Review | Stitch, Unstitch: Modernist Poetry and the World of Work by Kristin Grogan
Reviewed by John Attridge, University of New South Wales
Stitch, Unstitch: Modernist Poetry and the World of Work builds a powerful new account of twentieth-century poetic modernism on the premise that modernist poetry was deeply “enmeshed” (3) with the changing nature of work under capitalism. In doing so, Kristin Grogan not only shows persuasively how work and the politics of labor are central to the five poets who form the spine of the book—Ezra Pound, Lola Ridge, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, and Lorine Niedecker—but also carries out an ambitious theoretical reframing of the concept of “work” itself. One of the reasons why work resonates so pervasively through the oeuvres of these writers, Grogan shows, is that the conditions of labor themselves permeate the social and ideological fabrics of capitalist societies, structuring “cultural values” (18) far beyond the economic labor relation. Eschewing or demystifying the versions of work with which we in modernist studies may be most familiar, Stitch, Unstitch productively expands the landscape of modernist work to include modalities of labor—ordinary, repetitive, manual, reproductive, inexpert, invisible—that have tended to escape notice as relevant drivers of poetic innovation.
One of the primary frameworks for this recentering of occluded forms of labor is the “Marxist-feminist” (6) lens expounded in the book’s introduction, which underpins, in particular, Grogan’s rich and revelatory discussions of Stein and Niedecker. Drawing on arguments fashioned by Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Selma James in the context of the “Wages for Housework” movement in the 1970s, Stitch, Unstitch uses the concept of reproductive labor to critique not only the capitalist construction of gender but also the ways in which certain forms of labor under capitalism are designated as valueless. As Grogan writes, “social reproduction troubles those categories that structure human activity under capitalism: between work that is visible and invisible; productive and unproductive; valuable and valueless; private and public; queer and straight” (141). In attending to such ordinary, ambiguous or otherwise marginal kinds of work—from sewing to keeping house, and from cleaning to doing laundry—Stitch, Unstitch sketches a resistant axiology of unproductive labor as well as a revisionist counternarrative of modernist form.
The book’s first chapter, “Ezra Pound’s Work Ethic,” traces the shifting meanings of “craft” in Pound’s poetic imagination, from his early involvement with A.R. Orage’s guild socialism to the mythologized agrarianism that Grogan finds in the late cantos. Pound’s preoccupation with the idea of craft emerges in this analysis as a unifying thread in his aesthetic and political development, its ultimate “abstraction” in Thrones representing “less a change in Pound’s thought” than a “calcification” (67). A key episode in this journey is the notion of crafted worlds that Pound explores in the figure of the Venetian statesman as “glassblower-craftsman” (51), which modulates readily into his vision of the authoritarian ruler as an autotechnocrat: an all-seeing, all-powerful social engineer. Alongside its sweeping survey of the significance of craft across Pound’s career, the chapter also provides a subtle conceptual history of this familiar modernist metaphor, tracing how an ideal which emerged as an “alternative” to capitalist alienation becomes “one of the major aesthetic modes of dictatorial fascism” (67).
In different ways, chapters two and three, dealing with Ridge and Hughes, respectively, take up modernism’s vexed relationship with the Romantic Ur-genre, the lyric. Positioning Ridge and Hughes as writers whose “poetry turns over problems of collective life” (70), these chapters explore their differing attempts to reconcile the presumptive individualism of lyric poetry with the expression of shared political realities. One of the key examples of this tension considered in chapter two, “The Social Life of Sewing: Lola Ridge,” is Ridge’s 1918 sequence “The Ghetto,” which focuses on the Jewish women who emigrated in large numbers from Eastern Europe to New York City between 1880 and 1924 to work in the city’s sweatshops. “The Ghetto” also helps to introduce the poetics of inexpertness that Grogan offers as an alternative to the Poundian ethos of craft-as-mastery: Ridge’s inability to speak Yiddish forces her to confront the experience of “not being able to know completely” (94). Still less knowable are the global flows of capital and labor that pass through these factories and connect their workers to a global population of workers. Grogan finds a resonant figure for these abstract networks in the Singer Manufacturing Company, whose imposing New York skyscraper makes an appearance in “The Ghetto,” and whose globally distributed product—the Singer Sewing Machine—was used by garment workers around the world.
Less focused on labor’s material forms than on its ideological construction, chapter three, “Langston Hughes’s Constructivist Poetics,” reads Hughes’s “socially committed verse” of the 1930s as “a formal intervention into a shifting understanding of both poetic labor and poetry’s representation of collective life” (106). Focusing on Hughes’s encounters with Soviet culture as a visitor to the USSR in 1932 and 1933, and in particular his experiences with the workers’ theatre movement, Grogan shows how Hughes refashioned the lyric as a vehicle for collective experience, reaching, in a poem like “A Chant for May Day,” for a form that will hold “the expression and labor of a multiplicity of voices” (127), like a theatrical production. Tracing ingenious resonances between Hughes’s poetry and several key figures of Russian Constructivism, including Alexander Rodchenko and the dramatists Vsevolod Meyerhold and Nicolay Okhlopkov, the chapter persuasively invokes Constructivist poetics as a “vocabulary” for understanding his political poetry, which sought to reimagine “what a collective subject for literature might look like” (132-3).
Chapter four, “Reproducing Gertrude Stein”—in some ways, the book’s centerpiece—reads Stein as an “emblematic poet of reproduction” (142) whose oeuvre effects a sustained unravelling of the categories of capitalist labor. The poetic uses of repetition are a minor theme in Stitch, Unstitch, and Stein affords ample opportunity to develop this thread, from the “sheer vastness and…formal repetition” of The Making of Americans, which “model the texture and temporality of social reproduction” (146) to the interplay between attention and the “repetitions of daily life” (168) that structures Stanzas in Meditation. Summoning the context of early-twentieth-century home economics to great effect, Grogan reads Tender Buttons as a catalogue of commodities “disburdened of their use values” (153), revealing “the household’s unruliness and its refusal to be contained” (155). Alongside enlightening readings of Stein’s work, we find here sensitive and illuminating forays into the Beinecke Library’s Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Collection—“to leaf through [Stein’s] archival papers,” Grogan reminds us, “is to handle Toklas’s labor” (159)—which bolster an account of their shared life as a “sustained practice of queer reproduction” (142). Read alongside the handwritten notes that passed between Toklas and Stein in their daily life, Stanzas in Meditation “points us back to the fundamental condition of experience that makes life possible at all” and models the forms of “wandering attention” that constitute intimacy, which “cannot be fully disciplined by number, time, measure, or naming” (169-70).
If Stein looms in Stitch, Unstitch as one unmissable waystation on the twentieth-century map of poetry and work, Niedecker, subject of the book’s final full-length chapter, is another. Along with her own difficult working life, which culminated in a period as a cleaner at the Fort Atkinson Memorial Hospital in Wisconsin between 1957 and 1963, the homemade craft aesthetic and “restricted conditions” (181) that characterize Niedecker’s late verse make her an exemplary poet of reproductive labor, “with its values of care, preservation, and self-effacement” (170). Niedecker’s use of craft forms, which Grogan convincingly correlates with the craft techniques employed by postwar feminist artists like Lenore Tawney, Eva Hesse, Sheila Hicks, and Cecilia Vicuña, provide another counterexample to the Poundian ethos of “perfectibility, seriousness, and mastery”; here, rather, modernist craft connotes “tampering, repurposing, and bodily eroticism via compromised materials that are put to new uses” (188). A key source in this argument are the handmade books of poetry that Niedecker crafted, decorated, and sent to friends, which are held in her archive at the New York Public Library. Engaging with the material form of these artefacts, as well as with other unpublished materials, Grogan builds out a vivid account of Niedecker as a writer who worried restlessly at the uncertain boundary between everyday labor and poetic creation. In a nice bookend with the first chapter, which examined a very different turn to the natural world in Pound’s late work, the discussion concludes by considering the environmental implications of Niedecker’s poetics of self-erasure and “antiproductivity” (202) in a time of climate crisis.
A “Coda” regathers the book’s varied threads before offering a reading of Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s long, recursive “poem of a life” (213), Drafts, which she began in 1986 and has continued to work on throughout her career. A poem whose every “installment is a draft” (213), Blau DuPlessis’s project fittingly illustrates the ongoing importance of the modernist genealogy traced in Stitch, Unstitch—a modernism that is not, as Grogan puts it, “a calcified tradition but a living art that continues to make claims on us and that gives us a language with which to write and think, even if that language is only ever provisional” (218). This final turn to the contemporary echoes several such temporal leaps in the foregoing chapters, which move easily from Ridge’s study of the early-twentieth-century garment industry to Anne Boyer’s 2015 Garments Against Women, or from Niedecker’s late work to that of Bernadette Mayer. It brings to a close a compelling and immensely satisfying reconfiguration of the cosmos of twentieth-century modernist poetry, meticulous and inventive in its close readings of modernist form, diligent in its attention to material historical contexts, and rigorous in its sustained theoretical critique of the value-generating categories of capitalist labor.
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