Left of Poetry

Depression America and the Formation of Modern Poetics

Sarah Ehlers

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781469651293
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

In this incisive study, Sarah Ehlers returns to the Depression-era United States in order to unsettle longstanding ideas about poetry and emerging approaches to poetics. By bringing to light a range of archival materials and theories about poetry that emerged on the 1930s left, Ehlers reimagines the historical formation of modern poetics. Offering new and challenging readings of prominent figures such as Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, and Jacques Roumain, and uncovering the contributions of lesser-known writers such as GenevieveTaggardand Martha Millet, Ehlers illuminates an aesthetically and geographically diverse matrix of schools and movements. Resisting the dismissal of thirties left writing as mere propaganda, the book reveals how communist-affiliated poets experimented with poetic modes—such as lyric and documentary—and genres, including songs, ballads, and nursery rhymes, in ways that challenged existing frameworks for understanding the relationships among poetic form, political commitment, and historical transformation. As Ehlers shows, Depression left movements and their international connections are crucial for understanding both the history of modern poetry and the role of poetic thought in conceptualizing historical change.

Part I

Documentary

CHAPTER ONE

Photography and the Development of Radical Poetics

Langston Hughes in Haiti, Mexico, Alabama

But how many people have really listened to this photograph?

—Fred Moten, In the Break

What Kind of Poem Would You Make?

For Langston Hughes, the “red decade” began with a trip to the Caribbean. During the spring and summer of 1931, Hughes and the African American artist Zell Ingram traveled to Cuba and Haiti. The trip came at a formative moment for Hughes, when the “personal crash” engendered by his break with patron Charlotte Osgood Mason intersected with the effects of the 1929 stock market crash. As he later described it in his autobiographical I Wonder as I Wander, which opens with his 1931 travels, “When I was twenty-seven the stock-market crash came. When I was twenty-eight, my personal crash came. Then I guess I woke up.”1 Whether or not Hughes’s contemporary readers specifically reference his travels to the Caribbean, they also mark the early 1930s as a significant moment of personal and artistic transformation. Hughes had been involved in left political and cultural institutions prior to the 1930s (as a high school student, he supported the Russian Revolution, and he had been writing for Communist Party publications throughout the twenties), but his participation in the left increased exponentially during the Depression and had a “marked impact” on the form and content of his poetry.2 Hughes’s experiences in the Caribbean, and in Haiti specifically, were influential on the construction of his political persona and his radical poetics during the Depression. In U.S.-occupied Haiti, Hughes witnessed the exportation of Jim Crow, and what he saw there intensified his outrage at systems of race and class oppression. At the same time, his travels in the country engendered a connection to histories of black rebellion, which he linked to present international struggles against racial and economic imperialism.3 His 1932 poem “Always the Same,” for instance, evokes the “coffee hills of Haiti” in order to articulate the struggle of black laborers in the Americas at the same time that it uses documentary lists to demonstrate how those “coffee hills” are connected to “the docks at Sierra Leone” and the “cotton fields of Alabama” in ways that disrupt U.S. nationalist-populist discourses about left struggle.4

Thirties political poems such as “Always the Same” can be better understood, in both historical and theoretical terms, when one considers that Hughes traveled to the Caribbean in 1931 with the Kodak camera that his friend Amy Spingarn gave him as a graduation present. The extent to which Hughes used his handheld camera to document Haitian people, landscapes, and monuments is proven by his extensive visual archive from the trip, which contains several contact sheets of photographic prints, picture postcards, a photograph album, and “loose pages” from a scrapbook. At first glance, Hughes’s snapshots from Haiti, along with the albums and scrapbooks where he carefully arranged and captioned them, might appear as unremarkable personal ephemera. This is perhaps why, despite the continued critical interest in discerning the literary-historical and political import of Hughes’s travels in Haiti, almost every story told about them either leaves out the fact of Hughes’s Kodak or mentions it only in passing.

Hughes’s experience of taking photographs in Haiti, along with the process of organizing them in albums and scrapbooks, generated questions about the politics and practices of representation that he pursued in his subsequent political poetry. He did not snap pictures as merely a hobbyist or awed tourist. Hughes’s practice of visually documenting Haiti occurs in the context of his increasing involvement in left political and literary organizations during the early 1930s, and his photographs of barefoot children, fishermen, and women selling wares in crowded marketplaces demonstrate his concerted, if vexed, political effort to make visible the Haitian peasant class as well as his desire to comprehend the experiences of black diaspora subjects in relation to the totalizing effects of capitalism and imperialism. Hughes’s oft-cited accounts of Haiti—“The People without Shoes” (1931), “Whites Shadows in a Black Land” (1932), and the first chapters of his autobiography I Wonder as I Wander (1956)—indicate how he saw the country through the lens of intersecting racial and class struggles, and they emphasize the connections he made between what he witnessed in Haiti and the conditions of subaltern groups in other parts of the world. Hughes’s photographic encounter with Haiti is part of the construction of a transnational vision that starts in the Caribbean but then moves through the U.S. South and Mexico. Across these sites, Hughes utilizes documentary imaging as a resource in the construction of an anticapitalist, anti-imperialist countervisuality, one that is enacted in the interference between photography and writing.5 The photographic image is fundamental to Hughes’s attempts to map the connectedness of persons and locales in a capitalist world system as well as to imagine the formation of international political communities in resistance to that system.

The two chapters that compose this first section examine closely the nexus between documentary and poetic genres, demonstrating how Depression-era writers fused the two as part of their efforts to grasp historical experiences of capitalist crisis. Documentary techniques and objects reveal significant aspects of how left writers imagined the poem in relation to other technologies for representing political subjects. Even though Hughes was not publishing actively in photo-textual or photojournalistic modes during the thirties and forties, he, like his comrade Richard Wright, was attuned to the form and politics of the documentary photograph, and his experiments with emergent proletarian aesthetics were informed by the possibilities of photography.6 Indeed, it was a photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, who reminded Hughes in 1935, “You’re a child of the proletariat first.”7 Unlike poets discussed in chapter 2, such as Muriel Rukeyser, Ben Maddow, and Archibald MacLeish, Hughes did not overtly incorporate or theorize visual objects in his poems. Nonetheless, he described his early-thirties poetry as “documentary, journalistic, and topical.”8 The interactions between Hughes’s Haiti photography and his early Depression poems are conceptually complex: exemplifying Rukeyser’s call to “extend the document” and, as I will discuss later in the chapter, to “photograph and extend the voice,” in ways that explicitly address the international black proletariat and multiracial communist coalitions. The range of Hughes’s engagements with documentary imaging—from his own photographs of Haiti to his relationships with photographers such as Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Cartier-Bresson—push beyond the bounds of New Deal initiatives as they employ documentary in the shaping of an international public sphere.

Opening Hughes’s visual archive from Haiti recontextualizes the development of his radical poetics in terms of a documentary modernist tradition and, in so doing, reframes his political poems in relation to black experimental writing traditions. When Hughes’s 1930s poetry is recuperated, it is often idealized as a conduit for “common” or “vernacular” speech.9 Even recent efforts to demonstrate how the internationalist impulse of Hughes’s social poetics was mediated by modern technologies such as the radio cling to fantasies of “representative voices” that “could speak for all” through the ideal of a “universalized” expressive subject.10 Such analyses partake in an interpretive practice that Anthony Reed terms “racialized reading,” a “particular kind of misreading” that “locates texts within a preemptive black tradition or black social location,” and as a result they foreclose alternate possibilities imagined through experimental writing. Hughes’s engagements with photography, insofar as they complicate the notion that his poems are sites of authentic or unmediated expression, provide an alternate interpretive context that also allows for a “radical unlearning” of the predetermined understandings of black social life on which racialized reading practices rely.11

Complicating current understandings of Hughes’s career as a radical poet, this chapter further illuminates how African American writers’ engagements with photography enable “an altered understanding of the literary field” as well as a renewed understanding of “photography as a practice and cultural resource.”12 The movement between Hughes’s visual archive and his thirties poems also reorients conceptions of the relationship between the historical and the expressive. Created out of the interference between the visual and the verbal, Hughes’s radical verse interrogates how the speaker of a poem exists in a gap between lived history and representation, and it enacts a mode of expression that is not authentic or private but mediated by technology and history. Thus, there is more at stake in Hughes’s contemplation of the relationship between the photograph and the poem—or image and text—than figuring how the poem might match the photograph’s ability to render visible subaltern populations. What struck Hughes about photographs was not their evidentiary power but their unique temporality: the photograph’s capturing of an immediate situation provided Hughes with a template for representing new global political realities and networks of relation. Even if the photograph per se vanishes from Hughes’s interwar radical poetry, it remains as part of his conceptual and formal imagining of an international revolutionary community. In this sense, Hughes’s interwar political verses, far from being merely “ham-fisted” or “didactic,” are historical exemplars of, and precursors to, contemporary multimedia experiments that negate the conservative ideological parameters of the expressive subject.13

I begin by examining Hughes’s overlooked archive of photographs and scrapbooks from Haiti, demonstrating how Hughes’s photographic encounter with Haiti reveals significant aspects of how he imagined the poem in relation to other technologies for representing political subjects. In subsequent sections, I extend these considerations to Hughes’s interwar radical verse, including his 1931 verse play Scottsboro Limited, showing how Hughes’s encounters with visual objects on an international scale continued to influence his poetic compositions during the interwar period. The chapter closes by demonstrating how Hughes’s contemplation of the relationship between the practices of photography and poetry writing opens up new readings of James Agee and Walker Evans’s canonical documentary modernist text, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), notably Agee’s statements about the status of the poetic. Hughes’s early radical verses, like Agee’s experimental prose, attempt to translate the truth claims of the photograph into language and, in so doing, gesture toward an unrealizable whole through a concentration on the particular. To put it in Jacques Rancière’s terms, Hughes’...