If we’re going to assert that poetry is work, we need to go beyond the semantics and difficulty and consider how it’s valued alongside other types of labor. The movie Paterson and Jim Jarmusch give us the opportunity to compare the work of making poetry with material forms of creative work and the waged work of bus driving. By highlighting the contrast between Paterson writing at work and his wife Laura making things at home, we’re immediately confronted with the historically lopsided and gendered division of labor that takes place in the public and private spheres.
Political philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that the division of public and private realms is partially linked to the prioritization of intellectual over manual labor in classical Greek society. Arendt saw poetry, which is made purely of language, as the most human and least worldly of the arts. On the other hand, Richard Sennett saw craft as a merging of mental and manual labor, with the products representing the intimate connection between the hand and head.
However, the American philosopher Richard Sennett acknowledges that not all crafts are seen as equal, with parenting being viewed as different in character than plumbing or programming. Jarmusch defends the character of Laura against accusations of regressive gender roles, pointing out that she lives how she wants and is entrepreneurial, even if it’s in a domestic set-up. Jarmusch sees domesticity as a fact of how social structure works, but he also emphasizes the essential difference between the approaches to their respective crafts of the two main characters.
