Revolutionary Memory

Recovering the Poetry of the American Left

Cary Nelson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135310158
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Revolutionary Memory is the most important book yet to be published about the vital tradition of leftwing American Poetry. As Cary Nelson shows, it is not only our image of the past but also our sense of the present and future that changes when we recover these revolutionary memories. Making a forceful case for political poetry as poetry, Nelson brings to bear his extraordinary knowledge of American poets, radical movements, and social struggles in order to bring out an undervalued strength in a literature often left at the canon's edge. Focused in part of the red decade of the 1930s, Revolutionary Memory revitalizes biographical criticism for writers on the margin and shows us for the first time how progressive poets fused their work into a powerful chorus of political voices. Richly detailed and beautifully illustrated with period engravings and woodcuts, Revolutionary Memory brings that chorus dramatically to life and set a cultural agenda for future work.

1

Modern Poems

We Have Wanted to Forget

A Poetry Dossier

It is important to begin by remarking what a wealth of “beginnings” there are in the various stories that can be told about modern poetry and about its immediate predecessors. Some of these beginnings are moments of cultural and stylistic change; others are nodal points, moments when diverse cultural impulses coalesce in poetry of particular force; and finally some of these beginnings are moments of forgetfulness and loss, even instances of active repression, when vital poetic traditions have been suppressed so that more selective histories can be retold thereafter. Even in the selective histories that have served the dominant culture—the “we” of my title—it has been impossible to ignore the fact that modern poetry kept reinventing itself repeatedly and thus began again itself many times.

For much of this century, we have known that poetry is a palimpsest of multiple beginnings, that it is layered with earlier poems, with the memory of earlier poems and with echoes of poems forgotten that speak through us now unawares. Both the institutions that promote poetry and the multiple audiences for poetry are palimpsests as well.—;layered with traces of what is treasured and reviled, commemorated and rejected, witnessed and repressed.The space of the contemporary is also a space of memory; it is shaped in part by what we are willing to remember and are capable of remembering. Some traces of the poetic past can live again and others, it seems, cannot, though our own time is never the ultimate test of a poem’s viability.There are no ultimate tests; there are only continuing contexts, new openings and foreclosures of opportunity. The privileged status of the present is an illusion, the fool’s gold of cultural pride. It will pass.

Yet in the social spaces in which we do live there are contemporary opportunities that are available to us and us alone. The future cannot seize them; only we can. There are, we all know, multiple spaces and multiple audiences. The bookstore audience, the subway audience, the cafe audience, the classroom audience, the performance audience, the political meeting audience, the factory audience; all these and other audiences overlap and articulate their own palimpsests, but they are not identical.

In tracking some of the absences and presences that mark our own memory, taking advantage of the cultural space that makes this book possible, it will be useful to open with several instructive and widely forgotten moments in the prehistory and history of modern American poetry. I have chosen a list of examples so as to make clear that these are but fragments of an unwriteable history. That invocation of incapacitation cuts several ways: the history I want to narrate is as yet unwriteable because we do not have either the full range of modern poetic texts taking up the issues of politics, class, race, or work and its exploitation— issues intertwined in some of these poems—or the distinctive and sometimes ephemeral way the poetry was published and used at various moments by distinct audiences. Furthermore, and equally important, we have not yet widely recognized who the “we” are who would be writing this history. In other words, neither our disciplinary inheritance of remembering and forgetting this poetry and its rich cultural life nor our present relation to racial trauma, exploited labor, or the history of progressive culture is sufficiently present to mind for such a history to be undertaken. This is thus paradoxically (and perhaps necessarily) a moment at once of incapacitation and opportunity. In presenting these telling fragments of a hypothetical history, then, I must also try to position them within our contemporaneity. If this seems a little oblique and abstract, that is my intention. I want to withhold clarity on that issue until its proper moment. Here then are a set of partial narratives in the form of an emerging agenda:

1890

George P. McIntyre gathers together the poems he has been writing and publishing since 1877 and publishes them as The Light of Persia or the Death of Mammon and Other Poems of Prophecy, Profit, and Peace.¹ Though he later moves for a time to Topeka, Kansas, where he is known as the “Poet of Topeka, ” he is probably living in Chicago at the time the book is issued there by the Wage Workers’ Publishing Company. The book looks back on more than a decade of economic struggle for working people and draws a series of lessons for what will prove the economic crises of the 1890s. From the Depression and tumultuous strikes of the 1870s through the difficult years of the 1880s, when massive immigration enabled employers to keep wages low, the need for basic social change was continually apparent. McIntyre’s unique book is at once historically specific— among the historical notes and small essays included in the book is one called “Who Owns America?” and subtitled “A Record of Robbery Unparalleled in the World’s History” that gives a detailed list of all the land grants to railroads that allowed their huge profits—and more broadly reflective, as he works to generalize patterns of social inequity. An 1889 poem, “America, ” opens by satirizing a certain shock of recognition as relevant now as it was then; McIntyre is addressing not only the fact of poverty and hunger but also the structural blindness and illusions about America that allow such facts to be repeatedly registered with surprise.² To read his poem more than a hundred years later is to credit disturbing continuities in American self-deception and to grant poetry a role in calling witness to the realities of our social life. Here are the first two stanzas out of a total of fifteen:

“Want!” in a land of plenty—

“Want!” did I hear you say—

“Want!” in a land of harvests!

“Want?” in America?—

Great God! and is it then true,

That there is want in our streets to-day?

Gaunt want and wolfish hunger,

And cold, in America?

Want! in this land of plenty,

Want! in America,

Want! where rivers of golden grain

Are freighted away?—

Want! where mast-fed swine

Are roaming a thousand hills,

And mast-fed swine of another kind

Are discounting moneyed bills?

McIntyre’s The Light of Persia is also a workable place to begin rethinking both mixed forms and the social functions of poetry in the modern period. Although current readers would find many of his poems rather stilted and unsuccessful, they do have passages of interest, like the one above, and the book as a whole, unconventional in many ways, presents a remarkable set of aims for poetry. McIntyre quotes Montaigne for his epigraph: “I have gathered a posie of other men’s flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them together is my own.” The thread that binds, to a significant degree, is his own poems, and what it binds is a collage—distributed throughout the book—of three hundred prose and poem quotations from other authors.

Yet McIntyre largely suppresses his authorial function, for it is almost impossible when first reading through the book sequentially to have any firm idea which poems are his. The final item in the book is a partial table of contents; it includes a list of thirty poems, nineteen of which have dates of composition noted.A footnote at the bottom of the page reports that “poems bearing dates are the author’s.” Midway through the book McIntyre prints a “Table of First Lines” listing thirty-one items, but the authors here are unidentified, and the “lines” quoted are in some cases full or partial stanzas of two to six lines, so the table is itself effectively a poetic text. Much of the second half of the 221-page book is a series of notes, really a group of essays presenting social and economic background and evidence for the general claims staked out earlier in the poems themselves. The titles include “Why Farmers Are Poor” and “Who Owns America: Our Public Domain—A Record of Robbery Unparalleled in the World’s History, ” the essay cited earlier that offers a state-by-state list of acreage granted to railroads. “The poems herewith presented, ” he writes early on, “aim to specify and lay the blame for present iniquitous conditions where they belong.”

One contemporary review described The Light of Persia as a kind of one-volume library on economic issues affecting the working class. McIntyre is clearly trying to draw together a Left tradition of poetry and social commentary and to establish it as a more authentically democratic American voice. It is the poetry, however, that offers the broadest moral and political generalizations. Thus his poem “Embalm It” urges us to fold up the American flag and put it away, since the flag can no longer justifiably fly over a land whose social realities belie the flag’s symbolic history. He also puts forward a series of basic economic solutions in slogan form—“Abolition of Wage Slavery. Abolition of Private Property. Abolition of Money. Abolition of Poverty.”—and repeatedly prints the call “AGITATE!” at the bottom of his pages. Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of McIntyre’s work, it offers a model of poetry as revolutionary intertextual generalization, a partly anonymous and collective discourse that binds together history, economics, and morality in a project of clarifying the need for social change. It is an exemplary instance of premodern collage that reorients our memories of the social functions collage was sometimes intended to serve.

Between McIntyre and some of the great mixed forms of modernism—from Jean Toomer’s Cane and William Carlos Williams’s The Descent of Winter to Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead”—sometimes oblique and improbable and sometimes rather direct connections can be established.They are hardly connections demonstrating influence, since it is likely none of these poets knew McIntyre’s work. They are rather connections in the very different ways poets took up mixed forms as part of efforts to lay out broad visions of social life in the face of a dominant culture that was often inhospitable or worse. But before one could get to the sense of necessity informing any of these later works many changes literary and otherwise would have to take place. One of the first of these was a more complete disenchantment with national power than McIntyre himself could feel, since he still believed the country could be reformed. That change would come for some when they were confronted with U.S. imperialism at the end of the century; for many others it would arrive with the Great Depression of the 1930s.

1899

The text is the one American poem of protest against abusive working conditions almost universally remembered, remembered not only by literature professors but also, for many years, by the general public. For decades every high school student read it and some still do. The poem, of course, is Edwin Markham’s (1852–1940) “The Man with the Hoe, ” first published in the San Francisco Examiner in January 1899 and soon reprinted in newspapers across the country. It was one of several protest poems Markham published and not the only one to receive wide circulation, but its status is nonetheless exceptional. It was eventually translated into forty languages and became one of the anthems of the American labor movement, though in some ways, as I shall show, an atypical one. It also provoked a genuine national debate about its meaning and implications, one of the few times in our history a poem was the subject of such wide discussion and controversy over its proper interpretation. It was admired, attacked, imitated, and satirized repeatedly. Frank Norris made it a central referrent for the main character in his 1901 novel The Octopus. It was reprinted in numerous special editions and pamphlets, though apparently there were no successful takers for railroad magnate Collis Huntington’s pledge of a $5, 000 reward for a poem refuting “The Man with the Hoe” with equal vigor. People argued over its meaning with a dedication usually reserved for specialists. And it is, as it happens, unquestionably the perfect poem to have played the role it played in American culture then and since. One reader who wrote to the Examiner (March 11, 1899) worried that the poem’s depressing depiction of rural working conditions would lead to “thousands of misguided country youth flocking to our cities, ” while another a week earlier had castigated it as “the dreamy note of the inaccurate thinker stirred to sentimental sorrow by the appearance of wrong, too careless or unable to distinguish aright the cause of the trouble.”

The poem is an explicit response to an oil painting by the French artist Jean François Millet (1814–1875), one of several paintings on contemporary agricultural workin...