The Poetry of the Possible: Spontaneity, Modernism, and the Multitude by Joel Nickels (review)

In The Poetry of the Possible, Joel Nickels presents a nuanced and well-developed discussion of the ways in which modernist poetry explores the question of spontaneity, especially its collective articulations as emergent forms of self-organizing multitude. Showing how William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis, Laura Riding, and Wallace Stevens explore various inter- or transsubjective forms of spontaneous organization, the book contests the model of poetic spontaneity as individual artistic agency. Nickels contends that their writings offer the possibility of envisaging novel ways in which collective bodies operate in their social and political manifestations beyond centralized control or the influence of charismatic leaders. Nickels’ reading pivots on a sustained analysis of selected works—Williams’ Paterson, Lewis’ experimental play Enemy of the Stars, Riding’s “Disclaimer of the Person,” and Stevens’ “Owl’s Clover”—in order to foreground how these texts open “a potential space in which the multitude’s suppressed capacities for creative agency and critical judgment could be awakened” (213–14). Toward this end, Nickels adapts Antonio Negri’s notion of the multitude to help illustrate the existence of conceptions of collective agency at work in modernist poetry that reach beyond the idea of chaotic “masses” in need of leadership and organization. Negri, on his own or in tandem with Michael Hardt, underscores the latent organizational force of the multitude—that is, its capacity for spontaneous and decentralized decision-making and action. While Negri attributes these modes of spontaneous self-organization specifically to the postmodern multitude, Nickels argues convincingly that these forces are already present in the early twentieth century and find their articulations in modernist discussions of the term “spontaneity,” which “demarcates a complex speculative field in which dilemmas about organization, self-valorization, constituent power, affect, and negativity are continuously in play” (17).

Particularly impressive is Nickels’ careful tracing of the ways in which these texts, while illustrating how various concrete political articulations of individual or collective spontaneity tap into the dormant energies of the multitude, manage to evolve poetically novel figures of the multitude’s self-organizational potential. The chapter devoted to Williams moves from Kora in Hell to Paterson in order to illustrate the critical shift from the modernist notion of the poet as a spontaneous genius to the self-directive capacities of Paterson’s multitude. Focusing his reading of Paterson on Williams’ debate about the principles and restorative value of Social Credit, Nickels sees the modernist abstractions of Paterson as “some of the twentieth century’s early attempts to figure a political power that had no place within the era’s regimes of representative government” (90).

The chapters on Lewis and Riding present perhaps the book’s most persuasive readings, especially with regard to Lewis’ ambivalent and complex attitude toward both individuality and fascism, and Riding’s creative extension of everyday contacts and spontaneous relations into the sphere of social and political organization. These readings are too extended and intricate to summarize here. The core of the Lewis chapter, whose argument pivots on the dynamic between Arghol and Hanp in Enemy of the Stars, is that the fusion of the individual and collective potencies points to “the possibility of a multitude guided by self-suspending, critical powers typically imagined to be the sole possession of the individual mind” (131). The next chapter is organized around the development of Riding’s social vision, which is based on the collapse of the distinction between the private and the public spheres as well as the horizontal, transsubjective mediation that draws its inspiration from everyday affective links. Riding’s writings mark a departure from the prevalent early twentieth-century political conceptions of collective action as a disorganized expression of forces in need of external direction and thus susceptible to manipulation. For Riding, the deep layer of subjectivity is permeated with a sense of mutuality and proportion that is routinely distorted by existing social relations (171). Counter to the abstract and disembodied forms of social interaction, Riding locates “spontaneity...