Pub Date : 2019-06-10DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469651286.003.0005
Sarah Ehlers
This chapter considers the role of the archive in left literary studies through a recovery of Jewish-American communist poet Martha Millet. Specifically, it uses Millet’s work to trace a history and theory of poetic rhythm that rethinks the relationship between modernist poetic forms and left politics. The chapter’s first section uses Millet’s involvement with the children’s magazine The New Pioneer to unpack the historical relationship between traditional forms and political community formation. The generic histories enacted by communist children’s poems provide a foundation for considering how rhythm was evoked in Popular Front and antifascist poetic discourses. The second section argues that during the Popular Front diverse traditional genres were collapsed into an ideal rhythmic poem, where rhythm described both form and function. The third section focuses on Millet’s contributions to Seven Poets in Search of an Answer (1944) to demonstrate how rhythm was redefined in antifascist discourses. Throughout, the chapter suggests how Millet’s poetry might be read in relation to poets such as Carl Sandburg, Lorine Niedecker, and Kenneth Fearing. A coda returns to Millet’s Cold War criticism in order to ask what is at stake in her critical erasure and her critical recovery.
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Pub Date : 2019-06-10DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469651286.003.0007
Sarah Ehlers
This chapter considers Haitian communist poet Jacques Roumain and his reception in the United States. Analyzing the production, circulation, and reception of Roumain’s writings and his authorial persona, the chapter explores several connected variants of a communist internationalism that is imagined through the idea of “lyric,” or “lyricism,” and it demonstrates how such international imaginaries are tied to different conceptions of history. The chapter begins by sketching the import of Roumain as a figure for U.S. radicals. It then turns to Roumain’s friendship with Langston Hughes, showing how the exchange of poems between the two allows critics to move beyond straightforward historical accounts that show how radical African American artists and intellectuals referred to Haiti’s revolutionary past in their protests against Jim Crow policies, colonial occupations, and the rise of fascism in Europe. I argue that Roumain and Hughes harness and experiment with the unique temporality of the poetic lyric in order to present black radicalism as a formation unbounded by spatial and temporal borders. The final sections turn to the prose and poetry Roumain composed during his exile in the United States, using it to rearticulate ideas about the relationship of the poetic lyric to historical praxis.
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Pub Date : 2019-06-10DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469651286.003.0006
Sarah Ehlers
This brief epilogue summarizes the major conclusions of Left of Poetry and suggests how the book’s arguments might alter contemporary discourses about the intersection of poetry and left politics. The epilogue concludes with readings of Langston Hughes’s “Wait” and Muriel Rukeyser’s “Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars.”
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Pub Date : 2019-06-10DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469651286.003.0002
Sarah Ehlers
This chapter examines Langston Hughes’s overlooked archive of photographs and scrapbooks from his 1931 trip to Haiti, arguing that Hughes’s photographic encounter with Haiti is part of the construction of a transnational vision that starts in the Caribbean and moves through the U.S. South and Mexico. Photography becomes fundamental to Hughes’s attempts to map the connectedness of persons and locales in a capitalist world system and to imagine the formation of political communities. The chapter begins by considering how Hughes’s experience of taking photographs, along with organizing them in albums and scrapbooks, generated questions about the politics of representation in his subsequent political poems. The chapter then extends these considerations to Hughes’s interwar radical verse, showing how Hughes’s encounters with visual objects continue to influence his poetry during the 1930s. The chapter closes by demonstrating how Hughes’s contemplation of the relationship between photography and writing opens up new readings of James Agee and Walker Evans’s foundational documentary text, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Hughes’s engagements with photography place him in a developing documentary modernist tradition that pushes beyond New Deal initiatives and employs documentary in the shaping of an international public sphere.
{"title":"Photography and the Development of Radical Poetics","authors":"Sarah Ehlers","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469651286.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469651286.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines Langston Hughes’s overlooked archive of photographs and scrapbooks from his 1931 trip to Haiti, arguing that Hughes’s photographic encounter with Haiti is part of the construction of a transnational vision that starts in the Caribbean and moves through the U.S. South and Mexico. Photography becomes fundamental to Hughes’s attempts to map the connectedness of persons and locales in a capitalist world system and to imagine the formation of political communities. The chapter begins by considering how Hughes’s experience of taking photographs, along with organizing them in albums and scrapbooks, generated questions about the politics of representation in his subsequent political poems. The chapter then extends these considerations to Hughes’s interwar radical verse, showing how Hughes’s encounters with visual objects continue to influence his poetry during the 1930s. The chapter closes by demonstrating how Hughes’s contemplation of the relationship between photography and writing opens up new readings of James Agee and Walker Evans’s foundational documentary text, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Hughes’s engagements with photography place him in a developing documentary modernist tradition that pushes beyond New Deal initiatives and employs documentary in the shaping of an international public sphere.","PeriodicalId":375813,"journal":{"name":"Left of Poetry","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131715709","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-06-10DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469651286.003.0003
Sarah Ehlers
This chapter charts the formation of the documentary poetry tradition in the U.S. through a consideration of Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead. It demonstrates how Rukeyser pushed the boundaries of genre and media to imagine modes of expression that resisted traditional notions of liberal subjectivity. Drawing on multiple valences of the term alloy, the chapter argues that Rukeyser imagined documentary writing as a complex fusing of elements that speculates on the ontology of the poem itself. The chapter begins with an account of the historical, definitional, and theoretical concerns that have shaped documentary poetry. The chapter’s subsequent analyses of The Book of the Dead consider the impact of industry on subject formation: demonstrating how Rukeyser experimented with literary and visual genres, as well as poetic tropes and themes, to devise alternate modalities of personhood that interface the human with the materials of history and industry. The chapter concludes by showing how Rukeyser’s plans to adapt The Book of the Dead into a documentary film demonstrate a combination of formal and technical resources that illuminate new principles of composition.
{"title":"Fusing an Alloy","authors":"Sarah Ehlers","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469651286.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469651286.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter charts the formation of the documentary poetry tradition in the U.S. through a consideration of Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead. It demonstrates how Rukeyser pushed the boundaries of genre and media to imagine modes of expression that resisted traditional notions of liberal subjectivity. Drawing on multiple valences of the term alloy, the chapter argues that Rukeyser imagined documentary writing as a complex fusing of elements that speculates on the ontology of the poem itself. The chapter begins with an account of the historical, definitional, and theoretical concerns that have shaped documentary poetry. The chapter’s subsequent analyses of The Book of the Dead consider the impact of industry on subject formation: demonstrating how Rukeyser experimented with literary and visual genres, as well as poetic tropes and themes, to devise alternate modalities of personhood that interface the human with the materials of history and industry. The chapter concludes by showing how Rukeyser’s plans to adapt The Book of the Dead into a documentary film demonstrate a combination of formal and technical resources that illuminate new principles of composition.","PeriodicalId":375813,"journal":{"name":"Left of Poetry","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130096081","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-06-10DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469651286.003.0001
Sarah Ehlers
This introductory chapter examines how the historical and economic crisis of the Great Depression coincided with a complementary crisis in the literary. It argues that the 1930s is a crucible for understanding both the history of modern American poetics and the role of poetic thought in conceptualizing historical change. The introduction surveys important historical aspects of the left poetry community during the interwar period, and it outlines the book’s interventions in contemporary poetry scholarship as well as in studies of left literary culture.
{"title":"The Poetic Front","authors":"Sarah Ehlers","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469651286.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469651286.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"This introductory chapter examines how the historical and economic crisis of the Great Depression coincided with a complementary crisis in the literary. It argues that the 1930s is a crucible for understanding both the history of modern American poetics and the role of poetic thought in conceptualizing historical change. The introduction surveys important historical aspects of the left poetry community during the interwar period, and it outlines the book’s interventions in contemporary poetry scholarship as well as in studies of left literary culture.","PeriodicalId":375813,"journal":{"name":"Left of Poetry","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121340135","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-06-10DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469651286.003.0004
Sarah Ehlers
This chapter historicizes and theorizes an alternative record of lyric practice that emerged in the Depression but has been obscured. Specifically, the writings of communist poets Genevieve Taggard and Edwin Rolfe allow for an exploration of alternate conceptions of the poetic lyric, where lyric becomes a means to reinvent structural aspects of self in relation to the dialectics of historical change. After demonstrating how Rolfe’s engagements with the romantic lyric reasserted traditional terms of lyrical agency on the historical ground of capitalist crisis, the chapter mobilizes Taggard’s notion of a “lyric effect” to provide a different understanding of the contours of the lyric subject as well as the links between experiments with lyric and forms of collective action. Subsequent sections take up important aspects of Depression poetic discourses: the reception of Rolfe’s poetry in the left press; Taggard’s and Rolfe’s engagements with Romanticism, especially Walt Whitman’s legacy; and Taggard’s interest in music and radio technology. Across these topics, the chapter demonstrates how abstracted versions of the romantic lyric, choral music, and oral recitation become “lyric.” The final section turns to the contemporary reception of Rolfe’s poetry to forward a methodological polemic about the relationship of lyric reading to historical practice.
{"title":"Lyric Effects","authors":"Sarah Ehlers","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469651286.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469651286.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter historicizes and theorizes an alternative record of lyric practice that emerged in the Depression but has been obscured. Specifically, the writings of communist poets Genevieve Taggard and Edwin Rolfe allow for an exploration of alternate conceptions of the poetic lyric, where lyric becomes a means to reinvent structural aspects of self in relation to the dialectics of historical change. After demonstrating how Rolfe’s engagements with the romantic lyric reasserted traditional terms of lyrical agency on the historical ground of capitalist crisis, the chapter mobilizes Taggard’s notion of a “lyric effect” to provide a different understanding of the contours of the lyric subject as well as the links between experiments with lyric and forms of collective action. Subsequent sections take up important aspects of Depression poetic discourses: the reception of Rolfe’s poetry in the left press; Taggard’s and Rolfe’s engagements with Romanticism, especially Walt Whitman’s legacy; and Taggard’s interest in music and radio technology. Across these topics, the chapter demonstrates how abstracted versions of the romantic lyric, choral music, and oral recitation become “lyric.” The final section turns to the contemporary reception of Rolfe’s poetry to forward a methodological polemic about the relationship of lyric reading to historical practice.","PeriodicalId":375813,"journal":{"name":"Left of Poetry","volume":"79 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114820154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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