Abstract
Here, the editors explore the longitudinal history of the many interconnections between poetry and communism since Plato, with particular attention to the twentieth century, before turning to a conjunctural analysis of the current revival of communism as a project and its various connections to contemporary poetry. Arguing that the present conjuncture is defined by an acutely “evental” disposition of anti-capitalist practice, a utopian mapping of post-capitalist social space, and a movement of poetry away from the classroom and into the streets, Jennison and Murphet ask what kinds of poetry, and what kinds of theory, seem best suited to the emergence of new styles of political agency and solidarity in the ongoing crisis of senile capitalism.
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- 1.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 4.
- 2.
See Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy, “Figures of Romantic Anti-Capitalism,” New German Critique, 32 (Spring–Summer, 1984): 42–92.
- 3.
We should note here that the Soviet State continued for some time to encourage a robust internationalism, even as it itself did not hew to these principles: the entire experience of Black American artists in the USSR in the 1930s is a fine, if complexly fated, example, as we explore later in this book.
- 4.
Mayakovsky, I Myself, Vol. I of The Works by Vladimir Mayakovsky 6 vols. (Moscow: Ogonyok Library, Pravda Publishers, 1973), p. 78.
- 5.
Boris Pasternak, quoted in S. Zaytsez, “Mayakovsky’s Second Death,” Tatyanin Den (26/04/2012).
- 6.
Lenin, State and Revolution, in The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York & London: Norton, 1975), 313.
- 7.
Badiou, The Age of the Poets, and Other Writings on Twentieth-Century Poetry and Prose, ed. and trans. Bruno Bosteels (London & New York” Verso, 2014), 94.
- 8.
See Mark Steven, Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017).
- 9.
See, for example, the Warwick Research Collective’s Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015).
- 10.
Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London & New York: Verso, 2009), 285.
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Jennison, R., Murphet, J. (2019). Introduction. In: Jennison, R., Murphet, J. (eds) Communism and Poetry. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17156-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17156-8_1
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