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Introduction 1 Notes Introduction 1 . Similar attempts to link poetry to immediate political occasions have been made by Mark van Wienen in Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War and by John Marsh’s anthology You Work Tomorrow . See also Nancy Berke’s Women Poets on the Left and John Lowney’s History, Memory, and the Literary Left: Modern American Poetry, 1935–1968 . 2 . Jos é E. Lim ó n discusses the “mixture of poetry and politics” that informed the Chicano movements of the 1960s and 1970s (81). On Vietnam antiwar poetry, see Bibby. There are, of course, countless studies of individual authors that trace their relationships to politics and social movements. I incorporate the relevant studies throughout the chapters. 3 . In analogy to Wallerstein’s model, the literary world has been conceptualized as a largely autonomous cultural space constituted by power struggles between centers, semi-peripheries, and peripheries, most prominently by Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova (cf. Moretti; Casanova). But since Wallerstein insists that the world-system is concerned with world-economies (global capitalism) and world-empires (nation-states aiming for geopolitical dominance), systems, that is, which cut across cultural and institutional zones, it seems more plausible to posit the modern world-system as the historical horizon of textual production and interpretation. One of the first uses of world-systems analysis for a concep- tualization of postmodernity and postmodern art was Fredric Jameson’s essay “Culture and Finance Capital” ( Cultural Turn 136–61). 4 . Ramazani remains elusive about the extraliterary reference of these poets’ imagination. He argues, for instance, that Melvin Tolson’s Harlem Gallery , as a “poem of polyglot hybridity and pan-cultural allusiveness, like many other modern and contemporary poems, explodes mononationalist conceptions of culture and pushes toward the transnational and perhaps even the global” ( Transnational Poetics x). The opaque style of this sentence as well as its omis- sion of Tolson’s Marxism are symptomatic of the fact that Ramazani does not relate the sphere of cultural exchange to social and economic processes. 216 ● Notes 5 . In accordance with his periodization of “late” capitalism as the stage of capital- ism after 1945 (a notion taken from Ernest Mandel), Jameson sees the “growing contradiction between lived experience and structure” (“Cognitive Mapping” 349) at its height with postmodernity, which he understands as the cultural logic of late capitalism. While the problem of a global cognitive mapping has become more pronounced in the time after 1945, modern American poetry has already engaged many of these questions. It is important to bear in mind that for Jameson postmodernism is not a new mode of production but a “dialectical mutation of a capitalist system already long in place” (Cultural Turn 93). 6 . Unless noted otherwise, italics, capitals, and the like are in the original. 7 . M a r k M c G u r l ’ s The Program Era is perhaps the most successful Bourdieu- inspired attempt to theorize institutional influence, partly because of its distinct focus on American literature in the era of MFA programs and partly because he actually develops an interpretational mode from his sociological insights, read- ing literary form and content for traces of such institutional conditions. 8 . As Jennifer Ashton has argued in From Modernism to Postmodernism, the “mod- ern/postmodern divide remains intact” despite all attempts to read modernists as “postmodernists avant la lettre ” (2). 9 . See, for instance, recent anthologies such as the Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry (2000), Ishmael Reed’s From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas 1900–2002 (2002), the Norton Anthology of Poetry (2004), and the Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). 10 . To state that “lyrics aren’t poetry” and that “no song words [ . ] stand up as print texts” (Frith 181) misses the point of reading lyrics as poetic expression in a specific social and cultural context. The problem here is not the definition of lyrics, but the restricted definition of poetry. Besides the fact that many songs use poetic modes of expression and that, as Frank Kermode and Stephen Spender (among others) have pointed out, “there’s quite a lot of good poetry which started life in a similar way—Greek tragedy, medieval ballad—and has survived the loss of music and performance” (155), the implied contrast of the richness of song performances with the isolated experience of reading poetry seems also very questionable. 1 “Blazing Signals of a World in Birth”: Lyrical Expression and International Solidarity from the Literary Left to the Popular Front 1 . For the cultural and historical significance of the Lawrence strike of 1912 and Giovannitti’s involvement in its organization, see Dubofsky 132–51 and Topp 92–134. 2 . For a survey of Freeman’s work, see Scheiding. 3 . For a short summary of the various traditions that influenced Giovannitti, among them the radical poetry of his native Italy, see Sillanpoa 177–78 and 185–87. For the best account of Giovannitti’s life, see Bencivenni. Notes ● 217 4 . K e l l e r w r o t e a n i n t r o d u c t i o n t o Arrows in the Gale (cf. Giovannitti, Co llected Poems 135–41), in which she emphasized that “[t]he laws of poetic beauty and power, not one’s beliefs about the economic world, determine the excellence of his work” (135). 5 . Hester Furey has fittingly observed that Giovannitti’s work “had a nasty and uncompromising way of connecting politics with inner beauty, taking logics of the ‘universal subject’ so dear to poetry critics and carrying them to their shock- ingly democratic extreme” (37). For quite a long time, McKay’s choice of the sonnet was seen as contradicting the modernity of his poetry’s themes, while, as William J. Maxwell has remarked, his sonnets are now read as “the ultimate proving ground of his (more-than-honorary) modernism” (xxxv). Houston A. Baker, Jr., by contrast, has described McKay’s use of form as a necessary adop- tion of European traditions—a “mastery of form” that is intended to subvert the tradition (Baker 85–86). For a critique of Baker’s reading, see Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance 24–26. 6. Nelson has shown that in an illustration of Edwin Markham’s “The Man with the Hoe,” by contrast, the laurel wreath was used to lend an abstract, mytho- logical quality to an otherwise very concretely political poetic imagery and thus toned down the poem’s political meaning (Revolutionary Memory 20–21). 7 . Giovannitti’s use of free verse is representative of many modern American poets on the Left who laid claim to Whitman’s radical democratic heritage (cf. Wald, Exiles from a Future Time 33–37). 8 . Besides being a general topic of the avant-garde of the time, the concern with the city also permeated more explicitly political and functional proletarian poetry as in the ILGWU’s paper Justice, in which some of Giovannitti’s poems were published. In the same paper, a poet named Max Press portrayed the hard- ships of the laboring classes, drawing on the same imagery used by Giovannitti (125). The poem does not create the collective subject of history that we can witness in “New York and I,” but rather presupposes the subjectivity that achieves social change. Still, it similarly sees the city as created and reproduced by human labor, as a place of promise and, employing almost the same expres- sion as Giovannitti, of “toil and hunger” alike. 9 . Political sabotage was not intended to destroy the means of production, but to reappropriate them, a point that Emile Pouget makes when he quotes the Confederation Congress of Toulouse in 1897: “It is necessary for the capital- ists to know that the worker will not respect the machine until it has become his friend that will reduce his physical labor instead of being, as it is today, the enemy that steals his bread and shortens his life” (52). 10 . Mark Van Wienen has used the term “literary sabotage” in his analysis of the IWW’s subversive use of popular forms of poetry such as religious hymnody and popular songs during World War I (cf. Partisans 73–102), but he does not discuss Giovannitti’s poetry in this context. 11 . Freeman concludes that this rewriting of the subject into a collective subjec- tivity “is antithesis to the Wasteland, a wholesome break from everything for 218 ● Notes which the last of the bourgeois romantics stands for [sic]” (23). For him Eliot’s poetics—and any poetics, for that matter—is unacceptable not so much for formal or stylistic reasons, but because of its supposed inability to project a vision of the future. Eliot’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism probably colored Freeman’s judgment. 12 . For some critics, Rukeyser’s broad appeal was too wide-ranging and ended up forfeiting a systemic critique. In a review John Wheelwright (1897–1940), a Christian Marxist poet and critic, had complained that “[l]ike any good capi- talist, Rukeyser condemns bad, shockingly bad, working conditions, but makes no root attack on everyday exploitation” (qtd. in Schocket 240). 13 . The redefinition of gender categories is significant since, as Paula Rabinowitz has demonstrated, leftist discourses of the time frequently “re-presented class conflict through the language of sexual difference,” with masculine strength equating revolutionary action (8). 14 . Thurston elaborates on the parallels between death and rebirth in The Waste Land and “The Book of the Dead” (cf. Making Something Happen 200–10). 2 Global Harlem: The Internationalism of the Harlem Renaissance 1 .
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