target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_1de653e8-86a0-50b5-9f0c-74b5b2bb63dd">148 See, for example, de Cleyre’s “Literature the Mirror of Man” in Selected Works, 359–380; Gustav Landauer’s Ein Weg deutschen Geistes (München: Forum-Verlag, 1916) and “Fragment über Georg Kaiser” in Der werdende Mensch, 349–355; Rudolf Rocker, Artistas y Rebeldes: escritos literarios y sociales (Buenos Aires: Argonauta, 1922); B. Rivkin, Di Grunt Tendentsin fun Yiddishe Literatur (New York: Ikuf, 1947); Ethel Mannin, Bread and Roses: An Utopian Survey and Blue-Print (London: Macdonald, 1944); Herbert Read, Icon and Idea: The Function of Art in the Development of Human Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955); George Woodcock, The Writer and Politics (London: Porcupine Press, 1948); Paul Goodman, Speaking and Language: Defence of Poetry (New York: Random House, 1972).
149 Flecha qtd. in Ruiz Eugenio and Siles Molina, “Aportaciones de Mujeres Libres,” 344.
150 Juan Suriano, Anarquistas: Cultura y política libertaria en Buenos Aires, 1890–1910 (Buenos Aires: Manantial, 2001), 39.
151 George Richard Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain, 1868–1898 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989)132–133; Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), 163; Murray Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1868–1936 (San Francisco: AK Press, 1998), 105.
152 Parallel forms developed among anarchists elsewhere. In France, for instance, “groupes” gave themselves names like “Les Enfants de la Nature [The Children of Nature],” “Les Gonzes Poilus du Point-du-Jour [The Hairy Guys of Point-du-Jour],” “Les Indomptables [The Uncontrollables],” “Les Niveleurs [The Levellers],” “Les Insoumises [Disobedient Women],” or “Les Revoltées [Women In Revolt]” (Félix Dubois, Le péril anarchiste: l’organisation secrète du parti anarchiste [Paris: E. Flammarion, 1894], 43; David Berry, History of the French Anarchist Movement, 314).
153 Carpeña qtd. in Ruiz Eugenio and Siles Molina, “Aportaciones de Mujeres Libres,” 343.
154 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Selected Writings of P.-J. Proudhon, ed. Stewart Edwards, trans. Elizabeth Fraser (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969), 121–122.
155 Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 21; Benjamin, Illuminations, 231. For comparison, see Jonathan Lethem, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” Harper’s 314 (February 2007): 59–71.
156 See the entries for “Éternel retour” and “Répétition” in Daniel Colson’s Petit lexique, 99–108 and 279–281.
157 See, for instance, Peter Kropotkin’s citation of Turguenev’s unfavorable comparison of the hung-up intellectual Hamlet, who knows a hawk from a handsaw, to Don Quixote, “the man of action” who knows that windmills are giants—and more importantly, that “the witches, the giants,” i.e., “the forces hostile to mankind” that must be fought against, are “the oppressors” (Ideals and Realities, 110–112).
158 Goodman, Speaking and Language, 160; Taylor Stoehr, “Introduction,” in Paul Goodman, The Facts of Life: Stories, 1940–1949, ed. Taylor Stoehr (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1979), 9.
Part II: Speaking to Others - Anarchist Poetry, Song, and Public Voice
He returns. From the white ship
He looks upon the deep blue austerity...
………………………………………
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
