Well he's a steel town disciple

Working class poetics is stylistically different from historically celebrated poetry, in that it serves as a functioning text, which reveals the position that the working class holds in society. It is used as a  social commentary rather than attempting to emulate ideals of beauty and perfection.

Lauter ( 2005), states that there are three issues that distinguishes working class poetry from other styles, " the details one chooses, the priority or emphasis one gives them and the particular terms, the language, in which one registers" (lauter, 2005,p.66). 

In working class poetry for example there is an emphasis on daily humiliations, industrial violence, struggles money and power. Daily life is not glorified but bluntly expressed using often colloquial and crude language.The registry of their language is as Sarah Attfield describes, " to record the realistic speech patterns of people who do not speak Standard English nor conduct conversations along intellectually analytic lines. Therefore, they avoid heightened language in a deliberate attempt to prevent alienating their working-class readers and the musicality and 'physicality' of speech often provides the natural rhythm and shape of the poetry"(Attfield, 2007, p.52-53). Which corresponds with Raymond William's (1960), suggestion that working class is associated with the 'collective', where as bourgeoise is aligned with the individual (lauter, 2005, p.63). 

 Furthermore, they don't overuse metaphors as this aesthetic requires distance and contemplation, their work has an urgency and fast pace that flows to an industrial beat.Doesn’t overdo the metaphors, those types of aesthetics require distance and contemplation, rather than the urgency and drilling fast paced nature of working class poetry.

Counting Tips 

for Janet Zandy 

My mother came home from work,

sat down at tbe kitchen table

and counted ber tips, nickel by nickel,

quarter by quarter, dime by dime.

I sat across from her reading Yeats.

No moonlight graced our window

and it wasn't Pre-Raphaelite pallor

that bleached my mother's cheeks.

I've never been able to forget

the moment she said- 

interrupting The Lake Isle ofInnisfree"

I told him to go to hell."

A Back Bay businessman

had held back the tip, asking,

"How much do you think you're worth?"

And she'd said, "You can go to hell!"

All evening at the Winthrop Room she'd fed

stockbrokers, politicians, mafioso capos.

I was eighteen, a commuter student at BU,

riding the MTA to classes every day

and she was forty-one in her frilly cap,

pink uniform, and white waitress shoes.

"He just laughed but his wife was there

and she complained and the boss fired me."

Later, after a highball, she cried

and asked me not to tell my father

(at least not yet) and Ben Franklin

stared up from his quarter

looking as if he thought she deserved it,

and Roosevelt, from his dime, reminded her

she was twenty years shy of Social Security.

But the buffalo on the nickel. He-

he seemed to understand. 

(By John Gilgun). 

Attfield, S. ,2009, ‘The Poetics of Class’ from Working class Voices: The Working Class Experience in Contemporary Australian Poetry, VDM: Saarbruken, 40-62

Lauter, P, 2005, ‘UnderConstruction: Working Class Writing’ in Sherry Linkon and John Russo (eds) New Working Class Studies, Ithica: Cornell University Press, 63-77