Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left, and: Women Poets on the Left: Lola Ridge, Genevieve Taggard, Margaret Walker (review)

In its eponymous project of "recovering the poetry of the American left," Cary Nelson's Revolutionary Memory offers exhaustive scholarship of a genuinely lived kind, as personal interviews and rare artifacts of material poetic culture—texts marked up for performance, poems transcribed onto postcards home, scrapbook entries—reveal the meanings and uses of poetry in people's everyday lives and reflect this book's remarkable level of historical detail. Nelson adopts two complementary approaches, one poet-centered and one more collectively oriented, toward remembering these poems.

In his first chapter's polemic on the academy's failures of cultural memory, Nelson reminds us of the longstanding Left tradition in American poetry, establishing a succinct history of poetic responses to labor and class conflicts, poverty, and unjust wars. His goal here—and one central goal of the book—is to restore a kind of poetry to readers' attention and to propose ways of reading it. Revival of individual careers is part of this project, and Nelson accordingly devotes his second chapter to Edwin Rolfe. Rolfe becomes a symptomatic poet for Nelson, because of "the complex negotiations between poetry, autobiography, and history" (99) that his work invites, because of his major subjects—the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, McCarthyism and resistance to it—and because of the critical neglect that his typically direct approach to these subjects earned him. Nelson's key methodological contribution, however, comes in his idea of a "choral poetics." In chapter 3, Nelson proposes leftist poetry of the Depression as a collectively produced intertext that models a shift "away from an emphasis on self-expressive subjectivity" and undermines "the concept of authorship" (159). This "choral poetry of revolution" becomes in chapter 4 a "collective poetry of antifascism" (179). Nelson's ensuing discussion of "the sixty-year tradition of American poems about the Spanish Civil War" will be a revelation to most readers, and he constructs a fascinating metapoem or "huge intertext" (217) out of these poems.

As Nelson well knows, certain readers will find a gap between the general appeal of his argument and many of the actual poems on display. Revolutionary Memory both makes a theoretical issue of this gap and seeks to bridge it. In his understandable zeal to expand academic reading habits, however, Nelson sometimes writes against too monolithic a version of conservative literary and critical hegemony. I'm not confident that "still dominant assumption[s]" (4) regarding the reading of modernist poetry really are such, given the range of recent work on alternative modernisms and the canon debates of the last twenty years. Granted that the academy of the millennium leaves much to be accomplished, it is still not the Cold War academy.

While sharing Nelson's focus on progressive poetry, Nancy Berke emphasizes individual careers in Women Poets on the Left. Berke's interest lies in the poetry of female political radicals overlooked by, among others, feminist critics. As Berke argues, feminist criticism has either tended to privilege aesthetic radicalism or recuperate work once dismissed as genteel, sentimental, or formally conservative. Attention to these poets, then, does indeed advance a further rethinking of modernism.

The body in pain anchors the Lola Ridge discussion, as Berke traces the "physical manifestations of [political] violence" (35) in Ridge's work, "the female carceral body" (65) in her 1918 long poem "The Ghetto," and the ways in which "Ridge's own body played an important part in her poetics of resistance" (52) as she put herself at physical risk in her activism. Given Berke's announced emphasis, the relationship of gender to class politics in Ridge is oddly underdiscussed. The exception is Berke's substantial treatment of "The...