Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Dorianne Laux’s “What I Wouldn’t Do” is a poignant exploration of labor, identity, and human connection, as filtered through the speaker’s recollection of her various jobs. With unflinching detail and lyrical precision, the poem traverses a landscape of working-class experiences, uncovering moments of beauty, drudgery, and revelation in the mundane.

The poem opens with a declaration of the one job the speaker could not bear to keep—selling TV Guide subscriptions over the phone. This serves as an entry point into a broader reflection on a lifetime of odd jobs, each vividly recounted and imbued with sensory detail. The speaker’s voice is conversational yet poetic, grounding the narrative in a personal history that is at once unique and universal. These jobs—fast food worker, laundromat attendant, house cleaner—represent the kind of labor that often goes unnoticed or unappreciated, yet Laux elevates them through her careful attention to their textures and rhythms.

The imagery throughout the poem is particularly striking. In the laundromat, the speaker recalls “kids screaming from the bathroom and twenty dryers on high,” a cacophony of sound that underscores the chaos and tedium of the work. Yet even here, there is a moment of transcendence, as she describes “pressing bright coins from a palm,” transforming an ordinary exchange into something almost ritualistic. Similarly, while cleaning houses, she finds pleasure in holding a “hand-blown glass bell from Czechoslovakia,” marveling at its craftsmanship and the “foreign, A-minor ping” it emits. These moments suggest a capacity for finding wonder in the smallest details, even amidst the humdrum of labor.

The donut shop, described as the speaker’s favorite job, becomes a luminous focal point in the poem. The solitary night shifts, surrounded by “sugar and squat mounds of dough,” are rendered with an almost cinematic glow. The neon sign outside “gilding [her] white uniform yellow, then blue, then drop-dead red” captures the surreal beauty of this nocturnal world, a space of quiet industry and fleeting enchantment. The imagery here is lush and vivid, contrasting with the more utilitarian depictions of the other jobs, which speaks to the speaker’s deeper connection to this particular work.

At its core, however, the poem is about human connection—or the lack thereof. The job of selling TV Guide subscriptions becomes a metaphor for the broader sense of alienation that pervades much of modern labor. The speaker recounts the act of dialing strangers, their “held breath” on the other end of the line, and their “disappointment when they realized [she] wasn’t who they thought [she] was.” This moment encapsulates the distance and impersonality of certain interactions, where the speaker’s voice, stripped of individuality, becomes merely a function of the job. It is not just the monotony of the work that drives her to quit, but the weight of this unmet expectation, the profound human longing for connection that cannot be satisfied through such mechanical exchanges.

The structure of the poem mirrors the speaker’s journey through these jobs, with each stanza functioning like a snapshot or vignette. The rhythm is steady yet varied, capturing the ebb and flow of memory. Laux’s language is both precise and evocative, blending the tactile—“polishing the knick-knacks of the rich”—with the lyrical—“dipping the ten-foot measuring stick into the hole in the blacktop... dripping its liquid gold.” This interplay between the physical and the poetic reflects the dual nature of the speaker’s experience: grounded in the gritty reality of work, yet always seeking moments of transcendence.

The poem’s closing lines circle back to the theme of human connection, revealing the emotional undercurrent that ties these disparate jobs together. The speaker’s aversion to the telemarketing job stems not from the mechanics of the work, but from the “disappointment” she hears in the voices on the other end of the line. This disappointment is deeply human, a reminder of the fragile threads that bind us to one another, even in fleeting encounters.

In “What I Wouldn’t Do,” Laux invites us to reflect on the nature of work and its role in shaping identity. Through her nuanced portrayal of labor, she reveals not only its challenges but also its unexpected moments of grace and beauty. The poem resonates as a testament to resilience and to the human capacity for finding meaning and connection in even the most unassuming of places.

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