MACMILLAN Communism and Poetry: Writing Against Capital (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

Communism and Poetry: Writing Against Capital addresses the relationship between an upsurge in collective political practice around the world since 2000, and the crystallization of newly engaged forms of poetry. Considering an array of perspectives―poets, poet-critics, activists and theorists―these essays shed new light on the active interface between emancipatory political thought and poetic production and explore how poetry and the new communism are creating mutually innovative forms of thought and activity, supercharging the utopian imagination. Drawing inspiration from past connections between communism and poetry, and theorizing new directions over the years ahead, the volume models a much-needed critical solidarity with creative strategies in the present conjuncture to activate movements of resistance, on the streets and in verse. Review “A multi-national group of critics investigates and propels discussions of politics and poetry, rearticulating its critical errancy and radical histories, up to the immediate present with its intertwining of poetic realism, resistance and utopian urgencies. Controversies, critiques, insistences, and projections center this scintillating anthology that analyze poetry, in its socio-political, economic and ethical links with both capitalisms, communisms, insurgencies, and emancipations all in a striking and passionately interpretive ‘history of the present.” (Rachel Blau DuPlessis, poet, scholar, and professor emerita at Temple University, USA) “Now, more than ever, it is necessary that we take seriously the connection between poetry and communism, which is to say, the connection between the living breath and the unending criticism of everything that exists. By taking a broad, dynamic swipe from the contemporary landscape, Communism and Poetics: Writing Against Capital answers this urgent call. It should be heard as far and wide as the name of Marx himself.” (Anne Boyer, poet, scholar, and professor at the Kansas City Art Institute, USA)   From the Back Cover Communism and Poetry: Writing Against Capital addresses the relationship between an upsurge in collective political practice around the world since 2000, and the crystallization of newly engaged forms of poetry. Considering an array of perspectives―poets, poet-critics, activists and theorists―these essays shed new light on the active interface between emancipatory political thought and poetic production and explore how poetry and the new communism are creating mutually innovative forms of thought and activity, supercharging the utopian imagination. Drawing inspiration from past connections between communism and poetry, and theorizing new directions over the years ahead, the volume models a much-needed critical solidarity with creative strategies in the present conjuncture to activate movements of resistance, on the streets and in verse. About the Author Ruth Jennison is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA.  She is the author of The Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins, and The Avant-Garde (2012) and articles and book chapters on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American  poetics, Marxism and the political economies of literary form.   Julian Murphet is Scientia Professor of English and Film Studies at UNSW Sydney, Australia, where he directs study in English, Creative Writing and Film. He is the author of  Literature and Race in Los Angeles (2001),  Multimedia Modernism (2009),  Faulkner’s Media Romance (2017) and  Todd Solondz(2019).