or do you have to withdraw from it? The factory is on one hand productive of poetry – the inspiration for plastic. On the other, Rice has said he could not write about the factory whilst working there; he needed ‘distance’. Only once he had left was he able to contain the factory within poetry rather than the factory contain him.
Rancière describes ‘stolen time’ as the means ‘by which men and women wrenched themselves out of an identity formed by domination’. The speaker of plastic’s attempt to wrest poetry from his labour might be compared to a musical rubato whereby a musician deviates from the prescribed tempo, slowing or speeding up certain passages, ‘stealing time’ for an act of individual expression (though some theories hold that it must be paid back). The timestamps are reminders of the dominance of the factory clock, but there are varying intervals between each, changes of tempo: sometimes there are half-hour breaks, other times Rice packs a sequence of poems into consecutive minutes. Here it’s as though there isn’t enough time to say all there is to say, poetic inspiration chafing against institutional time.
There are moments when time is ceded to the shift and its timestamps, but others where ‘another timeline’ is glimpsed. Sometimes it is actually the machine that offers glimpses of other possibilities, as at 05:03 when watching the moulding machine birth its plastic tokens the speaker sees ‘every open heart’s possibility / of another life’. But escapes, too, are delimited by the factory: on holiday the speaker recognizes his handiwork on the plane, and his dreams are subsumed by panic before the shift starts, ‘It’s Monday tomorrow, it always is when dreams are alarms.’ The work is haunted by lost futures, emerging in repeated references to childhood promise. The final poem of the shift offers the clearest articulation of this mourning, when the speaker clocks out and his phone presents a childhood photo. He wonders, ‘whatever happened to that bow-tied little dreamer . . . who knows / who I wanted to be / in that past whose future / never came.’ Rice may write that ‘it’s only in dreams you’re truly free’, but in plastic dreams appear consigned to an irrecoverable childhood or an inaccessible other life.
Towards the end of the shift, at 06:15, Rice begins jotting down phrases that will form part of plastic’s prologue:
On the toilet I open my ‘notes’ app and begin to tap:
as accidents wait
as boredom waits
as illness waits
as comfort waits
Here we see the worker en route to becoming the poet. Yet insofar as as the speaker is a version of Rice whom he has left behind, the existence of plastic in a sense can’t help but maintain the barrier it seeks to transgress – an emblem of the division between dominated worker and emancipated thinker inscribed by the social order. Though Rice has escaped the factory where he worked in part to fund this dream, it is striking that the poem doesn’t acknowledge the possibility of this fate. Rice’s real escape is a far-off dream for its fictionalized speaker, whose poetry remains within and defined by the factory. The liberal notion that we are free agents navigating a meritocratic world implies that all you need is a dream and the entrepreneurial spirit to pursue it. In upholding the dream of a poetic escape from waged labour while showing how the fatigue by which we live circumscribes and determines us – our time and thoughts, our perceptions and our poetry – Rice’s book exposes this idea as another dream.
Read on: T. C. N., ‘The Nightwatchman’, NLR I/134.