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Handmade by Poverty: Worker Correspondence, Objectivist Poetics and the Pathos of the Readymade

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 August 2015

SIMON COOPER
SIMON COOPER*
Affiliation:
School of Access to Learning, Newcastle College. Email: simon753cooper@btinternet.com.
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Abstract

Worker correspondence was a form of found poetry employed by radical left writers during the 1930s. Readers' letters to publications such as New Masses and the Daily Worker were reworked with end stops and presented as free verse. This essay examines the practice of worker correspondence as a form of readymade, a consciously avant-gardist collision of politics and “high” culture. This examination is put forward as a reflection on current thinking on the literary left of the Depression decade and – along the way – suggests points of contact with the Objectivist poetics of George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Reznikoff.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , November 2016 , pp. 1089 - 1107
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2015 

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References

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2 John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade (London: Verso, 2007), 64.

3 Ibid., 68, 69.

4 Joseph Freeman, introduction to Granville Hicks, Michael Gold, Isidor Schneider, Joseph North, Paul Peters, and Alan Calmer, eds., Proletarian Literature in the United States: An Anthology (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1935), 9–28, 15, emphasis in source.

5 Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 105.

6 Zukofsky, Louis, “Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff,” Poetry , 37, 5 (Feb. 1931), 272–85Google Scholar, 280, 274.

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14 John Lowney, History, Memory, and the Literary Left: Modern American Poetry, 1935–1968 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 13.

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21 Jeff Allred, American Modernism and Depression Documentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 40, 41.

22 Michael Gold, “Workers' Correspondence,” Daily Worker, 20 Jan. 1934, 9, hereafter WC.

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24 Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1974), 281.

25 An editorial note in the Daily Worker, 22 Aug. 1934, 5, states that Potamkin “was the first to use Workers' Correspondence as themes for poetry.” Nelson, Repression and Recovery, 283 n. 112, records that Potamkin published “Mecklenburg County” in the paper on 24 June 1933.

26 Harry Alan Potamkin, “Merchant Marine,” Daily Worker, 22 Aug. 1934, 5.

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29 WC, 9.

30 Freeman, introduction to Hicks et al., 19.

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32 Freeman, introduction to Hicks et al., 9.

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38 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 79.

39 T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 208.

40 Zukofsky, “Sincerity and Objectification,” 274.

41 Bürger, 78.

42 See James D. Bloom, Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

43 WC, 9.

44 Langston Hughes, “Ballad of Lenin,” Daily Worker, 20 Jan. 1934, 9.

45 Cited in Clara Zetkin, “Lenin on Culture,” Daily Worker, 19 Jan. 1934, 5, 20 Jan. 1934, 9.

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47 Gold, “Kino of a Factory Town,” 12.

48 Cited in Barbara A. Zuck, A History of Musical Americanism (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1978), 137.

49 IWY, 179.

50 Felipe Ibarro, letter to the editor, New Masses, 10, 2 (Jan. 1934), 22.

51 Ibid.

52 IWY, 179–80.

53 George Oppen, “The Mind's Own Place,” in Oppen, Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers, ed. Stephen Cope (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 29–37, 32.

54 Charles Reznikoff, “Suburban River: Winter,” in The Poems of Charles Reznikoff, 1918–1975 (Boston: Black Sparrow, 2005), 104–8, 107.

55 “We wanted to be ourselves among the rubble,” Oppen told Burton Hatlen in 1980, “which held us half in and half out of political doings.” Burton Hatlen and Tom Mandel, “Poetry and Politics: A Conversation with George and Mary Oppen,” in George Oppen: Man and Poet, ed. Burton Hatlen (Orono: University of Maine, 1981), 23–50, 29.