Canon Fodder

Several people have e-mailed me recently to ask where I come across the poems and poets of social movements and organized labor that I’ve been discussing here during my interlude upon Harriet, as well as why these poems and their presumed dubious “aesthetic quality” should matter. Yesterday, as part of another project I’m working on, I revisited Robin D.G. Kelley’s seminal Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class and reread (with Harriet in mind) Kelley’s fifth chapter, “‘Afric’s Sons With Banner Red’: African American Communists and the Politics of Culture, 1919-1934.” The quote that opens his chapter title comes from J. Thompson’s poem “Exhortation,” a Claude McKay-“If We Must Die”-esque piece that Kelley discovered “buried in a barely readable microfilm edition of the Liberator.” In addition to his expansion of Marxism beyond the (white, male) figures most critics seem delimited to invoking in academic literary criticism (and readers interested in exploring further should begin with Cedric J. Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, though it is still unfortunately overwhelmingly masculinist), Kelley’s chapter on Black radicalism, class struggle, and poetry provides a unique and engaging overview of the social poetics and poetries of the era—much of it dug up from microfilms and archives.
One of the poems in the chapter that interested me on a variety of levels was “Southern Organizer” [Note: The periods represent indents, which I can't seem to figure out on Movabale Type]:
.......Badges gleam; they dump the sack
.......Into the water, turn and go.
It is peaceful in the Southland; tomorrow
They will hang and shoot some more
Of ours: but tonight, as all true men
.......with southern blood will tell you.
The possum is abroad, the bloodhounds sleep,
And it is beautiful. Comrades.
.......“Let us do this thing together.
Black man, comrade, we must together.
And he is dead. There is work for living
Men to do. We salute him.
We have no tears for him.”

Kenneth Patchen’s “Southern Organizer” was published in the Daily Worker on August 10, 1935. The poem does not appear in either Patchen’s Collected or Selected. And when I emailed Patchen’s excellent biographer, Larry Smith, yesterday, even he was unaware of the poem and asked me to email him a copy. A brief internet search turned up nothing besides Kelley’s Race Rebels, which analyzes the poem in terms of how “white Communists dealing directly with race made their pleas for interracialism in a wholly masculinist discourse.”
My question to Harriet readers is to ask why Patchen’s “Southern Organizer” disappeared (almost) from literary history and the American poetry canon? What makes it a “poor” poem—too low in aesthetic quality or cultural capital? What forces cause it to (almost) utterly disappear while a poem like, say James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio” becomes celebrated, canonized, and anthologized in everything from John Frederick Nims’ Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry to Cary Nelson’s Anthology of Modern American Poetry (which oddly excludes Patchen altogether) and Peter Oresick and Nicholas Coles' Working Classics: Poems of Industrial Life? Why is it that Wright’s sexist, racist machismo (where women, rather than being absent/erased as in Patchen’s poem, “cluck like starved pullets”) trumps the anti-racist activist machismo (not that I’d choose either)? Why is one poem so lauded while the other poem has nearly disappeared?
Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945, which several commentators have recently mentioned, tackles questions like these in ways that have remained productive for my own thinking over the years. Nelson pointedly asserts that “English professors should be pressed to explain why, for example, the poetry sung by striking coal miners in the 1920s is so much less important than the appearance of The Waste Land in The Dial in 1922.”
Any takers?
In his reading of the largely unknown H.L. Lewis, the “Plowboy Poet” of Missouri whose works were published here in Holt, Minnesota by farmer Ben Hagglund’s “Rebel Poet Booklets” series, Nelson argues a point that I think is useful when thinking about the Patchen/Wright juxtaposition I pose above (as well as many other similar comparisons we could analyze):
“If we have lost Lewis and others like him, it is partly because his poetry does not generally display the surface indecision and ambivalence that many critics since the 1950s have deemed a transcendent, unquestionable literary and cultural value. From that perspective, the ideal political poem is W.H. Auden’s 1937 Spain, a poem tortured by the impossibility of making a clear commitment to either side in an imperfect world. Because it reinforces the English profession’s ruling ideology of political indecision lived out in uneasy inner anguish and external inaction, Auden’s poem is often taken to be aesthetically superior.” [I was reminded of this quote, in part, when I read Daisy Fried’s excellent comment to one of my earlier posts: “It always has seemed curious to me that people who certainly seem to be a force for good in their practical actions--activist-poets like Claudia Jones--get criticized for their ideological associations, while people who *do* nothing at all, or worse, get a free pass.”]
What is it about that supposedly Marxist or liberation theological or XYZ bugaboo, “agency,” the condition of acting—of philosophers (and poets) not only interpreting the world but attempting to change it (and changing it)—that repels us as poets? And strong alliteration and sharp allegory defeat imbuing readers with the desire to act because…? Why does, to borrow Nelson’s terminology, “surface indecision and ambivalence” trump instrumentality in contemporary poetry and poetry criticism?
What is it that we are afraid might change?