Abstract
Reflecting on the proliferation in recent left-wing poetry of figures of the barricade, this chapter ponders the relationship between poetry and the “linguistic commons,” or the commons of language as such. Rather than construing the communist qualities of poetry in terms of its explicit ideological purpose, or its participation in direct anti-capitalist action, it is proposed that poetry is communist to the extent that it works as a prophylactic or barricade, protecting the commons of language from the predations and enclosures of private property relations. That language can be privatized, and with it the very wherewithal for socially critical thought and the building blocks of class consciousness, is historically obvious, as is the evolving function of poetry as an apotropaic anathema of and resistance to the logic of privatization. Various contemporary poets are read for their work in this direction.
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- 1.
“The commons – a vehicle for meeting everyone’s basic needs in a roughly equitable way – is being annexed and disassembled to serve a global market machine which treats nature as a brute commodity. Commoners become isolated individuals. Communities of commoners are splintered and reconstituted as armies of consumers and employees. The ‘unowned’ resources of the commons are converted into the raw fodder for market production and sale – and after every last drop of it has been monetized, the inevitable wastes of the market are dumped back into the commons.” David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, “The Commons as a Transformative Vision,” in Bollier and Helfrich, eds., The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State, e-book ed. (Amherst, MA: Levellers Press, 2012), loc. 350 of 11,127.
- 2.
Amy De’Ath, from Caribou (Bad Press, 2011), reprinted in Emily Critchley, ed., Out of Everywhere 2 (Hastings: Reality Street, 2015), 22.
- 3.
E. L. Doctorow, City of God (London: Little Brown: 2000), 243.
- 4.
Alain Badiou, “Poetry and Communism,” in 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.
- 5.
E. L. Doctorow, Lives of the Poets (New York: Random House, 1984), 76.
- 6.
Charles Olsen, The Maximus Poems I.13, ed. George F. Butterick (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 17.
- 7.
Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 3; Notes to Literature, Vol. II, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 198, 306.
- 8.
Adorno, The Culture Industry: selected essays on mass culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 108.
- 9.
Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 135.
- 10.
Adorno, quoted in Susan Buck-Morss, The Origins of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The Free Press, 1977), 175.
- 11.
Adorno, Critical Models, 222.
- 12.
“Because critique makes it possible for capitalism to equip itself with a spirit which … is required for people to engage in the profit-making process, it indirectly serves capitalism and is one of the instruments of its ability to endure.” Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans Gregory Elliott (London & New York: Verso, 2007), 490.
- 13.
Mark Greif, Against Everything, e-book ed. (London & New York: Verso), loc. 1695, 1878.
- 14.
Lisa Robertson, 3 Summers (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2016), 70.
- 15.
Walt Hunter, “Planetary Dejection: An Ode to the Commons,” in symploke 24:1–2 (2016), 226.
- 16.
See Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” in Notes to Literature, Vol. I, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 37–54.
- 17.
Keston Sutherland, “Statement for Revolution and/or Poetry” (October 15, 2013), at https://revolutionandorpoetry.wordpress.com/2013/10/15/keston-sutherlands-statement-for-revolution-andor-poetry/
- 18.
Andrea Brady, “The Principle of Song: Denise Riley’s Lyrics,” in Amy De’Ath and Fred Wah, eds., Toward. Some. Air.: Remarks on Poetics (Banff: Banff Centre Press, 2015), loc. 331 of 6608.
- 19.
William Wordsworth, in Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, eds. Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter (Toronto: Broadview, 2008), 178, 174.
- 20.
Percy B. Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2002), 520.
- 21.
Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), 33, 32, 34.
- 22.
T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” ll. 73–5, in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, Vol. I: Collected and Uncollected Poems, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), 205.
- 23.
See Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Language in Literature (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 71–94. I should state that I do not here wish to identify the poetic function with Jakobson’s famous definition of it: “The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” (71). This definition is perfectly compatible, as Jakobson himself makes abundantly clear, with Republican political campaign slogans and advertisers’ jingles.
- 24.
Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1991), 12.
- 25.
Bruce Andrews, in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, eds. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 55.
- 26.
Ron Siliman, in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, 123.
- 27.
Steve McCaffery, ‘The Death of the Subject: The Implications of Counter-communication in Recent Language-Centered Writing,” Open Letter 3, no. 7 (Summer, 1977): 70.
- 28.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” (1873), in Writings from the Early Notebooks, ed. Raymond Geuss and Alexander Nehamas, trans. Ladislaus Löb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 257.
- 29.
Denise Riley, “A Drift,” in Selected Poems (Hastings: Reality Street Editions, 2000), 69.
- 30.
Keston Sutherland, The Odes to TL61P (London: Enitharmon, 2013), 29–30.
- 31.
Jos Charles, interview with Juliana Spahr, Entropy, December 11, 2015, https://entropymag.org/interview-with-juliana-spahr/
- 32.
Justin Katko, “On That Which Must Be Stopped,” in Fred Wah and Amy De’Ath, eds., Toward. Some. Air.: Remarks on Poetics, loc. 930 of 6608.
- 33.
- 34.
Sutherland, Odes to TL61P, 27.
- 35.
Stephen Collis, in conversation with Sean Bonney, in Toward. Some. Air., loc. 5528.
- 36.
Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, History of the Paris Commune of 1871, trans Eleanor Marx (London & New York: Verso, 2012), 254.
- 37.
Contemporary observers quoted in Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury (London & New York: Verso, 2015), loc. 970 of 2985.
- 38.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Mask of Anarchy” (1819), ll. 295–302, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, eds. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd Ed. (New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2002), 324.
- 39.
As Keston Sutherland writes, “No poem contains any language that is never exhausted, and the best poetry is also invariably the best at using exhausted language.” In “Poetry or Emptying,” in Wah and De’Ath, eds., Toward. Some. Air., loc. 2867.
- 40.
Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (1859), at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm
- 41.
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: fugitive planning and black study, e-book ed. (Brooklyn, NY: Minor Compositions, 2013), loc. 138 of 2251.
- 42.
Hejinian, “The Sneeze: Oversignification, Protest, Poetry,” Contemporary Women’s Writing 10:1 (March 2016), 44.
- 43.
Greif, Against Everything, loc. 1907.
- 44.
Badiou, Age of the Poets, 94.
- 45.
Moten, “it’s not that I want to say,” The Service Porch (Tucson, AZ: Letter Machine Editions, 2016), 98.
- 46.
Moten, The Service Porch, 85.
- 47.
Juliana Spahr and David Buuck, An Army of Lovers (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2013, loc. 1184 of 1345.
- 48.
Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, sec. IV (1922), in The International Psycho-Analytical Library, Vo. 4, ed. Ernest Jones, at https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/assets/pdf/freud_beyond_the_pleasure_principle.pdf
- 49.
Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin, 1992), 284.
- 50.
Sara Larsen, Merry Hell (Berkeley: Atelos, 2016), ff.
- 51.
David Brazil, Antisocial Patience (New York: Roof Books, 2015), 18–19.
- 52.
Sean Bonney, Letters Against the Firmament (London: Enitharmon, 2015), loc. 754 of 1522.
- 53.
Keston Sutherland, from “Joshua Clover and Keston Sutherland, Always Totalize: Poetry and Revolution,” at http://theclaudiusapp.com/5-clover-sutherland.html
- 54.
Silvia Federici, “Feminism and the Politics of the Commons” in David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, eds., The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State, loc. 1591 of 11,127.
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Murphet, J. (2019). “Wide as Targes Let Them Be,” or, How a Poem Is a Barricade. 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_9
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