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Contents
List of Figures
ix
Acknowledgments
xi
Permissions
xiii
Introduction
1
Chapter 1 “Blazing Signals of a World in Birth”:
Lyrical Expression and International Solidarity
from the Literary Left to the Popular Front
21
Chapter 2 Global Harlem: The Internationalism of
the Harlem Renaissance
53
Chapter 3 Remapping America: The Epic Geography of
Post–World War II American Poetry
85
Chapter 4 From Cuba to Vietnam: Anti-Imperialist Poetics and
Global Solidarity in the Long Sixties
117
Chapter 5 Contemporary American Poetry and the
Legacy of the Third World
147
Chaoter 6
Contemporary American Poetry, Literary Tradition,
and the Multitude
175
Conclusion
209
Notes
215
Bibliography
227
Index
247
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A POETICS OF GLOBAL SOLIDARITY
Copyright © Clemens Spahr 2015
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First published 2015 by
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Introduction
O
n his 2008 album The 3rd World (2008), rap lyricist Immortal
Technique creates a poetics of solidarity that responds to the conditions of global capitalism. The album’s lyrics are inspired by the
rhetoric of Third World liberation movements. “That’s What It Is” is full of
a seemingly hyperbolic, messianic rhetoric of rebellion and revolution: “The
resurrection,/ ripping a ball through the record section/ Flight connection/
to the Chechen border for guerrilla lessons.” This poetics of rebellion, however, receives its full meaning only in the context of the song’s concluding
sample, a dialogue snippet from the neo-noir film Deep Cover (1992). The
song samples the film’s climactic scene in which David Jason, an American
lawyer and drug dealer, advertises what he considers a promising new drug
that will prove profitable since it knows “no international borders.” When
Hector Guzman, a corrupt South American diplomat, responds that the
global production of the synthetic drug comes at the cost of South and
Central America’s profit from the drug trade (“You racist Americans. You
just want to cut us poor Hispanics completely out of the market”), Jason
retorts that Guzman misses the point: “I think you know that there’s no
such thing as an American anymore. No Hispanics, no Japanese, no blacks,
no whites, no nothing. It’s just rich people and poor people.”
While the song makes abundantly clear that racism remains a dominant
factor in a globalized world, it uses the sample to dramatize the endless
accumulation of capital as the organizing principle of global capitalism,
a principle that affects everything from the black market through politics to everyday life. But Immortal Technique deliberately omits a crucial
line from the scene in which Guzman subscribes to a class-based collectivity: “The three of us are all rich, so we’re on the same side” (Deep Cover).
Instead of presenting this class consciousness of the ruling class, “That’s
What It Is” fades into the next song, “Golpe De Estado,” which proclaims
the need for a global movement that can stand up to Guzman’s vision of a
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global plutocracy: “Porque no podemos llamar esto un movimiento si toda
la propiedad/ intelectual pertenece a los que nos oprimen” (“Because this
can’t be called a movement if all the intellectual property is owned by those
who oppress us”; “Golpe De Estado” The 3rd World ). As the lines make
clear, before a social movement inspired by a vision of global solidarity can
emerge, education and history need to be reappropriated. Poetic expression
joins in this project: the poetics of resistance raises an awareness that such
alternatives to the neoliberal consensus and the rule of the market are necessary, possible, and have been an objective tendency, both historically and in
the present. Poetry’s cultural work, then, consists in mapping ideologies that
sustain global capitalism, while at the same time establishing a poetic space
for the imagination of a global solidarity. Read in this context, Immortal
Technique’s fierce rhetoric emerges as a poetic strategy to engage the audience in the complex project of imagining such a subject position from the
contradictions of global capitalism.
This poetics of global solidarity is characteristic of a large variety of contemporary American poetry and song lyrics. In Coal Mountain Elementary
(2009) Mark Nowak establishes a global working-class subjectivity through
his documentary poetics that juxtaposes newspaper articles, eyewitness
accounts, and lesson plans created by neoliberal think tanks, without a single line written by Nowak himself. But if contemporary poets and lyricists
(Nowak has compared his work to the sampling of a DJ, just as there is
much to be gained from analyzing song lyrics for their poetics) tackle the
conditions of globalization, their poetry also stands in the long tradition of
an engaged poetics that is connected to political activism. A Poetics of Global
Solidarity traces the transformations of this engaged poetics in modern and
contemporary American poetry and its imagination of a collective subject
position rooted in global solidarity. The book begins in the era of the great
historical upheavals in the first decades of the twentieth century when these
poets were part of an internationalist movement against imperialism and
colonialism. Later in the century their poetic imagination responded to the
threat of totalitarianism. This engaged poetry lost its public visibility in the
post–World War II years, only to regain it with a vengeance in the context
of the social movements of the 1960s. Now contemporary American poetry
engages the conditions of a globalized world increasingly characterized by
the loss of a center and clearly identifiable political antagonisms.
The trajectory of this book is provided precisely by the social and political movements with which the various poets and lyricists have affiliated
themselves. The presence or absence of these movements and their corresponding power or impotence crucially shapes the imagination of a poetic
tradition that sees poetry as a form of cultural practice potentially sparking
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political activism. I establish the literary left of the 1910s and the 1930s, the
Harlem Renaissance, the political poetry of the long Sixties, post–Third
World poetry, and the poetry emerging in the context of the antiglobalization movement as part of a tradition rather than as products of discrete,
self-contained historical or literary eras. Similarly, instead of compartmentalizing modern and contemporary American poetry into a number
of poetries (African American poetry, Chicana/o poetry, women’s poetry,
political poetry, etc.), I argue that many of the poets to whom these labels
are attached in fact see themselves as part of a broad coalition of engaged
poets. Reading the vision of global solidarity that underlies large parts of
modern and contemporary American poetry along the trajectory of the rise
and fall of important social and political movements allows us to establish a
littérature engagée within the field of American poetry.
In connecting American poetry to the various social and political movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this book links up with
a wave of revisionist studies in the wake of Cary Nelson’s groundbreaking
Repression and Recovery (1989). Nelson has shown that modern American
poetry was not a monolithic whole built around the canonic figures of
Pound and Eliot, but a diverse field, much of which was involved in a
vibrant cultural and political scene. Moreover, he has pointed out the social
function of modern American poetry by demonstrating, for instance, how
poem cards were circulated during rallies and at other political occasions.1
Other studies have shown how modernism intersected with the Popular
Front’s cultural institutions and politics (cf. Denning, Cultural Front; Alan
Filreis Modernism from Left to Right), how it was shaped by questions of race
and gender rather than being a self-contained avant-garde (cf. DuPlessis,
Genders), and how the Harlem Renaissance was characterized by the same
experimental impulse we associate with modernist literature (cf. Hutchinson,
The Harlem Renaissance). In a similar manner, critics have demonstrated that
the various literary movements of modernist American poetry interacted, as
in the case of the Harlem Renaissance, with working-class movements on
both institutional and political levels (cf. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left).
These contextual approaches have sparked a renewed interest in poetry’s
social function. Such an interest is also evident in studies of the poetry of the
1960s and contemporary political poetry.2 All of these studies have revised
the canon of American poetry, charted alternative traditions, or reassessed
the field through a cultural studies lens, emphasizing the interrelationship
of form, ideology, and poetry’s social function.
If these studies are often concerned with individual authors, eras, or literary movements, I chart the poems discussed in this book as part of what
I call the engaged tradition of American poetry. This tradition cuts across
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the various literary, cultural, and social movements of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. This is not to say that I simply amalgamate individual
poets into the historical narrative of a poetry that criticizes or rejects global
capitalism. The specificities of particular poetic forms, of literary eras and
traditions, as well as the ideologies of the movements figure as a significant
part of my argument. When I move across various movements and periods,
then, I try to demonstrate how these engaged poets have used a wide array of
poetic forms and rhetoric to contest the hegemonic imaginaries that maintain what Immanuel Wallerstein has conceptualized as the modern worldsystem. As a capitalist world-economy founded on the division of labor, this
“spatial/temporal zone which cuts across many political and cultural units”
(World-Systems Analysis 17) creates global capital flows and commodity
exchange, giving “priority to the endless accumulation of capital” (WorldSystems Analysis 24). World-systems analysis stresses that this system operates on multiple levels. The system’s institutions—“states and the interstate
system, productive firms, households, classes, identity groups of all sorts”—
allow the modern world-system to function properly, but at the same time
stimulate “both the conflicts and the contradictions which permeate the
system” (x).3 The authors discussed here reveal these conflicts and contradictions and contest the principles and rules on which the modern worldsystem’s multiple mechanisms of exclusion, hierarchy, and competition are
based. Their poetics of global solidarity gives rise to a subjectivity that is
consciously pitted against the liberal and neoliberal ideas maintaining the
system’s principle of endless accumulation.
In its interest in a global poetic subjectivity, this book dovetails with
recent studies that have stressed the transnational or global dimension of
American poetry. In A Transnational Poetics (2009) Jahan Ramazani has
identified textual strategies that envision “dialogic alternatives to monologic
models that represent the artifact as synecdoche for a local or national culture imperiled by global standardization, a monolithic orientalist epistemology closed to alterities within and without, or a self-contained civilizational
unit in perpetual conflict with others” (Transnational Poetics 12).4 The poets
that I discuss in the following chapters are American or have, at least, spent
the majority of their lives in the United States. While they have been firmly
embedded in local literary scenes, have been part of local and national cultural institutions, and have addressed national politics, their literary cosmopolitanism and their involvement in or support of global cultural and social
movements make them thoroughly international figures.
There is no naïve celebration of globalization, internationalism, or transnationalism in this attempt to understand world history and global politics as the partially disastrous and partially progressive results of human
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interaction in given socioeconomic structures. In those moments when
change seemed a realistic possibility, as in the 1930s when social and political movements were publically visible and politically effective, poets such as
Edwin Rolfe could, even in a time of crisis such as the Great Depression,
see “blazing signals of a world in birth” (Rolfe, Collected Poems 71). Mark
Nowak, in contrast, confronted with the absence of influential global social
movements at the beginning of the twenty-first century sees it as incumbent
upon the poet “to create local and global spaces for the collective, the ‘we,’
to exist” because poetry needs to re-create the “first-person plural” that has
almost ceased to be (“Interview,” 462–63). Rolfe and Nowak write in two
different historical periods. Yet for both the creation of a poetics of global
solidarity means creating an alternative vision of the world from the contradictions of global capitalism. Thus, and logically, for the Marxist Rolfe
the new world emerges only after a symbolic journey through the “black
world underground” (Collected Poems 70), just as Nowak primarily uses citations from mainstream newspapers to represent the oppressive black world
of mining from which a sense of solidarity can potentially emerge.
A Poetics of Global Solidarity identifies a poetic tradition that articulates
collective subject positions as alternatives to the hegemonic assumptions that
maintain the exclusionary mechanisms of the world-system. To be clear:
these subjectivities do not simply pose as alternatives to, or try to resolve the
tensions and contradictions of, global capitalism. They work on the level of
representation to question the ideological mechanisms that maintain that
very system by reproducing its structures (consciously or unconsciously) in
everyday life. These subjectivities therefore remain heteronomous. While
enabling a form of social practice and political activism from a consciousness
rooted in a vision of global solidarity, they remain determined by the very
system they criticize. The poets of the 1910s and the 1930s do not simply
present a full-fledged class consciousness that needs to be adopted, but rather
develop a lyrical subjectivity that refers the reader back to the economic contradictions in which he or she inevitably is involved and which need to be
changed before such a subjectivity can become lived reality. Likewise, the
antiwar poetry of the Vietnam era declares its solidarity with the victims of
war; but the global poetic subjectivity it imagines must remain incomplete
as long as the suffering continues. All of the writers I analyze create a vision
of global solidarity that ultimately refers the reader back to the economic
structures that enable the exclusionary mechanisms of the modern worldsystem. For this reason, the global poetic subjectivity developed in these
poems and lyrics is preliminary and demands its realization outside poetry.
Despite its broad perspective, A Poetics of Global Solidarity should not
be misconstrued as an exhaustive history of engaged or political poetry. It
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seeks instead to highlight episodes in the history of the engaged tradition
of American poetry. The poets and lyricists have been selected because of
their shared attachment to a particular form of political activism at a specific historical moment. This connects in a number of ways with Michael
Davidson’s On the Outskirts of Form, which investigates “how poems imagine a Subject constructed not as the caryatid supporting national identity
but as a more flexible entity occupying multiple geopolitical sites” (9). All of
the poets discussed here try to create a global poetic subjectivity rooted in
what Jean-Luc Nancy has called a “desire to discover or rediscover a place
of community at once beyond social divisions and beyond subordination
to technopolitical dominion” (The Inoperative Community 1). The global
and social political movements with which these poets affiliate themselves
are, in Wallerstein’s words, “all antisystemic in one simple sense: They were
struggling against the established power structures in an effort to bring into
existence a more democratic, more egalitarian historical system than the
existing one” (“Antiystemic Movements,” 160). What these poets share is
a concern to imagine a global subject position in the context of particular
social, political, and literary movements, and to create a poetics that engages
their readers in that effort.
Commitment
My selection criterion is the pedagogical dimension of poetry as it constitutes itself in the various alliances between poetry and antisystemic social
movements. The poets discussed in this book write in the context of social
movements to whose ideology they often complexly subscribe. But their
poetry does not simply teach or present a particular doctrine or politics; it
engages the reader in the mapping of a subjectivity founded on a sense of
global solidarity. Although for Jean-Paul Sartre poetry was a self-enclosed
“microcosm” opposed to the “utilitarianism” of prose (What is Literature?
32, 34), the poets discussed here are invested precisely in what he saw as
constitutive of a littérature engage: “the writer has chosen to reveal the world
and particularly to reveal man to other men so that the latter may assume
full responsibility before the object which has been thus laid bare” (38).
This object is the world-system in its various forms and with its social and
cultural consequences.
In a similar manner, Fredric Jameson has spoken of this literary operation as “cognitive mapping”: a spatial representation that enables individuals
to map their subject position within a “global social totality” (Geopolitical
Aesthetic 31). Jameson’s model adds a historical dimension to Sartre’s concepts through its incorporation of world-systems analysis. Importantly, for
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Jameson it is art that can achieve such a cognitive mapping, or at least provide its outlines: “Achieved cognitive mapping will be a matter of form”
(“Cognitive Mapping” 356). The engaged tradition of American poetry
develops a dimension of art that Jameson sees as unduly neglected in critical discourse: it “foregrounds the cognitive and pedagogical dimensions of
political art and culture” (Postmodernism 50) so that the reader, in Sartre’s
words, assumes full responsibility before the modern world-system that governs his or her everyday experience.5
Understanding how this poetry tackles the ideological mechanisms that
sustain the modern world-system is particularly thought-provoking. Large
parts of modern and contemporary American poetry have tried to imagine
global poetic subjectivities beyond what Wallerstein has called the “geoculture” of liberalism—a liberal universalism that “proclaimed the inclusion of
all as the definition of the good society” (World-Systems Analysis 60), while
at the same time excluding a considerable part of the world population from
access to socioeconomic resources, whether through hierarchical gender
relations, through a form of structural racism, or through economic deprivation. For Wallerstein “geoculture” does not refer to a supposedly unified
or globalized culture (there are always multiple cultural traditions) but to the
hegemonic imagination that maintains and reproduces the structures of the
modern world-system.
The poets and lyricists discussed in this book can best be understood
in terms of Adrienne Rich’s description of Karl Marx as the “great geographer of the human condition” who revealed “how profit-driven economic
relations filter into zones of thought and feeling” (“Credo of a Passionate
Skeptic”). In a similar manner, contemporary poet Anne Waldman has
described the task of her epic poem Iovis as the “delineation of map of
starvation” (Iovis Trilogy 671) and the creation of “a radical celestial mappemunde, wanting to shift the discourse toward another shore . . . anteriorward ”
(946).6 This claim can be transferred to all of the poets and lyricists discussed in this book: they map the conditions of the modern world-system
and show how these affect and frequently inhibit the imagination. Their
poetry fractures the supposed ideological coherence of nations and communities to reveal the fundamental class conflict as well as the race and
gender inequalities at the bottom of these societies. At the same time that
they criticize an often unconscious commitment to the re-creation of the
status quo, these poets seek to engage and transform these ideologies in
the name of an egalitarian reorganization of the world. They reveal, in
Sartre’s words, that commitment is constitutive of our existence: “Most
men pass their time in hiding their commitment from themselves” (What
is Literature? 76).
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While the poems reveal the world-system’s false universalism, they do
not simply develop a “truly” universal, global subjectivity. The subjectivity
that comes into being is not simply shown; it is produced in these poems.
In his Notebooks for an Ethics, Sartre demands: “Replace the pseudoobjectivity ‘human beings’ by a veritable collective subjectivity. Assume the
detotalized totality. We make up one yet we are not unifiable” (15). When
I speak of a global poetic subjecticity, it is more than the existing ideology
of a movement or an agreed-upon truth; it is a collective subjectivity that
constitutes itself poetically in opposition to the dominant geoculture. The
global poetic subjectivities of modern and contemporary American poetry
do not erase individual desire or identity, but rather come to constitute the
horizon of the individual’s relationship with the world. Individual consciousness is not simply replaced by a collective subjectivity, transposed, for
instance, into a proletarian collectivity, a black nationalist consciousness, or
merged into a transcendent notion of “the Other.” Instead, the individual
becomes a subject who understands him- or herself as someone constantly
positioning him- or herself in relation to the socioeconomic conditions of
the world-system.
Langston Hughes’s “Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria” (1931), for
instance, offers a trenchant critique of the luxury hotel’s supposed function
as a space of culture and cultivation. The poem reveals the Waldorf-Astoria
to be the latest manifestation of a long history of class conflict and exploitation, with the speaker finally calling out: “Mary, Mother of God, wrap
your new born babe in the red flag of Revolution” (Collected Poems 146).
Hughes connects a local site (the Waldorf-Astoria) to a secularized providential history: the Soviet Union realizes the promise of Christianity and
solves the contradictions epitomized by the Waldorf Astoria. This rebirth
is achieved as the speaker reveals the logic of magazine headlines that celebrate the Waldorf-Astoria while they simultaneously ignore its participation in socioeconomic processes of exclusion. Vanity Fair ’s advertisement
of the Waldorf-Astoria as featuring “All the luxuries of private home . . . ”
is juxtaposed with the speaker’s ironic comment that for this reason the
poor and hungry should “choose the Waldorf as a background for your
rags” (142). As a result of Hughes’s collage, the individual (the “new born
babe”) emerges as part of a collective subjectivity created through New
York City’s class and race geography (“GUMBO CREOLE” is served but
ethnic groups are excluded 144). Instead of showing a subject in rebellion,
Hughes’s poem stages the systemic contradictions to which a global poetic
subjectivity must respond.
In “These Men Are Revolution,” another poem from the Depression
era published in the New Masses in 1934, Edwin Rolfe similarly absorbs
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and transforms the socioeconomic hardships of the Great Depression into a
poetic imagery that stresses the people’s potential agency:
These men are revolution, who move
in spreading hosts across the globe
(this part of which is America), who love
fellow men, earth children, labor
of hands, and lands fragrant under sun
and rain, and fruit of man’s machinery.
(Collected Poems 79)
America here is literally bracketed. It is the local manifestation of a global
constellation. Rolfe rewrites the subject through the conditions of global
capitalism, but from a perspective of solidarity that highlights the necessity to overcome the lines on the map that mark both possession and
nationhood: “Soon there will be no line on any map/ nor color to mark
possession, mean ‘Mine, stay off ’” (80). Like Hughes, Rolfe does not simply celebrate the proletariat, but rather sees its (unwilling) complicity in
reproducing structures of exploitation: “your hands dug coal, drilled stone,
sewed garments, poured steel to let other people draw dividends and live
easy” (144). At the same time, the poem displays a faith in the men who
will live the revolution. Poetry imagines a global solidarity beyond imperialist color-coded maps and beyond maps that are built on “mines”—both
in the sense of coal mines and the possessive ideologies of accumulation
underlying them.
Both Hughes and Rolfe assert that global capitalism not only structures
everyday life and the geography of human affairs, but also that individual social practices constantly re-create and reinforce this system. Global
capitalism relies on individuals’ (conscious or unconscious) commitment
to its permanent reproduction. As Wallerstein has argued, this permanent
re-creation is precisely what renders these systems historical phenomena
and thus subject to change: “The historical systems within which we live
are indeed systemic, but they are historical as well. They remain the same
over time yet are never the same from one minute to the next” (Wallerstein,
World-Systems Analysis 22). Because of its reliance on social practice, such a
system can be tackled and changed through political and social resistance,
but it can also be changed through vicissitudes in cultural relations or the
redefinition of the domestic sphere, in short, through the imagination of
alternative subjectivities. The poems discussed in this book identify such
sites of complicity as potential sites of resistance, from world politics to the
unit of the household. They prompt us, as readers, to accept our inevitable
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positioning in the world-system and urge us to commit ourselves to imagining a future that is significantly different from the present.
Poetic Communities
If global capitalism in its various manifestations is the constant reference
frame for this engaged poetry, the institutional, cultural, and socioeconomic
formations that configure the moments of the modern world-system into
microsystems change considerably. The two poets I addressed, Hughes and
Rolfe, wrote at a time when they could rely on a close alliance between
literature and an effective political activism. Both poems appeared in the
Communist New Masses which, besides being a political magazine, was an
influential site of cultural exchange with a reputation for publishing seminal
writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, and Richard
Wright. The Harlem Renaissance’s and the Popular Front’s cultural output
were closely linked to effective political institutions that, in turn, understood culture and literature to be part of their struggle for justice. For a
brief moment, during the 1960s, with various social movements seizing the
moment to change the course of world history, poetry regained something
of its public visibility; and yet, it never reestablished the close connection
to everyday life and political debates that it displayed in the early twentieth century. Anne Waldman’s map of poverty and resistance, her “radical
celestial mappemunde,” engages in the same project of poetic solidarity, but
responds to a very different socioinstitutional situation. Waldman’s epic Iovis
project (1993–2011) is presented at a time when poetry needs to reconsider
and reassert its connections to social movements and politics.
The close link between literary and social movements that existed for the
proletarian poets or the Harlem Renaissance writers, and even the visibility
that T. S. Eliot enjoyed among academic audiences as when he spoke in front
of 14,000 people in a basketball arena, simply no longer exist. Adrienne Rich
addresses the problems of contemporary activist poetry in “North American
Time” (1983). In the poem’s middle section, Rich portrays the poet’s persisting desire to be politically relevant because of her poetry. “I am thinking this
in a country,” she writes, “where poets don’t go to jail/ for being poets, but
for being/ dark-skinned, female, poor” (Later Poems 135). Instead of being
taken seriously for presenting poetic alternatives to the world as it is—a
prophetic vision that could spill over into social reality and inspire social
practice—poets are sent to prison for political and social reasons that are
disconnected from their poetic production.
But Rich’s assessment also exemplifies how the desire to link poetry
to social movements has remained a constant factor in modern and
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contemporary American poetry, even though this relationship has become
increasingly complicated. In Poetry and Commitment (2007), Rich emphasized the unique capacity of poetry to engage in social issues—a capacity that
is needed all the more urgently at a time of poetry’s comparable impotency:
For now, poetry has the capacity—in its own ways and by its own
means—to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten
future: a still-uncreated site whose moral architecture is founded not on
ownership and dispossession, the subjection of women, torture and bribes,
outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of freedom—that
word now held under house arrest by the rhetoric of the “free” market.
This on-going future, written off over and over, is still within view. All
over the world its paths are being rediscovered and reinvented: through
collective action, through many kinds of art. Its elementary condition is
the recovery and redistribution of the world’s resources that have been
extracted from the many by the few. (36)
It is true that, as Joseph Harrington has shown, even an organic workingclass intellectual such as the influential poet and labor activist of the 1910s,
Arturo Giovannitti, had to address various audiences and used established
poetic forms in order to make his voice heard in the public sphere (cf.
Harrington 105–26). And yet, although there is no simple link between
poetic expression and political activism, Giovannitti could take for granted
that his poetry was linked to the actions of the IWW (the Industrial Workers
of the World) and other labor activists. Rich equally insists that the “ongoing future [ . . . ] is still within view.” But there is a subtle difference in
tone: Rich emphasizes that the nexus between poetry and political activism,
between finding alternative paths and treating them, is currently “rediscovered and reinvented.” Her statement reflects that contemporary American
poetry has to struggle for political relevance at a time when political alternatives have largely disappeared from the public consciousness—at a time,
that is, when these alternatives have become a “forgotten future.” It is this
forgotten future that poetry must remember.
The relationship between the public sphere, social movements, and
poetic communities, as well as the variations in institutional settings and
practices and the presence and absence of literary, social, and political movements to which the individual poet can connect must be gauged carefully.
Although dedicated to the same poetics of global solidarity, the various
poets discussed in this book pursue different strategies and use different
literary methods according to their specific historical situation.7 Recent
sociological approaches to literature have shown that this historical moment
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is refracted through the poets’ particular cultural and socioinstitutional
context. Mike Chasar has argued that “Americans living in the first half
of the twentieth century [ . . . ] lived in a world saturated by poetry of all
types and sizes” (4), a period in which “more people in the modern United
States were producing and consuming more verse than at any other time
in history [ . . . ]” (6). At the end of the twentieth century, by contrast, the
institutionalization of American poetry had forced contemporary writers to
address what Christopher Beach calls the “tension between the level of the
community and the level of the institution” (5). Poetry emerges as “a site for
the creation of community and value” (3, my emphasis), when in the early
twentieth century it could often rely on such communities and values for
institutional support.
It is necessary to consider these developments whenever we talk about
a particular political rhetoric or the choice of poetic form. The resurgence
of epic poetry in the 1950s, for instance, is also a response to the Cold War
liberal consensus and the crushing of influential social and political movements. It seemed inevitable for these poets to withdraw from politics temporarily to map a subject position beyond Cold War antagonisms. This is not
to say that other poetic forms were not available or produced; nor is it to say
that the epic form is a natural choice, or an epiphenomenon of a social or
cultural constellation. But the choice of poetic form at a particular historical
moment matters, since it also reflects the poet’s position in the social and
political struggles of the time.
My readings are therefore interested in the author’s choice of a particular form, in the (conscious or unconscious) social and political content of
the poem, and in how the poem’s social symbolism is related to the political imagination of antisystemic movements. In fact, social movements are
as important for an understanding of the engaged tradition of American
poetry as this poetry is for an understanding of these movements’ political
imagination. As Michael Denning has argued, “[m]ovements and countermovements continue to depend on philosophies of history, whether salvational histories of religious redemption, racial and national histories of
Aryan nations and white supremacy, or indeed narratives of uncompleted
revolution and eventual liberation” (Culture in the Age of Three Worlds 44).
In this context, an attention to form is especially significant. Rachel Blau
DuPlessis has emphasized that it is impossible “to analyze the meanings, ideologies and social-political functions associated with [objects, discourses, and
practices] in their time and across time ” (“Social Texts” 53) without paying
sufficient attention to form and to the text itself. DuPlessis therefore suggests an approach that she calls “social philology” (Genders 1). Similarly,
Michael Davidson has stressed “the implications of experimental form in
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13
addressing the geopolitical meaning of poetry” and “the social and cultural
meaning of formal operations for specific communities that may exist on
the outskirts of the national imaginary” (Outskirts 5). An attention to poetic
form and to the texture of poetry is indispensable not only to do justice to
the complexities of poetic expression, but also to understand how poets link
themselves to poetic communities and, in the case of this book, the social
movements of a particular historical moment.
Although A Poetics of Global Solidarity is not primarily concerned with
the effectiveness of the poetic imagination in producing or inspiring social
movements or political activism, but rather with the cognitive mapping that
poetry can provide in such political contexts, any poetics that aligns itself
with social and political movements needs to face the question of what precisely its public and political role can be. Astrid Franke has identified the
desire for “public poetry” as a consistent factor in the history of American
poetry (cf. Franke). The left-leaning poets discussed here do not necessarily expect to reach out to “the public” at large, but they acknowledge, as
Sartre notes more generally, that the writer “has been invested, whether
he likes it or not, with a certain social function” (What Is Literature? 77).
The engaged poet actively seeks that function and thus assigns his or her
poetry a political value. In Making Something Happen, the title of which
plays on W. H. Auden’s famous dictum that “poetry makes nothing happen” (Auden 248), Michael Thurston analyzes political poets between the
two world wars to show how their poems were politically effective even if, on
the most basic level, this only meant that “poetry makes other poems (and
critical judgments) happen” (6). The writer need not necessarily influence
politics directly; only in extraordinary moments can literary aesthetics entail
what Russ Castronovo has called “the possibility of mass mobilization” (11).
Thurston’s book importantly reminds us that ideological change can occur
on a variety of planes—institutional, cultural, social, and political. Poets
can share in the global political discourses of the time while aiming for local
change.
These poets’ vision of global solidarity ultimately helps us fathom what
Robert Seguin has called “the possibilities and restrictions of historical form
and agency” at a particular historical moment (113). To see poetry through
its relationship with the modern world-system and the antisystemic movements responding to it cuts across established categories of literary scholarship, both synchronically and diachronically, revealing continuities where
we often see ruptures. As such this book connects with recent studies such as
Philip Metres’s, which reads war poems ranging from Whitman and Melville
to Langston Hughes’s poems about the Spanish Civil War as well as Barrett
Watten’s Bad History and Adrienne Rich’s “An Atlas of the Difficult World,”
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both poems about the Gulf War, as “part of a larger human confrontation
with the violence, injustice, and oppressions that is in us and in our world”
(“With Ambush” 360; cf. Behind the Lines). This is not to simply abolish
differences between modernist and postmodernist activist poetry, but to see
them as responses to different stages of the same socioeconomic system.8
Such a perspective also contributes to an understanding of the alliances that
modern and contemporary American poetry seeks out in order to gauge
the possibilities and impossibilities of a global poetic subjectivity at various
moments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
To achieve this aim, however, theoretical readjustments are a necessary
but not sufficient condition. As John Newcomb has put it, to capture the
full diversity of modern American poetry, “[w]e need not only to surround
the old titans with fresh contexts but also to situate a much wider variety
of poets into those contexts” (“Out with the Crowd,” 251). To establish an
alternative, engaged tradition within twentieth- and twenty-first-century
American poetry, I therefore draw on canonic and neglected poets alike.
Only by recombining canonic figures with poets who are often not part of
literary histories will we be able to see the diversity of American poetry in a
particular historical period. The point here is not to establish a tradition of
political modernism against Eliot and Pound, or to propose an activist political poetry against lyrical poetry. The point is rather to argue that the engaged
poets tackled similar problems by different means and with different results,
and yet they were very much in conversation with, and inspired by, those
who were ultimately consecrated as the canonic poets of their time.
The extension of the poetic archive also benefits from a more expansive
definition of poetry. This broadening of poetic expression can enable us
to see links where we may not expect them. Many contemporary poetry
anthologies include song lyrics, and while some artists remain conflicted
about these parallels, others have embraced this confluence by republishing their song lyrics as Lyrics and Poems (Samson).9 More importantly, song
lyrics and poetry have frequently converged, and it seems unthinkable to
treat, say, the poetry of the Lyrical Left apart from the songs of the IWW,
Langston Hughes’s poetry apart from the Blues and jazz tradition, Allen
Ginsberg apart from Bob Dylan, or Amiri Baraka’s poetry apart from contemporary rap music. I am convinced that the inclusion of song lyrics helps
us to learn more about the various cultural and social functions of poetry,
and that literary critical methods can help us understand how multilayered
lyrics often are.
Both music and performance are fundamental for analyzing songs, but
they do not invalidate the analysis of song lyrics. In fact, the reprinting
of song lyrics in CD booklets designates them for circulation in a larger
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cultural context—beyond performances on the stage, where they are often
unintentionally inaudible. Conversely, poetry is often more than “the printed
word”; it is often read and discussed in specific settings and thus part of
what Stanley Fish has called “interpretive communities” (483–85), socioinstitutional spaces such as the university classroom and social and cultural
movements.10 But most importantly, the song lyrics discussed here draw
and comment on the engaged tradition of American poetry. When Dylan
mentions Eliot and Pound, when Immortal Technique defines the mission
of hip-hop by way of an engagement with the Harlem Renaissance, and
when Strike Anywhere offer a self-definition of contemporary punk rock
by rewriting Shelley’s “The Mask of Anarchy,” it is well worth considering
such appropriations of poetic tradition because they both tell us something
about the diverse social uses of poetry and the use of poetic techniques in
song lyrics to produce meaning. Finally, these song lyrics display the same
desire to connect the poetics of global solidarity to a broader social movement that has underlain the engaged tradition of modern and contemporary
American poetry.
*
*
*
The following chapters discuss poets who map their historical moment while
simultaneously imagining a collective, global future beyond the status quo.
The first chapter, ‘“Blazing Signals of a World in Birth’: Lyrical Expression
and International Solidarity from the Literary Left to the Popular Front,”
investigates a moment in the history of American poetry when the poetic
imagination was inextricably linked to social and political movements. This
moment extends from the Lyrical Left of the 1910s to the Popular Front of
the 1930s. Arturo Giovannitti, Edwin Rolfe, and Muriel Rukeyser exemplify a poetic tradition whose poetics maps a global subject position that
refers the reader back to the industrial union movements of the 1910s and
the Popular Front of the 1930s, respectively. My intention behind combining Giovannitti, a poet writing in the context of the Lyrical Left and
the IWW in the 1910s, and Rolfe and Rukeyser, who are affiliated with
the Popular Front of the 1930s, is to show that the engagement with form
in the name of a vision of global solidarity remained a consistent factor
throughout the early decades of the twentieth century. Giovannitti’s “New
York and I” (1918), Rolfe’s “To My Contemporaries” (1935), and Rukeyser’s
“Mediterranean” (1938) decenter the lyrical voice into the structures that
sustain global capitalism. Simultaneously, they involve the poems’ speakers and, by implication, its readers in an alternative to the ideologies that
sustain global capitalism. Although lyrical speakers figure prominently in
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their poetry, the carrier of the global poetic subjectivity in these poems is
no longer the individual poet, but a collective global subject that emerges by
way of a poetic rewriting of the individual through the imagination of the
powerful social and political movements of the time.
Just like the political modernist poets discussed in the first chapter, the
poets of the Harlem Renaissance wrote at a time when poetry was closely
linked to social and political activism. In the second chapter, “Global
Harlem: The Internationalism of the Harlem Renaissance,” I argue that
Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and
Claude McKay were internationalists who drafted a “map of the world”
(McKay, Home to Harlem 134) based on which they could imagine an active
role for African American culture within the context of the antisystemic
social and political movements of the 1920s and 1930s. These writers shared
a sense that the Harlem Renaissance was not only nationally significant,
but it was also a globally symbolic moment in the fight against discrimination, inequality, and poverty. In the context of social and political movements from the NAACP to the Communist Party and the various women’s
committees, these artists adopted a radical internationalism in response to
the institutionalized racism, gender divisions, and the class-structures of the
modern world-system.
The book then moves into the post–World War II era, which is characterized by the disintegration of the link between engaged poetry and
social movements. If Harlem Renaissance writers could regularly act with a
“map of the world” in their hands, the post–World War II liberal consensus
forced poets to rest content with such poetic mapping. The third chapter,
“Remapping America: The Epic Geography of Post–World War II American
Poetry,” discusses Thomas McGrath’s Letter to an Imaginary Friend (whose
first part was published in 1957), Norman Rosten’s The Big Road (1946),
and Melvin Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953), three epic
poems written during a crisis in the history of progressive social movements. As opposed to the classical epos of Homer and Virgil, which assisted
an emergent national identity, these poets destabilize nation-centered and
nationalist ideologies, assigning the United States a more modest role in
the parliament of nations. McGrath’s autobiographical journey into the past
creates a representative hero who realizes that the present needs to activate
potentials of resistance from the past; Rosten establishes a symbolic road that
becomes the heroic manifestation of the contradictions that the expansion
of the world-system produced throughout the centuries; and Tolson refracts
Western culture through Liberia, creating a heroic vision of a transnational
parliament of humankind, a “cosmopolis of/ Höhere” (Libretto 183). The
epic form here dissolves the nation-state, remapping it onto the modern
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world-system. These poems figure as a temporary refuge from which new
ways of seeing America’s role in the post–World War II world can emerge
and suggest new strategies to envision a global solidarity.
The fourth chapter, “From Cuba to Vietnam: Anti-Imperialist Poetics
and Global Solidarity in the Long Sixties,” shows that with the emergence of
the Civil Rights Movement and “the Movement” (cf. Terry Anderson) in the
long Sixties, the time period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, political
poets found themselves again thrust into the public sphere. In this chapter,
I trace the anti-imperialist poetic imagination of the 1960s that emerged
in the context of two major global political events: the Cuban Revolution
and the Vietnam War. Both of these events sparked an anti-imperialist and
often anticapitalist political poetry. Even before Vietnam, Cuba invited the
global poetic imagination of American radicals to consider alternatives to a
consumerist Western world and to global capitalism. All of the poets and
lyricists discussed in this chapter, from Bob Dylan to Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
Allen Ginsberg, and Denise Levertov, were involved in the social movements
of the 1960s. The sea changes in world politics and the constitution of the
New Left with its liberation politics not only enabled new coalitions but also
made it more difficult to place one’s poetry in the context of often contradictory social movements. The poets discussed here attempted to forge the
(often contradictory) impulses of various social movements into an enabling,
antisystemic poetics of resistance.
The legacy of these earlier literary movements is discussed in chapters 5
and 6. Both present poems and song lyrics that often do not figure prominently in literary histories which center on experimental, language-oriented
poetry and the lyric mode as the two dominant forms of contemporary
poetry. The poems analyzed here express the desire for a new coalition of
forces that is both inspired by and reconsiders the legacy of earlier poetic and
social movements from the Popular Front and the Harlem Renaissance to
Third World liberation movements. In chapter 5, “Contemporary American
Poetry and the Legacy of the Third World,” I analyze the poetry of African
American poet Amiri Baraka, Chicano poet Luis J. Rodríguez, and the
lyrics of American Peruvian rapper Immortal Technique as well as AsianAfrican American rap group Blue Scholars. These poets and lyricists carry
over the heritage of cultural nationalism and the political legacy of Third
World liberation movements into a global poetic subjectivity that addresses
the conditions of global poverty in the twenty-first century. All of these
poets deal with the disappearance of Third World liberation movements
and imagine possible global coalitions that can become the successor of
these liberation movements, working from a broader, more inclusive basis.
In their attempts to create a new poetics of inclusion, they exemplify Hardt
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A Poetics of Global Solidarity
and Negri’s assessment of a growing wave of cultural and political workers
believing that “revolutionary politics can begin with identity but not end up
there” (Hardt/Negri, Commonwealth 332).
Chapter 6, “Contemporary American Poetry, Literary Tradition, and
the Multitude,” continues this exploration of a form of contemporary
poetic expression that rewrites the impulses of earlier literary movements
into the imagination of a multitude. The poems and song lyrics analyzed
in this final chapter illustrate an ongoing commitment to global solidarity following the end of the Cold War. From the 1990s on, there is a
continuous effort to imagine a global poetic subjectivity inspired by the
antiglobalization movements. Whether in Mark Nowak’s long workingclass poem Coal Mountain Elementary (2009), Anne Waldman’s feminist
Iovis-trilogy (1993–2011), or melodic hardcore band Strike Anywhere’s
lyrics, we find an attempt to poetically map a historical moment of transition that escapes the individual’s cognitive abilities, and to give expression
to an emergent, often inchoate or incomplete collective subjectivity capable of confronting this constellation. The three modes of poetic expression I identify—Nowak’s documentary poetics in the tradition of Muriel
Rukeyser, Waldman’s collective autobiography, and Strike Anywhere’s
Romantic rhetoric of revolution—emerge from these authors’ engagement
with tradition. While they acknowledge the fact that new forms of protests
are necessary (if only for the problems and contradictions of older social
movements), they stress the necessity to maintain the heritage of social
resistance stored in the history of poetry. This imagination of a collective
subjectivity is predicated on the powerful fiction that the various social
movements will unite beyond the sectarian divides that have characterized
many of these movements in the past. By bringing together the poems and
lyrics discussed in this chapter, I focus on an important strand in contemporary American poetic expression that searches for poetic communities
and links poetic expression to broader cultural and social movements.
These texts show that the desire to connect poetic expression and political activism and social movements persists. The conclusion returns to
Adrienne Rich’s diagnosis of a postmodernity characterized by political
apathy. In “Benjamin Revisited” from her last collection Tonight No Poetry
Will Serve (2011), Rich replaces Benjamin’s angel of history with a janitor
sweeping away the remnants of history and political engagement, “stoking/
the so-called past/ into the so-called present” (17). While Rich’s poem,
and her poetry in general, is a trenchant indictment of cynical postmodern detachment, it is also a comment on the desirability and necessity of a
broad coalition of engaged poets. The conclusion discusses how, in order
to capture the future potential of engaged poetry, it is necessary to define
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poetic expression more broadly, to continuously extend the textual archive,
and, finally, to situate American poetry in a global context. The rearrangement of different poets along the lineages suggested by their affiliation
with the social and political movements of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries can help establish new, unforeseen constellations and reveal the
enduring cultural and political relevance of an engaged poetics of global
solidarity.
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Index
African Blood Brotherhood, 77
Alcan Highway, 99–105
Alighieri, Dante, 109
All-African People’s
Conference, 224n.3
American Coal Foundation, 183–4
American Colonization Society,
106, 109
American Federation of
Labor (AFL), 32
Annand, George, 98–9, 105–6
anticolonization movements, 106
anticommunism, 86, 97–8, 220n.14
antiglobalization movement, 3, 18,
166, 177, 199, 201, 206
World Trade Organization
Conference, Seattle 1999, 169
Appian Way, 99, 101
Aristotle, 89
Arrighi, Giovanni, 119–20, 145, 182,
211–12, 226n.1, 226n.2
Ashmun, Jehudi, 109
Auden, W. H., 13
Autoworker, 178–9
Aztlán, 162
Bagong Alyansang Makabayan
Movement (BAYAN), 166
Baha’i, 166
Bakhtin, Mikhael, 122, 222n.8
Bambaata, Africa, 224n.7
“Planet Rock,” 224n.7
Bandung Conference, 107
Baraka, Amiri, 147–58, 161, 164, 172,
179, 182, 211, 223–4n.2, 224n.5
“Class Reunion,” 182
“Cuba Libre,” 150
“In the Tradition,” 152–4
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide
Note, 150
“Somebody Blew Up America,” 150
“‘There Was Something I Wanted to
Tell You.’ (33) Why?,” 155–6
“Wise, Why’s, Y’s,” 154–5
Barcelona, 46, 49, 81–2
Barnett, Thomas, 201
see also Strike Anywhere
Basie, Count, 153
Beat Poetry, 120, 124–37, 150, 176,
190, 192, 221n.1
Benjamin, Walter, 100, 209–10
“Theses on History,” 209–10
Bering, Vitus, 102
Bering Strait, 99–103
Berkeley, 136, 138, 142–3
Bloody Thursday, 142
People’s Park, 136, 138, 142–3,
223n.20
Bernstein, Charles, 75
Birth of a Nation, 151
Black Arts Movement, 148–50, 152–3
Black Mountain School, 114, 139, 192
Black Nationalism, 8, 82, 148–52, 171
Black Panther Party, 148
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Index
Black Star, 165
Blake, William, 88, 202
“London,” 202
Blue Jays, 15
Blue Scholars, 147, 165–70, 211–12,
224n.8
“50k Deep,” 169
Bayani, 166–9
“Bayani,” 167–9
Cinémetropolis, 224n.8
“Opening Salvo,” 166–7, 212
“Second Chapter,” 166
Blues, 14, 44, 153
Bly, Robert, 137
Blythe, Arthur, 152
Boone, Daniel, 99
Boston Five, 137
boysetsfire, 209
The Misery Index, 209
Bradstreet, Anne, 72
“The Author to Her Book,” 72
Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 74–5
Brecht, Bertolt, 59
“Questions of a Worker Who
Reads,” 59
broadsides, 118, 126, 148
Browder, Earl, 23, 88
Buddhism, 136, 190–5
Burke, Kenneth, 213
Bush, George W., 191
Casa de las Américas, 130
Castro, Fidel, 120, 125–30, 221n.3
Castro, Raúl, 119
Chaplin, Ralph, 21
“Solidarity Forever,” 21
Chase, Richard, 98
Chicano Moratorium against the
Vietnam War, 157
Chomsky, Noam, 137
Ciardi, John, 221n.9
Dialogue with an Audience, 221n.9
Cinderella, 121–2
City Lights bookstore, 124
Civil Rights Movement, 117–18
Clash, The, 178, 201
Sandinista!, 201
Cloots, Anacharsis, 93–4
Coffee House Press, 190
cognitive mapping, 6–7, 13, 212, 214
Cold War, 12, 66, 86–8, 94–9, 104,
109–14, 117, 124–6, 224n.3
see liberal consensus
Collins, Judy, 138
Coltrane, John, 153
Common, 165
Communist International, 54–5
Communist Party of the United
States of America (CPUSA), 55,
88, 126
Cortés, Hernán, 162, 220n.6
Council for Democracy, 97
Crane, Hart, 88
Creedence Clearwater Revival, 203
“Fortunate Son,” 203
Creeley, Robert, 114
Crisis, The, 59, 67, 69, 72, 80, 219n.6,
219n.12
Cuba/Cuban Revolution, 117–37
Cullen, Charles, 73
Cullen, Countee, 54, 73, 220n.15
The Black Christ, 73
Caroling Dusk, 220n.15
cultural front, 35–6
cultural nationalism, 35, 42, 54–6,
75–6, 83, 147–73
Daily Worker, 23, 34, 137
Davis, Bette, 122
Davis, Mike, 149
Debray, Régis, 125
Foco theory, 125, 128
Revolution in the Revolution?, 125
Declaration of Independence, 126
Deep Cover, 1–2
Defoe, Daniel, 200
A Journal of the Plague Year, 200
Dell, Floyd, 27
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Index
Democratic Party, 45, 61
see Popular Front; Roosevelt,
Franklin Delano
Dessau, Paul, 42
“Die Thälmann-Kolonne,” 42
Di Prima, Diane, 118–20
Revolutionary Letters, 118–20
DJ Kool Herc, 224n.7
documentary poetry/documentary
mode, 44, 62, 98, 188–90
Dorsey, Thomas A. (Georgia
Tom), 154
Dos Passos, 21–2
U.S.A., 21–2
Du Bois, W. E. B., 67–71, 76–7, 113,
218n.1, 218n.2, 219n.7
“Criteria of Negro Art,” 70–1
Foreword to Johnson’s Bronze, 67–8
“The African Roots of War,” 113,
219n.7
“Two Novels,” 218n.1
Dulles, John Foster, 133
Dunbar-Nelson, Alice, 56, 67–74,
219n.10, 219n.11
“I Sit and Sew,” 68–9
“The Proletariat Speaks,” 69–71
Duncan, Robert, 143, 223n.19
Dylan, Bob, 14–15, 119–24, 137, 143,
222n.7, 222n.9
“Desolation Row,” 119–24
Highway ‘61 Revisited, 121
“Masters of War,” 121
“Only a Pawn in Their Game,” 121
Dynamo, 35–6, 43, 102
Eastman, Max, 26–7, 59
Einstein, Albert, 122–3
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 119
El Movimiento, 157, 164
Eliot, T. S., 3, 10, 14–15, 28–9, 38,
41–2, 50, 82, 88, 93, 108–9,
122–3, 194, 213, 217–18n.11
“The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock,” 29–30, 82, 123
●
249
“Tradition and the Individual
Talent,” 28–9, 38
The Waste Land, 42, 50, 109, 194,
218n.14
Ellis Island, 94
Emanuel, James A., 148–9
“At Bay,” 148–9
Engels, Friedrich, 182
epic poetry (epos), 12, 86–92, 114–15
equidistant azimuthal projection, 98
Esperanto, 112–13
Ettor, Joseph, 22
Fair Play for Cuba Committee
(FPCC), 126, 129, 131, 150
Fearing, Kenneth, 24
“Dirge,” 24
Federal Theatre Project, 61–2
Ethiopia, 61
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 118–20,
124–37, 142, 150, 222n.10,
222n.12
After the Cries of the Birds, 135–7
Americus, Book II, 124
A Coney Island of the Mind, 125–6
“Note on Poetry,” 118
One Thousand Fearful Words for
Fidel Castro, 126–9
Time of Useful Consciousness, 124
“Where Is Vietnam?,” 135
Firestone Rubber and Tire
Company, 106
Fish, Stanley, 15
foco theory, 125, 128
Ford autoworkers, 178–9
Freeman, Joseph, 23, 33–7
French Revolution, 53, 94
Fuller, Hoyt W., 148–9
“Towards a Black Aesthetic,” 148–9
Funaroff, Sol, 35, 39–41, 102–3
“The Bellbuoy,” 102–3
G. I. Bill, 86
Galeano, Eduardo, 163
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Index
Garvey, Marcus, 106, 165, 221n.8
geoculture, 7–8
Ginsberg, Allen, 14, 119–20, 124–37,
150, 222–3n.13, 223n.14
“A Vow,” 132, 134
“America,” 136
“Howl,” 124, 132
“Message II,” 130–1
Prose Contribution to Cuban
Revolution, 130–1
“Wichita Vortex Sutra,” 132–5
Giovannitti, Arturo, 11, 22–34, 38, 50,
56, 210, 213
Arrows in the Gale, 23, 25–6, 217n.4
“May Day in Moscow,” 26
“New York and I,” 27–31
“O Labor of America: Heartbeat of
Mankind,” 31–2
“The Walker,” 25
“To Helen Keller,” 26
global poetic subjectivity, 4–6, 8
Gold, Michael, 23, 34–6
“Go Left Young Writers,” 35
“Toward Proletarian Art,” 35
Golden, John, 32
Gompers, Samuel, 32
Gonzales, Rodolfo, 149, 157,
162, 224n.6
“I am Joaquín,” 149, 157, 162
Goodman, Mitchell, 137
gopher, 92–3
Gordon, Don, 92
Great Depression, 5, 9, 33–6, 57
Green Party, 158
Grimké, Angelina Weld, 57
Gropper, William, 79
Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 125, 129
Guido of Arezzo, 113
Guthrie, Woody, 186
“This Land Is Your Land,” 186
Haile Selassie Gugsa, 63–4
Hampton, Fred, 155
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri,
17–18, 149, 176–7, 181, 187, 193,
201, 211–12
Harvey, David, 179
Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster, 24,
43, 49
Hayden, Robert, 166
Hemingway, Ernest, 10
Hiatt, Ben L., 222n.5
Poems—Written in Praise of LBJ,
222n.5
Hill, Joe, 21, 32
“John Golden and the Lawrence
Strike,” 32
Hip-hop, 164–73
Holocaust, 92
Homer, 87
Hopi religion, 91
Hughes, Langston, 8–10, 13–14,
16, 23, 55–67, 73, 80–1,
218–19n.4
“Advertisement for the
Waldorf-Astoria,” 8
“Air Raid Over Harlem,” 61–7
“Christ in Alabama,” 73
“Johannesburg Mines,” 57–8
“Letter From Spain,” 58
“Proem” (“The Negro”), 59
“Question [1],” 59–60
“The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain,” 57, 218–19n.4
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers,”
59–61, 66
The Weary Blues, 59
Hurston, Zora Neale, 57
Immortal Technique, 1–2, 15, 147,
169–73, 211
The 3rd World, 1–2
“Golpe De Estado,” 1
“Harlem Renaissance,” 170–2
“That’s What It Is,” 2
“The 3rd World,” 169–70
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Industrial Workers of the World
(IWW), 11, 14, 21, 24, 27, 32–3,
50, 201
International Brigades, 42
International Ladies Garment Workers
Union (ILGWU), 26
International Monetary Fund (IMF),
169, 172
Iraq War, 197
Iron Front, 203–4
James, C. L. R., 94
Jameson, Fredric, 6–7, 119, 143, 213,
216n.5
jazz, 14, 37, 39, 57, 152–3
John Reed Clubs, 35
Johnson, Georgia Douglas, 55–6,
67–8, 71–4
“Black Woman,” 71–2
Bronze, 71–2
“Cosmopolite,” 72–3
“The True American,” 73–4
Johnson, James Weldon, 54
Johnson, Lyndon B., 132–3, 135
Justice Party, 158
Keats, John, 37–8
“Ode to a Nightingale,” 37–8
Keller, Helen, 26, 217n.4
Kerouac, Jack, 225n.10
King, Martin Luther, 120
King, Rodney, 158
Kipling, Rudyard, 113
“Recessional,” 113
Klee, Paul, 209
Kramer, Aaron, 86
language poetry, 176
Lauter, Paul, 137
Lawrence textile strike, 22, 25, 31
League of Revolutionaries for a New
America, 157–8
People’s Tribune, 157–8
●
Levertov, Denise, 120, 137–45
“At the Justice Department,
Nov. 15, 1969,” 143
“Biafra,” 144
“Life At War,” 139–41
The Sorrow Dance, 139, 141–2
To Stay Alive, 139, 141–3
“The Distance,” 144–5
“The Pulse,” 141–2
Levertov Olga, 137, 139–40
Lewis, John, 120
liberal consensus, 12, 85–8, 114,
117, 126
Liberator, The, 22, 25–7,
29, 77–9
Lieber, Maxim, 67
Lindsay, Vachel, 23
littérature engage, 3–15, 206
Little Red Songbook, 32
living newspaper, 61
Locke, Alain, 54–5, 67, 82
The New Negro, 67
“The New Negro,” 54–5
London, Jack, 73
Los Angeles Janitor’s Strike,
2000, 164
Los Angeles Riots, 1992, 158
Lowell, Robert, 117
“Memories from West Street and
Lepke,” 117
Lowenfels, Walter, 86
Lyrical left, 22–5, 33–4, 50
Macy, Anne Sullivan, 26
Malcolm X, 153
March on Washington for Jobs and
Freedom, 120
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 26–7
“Futurist Manifesto,” 26–7
Marx, Karl, 7, 36, 182
Communist Manifesto, 182
MC Globe, 224n.7
McCarthyism, 88
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Index
McGrath, Thomas, 86–97, 99, 106–7,
112, 114, 119, 131, 194
Letter to an Imaginary Friend,
86–97, 114
pseudo-autobiography, 90, 114, 194
strategic and tactical poetry, 87
McKay, Claude, 26, 53–7, 74–83, 217n.5
“Barcelona,” 81–2
“Exhortation: Summer, 1919,” 78
Harlem Shadows, 77–8
“Harlem Shadows,” 78, 79
“He Who Gets Slapped,” 79
Home to Harlem, 53–5
“If We Must Die,” 26, 78
A Long Way From Home, 80–1
“Peasants’ Ways o’ Thinkin’,” 75–7
“The Harlem Dancer,” 78, 79
“The International Spirit,” 79–80
“The Tired Worker,” 78
“To Ethiopia,” 78–9
Medical Bureau and North American
Committee to Aid Spanish
Democracy, 46
Merriam, Eve, 86
Merwin, W. S., 137
Messenger, The, 55, 57, 59
Mills, C. Wright, 118
modernism, 3, 14, 25–8, 31–2, 35–6,
42–3, 46, 61, 65, 86–9, 96–8,
108, 115, 122, 194, 213
Monroe, Harriet, 25
Moratorium March on Washington, 143
Morello, Tom, 201
The Nightwatchman, 201
Motown, 170
multitude, 164, 176–8, 181, 201–3,
205, 212
Mussolini, Benito, 48, 61
Myrdal, Gunnar, 110
An American Dilemma, 110
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 6, 211
Nation, The, 218–19n.4
National Council of Teachers of
English, 188
National Liberation Front, 144
Nelson, Cary, 3, 34–5, 217n.6, 219n.5
Neruda, Pablo, 222n.5
New Criticism, 88
New Left Review, 221n.3
New Masses, 8, 10, 23, 35, 43, 46, 97
New York School, 192
New York Times Book Review, 44, 114
New Yorker, 114
North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA), 160, 179, 195
Nowak, Mark, 2, 5, 51, 175–91, 197,
200–1, 204, 206, 211
Coal Mountain Elementary, 2, 51,
175, 178–80, 183–91
“June 19, 1982,” 181–2
“Notes Toward and Anti-Capitalist
Poetics,” 179, 188
“Notes Toward and Anti-Capitalist
Poetics II,” 179
Revenants, 180
Shut Up Shut Down, 180–3
Nuyorican Café, 165
Obama, Barack, 119
Occupy, 177, 190, 201
Olson, Charles, 192
Ophelia, 122–3
Orlovsky, Peter, 130–1
Owen, Chandler, 55
“The New Negro—What
is He?,” 55
Pa’ lante: Poetry Polity Prose of a New
World, 131
Pan-Africanism, 55, 77, 106, 152
Paris Commune, 154–5
Pearl Harbor, 105
pedagogical dimension of art, 6–7
Penguin, 190
Peoples’ Olympiad, 43, 47
Pindar, 108, 113
Pizarro, Francisco, 99, 101, 220n.6
Plessy versus Ferguson, 60
poetic archive, 14, 213–14
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poetic communities, 10–15, 18, 117,
125, 135–7, 142, 144, 178, 206
poetics of global solidarity, definition,
1–6, 9–10
Poetry, 25
Poetry Project (St. Mark’s Church in
Manhattan), 190
Popular Front, 3, 10, 22–4, 33–5,
41–5, 49–50, 57–8, 61, 67, 85–6,
97, 102, 131, 211
see also cultural front
Pouget, Emile, 33, 217n.9
Sabotage, 33
Pound, Ezra, 3, 14, 15, 25, 87–8, 98,
122, 194, 213
“A Few Don’ts By An Imagiste,” 25
The Cantos, 87–8, 98
proletarian poetry, 10, 35, 97–8
Proust, Marcel, 93
Public Enemy, 169
punk/hardcore punk, 15, 176, 200,
207, 226n.13
Rainey, Ma, 154
Randolph, A. Philip, 55
“The New Negro—What is He?,” 55
Reagan, Ronald, 142, 180
Bloody Thursday, 142
Reed, Adolph, Jr., 171
Reed, Ishmael, 152
Reed, John, 27
RESIST, 137
Revolution on Canvas, 200
Rexroth, Kenneth, 221n.3
Rich, Adrienne, 7, 10–11, 179, 209–12
“Benjamin Revisited,” 209–10
“Credo of Passionate Skeptic,” 7
“North American Time,” 10–11, 209
Poetry and Commitment, 11, 210–12
Rineheart and Company, 98
Rodríguez, Luis, 147, 157–64, 168,
172, 179, 211
Always Running, 157
“Fire,” 162–3
It Calls You Back, 157
●
253
“My name’s not Rodríguez,” 162
“Running to America,” 160–2, 168
“¡Si, Se Puede! Yes, We Can!,” 164
“Watts Bleeds,” 159–60
Rolfe, Edwin, 5, 8–10, 23–4, 33–43,
50, 56, 86, 92, 102, 123, 213
“Credo,” 36–7
“Death By Water,” 42
“Entry,” 42
First Love and Other Poems, 34, 42
“Georgia Nightmare,” 36
“Homage to Karl Marx,” 36
“Kentucky,” 36
“Letter for One in Russia,” 36
To My Contemporaries, 23, 35–6
“Poetry,” 23, 35, 41
“Room with Revolutionists,” 41
“Seasons of Death,” 33–4
“These Men Are Revolution,” 8–9
“To My Contemporaries,” 24,
36–42, 123
“Witness at Leipzig,” 36
Romanticism, 24, 28–9, 34, 35–42, 71,
202–3
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 45, 48
Ross, Diana, 170
“Brown Baby,” 170
Rossman, Michael, 145
Rosten, Norman, 50, 85–7, 97–107,
114–15, 119, 221n.7
The Big Road, 50, 86, 97–106
Rukeyser, Muriel, 22–4, 56, 86, 98,
137, 176, 179, 183
“George Robinson: Blues,” 44
Life of Poetry, 44–5
“Mediterranean,” 24, 43, 46–9
“Night-Music,” 44
“Praise of the Committee,” 44
“The Book of the Dead,” 24, 43–6,
49–50, 98, 176, 179, 183
“The Cruise,” 46
“The Lynchings of Jesus,” 43
Theory of Flight, 43
U.S.1, 43–6, 48, 50
Russian Revolution of 1917, 26, 78
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Index
Sacco, Nicola, 22
Sago Mine Disaster, 183–4
Samson, John K., 14
San Francisco Renaissance, 124, 142
Sandburg, Carl, 23, 28, 32
“Chicago,” 32
Sanders, Ed, 130
Santamaria, Haydée, 130
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 6–8, 13, 206
Notebooks for an Ethics, 8
What Is Literature?, 6–7, 13, 206
Schuyler, George, 57, 218–19n.4
“The Negro-Art Hokum,” 57
Scottsboro Boys, 43, 66
Second Writers’ Congress, 66
Sewanee Review, 88
Sex Pistols, 201
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 67, 88–9, 176,
200, 205
“The Mask of Anarchy,” 200, 205
Situationists, 124
Sixties/Long Sixties, 117–20
Smith, Patti, 178
Spanish Civil War, 13, 34, 42–3, 46–9,
58, 80–1, 92–3, 137
see International Brigades; Peoples’
Olympiad
Steinbeck, John, 110
The Grapes of Wrath, 110
Strike Anywhere, 15, 175–8, 200–7
“Amplify”/”Blaze,” 204–5
Change Is a Sound, 203–4
In Defiance of Empty Times, 201
Exit English, 205
“Extinguish,” 206
Iron Front, 203
“Postcards from Home,” 206
“South Central Beach Party,” 206
“To The World,” 202–3
“You’re Fired,” 202
Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS), 118, 131
Port Huron Statement, 118
Suez Canal, 105
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 28, 30
“Dolores,” 28
Tate, Allen, 108
Teh, Ian, 190
Thälmann, Ernst, 93
Thatcher, Margaret, 180
Third International Red Poets’ Nite, 23
Third World, 1–2, 112, 117–19, 125,
145, 147–9, 150–1, 156, 166–9
Third World Liberation Movements,
1, 117–19, 125, 145, 147–9, 166–9
Third World Marxism, 148, 150–1
Third World Project, 147–8, 156
Tolson, Melvin, 86–7, 106–15, 119,
152, 221n.9
Libretto for the Republic of Liberia,
86, 102–15
Touré, Askia, 152
“From the Pyramids to the
Projects,” 152
Trilling, Lionel, 86
Trotsky, Leon, 170
Twain, Mark, 200
“War Prayer,” 200
United Automobile Union, 179
United Nations, 98, 106
Universal Negro Improvement
Association, 106
Vanity Fair, 8
Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 22
Vietnam War, 5, 119–20, 126, 131–45
Virgil, 87
Volapük, 113
Waldman, Anne, 7, 10, 175–8,
190–200
“Fast Speaking Woman,” 190
“Global Positioning,” 191–2
Iovis, 7, 10, 175–8, 190–200
Structure of the World Compared to a
Bubble, 190
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 4–7, 9, 56, 119
Walton, Edna Lou, 44
Watten, Barrett, 142–3, 223n.20
Watts riots, 1965, 159
Weather Underground, 125
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White House Poetry Night, 165
Whitman, Walt, 13, 28, 31, 36, 105,
108, 110–11, 127–8, 210
“Passage to India,” 105
“Song for Alle Seas, All Ships,” 31
“Song of Myself,” 31
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloom’d,” 127–8
Williams, Raymond, 181–2
Williams, William Carlos, 10, 86,
88, 98
Paterson, 88, 98
Wonder, Stevie, 153
●
Workers Monthly, 59
World War I, 68–9
World War II, 87–8, 90–6
World-System, 4–10
see geoculture
World-Systems analysis, 4, 6, 101
Wright, Richard, 10, 82–3
“Blueprint for Negro
Writing,” 82–3
Young Communist League, 34
Zapatistas, 97, 179
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