While recent criticism has forged connections between labor and civil rights movements, capitalist value, and lyrical form, this MLA special session strengthens these connections in the work of Lorine Niedecker, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Amiri Baraka, by addressing the affective dimension of invisible and unrecognized labor in postwar American poetry. These three poets together present a robust picture of the expressions labor takes in literary, racialized, and gendered spaces of the twentieth century. Building on the formal ways that capitalist exploitations manifest, we ask what metric might sufficiently measure the cultural contribution of these poets in today’s discursive landscape.
In the fall and winter of 1964, Lorine Niedecker sent three homemade books of poems to friends. Covered in colored wrapping paper and prefaced with her own watercolors of her Wisconsin home, the books present themselves as the products of craft labor of an inexpensive, amateur, and resourceful kind. Departing from the well-worn critical terrain of craft labor, Professor Kristin Grogan (whose monograph is called The Labor Myth: American Poetry and the Idea of Work) locates labor in the period of time that Niedecker spent employed as a hospital cleaner—a labor which is only briefly mentioned in the poems themselves. Taking this non-appearance as a starting point, Grogan suggests that Niedecker’s cleaning work provided a poetics that values, rather than seeks to remedy, the invisibility of custodial work and that prizes an ethic of minimal imposition. Grogan suggests that this valuation can be felt in the affective management that these poems propose and in the set of diminished states—disappointment, deflation, passivity, self-effacement, and constriction—that her homemade poems insist on. Grogan’s readings, then, stage a broader argument about Niedecker’s formal minimalism, the relationship between literary form, diminished production, and post-war poetry of gendered labor.
With the downsizing of American industry in the 1970s, poetry's formal ambitions seemed also to contract. The midcentury settlement between capital and labor culminating in the Fordist social wage left minoritized and women workers out of the bargain. The very idea of work has come under erasure and revision in the gig work and zero-hour contracts of late capitalism, which Michael Denning calls “wageless life.” Dr. Lukas Moe (whose book project traces poetic modernism from the Depression to Civil Rights) takes this to be a signal development in literary studies, and asks, what is poetry’s cultural work in the absence of the mythologies whereby poets may be said to access history or the psyche? Moe’s paper considers how DuPlessis’ Pink Guitar (1986) and multi-volume Drafts (1986-) takes “cultural labor” and “production” as lenses for feminist and poetic critique, showing how post-Objectivist poetry offers a curiously modernist and anti-capitalist aesthetics that challenges concepts of productivity, social reproduction and, indeed, the wage earner, in the cultural sphere. Moe suggests that postwar poetics inherited a problematic distinction between “labor” and “work” from modernist aesthetics, a distinction that once again becomes urgent in light of 21st-century crises of labor, not least in the academic workplace that employs most working poets today.
In light of his evolving activism, Amiri Baraka’s poetic interest in the body outlines a particular relationship between his language and the politics of black bodily presence. Drawing on work from Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961) and Hard Facts (1972), Noa Saunders (whose dissertation examines capitalist uncertainty in poetry and film) considers labor as it is rooted not only in economic production but in the body’s endurance against capitalist contingencies. While Baraka’s communist politics expose themselves vibrantly in his work, they also take on aesthetic innovations by borrowing from theatrical performance to exhibit the intimate imprints capitalism lays on black lives. Baraka’s allegorical drama informs the way his poems embody the negotiation of visibility and invisibility, presence and absence, in everyday places like in the subway, eating lunch, or watching television. Participating in a communist aesthetic that is highly accessible and mobile, Baraka's theatrical work, therefore, models the performativity of his poems that, in the vein of J.L. Austin or Tracie Morris, gain self-determining ground against the persistent drive of capitalist, imperialist, and racist forces. Saunders shows that Baraka’s poetics, being deeply entwined with his activism and theatrical performances, responds to capitalism’s scrutiny of black presence with its own fury.
With our presider Professor Chris Chen—another expert, equally committed to a fruitful discussion about capitalism and postwar poetry—our session enriches the current scholarship by investigating poets whose forms complicate notions of poetic, physical, and political labor.