[New-Poetry] pink poetry & capitalism's soft touch

[jforjames at aol.com]

http://theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21895413-12332,00.html?from=public_rss
Red verse wins out
Bernard Lane 
June 13, 2007 


THANKS to a rather well known capitalist, Ariane Welch is off to the University of Cambridge to study a bunch of decidedly obscure communist poets.

"I told myself that I had absolutely no chance of getting the (Bill Gates scholarship), because I figured it would go to people working on science, technology, medicine," she says. "It never crossed my mind that they would give it to someone working on communist poetry." But they did. 


Welch, from the University of Sydney, has secured one of the 50 Cambridge scholarships given each year to non-US citizens by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 


She was pitching a PhD topic related to language and materialism when her supervisor, Julian Murphet in the English department at Sydney, suggested she look up the New York poet Louis Zukofsky. 

It was love at first sight. 

"I think initially it was that both language and politics are very explicit concerns in his poems," Welch says. 


In one poem, for example, the wooden saw horses of the New York proletariat go to work as the letter A. The shape and sound of words mattered to Zukofsky. His poetry is difficult. 


"He was a very, very neglected poet," she says. "People used to call him the poet's poet's poet. In general, Zukofsky was quite aware that he would never reach the masses." 


He eked out an impoverished existence between the wars with the occasional loan from the modernist ring master Ezra Pound: "the anti-Semite fascist supporting the communist Jew", as Welch puts it. 


But it's the communist wing of the modern movement that will preoccupy Welch in her PhD: Zukofsky, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff and others. Welch sees their politics and poetics as indivisible. 

But what if they had lived in the Soviet Union, where the avant-garde became suspect not long after the Bolshevik putsch? 


"(Russian futurist poet Vladimir) Mayakovsky got away with it for a long time, (but) I think you can say it probably wouldn't have been a happy ending for them," she says. 


"Zukofsky was never a member of the Communist Party but he was certainly a fellow traveller. He broke early with Stalinism."



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