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

Introduction

AN ERA ANY TIME OF YEAR Louis Zukofsky, “A”—22 What we are actively seeking is the true practice which has been alienated to an object, and the true conditions of practice—whether as literary conventions or social relationships—which have been alienated to components or mere backgrounds. Raymond Williams This book takes as its object of study the Depression-era works of three poets who constellated around the aesthetic nexus of Objectivism: Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, and Lorine Niedecker.1 Objectivism was a high modernism, but it was also a modernism whose practitioners remained in constant contact with the diverse and radical cultures that sprouted from crisis-driven cracks in the edifice of capitalism.2 Objectivism’s numbers included Jews, Yiddish speakers, feminists, working-class women and men, rural dwellers, Communists, and first-generation immigrants. Existence on these margins provided the foundational texture for Objectivists’ lived experience of the “immense left force-field” of 1930s America.3 While the Objectivists treated in this book shared with the canonical modernists an interest in experiment and innovation, they also held commitments to radical democracy and the realization of the cultural potentials simultaneously unleashed and constrained by capitalist modernity, commitments that they saw as the political parallels of their artistic avant-gardism. Introduction 2 The Zukofsky Era Objectivism provides the textual firmament for the analyses that follow. However, the methodology that underwrites these analyses is portable to the study of other avant-gardes and modernisms, diverse in their spatial and historical emergences. This book addresses the following questions: How can we establish a relationship between the spatial landscapes of capitalism in crisis and the formal choices of the revolutionary avant-garde? Is there a way to draw on the rich formalist traditions of close reading modernist poetics while also attending to the historical complexity of the situation in which modernist texts are produced? Can we energize the key concepts of materialist aesthetics—the tyranny of the commodity form; the text (and its producer) as an active mediation of a history that precedes it; the contest between the intra- and international uneven spaces of capital with which every text must engage—in a methodology specific to the study of poetics, and poetic modernism in particular? These questions guide this book both in its study of Objectivism and also in its broadest ambition: the opening up of a vocabulary especially suited to articulating the origin of modernist form in the tectonic dynamism of American capitalist production of space. To these ends, this volume reads against the grain of traditional accounts of modernist fragmentation. Prior to the recent emergence of the New Modernist Studies, literary historians and critics tended to characterize highmodernist Anglo-American poets as possessing a pessimistic perspective, of a culture in disarray, often resulting in a turn toward reactionary political solutions that were at odds with the ideals underlying these poets’ use of pathbreaking forms.4 Despite the objections of a new generation of scholars of modernism who resist tempting but specious speculations regarding the imprint of a subject supposedly fragmented by modern life upon the text, the account of modernist fragmentation enjoys an institutional hegemony. Such hegemony persists, in part, because fragmentation supplies students with a useful metaphor with analysis of modernist form in which fragments melancholically register the unstoppable proliferation of immigrant languages in the metropole and the sharding of the world produced by anticolonial resistance. Consider the breeziness with which David Perkins, in his otherwise indispensable A History of Modern Poetry, performs a rather magical parapsychological measurement of “consciousness,” and then aligns this with modernist form on the one hand and a curiously universal “experience” on the other: “The fragmentation and disconnection of modern consciousness had repeatedly been displayed from The Waste Land on . . . stylistic Introduction 3 features of the [modernist] text—syntactical discontinuity, fragmentation, juxtaposition of the heterogeneous, banality—represent similar qualities in experience.”5 While it is questionable whether such critical discourse can even account for the practices of the very canonical texts that seem to invite it (we can’t help but hear Eliot: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”), it is clear that fragmentation, as a concept, cannot do justice to the form and vision of those American modernists for whom revolutionary politics inform solidaristic landscapes and internationalist imaginations. Fragmentation , it turns out, is less a formal descriptor than it is a narrative about the ways in which a lamenting liberalism...