………………………………………
Palpitating with fever and tension,
With daring escapes, with audacious leaps,
With hopes and magical futures …
—Virgilia d’Andrea, “Il Ritorno Dell’Esule [The Exile’s Return].”
This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to.…
..........................................................
… Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.
—Jack Spicer, “This Ocean, Humiliating In Its Disguises.”
1: The Poet’s Feet
The quintessential anarchist poetry might be the deliberately obscure verse of Stéphane Mallarmé or the entirely indecipherable “sound-poetry” of Hugo Ball. Significantly, both of these are marked by a certain contact with political anarchism: Mallarmé welcomed some anarchists to his circle, spoke publicly in their defense, and occasionally adopted their imagery to describe his own poetic enterprise, while Ball was an assiduous reader of Bakunin.159 An analogy between anarchist politics and avant-garde poetics as “individualist politics,” on the one hand, and “individualist aesthetics” on the other, has been argued for.160
Fig. 1: Portrait of the avant-garde artist as anarcho-poseur (or mere “dilettante”): “Yes, my dear, this gentleman is an anarchist!” (Le Communiste: Organe du propagande libertaire 1.9 [Feb 29, 1908])
Fig. 2: Front page of an Italian anarchist journal, Il Piccone (May 1, 1905), with Olindo Guerrini’s poem, “Aurora.” Note the central placement of the poem.
Much attention has been lavished on these traces of anarchism in the experiences and experiments of the avant-gardes. However, it may be objected that their poetic revolt is not so analogous to political revolt as it is to other generational “swerves” of poets from their precursors. If, as Harold Bloom suggests, “strong” poets are always engaged in a struggle, this struggle may always be, on some level, a struggle against the elder poets from whom they have learned, a systematic attempt to cover up the extent to which they are subject to the “influence” of their literary forebears.161 Thus, by 1933, Lucía Sánchez Saornil (1895–1970), subsequently one of the founders of the anarchist-feminist Mujeres Libres, came to repudiate her early participation in the avant-garde Ultraísmo movement as a futile exercise in “snobbery,” declaring, in a tone of wry exasperation: “The avant-gardists were ‘sons of the bourgeoisie.’” Not in spite of, but because of the avant-garde’s constitutive hostility to “bourgeois” philistinism: “New and old, bourgeois and anti-bourgeois, are properly, eminently bourgeois terms.”162 This kind of opposition is all too closely tied to what it opposes. Avant-garde “Revolutions of the Word” might fall into the very pattern that anarchism sought to break, whereby revolutionaries come to mimic and identify with the authorities they overthrow, becoming the new bearers of authority—“the re-writing of the father,” as Bloom puts it.163
Accounts of the avant-gardes that seek to write them into the history of anarchism face another embarrassment: their engagement with anarchism rarely amounted to participation in or “commitment” to the anarchist movement.164 Mallarmé maintained a gingerly distance from anarchist action, and Ball flatly declared, “I am not an anarchist.”165 Moreover, the anarchist movement, which refused to nullify social commitments in the name of the autonomous individual, was not, on the whole, welcoming toward these experimenters, whose work they often saw as willfully obscure at best, more suited to the narcissistic enjoyment of a self-appointed élite than to the needs of working-class people in struggle (fig. 1).166 As Georges Poinsot and Mafféo-Charles Normandy bluntly conclude, in their review of the “social poets,” with regard to the Symbolists: “They are not social.”167 If the avant-garde poetics of the early-twentieth century were less quietistic and more confrontational than their Symbolist forebears, they were no more inclined to position themselves as speakers in a public arena of discourse: faced with a “crowd,” as André Breton famously put it in 1929, “the simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly”—the only alternative being to accept a “well-defined place in the crowd,… belly at barrel-level.”168 As a means of dismissing “the crowd” from the poet’s room (since, in truth, few Surrealists ever took up arms), the signature Surrealist technique of trance-writing, écriture automatique, was both less violent and more effective, letting the writer disavow public responsibility for the published word.
However serious these literary bohemian allies were in their political commitments, a search of the international anarchist press during the period of the greatest avant-garde ferment—the flourishing of Dada, Imagism, Futurism, Surrealism—reveals few traces of their work. These periodicals are not bereft of poems; on the contrary, as Pessin notes, it was quite common for them to print poetry alongside reportage, opinion pieces, correspondence, and statistics (fig. 2).169 Nonetheless, the anarchist movement did not depend on the productions of the avant-gardes for its poetry. Rather, the movement developed its own poetics—a poetics that, in many respects, appeared intent on affirming and even reinforcing the very kinds of symbolic relations that the avant-gardes had set themselves against. At the same time, these poets, at least at the movement’s peak, seem to have been largely unconcerned with the problem of influence in Bloom’s sense.
It is this other poetic tradition, the poetry of the anarchist movement, in its broadest historical dimensions, that this chapter is intended to investigate. I would like to ask: What is the relationship of this anarchist movement poetics 1.) to the speech of the past (i.e., to poetic legacies or traditions), 2.) to the adult speaking subject that emerges from this past speech, and 3.) to the public sphere that the speaking subject is supposed to found?
Within anarchist counter-communities, as Clara Rey has observed, poems are usually identified as “anarchist” not by virtue of revolutionary experimentation with form, but by their revolutionary content.170 Anarchist movement poetics, which has been termed “traditional” or “classical in form,” “filled with stereotypes,” “rather banal,” “unoriginal,” “staid,” is quite at odds with Pound’s “make it new.”171 Even in 1896, while anarchists were rubbing elbows with Symbolists and Decadents in Paris, an anarchist poet like André Veidaux (a.k.a. Adrien Devaux, 1868–1927) could face criticism from peers for too much stylistic “novelty” and “originality.”172
In East Asia, as Kim Gyoung-Bog notes, “modernity seemed to wear a double face”: colonial, mechanical, and oppressive in many respects, but potentially also rational, emancipatory, and utopian.173 Asian anarchists often felt the attractions of literary modernity outweighed its tainted association with the humiliation of colonialism; in particular, for a China repeatedly humiliated and colonized not only by the West but by neighboring Japan, the stigma of backwardness was of pressing concern. Native literary traditions were sometimes too closely identified with the patriarchal, Confucian culture that anarchists, as modernizers and advocates of “New Woman” discourse, were trying to overthrow. Tradition was felt, particularly by students such as Li Shizeng (1881–1973) in the “Paris group,” as a constraint, something to be shed, e.g., by importation (the translation of Western political and literary texts into Chinese), simplification (the adoption of baihua over old-fashioned “literary” writing), universalization (the replacement of Chinese by Esperanto), or rationalization (shifting from centuries-old forms of poetry to nineteenth-century Western-style narrative prose). “All