Life & Wisdom Quote by Ishmael Reed

Reed’s line refuses the cozy myth of poetry as pure inspiration - a lightning bolt, a muse, a vibe. He drags the art back into the body. “Hard manual labor” is a deliberately unglamorous metaphor: repetition, strain, calluses, time clocks. By yoking that phrase to “the imagination,” he collapses the false split between mental creativity and physical work, insisting that imagination is not an airy privilege but a craft discipline with real costs.

The specific intent is partly defensive and partly provocative. Reed has spent a career arguing against institutions that treat certain kinds of writing - especially Black, satirical, vernacular, politically unorthodox writing - as spontaneous “expression” rather than rigorous construction. Calling it labor demands respect in the only language America reliably honors: work. It also needles the culture industry that wants poets to perform authenticity on demand while underpaying them, as if the product sprang up effortlessly.

The subtext is class-conscious: manual labor evokes workers whose effort is visible yet routinely discounted. Reed flips that dynamic onto poetry, a field often framed as precious or elitist. He’s also hinting at process: drafts as scaffolding, line breaks as carpentry, revision as hauling weight. The imagination, in this view, isn’t a magic well; it’s a job site. Poetry “works” when it bears the marks of that work - not in obvious sweat, but in precision that looks inevitable only after the fact.