♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -Can we talk just a minute or so about legal pads?

Do you use legal pads?

-Sure.

I use it now.

I'm writing a book, and I have 98 outlines, of course, and I put them on my legal pads.

-I love all different kinds of paper, but I've just done lots of work on yellow pads.

-Legal pads are a little bit longer than -- You know, they have a very particular look.

-And if you have an 8x11, you run out of paper too soon.

You might have a better idea.

By the time you get to the bottom 3 inches, you might.

There's always that hope.

♪♪ -I was 16 years old.

I needed a job.

And that turned out to be working in a printing plant.

♪♪ I learned how to make legal pads.

It was not at all what I expected.

♪♪ "Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper."

"At sixteen, I worked after high school hours at a printing plant that manufactured legal pads: Yellow paper stacked seven feet high and leaning.

as I slipped cardboard between the pages, then brushed red glue up and down the stack.

No gloves; fingertips required for the perfection of paper, smoothing the exact rectangle.

Sluggish by 9 PM, the hands would slide along suddenly sharp paper, and gather slits thinner than the crevices of the skin, hidden.

Then the glue would sting, hands oozing till both palms burned at the punchclock.

♪♪ Ten years later, in law school, I knew that every legal pad was glued with the sting of hidden cuts, that every open lawbook was a pair of hands upturned and burning."

-The basic story Martín Espada tells in his poem "Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper" is itself not hard to follow.

But from its very title, we hear that this is a poem probing and asking questions about social inequities.

These questions, historical and economic, legal, and even medical, made me want to discuss the poem's deeper implications with some experts.

And so I gathered a group of interpreters, including Espada himself... an historian... an actor... three economists... some law students... and a retired Supreme Court justice.

We began with the poem's apparently simple first line.

♪♪ -"At sixteen, I worked after high school hours."

My father made me an illegal work permit when I was 13 that said I was 16 so I could work any job.

So I worked in a department store when I was 13 on a late-night shift.

-When I was in high school, after high school hours at age 16, I worked for my uncle, who was pretty tough, in his carpet warehouse.

-My father was a builder, so I did, you know, cement work, carpentry work, demolition work.

♪♪ -I put in my day in high school, and so the work took place at night.

-Working till 9 PM?

Well, that's awfully late for an after-school job.

-"Sixteen" presumably is a reference to a labor law that prevents child labor and exploitation of children.

Sixteen is the age at which they can more or less be asked to do hours of hard manufacturing labor after school.

-This kid -- He's a kid.

After school -- When I was growing up, after school, I played sports and hung out with my friends.

♪♪ -The reality is, of course, that the poet is working almost certainly for minimum wage or not much more.

-I needed a job.

I was invisible in almost every job I had for years, and that is the price you pay when you are paid less.

♪♪ -From the mid-19th century and into the Progressive Era of the early 20th century, American writers used their pens to protest injustices of the industrial workplace.

Their writing made the invisible visible.

-There's a long literary tradition in American letters of evoking the paper mill.

♪♪ -Water-powered paper mills were among America's first industries... [ Rattling ] ...springing up next to cotton mills, with the rags from one industry providing the raw materials for the other.

♪♪ -Benjamin Franklin printed paper made out of rags.

That's rags to riches.

He advertised in The Pennsylvania Gazette.

Your old rags for "ready money."

-In 1855, Herman Melville represents the dangers of the paper mill in his dystopian short story "The Tartarus of Maids."

Paper mills were often staffed by young women, and Melville sheds light on the realities these maids suffered, working in unheated factories, using scythes to shred rags, and breathing particulates that gave them brown-lung disease.

♪♪ -Later, in the Progressive Era, there was a great deal of agitation about exploitive working practices, having people work many, many hours, having people work in toxic conditions.

♪♪ -I was going to school during the day, and then I would work at night.

It's safe to say I learned more on the job than I did in high school.

♪♪ Because a job like this would teach me about how this society really functions -- based on class, based on money.

♪♪ My father was a community organizer and also a documentary photographer.

He was a leader -- some would say the leader of the Puerto Rican community in New York City during the 1960s and early '70s.

He spoke on behalf of those without an opportunity to be heard.

And what I do with my poetry has much the same impulse, much the same energy.

♪♪ -"At sixteen, I worked after high school hours at a printing plant that manufactured legal pads: Yellow paper stacked seven feet high and leaning."

There's all those wonderful details.

-"Yellow paper... stacked seven feet high and leaning."

♪♪ -There's a sense of peril with the leaning.

-This tower of paper is taller than me.

I was reaching over my head to do what I was doing, always aware that it might come tumbling down on me.

-"Stacked seven feet high and leaning as I slipped cardboard between the pages."

-He's got to turn it into legal pads by pushing the cardboard in every so often.

-You had to make sure that this was perfect.

And you were doing it by hand.

And nothing you do by hand lends itself to perfect symmetry.

I was handed a knife that was sharply curved.

You had to separate these pads from each other.

So you had to go through and -- tchoo, tchoo, tchoo, tchoo, tchoo.

-This is manual labor.

And so what's performing the labor are the hands.

♪♪ -As a kid who worked a million jobs in high school, you think about your hands all day long -- because the jobs require different things of your hands.

-I did demolition work, knocking all the braces off, taking all the nails out.

And I remember my hands being, you know, all calloused and, you know, and you get blistered.

-Sometimes I was a dishwasher, and then sometimes, you know, I was chopping vegetables all day.

-My father's hands, my uncle's hands -- if they touched you, your face would be scratched if they touched your face.

-And then sometimes I was peeling shrimp for hours and hours, and it was -- I felt like I was peeling my own fingers.

♪♪ -♪ Alabanza ♪ "Praise the cook with a shaven head and a tattoo on his shoulder..." -You're a poet of testimony.

-"A blue-eyed Puerto Rican..." -And you read and chant your poems to be heard.

-The poem is for the stage, as well as the page.

-"Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish..." -I have a lot of admiration for wonderful writers.

-♪ Alabanza ♪ -When I learn inferior material, then you have to think, "Well, how am I gonna attack this?

How am I gonna make it interesting?"

But if I learn great material, I don't think about how I'm going to do it.

With great writing, the words will, you know, carry you.

You know, you can just surf on the... ♪♪ -"Yellow paper stacked seven feet high and leaning as I slipped cardboard between the pages, then brushed red glue up and down the stack.

No gloves; fingertips required for the perfection of paper."

-"Sluggish by 9 PM, the hands would slide along suddenly sharp paper and gather slits thinner than the crevices of the skin, hidden."

-Espada's theme in this poem is craft, the laborious and exacting work toward perfection.

The poem shows his own careful craft in virtuoso patternings of sound.

The pile up of P's and R's in "printing," "plant," "pages," "perfection," "paper."

The jabbing, hard C's and T's of "stack," "exact," "rectangle," and "punchclock."

And those thin, slit-like I's.

-"And gather slits thinner than the crevices of the skin, hidden."

♪♪ -"Slits thinner than the crevices of the skin, hidden."

♪♪ You know, when you get a paper cut, it's painful, and you point out to somebody else that it's painful, and then they mock you.

You know, "Ha, ha.

It's a paper cut.

Get over it."

♪♪ -Paper cuts are extremely common, but not in this kind of way, where every single page, in some sense, because you need that perfection, it burns you as you, like, get cut and cut and cut.

-"Then the glue would sting, hands oozing till both palms burned at the punchclock."

♪♪ -In this context, there are sort of hazardous chemicals that you're dealing with and not being safeguarded against.

-OSHA is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

It's part of the Department of Labor that tells us, what should we accept in terms of risks to people's lives?

-Were there OSHA rules?

-No.

If there was something posted on the wall, we would have laughed at it.

-Part of doing anything manually, you're gonna cut your hands.

But they don't tell you that.

No one tells you that.

You just -- They say, "Wrap it.

If it doesn't stop bleeding, we take you to the doctor."

♪♪ -The glue was red, so, of course, it looked like blood.

I used to think about the fact that my blood was going into the glue, and therefore there was blood in the legal pads.

-"Then the glue would sting, hands oozing till both palms burned."

-"Till both palms burned."

♪♪ -"No gloves; fingertips required."

-"No gloves; fingertips required."

It's not, whose fingertips?

It's not, whose gloves?

-It's not, you know, Martín's fingertips.

There's no sense of a person there.

-As the evening goes on, I am less and less myself.

I am more and more an appendage.

♪♪ -It's the alienation of industrial labor.

You know, it's like -- Melville tells the story -- the work of doing that monotonous assembly-line production that the blank-faced girls in the paper mill have is almost like erasing their very selves.

And that's conjured here, too.

"I become lost in this.

I am just my bloody hands."

♪♪ -You could think about this whole poem as being pondering value.

What is value?

This question is one that economists, political philosophers, lawyers have pondered for generations.

♪♪ Karl Marx.

His view was the value of things is the effort that workers put into it.

The way modern economists think about it is the value of a legal pad -- it's easy to see.

It's the price.

It's $2.99.

-When you think about when you and I use a legal pad, you, like, write things down, and then you sort of rip off the paper and throw it away.

You don't really ever think about what all must have gone in to actually producing this thing that ends up being deeply disposable.

[ Machinery clicking ] -I was the youngest one on that particular crew.

I looked up to the other guys.

They were funny.

They were smart.

They were tough.

But this was what they did for a living.

They were stuck.

-If they're going to finish education with high school, then a manufacturing job is a very likely and, in some areas, in fact, very attractive job relative to their alternatives, so, um, welcome to your future, kid.

♪♪ -When people look at objects, they look at this object and they think, "Why is there this imperfection there?"

They don't even ask where it came from.

-Someone made that.

It doesn't appear miraculously.

Someone made it.

♪♪ -Often, there's somebody there taking a lot of pride in making the chair or the cushion or the shirt or the phone or the legal pad.

♪♪ -"Till both palms burned at the punchclock."

♪♪ -The punchclock is a piece of paper and a machine that makes this horrible noise.

"Cha-chunk-chunk!"

-"Punchclock."

The word "punch" is here.

-The word "punchclock" is a spondee -- two hard, evenly stressed syllables that show how time itself can overpower us.

-The experience of putting your time card into a punchclock.

That's kind of a punch, too.

-How?

-Because... this is a way of keeping track of you.

-He comes in after school hours and he says, "Here I am," punches the clock, and they know he's there.

And then when he leaves, he punches it again, and they know he left.

-It is a weird thing.

Like, your time is owned once you're punched in.

Your time is no longer your own.

And in this poem, he's talking about his body is not his own.

♪♪ -I come from a generation where men, especially, were not meant to be introspective.

We were meant to bury the past.

We were meant to forget it.

And, yet, I couldn't.

-"Ten years later, in law school, I knew that every legal pad was glued with the sting of hidden cuts, that every open lawbook was a pair of hands upturned and burning."

♪♪ -While the poem's two stanzas -- one long, one much shorter -- obey no classic form, the poem's form nonetheless tells its story.

The tall first stanza looms over the second, as imposing as that teetering pile of pads.

And in the space of the stanza break, time may elapse, but conviction only strengthens.

♪♪ -This poem ends with this short chapter, and the disproportion between the two parts of the poem is incredibly effective.

-Well, the poem turns.

♪♪ There is a swerve there.

♪♪ -This poem made me think a lot about what I'm doing at law school.

The first stanza, this young person at sixteen, it's very alive.

There's something breathing there.

Ten years later in law school, it feels more sterile.

♪♪ What is the law?

The law is what you find in books.

It's not about people.

-When I got to law school, I noticed that I was surrounded, as if in a nightmare, by a sea of legal pads.

And I was surrounded, too, by people who had absolutely no idea how they were made.

-This poem really made me think a lot about just how socioeconomically concentrated law schools are.

I saw this poem really as someone who is talking as if they don't belong at their law school.

-When I was in law school, the vast majority of my classmates, including me, had never had an experience like this.

That's just not the kind of person that goes to law school eventually.

-"Was glued with the sting of hidden cuts."

I see "hidden" there as connecting to, like, you want to keep your past hidden at law school.

You may not want to disclose that you have this manufacturing past at a place where prestige and background are so essential.

-It reminds me a little bit of what the dean of my law school said.

"Isn't it interesting that we call it the law school and not the justice school?"

Law school, we're trained to be better at battling things out for whoever happens to hire us.

-Many of my colleagues at law school went on to do something other than engage with the practice of justice.

And justice should be the daily practice.

By that age, I had begun to write poetry.

I didn't write this poem at that time, but I had begun to think that way.

And so, in effect, I became a poet spy.

♪♪ "I knew that every legal pad was glued with the sting of hidden cuts."

-Where he says I "know" -- So it's a really deep and important knowledge.

-It's lived knowledge.

He knew something other lawyers didn't.

-And you can imagine that it shapes the kind of lawyer that he seeks to be.

-I ultimately became a supervisor of a legal-services program for low-income Spanish-speaking tenants in Chelsea, Massachusetts.

We did eviction defense.

We did no-heat cases, rats and roaches, crazy landlords.

-It reminds him that what he's doing with all those words over there and all those cases is trying to deal with a person whose hands may hurt or maybe worse.

♪♪ Let's not forget that the people who come to you are quite often the ones who have problems that lead to those cases in the books.

♪♪ -Oftentimes, while I was waiting for my cases to be called, I would establish myself in my office, which was the stairway next to the courtroom.

And as I sat on the stairway, I would write poetry on my legal pad.

♪♪ -This is a lawyer who's also a poet.

The fact that he is both of those things allows him to communicate about justice and equity in a much more sort of gripping way.

[ Gavel banging ] ♪♪ [ Indistinct conversations ] -When we get to the end of the poem -- "was a pair of hands upturned and burning."

That's an image of beseeching.

-Uh, first of all, it's an image grounded in what an open book actually resembles.

An open book.

There's a pair of hands.

-It's so prayerful.

-If those hands are upturned and burning, it's a way of recognizing that the system itself is on fire.

It's still burning.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪