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Communism and Poetry: Writing Against Capital addresses the relationship between an upsurge in collective political practice around the world since 2000, and the crystallization of newly engaged forms of poetry. Considering an array of perspectives-poets, poet-critics, activists and theorists-these essays shed new light on the active interface between emancipatory political thought and poetic production and explore how poetry and the new communism are creating mutually innovative forms of thought and activity, supercharging the utopian imagination. Drawing inspiration from past connections between communism and poetry, and theorizing new directions over the years ahead, the volume models a much-needed critical solidarity with creative strategies in the present conjuncture to activate movements of resistance, on the streets and in verse.
List of contents
1. Introduction, Ruth Jennison and Julian Murphet.- 2. The Other Minimal Demand, Joshua Clover and Christopher Nealon.- 3. The Relation Between Poetry and Poems is Political, Sometimes, Sean Pryor.- 4. "Everywhere Worlds Connect": Realist Poetics and the Ecologies of Capitalism, Margaret Ronda.- 5. "The Changing Same": Value in Marx and Amiri Baraka, Tyrone Williams.- 6. Mayakovsky at Mirafori: Operaismo and the Negation of Poetry, Alberto Toscano.- 7. Sean Bonney: Poet Out of Time, Andrea Brady.- 8. Notes on Poetry and Communism: Abolition, Solidarity, Love, Rob Halpern.- 9. "Wide as Targes Let Them Be," or, How a Poem is a Barricade, Julian Murphet.- 10. "A Whole New Set of Stars": Poetics and Revolutionary Consciousness, Ruth Jennison.- 11. Free Disassociation/ Logic, Keston Sutherland.- 12. Just Come Now, Justin Clemens.
About the author
Ruth Jennison is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. She is the author of
The Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins, andThe Avant-Garde (2012) and articles and book chapters on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American poetics, Marxism and the political economies of literary form.
Julian Murphet is Scientia Professor of English and Film Studies at UNSW Sydney, Australia, where he directs study in English, Creative Writing and Film. He is the author of
Literature and Race in Los Angeles (2001),
Multimedia Modernism (2009),
Faulkner’s Media Romance (2017) and
Todd Solondz(2019).
Summary
Communism and Poetry: Writing Against Capital addresses the relationship between an upsurge in collective political practice around the world since 2000, and the crystallization of newly engaged forms of poetry. Considering an array of perspectives—poets, poet-critics, activists and theorists—these essays shed new light on the active interface between emancipatory political thought and poetic production and explore how poetry and the new communism are creating mutually innovative forms of thought and activity, supercharging the utopian imagination. Drawing inspiration from past connections between communism and poetry, and theorizing new directions over the years ahead, the volume models a much-needed critical solidarity with creative strategies in the present conjuncture to activate movements of resistance, on the streets and in verse.
