Underground Passages. Jesse Cohn
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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 summon your friends / ten million of me facing the tempest / Hear me, you lonely Me among them!”214 So might Oiticica have been speaking from the perspective of an imagined future self, a self that has lived through and surpassed his present suffering. On this level, the sonnet would represent a promise addressed from the future to the present: if you live through this, you will be stronger. On the other hand, when Oiticica publishes his sonnet in 1921, in shifting from a private to a public speech-situation, might it not change its address as well, so to speak, becoming another kind of promise, a gesture of empathy for the suffering of others and a testimony: I have been where you are? And in the dimension of “overhearing” that is brought into being by readers who are not and have never been in prison, could it be that Oiticica invites them to imagine themselves as stoic prisoners, so that the message becomes the grim promise: You may be where we have been? In constructing a plural first person, a “we” composed of many prisoners—present, past, and potential—suffering together, the poem enables all of these readings, dissolving the walls between self and others, between the horror of “today” and the future of the “pure dream,” between captivity and freedom.215
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