working-class rhetorics vs. working-class poetics

In addition to farming a plot of land in Mantua, Ohio, my great-grandfather spent the Great Depression writing sarcastic poems about FDR. He published a chapbook called "The New Deal" that collected eight of his ditties, each a deliberative meditation on rural, working-class libertarianism.

The Grounded Ear

We have a President Roosevelt,
the thing that makes me madder,
Is how craftily he sneaked around
And climbed up Teddy's ladder.

If you politicians would succeed,
Yes? Well then, here's the moral!
He rode up to our White House chair
Astride a whiskey barrel...

To his country stuck in banker mud
His order pedagogic,
"Lift yourselves by boot straps,"
Just simply is not logic.

All partisan, sectarian content. Political discourse. Quintessential deliberate rhetoric, tackling specific, context-bound, civic concerns.

And yet I'm fascinated by grandpa's use of poetry as not only a means for engaging in civic discourse, but also as a means to articulate his own class status. I see The New Deal as a statement of working-class identity.

Is a "working-class rhetoric" even possible? Our culture doesn't have a vocabulary for having non-fiction discussions about class status. We lack terms with agreed-upon meanings. Statements about class (especially working-class) status are politically divisive, perpetually contested. And yet here's a book of poetry that serves a rhetorical function and a self-defining function.

Julie Lindquist, in her ethnography of a working-class bar in Chicago, found that among her respondents class stood out as a "felt identity." Lindquist writes, "they are unable to name themselves as a sociopolitical entity…[and] have no conventional language in which to articulate a shared political predicament." Her thesis involves the notion that political debate at the bar becomes a performance of class identity, a substitute for a meta-cognitive language for articulating class status.

I think poetry functions in a similar vein for my grandpa. A performance of his working-class identity, a stand-in for a critical vocabulary for saying 'this is who I am.' I'm thinking poetics (and maybe by poetics I mean "performance") allows for this in a way that "rhetorics" can't.

So I'm toying with the notion that "working-class rhetorics" are impossible, whereas "working-class poetics" instead provides for opportunities for self identification, identity construction, and political discourse.