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This essay will explore the idea that while innovation and formal experiment within poetry have been persistently figured as the fruits of male, predominantly bourgeois literary production, the material conditions and the pressured social contexts of working-class women's lives exert a peculiar power over the rhetorics and aesthetics of our poetry, driving a relentless innovation. Such innovation has the potential to reinvent poetic method, to renegotiate the terms of social as well as textual encounter, and to resist the tyranny of 'good' middle-class prosody.