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 to evoke a realm that is neither conventionally “public” nor “private.”237 In the correspondence, articles, and speeches of anarchists such as Berkman and Goldman, too, as Kathy Ferguson notes, we find “blurred distinctions between letters addressed to a specific individual and public speech addressed to the generalized other.”238 In so doing, anarchist poets helped to construct a sphere of relations sufficiently opaque to the larger publics inhabited by anarchists to resemble the private realm, and at the same time translucent, “indefinite” in its extent, “mediated by print, theater, diffuse networks of talk,” to borrow the language of Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics.239 We might extend Ferguson’s observations to conclude that anarchist poets are vital architects of an “emergent anarchist counterpublic”—a social world “defined by [its] tension with a larger public,” its constituency “marked off from persons or citizens in general.”240
Such a counterpublic, while maintaining a vigilant and at times painful consciousness of its subordinate or subaltern relationship to the larger (and hostile) public within which it is embedded, would appear to have a number of advantages over the grand public. Its smaller scope—perhaps especially important for anarchists caught up in movements of displacement and migration, whether fleeing from Russian shtetls to the Argentine pampas or from rural Catalonia to seek factory work in Barcelona—could retain something of the intimacy of village life (even the intimacy of personal bickering), as against the anonymity and impersonality of the great urban centers. Like other counterpublics, as Warner notes, it permits “discussion … understood to contravene the rules obtaining in the world at large, being structured by alternative dispositions or protocols, making different assumptions about what can be said or what goes without saying.”241 Anarchist counterpublic discourse, thus, can unfold partially outside the range of locally tolerated opinion and expression, the little space between official orthodoxy and the outer limits of heterodoxy—the invisible boundaries of “free” public discourse.
It is when outsiders peer into the counterpublic conversations taking place in an anarchist newspaper like Golos Truda (The Voice of Labor, 1911–1918) or Khleb i Volia (Bread and Freedom, 1917–1918) that these conversations, constituted by a universe of references not shared by outsiders, appear to be, as Karen Rosenberg says, “arcane,” “a body of esoteric knowledge,” reserved for the “initiated,” etc.242 The apparent mysteriousness of anarchist counterpublic discourse is accentuated when it unfolds under intense surveillance, censorship, and repression (e.g., under the Czarist and Communist regimes in Russia). In such conditions, when the only “safe” public discourse is that which mirrors “the flattering self-image of elites,” anarchist discourse might be expected to take on the kinds of cryptic, inaccessible forms—carefully coded exchanges of subversive signs—so evocatively described by James C. Scott in his studies of peasants’ resistance culture. Sometimes, anarchists did resort to encrypted speech: Bakunin, for instance, was an avid user of ciphers, foreshadowing today’s cryptoanarchists.243 However, the police were all too often capable of countering such evasive maneuvers, as in 1892, when a group of French anarchists using a fairly sophisticated code were arrested, their messages intercepted
