Perhaps, though, the material context of anarchist poetry is always a kind of captivity. “Poetry,” for the anarchist Octavio Brandão (1896–1980), “makes its muse from pain and anger, vehemence and indignation.”216 We often find anarchist poets hurling invective at adversaries real or imaginary—false gods, exploiters, rulers, perpetrators of deception and murder. In “The Gods and the People,” originally issued as a pamphlet in Scotland, Voltairine de Cleyre asks, “What have you done, O skies, / That the millions should kneel to you?”217 Brazil’s Ricardo Gonçalves (1883–1916) pours wrath upon the owners of the earth: “Tremble, disgusting vampires! / Tremble in your opulent / golden palaces!” he thunders in the pages of São Paulo’s A Plebe.218 Here, poetry acts as a kind of “rehearsal for the revolution,” a dramatization of the possibility of one’s own power, from the perspective of present powerlessness, as Augusto Boal recommends in his Theatre of the Oppressed—or, in the language of syndicalism, as a “revolutionary gymnastics.”219 In the poem’s rhetoric, the enemy can be cut down to size—the inverse of the mental operation by which the enemy has been imagined as superhuman and omnipotent.
On the other hand, the adversary is not always simply them (the bosses, the generals, the priests and proprietors); it is quite often also us. Under the pseudonym of “Basil Dahl,” in Boston’s Liberty, Joseph Bovshover chastises the vampires’ all too willing victims—“I hate your superstition, workingmen, / I loathe your blindness and stupidity”—while fellow Yiddish anarchist poet David Edelstadt berates them: “Wake up, working brother, wake up!”220 And just as often, as Ridge and Oiticica demonstrate, anarchist poets address real or potential allies against the common foe. From Rosario, Argentina, in the pages of the anarcho-communist La Voz de la Mujer, Josefa M. R. Martínez (dates of birth and death unknown) greeted her potential comrades in arms: “Salud, Compañeras! Anarchy / Raises the liberator’s banner; / Hurrah, dear brothers, to the fight! / Strong be your arms, serene be your heart!”221 Barbaric exhortations indeed.
And who is doing the exhorting? Quite often, this is an anonymous voice, or someone who conspicuously and self-consciously identifies as a non-poet. “I don’t write literature!” declared Antonio Agraz (1905–1956), author of countless poems published in the newspaper of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT union.222 Nor was he alone in such a declaration. “I am not a poet—I am a worker,” declared Edelstadt; “I am writing … so that every worker will understand me.”223 In statements like these, it is easy for us to hear the echo of anarchist obrerismo (“workerism”)224 and to miss what else they tell us about how an anarchist might conceive of poetry and poets.
First, Edelstadt claims to write as a worker—a garment-industry sweatshop worker, at that—rather than on behalf of workers.225 In other words, despite the prophetic tone, the anarchist poet disavows any unilateral right to speak for others: in rejecting vanguardism, anarchists forswear poets’ traditional privilege of “prophesying” in an authoritarian mode. Where Shelley ends his Defence of Poetry by declaring that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” Goodman’s Speaking and Language: Defence of Poetry asks, “What does he intend? That they should be acknowledged? Then what would they do?”226
Secondly, the anarchist poet, frequently a working-class autodidact rather than a traditional intellectual or even a declassé bohemian, is writing for an audience of peers. Consequently, the anarchist poet shares with the audience an expectation of understanding—a serious departure, as Nelly Wolf reminds us, from traditions that made the poet a keeper of mysteries: whereas novelists were expected to write in the language of the “new,” poets were expected to write in a language of symbols, establishing “a tangible border between the language used inside the poem and the language used outside.”227 An anarchist poet writes without this prophylactic, contaminating an elevated, “poetic” vocabulary and imagery drawn from the past (romantic, medieval, classical, folkloric) with contemporaneous, everyday language. In his study of the anarchist romance poems of the Spanish Civil War, for instance, Serge Salaün notes the combination of quasi-medieval archaisms and “epic” features with “popular turns of phrase, puns, old saws, proverbs and sayings, the use of dialect or familiarisms, swearing and trivial words,” and so on.228 In this way, anarchist movement poetics resisted fetishizing the “purity” of genres and national languages and embraced hybridity.229
Quite frequently, the mutual understanding of anarchist poets and their audiences could be verified, as anarchists tended to favor the oral circulation of poetry in face-to-face settings—a tradition echoed later in the “Revolutionary Letters” recited by Diane di Prima (b. 1934) from the back of a truck in New York City.230 It is only in the age of print culture, as Victor Méric (1876–1933) noted in his entry on “Poésie” for the Encyclopédie anarchiste (1934), that “poetry is separated from the song,” shedding its communal character along with its orality: “Among the contemporaries, verse is tortured, dislocated, gives forth only vague assonances and an approximative music. Poetry willingly flees into the abstruse, escapes all rules, and rejoins prose in its absence of clarity as well as in its offenses against the most elementary syntax.”231 The lack of immediacy in the print medium presented a problem in other ways, too: even if the “enthusiasm and applause” elicited by the spoken word can be superficial, argued an anonymous contributor to the anarchist workers’ journal Le Ça Ira in 1888, “written thought also has its limitations; whoever reads too much of it loses their ability to act.… What’s needed is a balance between the two, so that the spontaneity evoked by the spoken word is joined with the kind of reflection that induces thought itself.”232 Finally, oral modes of circulation accorded well with anarchist critiques of property: whereas the technologies of print culture were concentrated in relatively few hands, everyone had the potential to participate in the production of oral culture—to add or subtract verses as the occasion and the spirit dictated, exercising a collective creativity.233 The written word, subject to copyright law, was private property; the spoken word, particularly before the advent of recording technologies, refused to present itself as an ownable, commodifiable object.234 Accordingly, a re-oralization of poetry was in order.
Even when circulated purely in written form, anarchist poems often took on some of the characteristics of oral culture. Joseph Labadie (1850–1933), for instance, often wrote occasional poems to present as gifts to friends, sometimes in individually hand-copied chapbooks. A typical sample, To Mr. & Mrs. Mehan, On Their Return from the East, dated “Detroit, June, 1901,” begins: “We welcome you with arms awide, / Greet you as morning’s golden gleams, / Your happy smiles like eventide / Bring rhythmic cheer & tranquil dreams.”235 The language and imagery are trite, the rhythm and rhyme mechanically tidy. It cannot be denied, however, that the resources of a certain poetic tradition have been mobilized in the interest of specific, intimate relationships; this is “occasional poetry,” lauded by Goodman, following Goethe, as “the highest [form of] integrated art.”236 It is “applied” poetry, poetry that has not fled into a separate realm, as Méric complains, but that renders service to life.
The example of Labadie’s occasional poetry—reminiscent of the practices of “poets such as Emily Dickinson” lauded by Simon DeDeo, “whose poetical work merges seamlessly into private communication through letters and notes”—is indicative of another dimension of anarchist movement poetics: the mixture of “private” and “public” forms