The Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins, and the Avant-Garde

1. Zukofsky: The Political Economy of Revolutionary Modernism

In the fields of modern and contemporary poetics in particular and cultural studies in general, recent scholarship has turned to world systems theory and critical geography to situate questions of culture in a global matrix. Increasingly , literary theorists and scholars are deploying the social-scientific concepts of center, margin, core, periphery, and uneven development in order to problematize critical commonplaces regarding the trajectories of “dissemination” of literary forms from the polis of empire to the countryside of the neocolony.1 Building on this turn, I analyze the political geographies of Louis Zukofsky’s early-twentieth-century Objectivist poetics as exemplary of what I will call here revolutionary American modernism, one characterized, in large part, by its anticapitalism and aggressive formal experimentation . I explore the ways in which Objectivist poetry elaborates in aesthetic terms the economic and social concepts of twentieth- and twentyfirst -century political economists of uneven development—an arc that extends from Leon Trotsky to David Harvey, and comprises a diverse, interdisciplinary tradition of thought.2 Readers will find Zukofsky situated within this political-economic arc, and his confrontation with capitalism’s differential tectonics in the early decades of the twentieth century reenacted. Allow this passage from “A”—8 to introduce the key concepts of the discussions that follow: Railways and highways have tied Blood of farmland and town And the chains Speed wheat to machine This is May The poor’s armies veining the earth! 1 Zukofsky The Political Economy of Revolutionary Modernism 30 The Uneven Poetics of Radical Parataxis Hirers once fed by the harried Cannot feed them their hire Nor the chains Hold the hungry in This is May The poor are veining the earth! Light lights in air blossoms red Like nothing on earth Now the chains Drag graves to lie in This is May The poor’s armies veining the earth. March From hirer unchained Till your gain Be the World’s3 This passage offers a complex expansion and rearrangement of a poem that Zukofsky had originally published in a May 1938 New Masses under the title of “March Comrades” (“Words for a Workers’ Chorus from ‘A’—8,” discussed in greater detail in chapter 5). The stanzas quoted above propose a poetics of revolutionary transformation informed by a Depression-era geography of unified unevenness in which “railways and highways have tied/Blood of farmland and town.” The chains that suture city to country are those from which the poor must emancipate themselves; they are also the very things that will dig the grave of the system itself, when “chains/drag graves to lie in.” Here the Communist language of chains that the working class must lose appears in an expanded role, referring, too, to the geographic interdependences that compel production itself. The passage inspires the question: how and why do spatial articulations of economic development texture Objectivism ’s literary landscape? Against the literary-critical view of modernity and poetic modernism as marked by fragmentation and dissolution (a view that follows the ideological -aesthetic perspective inaugurated by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot), we will find that Objectivists understand their modernity as a vast but increasingly integrated aggregate of cultural developments and particulars. What I will Zukofsky: The Political Economy of Revolutionary Modernism 31 be calling a poetics of uneven development is an aesthetic registration of such a landscape.4 The poetics of uneven development reveals that what seem to be the fragmented forms of a dissolving unity are, for the Objectivist , differentiations within a social world rendered legible by a relational intaglio of paratactical comparison. As the argument will reveal in detail below, this poetics is Objectivism’s key strategy for mapping Depression-era geographies of capitalism in crisis. Zukofsky’s comparative methodology fuses aesthetic and political economic approaches, yoking together seemingly distant objects and events through the chief formal strategy of parataxis . So, we find in Zukofsky’s “A,” for example, New York in 1648 cohabits with a late-Victorian Henry Adams. Or, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and the Russian Revolution interilluminate each other through their compressed adjacency. Such paratactical adjacency registers not only Zukofsky’s capacious understanding of history but, as importantly, capitalism’s production of differentially developed zones and geographies. Parataxis enjoys a long history in scholarly studies of modernism. In Adorno’s masterful retrieval of Hölderlin’s poetry from its celebration by the fascists, parataxis is that formal technique that allows the poet to “attack syntax...