Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Alan Shapiro’s "Manufacturing" is a meditation on masculinity, power, and inheritance, set against the backdrop of industrial labor and familial expectation. The poem’s setting—a factory office where the speaker’s father and uncle conduct business—is rendered with cinematic precision, capturing the rhythms of work, the crude language of power, and the unspoken codes of masculinity that shape the speaker’s coming of age. The title itself is layered, referring not just to the literal act of manufacturing goods but to the manufacturing of identity, of gender roles, and of the emotional detachment required to navigate a world driven by competition and survival.

The opening scene establishes a landscape of commerce and labor: "Up in the billboard, over old South Station, / the Captain, all wide grin and ruddy cheek, / held up a golden shot of Cutty Sark / high as the skyline where the sunset spread / a gold fan from the twig-like spars and rigging / of a departing clipper ship." The juxtaposition of the whiskey advertisement with the real sun rising over the city creates an immediate contrast between illusion and reality. The Captain, with his artificial cheer and carefully constructed image of masculine pleasure, presides over a grittier world below—where "agitated horns, brakes, fingers, and catcalls" merge into the hum of daily labor. The transition from this external world into the factory office brings the reader into a space of negotiation, dominance, and exclusion.

Inside, the father and uncle conduct business, their conversation mixing logistics with profanity: "The Century order, did it get out last night? / And had the buckles come from Personal? / Who’d go do Jaffey? Who’d diddle Abramowitz / and Saperstein? Those cocksucking sons of bitches, / cut their balls off if they fuck with us . . ." The crude language is more than just aggression—it is a form of masculine posturing, a way of exerting control over others in a competitive economic world. The young speaker, now old enough to witness this language firsthand, absorbs it with a mixture of fascination and discomfort. The enjambment in "I listened (blushing, / ashamed of blushing)" reveals his self-consciousness, his awareness that to react with embarrassment is itself a failure of the masculinity he is expected to embrace.

The poem then shifts to a meditation on what it means to "be a man": "It did and didn’t have to do with bodies, / being a man, it wasn’t fixed in bodies, / but somehow passed between them, going to / by being taken from, ever departing, / ever arriving, unstoppable as money." Here, masculinity is described not as something inherent but as something transactional—something gained by exerting power over others. The metaphor of money reinforces the idea that masculinity, like capital, circulates through domination and submission. The speaker internalizes the factory’s brutal logic: "Either you gave a fucking, or you took one, / did or were done to, it was simple as that." The binaries are stark—manhood is defined by the ability to dominate, and those who fail to assert themselves are reduced to the status of women in this hierarchy.

This lesson is reinforced through the story of Tony, a factory worker who has passed out drunk in the bathroom. The uncle’s dismissal—"The lush, the no good lush"—establishes the lack of patience for weakness in this environment. Yet the father, tasked with removing Tony, does so with surprising tenderness: "my father was gently wrestling with the man, / trying to hold him steady while his free hand / shimmied the tangled shorts and trousers up / over the knees and hips." The physical care with which he dresses Tony, "even got / the shirt tucked in, the pants zipped deftly enough / for Tony not to notice, though he did," suggests a residual humanity buried beneath the hardened exterior.

But the speaker recognizes that this tenderness is not kindness—it is efficiency: "I knew the tenderness that somewhere else / could possibly have been a lover’s or a father’s / could here be only an efficient way / to minimize the trouble." The father’s skillful detachment is not just a necessity but a survival mechanism. The factory does not allow space for true care, only for the expedient removal of inconvenience. And yet, the father’s "too adept" handling of Tony hints at an internal contradiction—does he suppress his emotions, or does he no longer feel them at all?

This detachment is reinforced in the final image of the men and women at work, reduced to mechanical extensions of the machines they operate: "The men fast at the riveters and pressers / and the long row of women at the Singers / were oil now even more than men or women, / mute oil in the loud revving of the place." The workers have become part of the machinery, stripped of individuality. The explicit gender divide—men at the riveters, women at the sewing machines—further enforces the rigid structures that govern this world. The "thrusting rods," "furious hammers," and "whirring blades" evoke both industrial power and sexual dominance, linking labor and masculinity inextricably to violence and control.

The poem concludes with the father ushering the speaker into this world, placing an arm around him and offering words that are both affectionate and transactional: "Come on now, Al, it’s time." The Captain on the billboard grins wider, his image now looming larger, as if in approval of this rite of passage. The father’s voice, softened against the noise of the factory, carries an undercurrent of expectation: "how much ass / he had to kiss to get me this, and I / should be a man now and not disappoint him." The final phrase—"should be a man now and not disappoint him"—encapsulates the weight of expectation, the pressure to conform, to suppress, to participate in the same system that has shaped his father.

"Manufacturing" is both a coming-of-age poem and a critique of the rigid, transactional nature of masculinity. Shapiro captures the tension between intimacy and power, between inheritance and resistance. The speaker is initiated into a world where survival depends on dominance, where tenderness is efficient but not sentimental, where the lines between human and machine blur under the demands of labor and expectation. The poem does not offer resolution—only the quiet weight of inevitability, as the father leads his son forward into the machinery of manhood.

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