Who, then, is speaking to whom in anarchist poems? It was a Romantic poet who insisted that the poet is “a man [sic] speaking to men [sic]”—a speech situation not unlike the ones we encounter every day.199 However, if ordinary speech almost always entails a specific somebody addressing a specific somebody else, what Jonathan Culler has called “the extravagance of lyric” consists in the lyric poet pretending to address almost anyone and anything but the actual reader—speaking as if to Death, the wind, an urn, or a flower—while the actual reader pretends to have “overheard” the poet’s voice.200 All of this is supposed to distance the lyric from the language of politics, i.e., from rhetoric: in Yeats’s famous formulation, if “we make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric,” then poems spring from “the quarrel with ourselves.”201 We hear an echo of the old lyrical address in Charles Erskine Scott Wood’s poem hailing a personified “Revolution,” asking it, in quasi-religious tones, to “destroy / This distorted and mis-shapen world,” and so on. Is this a pretense on the order of imagining that Blake is actually addressing a tiger? Or might Wood be asking the actual reader to identify himself or herself with the fictive audience, to—in some impossible way—incarnate the idea and become “Revolution”?
The case of Lola Ridge (1873–1941), “our gifted rebel poet,” as Emma Goldman called her, and founder of the anarchist Modern School magazine, might at first appear simpler.202 It is easy to read Ridge’s “Reveille,” appearing in Graham’s Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry, as relatively straightforward propaganda—“a call to the workers of the world to rise up in the name of justice against their oppressors,” as Daniel Tobin characteristically puts it:203
Come forth, you workers!
Let the fires go cold—
Let the iron spill out, out of the troughs—
Let the iron run wild
Like a red bramble on the floors204
Ridge’s poem asks us to become something that we are not yet; it speaks to something that is not congealed in the self, to formative forces.205 Likewise, in “The Song of Iron,” Ridge addresses a never entirely tamed force, asking it to make her into something she is not, almost as John Donne once asked God to “break, blow, burn, and make me new”: “Oh fashioned in fire … Behold me, a cupola / Poured to Thy use!”206 In Ridge’s anarchist lyric, then, what appears to be speech addressed to an impossible other is perhaps to be understood instead as evoking the impossible other that is within oneself. Conversely, we might question whether the “simplicity and immediacy” of an address to “you workers” is quite so simple. Consider, for instance, that the version Tobin quotes, with its breathless dashes reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s, is not actually the original form in which “Reveille” was published. In fact, its first appearance, in 1919, was in The Dial—a journal that would shortly become famous for its showcasing of modernists such as Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. Here, Ridge’s poem is printed shorn of dashes and outfitted with more thoughtful ellipses, the onward rush of certain phrases (“Let the iron spill out, out of the troughs”) blunted by more sedentary lines (“Let the iron cleave to the furnace”):
Come forth, you workers!
Let the fires grow cold…
Let the iron cleave to the furnace…
Let the iron spill out of the troughs…207
This is a version of “Reveille” that might do more to elicit a Yeatsian reading, even if there is still something smoldering inside it that threatens to spill out of containment. Moreover, The Dial makes an unlikely medium in which to encounter working-class readers. It even seems a strange place—an estranging place—to find working-class writers: witness Conrad Aiken’s patronizing review of Ridge’s “The Ghetto” in an earlier issue (“one must pay one’s respects,” Aiken admits grudgingly, while complaining that the verse “seems masculine,” that it “scream[s]” and is “sometimes merely strident,” lacking in “subtleties of form”).208
However, in this period, its political and aesthetic boundaries are very much in play, as the editorial direction is split between the anarchisant pacifist Randolph Bourne and his onetime mentor, the pro-war John Dewey.209 For a time, the magazine hosts poets in the Imagist line, some of whom will later turn to fascism, alongside poets and other writers from across the spectrum of the Lyrical Left, such as Carl Sandburg, Kenneth Burke, and Mina Loy; anarchist fellow traveler Margaret Anderson is another collaborator. Nevertheless, “Reveille” seems curiously out of place in The Dial; reprinted in Graham’s Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry, it is as if, exiled from the aesthetic domain, it has been repatriated to its own political nation.
But anarchy is a politics without a territory, without an “own”; witness Ridge herself. It is difficult to “situate” her geographically: should she be read as an Irish poet, since she was born Rose Emily Ridge in Dublin? Is she a New Zealander, since she emigrated there as a child, or an Australian, since her first poems signed “Lola” appeared in the Sydney Bulletin in 1901? Or is she really an American poet, since she spent most of her life in the United States, where she published her first book of poems, The Ghetto, documenting life among the Jews of Manhattan’s Lower East Side? Poems, of course, cross borders even more readily than the poets themselves. Perhaps every time a poem or a poet shifts its ground, encountering different readerships, the question of whom it addresses is raised again. What might this mean for the poetry of anarchists as creatures of movement, pushed around the world by currents of migration?
I am only passing through, but I like to speak your language. Forgive me if I seem distracted. It’s because three quarters of myself spills over every word and collapses into the depths. I only recognize what comes to the surface.
I have not traveled much; on the contrary, a whole host of peoples and centuries have chosen to make their journeys in my person. They stroll about in me, make themselves at home.
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I am nowhere entirely, but I also want a bit of myself in that place; nowhere; for that is where we find grace, and it is there that I met you, that I began to speak your language.210
The author of these lines, Giovanni Baldelli (1914–1986), born of an Italian father and a French mother, expelled for antifascist activities, then interned by the British in Australia as an enemy alien, now writing in French from his exile in Southampton, where he teaches Russian, knows whereof he speaks.211 For many an anarchist, “grace” is to be found, if at all, in placelessness. As Jens Bjørneboe wrote, in “Emigranten”: “I am a child of strange and alien planets.”212
Not that efforts haven’t been made to put these poets in their place. “Brothers, I salute you,” writes José Oiticica (1882–1957) from a military jail outside of Rio de Janeiro, after the failed anarchist insurrection of 1918, concluding that “We must welcome our pain, / the pain that does not oppress just men / and that renders the most humble superior.”213 The sonnet he composes “To the Companheiros in Prison,” however, will only be published nearly three years later, in O Sindicalista of Porto Alegre. To whom is this admonition or wish addressed? The lapse in time and place between composition and publication complicates things. Oiticica writes to imprisoned comrades, but he is in prison when he writes; he would have had no guarantee that anyone else would ever read it. Does he then address himself, counseling stoic patience, compensating for present suffering with the promise of a “superior” self-in-construction?
Poetic self-address as a mode of resistance forms the premise of much anarchist verse. We might compare this with Miyamoto Masakichi’s (birth and death dates unknown) “To the Poets” (1932), in which the isolated poet cries out, “Oh, my Self! / Become a hot fire and burn / or freeze and