Mick Vranich, "Radnik Pisar"

Last year, I was at a used book sale in Livonia and came across a copy of Radnik Pisar by Mick Vranich. Although I was not familiar with Vranich, I was in the middle of a poetry/small press phase (it happens), so I was pretty excited to find a book by a Detroit poet.

The book was published in 1983 by 2x4 Press in Detroit. The author bio on the last page reads, "Mick Vranich was born in 1946 downriver from Detroit. At eighteen, he was a general laborer at Zug Island; at twenty, a scrapballer and hooker at Great Lakes Steel; later, a squaring shear operator at Ford Stamping Plant. Other jobs include driving 130,000 miles delivering car parts in San Francisco, where he wore out three trucks. His first book, Salad Surreal: Discernible by Distortion, appeared in 1971. Vranich presently lives in Detroit and makes his living as a carpenter."

A note on the first page says that "Radnik Pisar" is Serbian for "Worker Writer," and Vranich definitely seems to embody the persona of the introspective laborer, alone with his thoughts. In "Scrapballer," he describes the beginning of the night shift at the steel mill, when he cleared his mind of thoughts of home and "poured a cup of coffee from my thermos and lit a cigarette and watched the steel spooling."

Vranich's writing style is some mixture of vague abstraction and the intense straightforwardness of Charles Bukowski, and it's usually very visual and chaotic. I don't want to try to speak for Vranich or make some grand statement about what he's trying to communicate, but I can say that the world often seems very hostile, lonely, and paranoid in these poems. Some take place from inside the home, sensing an unwelcoming world outside, and in others, the conflict and confusion seems to come from inside the poet's own head. That working class Detroit imagery permeates many of them, as in "Invade the Will," when Vranich is "walking on ice to the beer store / with a bag full of cans."

My favorite is a very brief poem called "Saxaphones in the Sunlight" --

"i think i'll take a walk
it's very bright outside
i know i have the ability
to walk in the streets
i have seen me there
i hear saxaphones in the sunlight
i hear warnings outside the door."

***

Vranich worked as a carpenter until February 2010, when he was seriously injured in a fall at a construction site. He died on March 29. Photos from the April 4 memorial can be seen at Tribes of the Cass Corridor, and the Metro Times printed some remembrances on March 30.