Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism: Social Reproduction and the Institutions of Poetry 135006386X, 9781350063860

Citation preview

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics Series Editor Daniel Katz, University of Warwick, UK Political, social, erotic and aesthetic—poetry has been a challenge to many of the dominant discourses of our age across the globe. Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics publishes books on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics that explore the intersection of poetry with philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis, political and economic theory, protest and liberation movements as well as other art forms, including prose. With a primary focus on texts written in English but including work from other languages, the series brings together leading and rising scholars from a diverse range of fields for whom poetry has become a vital element of their research. Editorial Board: Hélène Aji, University of Paris Ouest-Nanterre, France Vincent Broqua, University of Paris 8—Vincennes/Saint Denis, France Olivier Brossard, University of Paris Est Marne La Vallée, France Daniel Kane, University of Sussex, UK Miriam Nichols, University of the Fraser Valley, Canada Peter Middleton, University of Southampton, UK Cristanne Miller, SUNY Buffalo, USA Aldon Nielsen, Pennsylvania State University, USA Stephen Ross, University of Warwick, UK; Editor, Wave Composition Richard Sieburth, New York University, USA Daniel Tiffany, University of Southern California, USA Titles in the series include: Affect, Psychoanalysis, and American Poetry, John Steen City Poems and American Urban Crisis, Nate Mickelson Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism, Samuel Solomon Forthcoming titles: A Black Arts Poetry Machine, David Grundy Queer Troublemakers, Prudence Chamberlain

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism Social Reproduction and the Institutions of Poetry Samuel Solomon

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA   BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc   First published in Great Britain 2019   Copyright © Samuel Solomon, 2019   Samuel Solomon has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.   For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page.   Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Getty Images   All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.   Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.   Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.   A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.   A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.   ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-6385-3     ePDF: 978-1-3500-6386-0    eBook: 978-1-3500-6387-7   Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics   Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India   To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgments I ntroduction: Social Reproduction and Lyric Pedagogy 1 Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge 2 Denise Riley’s Socialized Biology 3 Forms of Reproduction in the Early Work of Wendy Mulford 4 Institutional Geologies and Lonely Sociality Notes Bibliography Index

vi 1 31 81 111 145 181 199 211

Acknowledgments This book would not exist without the efforts of friends, comrades and strangers. Much of what appears in these pages first developed at the University of Southern California under the supervision of Peggy Kamuf and David Lloyd. David’s continued provocations have shaped my thinking about lyric pedagogy, and he remains a model for me of engaged literary inquiry. Peggy, as a prose writer and as a supervisor, is exemplary (if that word can survive the arguments of this book). Other staff during my time at USC provided invaluable support, ideas and encouragement:  thanks especially to Alice Echols, Katherine Guevarra, Karen Pinkus and Karen Tongson. Friends from my life in LA and from before made that initial writing process more fun, challenging and rewarding than I  could have expected:  Amanda Altman, Jacquelyn Ardam, Nada Ayad, Becky Brown, Paul Chaikin, Marija Cetinic, Chris Farrish, Emilie Garrigou-Kempton, Gabriele Hayden, Joanna Clapps Herman, Sandy Kim, Molly Lambert, Anthony Leslie, Caitlin Mitchell, Danielle and Erin McCullough, Lauren Ng, Margarita Smith and Jessica Stites were all valuable co-teachers, work buddies and interlocutors at various points along the way. Mikel Wadewitz and Ryan Goodman lovingly shared so much with me. Nisha Kunte and Adrienne Walser shared the time and space of dissertation writing along with ideas, drinks, snacks and feelings. Shaoling Ma continues to teach me about the meaning of necessity, exigency and how to read the phrase “necessary almost.” I cannot imagine a life where I don’t get to follow the courageous and brilliant example of my sibling, Emma Heaney. Writers and activists in the United Kingdom are not only the subjects of this book:  they have been my anchor in rewriting it since I  hesitantly moved here five years ago. They are far too many to name, but I am especially grateful to Sean Bonney, Andrea Brady, Josh Cook, Amy De’Ath, Jane Elliott, Anna Gumucio Ramberg, Edmund Hardy, Seb Franklin, Sean Grattan, Francesca Lisette, Marianne Morris, Neil Pattison, Nell Perry, Nat Raha, Sanaz Raji, Nisha Ramayya, Denise Riley, Luke Roberts, Sophie Robinson, Savannah Sevenzo, Kat Sinclair, Benjamin Thompson, Juha Virtanen, Laurel Uziell, Dorothy Wang, and Florence Warner. Hannah Westall at the Girton College Archives was tremendously generous with her time and expertise when I visited in 2010.

Acknowledgments

vii

My co-workers at the University of Sussex have been so much better and more supportive than I could reasonably expect; thank you to Sara Jane Bailes, Sara Crangle, Anne Crawford, Denise Decaires Narain, Hannah Field, Alice Gavin, Michael Lawrence, Joe Luna, Rachel O’Connell, JD Rhodes, Arabella Stanger, Keston Sutherland, and Pam Thurschwell. This book would not exist without Natalia Cecire’s editorial prowess, unfailing backbone, and opinions on all things. Comrades in the United States have been the political engine for this work and have taught me not only about its importance but also and especially about its necessary incompleteness: thanks especially to Karla Alegria, Yolanda Alaniz, Christine Browning, Mary Ann Curtis, Stephen Durham, Yuisa Gimeno, Muffy Sunde, Nellie Wong, and Luma Nichol. My family of birth (immediate and extended) has been loving, challenging, and hospitable:  Ellen Solomon, the Solomon-Gagne clan in Maine, the Schoenbaums of Los Angeles, and especially my parents, Mark Solomon and Judith Block Solomon. Martin Dines has shown me all I know about how to be playful and nimble. Thanks to Dan Katz for giving this book such a good home in his series, to Clara Herburg and David Avital for guiding it through production and to two anonymous peer reviewers for insightful and challenging readings of the manuscript. Abridged versions of Chapters 2 and 3 were first published in the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry (vol. 5, issue 2) and in Modernist Legacies:  Trends and Faultlines in British Poetry (edited by Abigail Lang and David Nowell-Smith), respectively. My introduction borrows from a short piece, “What Pools Love to Arson,” first published on the Lana Turner Journal website in 2012. I have been impossibly lucky to spend time in the classroom and on the picket lines with students at the University of Sussex. To everyone who shared the classroom with me for “Literature in the Institution” across the past four years, this book took its final shape in response to your ideas and your actions, and it is dedicated to you. Thank you for exceeding the constraints of institutional life and for challenging me to do the same.

Introduction: Social Reproduction and Lyric Pedagogy

In late 2010, the newly empowered Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government enacted large-scale austerity cuts, setting into motion a series of protests throughout the United Kingdom. The cuts in question embraced almost every sector of the already whittled-down welfare state, and, perhaps predictably, those targeting higher education aroused special ire among artists and intellectuals. Cuts to higher education followed the recommendations of Lord John Browne, former CEO of BP (formerly British Petroleum), who proposed to shift state debt onto students by cutting all funding of nonpriority subjects (humanities and social sciences foremost among them) and raising student fees by well over 200 per cent in 2012–2013. For many of those who did not already have access to accumulated wealth, studying these subjects now meant signing up for a lifetime of student debt. The protests against this policy were massive, and they featured tactics ranging from marches to the destruction of corporate and state property. During these months, four young Brighton- and Londonbased poets put together a pamphlet called Poems, Written between October and December 2010. The writers start out from the dispossession wrought by the neo-liberal state, and they candidly ask:  what, if any, is an appropriate poetic response to the economic violence that renders many lives and livelihoods precarious and that makes lyric poetry’s deliberative care and love seem patently superfluous? Poems written comprises the work of four poets, Jonny Liron, Francesca Lisette, Joe Luna and Timothy Thornton. All of the poems are titled with dates, presumably of composition, and they are printed in chronological order. This kind of dating gives the pamphlet a documentary quality enhanced by the multiple keywords drawn from media and from the writers’ own first-hand accounts of the protests; this includes specific place names as well as words like “kettling,” the police practice of holding demonstrators entrapped for hours

2

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

until the energy of the street dissipates. This sort of documentation immediately presents a set of political problems for reading, problems regarding the social location of the documenting subjects and of their readers. To whom would the fact of police violence be news? Does the pamphlet make kettling news in a way that goes beyond a liberal shock at instances of repressive violence that have been documented for centuries? Writing about the primarily middle-income student movements, Danny Hayward, a poet and political-theorist-friend of the pamphlet’s writers, critiqued the practice among protesters of proudly proclaiming that they had been kettled and of assuming that this street cred assures that all working-class youths aim to be like them. As he writes, By imputing to working class teenagers the desire to “protest” up to the point where they resemble us in the cracked mirror of our own (bourgeois) sociological concepts (i.e., up to the point when they possess the minimal resources required to compete with us—at a safe disadvantage—in education and labour markets), the conception tells us nothing about the real complexity of class based impulses or aversions or about how they might be put to work “on the ground” in the production of a real movement against capital and its servant institutions. (n.p.)

Hayward’s note highlights the dangers of viewing the student anti-austerity movements as a “new” kind of response to wholly “new” social experiences. Poems written broaches this perspectival dimension of violence by laying bare the antagonism and tenderness built into their collaborative authorship. The pamphlet is not a dramatic dialogue, nor does its collective authorship automatically ameliorate the embarrassing passions of the poetic speaker by way of some beneficent “collaboration”; the whole thing works, rather, through the pull of distinct writerly modes taking each other on, and not without resistance and contradiction. The two opening poems are by Francesca Lisette. The first, the only poem dated from October, sounds a dystopian, inauspicious start, mockingly demanding the stark dystopia that austerity portends:       Make me lie  in  a dark bed stripped with froth; outer town stationary pet rumours there are no people left and zombies parade their dice heads serving Osborne’s roulette wheel, all the $ replaced with%.

Here, as elsewhere, the enumeration of Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne’s violences, signaled by the use of symbols rather than words, is



Introduction: Social Reproduction and Lyric Pedagogy

3

undercut by a skeptical attitude toward such accounting and recounting. It is as if the straightforward narration of violence would be complicit with the crippling capitalist realism of metrical rationality—better instead, it seems, to ironize the symbols that reduce lives to numbers. Lisette’s taunts to David Cameron’s government issue a trembling bravado that then gives way to more ambivalent assertions: where have your eyes gone back to, dreamed under curricula leaf solos still shaking the impossible X wants to wipe you out like a fishy fanny never was the difference is unrecountable.

With “the difference is unrecountable,” Lisette sounds a near whisper against the logic of “accountability” that shores up the depredations of the privatizing state that promises, all the while using the language of liberty, to “wipe you out like a fishy fanny.” One phrase that follows is a grotesque rendition of the romantic lyric’s impulse to embrace anything: “o loveable debt!” This first poem thus sets up a central problem for Lisette and her collaborators to take on—namely, to create a poetry that can live up to and past the antisocial logic of austerity. By the second poem, dated 2–8 November, the protests are well under way. Lisette’s focus has shifted from despair to the feverish sensuality of mass action; an apparently sincere first-person plural has also emerged in this shift: dare to breathe, i’m sorry we cant     limit push beyond oil-well slip   pulled up at midnight, your blue slender taskforce unhooking and papering silver crosses on aching trees

The embodiment of oppression and of passion alike are figured here through prosthetic layering:  apparel comes on and off with the manipulation of slips, covers, skins and marks, substances that burn these coats off or cover them further, and Lisette watches it all get thrown in the pot to stew: souped in a stink of bone & brevity    what loses face to maul, what pools     love to arson, shifts light ungathered      to a narrower acid  track.

Here the designation “what pools/ love to arson” calls into question some of the implications of incendiary poetic passion:  “pooling” reduces the finely

4

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

differentiated textiles that precede it into a fluid susceptible to indifferent combustion. What is ultimately intimated here is that the net effect of poetic care may be its own annihilation. Whether that would be a good or bad thing goes unclarified, insofar as the valences of “arson” or even a “narrower acid track” depend on the social content of that which they seek to abolish. The poems cannot solve this multidimensional puzzle, but they can track some of its shifts and layers. Struggles over higher education, then, are the terrain on which many UK poets, in recent years, have engaged the contradictions of social reproduction. The political economic situation of UK austerity has brought into focus some of the contradictory commitments of academically trained leftist and feminist poets, contradictions that it will be the work of this book to tease out by understanding the connections between literary education and the Marxistfeminist critique of reproduction. For now, these passages should suffice to open up the literary-political question that I elaborate in what follows: how do we talk about the uses of poetry to reproduce social relations—or to interfere with social reproduction? This book began in research about UK poets in the 1970s, a decade in which politically engaged, university-educated poets perceived that poetry had been deemed socially irrelevant. In the light of new global divisions of labor, the stateorganized cultivation of poetry was no longer instrumental in the same ways that it had been purported to be at least through the first half of the century. This book analyzes capitalist relations of reproduction in this perhaps surprising context of postwar British poetry. The poetry that I focus on circulated between the colleges of Cambridge University, groupings of poets and publishers that transgressed or skirted institutional boundaries and revolutionary socialistfeminist organizations. Within some of these groupings, poetic production and literary education were seen as dynamic nodes in the production and reproduction of both capitalist relations and revolutionary social movements. The poems and critical writings of Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Wendy Mulford, J. H. Prynne and, in particular, Denise Riley form the backbone of this study.1 This book argues, first, that the concept of social reproduction, elaborated by Marxist-feminists during this same period, is a crucial rubric for understanding twentieth-century poetry in the United Kingdom, both in its content and in its relationship to the institutions within which it is situated. At its most basic level, social reproduction refers to the processes by which human life is reproduced and by which the social relations of production through which people make their lives are reproduced. The poetry examined in this book reflects and



Introduction: Social Reproduction and Lyric Pedagogy

5

responds to the paradox of social reproduction under late capitalism. That is, the poetry reflects social reproduction’s quality of being both essential—in the case of reproductive labor, literally vital; in the case of institutional reproduction, likewise indispensable—and of working precisely because it is often invisible. This book looks at theorizations of social reproduction in relation to Marxistfeminist activism because Marxist-feminism as a milieu shaped both theories of social reproduction and the writing of the poets I discuss. Second, I argue that there is a specific materialist literary history to be told about twentieth-century UK poetry’s engagement with social reproduction. I use the phrase “lyric pedagogy” to tell a story: lyric pedagogy is the form through which, I  argue, poetry has been institutionalized and rendered a (nationalist and colonialist) good. Lyric pedagogy is an ideology that attributes ameliorative social and economic powers to instruction in the proper reading of poetry. Lyric pedagogy emerged before but was also bolstered by the British welfare state’s investment in reproduction in the immediate postwar period. The post-war shift in official attitudes to poetry indexed a change in social reproduction, to which lyric pedagogy responded by doubling down on claims both for the autonomy of literary instruction and for the civilizing and morally ameliorative powers of poetry. By explaining the affordances and damages wrought by lyric pedagogy as a state-sanctioned ideology of instruction, I  believe that it is possible to understand poetic responses to the overall social disinvestment in reproduction in the late twentieth century. Investigating twentieth-century British poetry through the concepts of social reproduction and lyric pedagogy helps get to the heart of pressing political questions:  how has poetry been enlisted for struggles around social reproduction—that is, the reproduction of life but also of institutional and ideological formations? It is not politically straightforward to argue for a “reinvestment” in poetry, or in the National Health Service (NHS) for that matter, when the terms of these investments have been grounded in ideological efforts to direct social reproduction precisely in order to regulate life. This is not to say that we don’t need a robust, free and accessible health service or form of public education, but that social reproduction as a framework helps us see the articulation of reproduction and care with scenarios of exploitation and violence, as in the anti-immigrant rhetoric of “caring for our own.” In either case, I argue that the work written under the sign of poetry in the context of late capitalist disinvestment in social reproduction has been a site for determining and articulating social need against both liberal and conservative forms of social privation.

6

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

In this introduction, I provide elaborations of the terms “social reproduction” and “lyric pedagogy” in the context of postwar British poetics and indicate their usefulness for contemporary cultural criticism. The framework of social reproduction helps me to articulate arguments about literary education and poetic practice with an analysis of class struggle and feminist politics in the United Kingdom. Along the way, I provide a somewhat schematic summary of Anglo-American and some European Marxist-feminism as a component part of the women’s liberation movement and a resource for thinking about social and cultural reproduction. This is to set the stage for a reading of radical organizing itself as a contradictory site of rupture and continuity. I aim throughout to show how contradictions of social reproduction were built into the material conditions and social relations of Marxist-feminist organizing and of the textual production that attended it from its origins. This book provides an explanatory framework for the contradictions that attend postwar works written under the sign of poetry, but it does not argue that these contradictions are necessarily terminal. At the close of the introduction, I turn to Nat Raha’s chapbook £/€xtinctions and relate this work to the voicing of “needs” in materialist cultural forms. By pressing on these contradictions and returning to the embarrassing but essential question of need, writing such as Raha’s seeks a way to rethink the work that “poetry” does and might do.

Social reproduction Social reproduction, in its broadest sense, refers to the reproduction of human life as well as to the reproduction of social relations of production. Under capitalism, the processes involved in social reproduction are those that allow people to return to work (food production and the provision and maintenance of housing, medicine, and intangibles like companionship, kinship, love, and leisure), but also those things that allow people outside of wage labor (children, unemployed people, many elderly people, those with some forms of disability) to live, and also the generational reproduction of the labor force through childbirth or otherwise (through immigration, for example).2 Some of these processes involve activities performed free of charge, and these are done disproportionately by women and other feminized people. In the United Kingdom and the United States, reproductive labor often takes the form of services offered on the market, whether bought and sold by corporations (e.g. fast food) or directly as private services (e.g. privately employed childcare workers).



Introduction: Social Reproduction and Lyric Pedagogy

7

These services are increasingly offloaded in overdeveloped countries such as the United Kingdom onto people of color and immigrants, including those who are undocumented. Social reproduction, however, also includes processes like education, immigration and institutionalized healthcare. That is to say, it is not necessarily only a name for reproductive or domestic labor and, despite many popular representations, it is not by any means exclusively or even mostly in the hands of people fitting the description of the archetypal middle-class white housewife. This book accepts the rhetorical and methodological messiness of the term as, in some ways, an enabling strength. I do hope, however, to provide some clarity about how the abstraction called “social reproduction” might help us to think through cultural production in both the specific period in question and in the present. Social reproduction is a capacious concept, and it’s not always distinct from “production” in any obvious way—it is, rather, a partial framework for understanding the total workings of complex and uneven class societies. The concept of social reproduction takes as its core interest the relations of capitalism that are frequently absent in analyzes of the capital/labor relation. At the same time, it holds to an insistence that relations (direct and indirect) between capital and labor have a determining force in the development of social life. Consequently, this term is useful for contemporary feminist and anti-racist thought that is invested in a materialist approach to the analysis of contemporary life and of culture. Much theorizing of social reproduction sets off from Karl Marx’s discussion of “simple reproduction” in the first volume of Capital, wherein he asserts that “every social process of production is at the same time a process of reproduction” (Capital I 711). As Michelle Murphy has explained, “In Capital, reproduction named the ploughing back of some of the products of accumulation into maintaining the means and forces of production” (Murphy 289). Marx explains that the capitalist mode of production must reproduce itself as part of its functioning, and that this is built into and coextensive with processes of accumulation: The capitalist process of production . . ., seen as a total, connected process, i.e. a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplusvalue, but it also produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself; on the one hand the capitalist, on the other the wage labourer. (Capital I 724)

Throughout Capital, Marx undertakes to discover how it is that individual capitalists reproduce themselves as individual capitalists and how the capitalist mode of production reproduces the capitalist and working classes in their

8

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

relations of production. The Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, in her 1913 The Accumulation of Capital, follows Marx’s effort to explain how the reproduction of a given mode of production requires specific “technical and social conditions” (32).3 For her part, Luxemburg insists that capitalism, for the accumulation that subtends its very reproduction, relies on social relations that are not, strictly speaking, “capitalist,” if that term is taken exclusively to mean the relations between wage laborer and capitalist.4 Social reproduction as a framework, then, in focusing on the range of processes and relations that attend capital accumulation (i.e., by looking past the dizzying movements of capital’s valorization at each turn), can illuminate the contradictions and potential rifts that arise in a given regime of capital accumulation. An important aspect of social reproduction, for the purposes of this argument, is that it makes fully evident the contradiction between capitalism’s need for an available and ready-to-work class of workers (who therefore require some forms of social reproduction) and its drive for the maximization of profit. In other words, capital still needs workers to produce surplus value, but it doesn’t want to lose money by paying any more than it needs to for workers’ (or especially for surplus populations’) health, education, training, leisure activities, etc. And in many circumstances, it helps capital if workers are struggling for most of these things, even if it still usually needs some workers to have access to some of these things. Capital generally benefits when different working-class people have different levels of access to their own means of reproduction, and it can also benefit when a lot of people are unemployed or otherwise have a difficult time meeting even their most basic needs. This book focuses on poetic production in an era characterized by crises of capital accumulation (or, differently put, of social reproduction). In this period— the mid and late twentieth century—these contradictions had led to especially mobile social formations, engendering transformations on local and global scales. The early 1970s, following the collapse of the Bretton Woods financial system and the 1973 oil crisis, are often considered to index a crisis of postwar capital accumulation. It is illuminating, however, to understand the crisis as lying, alternately, in the reproduction of capital relations. As Silvia Federici argues, we can see crises in capital accumulation as crises of reproduction that, despite being called “crises,” are neither accidental nor temporary: “the struggles of the 1960s have taught the capitalist class that investing in the reproduction of labor power does not necessarily translate into a higher productivity of work” (Revolution 101). Federici describes here the neo-liberal economic doctrine that continues to guide much UK economic and social policy. But, as Federici notes,



Introduction: Social Reproduction and Lyric Pedagogy

9

this tendency to demand that some go without the conditions for the robust meeting of social need is not just a blip or a new trend. It is, rather, a component of capital’s development that is not ultimately reversible under capitalism, since capitalism “fosters a permanent reproduction crisis” (104). This is, to return to Luxemburg’s point, a global phenomenon: the attack on anti-capitalist struggles and disinvestment in existing workers has major consequences for migration, gender, sexuality and race. This global restructuring of reproduction is an attack on working-class struggles, and it’s one that reconfigures gender, sexuality and race. This book focuses on poetic production in an era of just such crises, by poets engaged with a feminist critique of capitalist relations. For this reason, the next section of this introduction looks at how feminist activists, among whom we can count most of the poets discussed in this book, mounted that critique.

Marxist-feminism It was during the 1970s—in the wake of worldwide decolonization struggles and amidst falling rates of profit—that arguments about social reproduction took shape within the European and Anglo-American women’s liberation movements.5 Many leftist women, frustrated by the misogyny and indifference to women’s political concerns and contributions within both old and new left organizations, found that in order to organize against capitalism, racism, sexual oppression, and the military-industrial complex, it was necessary to fight within their organizations and movements for recognition of their leadership and for an equitable division of labor.6 Such struggles saw many leftist women turning their attention to gendered social relations that contribute to the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production and to the structures of domination that attend it. In many cases, this also involved analyzes of culture, the state and the family under capitalism as forces that contributed to the ineffectuality of much working-class resistance. Some Marxist-feminists continued to fight for women’s liberation from within existing left organizations (they were called “politicos” by US radical feminists who argued for autonomous women’s groups); others began to form autonomous Marxist-feminist organizations that were explicitly feminist and often integrated elements of “radical feminist” politics.7 The writers this book focuses on fell into each of these camps during the 1970s: Wendy Mulford was a member of socialist-feminist groupings but also remained in the Communist Party for much of the 1970s, while Denise Riley worked primarily within autonomous

10

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

women’s liberation small groups as well as in targeted campaigns. In most cases, Marxist theories and the basic perspective of historical materialism remained privileged anchors for analysis on the feminist left. Existing left groups, some feminists argued, reproduced the bourgeois oppression of women within their own organizational structures. Patriarchal power and ideology were too often explained away as epiphenomena of capitalism that would disappear after the revolution and that therefore did not need to be addressed within the left itself. Many leftist feminists then undertook analyzes of women’s specific oppressions under capitalism, expressing a practical need for an analysis of sexual oppression that was not immediately subsumable under existing narratives of class struggle. Among the women’s liberation movement’s unique contributions to Marxist theorization were detailed analyzes of the divide-and-conquer tactics that pit sectors of the proletariat against each other, both materially and ideologically, through investments in forms of sexual pleasure and gendered power. It became clear to many feminists in the course of struggle that such relations of antagonism within the proletariat were not merely incidental tactics of capital but were, rather, deeply entrenched within and effectively part of the laborcapital contradiction itself. Explaining the reproduction of these divisions, then, required sustained consideration and materialist analysis of relations other than those between the generic worker and capitalist and also of the role that cultural forms played in such processes. Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State served as a foundation (and irritant) for many of these analyzes. Engels’s work, drawn selectively and hastily from Marx’s own notes on the work of anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, deploys an emphatically materialist conception of history to explain the development of private property, the family and the state. The characterization of a particular society or social organization, for Engels, must be grounded in its mode of production. Engels’s work was of critical importance for debates in Marxist-feminism around the at-least-dual structure of women’s oppression in terms of both class and gender. Was women’s oppression really always directly determined by the mode of production? Many early second-wave Marxist- and socialist-feminists in the United States, the United Kingdom and Western Europe struggled to use Engels’s categories of analysis to describe, explain and ultimately abolish the oppression of women under capitalist societies. Feminist scholars and activists in the 1970s, then, presented significant challenges to the definition of historical materialism, especially with regard to its proper domain of objects.8 The commitment to a historical materialism that



Introduction: Social Reproduction and Lyric Pedagogy

11

would be both Marxist and feminist entailed an expansion of the category of relations of production, which had among much of the organized left referred exclusively to workplace relations, toward a broader consideration of the “sexual divisions of labor” within the household and the relations of reproduction of human life in social, economic and biological terms. As it became increasingly evident to socialist feminists that women were not only subject to capitalist hyper-exploitation via underpaid wage labor, feminists explored the influence of male supremacy, patriarchy and what Gayle Rubin called “sex/gender systems” in relation to capitalism.9 Such viewpoints renewed the meaning of the “material” of historical materialism insofar as class struggle did not only follow directly from the relation to the wage.10 This focus on the exploitation of women as fundamental to the development and expansion of capitalism and as a primary site for the reproduction of capitalist relations held many (often unheeded) lessons for the left. Alongside these Anglo-American struggles was the work of 1970s Italian autonomist Marxist-feminists such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici and Leopoldina Fortunati who, among others, retheorized the problem of women’s place in capitalism. They argued that reproductive labor was a site for the extraction of surplus value for the capitalist, even though it was not always directly waged work. These arguments emerged alongside and in defense of “domestic labor debates” that reverberated across national borders. The works of Fortunati and Federici call into question Engels’s speculative history of “Origins” by arguing that the destruction of a commons of reproduction (i.e. a collective social subject of reproduction as opposed to the atomized houseworker) was simultaneous with and at least as important to the functioning of capitalist “accumulation” as was the move within wage labor from the extraction of absolute surplus value to that of relative surplus value. According to Fortunati, when relative surplus value became the law for productive labor (in short, when labor time was intensified rather than extended), reproductive labor became a site for the production of absolute surplus value (i.e. the working day for reproductive labor was extended). Neither of these processes could have occurred independently of the other, she insists. As a result, Fortunati argues, relations between the classes continue to be shaped by the divisions within them: “for capital, control over labor necessarily became control over the composition of the class, and . . . class struggle is also the struggle against the class composition that capital imposes” (Arcane 167; emphasis in original). Thinkers like Fortunati sought to understand the ways in which reproductive labor, during the transition to capitalism, was appropriated by the state and

12

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

separated from productive labor, made into unwaged and atomized labor. The logical extension of this argument, and the conclusion reached by Dalla Costa, Selma James, Fortunati and Federici, among others, was that organization at the site of reproduction was a necessary element in any struggle against global capitalism and for a communist society. These thinkers saw women’s refusal to uphold the community through unpaid reproductive labor as integral to overthrowing capitalism.11 Federici, following Fortunati, James and Dalla Costa, recognizes that exploitation under capitalism is not reducible to the workplace relations of production, and that anti-racist, anti-imperialist and feminist historical materialisms need to be equally attentive to relations of reproduction and to forms of domination that may not appear to have anything to do with industrialized production at all. Federici insists that the realities of race, gender and colonial oppression call for analyzes that do not assume that all exploitation takes place in the waged workplace and can be automatically resolved by a planned economy (even an internationally coordinated, socialist economy).12 Third World and women-of-color feminists had already challenged, for years, the Marxist-feminist narrative of “capitalism vs./and patriarchy,” objecting to the ways in which race and racism were deemed to be epiphenomena of a more primary “capitalist patriarchy” that sought to be the totalizing theory of history where classical Marxism and radical feminism had supposedly failed.13 This union of two theories, some argued, merely reproduced ethnocentric thought and its exclusions: while racism was almost always addressed as a problem by early socialist-feminists, it was often tackled in an additive rather than integral fashion, that is, lamented as a manifestation of class- or sex-based oppression rather than recognized as co-constitutive with them (as manifested in the case of the forced sterilization of women of color and the racist and sexist attacks on the welfare state that were contemporary).14 It is important to emphasize that much Marxist-feminist thought and activity has, in fact, often engaged with workplace struggle, and this was certainly the case among black British socialist-feminists. The writings of Amrit Wilson and Hazel Carby are among the more famous examples of academic-activist work in this tradition. Carby famously advised in her 1982 essay “White Women Listen!” that “reproduction” as an abstract category in socialist feminist work was often inadequate for black feminism: What does the concept of reproduction mean in a situation where black women have done domestic labour outside of their own homes in the servicing of white



Introduction: Social Reproduction and Lyric Pedagogy

13

families? In this example they lie outside of the industrial wage relation but in a situation where they are providing for the reproduction of black labour in their own domestic sphere, simultaneously ensuring the reproduction of white labour power in the “white” household. The concept, in fact, is unable to explain exactly what the relations are that need to be revealed. (115)

Carby advised here that the emphasis on reproduction as unpaid “domestic labor” could serve to confuse as much as clarify the actual relations that shaped the lives of black women. Wilson’s Finding a Voice, meanwhile, provided nuanced and thorough accounts of labor organizing among South Asian women in Britain (including the infamous 1976–1978 industrial dispute at the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories in Willesden, led in large part by Asian women who had migrated to the United Kingdom from East Africa). A  key strategy for dismantling racist capitalist patriarchy would have to be, for Wilson, as for many, to “confront and defy the handful of men who control the trade union bureaucracy” (71). By emphasizing the concept of “social reproduction,” this book risks obscuring once again the activities of Marxist- and socialist-feminists such as Wilson who engaged the more “traditionally” leftist sphere of industrial action. However, the concept of social reproduction is not a substitute for but a supplement to such political frameworks; it provides a distinctive starting point for thinking about labor and activity, and it is especially useful for thinking about the political economy of “culture”—including the writing and teaching of poetry. Indeed, left academic discourse, including much feminist work in the 1970s and after, focused on understanding cultural production through the lens of ideology—a word that often served as shorthand for the cultural and psychological factors in the reproduction of relations of production. This aspect of feminist work also sometimes involved a general reconceiving of human value and of human need that often rejected economistic labor/value models. Three objective factors seem especially important for understanding the distrust of economistic thinking and the turn to analyzes of ideology. First, the UK trade union movement was weakened by the offshoring of manufacturing labor and the growth of nonunionized service industries.15 Second, cultural production and social services, alongside finance capital, would increasingly come to take center stage in the UK economy. Third, women and, to a lesser extent, people of color, were increasingly enrolling in higher education courses, and universities had become central to the United Kingdom’s self-image. It was in this moment— in the years prior to government pronouncements about the economic centrality

14

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

of “culture”—that ideology became a central component of feminist academic discussions of cultural production and education in the United Kingdom.16 Within the women’s liberation movement in the United Kingdom, Louis Althusser’s 1970 essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” was particularly pivotal for thinking through the problem of reproduction. Althusser argues that capitalism needs to reproduce its relations of production in order to reproduce itself (86), and he finds ideology and the “ideological state apparatuses” (ISAs) to be among the prime means through which the state guarantees such a reproduction for the ruling class. According to Althusser, the educational ISA, coupled with the family ISA, had become the dominant ISA by the midtwentieth century, supplanting the previously dominant Church-family couple (his reference point is clearly Republican France). He analyzes the school as the means through which individuals are shuttled into specific positions within the dominant capitalist relations of production, interpellated by ideology as subject-citizens of the ruling-class state to reproduce the ruling-class ideology and with it the existing relations of production. Some are trained in the schools to be producers, others to be managers, others repressive agents of the state. As Althusser points out, such stratifications are reproduced not only by the relations of production proper to wage labor and capital but also within and through other relations, relations of reproduction that are not necessarily preconditions to capitalism but that are all the same subsumed by and functional to it.17 Althusser’s discussions of the “relative autonomy” and “overdetermination” of ideology had particular purchase among feminists. Althusser asserts that ISAs are “relatively autonomous,” by which he means that ideology is determined by the capitalist mode of production and is rooted “in the last instance” in an economic base but is not immediately determined by the present needs of the capitalist class at any given moment. “Relative autonomy” is an extension of Althusser’s earlier writings on “overdetermination,” particularly the essay on “contradiction and overdetermination.” According to Althusser, one of Marx’s greatest interventions was to think contradiction and unity in terms of overdetermination:  capitalist society is a complex totality determined by the antagonism of capital-labor, but not all social differences and antagonisms follow automatically from the simple form of this contradiction.18 The dominant (labor/capital) contradiction itself is overdetermined at the same time that it is determining.19 It was precisely Althusser’s combination of “relative autonomy” with “determination in the last instance” that offered some British feminists a distinct lexicon for thinking through social reproduction and the not-immediatelyeconomic forces affecting women as important economic and ideological sites



Introduction: Social Reproduction and Lyric Pedagogy

15

for the analysis and transformation of capitalist relations. In her landmark 1971 book Woman’s Estate, Juliet Mitchell’s framed women’s oppression very explicitly in terms of overdetermination: Past socialist theory has failed to differentiate woman’s condition into its separate structures, which together form a complex—not a simple—unity . . . In a complex totality each independent sector has its own autonomous reality though each is ultimately, but only ultimately, determined by the economic factor. This complex totality means that no contradiction in society is ever simple. As each sector can move at a different pace, the synthesis of the different time-scales in the total structure means that sometimes contradictions cancel each other out, and sometimes they reinforce one another. Because the unity of woman’s condition at any time is in this way the product of several structures, moving at different paces, it is always “overdetermined.” (100–1)20

Mitchell, drawing directly on Althusser, sees “overdetermination” as a necessary category for any explanatory theory of women’s oppression under capitalist societies. Like Althusser, Mitchell and others saw “ideology” as a useful tool for understanding how capitalist relations of production are reproduced—that is, they saw the “relative autonomy” of sexism and racism as subsumed, even if not originally determined or brought into being, by capitalism. Crucially, Althusser himself identified the school and educational ISA as a central node in the functioning of ideology under industrial capitalism. The uneven development of ideological and directly economic forces was a useful model for other accounts of the educational apparatuses and especially of the role of literary education and literary criticism in the reproduction of late capitalist relations of production. In what follows, I introduce “lyric pedagogy” as a name for one of the strategies by which cultural education has been an ideological mechanism for social reproduction in twentieth-century Britain.

Lyric pedagogy The crises of reproduction to which feminists responded manifested globally, through the advent of new migration patterns and international flows of capital, and locally, through the withdrawal of state support for a range of social programs, including the arts and education. In other words, diminishing state provision of means for social reproduction included disinvestment in public institutions of poetic production. This book argues that these transformations also entailed a transformation of lyric pedagogy. By “lyric pedagogy,” I mean a set of theoretical

16

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

presuppositions about the usefulness of teaching people to read English poetry. More specifically, I mean an aesthetic ideology that grants distinct ameliorative social powers to the proper reading of lyric poems. This usefulness is said to work like so: reading lyric poems is an activity that is logically and temporally prior to other forms of being in the world, and to learn to read lyric is, first and foremost, to learn to erase one’s self so that lyric reading can take place. Lyric pedagogy names the practices—and, crucially, the theoretical justification of these practices—that promote the wiping clean of one’s history in order to be shaped by lyric, which is the call for one to interpret without recourse to one’s own worldly life. This book argues that lyric pedagogy became a hegemonic, state-sponsored and putatively democratic form of instruction during a period of both imperial decline and the growth of the welfare state in the United Kingdom as a force of social reproduction. That is to say, a certain mode of reading, and one taught at the university level, was understood to be a political and social good for the cohesion of a national middle class imagined to be growing. That this understanding of British political economy was imaginary is almost immaterial: there has been a proven stability to lyric pedagogy both among those who argue for the exemplary uselessness of poetry or for its utility for the economy, nation, state and class struggle. This book considers the latetwentieth-century legacies of lyric pedagogy and asks what happens when writers engage with lyric pedagogy in the absence of, or at least in a relation of belatedness to, its putative function to reproduce national relations of production. Virginia Jackson argues persuasively in Dickinson’s Misery that the dominant understandings of Anglophone poetry post-1900 have been shaped by a regime of “lyric reading.” “Lyric reading” is Jackson’s name for a range of practices and perspectives in which poetry is conflated with a particular version of “lyric” that is, in fact, as much a protocol for reading as it is a description of any activity of literary production: From the mid-nineteenth through the beginning of the twenty-first century, to be lyric is to be read as lyric—and to be read as a lyric is to be printed and framed as a lyric . . . Think of the modern imaginary construction of the lyric as what allows the term to move from adjectival to nominal status and back again. Whereas other poetic genres (epic, poems on affairs of state, georgic, pastoral, verse epistle, epitaph, elegy, satire) may remain embedded in specific historical occasions of narratives, and thus depend upon some description of those occasions and narratives for their interpretation . . ., the poetry that comes



Introduction: Social Reproduction and Lyric Pedagogy

17

to be understood as lyric after the eighteenth century is thought to require as its context only the occasion of its reading. (6–7)

Among Jackson’s many salutary aims is to position Emily Dickinson’s writing historically in ways that belie “a lyric reading practice [that] supposes that poems are written in view of a future horizon of interpretation” (57). While my argument benefits from Jackson’s thinking of “lyric” as a mode of reading, I aim in this book to supplement this by situating normative forms of reading in terms of institutionalized pedagogical praxis. It is for this reason that I refer here to lyric pedagogy—that is, to practices and theories of literary instruction that ascribe social benefits to the proper reading of poetry. I speak here of theories to indicate that this is not an empirical study of literary education: important though such work is, what I track here are the afterlives of the theoretical and polemical justifications of literary study, since I believe that these can undergird a range of different practices and ultimately torque their pedagogical effects. That is to say, following Jackson but expanding her explanatory framework, that “lyric reading” is grounded in pedagogical praxis. Cambridge University was at the center of some of the literary activity that I  engage in this book, and “Cambridge” has become a synecdoche for a tradition of post-avant-garde British writing. Cambridge was, in fact, a relative latecomer to the formalized study of English literature in further and higher education—such programs had originated through colonial administrations in South Asia as well as in some of the Protestant London Universities (the presentday University College London and King’s College London).21 All the same, in the period just after the First World War, Cambridge came to be among the most influential institutions through which English study was instituted as an intellectually respectable—and apparently socially desirable—component of state curricula. The study of English poetry had been understood in this phase to be fundamental to the reproduction of social and political relations and, with these relations, to the accumulation of capital in the late days of British Empire. This hegemonic understanding of the centrality of English to British University study was framed in terms of national policy by the Newbolt Report of 1921, which specifically called for the growth of English literary study in schools and universities, and the Robbins Report of 1963, which foresaw English retaining a central role in its plans for significantly expanding the higher education sector on a national scale. However, by the 1980s, with the decimation of the UK labor movement’s legal defenses and the offshoring of much manufacturing work,

18

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

literary education was no longer taken for granted as a necessary component for the training of the British working and middle classes. The story of English’s rise and fall as a centerpiece of the imperial project was investigated at length during the period of its demise. Indeed, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a number of Marxist literary critics wrote historical materialist accounts of British literary criticism. These were in part spurred by the cultural materialist projects of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall alongside Perry Anderson’s forays into so-called structural Marxism, and they were most famously undertaken by Terry Eagleton, Chris Baldick and Francis Mulhern. These critics traced the continuities and mutations of literary criticism’s “social mission,” beginning with German philosophical aesthetics via British romanticism, passing through the work of Matthew Arnold to the early critical writings of T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis and his journal Scrutiny. Eagleton, Baldick and Mulhern sought to explain how the rise of English as a discipline, most notably at Cambridge with Richards and Leavis, was continuous with Matthew Arnold’s belief that poetry needed to replace religion as a reconciling and edifying social force. Each of these mid-to-late-twentieth-century Marxist critics works from the argument that literary studies, and primarily further and higher educational instruction in literature, were designed in part to function as an ideological diversion from class struggle. Chris Baldick, in The Social Mission of English Criticism, undertook, as he put it, to trace the contribution of Matthew Arnold to the literary-critical renaissance of the 1920s and early 1930s represented by the writings of T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, and F.R.  and Q.D. Leavis. The achievement of these critics will be examined as part of a common development of the ideal of ‘practical criticism’—to be understood here in a sense wider than that of the technical exercise to which the phrase usually refers, denoting rather a ‘practicality’ in which criticism seeks a real practical effect upon society, directly or indirectly. (Baldick 3–4)

In this way, Baldick and others explained the rise of English as a discipline central to UK higher education by revisiting the arguments that were made for the study and practice of literary criticism as an important social force. English, that is, came into being as a field of study through ideological and political struggle, and it was only in relation to this struggle that it adopted its self-representation as the disinterested critical appreciation of literature. This claim of “disinterestedness” masks the variable interests that English has been claimed to serve, and these factors need to be taken seriously to understand how English came to be such a central and apparently natural part of national culture.



Introduction: Social Reproduction and Lyric Pedagogy

19

Baldick’s project undertakes to explain how, and especially why, literary critics worked at times in concert with the state to move English to the front and center of public education curricula. Both Baldick and Eagleton find in Matthew Arnold, the poet, school inspector and critic, the most canonical formulation of the function that poetry and literary education was meant to have in late nineteenth-century society. Arnold’s work responded to the changing class structure of nineteenth-century Britain, specifically the overtaking by the bourgeoisie of the aristocracy as ruling class and the near-total dominance of the capital-wage labor relation (although he tended to see class more in terms of rank than as a social relation of production).22 Arnold feared that the bourgeoisie had failed to replace aristocratic forms of social control and ideology—specifically, religion—with other forms of hegemony, and he argued that literary education and “culture” (derived from the German aesthetic rhetoric of Bildung) was needed to replace it in order to avoid what he called “anarchy” among the increasingly large and powerful working class. Terry Eagleton argues in his 1976 Criticism and Ideology that for Arnold, the aristocracy is rapidly losing political hegemony, but its historical successor, the bourgeoisie, is disastrously unprepared to assume it. He insists, accordingly, on the need for the middle class to attain to more corporate, cultivated forms, and to do so by enshrining itself in a civilising state educational system . . . The bourgeoisie is bereft of that pervasive spiritual predominance which has ratified aristocratic rule; unless it can rapidly achieve such cultural supremacy, installing itself as a truly national class at the ‘intellectual centre’ of society, it will fail in its historical mission of politically incorporating the class it exploits. (104–5)

As Eagleton explains here, Arnold argued for state-run “cultural” education as an idealist solution to class antagonism and ultimately as a pseudo-spiritual vehicle for class collaboration (Eagleton is drawing here primarily from Arnold’s work in The Popular Education of France). In this regard, Arnold’s proposals seem to follow directly from Friedrich Schiller’s ideas about the “aesthetic state” as developed in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. For Schiller, our psyche in the aesthetic state [ästhetischen Zustande] does indeed act freely, is in the highest degree free from all compulsion, but is in no wise free from laws; . . . this aesthetic freedom is distinguishable from logical necessity in thinking, or moral necessity in willing, only by the fact that the laws according to which the psyche then behaves do not become apparent as such, and since they encounter no resistance, never appear as a constraint. (Schiller 143)

20

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

It is according to the aesthetic dimensions of the psyche that we “act freely” in accordance to laws that do not appear as constraints. It is no accident that this resembles later Marxist descriptions of “ideology” and “hegemony”:  Schiller’s aesthetic state is indeed reminiscent of the Althusserian understanding of ideology in terms of our “imaginary relations” to the real relations of production. Thinkers at least as early as Schiller responded to the threat of bourgeois revolution with the proposal of literary education as a disciplinary formation for providing citizens who docilely—as if without constraint—appear to themselves to consent to their governance by others, whether monarchs and lords or, increasingly, bourgeois forms of “representative democracy.” By the end of his Letters, Schiller’s “aesthetic state” has indeed transformed the language of “situation” or “state of affairs” [Zustande] into one of the political state [Staat], as the “aesthetic State” names a realm in which men [sic] encounter one other not as constraining limits to agency but as pure forms: In the aesthetic State [in dem ästhetischen Staat], none may appear to the other except as form, or confront him except as an object of free play. To bestow freedom by means of freedom is the fundamental law of this kingdom . . . the aesthetic State alone can make [society] real, because it consummates the will of the whole through the nature of the individual. (Schiller 215)

Arnold takes Schiller’s motif of the aesthetic state literally, arguing that the divisions wrought in man’s being require a centralized reconciling force of aesthetic play. The generation of “sweetness and light” in every soul needs, for Arnold, to be achieved noncoercively, through an inculcation of “Culture” managed by the increasingly bourgeois state: “culture indefatigably tries, not to make what each raw person may like the rule by which he fashions himself; but to draw ever nearer to a sense of what is indeed beautiful, graceful, and becoming, and to get the raw person to like that” (Culture and Anarchy 413). This “sense” certainly derives from the Kantian proposal of a sensus communus, formative of and formed by the experience of the beautiful, as it had been extended by Schiller into the ambiguous domain of the aesthetic state. As Eagleton explains, for Arnold, the corporate state, then, is the social locus of culture—of that symmetrical totality of impulses which is the organic form of a civilisation . . . ‘Poetry,’ that is to say, is the final resort of a society in dire ideological crisis, replacing criticism with consolation, the analytic with the affective, the subversive with the sustaining. As such, it comes to denote less a particular literary practice than the mode of operation of ideology in general. (Criticism and Ideology 107–8)



Introduction: Social Reproduction and Lyric Pedagogy

21

Baldick and Francis Mulhern explain how this model of English study as social force came to fruition at Cambridge. Humanist critics fought against the dominant role of English as the cultivator of refined taste or a branch of specialized knowledge that it had supposedly been in the belles-lettristic manner of Cambridge or the philological tradition more dominant at Oxford. This new humanistic, spiritualizing mission of literary study was first institutionalized, Terry Eagleton writes, “not in the Universities, but in the Mechanics” Institutes, working men’s colleges and extension lecturing circuits. English was literally the poor man’s Classics—a way of providing a cheapish ‘liberal’ education for those beyond the charmed circles of public school and Oxbridge” (“The Rise of English” 23). English had found a lasting place at Cambridge by the 1920s, albeit not without opposition and conflict, and the new English tripos was established there in 1926, not long after the Newbolt report argued that English should be central to the national curriculum as part of broader postwar efforts to solidify British national unity and strength through culture in the face of Britain’s decline as a world power.23 It was in this context that Practical Criticism, a particularly influential and paradigmatic version of lyric pedagogy, would take shape at Cambridge.24 The poets I  focus on are writing within and against this regime of lyric pedagogy; they understand lyric pedagogy to be both fallacious and worth extending into other realms of life. The shift away from a national program of social reproduction in which the cultivation of the individual is to be done through aesthetic-pedagogical methods does not mean that “lyric pedagogy” disappears as a practice or as a theoretical motif, even as its relevance and effectiveness are in no way evident. The work of Denise Riley forms an exemplary trajectory for the understanding of how some features of lyric reading might be distinguished from the moralistic foundations of lyric pedagogy. This is most evident in her theoretical writings on the category of “women” and on “naming” as a factor in political solidarity more generally (I discuss these at length in Chapter  4). In much of her prose work, Riley explicitly attends to the ways that language carries and reflects social formations that it does not directly speak about, and she considers how the affective dimensions of language can both hinder and enable collectivity. What is of concern for Riley in much of her work is the problem of how to articulate and share needs that are not reducible to those attributed to people on the basis of sociological categories. In this sense, Riley’s work ventures the premise that language might be a medium for discovering the shared needs of concrete social individuals. This is another way of saying that lyric reading proves to be a useful fiction for Riley, but only insofar as it can be separated

22

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

as far as possible from the moralisms of lyric pedagogy. All of the writers that I consider in this book are, in some way, writing under the heading of lyric even as they recognize the tangles of trying to understand lyric reading as a social and not merely intersubjective practice. In these writings, we can see a renewed engagement with the articulation of social needs. On the one hand, “lyric” and “poetry” as normative and cordonedoff categories of language use will inevitably fail to articulate social needs insofar as lyric pedagogy is premised on the idealist disconnecting of the subject from social need. On the other hand, poetry has lost this officially underwritten function of divorcing in the service of an ideal classless citizenship (aside from a handful of prize-winning and aggressively marketed items) and has been reframed as “creative writing”—individually and sociologically representative expression. What is lost between these moments is poetry as one among other practices for articulating socially forged capacities and needs.

Poetry, reproduction, need The literary-historical trajectory that this book establishes also rethinks social need in a way that proposes ways out—however tentative—of social reproduction’s double binds. The disinvestment in lyric pedagogy that the late twentieth century saw also opened poetry up to renewed, reflexive investigations of need, precisely because it was clear that poetry was no longer understood to be “needed” in the same ways. Bringing poetry and social reproduction together helps us to think about how “literature” has persisted as an ideological category. But it also allows us to address crucial questions that might sound like those of a philosophical anthropology. One of the underlying assumptions of social reproduction as a category of analysis is a submerged yet fundamental conception of something like social need: most discussions of social reproduction assume that needs are regularly met even if they are agnostic about what precisely such needs are. Still, any conception of social reproduction is premised on the idea that life and death are determined by the extent to which basic needs for human social life are met. Marxist-feminist thought about labor and about sexuality can, I would argue, be read as an engagement with the enumeration of needs as an aspect of working toward social transformation. The disinvestment in lyric pedagogy and in poetry as a nationalist and class-collaborationist ideological formation has, I argue, actually opened contemporary writing up to a fresh exploration of social need.



Introduction: Social Reproduction and Lyric Pedagogy

23

This exploration is not unique to “poetry”:  materialist feminist and queer Marxist writings have been doing this for some time. Rosemary Hennessy, in particular, expands on the idea of need in her historical materialist writings on sexuality, affect and labor organizing. Hennessy takes up Deborah Kelsh’s insights about capitalism’s necessary production of “outlawed need,” reflecting on the extent to which the outlawing of needs—rendering the failure to meet them a matter of course—can serve as an impetus for collective action through struggles that aim to redress the violence of shared unmet needs: Outlawed need is a very useful concept that Deborah Kelsh has proposed as a way of understanding an important consequence of the commodification of labor under capitalism. When the worker meets the capitalist in the marketplace and exchanges his labor power for a wage many of his human potentials and needs are excluded as the unnamed price of the exchange . . . Another area of outlawed need is embedded in the production of labor power outside the workplace. Because the need to reproduce labor power is not part of the calculus of socially necessary labor covered by wages, the domestic labor of feeding and clothing and caring constitutes an outlawed set of needs. (Profit and Pleasure 216)

The version of social reproduction implied here assumes a social and biological genesis of need without elaborating its precise sources. This makes sense insofar as, for Hennessy, it is through the collective delineation and naming of unmet needs that social needs are realized. Hennessy has further elaborated this line of argument in her work on affect and labor organizing on the US–Mexico border. In this work, she explicitly argues that the activities that comprise social reproduction are sites for the negotiation of collective and social need: Marxist feminism embraces the fundamental premise of historical materialism, which is that the meeting of needs constitutes the baseline of history . . . Feminist work in the Marxist tradition has rethought Marx, elaborating his claim that the materiality of social life resides in the labor of cooperation to meet needs and reproduce the means to do so, a process that is shaped by historical conditions and always in some relation to nature. The subjects involved in these relations are sensate beings, and the cooperative interactions that reproduce life function through the meaning-making practices and political processes they employ. (Fires on the Border 56–57)

These “cooperative interactions” involve the naming of needs, but these needs are often differentially attributed to different categories of people. This is where capital often swoops in, at the point at which distinct groupings of people are identified: they can be marketed to, and they can be differentially exploited on

24

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

the basis of feminization and racialization. The naming of unmet needs is often a necessary response to these processes of feminization and racialization. Writing under the sign of “poetry,” in the era in which most poetry has been subject to widespread disinvestment, can be a way to name unmet needs without moralizing or imposing simplistic rhetorical or categorical solutions. The most recent poems of radical transfeminist poet Nat Raha might amount to the most sophisticated exploration of the extent to which what she has called “queer social reproduction”25 involves collective projects of survival that involve the delineation and meeting of outlawed needs. In her 2016 poem series £/€xtinctions, Raha ventures a poetic project that would work at the enumeration of needs against the obscuring of racialized and feminized peoples’ needs:          decolonial poetics sent nature to shatter linkage & destinations of the national interest (n.p.)

In “decolonial poetics,” the “linkage” that “directs the promise of possibility” toward “good nationhood” would be shattered:  the movement of decolonial poetics is the unmaking of “the national interest” as a destination and as a driving force. This “linkage” has always been tenuous: the national interest may never have existed as a real thing, but assertions certainly have been made in its name, and these have covered over the relations of oppression and exploitation that constitute the nation. Decolonial poetics—whether read in the Greek sense as a general sort of making or as the more technical accounting for the effects of poetic writing—is the unmaking of a linkage between poetic activity and the national interest of the colonial power. This includes the enumeration of possibilities beyond the false promise of the national interest. Raha’s account is not only normative or provisional (i.e. “we shouldn’t be directed by the national interest”), and she is not only writing about what a decolonial poetics does or might do. This line also reflects the fact that, with few exceptions, poetry simply is no longer given pride of place for maintaining class peace: poetry is no longer understood as an especially effective way to address the “national interest” of the United Kingdom. Raha writes in the context of a general disinvestment in the earlier state-sponsored project to teach civilians— at “home” and in colonized territories—to read English poetry properly. Raha is equally attentive to the ways in which the process of enumerating unmet needs might be incorporated by the solicitous late capitalist state. Her poem-collages literalize the ways that trans women of color, in particular, face



Introduction: Social Reproduction and Lyric Pedagogy

25

an uncertain fate; the collective subject, ‘we’, brought into being by queer social reproduction, is cut into scripts that it also cuts back against, as in this extract from £/€xtinctions:

Here we see strategies for the incorporation of minority difference reflected through the process of cutting:  “we were negations,” but then we were later “deemed fertile . . . for/ recognition and cheques.”26 Raha here compresses the logic that Hennessy describes regarding capitalist uses of feminized “second skins,” embodied markers of femininity that are used as an “accumulation strategy” by capital. Even if capital is “indifferent to who in particular bears a feminized second skin . . . it is deeply interested in cultural differences as it pursues new markets and consumer subjects” (171). Capital, Hennessy insists, relies on the markers of bodily dispossession provided by racialized and feminized proletarians: “the capacities of [the bearer of a feminized second skin] are more fully loosed from her possession than is the case for a worker who is not feminized” (142). The “identity extended by you/ easy bourgeois speech” that Raha records is part of the process of exchanging second skins—something deemed essential is “striped out” and thereby made “fertile” for the extraction of profit. This then gets touted as “recognition.” This is a form of domination that works by creating and “recognizing” categories of person (an incorporating and dominating version of recognition), and Raha figures this domination in terms

26

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

of cutting, shearing and deletion, a framing that echoes her textual production process of cutting and collage. These “deletions” are not total erasures, however; they are what make “us deviant femme whores” become “shorn/condensed,” as the conditions of “recognition and cheques” serve to , delete our fabrics, geographies, multiple shades of flesh,       deletions of life amid the hatred      of us deviant femme  whores :: the gay age of legal, betterment, (n.p.)

This imposition of a sort of identikit queerness and transfemininity for the purposes of capture—through wages, NHS waiting lists and/or incarceration— is also something actively undertaken by whitewashed LGBT+ media and advocacy groups that focus on liberal reforms and victories (hence “the gay age of legal, betterment”) that can flatten out and obscure the social reproduction of, for example, queer and trans people of color, and especially of trans women. At the same time, Raha’s poems inscribe the tenuous struggles for collective survival of those who bear feminized second skins prior to and in spite of such deletions. This involves being “open toward / for / healing” through collectivized practices of social reproduction and the collective enactment and delineation of unmet social needs. This kind of practice is invoked in Raha’s writings by way of a first-person plural feeling of “brokenness” that opens toward healing:         our / intensive support  * to be open towards / for healing, tinged negative          cacophony salutations rub / skid / through breaking, that we could be this warmed our own valuations & graze / manifest, slips out of narrations & herstory, tense rips the nuance from our throats close to cognitives // converse song of possible shifting of possible arms &



Introduction: Social Reproduction and Lyric Pedagogy

27

  syntax, arms of miraculous refusal         bare corporeal how we feel through the particularities of our brokenness / its worth possibily together (n.p.)

Raha points here toward a sort of queer use value that is “tinged negative // cacophony,” a miraculous and erased “herstory” of feeling together through a refusal to be reduced. For Raha, there is no naming of what “we” are and certainly no counting of how many would be enough arms of miraculous refusal. This activity of queer social reproduction is not, however, a simple source of comfort or relief:  it is easily rerouted, “here in the diaspora” into “their investments/ in our arms & genders.” This is a situation in which racialized and feminized minority subjects are “direct(ed)” into the “poetics of violent / & good nationhood.” After this warning about misdirection, Raha seems to delete nouns and connectors, eliding a recipe for the social reproduction of subjects whose needs go unmet and erased: frustrations & sourced / we       overwhelmed w/ healing      & waged  work plotted a sequence of perverse beauties, our commoning:       a conception of need they could not      grasp.      of our bruises      & collective selves;; fabrications      of / consciousness      the care that  grows          us together, yet  the       glamour and fracture of such love      scarce / down  the

There could not be a more evident writing of queer social reproduction and of social need than “we . . . plotted a sequence of perverse beauties, our commoning: / a conception of need they could not / grasp.” The assertion that our “collective selves” are ungraspable and inappropriable is powerful, even as it is hedged by the “fabrications / of / consciousness” that attend it. The closing of this sequence with “yet the/ glamour & fracture of such love / scarce / down the” reiterates

28

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

the tenuousness of those whose needs might be otherwise erased by naming a collective identity in “queerness.” A  poetics of good (queer) nationhood is undesirable—and is, anyway, impossible for the collective subject who might be called “trans women of color,” although such a naming is withheld by the poem. The withholding of the sociological category is both a reflection of its erasure by the language of “our” community and, more significantly, by the extraction of profit from and/or erasure of queer social reproduction as soon as capital picks it up on its scanners, pushing need back out of the picture. Raha’s work puts pressure on the concept of “social reproduction” insofar as it has been most famously, albeit not exclusively, developed by white, cisgender and straight-identified feminists. At the same time, the framework of social reproduction is helpful for the exploratory work already done by marginalized collectives to identify and meet needs that are not met by capital and the state’s own calculations of minimum social need. Raha’s work insists that the poetics of naming and meeting needs happens precisely in the feminized and racialized wake of the capitalist state’s disinvestment in social reproduction. The remainder of this book provides one crucial literary historical context for the poetics of queer social reproduction that Raha presents in her poetry: this is the story of the state’s investment and subsequent disinvestment in lyric pedagogy as an ameliorative form of capitalist social reproduction. It is my task to explain how writers engaged the contradictory legacy of lyric pedagogy in relation to their own Marxist and feminist frameworks and to outline the formal effects of such contradictions on their poetic output. I also consider how the contradictions of socialist-feminist organizing were directly related to the work of writers like Wendy Mulford and Denise Riley: such social practices are not merely a “content” that fills autonomous literary forms; they are part of the formal fabric of the work and of its circulation. But the poetry itself is often recalcitrant in the face of my theoretical framework, and the resistances posed by textual form are also sometimes lessons in the contradictions of social reproduction. In the first chapter of this book, I  elaborate this story about (1)  the consolidation of English poetry as a subject worthy of formalized study for means of making and sustaining class peace and (2) the effects that the incipient reshuffling of relations of reproduction in British higher education had on the ideological commitment to national poetry. This chapter, “Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge,” explores the twentieth-century history of poetry at Cambridge, reading the work of William Empson, J. H. Prynne and Veronica Forrest-Thomson in terms of “lyric pedagogy.” I narrate the origins and influence of the “Practical Criticism” developed at Cambridge and explain how



Introduction: Social Reproduction and Lyric Pedagogy

29

studying and writing poetry were seen as moral preparation for the creation or restoration of a better society. Practical Criticism, I argue, understands the social dimensions of poetry through the intersubjective model of the teacher/student dyad. The work of Forrest-Thomson and Prynne illustrates what happens when writers attempt to derail the moralism of lyric pedagogy while deploying the very pedagogical tools that they are opposing. In this sense, I explain the pervasive and lingering power of lyric pedagogy within literary studies even among poets and critics who might wish to escape its grasp. In Chapters 2 and 3, I argue that the early writings of Denise Riley and Wendy Mulford provide an alternative set of challenges to lyric pedagogy, this time grounded in a Marxist-feminist understanding of social reproduction. Both writers were students at Cambridge and both also actively engaged in Marxistfeminist theory and practice. I  track the continuities and differences between the Cambridge-based, pedagogical-moral understanding of lyric’s social worth and socialist and feminist political ambitions for poetry. Chapter  2, “Denise Riley’s Socialized Biology,” argues that Riley understands need through what she calls a “socialized biology,” a denaturalized and politicized form of biological existence that her first collection of poetry, Marxism for Infants, inhabits and propagates. Riley began to publish and read her poetry as a young single parent in the 1970s poetic coteries of Cambridge. If her early work inherits the literary historical lineage and political focus of Cambridge poetics, its social and political ambitions come less from the literary classroom (she was not a student of English) than from navigating childrearing and feminist struggles for housing and reproductive justice. I read Riley’s poetry alongside her contemporaneous theoretical, historical and political prose, much of which focused on a critique of the institution of motherhood and both left and liberal ideologies of the family and on a historical materialist reading of developmental psychology and state policies on childcare and women’s labor. Riley’s writing of “socialized biology” provides a feminist and materialist riposte to lyric pedagogy’s reliance on a moralizing account of intersubjectivity. Chapter 3, “Forms of Reproduction in the Early Work of Wendy Mulford,” asks how the poems and criticism of Wendy Mulford respond to her membership in the Communist Party, feminist organizations and poetic communities. Mulford and Riley collaborated on a chapbook, No Fee, published through Mulford’s Street Editions Press; they initially released it in 1978 for an art opening attended by poets and then produced another edition one year later to coincide with “Women’s Week” at Cambridge. As this itinerary suggest, Mulford’s work circulated at the nexus of Marxist-feminist and “late-modernist” literary practices; she was

30

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

involved in the Communist Party, the Cambridge Women’s Liberation Group, the innovative poetry and small press circles of Cambridge and she worked for a time as a lecturer of English literature writing Marxist literary criticism. In a sense, then, this chapter provides a microhistory of twentieth-century British political poetry. But Mulford’s work tests these commitments against a writerly impulse that often outruns them. Mulford’s poems from this early period, I argue, expose the tensions between commitments to “poetry” and to political organizing and the ways that these tensions also reflect already existing contradictions within the sociopolitical field. That is, writerly interruptions of political commitment—the unwillingness and inability of Mulford’s lines to reproduce any single “line”—also bespeak the difficulties of reproducing feminism and anticapitalism at the level of political organizing. The end of the chapter traces the decline of a popular Marxist-feminist politics and Mulford’s transition into antinuclear and peace activism, and I consider the different understandings of social reproduction that each form of collective resistance carries. The fourth and final chapter, “Institutional Geologies and Lonely Sociality,” examines how lyric pedagogy returns in Denise Riley’s later work as a sort of antidote to the uneven institutionalization of forms of minority difference (feminist, queer, racial-ethnic) within political and cultural institutions. Within the context of these institutional forms of absorption, Riley provides an account of the sociality of loneliness and singlehood, providing a critical orientation toward atomized and privatized society. The interplay of poetry and prose in Riley’s work chimes with a larger situation in which state disinvestment in poetry may freshly enable writing to articulate—and scheme to meet—needs without relying on morally exemplary lyric readers. Radical UK poets, today, find themselves face to face with the contradictions that this book teases out. Poets such as Raha, Lisette and Amy De’ath, with whom the book will close, have been involved in anti-austerity and anti-fascist struggles to defend state-funded education and social services while simultaneously fighting against a rising tide of racist, misogynistic, antigay, transphobic, and xenophobic populism. This involves maintaining a commitment to the critique of nationalistic state-funded literary education while simultaneously defending it from government pushes for privatization, and, for some, such as myself, remaining tied to universities as our workplaces. The aim for this book is to help us—whatever our relationship to the university—to navigate our relationship to literary education as a form of social reproduction that has lost much of whatever claim to centrality it may have had. There is no going back, and there’s no time, and no need, for moral preparation.

1

Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

Sarah Brouillette’s Literature and the Creative Economy takes millennial New Labour discourse about the “creative economy” as a starting point for understanding the contemporary political economy of UK literature. Specifically, New Labour arguments about the creative economy paradoxically inflated the value of “creative” workers (and of their products) on the basis of their resistance to value. Brouillette shows how the image of the creative worker, modeled after the “artist” whose labor cannot be easily quantified in terms of “hours” and who might engage in apparently useless activities, has become dominant in narratives about the valorization of capital in the deindustrialized United Kingdom more broadly: Faith in a cultural realm liberated from the constraints of the capitalist market has gelled with the new vocabulary of creativity and its political and economic uses. Artists’ vaunted ability to contest bureaucratic management and other forms of regimentation is no longer at all unique. (Brouillette 206–7)

Brouillette effectively demonstrates how this inflated faith in “creative work” was cribbed from management theories that, for their part, drew on psychological models of the creative individual. This nexus of management studies, psychology and government policy is based, Brouillette explains, on an erroneous but nonetheless influential understanding of the artist, and particularly of the writer, as a personality type. Such an understanding of the writer has, I show in this chapter, an equally significant source in lyric pedagogy—that is, in the praxis of creating proper readers of poems. For example, Brouillette points to a telling detail in her analysis of the “Symbolic Equivalence Test” developed by American psychologist Frank Barron in order to test the “creativity” of different people; she usefully explains that this test “was itself inspired by a writer. Barron had seen Cecil Day-Lewis give the Clark Lectures on ‘The Poetic Image’ at Cambridge

32

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

in 1946” (61). Brouillette shows how Barron seized on Day-Lewis’s description of how poets use metaphor to “transmute” images: for Barron, this provided a model for determining how to judge an individual’s “independence of judgment.” I would add to Brouillette’s persuasive framing of this account the fact that DayLewis was functioning as a critic (or poet-critic) and pedagogue as much as a writer when he gave the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge. Critics and poet-critics such as F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot had previously delivered the Clark Lectures, and Day-Lewis’s Lectures (later published in book form) were produced in an emphatically pedagogical context. The model of the writer as creator that he espouses is one that circulated in the pedagogical context of Cambridge English, which is the focus of this chapter. In Brouillette’s words, Barron argued that an appreciation for complexity is what allows the healthy individual to experience seemingly contradictory states of being with no real difficulty: she is healthier than others because she has experienced and worked through psychological problems . . . It is writers who best model the Complex Person for Barron . . . They are . . . more comfortable with ambiguity, balancing dualisms within themselves; they are, for instance, at once sicker and healthier than average. (62)

There are notable differences between the work of Day-Lewis and that of the critic-pedagogues that this chapter focuses on, I.  A. Richards, F.  R. Leavis, William Empson, J. H. Prynne and Veronica Forrest-Thomson.1 All the same, the resonances with the work of Richards and Empson at least will become evident. The published version of Day-Lewis’s The Poetic Image cites Richards approvingly on more than one occasion, including the following: Mr. I.A. Richards has most usefully reminded us that ‘that amazing capacity of his [the poet] for ordering speech is only a part of a more amazing capacity for ordering his experience.’ Consistency of impression in a poem is the result of a successful ordering of the experience from which the poem is derived. (Day-Lewis 74)

For Richards, teaching literature was precisely about the ordering of experiences, including vicarious experiences gleaned through the reading of poems. The models of creativity that management theorists developed on the basis of psychological theories are, in fact, based on an understanding of literary experience that was developed in early twentieth-century British higher education. This understanding was promoted alongside the propagation of English as a discipline with its own methodological prerogatives: reading poetry



Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

33

properly required an expansion of human capacities, including the capacities for passivity and social deracination. Of course, this shared rhetoric regarding the creative personality does not necessarily operate as social reproduction in the same ways in each of these contexts; the mid-century Cambridge lecture hall, the psychological theory inspired by it, the management theories that followed on this and the cruel optimism of the salvagers of capitalism (this time it’s creative!) are hardly equivalent rhetorical contexts. Still, the durability of this rhetoric— of the properly literate person who is taught how to survive contradiction— requires inspection. I begin this chapter with a sketch of lyric pedagogy at Cambridge in the twentieth century, focusing on the work of I.  A. Richards (1893–1979), F.  R. Leavis (1895–1978) and especially William Empson (1906–1984). My aim in doing so is to illuminate how the discourses surrounding so-called Cambridge School poetry have been and remain indebted to Practical Criticism. To this end, I consider how selected writings by J. H. Prynne and Veronica Forrest-Thomson respond implicitly to the demands made for “valuable” poetry by Richards and Leavis and presuppose the kind of lyric reading that Practical Criticism teaches— namely, a close encounter with the text in clinical isolation that tests and bolsters the moral fortitude of the reader. In their poetry and prose, both Prynne and Forrest-Thomson, that is, are caught in a loop of ambivalent complicity with Cambridge’s pedagogical project of Practical Criticism, and this thwarts some of the anti-moralizing, political aspirations of their work. Practical Criticism as a form of pedagogy is generally inhospitable to any attempts to understand the institutions of poetry in relation to social reproduction. My aim in describing “Practical Criticism” is to trace the refinement of lyric pedagogy, the ideological formation in which close attention to poetic texts putatively functions as moral preparation for social and political life. I. A. Richards delineated his experimental project in his 1929 book Practical Criticism; he provided his students at Cambridge with poems, divorced of any contextual information (he withheld authors’ names and dates of publication), asked students to analyze and evaluate them and printed their responses, interspersed with his own judgments of their aptitudes. This kind of examination soon became formalized at Cambridge; to this day, students in the English faculty there (not to mention elsewhere in the United Kingdom and in some former British colonies) are required to take an exam in Practical Criticism that follows similar protocols. Considering the valences of this pedagogical practice throughout, I  outline the ideological currents running through the polemics of Richards, Leavis and Empson, and consider their actual manifestations in pedagogical

34

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

and critical practice. My reading of this work is influenced by the historical materialist accounts of Terry Eagleton, Chris Baldick, Francis Mulhern and Ian Hunter from the 1970s and 1980s that sought to explain the rise of English as a discipline. These critics traced the ways in which literary study, and particularly the reading of English lyric poetry, was purported to reconcile the divisions in man’s (sic) being supposedly wrought by industrial capitalism. I then consider some of the poetic, pedagogical and critical texts of the “Cambridge School” poets, focusing on brief examples from the work of J. H. Prynne and Veronica Forrest-Thomson. These poets in particular, but also their peers Peter Riley, Andrew Crozier, Wendy Mulford and others, were trained under the English tripos at Cambridge, a course in English literature brought into being through the efforts of Richards and others that to this day maintains designated training and examination in Practical Criticism.2 That is to say, the work of poet-critics like Empson, Prynne and Forrest-Thomson responded to Practical Criticism and to related manifestations of lyric pedagogy, and in this chapter I  illustrate the strengths and limitations of the social thinking of poetry and criticism formed at this conjuncture. My goal is to understand the constellation of forces that overdetermine the social and political mission of poetry at Cambridge and to illustrate how certain aspects of lyric pedagogy persist beyond their instrumental usefulness. This chapter, overall, demonstrates why Cambridge-based debates about literary pedagogy from the twentieth century continue to persist and why social reproduction is the best framework for addressing such debates today. Here I  encounter some methodological difficulties. My outline of the Cambridge ideology of lyric can hardly begin to exhaust the full range of poetic production and literary criticism at Cambridge University, much less the city of Cambridge, and even less the shorthand of “Cambridge Poetry” that has encompassed writers based in London, Sussex, Essex, East Anglia and Yorkshire. Moreover, I run the risk of implying that a few texts on literary criticism and pedagogy, primarily produced in the 1920s and 1930s, somehow directly and monolithically determine the poetics of Prynne, Forrest-Thomson and some “Cambridge School” writ large from roughly 1967 through the present. In fact, such a claim would require a great deal of empirical work that is not the task of these chapters. This would also demand thorough documentation of Prynne’s teaching (formal and informal) practices at Cambridge, a biographical project quite distinct from what I am undertaking.3 In spite of these omissions and qualifications, Practical Criticism remains important for understanding much twentieth-century poetic production in the



Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

35

United Kingdom and particularly those works that emerged in relation to the Cambridge University English faculty. Moreover, the continued justifications for doing Practical Criticism at Cambridge and beyond, as well as instructions about how to do it, provide perhaps the most influential extant manifestation of lyric pedagogy and of its relationship to social reproduction in postwar Britain. Pedagogical-ideological formations are always enmeshed with processes of social reproduction, but these enmeshings are not fixed: they are accessible to shifts in broader modes of accumulation and production. This chapter explores the durability of Practical Criticism and its particular version of lyric pedagogy; the following chapters will consider how explicitly Marxist-feminism approaches to the politics of poetry have provided disruptive alternatives.

Practical Criticism and society It was at Cambridge that Practical Criticism inherited, in its purest form, the nineteenth-century tradition of situating literary criticism within a distinct and ameliorative sociopolitical itinerary. Practical Criticism transformed this tradition into a more specifically lyric pedagogy. I. A. Richards, William Empson and F. R. Leavis, unlike Matthew Arnold, were not state functionaries; they were students and teachers with a deep interest in the possibility of producing knowledge about literature as it related to life. Richards made his name as a critic in volumes such as Principles of Literary Criticism, Science and Poetry and Practical Criticism that wear their Arnoldian provenance on their sleeve. While Richards expressly rejects the idea of an “aesthetic” faculty or organization of faculties, he maintains that poetry has and ought to have a special place in society.4 In particular, the reading of poetry has a distinctly moral dimension for Richards insofar as it provokes the reader to take up a stance in relation to the world through textual interpretation and evaluation. Passages such as the following provide the purest and most exacting expressions of lyric pedagogy: The fine conduct of life springs only from fine ordering of responses far too subtle to be touched by any general ethical maxims . . . The basis of morality, as Shelley insisted, is laid not by preachers but by poets. Bad taste and crude responses are not mere flaws in an otherwise admirable person. They are actually a root evil from which other defects follow. No life can be excellent in which the elementary responses are disorganised and confused. (Principles of Literary Criticism 62)

36

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

The “morality” that Richards finds lacking in contemporary life is “a morality which will change its values as circumstances alter, a morality free from occultism, absolutes and arbitrariness,” one that allows individuals to have as many “valuable experiences” as possible (58–59). This explosion of valuable experiences is, for Richards, a necessary precondition for a “good life,” in terms of both individual satisfaction and social efficacy. That is, poetry trains readers to have sensitive and appropriate responses to situations that incorporate the whole personality in an equilibrium or poise in the face of apparently incommensurate, divergent or opposed experiences and attitudes. As Seamus Perry writes, The good life, says Richards in Science and Poetry (1926), is when your interests ‘come into play and remain in play with as little conflict among themselves as possible’, a condition of being which is to be found in ‘the experience of poetry’:  poetry effects ‘the swinging back into equilibrium of these disturbed interests’. (Perry 117; citations from Poetries and Sciences 38, 39 and 28)

Richards’s “equilibrium” functions like the perfect “sweetness and light” that Arnold sought from culture. It is the ability to organize all possible responses through poise, balance and an ironic stance that can reconcile various impulses to allow for morally appropriate action, hypothetical or actual. Richards, however, unlike Arnold and his predecessors, seeks to ground his literary criticism in “scientific” praxis by rooting both interpretation and evaluation in cognitive and psycholinguistic theories of communication and evaluation. For Richards, it is only through such a scientific understanding, that is, one stripped free of subjective mistakes (such as sentimentality, stock responses, irrelevant associations, etc.), that poetry can properly “lay the basis” for the humanistic morality that he, like Arnold, hopes will “save us.” Literary education and particularly exercises in Practical Criticism, which I am provisionally defining here as the close encounter with poems in clinical isolation for the purposes of testing the ethical integrity of the student-reader, are the best way to spread this morality around, by extracting literary works and studies from any heteronomous “aims.” The “aim of the poem comes first,” and, he insists in a footnote, “I hope to be understood to mean by this the whole state of mind, the mental condition, which in another sense is the poem . . . I do not mean by its ‘aim’ any sociological, aesthetic, commercial or propagandist intentions or hopes of the poet” (Practical Criticism 195n6). Thus, the poem is to provide an experience of otherness removed from the worldly ambitions of the poet, whether altruistic or careerist. But equally important to Richards is the demand that literary criticism recreate this “mental condition” without



Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

37

reference to the preconceptions, desires or beliefs of the reader. As Richards says of narcissistic responses to literature (which signal for him immorality in life more generally), The only corrective in all cases must be a closer contact with reality, either directly, through experience of actual things, or mediately through other minds which are in closer contact. If good poetry owes its value in a large measure to the closeness of its contact with reality, it may thereby become a powerful weapon for breaking up unreal ideas and responses. (Practical Criticism 238)

That is, the proper, scientific reading of poetry involves a recreation of experiences of “reality,” and this reconstruction of experience via the example provided by poetry serves to hone the general evaluative skills of individuals. The mutation that takes place in critical discourse with Richards’s Practical Criticism is the move toward a scientistic discourse of literary criticism, albeit one that retains Schiller and Arnold’s humanistic belief in the civilizing value of literary study.5 Indeed, Richards insists that the value of poetry lies not in its effective exposition of doctrine, true or false, but rather as the representation of experience, and particularly of feeling. He accordingly works to develop a scientific means for understanding how language communicates affective experience. Richards argues that any good reading of poetry involves the full personality, and that such a wholeness is needed for the reader to develop an ironic stance in relation to the world, replacing impulsive behaviors with “imaginal action”: “the difference between the intelligent or refined, and the stupid or crass person is a difference in the extent to which overt action can be replaced by incipient and imaginal action” (Principles of Literary Criticism 85).6 For the early Richards, in the modern world science might have replaced the pseudo-knowledge of religion, but poetry was still needed to replace religion’s affective intensity in order to train the attitude for ironic judgment as preparation—or substitute— for action.7 If poetry is still granted the power to save in Richards’s early writings, this is to be achieved through a pedagogical apparatus of supervision in rigorous literary criticism and especially through the teachings of Practical Criticism in secondary and tertiary education. F. R.  Leavis amplified Richards’s call to jettison aristocratic declarations of taste and replace them with a discerning moral literary criticism. In his 1932 New Bearings in English Poetry, Leavis wrote that “adult minds could hardly take seriously” the “romanticist Victorian answer” to “modern conditions [of] disillusion and waste . . . An adult can hardly, even in his poetry, always turn

38

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

his back so directly and simply upon the world” (New Bearings 46–48). In an early pamphlet on Mass Civilization and Minority Culture, Leavis had asserted that “the critically adult public . . . is very small indeed. They are a very small minority” (20). What matters here is less the specific context of these judgments than Leavis’s consistent recourse to the moralizing, developmental language of “adulthood” to gauge varying aptitudes for literary study. Moreover, this rhetoric is extended to explain social stratifications (“the critically adult public”); Leavis argues that literary intellectuals should play the part of the spiritual and moral vanguard in British society, and he does so at a time when literary education— and higher education as a whole—was growing on a national scale. It is not enough simply to expand this circle of critical “adults”; he wants the cultured “minority” to have a qualitatively different role in English society. As Francis Mulhern argues in The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’, “The ‘revolution’ in the discipline” that Richards called for and for which Leavis saw his circle as vanguard “was also a revolution of literary criticism against the palsied cultural regime of post-war England” (28). Alan Sinfield explains that the need for such a revolution was felt to be especially acute as university education went from a primarily aristocratic to a more broadly middle-class pursuit (especially after the passage of the 1944 Butler Education Act that expanded secondary education provision at a national level). That is, Leavis pushed for a reshuffling of social stratification by way of shifting the ownership of literary culture onto a small, vanguard grouping of middle-class moral exemplars: “By insisting that literary appreciation was not a class accomplishment but an individual attainment, Leavis rendered it suitable for teaching and examining” (Sinfield 62). The premise of Leavis’s moral criticism is that human spiritual and moral development is a necessary precondition for the preservation of what Leavis called “continuity,” namely, the tradition or memory of a homogenous community that preceded the industrial rise of mass civilization and its concomitant destruction of a culture held in common.8 The anti-Marxism of Leavis and his coterie was largely maintained through this insistence on the spiritual and moral dimensions of “fine living” that had been destroyed along with the preindustrial rural “organic community” through the enclosure of the Commons. Economic and political transformations alone could not possibly ensure the return of a morally and spiritually advanced common culture.9 Leavis links morality to a mandate for “adult” development that consists of the acquisition and maintenance of a discerning moral stance, which, under the conditions of industrial capitalism, can only be acquired through literary instruction. Literature is, for F. R. Leavis and his peers, the primary remaining



Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

39

stronghold for the maintenance of this spiritual and communal tradition. It is the job of the literary critic and English tutor to combat civilization’s downfall by inculcating the moral consciousness that only literary discernment can still provide. Chief among the many obstacles to this thoroughly moralizing literary education is the perceived childishness and narcissism of the “masses.” Leavis, like Richards, conceives of the “masses,” in their “stock responses” to mass media and advertising, as narcissistic and childish, unable to see anything but the massproduced images that are given to them as their own reflection but that they play no active part in forming. Both Leavis and the early Richards, then, find in the study of literature a site for the inculcation of moral value and in morality a precondition for any form of political commitment or engagement that might eventually emerge. Such a literary morality (or lyric pedagogy) requires that one maintain a stance against the narcissistic masses that oil the machinery of industrial civilization. In this Leavisian paradigm, criticism is the means for the passage from literature to morality by way of an ethics of intersubjectivity—being good to another human being. Leavis’s criticism, however, does not utilize much of the critical rigor developed by Richards; rather, his is an amalgam of judgments of individual poets’ characters—poet and poetry are thoroughly mixed up, that is, in Leavis’s accounts. In this way, it has been customary to denounce or brush aside Leavis without recognizing the extent to which some of the more unsavory elements of his doctrine are there in germ in the work of Richards, as Baldick and others demonstrate. The continuity between Richards’s early claims and their extension in Leavis’s polemics seems to be overlooked in some contemporary teachings of Practical Criticism at Cambridge in particular. The Cambridge Faculty of English website’s “Introduction to Practical Criticism” indicates as much: “In the work of F.R. Leavis the close analysis of texts became a moral activity, in which a critic would bring the whole of his sensibility to bear on a literary text and test its sincerity and moral seriousness” (n.p.; emphasis added). What is not emphasized in the accounts of Baldick, Eagleton and Mulhern, despite their painstaking reconstructions of the ideological foundations of English literary criticism, is the extent to which the form of Practical Criticism as lyric pedagogy has social and political implications far beyond their literarycritical or philosophical “content.” As a material practice, that is, Practical Criticism—as it is taught and reproduced by its students—imposes a structured relationship between student and teacher and between reader and text. As the Cambridge “Introduction to Practical Criticism” asserts, this formal practice of Practical Criticism should remain intact:

40

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism Practical criticism in this form has no necessary connection with any particular theoretical approach, and has shed the psychological theories which originally underpinned it. The discipline does, however, have some ground rules which affect how people who are trained in it will respond to literature. It might be seen as encouraging readings which concentrate on the form and meaning of particular works, rather than on larger theoretical questions. The process of reading a poem in clinical isolation from historical processes also can mean that literature is treated as a sphere of activity which is separate from economic or social conditions, or from the life of its author. (n.p.)

The practice in question consists of reading texts “in clinical isolation,” and its practitioners will be genially encouraged to treat literature “as a sphere of activity which is separate from economic or social conditions.” But beyond this particular practice, these ground rules for Practical Criticism will “affect how people who are trained in it will respond to literature.” By this logic, such a pedagogical practice ought to and will have subjective effects upon the responsiveness of readers to literature more broadly, even when they are not provided texts “in clinical isolation.” Of course, this is all consistent with Richards’s famed experiments in literary pedagogy. This description of a course in Practical Criticism demonstrates the extent to which the latter has outlived its original justifications; fewer pedagogues today would in good conscience assert the messianic moral powers of reading poems without context. Yet the particular pedagogical practices of evaluation and supervision, the exemplarity of the good practical critic (manifest in Richards’s reprimands to his students’ poor judgment and management of experience throughout Practical Criticism) survives almost completely intact. This is the main thrust of Ian Hunter’s argument in his 1988 Culture and Government, a Foucauldian account of British literary education that takes issue with the central assumptions of works by Marxist critics such as Baldick, Eagleton and Mulhern. Hunter objects wholesale to the assumptions of post-Arnoldian criticism that literary study is a redemptive force, but he likewise rejects what he takes to be Mulhern’s implication: that, had Leavis et al. not rejected Marxism, their literary critical practices might have had revolutionary effects. According to Hunter’s patently Foucauldian framework, this argument fails to look at the actual historical development of English literary education, which, he argues, shows a piecemeal process contingently aligning governmental regimes with “ethical practices” rather than any unilateral “function” of criticism for any unified “state” or “ruling class.”



Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

41

Hunter argues that literary romanticism, the content of which infuses postArnoldian criticism, began as a refined, caste-specific “ethical practice” and only later came to be seen as the special property of aesthetic education or literary critical “knowledge” (286). For Hunter, Marxist arguments about the ideology of culture are beside the point, since cultural education never did have the functionalist power that writers such as Schiller and Arnold ascribed to it. Yet, all the same, he explains, this erroneous attribution of a function to culture is precisely what has allowed for English to be such a prominent part of state curricula, and it remains the dominant justification for humanities education.10 The “Rise of English” was not, according to Hunter, related to any political or social function immanent to literary criticism but was rather a gradual and contingent process dependent almost entirely on the rise of “governmentality,” a concept that he borrows from the late writings of Michel Foucault. Hunter’s book, like much of Foucault’s writing, is avowedly “descriptive,” and Hunter is suspicious of self-declared “materialists” who believe that by uncovering or producing more knowledge they can undo or overcome ideological hindrances. “Aesthetico-ethical power” does not repressively block access to the truth of our domination; it is, rather, productive of practices of the self and of knowledge: In short, knowledge in modern criticism is inseparable from the instituted relations and activities through which a special form of aesthetico-ethical power is generated and exercised. We have already seen that this form of power does not operate on individuals indirectly, through their unconscious, by blocking knowledge. Instead, it takes hold of individuals directly (by requiring the exercise of certain skills and techniques; by instituting certain relations of emulation and correction between them) where it in fact produces knowledge (of the state of the sensibility; of the level of theoretical awareness). (281)

This “direct” production of knowledge is indeed one of the aims and effects of Practical Criticism. The social aims of literary education, and specifically of what I am calling lyric pedagogy, are precisely to provide training in “states of sensibility” that allow the student-reader-citizen to maintain a stance of equilibrium while fully undergoing a range of affective experiences. As Hunter argues, “The formulation we need is not:  Poetry cannot be paraphrased (and hence constitutes its own metalinguistic description), but:  Under these circumstances (that is, in obedience to this regimen, using these techniques etc.) we do not paraphrase poetry” (189). While Hunter deftly describes the form of English pedagogical practice, his insistence on the absolute contingency of literary education’s development,

42

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

like his claim that so-called “ethical practices” are not amenable to historical materialist analysis, falls flat as an explanatory framework. David Lloyd and Paul Thomas contest Hunter’s account in their own Culture and the State, a work that seeks to explain how these forms of literary pedagogy have in fact been part of a broader project to “represent representation” for the working classes alongside the rise of representative democracy. Through the teacher–student relationship, both domestic working classes and colonized subjects learn to be represented as abstract individuals by the bourgeois state and to subsume their own particularities for the benefit of the supposedly disinterested “universal” representation provided by the state. Lloyd and Thomas illustrate how workingclass cultural politics rejected this developmental, edifying notion of “culture” and cultural education as preparatory for social life, insofar as working-class radicals rejected precisely the divisions between aesthetic, political, educational and economic life that this model presupposes. Lloyd and Thomas reject Hunter’s premise that cultural education is necessarily a part of an agentless process of governmentality. Rather, they insist that class interests and other facets of social struggle need to be considered seriously in order to describe and evaluate the political aims of educational practices (aims that can best be explained, I believe, through the framework of social reproduction). Given this perspective, Lloyd and Thomas find Hunter’s assertions of the “contingent” development of literary education to be suspect (17–18). Moreover, Lloyd and Thomas insist on the specific class dynamics of state and local pedagogical initiatives: “why is the object of middle-class education reforms consistently and specifically the working classes rather than what he loosely terms ‘the population’”? (18) I agree that Hunter too hastily rejects the various normative theoretical tasks assigned to literary pedagogy (i.e. the “idea” of the state or “representing representation,” as Lloyd and Thomas would have it). Despite these misgivings, I would like to retain from Hunter his insistence on the specific forms of literary pedagogy rather than merely on their varied (i.e. “progressive” or “reactionary”) contents. Lloyd and Thomas argue the same when they insist that the “very formality of what is held forth in the classroom—the exemplary abstract subject that the teacher represents to and for the students—is permitted by the materiality of that pedagogical space” (19–20). It is this terrain of pedagogical relationships that I take up in this book, albeit through readings of poetry and criticism, in order to discuss how poets, teachers and critics consciously consider the mechanics of their literary praxis and in doing so cannot help but express assumptions about the value and intended functions of their work as part of broader processes of social reproduction.



Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

43

This is not to say that each writer accurately or rigorously defines his or her pedagogical objectives, but that the work consistently approximates normative ideas not entirely of the writers’ making. Following from the sketch of Cambridge discourses of poetic production and literary pedagogy that I have provided so far, the remainder of this chapter will consider the constraining legacy of the Practical Criticism on the work of Cambridge-affiliated poet-critics. I begin, by way of transition, with a partial account of William Empson’s dalliances with the rhetoric of “tact.”

Empson’s tact, revisited While a number of historical materialist accounts of English studies and literary criticism were written in the last decades of the twentieth century, fewer have attempted to extend such politically grounded readings to the work of William Empson, whose work presents significant resistance to functionalist readings. Empson is a curious case when compared to Richards or Leavis, insofar as his writings extend Richards’s critical methods, stretching them to a point that calls their very foundational assumptions into question. Few have been willing or able to claim Empson, that famed thinker of “ambiguity,” for any broad political project or to recognize in him the same idealist assumptions that Baldick and Mulhern found so readily in Richards and Leavis, respectively. It is, all the same, worth considering the complicated political implications of his reception and legacy in contemporary critical practice. Through a reading of his use of the word “tact” in Seven Types of Ambiguity, I show that Empson’s work is forged in the crucible of lyric pedagogy and bears the same worries about social reproduction that so many have found more readily in Leavis. As has often been observed, Empson’s first book takes up Richards’s critical techniques and some of his theoretical underpinnings, but they take on a different feeling in Empson’s fast-moving hands. Empson’s temptation is to follow the track of signification in poetry beyond the reconcilable dichotomy implied by “ambiguity” and into a structure that can handle divergent meanings. As Seamus Perry explains, “Where Richards characteristically emphasizes balance and reconciliation, Empson tends to dwell on the oppositions and discords which are the imagination’s prerequisites: a poem is often a more wartorn phenomenon in Empson’s criticism than it is in Richards’s” (Perry 118). Indeed, Seven Types of Ambiguity builds up steam through tireless explorations of the different possible meanings of small bits of poetry. Although some of

44

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

the “types” tend toward the reconciliation of multiple meanings or attitudes in a composed stance (as Richards had it), at least the seventh, or final, type of ambiguity traces contradictions that cannot be reconciled by poetic consciousness. In an early essay, Paul de Man praises Empson for precisely this willingness to follow formalist methods infinitely without the pretenses of moral posturing; “chapter seven [of Seven Types] develops a thought Richards never wanted to consider: true poetic ambiguity proceeds from the deep division of Being itself, and poetry does no more than state and repeat this division” (Blindness and Insight 237). De Man locates in Empson the impasse or “dead end” into which formalist criticism drives itself when rigorously undertaken. In Empson’s hands, that is, Richards’s rigorously formalist methodology piles up a multiplicity of possible meanings that effectively undoes the certainty of a recognizable, single and unified mental state or experience, inevitably moving toward the revelation of an originary rift within being itself.11 For de Man, then, Empson’s later work on pastoral (itself ambiguously positioned in relation to Marxist criticism) has the virtue of ontologizing the gap between sensation and intellect. For de Man, it is in irony as “permanent parabasis” that literary criticism bravely risks encountering an infinite regress of meaning and, in so doing, becoming itself undone. In other words, it is the good critic’s drive to endless interpretation that constitutes an ethical and truthful relation to the text, and this is an experience that does not substitute for some other “valuable experience” but instead tears open the grounds of experience itself. In his praise for Empson’s first and seventh types of ambiguity, de Man dismisses the eighth and final chapter of Seven Types as “rather pedestrian” (238). However, Empson’s eighth chapter is not a perfunctory relapse into Richards’s territory but is, rather, coeval with the “reconciliatory” project set out first by Richards and under the aegis of which Empson wrote Seven Types. This is the project to sharpen critical sensibility through an engagement with textual ambiguity managed through an ironic stance—that is, lyric pedagogy. In Richards, this engagement would go up to the point where one has reproduced or represented a complex of experience, a total mental state that may consist in complexity and ambiguity but which is, all the same, unambiguously itself, whole and reproducible through exegesis. Empson’s seventh type of ambiguity breaks through the containment of such a stance and teeters on the edge of irreconcilability. The problem for Empson in his eighth chapter, however, is a pedagogical and social problem: how can he teach the kind of reading of which he is the



Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

45

exemplary practitioner without thereby producing massive confusion and aesthetico-ethical relativism? The readily available tactic, as suggested by Richards and later to a far greater extent by Leavis, was to promote an ironic stance in relation to such difficulties. This stance or attitude amounts, I would argue, to the fiction of maintaining a certain degree of subjective stability amidst an almost complete hermeneutic and affective shuffling of the text object. In the eighth chapter of Seven Types of Ambiguity, Empson vacillates between gleefully plunging his readers into the infinite abyss of ambiguity and worrying that this just may be too much for his less sophisticated readers, or, at least, too much too soon. A few critics have flagged up Empson’s use of the word “tact” and noted its ambivalence; usually, in his writings, tact is dismissed as a form of intellectual snobbery or laziness, but at times it is a valorized pedagogical strategy.12 The final chapter of Seven Types of Ambiguity is readable as an attempt to demarcate the demands upon the critic of different social and pedagogical situations (in which, by extension, tact might or might not be necessary or appropriate). Empson summarizes these different situations by heuristically describing a sort of split personality necessary to every good critic (I quote at length): On the face of it, there are two sorts of literary critic, the appreciative and the analytical; the difficulty is that they have all got to be both. An appreciator produces literary effects similar to the one he is appreciating, and sees to it, perhaps by using longer and plainer language, or by concentrating on one element of a combination, that his version is more intelligible than the original to the readers he has in mind. Having been shown what to look for, they are intended to go back to the original and find it there for themselves . . . The analyst is not a teacher in this way; he assumes that something has been conveyed to the reader by the work under consideration, and sets out to explain, in terms of the rest of the reader’s experience, why the work has had the effect on him that is assumed. As an analyst he is not repeating the effect; he may even be preventing it from happening again. Now, evidently the appreciator has got to be an analyst, because the only way to say a complicated thing more simply is to separate it into its parts and say each of them in turn. The analyst has also got to be an appreciator; because he must convince the reader that he knows what he is talking about (that he has had the experience which is in question); because he must be able to show the reader which of the separate parts of the experience he is talking about, after he has separated them; and because he must coax the reader into seeing that the cause he names does, in fact, produce the effect which is experienced; otherwise they will not have anything to do with each other. (249–50)

46

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

In other words, the literary critic must show himself, as an appreciator, to be just like the reader so that his exemplary analysis has the force of some hypothetical or provisional belief to back it up. The balancing act between analytical and appreciative, or affective, personalities, however, varies based on the situation. In the elementary classroom, for example, the critic is often in the role of exemplary appreciator and therefore must use “tact” so as not to overwhelm and alienate the uninitiated with baffling analyzes. Speaking to other professionals, who already possess certain critical capacities, however, “analysis” might be called for more readily. Both approaches, however, run the risk of condescendingly stating the apparently obvious, which is one of the situations that, we will see, may also necessitate tact. In light of this partitioning of distinct social situations, I will read two examples of Empson’s invocation of “tact” from the eighth and final chapter of Seven Types of Ambiguity, since it is precisely through the proximity of these two utterances that the contradictory ramifications of these claims can best be understood. The first example is more recognizably Empsonian and is echoed frequently throughout the later writings. Empson takes pride here in his comparative lack of tact, in his willingness not to stop analyzing just because others may think he is going at ridiculous length in his analysis of ambiguity. He has no truck with the false “tact” used as an alibi for critical faintheartedness: Many people who would admit that there is a great deal of ambiguity in poetry, and that it is important, will consider that I have gone on piling up ambiguities on to particular cases till the ‘whole thing’ becomes absurd; ‘you can’t expect us to believe all that.’ I have, in fact, been as complete as I could in cases that seemed to deserve it, and considered whether each of the details was reasonable, not whether the result was reasonable as a whole. For these analytical methods are usually employed casually and piecemeal, with an implication that the critic has shown tact by going no further; if they are flung together into a heap they make, I think, rather a different impression, and this at any rate is a test to which it is proper that they should be subjected. If the reader has found me expounding the obvious and accepted at tedious length, he must remember that English literary critics have been so unwilling to appear niggling and lacking in soul that upon these small technical points the obvious, even the accepted, has been said culpably seldom. (244; emphasis added)

Tact, in this case, would be stopping before one has amassed a sloppy “heap” of ambiguities through analysis. Empson emphasizes the importance of giving up on tact for the sake of critical rigor, as he had in the preface to the second edition of the book: “My attitude in writing . . . was that an honest man erected



Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

47

the ignoring of ‘tact’ into a point of honour” (vii). Likewise, in the passage cited above, “tact” signifies critical laziness (“these analytical methods are usually employed casually and piecemeal”) and an eager-to-please sycophancy (“English literary critics have been so unwilling to appear niggling and lacking in soul”). Either way, tact is readily identified as a form of culpability that holds back the progress of literary criticism, and Empson positions himself, somewhat aristocratically, as the cavalier thinker who doesn’t have much need for tact and will just get on with it and say what he knows to be true.13 On the other hand, however, Empson sees that when facing certain readers or audiences, “tact” may be a necessary evil and even a good: Many works of art give their public a sort of relief and strength, because they are independent of the moral code which their public accepts and is dependent on; relief, by fantasy gratification; strength, because it gives you a sort of equilibrium within your boundaries to have been taken outside them, however secretly, because you know your own boundaries better when you have seen them from both sides. Such works give a valuable imaginative experience, and such a public cannot afford to have them analysed . . . Under these rather special circumstances one should try to prevent people from having to analyse their reactions, with all the tact at one’s disposal; nor are they so special as might appear. The object of life, after all, is not to understand things, but to maintain one’s defences and equilibrium and live as well as one can; it is not only maiden aunts who are placed like this. (246–47; emphases mine)

The logic of this passage should by now be familiar; many works of art are of value precisely because they force the reader or viewer to take on an ironic stance in order to accommodate experiences and views foreign to their own, and it is this encounter with otherness that allows you to “know your own boundaries better.” However, this “valuable imaginative experience” cannot be tolerably analyzed by “such a public” (i.e. Richards’s stupid person unable to engage in “imaginal action” or Leavis’s suggestible “masses”). Empson here names tact as the tactic or faculty through which “such a public” can be spared any awareness of the boundary-crossing they are supposedly experiencing. Matthew Creasy writes in reference to this passage that Empson’s reference to the “tact” with which maiden aunts need to be handled indicates that it might be rude to point out truths or thoughts that are already present either in the back of the mind or as unspoken assumptions . . . Tact becomes part of the general social conventions which keep unruly desires in check. (Creasy 195)

48

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

On this well-researched but moralistic reading, “Empson’s tact” names a pedagogue’s empathy in sparing the feelings of the unintelligent; Creasy writes that “a humane ability to disentangle meaning and retain regard for the wider social situation represents Empson’s true tact and his critical achievement” (200). This may be an accurate depiction of Empson, but do we really value (or believe in the actuality of) a literary critical practice the effect of which is to “keep unruly desires in check”? Creasy argues that the various senses and values accorded to “tact” by Empson are ultimately more or less complexly reconcilable. Paul Fry, by contrast, argues that the inconsistencies in Empson’s deployment of the word “tact” correspond to the latter’s seventh type of ambiguity: If ‘tact’ then can mean either cant or—less unequivocally—doing the humane thing, it puts us in the grips of an ambiguity of the seventh type, ‘when two meanings of the word, the two values of the ambiguity, are the two opposite meanings defined from the context, so that the total effect is to show a fundamental division in the writer’s mind’. (William Empson 32; citation Seven Types of Ambiguity 192)

Indeed, the tact that Empson champions in the above passage is at odds with the tact that he earlier derides, but I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say that they are “two opposite meanings.” Rather, the contexts are different, indicating, perhaps, a “division” in Empson’s approach to lyric pedagogy: between his critical and his social tasks. The tact that Empson recommends is really a tactical irony—say what you know is not quite true (that literature is simple or that the feelings and beliefs it engages are beyond the scope of analysis) for the purpose of, you hope, leading others to believe what you know to be true (the opposite of what you’ve said). Tellingly, this passage follows another one in which Empson explains that “the position of a literary critic is far more a social than a scientific one . . . It is the business of the critic to extract for his public what it wants; to organise, what he may indeed create, the taste of his period” (Seven Types 245). In other words, criticism is plainly a form of social pedagogy. In which case, this “business” of the critic will, as discussed above, sometimes require analysis and sometimes demonstrative shows of exemplary “appreciation.”14 What Empson misses in some moments but clearly grasps elsewhere is the extent to which “analysis” may also be an exemplary form of charismatic practice with the intended effect of inspiring emulation: In the last few generations literary people have been trained socially to pick up hints at once about people’s opinions, and to accept them, while in the company



Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

49

of their owners, with as little fuss as possible; I  might say, putting this more strongly, that in the present state of indecision of the cultured world people do, in fact, hold all the beliefs, however contradictory, that turn up in poetry, in the sense that they are liable to use them all in coming to decisions. It is for reasons of this sort that the habit of reading a wide variety of different sorts of poetry, which has, after all, only recently been contracted by any public as a whole, gives to the act of appreciation a puzzling complexity, tends to make people less sure of their own minds, and makes it necessary to be able to fall back on some intelligible process of interpretation. (243)

Here, then, “analysis” is proposed as a means of bringing “order” to this contemporary anarchy of appreciation. Like Richards and Leavis, Empson is concerned about “the public’s” lack of discernment and of evaluative capacities. In the face of this “indecision of the cultured world,” tact might be a dangerous and unnecessary burden when really clear-headed, rigorous analysis ought to prevail. Empson reaches an impasse here, though, insofar as he fears that his analyzes of ambiguity can all too easily look like the “indecision of the cultured world.” Empson thus situates his literary critical project within an imaginary social hierarchy; he suggests that the aptitudes needed to deal successfully with the demands of “today’s world” can be acquired through the infinite regress of literary criticism. Unlike Richards and Leavis, however, Empson does not insist on a return to the values of the “organic community”; his understanding of what is socially necessary is considerably more open to the historicity and contingency. As he goes on to insist, It is widely and reasonably felt that those people are better able to deal with our present difficulties whose defences are strong enough for them to be able to afford to understand things; nor can I conceal my sympathy with those who want to understand as many things as possible, and to hang those consequences which cannot be foreseen. (247–48)

Empson does not here oppose knowledge to belief or science to religion, as Richards and Leavis do. All the same, in Empson’s text, the complex of attitudes that are supposedly the object of study of poetic criticism are folded into the pedagogical practices of the poet-critic as person, or vice versa.15 In other words, attributes supposedly belonging to the poem as an object are, in fact, repurposed to produce different modes of attention, affects and subjective practices in the student-reader. In this way, the problems of pedagogical management and the social reproduction of civic consciousness are interwoven with the

50

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

hermeneutical projects of literary study. Ideally, everyone would be able to enjoy the interminable analysis of ambiguity, but not everyone is prepared for this, and so some provisional tact is required to allow people to reach the stage at which to learn tactlessness. Empson’s ambivalence toward “tact” in ­chapter  8 of Seven Types, then, highlights the contingency of the politics of literary critical procedures and of lyric pedagogy itself. The decision to go on—or not go on—with analysis does not in and of itself have a particular function for social reproduction. If Leavis thinks it better to stop, and de Man insists on going on, and Empson hesitates between the two—well, these decisions, as critical decisions, are tactical. Neither is inherently “useful” or “resistant to instrumentalization,” and each may provide an important pause or a rallying call to arms under certain circumstances. In the context of Arnoldian ideology, Empson’s deferral of unambiguous wholeness may have interrupted or refused some sweetness and light; his provisional insistence on imperfectability may have been a tactical rejection of the logic of a detached ironic “stance.” Likewise, in the context of New Critical celebrations of poems as self-contained “paradoxes,” Paul de Man’s insistence on a structural intentionality of language may have interrupted the fixity of one hermeneutical regime, even if only to replace it with another exemplary critical practice—this time that of an endless irony without any subjective stance to back it.16 Empson’s tact and tactlessness may have often been on the side of the angels, but they were not in the case of the “maiden aunts,” where a social bias supposedly removed from the scene of critical inquiry rears its ugly head and is managed by tact—by the evasion of an antagonism that is thereby more surely reproduced. Empson’s tact ultimately serves as an example of how lyric pedagogy remolds social and political antagonisms into the form of an exemplary intersubjective encounter following the teacher–student model. Politicized literary criticism cannot will this model away, insofar as it is materially instituted in and by the mode of production of literary criticism itself in a social-pedagogical context. In the remainder of this chapter, I read the work of two poets who come up against the dead ends of lyric pedagogy and who attempt to work their way out of it without departing from this social-pedagogical frame.

‘I have lived long enough having seen one thing’ In her long poem “Cordelia:  or, A  Poem Should Not Mean, but Be” (1974), Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947–1975) approaches the Western literary



Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

51

canon through the conceit of the faithful-because-faithless daughter. The poem registers a kind of terminal point with relation to the Cambridge University poetic experience. The poem circuits back and forth, through “traditions” and “rebellions,” between libraries and dons’ rooms, pained by all and seeking out joy wherever it may be available. All the while, a tremendous amount of feminist fun is had with the poems that make up Forrest-Thomson’s own Victorianmodernist tradition, from Swinburne to Pound. The moralism of the English literary tradition doesn’t target everyone in the same way, and Forrest-Thomson expresses the pain that comes from being the “good daughter” (Cordelia) of literary traditions even as her poems also testify to a fleeting but very real exhilaration that attends literary playfulness. The poem painfully and joyfully tracks a counter-tradition that would traduce the moralistic pretensions of English literary tradition. The poem repeatedly parodies the moral ambitions of poetry, ending with a moral of its own: The motto of this poem heed And do you it employ: Waste not and want not while you’re here The possibles of joy. (Collected 175)

As Gareth Farmer notes, “here” can be read as a reference to the space of the poem itself: “the reader must stay close to the ‘here’ of the final lines of the poem, which is the space and time of the poem itself ” (“Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s ‘Cordelia’” 74). That is, the poem is a transport to an alternate present—a space through which to access a here and now that lyric pedagogy might otherwise find to be unacceptably immediate and uncritical. Thorough analyzes of this poem and of its singular place in Forrest-Thomson’s oeuvre already exist, but I want to zoom in on two lines that echo the opening to Swinburne’s “Hymn to Proserpine.”17 Where Swinburne writes “I have lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an end” (Swinburne 67), ForrestThomson replaces the word love with “term”—indicating the subsuming force of Cambridge’s academic calendar. She writes, “I have lived long enough having seen one thing; That term has an end” (Collected 168). In Swinburne’s lines, the word “that” is clearly a conjunction introducing the fact “love hath an end” (i.e. this is the thing that the speaker has seen). Forrest-Thomson’s lines, however, are readable in at least two ways. As in Swinburne’s poem, the “one thing” that the

52

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

speaker has lived long enough having seen is the fact that term has an end. Any student at Cambridge University would indeed be repeatedly reminded of this fact, as, over and over again, each term is built up as a world in itself. That then ends. But another, more tendentious, interpretation would read the semicolon (introduced by Forrest-Thomson where Swinburne had a comma) as indicating that in the second clause, “That term has an end” features “that” as a determiner and not a conjunction. What we’re being told is that “that term” (and not any other term), has an end. Namely, that term, or period of time, would be the term in which one lives having seen one thing. The term in which I have lived seeing one thing will end. I will leave Cambridge. My life at Cambridge will come to an end. And so, another life might be in the offing, or a term of not seeing this one thing, or of seeing something else. These two readings reinforce and enrich each other so that the net effect is a sort of questioning: when does term end, and does the term of seeing terms end also have an end? Can one leave behind the academic calendar and its peculiarly episodic organization of time? Can one get out of lyric pedagogy’s constricting process of social reproduction by way of writing a lyric poem? Or, can one leave Cambridge in a poem? The remainder of this chapter dwells in the dead end of this question by looking at the work of J. H. Prynne (b. 1936) and Forrest-Thomson to show how these writers attempt to derail the moralism of lyric pedagogy by deploying the very lyric-pedagogical tools that they are opposing. There are significant tensions between Practical Criticism’s moral-pedagogical implicit understanding of poetry as ameliorative social reproduction and the distinct but related aspirations of Prynne and Forrest-Thomson for an anti-moralistic and socially transformative poetics. I tease out these tensions through a reading of a small sample of J. H. Prynne’s prose and poetry as well as an extended reading of Forrest-Thomson’s critical and poetic engagement with the work of William Empson.

Prynne’s Anglo team Prynne’s work illustrates how lyric pedagogy takes shape in the work of a politically savvy writer, one considerably less sanguine about the possibilities of “culture” than, say, F. R. Leavis. In spite of this skepticism, discussions among some “Cambridge” poets about the sociopolitical dimensions of poetry have been continuous with, rather than simply breaking from, the lyric pedagogy of Practical Criticism. That is, the protocols of lyric pedagogy have set the terms of discussion in a way that often eclipses alternative understandings of the



Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

53

sociality of poetic production and literary education. It is my contention that the imbrication of Prynne’s writings in the lyric pedagogical project of Practical Criticism conditions the political prospects of his writing. In this sense, Prynne’s work situates itself always in reference to (whether with or against) a lyric pedagogical model of social reproduction that insistently deflects sociopolitical problems from the scene of literary education. The standard narrative of Prynne’s poetic and critical development has been surrounded by a great deal of mythology.18 A bare-bones account, tailored for relevance to my discussion, would go something like this:  Prynne studied in the English tripos as a member of Jesus College at Cambridge University. After a year of study at Harvard, he returned to Cambridge as a fellow at Gonville and Caius College, where he has since remained, having also long been the college librarian. Prynne was personally acquainted with Empson and Richards and has tutored Cambridge undergraduates in English since the 1960s. Prynne’s poetic output from the 1960s developed in conversation with the work of US-based Black Mountain poets, most notably Ed Dorn and Charles Olson, and later with other contemporary North American, European and Chinese poets. The element of Prynne’s work that I  will somewhat tendentiously extract from the complex unity of his oeuvre concerns his relation to Practical Criticism. By Practical Criticism, I  refer both to the writings and teachings of Richards and Empson and to its ongoing, institutionalized teaching in the Cambridge English faculty.19 Prynne’s cultural politics are continuous with the Practical Critical assumption that moral and cognitive comportment is the primary political problem posed by engaging with poetry. Prynne admires Richards’s and Empson’s critical works as attempts to lay down positive contributions to the knowledge of literature and language; it could be argued that he has emulated Empson in some of his later published works of criticism.20 Prynne’s poetry does work to crack open the implied reader’s “ethical” training to expose its social and political underpinnings. This is true even though the discourse surrounding his work, including much of his own criticism, is mired in lyric pedagogy’s typical emphasis on questions of “attention.” To get a sense of the discursive field in which the poetic community in Cambridge found itself in the 1970s—a dispersed and changing community in which Prynne functioned as exemplar, pedagogue and peer—I  will look at a few remarks from Prynne’s published letters (this is the main format in which his critical writing was published in English up until quite recently, usually in limited-circulation poetry and poetics periodicals). In a letter to Douglas Oliver

54

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

from January 1972, published in the 1973 volume of Grosseteste Review (a poetry and poetics journal edited by John Riley and Tim Longville and featuring many Cambridge-affiliated writers), Prynne remarks on his experience of reading Oliver’s then-new novel The Harmless Building.21 The novel is conspicuously the work of a poet, interweaving, as it does, verse, prose and dramatic formats. In his letter, Prynne praises Oliver, frequently noting the “goodness” of Oliver’s work, particularly with reference to the shifting frames of “attention” demanded by the text: I have just finished reading [The Harmless Building] and I  need to write at once because I am struck by how decisively good it is, I mean really powerfully and toughly so. It was exhilerating [sic] to work with because it was so closely cross-woven and under control. That kind of intellective deliberateness goes for maximum vigilance in the arena, all the tendons under multiple stress, it absolutely is fine. I  had to go very carefully indeed over the surface transformations, following the jolts of body syntax from the synthetic identities of person as subject, ready for skew pieces of affect, wary for quickened wits: it is rare and truly exciting to be asked for that kind of attention and to find it then taken up and used. (‘A Letter’ 152)22

Two interwoven motifs are worth drawing out from this passage: there is, first, the “goodness” of the book, which Prynne describes as “decisively,” “powerfully and toughly” good. Second, Prynne recounts the exhilaration of encountering this sort of “intellective deliberateness”; Oliver’s writing has demanded that he “go very carefully indeed,” and it seems that it is precisely such a requirement for poise that Prynne most values here. That is, reading this book requires that one be “ready . . . and wary”; ultimately, it is the demand and reward for a particular “kind of attention” that this reader has found so “rare and truly exciting.” Thus, the “goodness” of the book signifies as an index not only of aesthetic but also of moral value, of inducing particular stances and forms of behavior. Indeed, Prynne goes on to describe The Harmless Building as “a novel deeply curled in around the experience of good.” The imputation that Oliver’s novel relays such an “experience” of goodness readily recalls Richards’s ideas about literary study’s powers to extend “valuable experiences.” Yet, Prynne simultaneously moves into the realm of Empson’s ambiguities, insofar as such “valuable experiences” do not preclude violence and discontinuity: The ethic vector is violent and discontinuous, developing schizophrenia of the body-percept and the embedding of will within larger spiritual bodies, but also



Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

55

revealing absolute moments of truth. ‘The flaw in goodness is also a wound in your image of your body.’ (152–53)

This bifurcation and combination of levels of experience is itself put under significant pressure by Prynne’s phenomenological understanding of pain. It is by virtue of a willingness to man up, as it were, to pain that Prynne distinguishes the “team” of British (read: white, male, Cambridge-affiliated) poets of the early 1970s from its American contemporaries (he most likely has Black Mountain and some New York School poets, perhaps John Ashbery, in mind here): How interesting it is to see, if one reads In One Side and Out the Other [John James, Andrew Crozier, and Tom Phillips] or Printed Circuit [Andrew Crozier] or Brass or Oppoetique [sic; Prynne is referring here to Oliver’s 1969 chapbook Oppo hectic], that the Anglo team have their teeth really sunk into pain, great physical gouts of it, as opposed to the watercolour joys of the American art gallery nympholepts. Your novel confirms this; its elegance is much too vorticist for the pre-sexual phenomenology preferred in l’Amerique du Nord. Only Frank O’Hara had that pail of serpents always in view. (153–54)

Oliver’s sexual (or postsexual?) “vorticism,” then, marshals language through the bearing of pain. Prynne reports that he has been drawn as a reader into a form of attention that involves the dirty work of sinking one’s teeth into pain (thereby inflicting pain upon pain). Prynne describes Oliver’s work as demanding of the reader an embodied relation to the text, a phenomenological admission of the corporeal (and with it of vulnerability to pain) into the kinds of experiments that Oliver is undertaking. This is achieved, for Prynne, precisely through ruptures in discourse that are not contained by any prosodic or narrative smoothing over. We have come quite a ways, then, from the ironic stance of “equilibrium” demanded by Richards and F.  R. Leavis. Yet while Prynne’s appreciation of Oliver seems almost entirely devoid of tact, it retains the language of a training of attention, or sensibility, to an ethical text that rewards the kind of attention it demands. Moreover, Prynne’s quick attribution of this vulnerability to the “Anglo-team” testifies to the powerful legacy of the Arnoldian notion of culture through a Wordsworthian quasi-theology of loss and gain. While Prynne is at least arguably correct in the aesthetic distinction he is making, and while he is also being jokey with the mention of “teams,” his language bears a pseudo-nationalism that is consonant with the paradoxically provincial cosmopolitanism of Cambridge and the implicit valorization of British moral character that accompanied and spurred the polemics in favor of the development of Practical Criticism.

56

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

When Prynne wrote this letter to Oliver, his most recently published book of poems was 1971’s Brass, and he was in the process of composing Wound Response. Brass is generally seen as a break with the late-1960s works Kitchen Poems and The White Stones, as these adhered more (although not in any programmatic way) to the projective-verse project of Charles Olson. Keston Sutherland describes this break as a movement from “lamentation” to “satire against that lamentation”: Our failure in The White Stones is sung in lamentation, confessed in melancholy outcries, iterated in vignettes shaped to a private life that are compulsorily iconic of universal abandonment. What happens throughout Brass, but is only hinted at toward the end of The White Stones, is satire against that lamentation and savage mockery of the idea of a cosmogenic agency of surrender. (‘Hilarious Absolute Daybreak’ 119)

So, Sutherland explains, Brass represents a move away from the more or less reasonbased ethical exhortations of the early poems’ moral injunctions to the reader. The move toward “satire . . . and savage mockery” accompanies what Sutherland characterizes as a loss of faith in “the power of lyric to assert fluency”: “The earlier poems are for the most part both rhetorically and propositionally coherent. Their prosody is sustained across specimen and trial disruptions by an emphatic confidence in the power of lyric to assert fluency. The poems of Brass satirise that confidence” (120). Sutherland is right to point to the distinction between “trial disruptions” and full-on satire of lyrical fluency. The poems that comprise Brass are characterized by shifts in register, usually marked by jolting changes from recognizably “poetic” language to apparently scientific and industrial jargon; lyric seldom gets the final say in any synthesizing sense. These shifts can be difficult to countenance, requiring, as per his indications about reading Oliver, a mode of attention that does not rush to synthetic judgments or equilibrium, as the earlier work arguably might have. Rather, Prynne demands an Empsonian reader willing to sustain an ironic stance that refuses to accommodate the lyric urge for swooning transcendence. This is what Prynne in 1972 might have called the “ethic vector” of Brass and of his subsequent work. Accounts of Prynne’s tutorial and teaching practice only bolster the extent to which we might read his oeuvre as one anchored in lyric pedagogy. Emily Witt points to a document written by Prynne in 2004 for first-year undergraduates beginning an English course at Gonville and Caius college. The document, entitled “Tips on Practical Criticism, for Students of English,” is of significant merit; it is generous and daunting in its broad exposition of the experiences



Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

57

forthcoming for the close reader of poetic texts. As Witt remarks, the piece is also continuous with some of Richards’s initial assumptions about and claims for Practical Criticism. Prynne describes the balancing act required for a good Practical Criticism: Articulating arguments based on specifically localised effects requires both accuracy in disinterested recognition and also a certain logic of enquiry and the support of value-assessments by balanced discussion: ‘balanced’, that is, between assertions of mere preference or personal taste in the context of disagreements, and the attempt to base estimation of quality or success on supporting featureanalysis and comparative appraisal:  what might be termed ‘evidence-based’ critical argument. (‘Tips’ 1)

Prynne’s language here, with its references to “balance,” “disinterest” and “value-assessment,” is clearly indebted to Richards; it is especially reminiscent of Richards’s insistence on an equilibrium of different affective and cognitive responses. Prynne’s work also suggests the same division between “appreciative” and “analytical” criticism that we saw Empson (unsuccessfully) attempt to resolve through the dialectics of tact. Here the “empirical” and the “personal” are also treated as two contrary tendencies to be “balanced” or combined, but there is no synthesis for Prynne in a third term through which they are best to be handled. Like Richards in Practical Criticism, Prynne enumerates many potential obstacles to good reading. He likewise recommends that equilibrium be maintained through an ironic stance and a cultivated capacity for self-distancing as a mechanism for correcting errors in reading: Sometimes, despite efforts to keep your mind fully open and receptive, a very specific point of view can take command of your thoughts, too early or too completely, and then you may need to argue against yourself, to rekindle your uncertainties so as to discover other dimensions, maybe even working your way out of a deep and comfortable pit into which you have all-unguardedly stumbled. (5)

All of this should sound fairly familiar from Richards’s attempts to isolate and correct the sources of error in his students. Indeed, this kind of ironic distancing is key to the kinds of reading that Richards demanded. Prynne, however, does not venture an amateur sociology of the “masses” as the source of such erroneous tendencies; after all, he is writing for the elite students of Cambridge English, and the lessons in Practical Criticism that await his readers will comprise intimate tutorials with faculty that require a different form of address from the mass distribution of Richards’s Practical Criticism.

58

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

Still, like Richards, Prynne advances (however tentatively) the proposition that the skills and experiences drawn from close encounters with texts can accompany us into other parts of our lives. Writing about the effects of “unity in retrospect,” that is, when a text presents a number of apparently divergent elements that are only united retrospectively, after completion of and reflection upon the text, Prynne suggests that “reader-encounter with such integrating closure may prompt large and deep reflection, on how such experiences can affect and satisfy us; and, maybe, can alter or enhance our primary sense of meaning in how we view the world and understand ourselves” (7). This is quickly followed by the rejoinder that “of course our deep thoughts may be not without a certain smugness, too,” but his first point is not thereby rendered moot. Prynne asserts here, as elsewhere, that aesthetic education can and should serve as training for right living in the world. Things are not quite so simple, however, and Prynne does not by any means crudely suggest that training in Practical Criticism is straightforwardly preparatory for “the world.” In the pages that follow, Prynne goes back and forth between outlining the technical skills to be gained from a training in Practical Criticism and suggesting the extra-critical or extra-literary (i.e. more broadly ethical) applications of such skills: What is the final purpose of these exercises, to what end are they instrumental, apart from developing certain study skills which can hardly be cultivated merely for show, like prize marrows. What is Practical Criticism for? The short answer must be, to strengthen discrimination in making judgements of value about works of literature, so as to make reasoned decisions about what is good: whether a text under consideration (briefly excerpted or a complete whole) has value, and what it means to make claims of this kind. (9)

This quickly leads to an Empsonian exposition of the various ways in which “good” can signify, suggesting that the tasks of Practical Criticism extend far beyond local exposition to political and social questions of good living (10). Indeed, Prynne clearly takes from Empson (among others) an insistence on the possibility of contradictions (such as those attending the overdetermination of the “good”) that are not resolvable simply through the stance of the subject but that are either metaphysically or materially produced:  “Some large and important ideas may indeed be intrinsically, permanently, characterised as not-clear” (9). In this way, Prynne foregrounds the limitations that attend the Arnold-Richards-Leavis emphasis on the preparatory nature of literary study as moral training for citizenship.



Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

59

The question of the extension or application of Practical Criticism (“microcriticism”) to the domain of judgment more broadly (aesthetic and otherwise) remains suspended throughout Prynne’s “Tips”; among the more surprising developments in the document is the movement toward a relativist and pragmatist approach to value and evaluation: Judgements on a small scale, micro-criticism, are not essentially different from those made more broadly or with a larger scope (macro-criticism); it may not be plausible to claim that a judgement can be definitively right, but there are certainly many ways to be wrong:  unobservant, flimsy in argument, facile or shallow as well as well-intentioned but not very bright. In using terms like good and other language-forms making value-claims we attempt to develop a shared discourse of judgemental acts which may strengthen a shared sense of the values which we care about, and why we do so. (10)

The language of “value” is increasingly foregrounded as the document goes on, and it is at this point that Prynne’s conception of value becomes most apparent. Writing here about the nomination of “the good,” Prynne presents evaluation and even value itself as contingent and social practices. This constructivist theory of value is, however, tempered by the ambiguous recourse to the first-person plural. Does this “we” exist before the dialogical articulation attempting to form a “shared discourse of judgmental acts,” or is it a by-product of a supposedly scientific (i.e. collectively falsifying) activity of evaluation? This question is unanswerable in its own terms, but its posing marks the terrain of microcriticism as a social space of indeterminate boundaries. The final sentences of the document, however, recement the sociality of reading within a hierarchical pedagogical relation, moving away from the kind of public sphere of competing rationalities that is described in the passage above. As I have been at pains throughout this chapter to insist, lyric pedagogy’s moments of correction and censure always entail moral training: Whether during this course-work you are asked to produce written reports, or to construct the argument orally during prepared discussion, it is only a full engagement that will carry you strongly beyond your present horizons, and awaken your latent insight into literary representation as deep evidence of human life. Make much effort, and learn the ropes. (11)

The tutorial authority over the apprentice of Practical Criticism is bulwarked by the promise of a movement “beyond your present horizons.” The document preceding these words is indeed a useful guide for the new student of University

60

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

English, presenting as it does a wide range of possible pleasures and difficulties along the road ahead. Additionally, it is calculated toward a particular audience, and Prynne generously estimates the critical capacities of his students; this is not an easy read, and it may bewilder as much as comfort. These are, all the same, students who have chosen to study English at Cambridge, and many are likely to fancy themselves included rather than excluded by linguistic and conceptual difficulties. What I want to mark here is Prynne’s articulation of, on the one hand, tutorial pedagogical authority with, on the other, a form of preparatory moral training. In this, his writing is continuous with the work of Richards and others surveyed earlier and is vulnerable to some of the critiques leveraged against them. At the same time, there is also a movement within this document against the grain of its “preparatory” pedagogical purpose, toward a consideration of the literary text and of critical reading as already social processes and of reading and writing as forms of labor that produce value. It is this move, and the limitations of its enactment, that I will seek to track through a brief reading of one poem from Brass. Most of Prynne’s writing is more explicitly engaged than this pedagogical treatise with the question of poetry’s grounding in social materiality. I  turn here to a brief reading of Prynne’s oft-cited 1971 poem “L’Extase de M. Poher,”23 which was composed in a moment of capitalist political regroupment following the global uprisings of 1968. I read in this poem a strong effort to query whether a politically committed, demythologizing and socially relevant poetry might have any epistemological, moral or even rhetorical ground left on which to stand:               No Poetic gabble will survive which fails to collide head-on with the unwitty circus:     no history running       with the french horn  into           the alley-way,  no       manifest emergence      of valued instinct, no growth       of meaning & stated  order:     we are too kissed & fondled,    no longer instrumental     to culture in ‘this’ sense. (Poems 162)



Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

61

That is, to risk paraphrase, the only possibility for the “survival” of poetry hinges on the negation of the naturalization of language as either aesthetic (“the french horn”), biological (“valued instinct”), or rational (“meaning & stated order”). “We are too kissed & fondled,” that is, we (poets?) are both pleasurably and coercively touched and brushed by this multiplicity of cultural discourses such that “culture” is no longer, if it ever was, successfully instrumental toward any external end. And, more alarmingly, we are no longer in any functional relationship to “culture” in the first place. The poem draws to a close with a bold assertion:            Rubbish  is    pertinent; essential;  the     most intricate presence in     our entire culture; the ultimate sexual point of the whole place turned       into a model question.

Here Prynne’s ironical sermon (which Sutherland reads as parody of the politician’s rhapsodic speech) also seriously suggests that the attempt to salvage poetry for any national culture may miss the “essential” value of that which has been grotesquely discarded and left to rot. In other words, the valuable dimensions of the abject are precisely those that are irrecoverable, and poetry is no exception to this rule. Prynne composed this poem contemporaneously with the death pangs of a long tradition that had considered poetry to be formative of British national culture. As I  discuss in my introduction, the state-organized cultivation of attention to poetry had increasingly been left behind, and poetry was no longer instrumental in the ways that it had been purported to be at least through the interwar period of British imperial decline. Of course, Oxford and Cambridge are somewhat exceptional in this regard, insofar as many of their wealthy students won’t have to worry as consistently about debt incurred by skyrocketing fees and so can pursue the humanities with or without state funding. All the same, Oxbridge has not been immune from the rise of state-mandated, valueadded metrics for fiscal accountability and impact that have disproportionately reduced state funding to the humanities and social sciences in Britain over the past decades. If Prynne’s poetic production was and continues to be contemporaneous with the state’s devaluing of literary culture, then, it has also been coeval with the rise in Britain of what Jeffrey J.  Williams calls, in the US context, “the

62

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

post-welfare state university.” Primarily under Thatcher, the United Kingdom moved, like Reagan’s America, away from cold-war era concessions granted to demands for social services and civil rights such as affordable housing, childcare and accessible education in the fields of one’s choice. In the United Kingdom, however, the socialist left under Thatcher was larger than in the United States, if it was also fragmented and sectarianized. Left scholars and academics in Britain, many of them employees at state-funded institutes of further and higher education, were more vocal and militant than their US counterparts in linking the fate of the university (privatization) to broader attacks on hard-won welfare-state social services and reforms. At the same time, they often recognized that the very institutions they were defending had developed through vested state interests in governing the populations of the United Kingdom and its colonized territories. Beginning in 1980, in fact, several groups of British literary studies scholars and students created an informal network based in an annual conference and resulting publication under the name Literature Teaching Politics (LTP).24 In the teeth of a situation that is uncannily familiar in today’s context of budget cuts in public education (primary, secondary and tertiary) and particularly in humanistic disciplines and others that are perceived as productive of ‘radical’ intellectuals, Andrew Belsey, an organizing member of the original collective at University College, Cardiff, wrote, In the face of reactionary attacks on education most teachers will of course defend it. But many may do so without real conviction: being aware of its actual ideological effect, or having read Illich, Freire and the other radical critics of schooling, they will wonder whether it is in fact worth defending. And how can it be, if it is simply reproducing the worst excesses of capitalism? And how can it be appropriated for the people, given its apparent impregnability as part of the capitalist system, and that system’s ability to recuperate and incorporate apparently radical challenges? These are dilemmas, but if socialists thought that they were inescapable they would not be socialists. Some contradictions in the system are problems but others are opportunities. Every institution is in process, as a site of struggle. Education is no exception. (Belsey 78–79)

I would highlight from this passage, and from the very existence of LTP, both the antagonisms and the continuity between, on the one hand, struggles in higher education and, on the other, broader social movements.25 Belsey insists that higher education is something people want and need, but that in no way means the university ought to be preserved exactly as it is. We cannot merely argue



Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

63

for a preservation of things as they are, since, as we have seen, institutions like Cambridge have always colluded with broader projects to elide and suppress real social conflicts and contradictions such as poverty, racism, colonialism, white supremacy, ableism and heteropatriarchy. The question that I bring to Prynne’s poem, then, is how it engages with the moral-pedagogical dimensions of culture drawn from the Romantic tradition, nationalized in the early twentieth century and progressively abandoned starting in the 1970s and after. This reflection of changes in the state’s relation to cultural education is one concrete way in which “Brass is,” as Sutherland puts it, “a prophecy at the threshold” (“Hilarious Absolute Daybreak” 115), as “culture” returns increasingly to the leisure time of the privileged castes. The refusal to engage with state institutions designed to instill good citizenship has become an almost meaningless stance, since the state no longer needs the working and middle classes to have “culture” anyway. Or, as Sutherland explains, “Resistance can no longer mean self-exclusion through definition of a zone of moral austerity, not only because moralism has slowed down, but because we are not included in ‘this’ culture in the first place” (146). As we have seen, Prynne’s prose evinces a faith in the value of Practical Criticism as a pedagogy for life. So, what is Practical Criticism to do in relation to all this rubbish and with Prynne’s refusal in this poem of the discourse of culture as moral edification? And, moreover, why start with that question? Or, as “L’extase de M. Poher” begins, Why do we ask that, as if wind in the telegraph wires were nailed up in some kind of answer, formal derangement of the species. Days and weeks spin by in theatres, gardens laid out in rubbish, this is the free hand to refuse everything.

“As if,” that is, the method of revealing mistakes and their ostensible causes (viz. “formal derangement”) answered anything. The only “freedom” we have in responding to this trashed cultural (note that “theatres” and “gardens” are the sites here for “spinning” and “rubbish”) condition is the “free hand to refuse everything,” that is, every question and every proleptic answer. As Sutherland explains of the poem’s final language of the “model question,” this “model” actually amounts to a form of refusal. The poem, that is, provides no moral closure to the student of Practical Criticism; it promises no new equilibrium of sense and feeling, even as what Sutherland calls the “grid” form (“Hilarious

64

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

Absolute Daybreak” 138) of its various indented sections implies a strong and reasoned reordering of its materials. Take, for example, who is the occasion  now    what is the question in  which      she what for is a version   of when, i.e.

Sutherland is right to suggest that the poem does not allow us to “reconstitute the whole, unsplit locutions that are broken up in the grid,” but he acknowledges that “if we could . . ., it appears likely they would be inquiring or pedagogical . . . the value of the hypostatised ‘whole’ text is uncertain throughout our reconstruction of it; and the value of our efforts to reconstruct it is uncertain too” (“Hilarious Absolute Daybreak” 139). This all seems correct to me. But it does not quite account for the extent to which, all the same, the poem actively pushes us in the direction of this kind of reconstruction; that is, it is tailored to the reader ready and set to get going with a practical criticism. In fact, the kind of satirical effect that Sutherland finds so prevalent throughout the poems of Brass would seem to be lost on readers who are not expecting moral training from their poetry at all—that is, perhaps, on readers skeptical of or untrained in the rigors of Practical Criticism, particularly in its Cantabridgian incarnations. This is not to fault the poem for its failure to work the same for every reader, as if that were possible or even desirable. It is, however, simply to indicate that the poem does include a pedagogical movement, as does much writing. It leads its readers toward a certain form of reading, that is, toward an attempt to reconcile, à la Richards, a variety of apparently contradictory linguistic attitudes. That the poem ultimately thwarts such efforts does not mean that it bypasses or refuses this approach; rather, it confirms the need for an Empsonian response and a willingness to dwell in ambiguity and contradiction. I maintain here, as I did in relation to Empson’s tact, that such a technique does not have a politics in and of itself, but that it depends on the particular provenance and aims of the poem in the various conjunctures of its composition and reading. For Prynne, it would appear necessary for a poem to first invite the kind of reading that it then rigorously thwarts and frustrates. This, in turn, preserves lyric pedagogy’s imaginary relation between text-tutor and student-reader, wherein poetry provides training for social and political life, even as this poem forcefully asserts the futility of such efforts. This is not, then, poetry as successful in producing a



Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

65

closed circuit of liberal subjectivity, but it does, all the same, bear the traces of a national project to train readers’ attention through a putatively autonomous lyric morality. That is, this poem reflects (negatively) the aspiration for poetry to play a crucial role in social reproduction—we keep asking it to do so, but it does not. This is perhaps a melancholic relation to lyric pedagogy that loops back and back into itself. Ultimately, the poem’s purpose is to demand types of attention that must be unfixed from social contexts other than those of literary instruction, or else there would be no need for the study of poetry. In this light, it should not seem too peculiar that Prynne could write the “Tips on Practical Criticism” more than 30 years after Brass demanded, “Why do we ask that?”26

Polemic and artifice: Veronica ForrestThomson and literary morality I turn now to the work of Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947–1975), as a second instance of a celebrated “Cambridge School” poet whose work, I argue, was in large part a direct response to her literary training at Cambridge. A  number of UK-based poet-critics have revised the widely held notion that she was a proto-“language” poet, a writer “before her time” who was “discovered” by the Americans who have inherited her linguistically innovative legacy. This dominant understanding of Forrest-Thomson as a language poet was spurred primarily by Charles Bernstein’s remarks about her work in his “Artifice of Absorption” and was elaborated in Alison Mark’s Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Language Poetry. More recent British critics have objected that this reading of Forrest-Thomson neglects both the institutional and literary historical contexts of her work and the actual character of her poetry. I would agree that any critical understanding of Forrest-Thomson’s work requires a consideration of the contexts of lyric pedagogy and late-modernist British writing as she would have encountered them at Cambridge. Additionally, these recent critics have pointed to the gap between the sweeping claims of Forrest-Thomson’s theoretical prose, which are more amenable to language school polemics, and the less sure-footed movements of her poetry. Neil Pattison contentiously suggests, in a short essay, that Mark almost completely elides the particularly British provenance of Forrest-Thomson’s work and particularly her close contact and dialogue with Cambridge-based poets J. H. Prynne, Anthony Barnett and Andrew Crozier. Forrest-Thomson’s critical

66

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

prose is indeed in large part a polemical response to the British tradition of lyric pedagogy. She rejects some of this tradition’s most dearly held presuppositions while proceeding, all the same, with many of its assumptions and methods. Her objections to other critical practices are actually continuous with the very strands of lyric pedagogy against which she is reacting. Most specifically, I am interested in how, in spite of her claims to the contrary, Forrest-Thomson’s work implicitly assents to the normative idea that poetry and literary criticism can and should provide exemplary moral techniques to take a stand in what she calls “the awfulness of the modern world” (Collected Poems 167). Poetic Artifice:  A Theory of Contemporary Poetry pits poetry’s singular constructions of knowledge against totalizing preconceptions of “the world.” Poetic Artifice echoes seminal mid-century UK and US theories of poetry, such as Cleanth Brooks’s essay “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” in which Brooks rails against reducing poems to discursive “statements” about the world. He proposes there a new conception of the “structure” of the poem as an organization of material in a unity for the effect of an “achieved harmony” (Brooks 193–95). Forrest-Thomson certainly does not espouse any such “harmony,” but the idea of artifice as poetic ordering is present throughout her work, as in the following passage: The ‘message’ in the old sense is not what is important; message in the new sense is a product of the re-creation of the old orders, primarily through non-semantic levels. The poet as tribal mediator does not himself know what world he is in until the mediation has taken place (the poem is written). The worst disservice criticism can do poetry is to try to understand it too soon, for this devalues the importance of real innovation which must take place on the non-semantic levels. Criticism’s function is eventually to try to understand, at a late stage, even Artifice. (161)

This refusal of human intentionality echoes Wimsatt and Beardsley’s New Critical work on the “intentional fallacy,” insisting that the “message” is “a product of the re-creation of the old orders” (and this is what is called “artifice”). This recreation is accomplished without the control of any empirical human agent: it happens in and as the poem, and it is only at “a late stage” that it can be understood or that its effects can be felt (i.e. only then can a reader attempt a “good naturalisation” or “thematic synthesis”). Forrest-Thomson’s insistence on the “non-semantic” levels of language is one of her strongest and most useful lessons, even as these non-semantic levels are always “naturalized” through the critic’s activity of finding meaning in the new order’s contours and structure. As Forrest-Thomson insists,



Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

67

Artifice tells us that selecting and ordering external contexts is one of the basic manoeuvres in writing and reading poetry . . . When we get behind the surface of a poem we encounter not another kind of meaning nor a different non-poetic world, but another organisation of the levels of language that produce meaning. Through the relation between these levels, language and the world may be changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. Often, of course, the birth is slow and obscured; it may seem a blur rather than a change. (36)

The imperceptibility of the “change” wrought by (good) poetry is here chalked up to its slow pace and indirection: “language and the world may be changed, changed utterly” but this “birth is slow and obscured.” Thus, there is no directly perceptible movement from the world into the poem, nor is there any immediately visible movement back out into the world. Yet, all the same, there is an assertion of “utter change”:  “The world is not something static, irredeemably given by a natural language. When language is re-imagined the world expands with it” (19). This change takes place through an organization that is neither determined by nor entirely autonomous from the “old order” of the “non-poetic world.” In order to attribute this transformative power to poetry, Forrest-Thomson makes it clear that artifice is a property of poetry rather than of prose, a distinction that can only be maintained through an at least minimally operational opposition between poetry and prose. Since poetry seems to be defined here implicitly (and tautologically) as that which is made different by artifice (which is what poems are made of), “prose” becomes a fictional entity, a negation of the poetic that all the same houses the only discourse through which a proper critical recognition of artifice can take place. Rather than knocking Forrest-Thomson’s distinction between poetry and prose, I  want to understand it, and most of her own prose, as an attempt to navigate the impasse of claiming an importance for poetry while distrusting, and even despising, previous attempts to do so. That is, this element of ForrestThomson’s theory rehearses a long tradition of literary critical thinking traceable at least as far back as German philosophical aesthetics. As I argued earlier, this post-Kantian tradition posits the aesthetic as a space in which antinomies, and particularly the seemingly ineradicable distance between individual self and civil or political society, can be reconciled through the “free play” of the mental faculties. Part of my point in what follows is to show, by way of Forrest-Thomson’s poetic argument with Empson, the extent to which the terms of the discussion were set by nineteenth- and twentieth-century English aesthetic theory, in which learning to read is unavoidably a question of moral improvement and

68

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

civic management. The particular issues over which she argues with other critics (and particularly Empson) tend to surround the question of the relation between poetic artifice and the “external world.” Forrest-Thomson’s efforts to sever artifice from the “non-verbal world” seem to respond to the moralizing facets of lyric pedagogy that extend from Arnold through the Practical Criticism and culminate in Leavisite anti-Marxist proposals for cultural struggle to preserve the great tradition of English humanism. Keston Sutherland glosses Poetic Artifice in terms of its relation to the tradition of literary criticism as a form of moral preparation for civic engagement. I quote his lucid account at some length: Its question is ‘how we ourselves should behave . . . as readers,’ [Poetic Artifice 15] and its answer is that we should not objectionably turn poems into stories about life, history, and the world . . . We might think that this question, ‘how we ourselves should behave . . . as readers,’ must be a moral question . . ., but her emphatically restricted interest, in Poetic Artifice, in our behaviour only ‘as readers,’ suggests that Forrest-Thomson may intend, if not an outright dismissal of moral questions, than at least a specimen question whose moral meaning is subversively isolated. Subversively because her question tells us that how we behave ‘as readers’ has, radically at least, nothing to do with any other way we might behave in what she was satisfied to call the external world, and indeed that the confusion of the two is objectionable; and if that is true then what we call morality must itself be radically discontinuous in order to exist in both separate contexts, that is, both in the context of reading and in the context of living. How we behave in the context of reading is not just an instance of how we behave in general. If there is a morality of the text, it may be structurally homologous with, but will not be simply the same thing as, nor simply capable of influencing or being influenced by, other moralities. (Sutherland 1–2)

Sutherland provides here an excellent description of Poetic Artifice’s critical injunction for the reader of poetry to abstain from moralizing. In this way, ForrestThomson seeks to sever critical judgment from moral judgment, to repudiate the idea that reading poems serves as preparation for action in the world. But I think that further light can be shed on the contradictory implications of this effort when the history of Practical Criticism at Cambridge is more explicitly taken into account. What must be made explicit is the extraordinary force of the tradition against which Forrest-Thomson’s polemic is directed: namely, the tradition of Practical Criticism, the then—and still—institutionalized form of English literary study that has been developed by Cambridge faculty and alums, from Richards to Prynne.



Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

69

Following the lead of her training, Forrest-Thomson complains in the introduction to Poetic Artifice about the critical tendency to reduce poetry to propositional statements and to focus merely on semantic levels of language that belie the actual form of the poem. But alongside this comes an assertion that through good, productive readings, poetry can change our world. ForrestThomson writes, Contemporary poetry has suffered from critics’ disposition to make poetry above all a statement about the external world, and therefore it is now especially important somewhat to redress the balance, to stress the importance of artifice. Poetry can only be a valid and valuable activity when we recognise the value of the artifice which makes it different from prose. Indeed, it is only through artifice that poetry can challenge our ordinary linguistic orderings of the world, make us question the way in which we make sense of things, and induce us to consider its alternative linguistic orders as a new way of viewing the world. (xi)

Here we enter murky territory: it is difficult to tell if artifice is a way of viewing the world or rather if it is a new world in its own right. It is in the recreation and reordering of the world that Forrest-Thomson sees the subversive and liberating potential of reading poetry, but this is still referred to as a “way of viewing the world.” Only now, the “world” is the internal world of the poem, which no longer maps onto external referents. In this sense, Forrest-Thomson reinscribes the sort of moralistic lyric pedagogy that she seeks to excise from her work, although the new ways of ordering the world can no longer be translated neatly back into nonpoetic languages. Aporetic though this morality of artifice may be, it continues to operate via the machinery of a pedagogical-ethical exemplarity: goodness is still attached to good reading, and perhaps this is the only kind of goodness that can be ascertained. In many ways, Forrest-Thomson’s work is continuous with the early polemics of Richards, who had put forth the idea that poetry’s “pseudo-statements” should not be immediately referred to the outside world and then judged as “true” or “false.” At the same time, Richards insisted that, while poetry was not a statement about the “external world,” it was the communication of a mental state, however complex. The success or failure of a poem, then, lay in its ability to make recognizable and to reproduce in the reader an original mental state or feeling. Empson queried the unity of such mental states or “attitudes” but held on in his theoretical statements to the possibility for rational reconstructions of poetic language. Forrest-Thomson, for her part, rejects Empson’s rationalism,

70

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

insisting that external standards of rationality do not apply to the new orderings of poetic artifice. I want to stress that I  do not believe Forrest-Thomson’s resistance to the Richards-Empson theory of communication is simply the result of her education in French structuralism, or in the philosophy of language, or of her taste for poets like Ashbery and Prynne (the latter provides, on her reading, an example of what she calls “tendentious obscurity”).27 Forrest-Thomson’s Poetic Artifice is, after all, as much a polemic as a faulty scientific study. For ForrestThomson, poetic artifice (and not the “state of mind”-based criticism argued for by Richards and even by Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity) must be asserted as a counterweight to the moralism that attends the otherwise useful methods of Practical Criticism. While her own critical methods are very much drawn from Empson, Richards and American New Criticism, the polemical thrust of her work unhinges these methods from their moralistic embellishments by redirecting the attention that these writers gave to “external” contexts and “non-verbal elements” toward the “internal organization” of poetry. Thus, her work is very much of and from mid-twentieth-century Cambridge, even as its provenance extends to Tel Quel, philosophy of language (although Wittgenstein was, of course, a fellow at Cambridge) and mid-century American modernist verse (John Ashbery in particular). That her poetry is not amenable to her theory may be the case, but this misses the point that a moralizing discourse of lyric pedagogy is likely inevitable as long as one stays insistently within the domain of literary criticism, attempting to justify and defend it using the dwindling legs on which it currently stands.

Poise and sense: Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s Empson I close this chapter with an extended reading of Forrest-Thomson’s poem “Not Pastoral Enough,” examining the difficulties faced by a poet attempting to reject lyric pedagogy’s moral pretensions while simultaneously staking a claim for a politics of pure poetry. “Not Pastoral Enough” appears in ForrestThomson’s On the Periphery, published by Wendy Mulford’s Street Editions Press in 1976, one year after the poet’s untimely death. On the Periphery itself consists of poems composed in the last years of Forrest-Thomson’s life, some of which had been published in journals and in the limited chapbook publication of Cordelia: or, ‘A Poem Should Not Mean, but Be’ in 1974. On the Periphery includes a number of poems that make direct references to literary



Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

71

critics and teachers: the first two poems consist of Oulipian-style exercises in excising and rearranging words from the works of F. R. Leavis and Graham Hough (Forrest-Thomson’s thesis director at Cambridge); the third takes on Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Other poems rework texts by or include references to Pound, Eliot, J. L. Austin, Barthes and J. H. Prynne. But perhaps no single poet or critic is as central to these poems as William Empson. Following the poem “Pastoral” (which Forrest-Thomson had the audacity and good sense to quote and analyze in Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth Century Poetry) comes “Not Pastoral Enough,” an homage to William Empson. That both poems allude to Empson’s magisterial work of 1935, Some Versions of Pastoral, seems clear enough from this dedication. In Some Versions of Pastoral, the 1935 follow-up to Seven Types of Ambiguity, Empson redescribes pastoral as a mode of writing that puts the complexity of the world into a comparatively simple form without eradicating the contradictions that spawn it. Additionally, pastoral is an attempt to reconcile social conflicts: The poetic statements of human waste and limitation, whose function is to give strength to see life clearly and so to adopt a fuller attitude to it, usually bring in, or leave room for the reader to bring in, the whole set of pastoral ideas. For such crucial literary achievements are likely to attempt to reconcile some conflict between the parts of a society; literature is a social process, and also an attempt to reconcile the conflicts of an individual in whom those of society will be mirrored. (Some Versions 19)

As Paul Alpers notes, Empson never provides his reader with any encompassing definition of pastoral: “Readers naturally seek Empson’s ‘definition of pastoral’ and are frustrated when they find what seems to be a collection of brilliant fragments” (Alpers 101). Still, it was possible for Forrest-Thomson to suggest that something might not be “pastoral enough”; the exact explanation for this failing, however, is less clear. Does the poem announce its failure to reduce the complex to something simple enough or to attempt an aesthetic reconciliation of a social contradiction? The answer seems to be both: Forrest-Thomson would not argue that either of these are undesirable goals but would more radically insist that they are both impossible and have nothing to do with the way that poetic language works. For Forrest-Thomson, a good reading of poetry would first have to account for the various nonsemantic layers of artifice—rhythm, meter, sound patterning—before trying to produce a “thematic synthesis” such as those that Empson attributes to pastoral.

72

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

“Not Pastoral Enough” is certainly readable as a parody of Empson’s critical method and a not-so-subtle recommendation that the student of Practical Criticism take some of his readings with more than a grain of salt. The poem is also, however, a rewriting of Empson’s own poem, “Villanelle,” which reads, It is the pain, it is the pain endures. Your chemic beauty burned my muscles through. Poise of my hands reminded me of yours. What later purge from this deep toxin cures? What kindness now could the old salve renew? It is the pain, it is the pain endures. The infection slept (custom or change inures) And when pain’s secondary phase was due Poise of my hands reminded me of yours. How safe I felt, whom memory assures, Rich that your grace safely by heart I knew. It is the pain, it is the pain endures. My stare drank deep beauty that still allures. My heart pumps yet the poison draught of you. Poise of my hands reminded me of yours. You are still kind whom the same shape immures. Kind and beyond adieu. We miss our cue. It is the pain, it is the pain endures. Poise of my hands reminded me of yours. (The Complete Poems 33)

This poem is one of three villanelles that Empson published during his lifetime, alongside “Reflection from Anita Loos” and the more famous “Missing Dates,” which thematically and formally resembles “Villanelle” (from “Missing Dates”: “Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills./…/ The waste remains, the waste remains and kills”; The Complete Poems 62). Like “Missing Dates,” “Villanelle” narrates the necessary recurrence of the pain of love. In “Villanelle,” a sense memory serves as a catalyst for the dormant pain of lost love:  “The infection slept (custom or change inures)/ And when pain’s secondary phase was due/ Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.” The conceit here is not especially unusual: lost love is experienced somatically as pain and subsequently figured as a traceable physical event; lost love is both an external force acting on the body and the body doing something to itself.



Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

73

The poem’s pseudo-scientific lexicon draws from archaic sciences, alternating alchemical and early modern medical discourse to imply a causal relation between physical process and emotion. Upon closer examination, however, the dominion of the chemical and biological is ironically staged through the moral-aesthetic language of “poise.” That is, the “poise” of hands is not merely a physical characteristic; it specifically implies a position or gesture maintained in between, whether this is a tenuous balance or a peaceful equilibrium. One might semantically expect the word “position” or “shape” or even “repose,” while sonically “pose” would make the most of the sound patterning. There is no obvious reason why the “oi” phoneme should appear here (except perhaps to suggest a “poison”), and the oddness of this prominent word choice draws our attention to the semantics of “poise” as equilibrium or balance—in other words, as what Forrest-Thomson calls artifice. The implication of form is reiterated by the line “You are still kind whom the same shape immures,” in which the “shape” is not something comfortably or naturally borne by “you” but rather something that constrains, perhaps even causing pain. Of course, the villanelle itself is such a constrained shape or form, and for all “your” kindness, you are molded “beyond adieu” by the form. The poem closes with the refrain asserting that “poise”—the aesthetic equilibrium of sense impressions and feelings—is ultimately unsatisfying, immuring and painful. Formal constraint and equilibrium are painful, that is, and not very good preparation for love. What “endures” is precisely not a poised stance but the pain that attends it. I take this ambivalence of Empson’s “poise” as a foundation for reading Forrest-Thomson’s rewriting. The A1 line of Forrest-Thomson’s “Not Pastoral Enough” echoes the syntax of Empson’s refrain, with a change in noun and verb (“pain endures” becomes “sense, controls”)28: Not Pastoral Enough          homage to William Empson It is the sense, it is the sense, controls, Landing every poem like a fish. Unhuman forms must not assert their roles. Glittering scales require the deadly tolls Of net and knife. Scales fall to relish. It is the sense, it is the sense, controls. Yet languages are apt to miss on souls If reason only guts them. Applying the wish, Unhuman forms must not assert their roles,

74

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism Ignores the fact that poems have two poles That must be opposite. Hard then to finish It is the sense, it is the sense, controls, Without a sense of lining up for doles From other kitchens that give us the garnish: Unhuman forms must not assert their roles. And this (forgive me) is like carrying coals To Sheffield. Irrelevance betrays a formal anguish. It is the sense, it is the sense, controls, ‘unhuman forms must not assert their roles’. (On the Periphery 18)

This is a neatly crafted villanelle built around the lines “It is the sense, it is the sense, controls” and “Unhuman forms must not assert their roles,” with all first lines ending with variants of the end-rhyme “oles” and second lines with the end-rhyme “ish.” While Forrest-Thomson was not averse to writing in fixed forms, this is her only published villanelle. The villanelle form provides ample opportunity to ironize multiple refrains, which makes it seem an apt vessel for the kind of parody that the poem appears to be. Most readers, indeed, have read the poem as simple parody; in a thoughtful essay on the place of Cambridge in Forrest-Thomson’s poetry, Gareth Farmer notes, The emphatic repetition of ‘sense’ in the opening line and refrain parodies Forrest-Thomson [sic] conception of Empson (and others’) critical method of trying to catch a poem’s sense too quickly without attending (or ‘relishing’) its formal qualities. (‘Slightly Hysterical’ 170–71)

Indeed, Forrest-Thomson’s poem is readily readable as such a parody. This is especially so given that Forrest-Thomson has marked the poem as “Not Pastoral Enough,” and that she has elsewhere directly written on ‘the association of Parody with Pastoral’: Pastoral is the genre which asserts connection on the conventional level, which is granted, by convention, the right to put the complex into the simple, to unify the natural with the highly artificial, to bring together the tribe and the poet. Parody is its counterpart, as a technique stressing connection on the thematic level by taking another language as its theme. (Poetic Artifice 113)

I’m not sure, however, that it makes sense so quickly to reduce the poem to parody or to a purely polemical operation. The poem itself frankly asks forgiveness for



Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

75

this parodic quality, for “carrying coals/To Sheffield,” where Empson lived and taught from the 1950s until he retired. Although Sheffield, unlike Newcastle, is not especially famous for coal, the implication is that Empson knows all of this, already. This sort of apology could be read as a moment of pastoral invocation— it is a gesture of bringing together and of direct address, and not simply an extension of parody’s “connection on the thematic level.” In fact, Forrest-Thomson’s own critical recommendations suggest that this kind of naturalization of a unilateral relationship between form and content (i.e. the villanelle is a good form to choose if you want to write a parody) may be hasty: If form must support content, it is no less necessary . . . that content should support form. There must be as much or as little power in the theme as transmitted through the image-complex—that is, through a mixture of meaning and the non-semantic levels—as is appropriate for the formal convention. In other words, themes appropriate for the villanelle will not suit the sonnet, still less the ode or the epic. (Poetic Artifice 121)

Later in the same chapter, Forrest-Thomson refers, in an aside, to the “banality in content necessary to such stylised forms as villanelle and sestina” (136). In other words, Forrest-Thomson would insist that there is no sound reason to assume that a theme was found and then a form chosen. Indeed, the correspondence between Forrest-Thomson’s poem and Empson’s would suggest that she initially set out to write a villanelle as an echo of Empson, and that the echoes of Empson’s language dictated the word choices as much as any “theme” or “idea” she may have intended to convey. Whatever its genesis, the poem does go to great lengths to ironize the semantically and sonically rich word “sense.” This is not just any word for either Empson or Forrest-Thomson, and it is very difficult to determine to what end this irony ultimately works. Empson himself wrote at length about the complexity of the word “sense,” most notably in a series of essays published as c­ hapters 12–15 of his 1951 The Structure of Complex Words. In c­ hapter 14, “Sense in the Prelude,” Empson provides an encyclopedic account of the appearance of the word “sense” in Wordsworth’s Prelude. Empson argues that, in Wordsworth’s poem, “the word . . . means both the process of sensing and the supreme act of imagination, and unites them by a jump” over the “middle” meaning of “good sense” or judgment (Structure 304). Sense can signify in other ways, too (as sensation, meaning or interpretation, sense of humor, sensuality, etc.); Forrest-Thomson’s poem bears on these multiple senses of “sense,” creating what Empson called an ambiguity of

76

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

the seventh type, one where a contradiction is expressed through a single word with at least two different meanings and where, by way of the word’s placement, these meanings seem to be directly opposed. “Sense” is capable of playing this role, especially insofar as the various “senses” of sense are not entirely unconnected; indeed, Empson argues that a connection or likeness between the multiple meanings of the word is a necessary condition for the seventh type of ambiguity: Grammatical machinery may be assumed which would make the contradiction into two statements; thus ‘p and -p’ may mean: ‘If a=a1, then p; if a=a2, then -p.’ If a1 and a2 are very different from one another, so that the two statements are fitted together with ingenuity, then I  should put the statement into an earlier type; if a1 and a2 are very like one another, so that the contradiction expresses both the need for and the difficulty of separating them, then I should regard the statement as an ambiguity of the seventh type corresponding to thought and knowing one’s way about the matter in hand. But such contradictions are often used, as it were by analogy from this, when the speaker does not know what a1 and a2 are. (Seven Types of Ambiguity 196)

Whether or not Forrest-Thomson “knows” the difference between the different kinds of sense is rather beside the point; the word carries these meanings insofar as “sense,” in Forrest-Thomson’s poem, can refer to, among other things, what is available to the senses—the “pure sound” or visual aspects of poetry on the page— or to the “meaning” of the words. Forrest-Thomson’s poem most obviously uses the word “sense” to signify “meaning,” and this is how Farmer and others have read it, but it carries with it notions of sensation, sensibility and sensuality. Like other complex words, according to Empson, “compacted doctrines” necessarily attend the word “sense,” in poetry as in ordinary speech. For the younger Empson, ambiguity in literary language had been a reflection of ambiguities in the world that extended beyond the linguistic. His later work on The Structure of Complex Words slightly modifies this claim, as he insists that literary complexity is continuous with complexity in ordinary language and can be divided into the same types (but not that it is a “reflection” of complexity in the world). Forrest-Thomson’s whole critical apparatus, as we have seen, works to reject this assumption that poems can represent any extralinguistic (or “non-verbal”) “state of mind” or that they are primarily “continuous” with ordinary language. Indeed, she seems to argue most vociferously with Empson rather than with Richards or Leavis precisely because he is (as in ­chapter  7 of Seven Types of Ambiguity) more interested than they in language’s capacity to avoid, defer or,



Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

77

as Forrest-Thomson puts it, “suspend” semantic closure and thematic synthesis. Empson doesn’t go nearly far enough in this direction for Forrest-Thomson. But, at the very least, his analysis of “sense” in Wordsworth demonstrates a willingness to consider how the word avoids, through Wordsworth’s magisterially sophistic handling of it, crystallizing any particular compacted doctrine into a theory of sense: “I think it is fair to say that Wordsworth had not got any translation ready; he was much better at adumbrating his doctrine through rhetorical devices than at writing it out in full” (Structure of Complex Words 299–300). In this way, Empson’s account of “Sense in The Prelude” forms an exception to the implication that poetry, like ordinary language, actually does “make sense”: “What is really in question, I  think, is not any theory in Wordsworth’s mind about the word but a manipulative feeling, of what he could make it do; a thing more familiar perhaps to poets than critics, and which a poet easily forgets” (Structure of Complex Words 293). On the one hand, this provides Empson with some grounds for censuring Wordsworth, as he had in his reading of “Tintern Abbey” in ­chapter 4 of Seven Types (151–54). Christopher Norris suggests that Empson thinks it important not to let Wordsworth off too lightly by suspending our normal logico-semantic ‘machinery’ of rational judgment, enjoying what the poem has to offer by way of uplifting pantheist sentiment, and thus falling in with a suasive rhetoric capable of other (less innocent or high-minded) uses. (Norris and Mapp 73)29

On the other hand, Empson cautiously suggests in “Sense in the Prelude” that Wordsworth’s “manipulative feeling” may have a value distinct from that of “rational judgment.” In this way, the word “sense” provides a moment in Empson’s work where poetry that does not “make good sense” is saved from the class of sophistry or “suasive rhetoric”: It does not seem unfair to say that [Wordsworth] induced people to believe he had expounded a consistent philosophy through the firmness and assurance with which he used equations of Type IV [i.e. roughly, those in which two senses of a word are used with equal weight due to their ‘similar relation to a third meaning of the word, which may be only vaguely conceived’ (Structure of Complex Words 52)]; equations whose claim was false, because they did not really erect a third concept as they pretended to; and in saying this I do not mean to deny that the result makes very good poetry, and probably suggests important truths. (305)30

In this way, Empson admits of a “poetic” value—that of “very good poetry”—that does not make sense according to the measure of rationality that he otherwise

78

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

applies throughout the majority of Complex Words. This may be precisely the kind of “reordering” that Forrest-Thomson claims to be the achievement of poetic artifice. To return to “Not Pastoral Enough,” the “b” rhyme does seem to argue against treating poems only by looking for sense-as-meaning; “landing every poem like a fish” suggests the threat posed to poetry by focusing only on the semantic functions of language:  “landed” fish will perish. The “b” rhyme includes a set of gustatory and culinary metaphors, and fish has no thematic priority over the other end words. And so relish, wish, finish, garnish and anguish may have proven just as decisive in the selection of the –ish end rhyme (there is no way to know, nor is it a sound assumption that one word was “chosen” first at all, or solely on the basis of end rhyme rather than internal sound patterning, syntax, theme or one of the other “levels” of artifice that Forrest-Thomson is so careful to delineate). This gustatory rhetoric brings the physicality and sensuality of “sense” to bear on the poem: “Applying the wish,/Unhuman forms must not assert their roles,// Ignores the fact that poems have two poles/ That must be opposite. Hard then to finish/ It is the sense, it is the sense, controls,// Without a sense of lining up for doles/ From other kitchens that give us the garnish:  /Unhuman forms must not assert their roles.” That is, the polemical “garnish,” the closing refrain, is actually prepared, the poem asserts, in “other kitchens” than the one of sensemaking and most likely from the formal requirements of the villanelle. But the thematic continuity of “other kitchens” and “garnish” reminds us that this form of determination still has everything to do with a different version of “sense,” and that perhaps “it is the sense, it is the sense, controls” after all. My reading of “Not Pastoral Enough” is aimed to show the extent to which Forrest-Thomson’s work was even more of a response to the Practical Criticism and to the tradition of lyric pedagogy than has thus far been accounted for, and that this is the case regardless of her arguably feminist (or at least, antipatriarchal) poetic writing about Cambridge literary culture. The point, here as elsewhere in this chapter, has been to highlight the political ineffectuality of pedagogical-moralistic justifications for literary criticism and for poetic production. Forrest-Thomson managed to produce fascinating critical theory and some of the most incisive poetry of her moment precisely because she worked at the contradictions of the Arnold-Richards traditions, but she could not resolve them within the terms of literary criticism alone, hard as she tried to purify it of moralism. She and Prynne remain within the orbit of Practical Criticism and its moral-pedagogical imaginary of the social production of



Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

79

poetry. This chapter has aimed to demonstrate the durability and persistence of lyric pedagogy beyond its instrumental usefulness, even among those who would like to exceed the strictures of a Cambridge-centered social imaginary. Various forms of affiliation—teacher–student, nontraditional family, affinity group, democratic centralist organization—are neither absolutely “good” nor ‘bad’ forms of association from a revolutionary standpoint. All the same, they need to be understood as complex social relations rather than as simple standpoints or moral choices. In the chapters that follow, I  turn to writers associated with “Cambridge” poetry who not only rejected but who also engaged in serious alternatives to the closed circle in which poetry and literary study serve only prepolitical, moral-pedagogical ends. The debates about the social pedagogy of poetry that this chapter has set up will remain relevant throughout. Lyric pedagogy’s insistence on reading poetry as an intersubjective training ground for political life has had deep and tough roots. The social deracination central to Practical Criticism’s ethics of intersubjectivity serves to reproduce an individualist ideology that is hostile to the kind of thinking of sociality that I will find in Riley and Mulford. Only a radical approach to social reproduction can provide ways out of the impasse of lyric pedagogy.

2

Denise Riley’s Socialized Biology

This chapter surveys the work of Denise Riley from roughly 1975 to 1985, analyzing the formal textures of her prose and poetry alongside the political and personal contexts that occasioned these writings and the ways in which Riley intervened in them. Work on Denise Riley as a poet, even a “feminist” poet, has tended to miss the actual force of her critical writings in the context of their political moorings, and work on Riley as a feminist theorist has tended simply to note her status as a “poet” to explain away the peculiarities of her prose. The poetry and prose seem to stem from the same set of questions and concerns, even as they each take different kinds of responsibilities and linguistic approaches to them.1 Here, I  undertake a reading of the early poetry with the early critical writings, integrating each part of the oeuvre in a fashion that work on Riley in feminist and literary studies has generally avoided. Read together, I argue, her early prose and poetry trace what she herself calls a “socialized biology” at the heart of poetic and political language. Riley’s development of a socialized biology cuts directly against lyric pedagogy by rejecting the assumption that poetry’s sociality can be reduced to an ethics of intersubjective encounters. I situate this reading of Riley’s work within the framework I have developed in about the social stakes of lyric pedagogy and the latter’s limitations for anticapitalist and feminist politics. Riley’s work provides strategies for interrupting the lyric pedagogical understanding of poetry as prepolitical moral training. The result, I  argue, is the effective disruption of the prevalent idea that some literary “morality” connects culture to politics—precisely because Riley’s work refuses lyric pedagogy’s baseline insistence that intersubjectivity is previous to politics. This work gives an implicit account of the relationship between poetry and social reproduction that jettisons the lyric pedagogical tradition, taking its lead from a critical politics and poetics of social reproductive justice.

82

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

‘The Force of Circumstance’ In her 1983 War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother, Riley sought to understand how developmental psychology, psychoanalysis, state social policies, wartime economics, employers’ production needs and feminist and socialist organizing intersected around the rapid rise and fall of municipal nurseries in and after the Second World War in Britain. Riley’s interest in this question sprang from her own experiences as a single mother with socialist commitments active in the women’s movement in the 1970s and 1980s. The problem that animated Riley’s work can be stated in a relatively straightforward way even as its implications open into a web of conceptual and affective tangles: how to articulate the needs of single working mothers under late capitalism, without reentrenching the ideology of motherhood as a fixed role separate from the gender-neutral “worker” or “citizen.” Riley’s concluding remarks may sound somewhat simple:  “My conviction is that . . . there can be no version of “motherhood” as such which can be deployed to construct a radical politics” (War in the Nursery 196). But what gets her to this point is a rather tremendous heap of historical and theoretical material, all compiled in order to understand how various discourses, ideologies and material circumstances intertwined, in the period in question, to produce the figure of a “mother” that “effectively rendered invisible the needs of those working women with children” (7). Riley begins with a chapter on “Biology, Psychology and Gender in Socialist and Feminist Thinking” in which she points to the need in socialist-feminist praxis to interrogate the categories of the biological and the social: There is a need, in the often painful gap between the body politic and the individual body, for an idea of a socialised biology. This would speak to problems adumbrated in slogans like ‘the right to choose’, ‘the right to sexual self-determination’ ‘control of one’s own body’—the language of campaigns concerning abortion and contraception, welfare and population policies, or asserting sexual categories. The idea of a socialised biology would also join broader questions about human capacities and wants, growth, illness, ageing; and, instead of holding these at the margins of socialism, would set them at the centre of its ethical nerve. At the same time, I want to illustrate ways in which the history of psychology has in fact worked against this kind of development, sometimes by acting as an inadequate representation of socialised biology. (8–9)

The subsequent chapters of her book do just that, moving through the literature on developmental psychology that depicts the infant as progressing from biological



Denise Riley’s Socialized Biology

83

animality to social “humanity” (­chapter 2), understandings in child psychology of the basic needs of infants (particularly Kleinian theories of infantile aggression— chapter 3), the “popularization” of these ideas in Bowlby’s theory of “maternal deprivation” (­chapter 4), how these psychological theories figured in policies on wartime nurseries alongside other ideologies and material factors (­chapter 5) and finally, in c­ hapter 6, the rise of postwar pronatalism and its relation to various sectors of the state, employers’ demands, socialist and feminist politics and the continually mounting address to an isolated figure of “the mother.” I will return to some of these points in more detail later in my chapter. While War in the Nursery, the book version of her PhD thesis in Philosophy from the University of Sussex, is an academic study, Riley concurrently wrote a number of short prose pieces for feminist and socialist newsletters and journals that supplemented this work and brought into focus the ways in which these questions crossed with her own life. In “The Force of Circumstance,” published in the socialist-feminist newsletter Red Rag in 1975, Riley reflected on the “conservatising” effects that being a single mother had on her, even within the context of a leftist feminist movement: It’s struck me that the single mother is effectively voiceless inside the Women’s Movement as a whole; that while some good practical work is being done by various one-parent-family pressure groups tangential to the movement, and was done some years back by women in the claimants’ unions—cf The Unsupported Mothers’ Handbook—at the present we aren’t talking as single mothers on any broad basis. At the moment we fit in around the cracks in everyone’s theorising like so much polyfilla. I’m beginning to feel what I  can only describe as the profoundly conservatising effect of being a single mother now. I  sense this conservatising on all fronts at once; housing, geography, time, work, medicine, sexuality, love. (‘The Force of Circumstance’ 26)2

Continuous from this early piece through her later work is an insistence on the affective dimensions of lived material and ideological circumstances, on the feelings that are not necessarily mitigated by a recognition of their ideological or historical embeddedness. Take “the housing question,” for instance: Everything turns on the housing question as the most visible uniter (‘home’) of structures of money and class. It’s in respect of housing that my single motherness pushes me back hard into the most overtly conservative position. I’d hoped to live more or less communally with people I  cared for and could work with (without pushing the commune ideology too far; mutual support/ convenience not necessarily entailing good politics). But I never found/co-made

84

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism such a group. Lacking one, I couldn’t wait; and so I filled in such gaps as turned up in peoples’ flats on a need-a-roof-over-my-and-child’s-head basis, (which many of us do). In the event we have moved seven or eight times in his [her child’s] life-time; most of those moves I didn’t want, but were forced on us as a result of overcrowding, emotional demands from people in a landlord position which couldn’t be met, leases expiring, and so forth. The obvious solution to having a child alone is to live with people; but there are always a majority who can’t or so far haven’t had the massive good fortune of making it work, who cannot be consoled by the diminishing prospect of true communism. Though we know the utter brutal irrationality of living alone. (26; emphases in original)

In this case, the “knowledge” that her newfound, “conservative” desire for private home ownership and family security is, in part, the result of a lack of socialized material resources that might otherwise be available—or, indeed, fought for—does not lead to any straightforward transformation of this desire. Riley recognizes the appeal of prefigurative, libertarian-socialist communitarian ideals while feeling their inadequacy in the absence of the material circumstances that would make them truly democratic possibilities. We may “know the utter brutal irrationality of living alone,” but we may still need and even desire it in the absence of other practicable options. Riley also implies that unmet emotional needs intertwine with unmet material needs in awkward ways:  “emotional demands from people in a landlord position which couldn’t be met.” This kind of autobiographical reflection also shows up in Riley’s poetry, albeit in a form that is hardly confessional or expressive in the crude sense of transcribing raw lived “experience.” Consider the following poem, from Riley’s 1977 Marxism for Infants: You have a family? It is impermissible. There is only myself complete and arched like a rainbow or an old tree with gracious arms descending over the rest of me who is the young children in my shelter who grow up under my leaves and rain In our own shade we embrace each other gravely & look out tenderly upon the world seeking only contemporaries and speech and light, no father. (“Marxism” 15)



Denise Riley’s Socialized Biology

85

Here the exigencies of “living alone with children,” as another poem calls it, are worked through in various modes—having a family is impermissible for the single mother, who is not accounted for or celebrated by familialist rhetoric. This rhetoric is simultaneously folded into a more general, if metaphysical, question, namely, whether or not anyone ever has a family, or whether, rather, “there is only myself.” But this solipsistic humility and caution, whether socially enforced or individually elected, immediately warps into a set of stock attributes of the individual, “complete and arched” and then of motherhood “like a rainbow or an old tree/ with gracious arms descending.” And then, in another reversal, the “complete” I folds over itself, “over the rest of me” which is, in fact, composed of others: “who is the young/ children in my shelter who grow/ up under my leaves and rain.” And so a firstperson plural emerges but not in the form of a celebrated universality; rather, it is the moment of a conservatizing familial-individualism, the notion of a “haven in a heartless world” that many feminists rightly decried:  “In our own shade / we embrace each other gravely &/ look out tenderly upon the world.”3 This grave embrace speaks to conservatizing forms of familialist attachment in the face of the force of circumstance. Yet the hope for other forms of kinship, based on mutual care and respect, remains in the “tender” gaze “out . . . upon the world/ seeking only contemporaries/ and speech and light, no father.” I have read this poem as a sort of laboratory or playground for the concerns brought up by “The Force of Circumstance” and War in the Nursery. But Marxism for Infants also opens well beyond the generic borders of political theory and personal narrative, into a series of verses that navigate the difficulty of voicing needs, feelings or desires through a social language and body that are both individuating and alienating: postcard;  “I live in silence here a wet winter the baby’s well I give her bear’s names Ursula Mischa Pola Living alone makes anyone crazy, especially with children” I live in silence here x is the condition of my silence s/he the tongue as a swan’s neck full and heavy in the mouth speech as a sexed thing the speaking limb is stilled (6)

86

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

The “I” who writes the “postcard” is effectively split and doubled, not only in the sense that any “I” is already both mine and anyone’s, but, more specifically, in the sense in that the voice of the “mother” already speaks for her children; she is already more and less than one. The apparent paradox of “living alone . . . with children” rehearses the splitting off of the “mother” from liberal and social-democratic understandings of citizenship, in which the putative equality of every “I” effectively erases the relationships of dependence and exploitation that produce the “freedom” of some at the expense of others (in this case, all those both relegated to and excluded from the figural status of “mother”). Unlike some of the poetry produced in the Women’s Liberation Movement, however, Riley’s “I” does not break through its former silence as a victorious, self-realized entity.4 Silence is not experienced as an external force of repression but rather as a constitutive factor in the production of language itself: “I live in silence here/ x is the condition of my silence.” The sexed silence in which the “I” comes to speak is somatized in the form of nonhuman prosthetics: “the tongue as a swan’s neck/ full and heavy in the mouth/ speech as a sexed thing.” But this kind of phenomenological investigation is also in tension with socialistfeminist aims, insofar as such conspicuously sexed somatization can, in the absence of Riley’s “socialized biology,” also elide the sociality of speech, making speech appear as a matter of personal hygiene or self-care, as solely one’s own responsibility, however constitutively exterior the “self ” may be. The poem shows how this embedded practice of individualizing sociality feeds into the loneliness of living with children in the celebrated intersubjectivity of motherhood. This poem, then, effectively illustrates the insufficiency of an intersubjecive ethics of social-sexual differentiation or of personal relationships more generally. The mother is at once a single entity asked to speak for herself and the container for an intersubjectivity that is her only allowable sociality: the preparation of the infant for social life. The poem protests that sovereign expressions of feeling in the confessional or consciousness-raising mode may only articulate needs that are already recognizable as the province of the imaginary figure of “the mother.” In which case, poetry seems like a curious place to turn in order to explore what one single mother’s needs might sound like (if this is, as I believe, one of the things that the volume seeks to do). These are, after all, political problems generated well beyond the boundaries of any “I”/“you” relationship, even as they are, significantly, experienced through interpersonal relationships and personal feelings. Riley’s work, then, in the tradition of Marx’s telegraphic theory of the “social individual” as developed in the Theses on Feuerbach and the Grundrisse, breaks



Denise Riley’s Socialized Biology

87

from an understanding of the social as a sum of preexisting intersubjective relations. Marx instead urges us to read those relations as expressions, at least in part, of more complex social formations. Marx’s Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach reads, “Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations” (n.p.). This is where, in breaking with a particular libertarian feminist aesthetics and ethics, Riley’s poetry also breaks away from lyric pedagogy’s framing, still palpable today, of poetry as a prefigurative training ground for social and political being:  the affects and addresses of poetry are always saturated with social and political content, and so it makes no sense to see them as preparatory for these arenas. Poetry does not, for Riley, cultivate that primary agency of liberal humanist social democracy, the ability to voice one’s needs and respond to the exigent demands of others, since the voice attributed to the social individual would only be readable through what she tantalizingly calls a “socialized biology” of speech. In what follows, I trace the idea of a socialized biology through Riley’s early critical work before undertaking a reading of Marxism for Infants.

“The Serious Burdens of Love” The circumstances of Denise Riley’s life in the 1970s and 1980s led her to remark on inadequate housing policies, the loneliness of bourgeois familialism (whether inside or out of “the family”), dwindling nursery provisions and the moral invigilation imposed on “unsupported mothers.” These were never simply problems of social policy; they were the material conditions of Riley’s life. Born in 1948 in Carlyle, Riley was raised as a Protestant by her adoptive parents, who sent her to Catholic school.5 Riley enrolled at Oxford to study English but found herself dissatisfied and transferred to Cambridge, where she studied philosophy and graduated with a degree in fine art. She subsequently did an MA and DPhil, both in philosophy at the University of Sussex. Her doctoral thesis, which turned into War in the Nursery, was on the “history of theories in European and American child psychology and psychoanalysis . . . so roughly, in the area of intellectual history, querying the category of ‘ideology’.”6 Riley lived in Cambridge during much of this time while raising her young children as mother in a one-parent household (she also lived in a squat in Lewes for some of this time); childcare was never merely an academic question for her. In her critical prose, Riley brings the personal politics of feminist and libertarian work into

88

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

contact with questions of political economy and socialist strategy, illuminating the social and material components behind personal politics without eclipsing the affective intensity that attends them. Riley’s political outlook in the 1970s developed in conversation with the traditions of Marxist-Leninist organizing and theory, the small group approach of the Women’s Liberation Movement, various forms of left libertarianism and the direct action tactics of particular campaigns such as the Unsupported Mother’s Group. Riley does not fit neatly into any of the categories or schools of socialist-feminist thought that surrounded her, insofar as she was not a member of any vanguard party but, all the same, did believe in the necessity of organizations making coordinated and concrete demands upon the state in the hopes of transforming society. Riley’s primary locus for political action in the 1970s was in work on specific campaigns pertaining to reproductive justice and nursery provisions within the Women’s Liberation Movement, particularly the Cambridge Women’s Liberation Group.7 From the mid- to late-1970s, Riley contributed a number of articles to the Cambridge Women’s Liberation Newsletter, ranging from discussions of “A Woman’s Right to Choose” to the possibility of a women’s self-help therapy group. In all of these contributions, including those that are co-authored, Riley’s characteristic dialectical style is clear. Her prose provides the index of a profoundly self-critical mind and ear at work, catching itself in false generalities but never paralyzed by the necessity of being wrong sometimes. In a short piece written for the Socialist Women’s Regional Workshop in 1976, Riley argued along with two co-authors that a “positive politics of the family” was necessary for women and for the working class in general: Nineteenth and early twentieth-century socialists and feminists who did campaign for the dissemination of information about birth control were plunged into a set of contradictions—the Malthusian implications of contraception for the workers as an alternative to any true political and social reform; eugenistic elements and ‘social hygiene’ currents tangled up with genuine attempts at progressive reform . . . From our vantage point, it’s not hard to detect the eugenically reactionary elements in earlier population control attempts. But what’s more interesting, from a feminist perspective, is to try to establish how far anyway women’s fertility is susceptible to State intervention at all, and how. (‘Fertility, Abortion, “Choice”’ 2)8

The task of this work was to understand how socialist-feminist politics might take up the vexed problem of “the family” without either simply deriding



Denise Riley’s Socialized Biology

89

“bourgeois familialism” or upholding the telos of a genuinely “socialist family.” As elsewhere, part of the aim was also to attempt to disaggregate the aims of ruling class strategy from their effects:  state efforts at control are not, Riley insists, transparently successful affairs (these aspects of her approach draw from Foucault’s histories of discourse). No work on Riley has engaged with these early political writings. The closest is a chapter of Centre and Periphery in Modern British Poetry, in which Andrew Duncan speculates, in an oblique argument against “theoretical poetry,” that Riley’s early education in the natural sciences left a mark on her work:  “this early phase of very close observation of nature (birds and plants) left a mark: she has ever since detested generalisations and confusion and admired precise recording of phenomena” (Duncan 94). As a result, he argues, Riley “never fell for Marx and Freud, but spotted them on first reading as authoritarians whose paranoid love of system-building had led them away from the sober rules of evidence . . . I don’t think she was ever a Marxist . . .; she was at the libertarian-anarchist end of things’. Duncan sees in this a salutary rejection of authority, of political lines that proceed purely from theoretical doctrine and from misrepresentations of consciousness that occlude the truths of politics as it is lived and felt. While Duncan does a better scholarly job than many critics of Riley’s poetry in tracking down her sources, his analysis departs from the poetic work and, more disconcertingly, from Riley’s stated positions, to construct a speculative politics that has little relation to the actual history of Riley’s political involvement. To call Riley’s political work libertarian rather than Marxist is fundamentally incorrect, insofar as it elides Riley’s investments in state institutions and forms of social control and welfare, in their widely variable relations of antagonism and collusion with feminist and socialist aims and campaigns.9 In particular, Duncan ignores Riley’s outright dismay at some libertarian rejections of institutions like “the state” or “the family.”10 Duncan is right, though, that Riley finds fault in aspects of the Marxist tradition, from Engels through Lenin and to a certain extent Kollontai and Trotsky, in its assumption that “the family” is a coherent entity traceable across history and projectable into its future as a “socialist” or “communist” family. The socialist family was usually imagined in the utopian or dystopian terms of heterosexual monogamy (or “individual sex love”) that Engels championed as one of the moral advances of women under capitalism, one that would be fully realized and extended to men after the revolution. In a 1982 article taking on various “Left Critiques of the Family,” Riley maintains that “when one adds

90

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

Engels” famous pronouncement on women’s liberation [i.e. that it could only follow from the participation of women in public, large-scale industry] to his supposition that love and economics stand in a roughly superstructure-tobase relationship, then the limits and strengths of his position are clear” (79). Riley goes on to explain that “the historical specificity of family forms, on which Engels usefully insists . . ., is nevertheless an argument which may serve to retain orthodox conceptions of “the family.” In itself it does not contain any challenge to the idea of the family as a directly cellular unit of the body politic, a microcosm of society.” This dialectical critique of the Marxist treatment of the family is trenchant, but it is a far cry from Duncan’s understanding of Riley’s focus on the family, in which “the house is the exact boundary where the natural and affective association of the family comes up against the rational and alienated world of property” (Duncan 93). This reading of Riley’s feminism is, like many understandings of women’s liberation, unable to understand the extent to which housing and the family are already political concepts in various dialectical relationships with the “world of property.” There is evidence that Riley was interested in organizational tactics drawn from early radical feminist and left libertarian organizing, but she never takes these on as adequate substitutes for more direct engagement in class struggle. In the October 1976 issue of the Cambridge Women’s Liberation Newsletter, she contributed to a discussion about the possibility of forming a Women’s Self Help therapy group. Riley writes, rather sheepishly, “I am taking a deep breath to say that I’d like there to be some sort of women’s self-help, political/feminist, hmm, therapy group” (n.p.). On the one hand, Riley is quick to demonstrate her distance from some libertarian and radical feminist versions of self-help that might “conservatively substitute Psychology for politics” and “promise instant Joy.” On the other hand, Riley feels that much political organizing represses feelings in the name of a politics that tends to “moralistically and repressively reduce all individual anxieties to Politics with a monolithic P (or to History, or to Alienation) and to expect immediate resolution of private conflicts in political action.” Riley is characteristically pragmatic and undogmatic in her approach to the possibility of a self-help group, rare qualities amidst the bitter debates blustering around her between Marxist-Leninists and left libertarians over the appropriate tactics for organizing. She makes no blankly antiauthoritarian or messianic claims for collective self-help, but neither does she condemn it as a distraction from the “real” work of party building. In the passage that follows, Riley explains how personal politics might be addressed at the level of socialist and feminist organizing:



Denise Riley’s Socialized Biology

91

The personal may ‘be’ the political alright, but the relationship’s fine and complex and not one-to-one, e.g. for myself I  can account for continuing feelings of isolation, depression etc, in terms of ‘it’s all because you live with just one person who’s out to work, and you have young children and no job which takes you outside the house’ and can analyse that ad infinitum in terms of sex roles, nursery provisions, ideology, capitalism etc. But while this is fine as far as it goes, the most detailed understanding of the sources of unhappines [sic] need not lead to any increase in your capacity to act effectively;—years of communism and feminism haven’t stopped me from literally shaking in a roomful of people. It is not that the sources of this are mysterious to me; amateur self-psychoanalysis may inform—but not change, which is why I’d like there to be a practical group of some sort, if others would too. (‘Notes Toward’ n.p.)

In the proposed scenario, a self-help therapy group would be neither a replacement nor a preparation for “real” political work; but neither are her own personal anxieties unrelated to racism, capitalism and heteropatriarchy or to the organizing required to fight them. This kind of pragmatic approach to organizing is reflected throughout her remarkable 1987 essay, “The Serious Burdens of Love,” in which Riley revisits the question of how feminists and socialists might address childcare as a right and need: There will be a kind of eclecticism about formulations on child-care. Political thought always, in a way, comes from somewhere else; there’s a necessary stitched-togetherness at work, even though the dream of a pure and unique place of ideals is not to be forgotten in the name of a modest practicable daylight. For, however much history can demonstrate our lack of originality, the recognition of that need not entail a resentful surrender to ‘common sense’ . . . You can derive consolation, for instance, from the free-floating nature of the attachments of socialisms and feminisms to psycho-analysis and psychology. The consolations lie in the release from having to suppose that there is something necessarily congruent between them which has at all costs to be ‘worked out’; and also in taking this very supposition of congruence to have a considerable history and political interest in its own right. (188)

The socialist-feminist desire to articulate and ultimately meet the needs of working mothers through serious social provisions such as childcare requires a socialist-feminist theory of what needs are (184), but this theory will inevitably run up against its own constitutive embeddedness in discourses that exceed and even oppose it.11 No political theory (i.e. neither feminism nor socialism) can, Riley insists, cover the total field of human relations without borrowing from

92

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

other practices and frameworks that remain at least somewhat heteronomous.12 No amount of theoretical maneuvering can get around this, and Riley insists that it is best to acknowledge the necessary impurity of political theory in order to get on with it critically. As she writes in War in the Nursery, I take it that it’s necessary both to stress the non-self-evident nature of need and the intricacies of its determinants, and also to act politically as if needs could be met, or at least met half-way. The benign if traditionally unimaginative face of ‘socialist planning’, is, at the least, preferable to its known alternatives, however much its objects will always tend to be in excess of it and slip away. (193–94)

Riley is also scrupulous in indexing her understanding of the necessity for single-issue defensive slogans and reform campaigns (such as “a woman’s right to choose”) even as she recognizes the practical limits and metaphysical impossibilities of this liberal language of choice: ‘The right to choose’ must imply the right to choose to have (not merely not to have) children; and this right is a very metaphysical assertion in a situation where provisions for the myriad needs for bringing up those children in a humane way are thin on the ground. And, of course, conspicuously thinner for some than for others. To follow through the ‘positive’ aspect of the right to choose would entail a many-faceted campaign, a generalising of the issue which linked it to a wider context of agitation for the reforms necessary to give more plausibility to the notion of choice. Nevertheless, it seems to me to be wrong to criticise an essentially defensive slogan, so heavily marked by its necessary strategical locations, on the grounds of its incompleteness. (‘Feminist Thought and Reproductive Control’ 191)

Riley here refuses to stop short of opening to analysis the connections between these different questions of social policy, highlighting the affective tangles from which they are inextricable and understanding the movements of these discourses and ideologies both with and against their explanation in a simple economic base. In this, she both follows and departs from Althusser’s notion of the “overdetermination” of the superstructure and base. War in the Nursery is precisely such an effort to base Marxist-feminist strategy on an understanding of how economic and political power can shape— and fail to shape—social needs.13 The crux of this matter is, as I will elaborate, Riley’s insistence on the distinction between “socialization” and “human development” through intersubjective relations. The chapter on “Developmental psychology; biology and Marxism” takes on various tangles in the domain of theories of socialization.14 Like many of Riley’s essays, this is a self-reflexive



Denise Riley’s Socialized Biology

93

piece that provides rigorous, dialectical accounts of concepts such as “biology,” “the social” and “the individual”:  “I want to try to describe some conceptual problems concerning the “relationship of biological and social factors,” using one particular area, the developmental psychology of children, as a touchstone” (“Developmental” 73). But Riley immediately follows this assertion with a rejoinder: “my opening sentence has used scare-quotes, a pointer to the awkward necessity of using a terminology to discuss its own restrictions.”15 Riley next surveys existing models of accounting for the movement of the “infant” from the category of biological animal to social human. Along the way, she reopens the question of the relations between “the biological” and “the social,” calling out the presupposition that each of these terms refers to a definite or unified terrain while simultaneously recognizing their effective power as abstractions in the world. Her interest in the infant lies in its odd transitional status in the chain of “socialization” and “human development,” two nonidentical yet often conflated processes. As Riley insists, socialization and the development of intersubjective relations are actually distinct conceptual categories. Socialization, or the entry into a totality of relations, has yet to be explained by theories of child development, especially those that look at mother–child relations in a vacuum. Riley laments that, within developmental psychology, the ‘ “social” is generally understood as synonymous with the “interpersonal,” and that within a severely restricted field of persons anyway . . . That these activities [those of the mother-child couple] are read as uninterrupted by the exigencies of housing, class, etc. is to say that “social factors,” anything beyond mere intersubjectivity, are unthinkable. Development happens on a terrain of pure (inter)individuality’ (‘Developmental’ 75–76). The infant is of such importance to Riley precisely because, while theories of developmental psychology locate in the vague terrain of “infancy” or “childhood” the emergence of human sociality, these discourses supposedly about the child always also address “the mother.” In subsequent chapters of War in the Nursery, this slippage is traced through the “popularization” of Kleinian-derived theories of infant psychology, beginning with Melanie Klein’s emphasis on innate and preOedipal infantile aggression more or less regardless of the mother’s behavior, to John Bowlby’s theories of “maternal deprivation” that argued for the almost total dependence of infantile well-being on the attentive presence of the mother.16 Without a working conception of socialized biology, Riley argues, socialist feminism will fail to understand the complexities of reproductive experience and the ways in which biological, psychological, political and other ideologies work both with and against each other. Riley’s interest in recuperating the

94

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

category of the biological for socialist feminist thought lies, then, in what she sees as a need for any historical materialist account of the individual and society [to] include a sense of the highly specific forms in which ‘biology’ is lived; and . . . the category of ‘biologism’ can serve to close off examination of areas that actually crucially need marxist and feminist critical attention. These include, for example, reproduction, fertility control, sexuality, child development, illness, ageing. (‘Developmental’ 74)

Riley’s claim is that “biology is simultaneously biography,” and that this demands a thinking of “biography” that goes beyond the empirical description of experience or the narration of feelings and of biology as other than a set of nonideological facts: To overlook the particular forms in which biology is lived out is to overlook the fact that biology is simultaneously biography. For women in particular it is evident that an extremely significant proportion of ‘social’ experience is socialised biology handled in highly specific forms—all reproductive experience, for instance—and these forms have at the same time a clear political dimension, most obviously for the question of the conditions for a real control of fertility and for the possible real content of slogans like ‘sexual self-determination’. (‘Developmental’ 89)

In Riley’s feminist socialized biology, “all reproductive experience” must be read in conjunction with specific social and political rhetorics, policies and campaigns. It remains, however, somewhat unclear exactly what the writing of this socialized biology looks like: it is my contention in this chapter that it takes partial form in the poetry that Riley was concurrently writing.17

A note on sex I turn here to a consideration of the poetry that Riley was writing alongside the papers that led to War in the Nursery. Riley’s first volume of poetry, in which the poems quoted above were published, was Marxism for Infants, published in 1977 by Wendy Mulford’s press, Street Editions, as a small-release staplebound volume. The collection begins, of course, with its title, framed explicitly in relation to the questions of the reproduction of relations of production that animated much Marxist-feminist political thought. The title is taken from



Denise Riley’s Socialized Biology

95

George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, in which a fictional “Comrade X,” a bourgeois socialist, authors a volume called Marxism for Infants all the while remaining marked by the “training of his childhood, when he was taught to hate, fear, and despise the working class” (Wigan Pier 135–36). At her first ever public reading of poetry (a joint reading with Wendy Mulford at the 1977 Cambridge Poetry Festival), Riley explained that the title was in fact only unconsciously drawn from Orwell: I’d thought of the title for myself, but Wendy pointed it out that I hadn’t, and it’s a submerged memory of what Orwell says in The Road to Wigan Pier, and I’ll read the way Orwell uses the title, I suppose because it’s so much . . . he sells it short in a way; it’s such a lovely phrase and he uses it very undialectically . . . I wanted to retrieve that and use it, I suppose to say that if Marxism does not have to do with infants and vice versa then there’s not much hope for either infants or for Marxism. (Cambridge Poetry Festival Collection n.p.)

Riley’s version of the title also points to the persistence of conservative feeling in the very effort to “retrain” consciousness via a moral and cultural indoctrination in early education. The adoption of this title is at least doubly ironic in light of Orwell’s own pronatalist writings from the 1940s that Riley quotes at length in War in the Nursery.18 Riley’s title also harbors reservations about the political purchase of her own relatively “academic” socialist-feminist poetry, given its limited and somewhat rarefied circulation.19 Finally, the title riffs on Orwell’s suggestion that a socialist would demand some sort of swap be made between Marxism and infants—in other words, bourgeois intellectuals might exchange their Marxism for rearing children, or perhaps, according to a eugenicist logic, the working classes should give up on having children and embrace Marxism instead. Riley, for her part, will have none of this. Calling itself a sort of handbook, then, Riley’s sequence of nineteen poems is nonetheless hardly didactic; it is accented, rather, by moments of doubt and uncertainty. The lexicon flickers with the concerns of the time, as the discursive materials drawn from feminist and Marxist political praxis are disorganized and reorganized, echoing each other through sound patterning, an unconventional use of the page and complex slippages between the third-person pronoun “she,” the first-person “I” and an impersonal, generalized “you.” From the opening poem, “A Note on Sex and the Reclaiming of Language,” Marxism for Infants calls into question lyric and feminist reclamations of an authentic voice, all the while insisting on the necessity of grammatical personhood developed alongside a constant disruption of lyric address with more impersonal elements. “A Note

96

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

on Sex” has generally been read as a key to Riley’s early work, and it does indeed prefigure the political philosophy of language that she developed later in Am I That Name: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (1988): a note on sex and the reclaiming of language The Savage is flying back home from the New Country in native-style dress with a baggage of sensibility to gaze on the ancestral plains with the myths thought up and dreamed in her kitchens as guides                She will be discovered as meaning is flocking densely around the words seeking a way any way in between the gaps, like a fertilisation                The work  is e.g. to write ‘she’ and for that to be a statement of fact only and not a strong image of everything which is not-you, which sees you The new land is colonised, though its prospects are empty The Savage weeps as landing at the airport she is asked to buy wood carvings, which represent herself (‘Marxism’ 1)

These lines have been read by critics as a relatively straightforward polemical allegory for the misrecognitions of categorical identifications and interpellations. Unlike much of Marxism for Infants, “A Note on Sex” works within a restricted thematic, lexical and syntactic range and sustains an extended conceit of the “Savage” as a critique of radical feminist injunctions for women to “reclaim the language.”20 Riley is obviously skeptical of this possibility; in all of her work, language has us as much as we can ever dream of having it.21 Self-descriptions are always, for Riley, appropriable to ends against one’s needs and wishes (“mother” being her early test case), not because we name ourselves incorrectly but because language is radically privative. The attempts of the “Savage” to escape colonization by returning “home,” in “native-style dress,” are readily commodified and sold back to her for a profit. Some of Riley’s contemporaries seem to have altogether missed this irony, reading the volume as attempting to “reclaim the language.” In a 1977 review published in Perfect Bound, Peter Robinson insists that the volume earnestly believes this to be a desirable goal and finds fault with the volume for its absence of the “male pronoun”:  “Until the man can be reintroduced upon



Denise Riley’s Socialized Biology

97

terms that are more evenly distributed the reclaiming of language remains a formulation defined in the terms of a now absent male orientation from which the language has been reclaimed” (Robinson 85). Riley’s more avowedly feminist readers have also tended to read this poem as an attempt to “reclaim the language,” but they have also more readily recognized the poem as an allegorical ironization of any such effort. Linda Kinnahan reads in the poem an attempt to voice “the female “I” outside of dominant norms”: Just as public myths enter the domestic kitchen ‘as guides’, the private woman is neither separate from nor immune to the systematic othering of the ‘feminine’ within private, public, historical, and literary spheres . . . The language of the poem, in evoking various narratives, seeks an alternative for the ‘she’ to the cultural representations available to her and suggests that the meaning ‘flocking densely around the words seeking a way/ any way in between the gaps’ occurs not through mimetic means but through the ‘gaps’ made apparent when seemingly disparate narratives (travel, domestic, imperial) are brought together and their interconnections foregrounded. (Kinnahan 211–12)

Kinnahan sees the poem, and Riley’s work more generally, as enacting a primarily negative movement of refusal while retaining the hope that the truth may come through the “gaps” between different discourses, each of which is in itself too overdetermined. Frances Presley reads the poem, and Marxism for Infants more generally, along similar lines: “in Riley’s feminism and her language it is easier to say what a woman is not, and it is much more dangerous to start saying what she is” (Presley n.p.). Romana Huk has read the poem’s ironic manipulation of a naturalizing language of sexuality as evidence of Riley’s critique of radical feminist affirmations of the “feminine”: “Sex” as gendered essence is thus de-naturalised by the poem’s parodic naturalisation of the relentless and inevitable process of linguistic construction of selfhood—all of which issued, when the poem appeared twenty years ago, a potent early critique of romanticised projects in the female construction of identity. (Huk 241)

Carol Watts also argues of Riley’s early poetry more generally that “it is easier . . . to see what is being broken from than broken towards” (Watts 159). Each of these readings helps to explain what is happening in “A Note on Sex.” But too exclusive a focus on this poem and on its relationship to a more or less schematized version of her 1988 book “Am I That Name”: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History has tended to obscure what is happening

98

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

in the remainder of Marxism for Infants and the volume’s relationship to the political and historical writings that Riley was concurrently working on. For example, Presley is able to argue that the title of Marxism for Infants ‘is undercut by the poems which follow in which the infants are her own, and what she has to teach them has far more to do with feminism and feminist linguistics, than with Marxism.” This is a somewhat unhelpful distinction, not only insofar as Riley’s political milieu was working through the connections between Marxism and feminism, but also because the poetry itself works in and at this connection through its concentration on the “socialized biology” of “the mother’s” voice. In other words, “A Note on Sex” does prefigure Riley’s later turn to a feminist philosophy of language, but it does not exhaust the range of affects and relations to language, space, voice and body that are explored throughout the remainder of Marxism for Infants. This is not only because other poems broach different subject matter; they are also formally quite different. The other poems I’ve read above represent another tendency among the poems of Marxism for Infants: the first type of poem, exemplified by “A Note on Sex,” is a relatively self-contained lyric artefact. Few of the poems that follow it really stand on their own in the same way, which may explain their relatively minimal presence in Riley’s 2000 Selected Poems, published by Reality Street, which focuses much more on the poems from the 1993 collection Mop Mop Georgette. The majority of the poems in Marxism for Infants do not lend themselves to being read as individual poems; they are more numbers in a series best read in quick succession. Indeed, almost all of these poems are untitled in Marxism for Infants, but a number of these are provided with titles when they reappear in the 1985 collection Dry Air. Although the distinction I am drawing between stand-alone lyric and verse sequence is contestable, I think it can help to illuminate part of what is happening in the collection and to provide a corrective to the reception of this work, which has for the most part been read according to a model based on the short, selfcontained lyric poem.22 In the Cambridge Women’s Liberation Newsletter of July 1976, Ruth Craft in reporting on a meeting of the “Women and Writing Group” noted that “Denise would like to attempt a sustained work but, for example, finds conventional third-person narrative an impossibility.” I would argue that Marxism for Infants is such a work, even though the poems that comprise it were written over a number of years. Indeed, when Riley read the work at the Cambridge Poetry Festival, she introduced it as a single poem: “I want to read a poem of mine that goes on for fifteen minutes. It”s called Marxism for Infants.” I will refer to the sections of the poem as individual poems themselves, but they operate as part of a single serialized piece.



Denise Riley’s Socialized Biology

99

The serialized quality of this work is relevant to the argument I am making about Riley’s socialized biology. To the extent that Marxism for Infants is a “sustained work,” its shape is not reducible to the bounded, formal management of feeling and perception that is often attributed, however spuriously, to the successfully autonomous lyric poem (by, e.g., Richards’s Practical Criticism). In this way, the poems are not miniaturized encapsulations of the political theory discursively elaborated in the prose; they are, rather, leaky echo chambers in which political and personal discourse are bounced across and through each other. Carol Watts argues that, in the poems of Marxism for Infants that suggestively figure language in domestic terms, “the lyric form is unravelled as topography . . . If the house is synonymous with the self, as in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, it cannot escape its gendered coding:  domesticity, hearth, shelter, prison, tomb” (Watts 160). I would extend Watts’s comments by arguing that, in Marxism for Infants, the walls of that great house of lyric autonomy are also porous; each poem reflects an essayistic writing of the social individual captured and recaptured in the contradictions and complicities of political and personal language, each attempt echoing pieces of the others such that no effort at writing can possibly contain the problem in a single, self-contained lyric.

“Is it enough like this as I am” I would draw two main themes and formal operations from what I’m calling the “second kind” of poem: (1) the dislocation of voice and of bodily proprioception, amounting to a querying of how one lives the biological and social as biography— as the writing of life—through lyric address and versification, sound patterning, echoing; and (2) the address to another, you, who is perceived only through the above series of dislocating maneuvers. The way in which these two strands are formally linked and dispersed shows a very different management of “lyric” from that proposed or analyzed by the Practical Criticism; the poems work cumulatively by extending “the fine steely wires that run” not only “between love and economics” (as a poem from No Fee has it) but also through and around want, need, rights, speech, sex, voice, biology and individuation. In what follows, I read the remainder of Marxism for Infants in light of the materials I’ve covered so far, considering how Riley’s poetic text works on the analytics of socialized biology toward which War in the Nursery insistently gestures. As I’ve suggested, Riley’s notion of a “socialized biology” remains primarily gestural in War in the Nursery. I believe that this reflects the necessity, for Riley, of thinking this notion

100

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

through the language of the first and second person. That is, the “biology” that Riley seeks to understand is only accessible through a writing of life that cannot readily be described in the third person. This means that there can only be an aporetic relationship between “socialized biology” as a theoretical or discursive category and its enactment as a biographical praxis. This tension will accompany all of my readings of the poems: each time that I attempt to read them theoretically as expressions or developments of “socialized biology,” I risk appearing as though I don’t notice the ineradicable difference between these poems and the discourses of biology or sociology. But this seems to be an unavoidable foolishness preferable to not noticing the ways in which Riley’s poetic and theoretical works actively supplement one another to write the sociality of biology “as it is lived.” Like “A Note on Sex,” the remainder of Marxism for Infants does not adhere to the epistemological claims of consciousness raising, as Claire Buck notes in her essay on “Poetry and the Women’s Movement in Postwar Britain” (1996) but neither does any “Marxism” get transmitted to any “Infants” through some sort of “training”- or “instruction”-based political education (or, for that matter, through the authority of a mother or father who knows best). Rather, the political and personal materials are circulated through prosody, and subjectivity is voiced in the echoes of intimate and political addresses. The fourth poem reads, Says   I’m into cooking now says   I’m into taoism absorbed by a shifting of bright globes serially You have a family, then?   No. mothers    hospitals sex   class   housing anchored    flying is it enough like this as I am is the human visible through above & completely in the material determinants               up I cannot understand the function of the living body except by enacting it myself and except in so far as I am a body which rises towards the world (4)



Denise Riley’s Socialized Biology

101

The sound patterning of the middle section of this poem (beginning with “mothers” and ending with “up”) shifts from an emphasis on “o” and “s” (mothers hospitals sex class housing) to “s” and “i” in “is it enough like this as I  am.” The effect is such that while “Anchored”/“flying” would be a simple opposition without the work of sound patterning that leads up to it, the -ing that links “housing” to flying calls into question the “anchored” status of the former. Finally the “n” and “m” phonemes gain dominance, with “i” remaining in the mix by the underscoring of “in” such that “the material determinants” close this image-complex without any sonic or orthographic surprises, subtly echoing the question about how “I am.” But then “up” oddly irrupts in a hiccupped syllable with the “p” phoneme which has not appeared at all in the densely alliterative poem thus far. A British hiccough might better echo the “enough,” but this is precisely not what happens; we are not “off ” but “up” in a moment that signals a decisive turn in a poem that already seems quite vertiginous enough. This “up” also points “above” the material determinants sonically and semantically rather than “in” or “through” them, to the above of the superstructure of “culture.” But this performative “up” also points back to the beginning of the poem on the page and back to the names of those material determinants themselves. And it is also perhaps “up” as in “time”s up.” The question remains, however, “is it enough like this as I  am”—it, this and I linked in a question, this is as I am, but is it enough like this. It and I are crossed like anchored and flying, and what I  am is woven into the elements that precede and “house” it. The first moments of this poem are, let’s recall, a sort of anonymous reported speech: “says I’m into cooking now/says I’m into Taoism” seem to have introduced the “I” into the poem as a quotation from a third person, echoing the impersonality of all strategies for meeting externally defined personal needs. But is this, is it, am I, enough? Is this impersonality of the subjective “I,” is its sociality enough, even if the “I” is socialized and therefore never a self-contained sovereign agency? The effect of the crossing of it, I, and this is such that when we return to the “I” in the final stanza, what “I am” (a body) is an “it” I enact, suggesting that the speaking and enacting “I,” the subject of enunciation, is itself something that is enacted. This final stanza consists of a sentence taken directly from MerleauPonty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945), a philosophical work that greatly impressed Riley. The sentence narrates the paradoxical experience of the body simultaneously as object and subject of perception. Each of these frameworks, the objective and the subjective, elides the other, but it is only in and as this shifting back and forth that any understanding must take its place. This is what

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

102

cannot be understood of or by the living (socialized) body, namely, its needs and desires, at least not when society and biology, subject and object, are understood as discrete regions of experience, however mutually “interacting” they may be. But this theoretical statement cannot explain the poem that includes it; it is also affected by the jolt of the poem’s spacing (‘up’) and the lines that precede it. The only possibility for knowledge is a rising of the (biological) body not above the (social) world but toward it. In this way, the “up” transforms and is transformed by the end of the poem, as are all of the “material determinants” and the theories that would seek to name them. The poem on the next page traces another topography of the body in speech, recalling Merleau-Ponty’s account of phantom-limbs (Merleau-Ponty 87–102) in its efforts to understand the I/you relationship in terms not reducible to an interior/exterior dichotomy: the speaking,  the desire to be heard the hearing,   the desire to be told tongues piece the joints of scattered limbs click lubricants of social grace ‘articulacy’ articulates a flow, 

a dazzling mass

the speaking,   the desire to hear the hearing,   the desire to be spoken is thus sweet  massy  glowing extension to you  to you 

a diffused

(shaking) (absence) (‘Marxism’ 5)

This poem moves between two interconnected experiences of direct address:  speaking so as to be heard and hearing to be told are followed by speaking as “the desire to hear” and hearing so as “to be spoken.” The first, in which “tongues piece the joints of scattered limbs/ click lubricants of social grace” works, through such clicking articulation (and one can hear in the hard consonants of “click lubricants” the socially graceful clucking of tongues) to articulate “a flow, a dazzling mass” that quickly turns into a less venerated tradition of speech. “The desire to be spoken/ is thus sweet massy a diffused/



Denise Riley’s Socialized Biology

103

glowing extension/ to you”: here the glow of desire is diffused and extended like a phantom limb that neither excludes nor wholly encompasses “you.” Jonathan Culler has argued that apostrophe, the figure of speech in which some inanimate or absent person or thing is addressed as if present and capable of responding, is a feature of all lyric rather than a special case. This is so, according to Culler, insofar as lyric works in vocative modes to produce textual events rather than merely to represent events extrinsic to the action of the poem. For Culler, apostrophe has “a special temporality which is the set of all moments at which writing can say ‘now’” (Culler 149), and this temporality is foundational to lyric as a genre or mode of discourse; the vocative call to another is the very stuff of lyric poetry. Culler further suggests that one distinguish two forces in poetry, the narrative and the apostrophic . . . Nothing need happen in an apostrophic poem . . . because the poem itself is to be the happening . . . Apostrophes remov[e]‌the opposition between presence and absence from empirical time and locat[e] it in a discursive time. The temporal movement from A  to B, internalized by apostrophe, becomes a reversible alternation between A’ and B’: a play of presence and absence governed not by time but by poetic power. (149–50)

Taking into account the hyperbolic, fictional power of apostrophe as outlined by Culler, the “I” and “you” of lyric address cannot be reduced to empirical intersubjective discourse. “I” remains, rather, an inanimate linguistic personhood that has no authority except in relation to a “you” that it animates in order to be animated by it. It is this discursive time of address that conditions the lyric power to produce a textual event, as Culler suggests all apostrophe does. On its own, Riley’s poem reads as an enactment of this deconstructive movement of apostrophe. But here I would protest that reading this poem as an application of Culler’s writings misses the particular social staging of lyric address in Riley’s work, and this staging is not as readily universalizable as Culler’s framework might suggest. Barbara Johnson’s essay on “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion” brings Culler’s theory of apostrophe into an encounter with sociopolitical debates about abortion, showing how the “poetic power” of apostrophe can have analogous effects in the (real) “world of difference.” For Johnson, apostrophe can function to animate another who will, in turn, animate the first speaker (as in the case of the unborn “child” whose imagined ability to be addressed and to respond lends the antiabortion apostropher a considerable degree of authority). Johnson has exposed the extent to which apostrophe, as figure, carries with it social

104

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

contradictions far beyond the scope of an abstracted “I” and “you.” This sociality of lyric is signaled, in Riley’s work, not merely by the appearance of the word “social” in the text but, as the poems work together to show, and as no single poem can quite demonstrate on its own, this sociality is constitutively built into the body and voice, as “the desire to hear” or “be heard” obviously comes before and stays beyond the hearing of any individual utterance. Apostrophe’s performative power works in this way against itself, effectively destabilizing any empirical temporality of the speaking subject and infecting it with the sociality latent in the mother/child dyad; as Johnson asks, “who, in the final analysis, exists by addressing whom?” (Johnson 192) Indeed, the chiasmus of “the speaking, the desire to hear/ the hearing, the desire to be spoken” inverts the primacy of presence to self via a speaking to the other who is to animate the self ’s own mouth. “My” voice in this poem comes from “your” mouth, but you are not just anyone; voice is experienced as a phantom limb, a diffused and massy “extension/ to you” who are an absent and shaking linguistic person. The conventions of the love poem are thus inflected by Riley’s social inscription of motherhood from the other poems. The tripping movement across imagined and real borders between “I” and “you” is not reducible to the stance of a “self ” in relation to some “other,” as in the ethics of intersubjectivity; they are already soaked in the socialized biology of speech as they are lived. Once again, Riley’s work considered as a whole insists that socialization cannot be reduced to intersubjectivity and neither can the reading of poetry. This model of speech is more fully elaborated in the antepenultimate poem in the volume, in which speech is narrated in the third person, the objective experience of the body as a set of objects: A woman’s head occupying the whole depth;  a white ground. Her head turning and the voice and the voice beginning. The hand reaching,  brushing slowly across the mouth and      withdrawing, thus describing an  arc. The voice repeating a phrase which the mouth shapes. The mouth and the hand together encircling the words. This impulse renewed over and over again. (17)

This poem traces the emergence of “voice” as a phenomenological category terminating and originating in repetition (“renewed over and over again”). The



Denise Riley’s Socialized Biology

105

poem’s third-person narration allegorizes the exteriorizing and objectifying nature of theorizing the body in impersonal terms. The body in question is marked as a feminine impersonality, alternating between the definite and feminine possessive articles (“A woman’s head” and “her head” interspersed with “the voice,” “the mouth and the hand”). The poem traces a movement from subjective experience to objective appearance, beginning with the attempt to perceive a total immersion in subjectivity: “A woman’s head occupying the whole depth,” and then the parts of the body that enact speech are parceled out as objects, primarily hand and mouth. These are the agencies of speech as the body attempts to form and shape a language that in fact gives it form: “The voice repeating a word which the mouth shapes./ The mouth and hand together encircling the words.” Finally, “This impulse renewed over and over again,” an impulse to speak coming from outside the hands but within the world of the woman’s head, in which language gives contour to the hand and mouth within the total field of the “woman’s head” that it simultaneously constitutes. There is no mention, in this poem, of “you,” but the conditions for any address are shaped by this constitutive exteriority and iterability of “the voice.”23 A few pages earlier, the fourteenth poem brings “you” into this dynamic, narrating the affective intensity that both “you” and “I” have felt. The poem is breathless, briefly cathecting on different objects of promise as it passes between each “particular/ whatever . . ./ that shone to the eye immediately,” including “your” own face in the mirror: you’ve met I’ve met people in rooms before we’ve gone into rooms burning with our own          rightness for  now & alight with eagerness and almost touch & stay the night here and yes! the blazing ever-realised vividness of that particular whatever—stone postcard slow scarlet of a paperback’s creased edge sharp corner of soap & at the mirror your face outdated since you are already gone on ahead of it to this on which you are embarked & goodbye to your opened face as you turn back to the lit room seriously – anyway that shone to the eye immediately before touch (14)

106

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

The first words of the poem assert a continuity between “you” and “I” (“you’ve met I’ve met people in rooms before”), the vagueness of the verb and predicate forcing a recognition that indeed “you” and “I” have both had this same experience. The distinction between you and I  is then dissolved in the next line into we: “we’ve gone into rooms burning with our own/ rightness for now,” which might have been a bit harder to get “you” to ascertain had the stage not already been set for “our” conflation. The next few lines speed up with the casualness of opening ampersands echoed in the “ands” that follow later in each line, the internal rhyme of “rightness/”alight”/”night” and the consonance of “s” and “t” repeating (“eagerness and almost touch/ & stay”). The opening affirmation culminates with “& stay the night here and yes!” after which the poem is slowed down by “the blazing/ ever-realised vividness of that particular/ whatever–,” “whatever” dulling the “vividness” that the poem subsequently attempts to articulate. The next lines’ relative lack of punctuation and abundant enjambment make them read quickly, if not exactly “vividly”: “stone postcard slow scarlet of/ a paperback’s creased edge sharp corner/ of soap & at the mirror.” And right here, between these vivid objects and the room “alight” with promise is “your face outdated.” Once again “you” is the impersonal you, directed to anyone listening and more or less interchangeable with “I”: “& at the mirror your face outdated/ since you are already gone on ahead of it/ to this on which you are embarked.” Here the subject is, like the reader, burdened by its own necessary retroactivity, as “you” are/“I” am already past as we turn toward another person or object, and you experience this redoubling of self-presence by reading the poem’s addresses. At this point the poem gathers speed:  “since you are already gone on ahead of it” might almost be a sequence of dactylic tetrameter, depending on whether or not the “you” is impersonal and unstressed or apostrophic and stressed. This is followed by the metrically irregular and overly grammatical “to this on which you are embarked,” and then a departure from this encounter with your anachronistic face and from the regular meter that led away from it: “goodbye/ to your opened face as you turn/ back to the lit room seriously.” The high-speed intensity of these lines is rhetorically disregarded or dismissed by an “anyway”: “anyway / that [i.e. “that particular whatever”] shone to the eye immediately”. All of this has taken place “before/ touch,” and so the “touch” of a prospective lover emerges both as impetus and endpoint to the “vividness” of each “particular whatever,” much as it haunts the face in the mirror throughout. The touch of sex is thoroughly interspersed with the self-regard that it both faces and follows after (in the double sense of “before”).



Denise Riley’s Socialized Biology

107

This interplay of conversational and ecstatic tones reappears in the second half of the sixteenth poem, after three shorter stanzas, the first composed in vocative and almost mystical verse, the second listing fragmented figurations of some undefined entity and the third a single line further juxtaposing coolness with emotion: hold fast in arms before astonished eyes whom you must grasp throughout great changes constant and receptive as a capital city is now a fire      now a frozen hand a rainstorm     white  birds a rotting log     a young boy a savaged sheep    an indifference a kind of seriousness, a kind of rage and through each transforming yourself to be not here whose body shapes a hundred lights a glowing strip of absence night’s noisy and particular who vanishes with that flawless sense of occasion I guess you’d have if only I knew you at first light leaving “the wrong body,” old, known (16)

The stanzas diverge in structure and tone, but there are some clear continuities between them. Beginning with the first line, there are unmistakable, if rather unexpected, echoes of “Dreams,” an early poem by Langston Hughes: “Hold fast to dreams/ For if dreams die/ Life is a broken-winged bird/ That cannot fly// Hold fast to dreams/ For when dreams go/ Life is a barren field/ Frozen with snow” (Hughes 32). Not only are the opening words of each poem the same, but each first line shares an end rhyme (die/eyes) and stress pattern. Moreover, the “white birds” and “frozen hand” in Riley’s second stanza take on a new significance in light of this intertext, echoing as they do the barren fields of Hughes’s dreamless dreamland. Hughes’s injunction to dream within the context of US antiblackness and economic exploitation positioned the sovereignty of imagination ambivalently between escapist fantasy and revolutionary force. Riley’s second stanza ends with “an indifference,” terminating the “great changes”

108

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

in Hughes’s bleak, affectless landscape that threatens to neutralize the charge of the antitheses that precede it (fire or frozen, mineral or animal, rotting or young). But the grammar of Riley’s first stanza is ambiguous: in the second line, does “whom” correspond to the “eyes” or to whatever one must “hold fast in arms” (perhaps a dream?) before the eyes? What is being modified by “constant and receptive as a capital city?” Is it paradoxically the “great changes” from the previous line? There is no punctuation to help us here, and the second stanza only produces more ambiguity: what exactly is “now a fire,” and so on? On what object are these figural transformations enacted? The challenge of the poem lies in its demand that this otherness without place, this thing that must be held or must hold “fast in arms” (an infant?), must also somehow survive and be survived. The final stanza speeds up again into that rapturous, breathless stream that we saw in the fourteenth poem, lacking punctuation and replete with enjambment and suggestions of regular meter (the trochee and the rhymes of “whose/ BOdy SHAPES a HUNdred LIGHTS a/ GLOWing STRIP of ABsence NIGHT’S”). Again the poem is primarily addressed to an impersonal you who could also be an “I” or a “one”: “and through each transforming/ yourself to be not here.” This otherness can only be elsewhere, somewhere other than this lonely anonymous capital cityscape “whose/ body shapes a hundred lights,” and “you” are one who, like the capital city, “vanishes.” Still, the location of this otherness in transformation is unclear—indeed, the very occasion of its/your transformation is unknowable since we don’t know whose or what entity’s “wrong body” is being transformed or left behind in the first place: “with that flawless sense/ of occasion I guess you’d have if/ only I knew you at first light/ leaving ‘the wrong body’.” This “old, known” body, however, was never known or even dreamed by the speaker. Here, Riley takes on the problem of knowing the affective struggles of anyone else. “The forces of circumstance” that guide anyone else seem to be “a frozen hand . . . an indifference” to me. This attempt to know and to feel anyone else’s life will be the standard to which much of Riley’s later poetry will hold itself. For my purposes, it is worth noting the movement from the assertion of indifference to the rapturous quality of much of the final stanza. Although the poem ends by recognizing the inability to know from what interpellation another person has struggled to break away, the lines that immediately precede it bespeak a passionate and compassionate movement that burns with more “rightness” than the doubt that surrounds it. I close this chapter by reading the tenth poem from Marxism for Infants, in which Riley narrates a less bleak dreamscape, albeit one that all the same “looks impossible.” This poem is quite distinct from the rest of the collection in that



Denise Riley’s Socialized Biology

109

it reads as perfectly grammatical (if imperfectly punctuated) prose. It is one of few poems in the volume other than “A Note on Sex” to feature a sustained conceit and to provide a seemingly straightforward narrative account. This very short story recounts an attempt to move from one unlikely domestic setting, presumably brought on by the force of circumstance, to something willed and genuinely chosen: I lived with my children in a warm bright and harmonious room which formed the crest of a high timber scaffolding—a room on stilts. Outside it was a black night, an old railway yard, abandoned tracks, a high wind. Our room although too small for our needs was glowing and secure despite the fact that it had no roof, that its walls led straight upwards to the black clear sky.      I left there briefly and encountered x who pointed upwards to show where we should both go. A smooth platform hung in the sky, its only access a long swaying cord joined to its midpoint, the end of which drifted against my face. It looked impossible but I was not disheartened. (10)

The first stanza provides a surreal portrait of a sort of squat: the surroundings are “old” and “abandoned,” and the atmosphere, following the pathetic fallacy that is perhaps all that can be seen from within the “grave embrace” of the family, is a “black night” with “high wind.” The room is both removed from and a part of this world: it is “a room on stilts” yet has “no roof.” This housing report vacillates between pointing out the shabbiness of the squat and emphasizing its miraculous sufficiency: this is the dream of the family always being enough even as it is wide open to and propped up by “the outside” that simultaneously abandons it to itself. Thus the room, “although too small for our needs” and “despite the fact that it had no roof,” appears “glowing and secure,” “warm, bright, and harmonious.” The poem does not simply demystify the bourgeois comforts of security and harmony; they are presented as part of the same fantasmatic reality that extends “upwards to the/ black clear sky.”

110

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

At this point the poem shifts to its second act, in which the speaker recounts having “left there briefly.” What transpires is an encounter with “x,” an ambiguously authoritative figure who suggests “where we should both/ go.” The “impossible” architecture that follows ends the poem ambivalently. If “it looked impossible,” then why is the speaker not disheartened? Is it because she is plucky and believes that with effort she will succeed? Or, alternately, because she does not want to leave with x at all but would prefer to remain in the roofless house? Should we read the speaker as intentionally withholding the reason for her perseverance? Or, reporting a dream, is she merely recounting an affective state without any understanding of its cause? The poem leaves these questions suspended, and in this way invites the reader to speculate on the affective dimensions of housing and the as-yet-inscrutable nature of the needs of single mothers within a regime of the figure of the mother as vessel of intersubjectivity. Like much of Marxism for Infants, then, this poem lays bare a range of affects and experiences for the reader’s attention. This is not, however, because these poems invite the reader to imitate the lyric subject or to find moral integrity by censuring her. Rather, poetic address, as the purportedly ethical management of otherness, is shown to be coeval with and implicated in the institutional (linguistic, ideological and repressive) discourses of the capitalist nation-state. But what these poems bring to the surface is the way in which wants and needs are, all the same, constantly produced within and through this matrix, written onto and out of the socialized body: and they will continue to be so even after any revolution in the relations of production. “Real” needs and wants are recuperable for struggle only through their rehearsed expression, only through repeated, partial attempts to share them with “you.” This is the socialized biology of Riley’s lyric, which cannot be produced in expository discourse but only in the vocative registers of a writing that simultaneously decries the myth of a prepolitical, ethical realm of pure intersubjectivity. So no, it is not enough like this as I am, but it will even more certainly never be enough as long as all that passes before touch is consigned to the realm of the ethical, of pure intersubjectivity, of some mother’s good sense to develop herself into the psychology of a fantasmatic child.

3

Forms of Reproduction in the Early Work of Wendy Mulford

In February 1979, Wendy Mulford’s Street Editions released a 200-copy second edition of No Fee:  A Line or Two for Free, a chapbook of poems co-authored by Mulford and Denise Riley. No Fee had first been issued in 1978 for an art opening at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; the second edition was released to coincide with the inaugural “Women’s Week” in Cambridge. Women’s Week included film screenings, talks, panels, workshops, an art exhibition and a “women-only” performance of music and poetry, with readings by Mulford, Riley, Judy Carey, Julia Dale and Angela Carter “or bring your own.”1 The thread connecting the headlining writers was their involvement in the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM); they were not necessarily otherwise bound by common literary strategies. Angela Carter, who had recently published her novel The Passion of New Eve, engaged, like Riley and Mulford, the problem of women’s oppression. Unlike either of them, she made a steady income from writing prose as a journalist and novelist. Judy Carey was a fellow member of the Cambridge Women’s Liberation Group (CWLG), and her poems, brief and whimsical pieces of confessional free verse, were unlike the compositions of Riley and Mulford. Indeed, Riley and Mulford never had poems published in the Cambridge Women’s Liberation Newsletter (CWLN), despite being actively engaged in the CWLG and its ‘small group’ focusing on women and writing. In the April 1979 issue of the CWLN, Carey herself appraised the reading and art exhibition at Women’s Week: The poetry and art both went well I  think. As I  said earlier though I  think there is much more local talent which we should be reaching and encouraging. Women are commonly shy of exhibiting their creativity particularly in a critical atmosphere such as is generated by the art historians and literary fellows of Cambridge University. We must be sure of informing them that there is equal space for all women, regardless of intellectual expertise. (CWLN April 1979)

112

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

Both Mulford and Riley were working in the academy (Riley as a doctoral student at Sussex, Mulford as a lecturer of English both in Cambridge and at Thames Polytechnic) and were thus among those whose intellectual expertise Carey may have perceived as generating a “critical atmosphere.” Mulford was involved in the network of writers sometimes called the “Cambridge School”; her Street Editions press had published chapbooks by Andrew Crozier, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, John James, Douglas Oliver and J. H. Prynne, and her own poems had appeared in poetry newsletters and journals that circulated in Cambridge, including the late-1960s review The English Intelligencer—she was one of few women published in such venues. Mulford’s public prominence in the Cambridge poetry scene was, until at least the mid-1970s, first and foremost as an editor and publisher. Her poetry provides the materials for a study in miniature of late-1970s and early1980s poetry as it traveled between the University classroom, local small-press editions and readings and feminist organizations; each of these contexts had contradictory relationships to the tradition of lyric pedagogy, whether, as in the classroom, it was a vestige or, as in many feminist groups, it was an antagonist. Mulford’s work from this earlier period, however, provides a test case for the effects of left fragmentation, and the waning of lyric pedagogy’s state sanctioning, on the techniques and themes of leftist innovative poetry. Mulford is an especially absorptive writer, which is part of her unique strength and interest, taking on as she has the styles and positions of friends and various other ideological and aesthetic tendencies. This is evidenced by both her editorial commitments and her engagements with the small group organizing of women’s liberation. She was also explicit about her status as a woman within these different contexts. In 1979 she wrote, My writing is read and heard mainly by men engaged in poetic practices of differing kinds for whom my work has significance because of the attempt I have been making to work at the level of the production of meaning. But I want to join my voice with the voices of other women struggling to destruct [sic] the lie of culture. (‘Notes on Writing’ 33)

This reflection suggests an affinity with Carey’s ideas about the radical potential of a nonhierarchical creative community of women, as does Mulford’s following claim: “the coming together of women to create art in many different ways, and the breaking down of the artist-audience divide, together with experimentation, constitute the opening up of a real challenge to the dominant culture” (35). But Mulford’s questioning of the authority of the lyric “I” to speak authentically and for forms of “culture” to express “truths” distinguishes her poetics from that



Forms of Reproduction in the Early Work of Wendy Mulford

113

of the avowedly consciousness-raising aesthetic of much women’s movement writing in the United Kingdom.2 For Claire Buck, Mulford and Riley’s “selfproclaimed allegiance to a modernist concentration on formal and linguistic experiment, together with a very explicit use of poststructuralist theory, set their work somewhat at odds with the work of poets published in One Foot on the Mountain”(83).3 During this time, Mulford also taught and wrote about literature within the academy; she did so in the context of the 1970s blossoming of British Marxist aesthetic and literary theory. At the time, like others, she saw literary criticism and the literature classroom as places that could expose the contradictory nature of capitalist relations of production, even as they reproduced these contradictions. In her critical accounts from this period, Mulford argues that literary study tends to reproduce the dominant relations of production (through the moral techniques of lyric pedagogy) and to be a home for avowedly anti-capitalist and feminist ideological bolstering. Because it is an ideological formation, that is, literary study for Mulford was a locus for ideological contestation for and interrupting the reproduction of lyric pedagogy. Mulford seems, moreover, to have seen some contemporary feminist poetics as too attached to the “lie of culture.” All the same, Mulford attempted to align her work with the collaborative aims of the women’s movement and to connect innovative poetic practice with the critical and theoretical perspectives of the women’s movement, as is evident from her editorial work and critical prose. But also from her poetry: one poem from No Fee closes as follows: women on the streets in the raw-colour cold men and women by the picket fires through the night wheels and steel tongues crushing you an image-nation hurls itself at us & we pick holes in each other it’s enough to make you cry to organise (11)

While this poem is not confessional, it is also not especially obscure or difficult. So, why wouldn’t this work have had greater purchase in the British WLM? Perhaps because the poem is not celebratory: it describes the fragmentation of

114

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

dissident groupings (“we pick holes in each other”) by a “crushing” nationalism; and it recognizes that this perhaps ought to provoke a cry to organize, but that it might just be enough to make you cry, full stop. The poem does not itself enact either such cry; rather, it describes the conditions that are “enough” to spur it on. In this sense, Mulford’s poem is in direct conversation with one by Riley appearing four pages earlier in No Fee. Riley’s poem similarly ends in a couplet worrying about the political ambitions of her writing: writing politics is a luscious glow and gives a quick buzz to your style (7)

Peter Middleton reads this couplet “as both approval and as warning of the transience of the ‘buzz’” (“Breaking” 6): “writing politics” here is a question of “style” as well as of commitment. Both poems consider the distance between the question of “style” and the question of organizing, insofar as the “cry” to organize is clearly not equivalent to the set of complex and disciplined actions cried for. Because they thematize commitment in a manner that questions the authority of the lyric “I” to express such commitment, these poems by Mulford and Riley sit uneasily alongside an ethos of consciousness raising. Against the pigeonholing of “lyric” as either solipsistic, antihistorical and depoliticized or as morally exemplary, this chapter shows how an impulse for poetry in Wendy Mulford’s early writings tests and, at times, outstrips her documented commitments to the Communist Party, feminist organizations and poetic communities. Mulford’s work from the 1970s and early 1980s exposes the tensions between commitments to poetry and to political organizing, revealing how these tensions reflect already existing contradictions within the sociopolitical field. That is, the writing’s interruptions of political commitment— the unwillingness or inability of the poems simply to reproduce any single “line”– also bespeak the difficulties of reproducing feminism and anticapitalism at the level of political organizing. In this way, Mulford’s work from the midand late-1970s amounts to an attempt to sustain and reproduce forms of social belonging both through and against the idiosyncratic trials of poetic articulation. The tradition of lyric pedagogy, in Mulford’s hands, provides a license to understand poetry as a practice that can get at the contradictory nature of social reproduction, precisely because political poetry is not, on Mulford’s account, simply meant to reproduce any political line.



Forms of Reproduction in the Early Work of Wendy Mulford

115

This chapter focuses on Mulford’s work from this period; I  structure my reading through the problematic of social reproduction and its relationship to lyric pedagogy. I  begin by reading Mulford’s earliest published poetry in the context of her involvement in the Communist Party Great Britain and the WLM. I  then consider her writings about teaching and literary criticism in relation to the history of lyric pedagogy at Cambridge, and I subsequently read poems from her 1977 Bravo to Girls & Heroes in light of Mulford’s complex relationship to Marxist-feminist praxis. Next, I turn to a poem from No Fee in light of the preceding discussion, and, finally, I  outline the changing nature of Mulford’s political commitments at the start of the 1980s with a reading of one poem from that period. Across the chapter, I  track the changes in Mulford’s work across the 1970s and into the early 1980s, at which point her work turns away from a grounding in Marxist-feminism and toward the somewhat more metaphysical and geographical, if still identifiably feminist, concerns that accompanied her involvement in the antinuclear proliferation movement. A newly felt imminent risk of total annihilation shifts Mulford’s thinking of “reproduction” away from attention to the contradictions of capital as they are reflected in literature and toward the desperate survival of the human species in the face of nuclear catastrophe, through an affirmation of life:  “Without my life I shall not think or write. As long as I  write I  must fight, for the life of all I  love” (“Notes on Writing” 41). I do not address Mulford’s work from the mid-1980s through the present, during which time Mulford moved on from what she seems to see as the dead end of binding poetry to Marxist-feminism. While this later work is of great interest on its own terms (see, e.g., her 1998 volume The East Anglia Sequence:  Norfolk 1984—Suffolk 1994, in which ecological questioning takes the form of an in-depth, documentary-poetic investigation of the ecological transformation of postindustrial coastal villages), it is also less worried about the contradictions of lyric pedagogy than the earlier work.4

Early poems and political transformations Mulford was born in Wales in 1941 and moved to Cambridge to study English in the 1960s. There she met poets John James, J.  H. Prynne, Douglas Oliver, Andrew Crozier, Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Denise Riley (among others), each of whom she published in the 1970s through her Street Editions Press. These writers and friends encouraged her to write poems, but, as she reflected

116

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

in 1979, “English teachers at Cambridge did not, I think, aid that process—and they certainly made it difficult for me to write with any confidence for many years” (“Notes on Writing” 38). Mulford credited other communities for the development of her writing practice: I’ve been writing for about twelve years, running a small press, Street Editions, and for eight years I’ve been in the Communist Party and been an increasingly bloody-minded feminist. I find it hard to estimate exactly what has happened to my writing in this period, but certainly at the outset I found it impossible to value what I was doing—to see it at all clearly. It just seemed to dribble out. Out of the intensity of my feeling, I think I would have said. (31)

But this is not quite borne out by her early work. In fact, in her earliest published poems, from the late 1960s, Mulford demonstrated her familiarity with continental European culture (early poems reference Schwitters and Nolde, among others), and interspersed such references with what might, perhaps, be called “dribbles” of feeling. The early poems tend to present femininity as a momentary and fragile disruption of public space, one that is fairly quickly swallowed up by dominant logics of gender, as in the following stanza: to being a cynic—orange white & blue striped sheets airing the civic scents over the bal cony, so alone, in bright sun . . . people drawl the wide promenade tulip trees blossom over a princess. (The Last-Minute Choice 3)

This cynic’s take on the lonely airing of bedsheets (which seem then to be a tricolor flag) is accompanied by a light tone achieved formally through frequent ellipses and enjambment, even mid-word (as in “bal/cony”); lines are rushed through and objects change with line breaks (see, e.g., tulip becoming tulip tree). Mulford’s feminized personae observe the “cultured” world’s coldness in response to attempts at personal expression. Better, then, for the poet to be a cynic, hiding behind her ironical spectatorship, than to air any sheets. These poems seem uncertain about domestic settings as sites of social critique; the domestic breaks out into public spaces, but it is emphatically not at home there, and it serves primarily as an index of alienation (one poem, e.g., is titled “The lady professionally alone”). The loneliness attested to in these poems (that of the



Forms of Reproduction in the Early Work of Wendy Mulford

117

young woman writer in the public sphere) provokes fantasies of an aristocratic, private ownership of the means of cultural production and consumption: the tightly pursed mouth stares in the ornate hall mirror, what happens        is none of my interest except to be out of the sun in a tall well-polished room, it is yours & the distances your choosing. (n.p.)

That is, forget the outside, what “happens/ is none of my interest.” Here is the fantasy of owning culture and society, of safely withdrawing into aristocratic spaces that reflect only tightly pursed lips and do not foster any vulnerability. But, of course, this fantasy cannot be sustained; the “ornate” privacy of commodious interiors is yours, and the speaker can only be a sort of kept woman in this semifeudal economy. Professionally alone or feudally owned, then, are the options provided by reality and fantasy, respectively: enter the cynic. Over the course of her involvement in the women’s movement and the Communist Party, however, Mulford would begin to embrace “domestic” objects and relations as basic elements for the composition of poetry and not merely as occasional evidence of alienation. That is, marks of the domestic are no longer peripheral to the dialectic between the speaker and the social body that gives her a voice and addressees. This change reflects, for the Mulford of the late 1970s, the basic facts of the capitalist separation of reproductive labor from the production of surplus value and the concomitant isolation of the reproductive worker. It would, however, take an active involvement in the WLM for this kind of change to take shape in her work. In a 1979 prose piece, “Notes on Writing: A Marxist/ Feminist Viewpoint,” Mulford reflected on the various discursive materials that had formed and framed her writing: In my head as I write are the reverberations of other parts of struggle, of other kinds of consciousness; my place in the family, sounds of children’s voices, of work, of politics, shifts in sexuality and relationships, leading into and out of the house, ‘home,’ and how we live. Small, material, local, domestic. The centre of our politics. Ten years ago I would have seen that as triviality, not reaching the important universal conditions. Now I see these material conditions as the reality within which we work. (‘Notes on Writing’ 36)

118

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

Mulford here sketches an account of political and personal struggles as “material conditions” that determine the form of her writing. Mulford’s and other feminists’ concern with the problematic of reproduction and with the domestic as a determining element of political economy was not, strictly speaking, new; many Marxists sought to understand social relations that indirectly contributed to the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. Socialist-feminist responses to the waning of left popularity grouped mainly in two camps:  the first response was to stick to the organizational forms of Leninism, armed with a strict understanding of the class line at the possible expense of other social divisions. The second found sexism, racism and ethnocentrism within Leninist democratic-centralism itself and urged the creation of decentralized organizational forms. The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), at least since the 1958 second version of their programmatic document “The British Road to Socialism,” had argued for a provisional alliance with the Labour Party, ultimately with the aim of moving it to the left and thereby transitioning to socialism through electoral reforms rather than proletarian revolution. Trotskyists and many others saw this as an opportunist, Stalinist selling out of international revolutionary socialism for nominal reformism.5 The program of the CPGB, in its 1978 fifth edition, also took a waffling position on the WLM, stating that, should socialism arise in the United Kingdom, “there would have to be a sustained effort, in which an autonomous women’s movement would have an important part to play, to end the sexual division of labor between men and women in the family and at work” (Communist Party Great Britain 60). This gesture toward autonomous women’s organizing is hardly concrete; while the authors argue that socialist revolution is not enough to ensure women’s liberation, the necessity for feminist organizing remains in the conditional (“there would have to be”). In the late 1970s, then, the CPGB, of which Mulford was a member, would have been a locus of somewhat eclectic political thought, and there was room within it for creative experimentation; cultural endeavors were not necessarily dismissed out of hand as bourgeois deviations. But whatever cultural and personal advantages such permissiveness may have had, it also accompanied a capitulation to capitalist party politics (rather than anti-capitalist proletarian vanguardism) that arguably contributed to the defanging of the British left throughout the 1970s. Meanwhile, the early 1970s saw a proliferation of socialist-feminist groups, most of them short-lived. Many of these groups struggled internally over methods of political education and organizational form, arguing often in terms of the reproduction of social relations (of production and of reproduction). In



Forms of Reproduction in the Early Work of Wendy Mulford

119

the 1979 volume Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism, Sheila Rowbotham details the dynamic forms of organization characteristic of the WLM: In the women’s movement for nearly ten years there have been organizing assumptions growing, mainly communicated by word of mouth. The difficulty of translating these assumptions into a language which can touch current definitions of organization on the left have been enormous. This is partly because these have emerged from the practice of a movement in a piecemeal way. They challenge the left groups implicitly rather than explicitly. But also they cannot be contained within the accepted circumference of debate established by the maledominated left. Coming partly from the experience of feminist women’s lives they reach continually outwards towards new forms of expressing defiance and resistance. (Rowbotham et al. 39)

While Rowbotham argues that a socialist-feminist perspective is needed among these groups, she does not believe that a new “theory” will be enough to transform the psychology of leadership prevalent in the predominantly nonfeminist left in Britain. The place of the hyphen in the name “Marxist-Feminism,” then, allowed both for attempts to create a unified theory of “capitalist patriarchy” and for the acknowledgment of many different systems of thought, not all of which were obvious guides to anti-capitalist revolutions. For Mulford’s work in the late 1970s, this eclecticism may have both enabled and hindered expressions of political solidarity. On the one hand, Marxistfeminist organizing provided a setting for her to think through the political relevance of personal experience and to understand personal politics as part of an effort to transform society collectively; on the other, the force of the left was waning at this moment, and the enthusiasms of the women’s movement were beginning to sour.6 It remained quite unlikely, then, that any “fragments” could be gotten “beyond” solely at the level of organizational forms.7 What was at stake, both for left-libertarian feminists such as Rowbotham and for Marxist-Leninist feminists, was the possibility of maintaining movements against capitalism. Such movements needed, simultaneously, to respond to shifting relations of production and to maintain integrity as a significant force primed to topple and replace capitalism. While some version of this contradiction is always a problem for the revolutionary left, it was especially acute in 1970s Britain, given the perception that the left was fragile and self-defeating and facing an increasingly bloodthirsty adversary with the rise of conservatism. Mulford’s writing is pervaded by the objective conditions of the left in the late-1970s, as her poems both assert her social and political commitments and outpace these affiliations.

120

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

The poems leave open the question of how political commitment can take shape in the regime of lyric pedagogy.

Literary study and poetic practice In the 1970s, Mulford saw literary education as a site for Marxist-Feminist praxis to interrupt the reproduction of relations of production; she actively engaged in debates about the politics of teaching and studying literature. In contrast to the socialist-feminist poet, she argues that the broadly socialist teacher of literature always works consciously in service of a sociopolitical agenda or movement. Teaching and criticism are meant, for Mulford, to be more directly committed to movement politics than is the production of poetry. Like the Marxist critics discussed in my first chapter (Baldick, Mulhern and Eagleton), Mulford sought to move literary pedagogy away from functioning for the capitalist state as moral preparation for “good citizenship,” that is, class collaboration. Mulford’s suggestions for how this might be done correspond to those of Marxist critics like Pierre Macherey, Terry Eagleton and Michèle Barrett, insofar as each writer argues against the study of literary texts as discrete objects of evaluation and for an analysis of literary production. For Mulford, as for these theorists, the category of “production” carries both economic and semiotic senses; it includes the production not only of books and technologies of distribution but also of meaning in the confrontation of the writer with various extra-literary discourses. In an article on “Socialist-feminist criticism,” Mulford argued just this when discussing the English classroom: Those of us who define ourselves as feminist and socialist teachers of English in higher education need to shift the ground of our study, and the goals we set our students, away from aesthetic and moral questions of the value of the text, to a broader analysis of literary production in its period, and to see this as one of the manifestations, and shaping forces, of the social and political reality of the time (“Socialist-feminist criticism” 182).

This proposed move from textual evaluation/explication to the analysis of production, however, is not identical to Macherey’s interest in “literary production” as the object of theory. Rather, Mulford is interested in production, it would seem, primarily as a means of transforming the English classroom from a site of applied moral philosophy into one of political history.8 Mulford herself goes so far as to argue that such problems for literary theory do not in and of



Forms of Reproduction in the Early Work of Wendy Mulford

121

themselves depart from the problem of ‘training “sensibility” ’; they may, in fact, extend such a project: As long as we allow the major concern of our studies to be with the appreciation and evaluation of the individual text, and the individual great writer’s work, however much we juggle with the canon and contextualise our texts, devise new methods of analysis, ask new questions, the end result of our labor will not greatly differ from that of New Critics, Leavisians, post-structuralists or any other group of academic critics. We will be training ‘sensibility’ in an updated guise. (189)

In this sense, Mulford’s argument is continuous with Ian Hunter’s perspective, insofar as he argues that most “historical materialist” analysis of literature and literary education erroneously maintains that the study of literature will either, as with Leavis, restore man’s authentic being or, in the mode of Macherey’s Althusserian critique, expose the ideological conditions of possibility for theoretical thought. Where Mulford departs from Hunter’s Foucauldianism is in her insistence that the social production of literature is a legitimate object of study, and that such study can interrupt the disciplinary apparatus of sensibility-training insofar as it directly admits the place of interest in the classroom. Her essay on the collective literary efforts of early twentieth-century women’s suffrage organizations does just this, laying bare Mulford’s own interest in aesthetic-political problems such as how the novelists and playwrights in question represented political commitment fictionally, the different generic and representational modes used for personal and political content (melodrama and documentary, respectively) and especially the problem of “the cause as a protagonist” in realist fiction (184– 86). Mulford then seeks to extend the logic of her “clear choice” of content in terms of its focus on the “positioning of writers amongst the forces for change at any given time”: Our work in English in higher education should . . . proceed . . . towards a mapping of the writers of a period in terms of the social and political force which they constituted. We should be looking more fully and systematically than our present contextual and period studies allow at the positioning of writers amongst the forces for change at any given time, and we should be making it our clear choice to study those periods, organisations and writers whose work is exemplary for us in terms of our social and political struggles today. (188–89)

In this passage, Mulford implicitly argues for a reconfiguration of scholarship beyond the pale of literary-historical expertise (whereas Hunter had argued for

122

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

philology as a modest but inoffensive direction for literary study to take in order to avoid the traps of bad disciplinarity) and toward the problematic of literarypolitical interest. Literary scholars and teachers need to move beyond the evaluation, appreciation and even interpretation of individual texts. Scholarship and teaching need instead to declare their interest in literature as a form of social (re)production: we have as teachers and critics a particular and declared interest in the nature of the interrelationship between literary production and the social matrix. So long as our students are made clearly aware of the position from which we speak, and are not bamboozled by any claims to exclusive and authoritative ‘truth’ by their teachers, we need have no fear of the inevitable charges of ‘bias’ and ‘coercion’ that will be made by those speaking from a different interest. To take as an example for study a period when the relationship between literary work and the society of which it forms part are [sic] necessarily and evidently acute, both in terms of the social and political crises of the time and the self-conscious response of certain sections of writers to those crises, is to make a deliberate choice of terrain. (189; emphases mine)

Teachers and critics of literature always have particular interests in the social production of literature and in literature as a form of social reproduction, and such interests cannot be divorced from broader social and political struggles. Mildly proclaiming that literary study serves in the “training of sensibility” is an endemic understatement of such interest, insofar as it reduces the social dimensions of reading and writing to a composite of individual sensibilities. Such a reduction masks the social forces at work in the production of literature as a form of social reproduction. It is in contrast to such pedagogical-moral understandings of the social that Mulford poses the social value of literary study as a remarking of writers’ responses to crises and contradictions. That is, the production of writing is situated within a complex of antagonisms to which it responds. To focus on “a period when the relationship between literary work and the society of which it forms part are necessarily and evidently acute” in terms both of the intensity of crisis and the self-consciousness of the writer’s response would naturally have been appealing to writers like Mulford working as radical poets between the university, the literary critical establishment and the WLM. Yet, as Mulford remarked in her “Notes on Writing,” such interest was too seldom directed by feminist critics and academics to the contemporary production of feminist literature:



Forms of Reproduction in the Early Work of Wendy Mulford

123

Contemporary experimental Marxist/Feminist writing is also untouched by the critical activity of those Marxist/Feminists best placed to understand it, whose work in related theoretical areas on the symbolic and the construction of the subject, for example, is directed toward the mainstream, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts of the ‘great tradition’ taught in universities. And many of them don’t care to read contemporary writing, unless it is offering representations of women today in a positive way. I may be being less than wholly fair here but it does seem to me that there’s a remarkable absence of cross-fertilisation between women working in the theoretical field and those producing certain kinds of contemporary fiction and poetry, both here and in America, a cross-fertilisation which I for one would very much welcome. (‘Notes on Writing’ 33)

Indeed, Marxist-feminist literary critics tended to focus on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literary production, as in the case of Mulford’s own article on the literary collectives of the suffrage movement or the MarxistFeminist Literature Collective’s article on Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.9 But Mulford actively sought to change this by working at the intersections of the Cambridge poetry scene, literary studies and the WLM. The May 1979 issue of the CWLN includes a notice for an upcoming ‘Reading/ Discussion Event . . . On Women and Writing which is part of the 3rd Cambridge Poetry Festival. Anne Waldman, Carmen Caull (Virago Press), Hélène Cixous & The Local Kids, D. Riley and W. Mulford will be a few of the many taking part. This will be a mixed event’. The next lines of the notice read, “We are hoping to organise an informal women-only event amongst ourselves possibly on the Sunday: when Helene Cixous would like to meet/read/discuss with us, as a kind of fringe event, & we might consider what our attitude to the male-dominated festival is.” This kind of organized event, taken with the Women’s Week reading, indicates Mulford’s attempt to bring together the different spheres of activity through which she worked to interrupt particular relations of reproduction (the matrix of sexism and Cambridge-based lyric pedagogy) and to cultivate others (radical women’s experimental writing). Poetry might be an exemplary practice for synthesizing such fragmented interests. Yet, Mulford very explicitly did not demand that poetry reproduce the line of any particular party, group or tendency. Rather, in her writings about her own poetic practice, Mulford emphasized the importance of revolutionary transformation in the field of culture. Mulford writes, in 1982, What I  am thinking of is not the kind of poetry that ‘services’ the women’s or any other movement, not words for marching songs and hallelujahs for

124

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

meeting-halls, though we need those too (and ballads, satires, odes, lyrics, epigrams, pop lyrics, choruses, and, and), but poetry that is transformative, that compels us to recognitions we would prefer not to see, and makes us aware of choices we had denied. (38)

Thus poetry itself ought to and can transform consciousness to “make us aware” and “compel . . . us to recognitions.” This sounds quite a bit like the “sensibility training” that Mulford wished to depart from in her writing on literary criticism, except that the emphasis here is on making poetry rather than on learning to read it. Mulford endeavors to counter the “particular lie of the universal transcendent nature of art and of art’s function to ‘coax on stage’ the truth known already elsewhere, in which art acts as confirmation of knowledge we possess by other means, representation of enduring human truth.” In this way, Mulford imputes an epistemological and cognitive dimension to poetry as a practice that both transmits and produces knowledges: “I have been concerned to produce meaning across and in defiance of the repressive codes of everyday, communication-ready language” (“Notes on Writing” 31–32; emphases in original). One “transformative recognition,” and the one most stressed by Mulford in the 1979 piece, is a recognition of the structuring of “material reality” along “the sexual divide”: Perhaps some people will see what I have said in its emphasis on the specificity of women’s struggle and women’s place as divisive, but I  think in order to transform society from this inhumane, partial, literally murderous state we have to recognise first that material reality, to see laser-sharp how it is structured at the deepest level on the sexual divide in order to be able to work together, as men and women, to change it, a task as urgent for artists as for workers in any other field. (36)

This “recognition” of a supposedly natural sexual division and its structuring of material (i.e. lived social) relations was a significant legacy of feminist struggles as they developed alongside Marxist politics. Indeed, many felt that a feminist historical materialism would precisely have to make the connections between the relations of production under capitalism and “the determinate character of the sexual division of labor and the implications of this for power relations between men and women at different conjunctures” (7), as Annette Kuhn and Ann Marie Wolpe argued. Yet, Mulford’s claims here and above concerning the political import of poetry bespeak a paradoxical temporal relation between poetic and social transformation, since writing seems to be both productive of and secondary to critical political analysis (i.e. “recognition”). According to this



Forms of Reproduction in the Early Work of Wendy Mulford

125

logic, Marxist-feminist political praxis needs to come before the poems, while at the same time the poems themselves are to transform rather than to serve or reproduce “the movement.” This means, somewhat paradoxically, that the possibility of reproducing an anti-patriarchal and anti-capitalist cultural politics relies precisely on avoiding service to this movement, insofar as said service would ratify the “lie” wherein “art acts as confirmation of knowledge we possess by other means.” The radical potential of poetry, then, depends on a certain indirection in relation to capitalist patriarchy rather than a face-on opposition along the lines of other forms of political action. This indirection was precisely not a feature of Mulford’s account of literary pedagogy, yet it is part of her account of the political making of poetry. In this sense, we can see lyric pedagogy transposed from the scene of teaching onto the practice of writing poetry itself, a transposition that is not simple to read in straightforward political terms. It seems important to Mulford, here, that poetry not simply reproduce political practice; what I  am arguing is that this has something to do with just how difficult feminist political practice was simply to reproduce in the first place, characterized as it necessarily was by shifting and moving antagonisms and fractures. In this sense, Mulford’s apparently paradoxical approach to the question of the revolutionary potential of poetry is perhaps best explained not simply with recourse to the Marxist aesthetic tradition’s debates about “commitment” versus “aesthetic autonomy” but rather through the lens of the contradictions of social reproduction.

Bravo to Girls & Heroes The political and social developments that I have outlined above are revealed through the contrast between Mulford’s very early published poems and some of those contained in Bravo to Girls & Heroes, which collects poems written between 1968 and 1976. Mulford published the volume, her first full-length collection of poems, through her own Street Editions Press in 1977.10 She frames the collection in explicitly feminist terms, following the main text with a handwritten note explaining that the poems were written between 1968 and 1976. They represent a very small selection of the poems of the past 10 years, which I have put together here for the following reason: that these poems indicate some of the problems facing a ♀ poet today, + that they include some of the strategies I’ve used to confront these problems, + to attempt to ‘reclaim the language’, for myself, as a ♀. (Bravo 36)11

126

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

I do not read Bravo to Girls & Heroes simply according to this indication: Mulford’s achievements in poetry are not reducible to an attempt to ‘reclaim the language’; and besides, it would be possible to find such local subversions of masculinist language in the work of many poets, and not only women, from almost any period. What singles this work out is its place at the conjunction of left feminist trajectories and late-modernist aesthetic practices, exposing the tensions between political and lyric commitment, tensions that redouble already existing contradictions within the sociopolitical field. In one poem from Bravo to Girls & Heroes, Mulford puts the ‘mirror’ to quite different use from what we saw in her poem from 1969, using it now not to frame the refinement of the private hall but rather as an interrogative goad, satirizing lyric pedagogy’s insistence on the privacy of self-reflection: BREAKING IT IN TWO, THE WAY IT GOES yet again the music ends & I’m forced to switch I do not believe in chance slow down slow down someone must have said lets slow him down but we are already moving off & a pale blur of light indicates the past – you love her & I love she & we & here we go up against the big blue roof look no hands no nets no ropes & the few spectators looking away we walk the streets boldly hand in hand currents of extra-terrestrial prescience spilling out of our impassive bodies: there are other spaces of knowledge and desire concealed behind our copper eyes. You check your body—what do you see in the bathroom glass? are those nipples real? underneath the skin are we all monsters timeless glistening and taut? (Bravo 4)

Thematically, the difference between this poem and the earlier ‘to being a cynic’ is striking; ‘what happens’ is clearly of interest to the speaker in this poem, which is, on one reading, a romantic melodrama (as in the ‘I am the walrus’-reminiscent



Forms of Reproduction in the Early Work of Wendy Mulford

127

line ‘you love her & I love she & we & here we’). Beginning with an all-caps title, the poem exhibits a prosodic boldness, but the poem also announces itself as ‘broken’ into two stanzas: that is ‘the way it goes’. The title bolsters the defiant bravado of the simple line ‘we walk the streets boldly hand in hand’. This attitude is built in part through the speed of the poem’s middle lines which move ahead of any commands:  ‘slow down slow/ down someone must have said lets slow him/ down but we are already moving off ’. These lines are taken from David Bowie’s song ‘Karma Man’, and they also echo Riley’s poem from Marxism for Infants featuring the line ‘since we are already gone on ahead of it’, a poem that, as we’ve seen, pauses for a glance in the mirror before returning, passionately and uncertainly, to a lover. But Riley doesn’t write as stridently as Mulford, at least not without immediately shifting into doubt, and then shifting back, in the general dialectical movement of her lyric. Mulford, for her part, breaks her poem in two, though this time not along the stanza line; it is within the second stanza that the speaker’s braggadocio halts after the colon in the third line: ‘there are other spaces/ of knowledge and desire concealed/ behind our copper eyes’. The eyes turn to the mirror (‘You/check your body’), and from it flows a somewhat ridiculous interrogative voice. The questions are still breathless:  ‘what do you see/ in the bathroom glass? are those nipples/ real? underneath the skin are we all/ monsters timeless glistening and taut?’ The mirror (‘bathroom glass’) of the aristocratic lyric is no longer any sort of refuge, but neither does it launch the reader into cynicism. Peter Middleton writes that this ending expresses a ‘hope that there is something underneath the words’, that language bears a force more powerful than its surfaces (‘Breaking’ 4). While this is certainly one part of what is happening here, the language of the ‘extra-terrestrial’ also ironizes the Christian and humanist rhetoric of transcendence as the basis for human solidarity (‘timeless’) that it simultaneously introduces. Yes, the alien is also a goad to move beyond the ‘impassive’ body. But the alien interrogative that closes the lyric is also a satire of such idealist goading, a satire that is more honestly and damningly self-indicting for including itself in the ‘we’ that is its object. Many of these features of Mulford’s poetry developed in conversation with other poets around her; in her work from the 1970s, Mulford echoes and repeats lines and phrases from those writers closest to her, particularly John James and Denise Riley (and they echo and repeat her, too). Much of what I am asserting about Mulford’s poetry—that it works at the contradictions of lyric pleasure’s indirection and political commitment—can be demonstrated through a comparison of her work with that of John James, then her husband. John

128

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

Wilkinson argues that for James there was no contradiction between Marxism and an appreciation for the “finer things” in life (Lyric Touch 58); for James, communism would entail a democratization of material and sensual abundance. Wilkinson identifies in James’s culinary poetics a salutary appreciation of objects of pleasure and desire, one that allows such objects to remain other and loveable for their survival of aggression (Wilkinson’s reading is markedly Winnicottian in this sense); such an appreciation of objects is deemed useful for its ability to be simultaneously intimate and impersonal.12 Mulford’s poems feature a different sort of impersonality in relation to objects, an impersonality trained in the ambivalence of an enforced identification and the pleasures and constraints that accompany it. Mulford tries out her own appreciation of the “finer things” in the second poem of Bravo to Girls & Heroes. But in Mulford’s hands, these things cannot but be immediately implicated in reproductive politics, both through the presence of “children” and because her catalogue of domestic items of reproductive pleasure always bear the ambivalence of reproductive work: we like to live simply & we like to eat well. that does not include children. definitely. they exclude it. if we could include curtains & carpets, where would you go, to make that the best place, the most pleasant in the late afternoon sun. clouds, clouds, he sleeps through the cuckoo clock marks of the great ouse alas upon the covers a complete collection of ice-creams sleep, the window is in pain again to the tune of below their stamping feet greet the extra, english, homework hour, is it, no I do not think it will be just now till sundown, calm deriving precious & little (2)

This quasi-sonnet (many of the poems in Bravo hover around fourteen lines) is composed through a pattern of shifting predication with subjects and objects continuously switching places. The opening declaration that “we like to live simply & we like to/ eat well” is immediately complicated by the problematic inclusion and exclusion of the “we” who are able to declare this so simply. But then, “they exclude it” shifts the agent of exclusion and inclusion, unsettling



Forms of Reproduction in the Early Work of Wendy Mulford

129

whether it is “we” or “children” or “that” or “it” that excludes or is excluded. “They exclude it” is prosodically indeterminate, hovering between a single stress on “clude” and the possible stressing of either or both “they” and “it,” and each version might have distinct semantic implications.13 All of these possibilities are held together in the chiasmus of exclusion, breaking apart the swaggering “we” who declare our preferences, definitely, in repose. The realization of such preferences requires making decisions and, more importantly, making the pleasant places that “we like” to inhabit: “if we could/ include curtains and carpets, where would/ you go, to make that the best place,/ the most pleasant in the late afternoon sun.” The poem shifts here to a catalogue of domestic objects and persons, each one an overdetermined node in networks of pleasure and travail. The sequencing of these elements is primarily justified through sound patterning:  a hard “c” dominates lines 7–9 and extends the earlier “curtains & carpets”:  cf. “clouds, clouds . . . cuckoo clock . . . covers . . . complete collection . . . creams), long vowels are interspersed with sibilants in these lines (“the great ouse alas,” “ice-creams sleep”). These objects are as if lost on the child (or postcoital male) figure who “sleeps through” it all, “alas.” Maternal pastoral is not a source of pleasure: “the window is in pain again”– that is, the window “pane,” as liminal space between the domestic and the street, as potential source of sunlight, is in fact a source of danger and displeasure, of missing the afternoon sun altogether: “no I do not/ think it will be just now till sundown.”14 This nonarrival of the present, of the “just now,” is the nonarrival of “living simply.” Finally, the poem’s last enjambed bit, “calm/deriving precious & little,” reenacts the paradoxes that have not been resolved in the course of the poem. “Deriving” works as transitive and intransitive, indicating both the origination of “calm” and its products; “precious & little” echoes the phrase “precious little,” both in the sense of “very little” and as an endearing diminutive. The ampersand signals the coexistence of each of these possibilities and their chiastic crossing in insoluble contradiction. What is eminently clear at the close of this poem is that at least two structures of desire, expressed initially as preferences, cut across each other and interpenetrate: motherhood and the “finer things,” the pleasures of consumption and simple intimacy, cannot peacefully coexist. We can see Mulford’s elaboration of this dilemma if we compare the appearance of sausages at different moments in the work of John James and Mulford. James’s short poem “After Francis Amunatégui,” collected in 1983’s Berlin Return, opens,

130

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

The appearance of a hot sausage with its salad of potatoes in oil can leave nobody indifferent (Poems 208)

On Wilkinson’s reading, James’s language “oscillates between referentiality and selfcontainment: the poem tells the truth or embodies the truth. These two readings can be accommodated, but cannot be reconciled into stability.” For Wilkinson, James’s treatment of objects of appetite is unique for conjoining their “elusiveness” and “vivid presence”; sausage provides the exemplary case of James’s skill at keeping appetite alive but its objects complete, even and because their elusiveness is conjoined with their vivid presence, their consumption with their sustaining power. This simplicity precludes attitudinising and literary showiness as well as sentimentality, and poetic resources must be deployed with extreme discretion. (64)

Wilkinson here rightly links consumption to sustaining power; however, this kind of “link” can obscure the fact that the wage, under capitalism, does not immediately turn into objects of appetite. The wage is transformed into sustaining objects of consumption through waged or unwaged reproductive work. Indeed, a short poem from Bravo to Girls & Heroes presents quite a different sausage from those that Wilkinson admires in James: when I am alone the pigeons drop down on our garden knowing I cannot cock the hammer they walk like mandarins & make a leisurely choice of what to eat. all day I watch them secretly from my tiny kitchen window & plot ambuscadoes with slings snares & catapults. even when I’m dreaming I always miss. when you return they vanish fatly into thin air shot from a gun, attached to a string of sausages (9)

While this is clearly not the “same” sausage that we found in James, Mulford’s poem can still complicate Wilkinson’s reading, insofar as it shows how the “vividly present” appearance of products of reproductive labor reifies them as mere



Forms of Reproduction in the Early Work of Wendy Mulford

131

objects of consumption. While they are not necessarily operative as commodities (with the exception of the peculiar commodity called labor power), products of domestic labor are all the same implicated in the capitalist mode of production precisely by virtue of their exclusion from direct engagement in the capital/ wage-labor relation. Mulford here expands the “culinary” from a simple mode of pleasurable consumption (that thereby reproduces human life and labor power) to reflect a sexual division of labor. She renders from sausage the problem of sexual difference, here rather jokingly, by pulling both at the figurative resources of the phallic and by insisting on the domestic setting. Indeed, someone makes sausages, and that someone is not usually a celebrity chef. But this string of sausages has only appeared with the arrival of the addressee. Presumably, some man brings a sausage home, then, and with it the ability to shoot a gun (“cock the hammer”) and jettison the bureaucratic pigeons. “You” are not limited, as “I” am, to the vantage point of the tiny kitchen window; the (implicitly) masculine “you” can come and go, and with that mobility comes sovereignty over the borders of the home. And, this sexual division of labor has been thoroughly internalized in the speaker: “even when I’m dreaming I always miss.” One of the volume’s less straightforward poems indicates that James and Mulford composed work in conversation during the 1970s. The title, “Fairex the Liberator,” also appears in the text of a long poem by James published in 1979 to coincide with an exhibition that he curated, both called Toasting, and which served as the exhibition’s catalogue.15 The phrase in question appears with regard to the work of Bruce McLean in a stanza that seems to list various titles by McLean, inventing and cataloguing absurd phrases: Jerry Lee Lewis Killer & Iron thief of Banal Gesture as Arousal Assassin Banger of the lover of the Deep Freeze Murderer of Monumental Aspiration Slayer of the Merely Mercantile & P & I Gothic Vandal of the Over-Posed Home Fairex the Liberator of the Chair Person from the Hedgemony of the Angelpoise Lamp Habitat & Sainsbury Time Out Curfew & Founder Leader of the SFPHBIA (Poems 177; misspellings in original)

S.F.P.H.B.I.A.  was the “Society for Putting Humour Back Into Art,” of which McLean was a founding member, which suggests that James here is dubbing his friend “Fairex the Liberator of the Chair Person,” yet the phrase also points

132

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

to Mulford’s poem, coming as it does two years after the publication of Bravo to Girls & Heroes. A bit of sleuthing can more readily illuminate the title of Mulford’s poem.16 Here it seems to refer to a Heinz-issued line of baby food products called “Farex,” which Mulford puns on to gesture toward some technology of justice, perhaps a “fair exchange.” The first stanza of this quasi-sonnet (it has sixteen lines, two of which are truncated) thematically bears out the reference to prepackaged baby food, even as it paratactically shifts to other possible readings of the title (including the possibility that it is an obscure nonreferential or only privately referential phrase, such as those found in James’s poem): FAIREX THE LIBERATOR I have lost the coast to my dressing gown pardon me these shifts stole up & they can say what they like about that. how tired he is under cover & milk stains transposed on condition of a twelve pound trace. a fine return to the tonic, for the start of the autumn season. I’ve lost the thread to my lumpy bag & what to throw away presents great problems. pie & ashes. parallel lines can be counted on, how does the grass grow? seeing us off without a punch for a chilly presence is closing in hot pursuit of moral flare.

The poem opens by flaunting various improper uses of feminine garments—”lost the coast” echoes “coats,” which previews “dressing/gown” and especially “shifts stole/ up”—and then describes a third person, “he,” at first seemingly a lover (“how tired he is/ under cover”), but also, or rather, an infant: “& milk stains trans-/ posed on condition of a twelve/ pound trace.” It seems likely that the speaker has been liberated by Fairex from the burden of constant breastfeeding, allowing for a degree of personal freedom. But Mulford doesn’t let things rest: there is, instead, “a fine return to/ the tonic, for the start of the/ autumn season.” The “fine return” implies that the 12-pound trace may instead be some



Forms of Reproduction in the Early Work of Wendy Mulford

133

sort of loan or payment, although “trace” may also refer to the piece of tackle used in pike fishing that connects the line to the lure, protecting it from the pike’s teeth. “A fine return to the tonic” also suggests the musicality of the verse, or perhaps some sort of cocktail, and also, with our provisional reading of the title in mind, the tonic as baby food, to stop the crying that has returned. Only we are here returned “for the start of the/autumn season,” recalling the language of the fashion and fishing industries and the garments and lures with which we have thus far engaged. The first stanza produces a strange rhythm through the pauses that accompany ambiguities, yet the enjambments urge a movement onward so that the rhythm is rather like a harried moment of childcare that opens into multivalence by interrupting any long thought with a cry and return to the tonic. Which is precisely what the second stanza seems to achieve, a return to the start: “I’ve lost the thread to my lumpy bag” reenacts the distracted maneuvers of the previous stanza and the loosening of garments and accessories but then moves toward the resulting difficulty of such an accumulation of meanings: “& what to throw away presents great/problems.” Next comes something like a volta, as the syntactical fluency of the preceding lines is interrupted by the end-stopped “pie & ashes,” both of which would be rather unpleasant to have tumble out of a lumpy bag but which also curiously echo the names of the protagonists, Pie and Outwash, in J. H. Prynne’s celebrated poem “Of Sanguine Fire,” published in his 1971 volume Brass. The final lines return to the multivalent fluency of the first stanza, but the tone has shifted perceptibly: “seeing us off without a punch for a /chilly presence is closing in hot pursuit/ of moral flare.” We return here to the cadence of the fashion spread, only it has been mutilated. The departure or “closing” links contraries (chilly/hot, presence/pursuit) through the double-duty usage of “in” as both “closing in” and “in . . . pursuit.” The two parts of the poem, before and after the volta, are thematically connected only through the declared deferral or rejection of moralizing. That “moral flare” is pursued implies its absence, and any “liberation” turns out to be more quotidian than the title’s promised romance. The incompatibility of the poem’s references is gathered in the title’s private obscurity, and this gathering of incommensurability amounts to a poetic trial of the experience of liberation. Lyric pedagogy pursues a moral flare, but the flare of lyric continuity is not, in fact, coextensive with the partial and paratactic experience of liberation that the first part of the poem enacts. In this sense, Mulford threads satire through the contradictions attending any commitment to Marxist-feminism under the conditions of capitalist patriarchy. Such commitments cannot survive the poem’s lumpy accumulation of affect unchanged, and the poem obliquely expresses this

134

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

gathering fragmentation of political and personal commitments, knowingly linking incommensurables by prosodic means.

“Back-street rhymes” Such commitments are tried out as a collaborative project in No Fee: A Line or Two for Free, which we may recall Mulford and Riley produced and distributed at Women’s Week in February. No Fee is a set of A4 pages copied and stapled together, as were many publications from Street Editions and other small-run poetry presses at the time. The cover page is handwritten, featuring a simple pen-and-ink drawing probably done by Riley. At the bottom of the page are the authors’ names, handwritten without much spacing, as if a single name: “Denise Riley Wendy Mulford.” This is indicative of the attitude toward authorship displayed throughout: the poems are not individually attributed to either author, although the subsequent reprinting of many of them (in the co-authored Some Poems and in Riley’s Dry Air) signals that the first seven are by Riley and the remainder by Mulford. The poems are also mostly untitled, and it is sometimes difficult to tell whether a poem ends at the bottom of the page or continues onto the next, adding to the potential confusion over the proper borders of each poem and of each poet’s work. If Bravo to Girls & Heroes riffed on the sensual abandon of John James’s earlier writings, some of Mulford’s contributions to No Fee move, as did James’s 1978 A Former Boiling, toward more militant, heavier verse. Mulford’s contributions here also include some terrifically funny bits:  “am I  the only person here looking/ although it is dinner time/ is that a sneaky delaying orange?” (No Fee 13). Mulford’s most striking contribution, and the one that I  will focus on, is the antepenultimate poem, a suite titled “back-street rhymes.” The “rhymes” are divided into various segments, each differently lineated and employing distinct tones, grammars and idioms. It looks something like a chant sheet for a march or rally and opens with what might be a chant (or perhaps some especially dystopian Springsteen lyrics): we’re unashamed but it’s not true we’re    unafraid we’re  strong terraced in rural streets by day we     choke in garage land (15)



Forms of Reproduction in the Early Work of Wendy Mulford

135

This anthem is interrupted by an obstinate, negative insistence on the undesirability of straightforward belonging. The next stanza shifts to a singular first-person address to the crowd: dont make me a miracle woman keep     on playing the sounds dont rule dont guess dont buy dont lay     anything on my voice

The absence of apostrophes in “dont” marks an informal voice worried about the “we” of the earlier stanza while simultaneously avoiding any definite distinction from it. These are the sounds of defiance wrought by feminist consciousness raising, but they are also the showiness of an anarcho-punk aesthetic—these strands intersect in the next stanza through a frank sexual and gustatory rhetoric: could the risen bread have a simpler flavour beneath the skin the crawlies creep shut up wedge tight guzzle yr meat late nice slice & masturbate

Here the “simplicity” of consumption gives way to the bodysnatching we saw in “Breaking It In Two, The Way It Goes” (“beneath the skin/ the crawlies creep”). The sonic and syntactic fluency of these first four lines is cut off by the tensed monosyllables “shut up wedge tight” and the crudeness of “guzzle yr meat.” The return to sonic fluidity comes with “masturbate.” We have been prepared by the opening (“we are unashamed”/ “dont make me a miracle woman”) not to read masturbation as a moral problem but rather as a phase in the dialectic of individuation and solidarity. The short lines of this second fragment exert a vertical pull downward to the suite’s most regularly metrical section, a quatrain composed in a slurring idiom that works through cumulative negation to outline the valences of the street: snot love snot hate snot riot kniver s’us sitting still seventy seven frever head rockin snot here snot there kniver snot in the street silently nor sweet

136

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

The repetition of “s” and “n” sounds, the idiosyncratic end rhymes of the first three lines and the relatively regular meter all refer the quatrain to the doggerel chant of the poem’s first fragment. “Snot” is repeated as both negation and mucus; the negative ambivalence of the lines is disgusting and intimate rather than coolly indifferent. No sublimation follows from the repeated negation, however: “s’us sitting still seventy seven frever” (most likely referring to the year of the poem’s composition). This insistence on stillness and the stopping of time syncs with a refusal of any traditional sociology of the street: there is no opportunity (“snot in the streets silently nor sweet”) for temporal or spatial distancing by which to analyze “us.” This is a pluralizing, marked by its idiomatic contractions as distinct from universalizing, of the admonition not to “lay anything on my voice.” The streets will be neither romanticized nor pathologized; we may not even be in the streets at all. The quasi-caesura of “snot in the street // silently nor sweet” enacts a transition to what follows on the next page, where silence appears as a delicate masque of self-protection: the silence a thin skin if you could turn your steps springcold light breaking turf greening under broken brick tenants running to shelter all these years:

Here Mulford shifts to the sociological rhetoric surrounding tenancy under conditions of so-called urban blight. She inserts a long quotation adapted from philanthropist and proto-sociologist Charles Booth’s late-nineteenth-century Life and Labor of the People in London:17 ‘desolate streets spring into existence decay with startling rapidity any tenant will do who will give the house a start by burning a little coal in it a vast township raised on hollow land levelled with foul rubbish breeding fevers & profit’ in silence

Mulford’s versification of Booth’s muckraking study starkly isolates his phrases such that her subtle addition of “& profit” seems plausible. Bookending the noisy



Forms of Reproduction in the Early Work of Wendy Mulford

137

description with “silence” highlights that something, perhaps “profit,” is both noisily raised and yet somehow, for this very reason, unanalyzed, unspoken and ultimately unaccounted for in the copious discourses surrounding the streets. The negativity of the back-street rhyme, then, is born in this silence. The poem closes with a series of couplets that manage to hold the silence borne of the previous refusals (from “dont lay anything on my voice” to the repetitions of “snot”): drive out again onto the streets echoes derisively splitting the head in search of replete cultural forms of late capitalist aggression & the ultimate anodyne of absence

The lines seek a way around the impasse between “replete cultural forms” that belong to “late capitalist aggression” and what is called the “ultimate anodyne of absence.” That is, silence won’t quite cut it here. Peter Middleton writes of these lines that The nod at “replete cultural forms” could easily be a nod at the shocking tactlessness of the open admission in the next line [i.e. “late capitalist aggression”?]. The metaphorical self-approval of the intense mental effort required in the search for culture reveals its violent methods of hegemony when the expected verb falls off the end of the line and “in” transfers itself violently to the head. (“Breaking” 5)

I would expand Middleton’s subsequent suggestion that “these holes are poetic method” to note the absent presence of silence throughout the poem as a component part of Mulford’s back-street lyric. Middleton is right that the poem’s emphatic negation does not culminate in “replete cultural forms,” but it does still open a “near impossible . . ./ gaping” from which to “make a little outing”: under the near impossible wishing, gaping, we make a little outing perhaps to return at full tide or ebb once again drifting our hearts have leaped aboard a bemused smile at our lips waiting the turn to speech

138

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

The “bemused smile at our lips/ waiting the turn to speech” evokes the power of abstention rather than opposition, but this abstention is not entirely unrelated to the negativity of protest. The poem holds both refusal (silence) and opposition (negation) together; it doesn’t sanction one or the other as the correct praxis for the back-street rhyme. Doggerel and elevated style mix, and neither one nor their combination resolves the contradictions of workingclass political commitment in the face of deindustrialization and “urban regeneration.” “Back-street rhymes” sounds out the near-impossibility of a collective and individuated poetic negation of what is, leaving how “we” will reproduce or abolish ourselves somewhere between sing-song and silence. The reproduction of Marxist-feminist struggle cannot be secured by any pedagogical or aesthetic approach to lyric:  poetry can, however, be a site for working at and exacerbating the contradictions of social reproduction rather than smoothing them over. The tradition of lyric pedagogy, and the indirection that it insists on, served, in Mulford’s poetry, as a justification for the elaboration of the contradictions of social reproduction in the deindustrializing United Kingdom of the 1970s.

1980, or, the end of the world The cover page of the January 1980 issue of the CWLN featured a note titled “Women’s Place in the 1980s.” The note marks a significant shift toward pessimism in the pages of the newsletter; with the 1979 electoral victory of the Conservatives, and Thatcher’s accession to the role of prime minister, feminist progress looked more unlikely than it had for some time: New year gloom. We are in reverse gear. Gone are the happy days of the 1970s when we moved ahead on the 7 demands of the women’s movement, where we could proudly say women are in charge of their reproduction and free to take on half the world. We now face reductions in abortion rights—family planning—nursery places—research into safe alternatives to the not so perfect contraceptive pill—the free day of the mother of school children with the cuts in school meal facilities—the widening gap in male/female pay—T.O.P.S. courses for women returning to work being curtailed. This together with the public opinion advertising campaign saying married women should not work outside the home thereby solving the unemployment problem. (1)



Forms of Reproduction in the Early Work of Wendy Mulford

139

Economic problems are being solved on the backs of poor women, the note laments, and the task for Women’s Liberation is now to defend the gains of the previous decade rather than to “move ahead.” And yet, the note insists, building a broad collective movement is as necessary as ever: How shall we stop that reversal? As individuals we do all we can—we work in small groups on different aspects of it, but is the strength of the movement coming across—how easy is it for new women to put their energy into our fragmented groups. Not everyone can see a way out of the maze on their own. Let us help each other.

Mulford’s own political focus had also moved toward conservation and survival rather than further political gains. Like many feminists (notably those at the Women’s Peace Camp, who in 1981 set up encampments at Greenham Common— where there had been a “temporary” US and Royal military base since the Second World War—to protest the government’s decision to allow cruise missiles to be based there), Mulford found her political energies directed toward the problem of nuclear disarmament.18 In the December 1979 issue of the CWLN, Mulford published a short piece with the headline “WARNING: HM GOVERNMENT DEFENCE POLICY CAN SERIOUSLY DAMAGE YOUR HEALTH/ YOU ARE IN A NUCLEAR DANGER ZONE.” The piece sardonically outlines the latest NATO policies regarding the cold war arms race and emphasizes the aggression of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Western European forces directed toward the Soviet Union: The Soviet ‘threat’ to Nato is used by the Tories to increase arms spending at the same time that they are closing hospitals, cutting school meals, attacking the Nationalised industries and the Trades Unions, threatening abortion rights, creating unemployment & trying to drive women back into the home, etc, etc. CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament] points out that in reality the Soviet armed superiority in Europe is a myth, from troops to tanks to boats to nuclear missiles. In other words, the warmongering starts right here . . . East & Central England, & other areas near American bases, could, if need be, be sacrificed. WITH EACH STEP IN THE GAME THE CREDIBILITY OF LIMITED NUCLEAR WAR & ITS ACCEPTIBILITY [sic] TO THE MILITARY & THE GOVERNMENT INCREASES. In this game there are only losers.

Mulford’s tone is both urgent and sardonically understated (“East & Central England . . . could, if need be, be sacrificed”). The jauntiness of such declarations

140

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

is bolstered by the seemingly random bursts of all-caps. This typographical unorthodoxy reflects the uncanny unreality of total destruction: WHAT SHOULD WOMEN IN THE MOVEMENT BE DOING AGAINST THE NUCLEAR ARMS RACE? HOW CAN WE TRY TO CHANGE THESE CRAZY POLICIES TOGETHER WITH OTHER FOLK WHO DONT FANCY FRYING? That’s what I’d like to ask everyone at Eden St on Dec 4      Wendy (M).

That is, thinking the total abolishment of the world is practically impossible, but it needs to be done, Mulford suggests, in order to get on with anything at all. The piece’s special pleading (“FOLK WHO DONT FANCY FRYING”) insists that fighting total annihilation is a necessary task for the movement and that it is absolutely incumbent on all who want radical movements to survive to join with anti-war activists. In 1982, Mulford wrote a postscript “Three years on” to her earlier “Notes on Writing.” The postscript cements an oblique shift in her politics from what she called a “Marxist/Feminist Viewpoint” to a fascination with and dread of nuclear apocalypse. We see here a shift away from a critique and rejection of peacetime capitalism’s reproductive politics. Now, Mulford is writing angrily, desperately, about survival and what possible place women writers could have at this present juncture, how we could use our voices to help build resistance to the threat of nuclear genocide. Since that is what I care about most today, what I originally intended to talk about, my personal shaping as a woman and as a writer doesn’t any longer seem terribly interesting, or relevant. (‘Notes on Writing’ 37)

Survival is the watchword here: the literal survival of the human species and of life on earth. This shift away from a transformative politics and toward a conservation of what is echoes the note from the newsletter, yet the task Mulford sets for feminist poets is not primarily to protect the advances of the previous decade but rather to “be . . . alive in language to the imagined reality of the destruction of our world . . . What would a feminist poetics and practice be that was strong to take on such a challenge? I  think that’s an important question to ask, even though it’s unanswerable” (37–38). The ambition to develop transformative Marxist-feminist poetics is now submitted to the metaphysical exhortation to “imagine our deaths”: “We have to imagine our deaths . . . that is almost impossible to do, precisely because we are so committed to our lives.” The imagination of death amounts, for Mulford, to an affirmation of life.



Forms of Reproduction in the Early Work of Wendy Mulford

141

Curiously, this kind of celebration and recreation required, for the Mulford of 1982, that she stop teaching:  “I was a teacher until quite recently and my decision to give up teaching was influenced by my sense of the urgency of this present moment, that I must work and write where I can wholly commit myself ” (39). In the face of the “almost certain” destruction of the world, ideological struggle within the classroom or in the field of literary criticism seems to be a distraction from the affirmation of life that poetry must take up. This is a new age for the politics of social reproduction, construed by Mulford here primarily in an affirmative mode, although the contradictions cannot be too far from the surface. This political rhetoric of “survival” with was not, however, only a feature of anti-war and CND activism. Indeed, much black British political discourse from the 1970s and 1980s, feminist and otherwise, formulated the urgency of its work in terms of survival.19 But black British socialist feminists also engaged directly— and critically—with the language of “survival” voiced by predominantly white UK peace and disarmament movements. Multiple essays and poems in the anthology Charting the Journey: Writings by Black and Third World Women, published in 1988 and edited by Shabnam Grewal, Jackie Kay, Liliane Landor, Gail Lewis, and Pratibha Parmar, confront white feminist anti-war and disarmament politics directly.20 Some objections to American military and imperial power do, indeed, amount to the disavowal of the United Kingdom’s (and particularly England’s) past and present iniquities. Rada Gungaloo brings a “Third World Perspective” to “the nuclear question,” pointing out that the front lines of nuclear destruction and devastation had precisely not been in Europe, and that the apocalyptic fear of the ultimate holocaust, however real and legitimate, prevents us understanding the rationale behind the nuclear build-up . . . It is only an understanding of the economic and political reasons behind the building of bases, stockpiling of missiles and sale of arms which will bring about an awareness which goes beyond a purely life-and-death perspective. The real fight is for the elimination of the causes of the problem and not merely its symptoms. (278–79)

This unflinching articulation of an internationalist socialist feminism surely complicates the drift of some of the more reactive survival formations that Mulford and others in the CWLG seem to have taken on. Black British socialistfeminists had long been, both of strategic necessity and due to histories of migration, engaged in internationalist political formations that challenged the insularity of viewing political and economic strategy only in terms of

142

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

whatever the UK government happened to be doing at any given time. Gail Lewis, in the same section of Charting the Journey, explains that black feminists in the 1980s shared a suspicion of the British peace movement for its “racist, nationalist, xenophobic, and heterosexist” underlying assumptions” (271). But Lewis describes how her views were challenged when she visited Nicaragua and met socialist women there who demanded that rather than dismiss the British peace movement, black British feminists should work to transform it with an internationalist, anti-capitalist perspective.21 Mulford’s own shift from transformation to “survival,” then, can be read as part of a broader waning of 1970s forms of socialist-feminism organizing, but this shift cannot by any means be understood as the only option perceived by feminists. Indeed, Mulford’s work itself suggests that such a shift, from militant activism to affirmation, was far from being wholly satisfactory even on its own terms. To illustrate this, I look in closing at “How do you live?,” the first poem from Mulford’s 1985 collection The A.B.C.  of Writing and Other Poems. This poem announces itself as an affirmation of life, yet it also, and significantly, rails against the fact that such affirmation seems the only available possibility for poetry engaged with reproductive politics. The poem, dated 1979–1983, is dedicated “for Hélène Cixous, who gave me the question.” Previous readings of “How do you live?” have focused almost exclusively on this dedication as the source of the poem’s approach to political poetry and have read from this a “poststructural” turn in Mulford’s feminism and in her poetry, in particular as questioning gender essentialism.22 The poem begins in a promising vein for this sort of reading: no clear answer. ambivalently. reciprocally. in oscillation. lurching in surprise & wonder.

However, the poem’s “ambivalence” is not really or only an Anglophone imitation of Cixous; it must be understood in the context of Mulford’s project to write against nuclear apocalypse by affirming life, however damaged it may be. Written in 1979–1983, the poem corresponds almost exactly to the historical gap between the sections of Mulford’s “Notes on Writing” and to the years after Beyond the Fragments and the beginning of Thatcher’s premiership. The poem forms part of Mulford’s turn toward thinking social reproduction as survival against the threat of annihilation, and this turn takes shape amid what she seems to see as an infighting left with diminished hopes for change:



Forms of Reproduction in the Early Work of Wendy Mulford

143

after-effect of too much pricy delegation, herein described as daringly / close to disaster, danger’s cousin.

In this passage, all distinct administrations of power threaten to fade into the dim fate of disaster. “herein described” marks the shift whereby Mulford will locate in late capitalist warfare an irresistible drive toward total destruction. The job of a socialist-feminist poetics alive to language is now to stop this disaster and to reproduce life, precisely so that an answer to the question “how do you live?” might survive the “surprise & wonder” that it can be asked at all. The poem’s second half threads together the problem of feminist poetry with the threat of total destruction:           oh there  is too much talk & what is shared in timid in timid recoil does not nor ever can satisfy the heart, these ultra-private accommodations between person & politics negotiating survival while the sea rises hold on for what you can I sd

The space in which person and politics, or, analogously, lyric and feminism, “accommodate” each other is “ultra-private” and cannot ever “satisfy the heart” even when it is shared “in timid/in timid recoil.” The repetition seems to force the ear to hear “intimate” in “in timid.” Linda Kinnahan argues that these lines “momentarily highlight . . . the interiority of the self, another conventional voicing of the “feminine,” only to assault it with “politics negotiating survival”” (205). But this reading still bypasses the problem of total destruction. How do you live:  “negotiating survival while/ the sea rises hold on for what you can.” This is a reactive demand; forget “too much talk,” and hold on. At the same time, the poem is a lament that this will not do: that this is not a poetics, this is not a politics, this comes all too close to an earlier line’s chilling injunction to “lie back my sweet/ & take it.” The poem, then, actively resists the politics of simply affirming life that it finds to be the only available choice; it has not forgotten the days when “the movement” forged ahead with demands. What’s left is resignation, and Mulford will not have it, even as “there is no alternative,” in the notorious words of Thatcher. The poem closes with what “I sd” wrapped in quotation marks:

144

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

I sd ‘a woman’s place behind the home everywhere & nowhere fear of placelessness, hold on for what we can, cradling cuddling care. home love tucked body refuge will satisfy what part?’

In the 1987 selected poems volume late spring next year, Mulford has changed “placelessness” to “placeness,” and all of Mulford’s critical readers have referred to this version, indicating that they have read Mulford’s late spring next year even when they refer to the earlier volume. This may account for the fact that they miss the fear of annihilation that motivates the poem’s dialectic between the reproduction of life and disgust for the concomitant survival of living oppression.23 In “fear of / placelessness,” placelessness also signals that there may be no “home” at all on our planet, and so “hold on for what we can” is not so much a rallying cry for an ethics of collective care as it is a frozen, weakened (“tucked body refuge”), last-ditch effort at reproduction as simple survival. Get under your desks, kids. This poem, then, in its original published form, mourns the loss of “reproduction” as a problem for the internal machinations of left organizations:  reproduction now covers only the most basic survival of life.24 While the poems of Bravo to Girls & Heroes and No Fee worked at the contradictions of reproducing movements and collective projects, “how do you live” repeats the desperation of the individual in the form of a “we”—what binds “us” here is not a generative negation of what kills us but rather the dismal hope for bare survival. This was not the only possible conclusion to be drawn from the early Thatcher years, nor was Mulford’s the only road taken, but it was also by no means unique to her. It is precisely this reduction of commitment to mere repetition that is, finally, what Mulford’s poem marks as an intolerable form of reproduction.

4

Institutional Geologies and Lonely Sociality

The political pitfalls of spurious assumptions of unity, especially when unity is assumed on the basis of neat identity categories, are reflected in the theoretical and poetic writings of Denise Riley from the late 1980s through the early 2000s. But Riley’s skepticism that sociological categories can provide a neat basis for solidarity is not only a response to the internal dynamics of feminist organizing or to the rise of Thatcherite conservatism in the 1980s. I  would contend that Riley is also responding to the profoundly uneven incorporation of forms of minoritized difference into cultural and educational institutions that took place across these same years and beyond. This incorporation has sometimes taken the form of mandates to “represent” minority cultures through an expressivist poetics rather than through political critique:  certain versions of minoritized expression would be accommodated by universities, cultural organizations and municipal and nonprofit funding bodies, provided they were understood to be properly sociologically representative (and thereby containable to the particular). The context for Riley’s later political thought, then, has to include an emergent but uneven and contradictory British multiculturalism and hesitant accommodation of liberal feminism. Roderick Ferguson’s The Reorder of Things: The University and the Incorporation of Minority Difference theorizes a similar dynamic as it played out in the US academy in the late twentieth century. In particular, Ferguson focuses on the way in which minority social movements would be solicited by institutions to develop forms of organizational representation; he describes this solicitation, as well as its embrace, in terms of a “will to institutionality”: The will to institutionality suggests that minority difference can achieve effectiveness and agency by investing in dominant institutions, making institutionalization a historical necessity rather than one item on a menu of interventions, suggesting that minority difference can only be achieved through the forms that dominant institutions offer. (Ferguson 226)

146

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

The institutionalization of minority social forms that Ferguson discusses is significantly less developed in UK higher education than in the United States (there are very few women’s, ethnic, queer or black studies departments extant in the United Kingdom, to take one minor example, and fewer than 1 per cent of professors—the equivalent of “Full Professors” in North America—are nonwhite at the time of writing). UK universities have, in the era of their postwar and “post-Empire” expansion, been places in which British class, gender and race relations have been reproduced and reshaped. This has involved the rapidly expanding admission and recruitment of women since the mid-century and of many more working-class students under the post-1992 unified domain of universities, and this always has included migrants from former colonies and the EU as well as nonwhite UK-born students. Still, we are presented in the United Kingdom with a very different situation from that of post-1968 American higher education, where many universities did take on concerted strategies of incorporating minority representation (in terms of curricula, controversial affirmative action admissions programs for students and, to a lesser extent, staffing). Riley was curiously placed in relation to these developments:  her work as a philosopher of Marxist and feminist praxis was relatively under-recognized in the UK academy, even as her poetry maintained a devoted (if numerically limited) following among readers of British avant-garde and feminist poetry (her collection Dry Air was published by the feminist press, Virago, in 1985, and then Mop Mop Georgette came out in 1993 from Reality Street, a merger of Mulford’s Street Editions with Ken Edwards’s Reality Studios magazine). Moreover, Riley’s experiences of teaching and working in the academy—in various part-time positions up to and including her current position at the University of East Anglia (UEA), where she arrived in 1998—included postdoctoral and other visiting fellowships and roles in the United States, where she was more regularly recognized as a notable feminist theorist (following her stint as a postdoctoral fellow at the Pembroke Center for Research and Writing on Women in 1984– 1985). At the same time, Riley also had first-hand experience of the way in which “creative writing” functioned as an academic subject, teaching, as she did, at UEA, home of the first-established and still most highly regarded Creative Writing program in the United Kingdom. Riley’s academic employment, then, surely provided a view to the ways in which the US academy institutionalized women’s studies, incorporating anti-oppressive insurgencies (student and other social movements) as sites of institutionally authorized knowledge production, and also of the rise of “creative writing” as a subject within the United Kingdom.



Institutional Geologies and Lonely Sociality

147

In this chapter, I explain how Riley’s work, read in relation to the historical and institutional parameters laid out here and throughout this book, responds to these predicaments. My reading renders legible the extent to which Riley’s work arises within the constrictions of a set of institutional situations that can reduce Marxist and feminist critique to a series of poetic and academic personalities and authorities.1 In this context, it seems, Riley finds some new resources in lyric pedagogy, albeit a lyric pedagogy with a difference. Riley is certainly not the only figure whose work could be explored in this light, but her work provides an exemplary case, precisely because of what I have argued is her longstanding implicit critique of lyric pedagogy’s relationship to social reproduction. I see this in her rejection of intersubjectivity as a model for understanding the sociality of lyric poetry. There are many poets—feminists and otherwise—who engage directly with social reproduction in their poetics, but not many of them do so within and against the grain of lyric pedagogy as it transformed across the late twentieth century and rubbed up against the institutionalization of social movements and creative practices previously “outside” the remit of university study. One of the key ways that I see this belated and critical engagement with lyric pedagogy taking shape in Riley’s work is through the repetition and echoing of phrases and lines, including repetitions of lines and phrases from her poetry in her prose. In a sense, Riley’s work literalizes lyric pedagogy by showing how bits of language resound beyond their original instances of conditioning. If “lyric reading” as described by Virginia Jackson involves the presupposition that lyric, by its very nature, outlasts or is from the outset outside of history, and if lyric pedagogy involves teaching what gets called lyric under strict orders not to refer to its social production, Riley’s poems paradoxically “outlast” themselves, realizing themselves as lyric only by reappearing in the context of prose. This chapter proceeds by following Riley’s late 1980s and 1990s retrospective accounts of Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) organizing and feminist theorizing. This involves for Riley an account of the epistemological shifts that come with “retrospection” and a partial theorization of what I  will as shorthand call a “talismanic” poetics that cuts across her writings. I will then think about how Riley’s poetry and prose from the late 1980s on turns toward a consideration of the sociality of loneliness in light of her retrospective account of some of the failures of the WLM. I then look at how Riley’s “talismanic” poetics plays out in the exchanges between her poetry and prose, highlighting what I call a “geological” rhetoric. These aspects of Riley’s style are, I argue, part of her response to the institutionalization of social loneliness that is achieved by a kind of enforced sociology. Riley’s vulgar materialist rhetoric enriches her description

148

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

of the ways in which inadequate understandings of sociality get in the way of enumerating the variable social needs of feminized people.

“A sliver of the history of the present” Writing in the early 1990s, Riley reflected on the collective forces that had led her, two decades earlier, to conduct the initial PhD research for what would become War in the Nursery. At the time of her earlier writing, she explains, she was one of many in the WLM who saw historical materialist analysis as key to contemporary feminist struggle. Socialist-feminists, and not only those few firmly lodged in the academic disciplines legislating historical work, were, she says, driven to enter “the archives.” Riley describes feminist efforts to develop materialist histories of women’s oppression and resistance in the face of a general uncertainty about what ‘the State’ was, and what ‘rights’ might be; the British women’s liberation movement formulated demands to a (solidly unresponsive) State, so that there was nothing academic about this interest; it was understood to be sharply political. Those of us who could somehow manage to research these questions saw our investigations as ‘at the service of ’ feminist politics and campaigns. In this we continued an aspiration of the late-1960s libertarian socialism which hoped for critical intellectual work to be done outside of the universities, to have an independent base. (‘A Short History’ 124)

Riley testifies to the manner in which this socialist-feminist understanding of historical method productively opened the field of materialist analysis to questions of specific importance to women. But the slogan “the personal is political” carried more complex addresses and affects. For those engaged in socialist-feminist activism, she explains, feminist historical scholarship was an urgent political undertaking to be fueled by the experiences of women in the present. Participants in the WLM understood historical work itself as a potential domain for democracy, and the act of private research was quickly aligned to such visions of prefigurative social relations: The questions which were then agitating the women’s liberation movement could be felt vividly enough to determine many working trajectories, and could fire our ‘historic passions’ as surely as any more conventionally historical enthusiasms . . . That conviction, that a collectivity of public action did exist into which some shreds of private work could be fed, was perhaps a last kick of the



Institutional Geologies and Lonely Sociality

149

longing of 1968 for a democracy of criticism, for an unwalled invisible university so free that all could drift in and out at will. (“Historic Passions” 238)2

From the vantage point of the 1990s, Riley worries that this tendency sometimes amounted to an attempt to synthesize and universalize at the level of theory (albeit theory based in historical materialist research) the contemporary forms of domination and exploitation that faced mostly white cisgender women with some experience in higher education. Ironically, this incitement for all to conduct historical materialist research may have also forced too quick a jump between the “archives” and present feminist concerns—that is, it may have amounted to a smoothing over of historical differences. In retrospect, Riley is skeptical of the tendency to align the political content of historical research with the activity of doing research; the women’s liberationist analyzes of the prospects for revolutionary change were, she suspects, too easily conflated with the exhilarations of inquiry and composition. The subsequent shift in Riley’s work from historical materialist research toward more reflective and philisophico-linguistic concerns is not simply the product of a change in temperament or of Riley’s “maturing” as a thinker and scholar. It is also the result of the objective changes in feminist organizing and political economy that I have sketched up to this point. Throughout the 1980s, the popularity of the WLM waned; a large number of women’s liberation groups moved toward liberal single-issue programs or else toward cultural feminist separatism. Socialist-feminism had become, for many, a matter of academic debate and at times went unchecked by the experiences of extracurricular organizing or direct action. Part of Riley’s project in the 1990s, then, was to historicize the affective dimensions of her earlier historical investigations, to query and delineate the links between WLM accounts of history and the affective dimensions of writing politics (here we can recall the closing lines of “To the Islands” from No Fee: “writing politics is a luscious glow/and gives a quick buzz to your style”). As Riley reflects, Once you have realized that some inescapable leaven of self-fascination is busily at work under the banner of reinterpreting oneself as a sliver of the history of the present, then you are forced to speculate about exactly what it’s up to there. How someone will speak about herself is, deeply and immediately, historical. To overhear one’s self, though, is to witness it singing an aria, the evaluation of which demands the hardest criticism and a knowledge of every rhetorical trick in the book. (‘Historic’ 241)

150

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

Riley attempts, in these reflections, to “overhear” her own writings from the late1970s (much as one ought to “overhear” the speech in lyric, according to J. S. Mill). She concludes that reconstructing one’s place in history can lead to a freezing of the past in one’s self-image rather than an animation of the self as a “sliver of the history of the present.” Seeking to find herself everywhere, she worries, will limit the chances of actually producing a materialist analysis of her research and writing as historical agents themselves. Riley instead attempts to reconstruct the conditions of her earlier writing and to bring her own process of composition into the field of historical materialist analysis, and she implies that any truly dialectical materialism requires this sort of detour. To this end, Riley delineates the theoretico-political context of her academic prose on another occasion in the early 1990s. In “A Short History of Some Preoccupations,” she provides a sort of encyclopedia of the theoretical and political formulations that haunted her own writings: Certain phrases and formulations take on a talismanic quality, rattle at the back of one’s brain for years. Perhaps, or even probably, they are not deployed, not formally worked up and digested into a coherent theory; none the less they keep a powerful presence on top of which later ‘influences’ lie only lightly . . . I imagine that many of ‘us,’ especially the bookish ones, felt ourselves to be hung around with talismans or mottoes, which we’d collected and which could be fingered like rosaries for guidance in the tumult. The new feminism gave us the ubiquitous ‘the personal is the political’ and the slogans (like ‘No women’s liberation without socialism! No socialism without women’s liberation!’) but these were new accretions which fell upon the older layers; the formulations about the State and the individual, Marx and Freud and why 1917 had failed. It is these formulations, these talismanic memories, which possess a powerful and continuing presence in the work done perhaps a decade or fifteen years later, even where they are not consciously remembered, or are refined, or indeed are repudiated. (123–25)

Riley attends here to the “talismanic” quality of formulations that are not fully worked through but rather clung to as magic keys that do not necessarily determine a textual politics in any rigorously consistent manner. Such talismanic returns will prove a key element of Riley’s poetic composition into the 1990s, and they will also be crucial to the politics of irony and the theory of linguistic materialism that Riley elaborates in her later prose. These two self-reflective texts mark an interval between Riley’s prose works Am I  That Name? (1988) and The Words of Selves:  Identification, Solidarity, Irony (2000). While the earlier text is a historical-theoretical monograph on



Institutional Geologies and Lonely Sociality

151

the collective name “women,” The Words of Selves and its follow-up, Impersonal Passion (2005), present a second-order discourse or abstraction from the particular histories of the names catalogued in Am I  That Name? and War in the Nursery. The stakes have shifted from interventions in particular historical determinations (i.e. the myriad forces convening to produce and then collapse wartime nurseries or the shifting valences of the name “women” for feminism) to more evidently philosophical engagements with the vicissitudes of selfdescription and the affect attendant to speech acts tout court. If specificity is forfeited for the sake of generality, however, The Words of Selves marks this loss throughout with its shifts and doubts, its self-negating tendency and its nomination of irony as the unreliable thread linking varied forms of political speech. I will have more to say about irony later in this chapter, but for now it is worth remarking that Riley’s account and practice of irony engages with the analytic categories that my preceding chapters have elaborated. Riley’s theory of linguistic materiality is at the same time performed by the echoing of earlier writings in the later prose, and in this way, literary pedagogy, socialist feminism, poetic collectives and the divergent commitments to each are scrambled and reconfigured. This is all to say that Riley’s move from a philosophical practice of history to a historical practice of philosophy was also mediated by her poetic output from around 1985 through 2000. “Reflections in the Archive” and “A Short History of Some Preoccupations” demonstrate an explicitly literary thinking of historical and political writing; they bring the writing subject into direct contact with the political contents broached and speculate on the mutual determinations of these domains. They consider slogans and theoretical formulas as performances of the self as “a sliver of the history of the present.” Riley’s readings of such slivers are not without the resources of lyric pedagogy, and they partake in a similar practice of making concrete the particularities of “impersonal passions.” Still, more than a few poet-critics have noted the failure of Riley’s later prose to match the affective intensity of her poetry. Andrea Brady writes that “there is . . . a significant gap between the pragmatic but optimistic conclusions of Riley’s theory, and the dark aggressions of her verse” (Brady 4), while Neil Pattison wonders at how “the cool, diffident authority of Riley’s critical self-reflection is difficult to reconcile with the extravagance and vulnerability of the work it recalls” (Pattison 2). In contrast to these appraisals, I  argue that The Words of Selves and Impersonal Passion offer an extension or afterlife of the poetry that performs the processes described in the prose. Moreover, these afterlives amount also to a peculiar afterlife of lyric pedagogy itself. In my view, Riley’s

152

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

theoretical prose does not simply explain or fail to explain her poetry; rather, contradictions teased out in the poetic work return in the prose, often in the form of “talismanic” words or phrases that have not been exorcised by poetic composition. In this sense, the poetry bears on and into the prose, contributing to the thick historicity of the particular “words of selves” that are proffered for and by Riley’s political philosophy of irony. These lonely echoes of the verse are often unmarked, but they perform an echoing loneliness that, I  argue, Riley repeatedly presents as a critical limit case for social thinking. In this sense, the poetry and the prose intermingle in a diffuse but coherent account of this limit case of loneliness and its linguistic mechanisms and affects. I will not provide a comprehensive reading here of Riley’s poetic output from the 1990s, although I do benefit from and amend some excellent accounts of this work.3 Rather, I am focusing on the afterlives of Riley’s poetry in her prose so as to outline how her theories of lonely sociality, talismanic politics and metaphor and rhetoric intersect in her unique account and performance of linguistic materialism. This shift in Riley’s work also needs to be historicized as a response to the provisional academic incorporation of feminism and of the expressive poetics of “creative writing” that tend to link racialized and feminized writers to sociological categories in ways that, for Riley, occlude the workings of political solidarity. Riley’s practice of carrying materialist poetics into her prose is, I  show, continuous with the Empsonian trajectory of a near-infinite querying and process of interpretation. All the same, Riley’s engagement with socialist-feminism, and the intervening political struggles and forms of socialist-feminist literary production that I trace in my second and third chapters, has severed the reflexive connection of such rigorous interpretative methods from their “civilizing” bases in moralistic pedagogical practices. For Riley, rather, the talismanic effects of complex words are the very stuff of political thought and organizing, and her poetry lays bare such contradictions rather than pretending to resolve them.

The lonely social In her second book of critical prose, Am I That Name?: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (1988), Riley tracks the historical oscillations, in feminist and proto-feminist movements, between claims for and disavowals of the name “women.” The book asks how “women”—as a name and as language—has interacted and will continue to interact with feminist political formations as both



Institutional Geologies and Lonely Sociality

153

an irritant and a necessity. The book’s argument is that such shifts and mutations are not aberrant but rather endemic to feminism’s multifaceted relationship to the category “women” in the first place. Riley’s goal is not simply to insist on the real heterogeneity of women, as if the category “women” contained an empirical mass, however variable, but rather to show that the category itself amasses and gathers forces that sometimes do violence to those who call themselves or find themselves called “women”; so, as she writes, The risky elements to the processes of alignment in sexed ranks are never far away, and the very collectivity which distinguishes you may also be wielded, even unintentionally, against you. Not just against you as an individual, that is, but against you as a social being with needs and attributions. (17)

There is a clear continuity between this kind of claim and those found in Riley’s first book of prose, War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother (1983). In the earlier text, Riley showed how invocations of “mothers” often elide the actual needs of those who find themselves called “mothers.” Similarly, Riley in 1988 argues that feminists must navigate the twin threats of responding and not responding to a misinterpellation: to refuse, to say ‘no, we are not women’ risks being utterly unintelligible and being swept up along with the attribution that was presupposed in the first place, whereas even canny affirmations of “women” be appropriated to underwrite rather than transform the troubling operations of the category (112). The tactic that Riley proposes, in light of this oscillating threat, is a politics of irony as a working from within that may or may not be audible, even to its speakers, who will never control the historicity of the classifications that they repeat or refuse. Many readers of Riley’s poetry and prose have taken up this emphasis on irony as political tactic and attempted to decide whether irony is a political good (as Riley herself sometimes claims) or is instead an excuse for quietism. Bypassing this pro-or-con approach, I aim to show that Riley’s writings more interestingly set to work the dialectics of the social and the antisocial, and that they do this by elaborating states of singleness and loneliness. This is the case across her poetry and her prose. Riley rejects an approach to poetry that assumes the framework of an intersubjective relation between two persons, and she provides in its place a rich writing of the inherent sociality of apparently solitary states. Her poetry and prose work to explain the reproduction of forms of experience that fall on the far side of what counts as “social.” For Riley, it is precisely the reproduction of the division between the social and the nonsocial, and the jettisoning of all questions of human need to the “social” side, that elides the crucial question of

154

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

how needs are produced and met. What is of concern for Riley, and for me, in much of her work is the problem of how to articulate and share needs that are not reducible to those attributed to people on the basis of sociological categories. To this end, Am I That Name? amends some of her earlier arguments from War in the Nursery. The most significant challenge comes in the book’s third chapter, on ‘ “The Social,” “Women,” and Sociological Feminism’. Here, Riley tracks the development of “the social” across the long nineteenth century in the United Kingdom, considering how “the social” came to designate a specifically feminized sphere of human life. While War in the Nursery had insisted on rethinking the “social” through an account of “socialized biology,” Riley now argues that the very delineation of the social must be understood as an historical event with particular logical consequences that cannot go unchallenged. She writes, Once the seemingly neutral and vacant backdrop of “the social” presents itself for scrutiny, it appears as a strange phenomenon in its own right . . . [O]‌nce the authenticity of “the social” is called into question in itself, it cannot function as a neutral site upon which progress or reaction may win the day. (49)

That is, “the social” has, as a category, been an agent of historical change. The frequent usage of “the social” to name a neutral field upon which to compose feminist politics ignores this history, and along with it the historical and political force imposed by the delineation of “the social” itself. Most significantly for Riley, “the social” emerges as a doubly feminized sphere by virtue of its proximity to domestic life and by its subsequent openness to the virtuous interventions or deleterious failings of individual women, for better and for worse in the eyes of those who would seek to manage it (often themselves women). Riley writes, One of the peculiarities of “women” in its proximity to “the social” is a doubled feminisation. In so far as the concerns of the social are familial standards— health, education, hygiene, fertility, demography, chastity and fecundity—and the heart of the family is inexorably the woman, then the woman is also solidly inside of that which has to some degree already been feminised . . . One striking effect of the conceptualising of this “social” is its dislocation of the political. (50–51)

That is, the contents of the “social” are already feminized in advance of their ascription to women’s activities, and this ascription enacts a redoubling of femininity. But it also means, Riley insists, that the invention of “the social”



Institutional Geologies and Lonely Sociality

155

was part of a “dislocation of the political” away from the sphere of women’s participation and influence. This is part of a project of divorcing political thought and practice from the conditions and concerns of exploited and oppressed people, and particularly from the lives of women as waged and unwaged workers: The question of poverty, for instance, becomes divorced from politics and assigned . . . to the social sphere. The associations of ‘women’ with this sphere accompany a displacement and a permanent erosion of older distinctions between the ‘public’ and the ‘private’, at the same time as the constriction of the ‘political’ is refined. ‘Women’ are overwhelmingly sociological and therefore, given these new definitions, not political entities . . . The social is in this sense constructed, rather than being the universal agent which bathes everything else. (51)

There were, then, significant obstacles to attempts by women to use “the social” as a launching pad into political life. Indeed, as Riley writes, “How “women” might become candidates for translation from the social to the political sphere depended not only on how “women” were conceived, but on how the understandings of those spheres themselves were altered” (55). In this sense, Am I That Name? supplements Riley’s thinking of “socialized biology” by unpacking further the contradictions that are historically embedded in “the social,” such as the tenuous divorcing of women from the political by way of the supposedly nonpolitical nature of the social. All of this amounts to a project to transform “the social” by thinking about how and when refusals to assent to sociological categories might have some cumulative effect upon the constitution of the division between the social, where marked identities would be placed, and the political. I  am arguing that Riley works at this desired reconfiguration of the “social” by elaborating seemingly asocial or antisocial experiences and relations. In her poetry and prose from the late 1980s to the present day, Riley elaborates loneliness and singleness as political wedges against the enforcement of feminized sociality. Her writing approaches tenuously social forms of loneliness and nonbelonging dialectically, in order to counter the reproduction of the division between the social and the antisocial, a distinction that tends to sever questions of social reproduction from the activity of politics. I’ll illustrate this with a glance at one of Riley’s more surprising poems, ‘Curmodgeonly’. The poem’s long lines extend across the wide pages of Riley’s 2000 Selected Poems, forming a ragged margin at the right edge of the page. In spite of this unusual lineation, “Curmudgeonly” is basically a mini-prose-essay decrying

156

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

the use of the term “partner” in reference to the couple form. It is an alternately wry and impassioned critique of “partner.” But the poem’s title also undercuts the seriousness of its own critique by announcing itself as “curmudgeonly”—as holding a grudge and emitting a grumble—and, in any event, as coming from someone who finds themselves behind or just outside of the times. In this sense, not only the content but also the species of the critique—the characterization of itself as “curmudgeonly”—is flamboyantly and recalcitrantly antisocial. The poem grouses about “partner’s” lexical trendiness:            This maybe is my soured reaction; but I only  mean If you’ve a private contract to describe a person as your partner, junking all the shackles Of the state, plunged in a glow of free association—that is fine, but don’t you then set up An unintentional excluding coldness to the millions who through bad luck, mismanagement,            death or desertion, find themselves un-partnered? (92)

The seemingly anodyne use of “partner,” on this account, flattens out the lived material histories that leave people partnered or un-partnered. The effect of this flattening is that singleness is rendered a distasteful failure to participate in a liberal democratic institution. The poem doesn’t provide a satisfying alternative designation, however: Of course just what to call them makes you slither (like ‘the father of my youngest child’, “a person I once lived with”?)—but I can’t warm to this vogue for “partner,” since not to possess something So sober yet so mildly venturesome, so virtuously unlicensed by the state, sounds worse Than not being trusted in business, not being picked for even the weakest school netball team

Things get better—or, anyway, more curmudgeonly—for the remainder of the poem, which climaxes with millenarian premonitions of a further flattening of social life:      Better a cheerful privacy than this partitioning pseudo-public speech Of two followed by two, neat and wooden as Noah’s Ark. I  hear a bloodless future come



Institutional Geologies and Lonely Sociality

157

In which we’ll sidle as usual through attachments whose truthful varieties are beaten flat Under one leaden word.

The particular content of the antisociality of this poem’s argument lies in its rejection of a social democratic rhetoric of intimacy. Indeed, the poem opens, “A partner is a social-democratic thing to have.” Jokey denigrations of social democracy were always a feature of Riley’s writings:  her work tends to understand social democracy as an approach to politics that is profoundly inattentive to the material foundations of the social. On her account, social democracy atomizes individuals on the basis of abstract categories and casts the state in the role of meeting the aggregate needs of individuals who have been sociologically subcategorized.4 Social democracy here names a political ideology that grounds its approach to human needs in abstracted categories and assumes the stability of crudely sociological designations of individual types. For Riley, this assumption of the stability of sociological definitions inevitably reproduces the elision of the needs of people—such needs, she maintains, are not readily encompassed by ascriptive practices. “Curmudgeonly” is a performance in the face of such forms of categorization, and it places itself firmly on the outside of the social democratic arithmetic of partnership wherein individuals freely elect to add themselves together. Riley’s 2004 essay “The Right to Be Lonely” revisits this same problem in an attempt to query the rise of “alternative” forms of kinship that progressively pass for legitimate variations on “the family”; such an expansion of the family just pushes those outside of its grasp further to the margins. The essay’s considerations of “loneliness” spring into an elaborate description of an “emotive topography” of sociality: “There is an emotive topography in that spatial conceptualization of inclusion and exclusion; it is this linguistic emotionality which suffuses all political philosophies of who is in and who is left out” (Impersonal Passion 50–51). According to this argument, the unavoidable fact of spatial rhetoric produces and reproduces a structurally necessary affect of loneliness among those falling both inside and outside of new definitions of the family. In contrast to the pervasive figuration of loneliness as cut off from or outside of the social, Riley challenges her reader to imagine loneliness not as a nonsocial state but rather as the social form adhering to those who refuse or who are refused the call of socially legitimate affiliation that finds its form in the word “family.” Riley writes,

158

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

But there’s a stronger solitude which refuses to be understood as merely presocial and which rejects the benevolent will to make everything, and it too, familial. This solitude has no time for any plangency about its own ‘exclusion.’ Indeed, it groans at the prospect of being tenderly ushered into the domain of the new social . . . How might such singleness neither be considered pathological nor be swept up, in an ostentatious depathologizing, into a compulsive sociability? (58)

This loneliness refuses to endorse the language of inside and outside, and with it the affect attendant to all talk of inclusion and exclusion that a “social democratic” understanding of loneliness might entail. Such singleness rejects “compulsive sociability” but is not for that reason asocial; the refusal is part of a dialectical relationship that is within, so to speak, the social, insofar as the social is the institution of a division between the social and the nonsocial.5 Here Riley insists on the political need for a singleness that places itself neither outside nor inside of the social. The essay closes, Might a properly recognized state of singleness (to wrench the notion of ‘recognition’ away from its usual oppressively gregarious tone) recast that desolate and resentment-prone metaphoricity of social exclusion—and might it also somewhat allay the burden, or at least the embarrassed self-reproach, of those who may find themselves effectively living in solitude at the very same time as they live inside the family? (58)

“The Right to Be Lonely” picks up the contradictions that animated Riley’s earlier writings on the social and on motherhood and the category of “women,” but it focuses its investigation of such contradictions on the spatialization of language and on metaphor. This spatiality is a complex reflection of social contradiction. As Riley writes, “I’m not inside anything. I’m not outside it, either. Yet the public/private distinction, which has such solid realities in its effects, tends in its topographical conceptualization to underwrite the affective metaphoricity of inner and outer. This cuts many ways” (54). This is one of many passages from Riley’s prose that reuses lines from her own poems, in this case from a poem that likewise worries at the barrier between inside and outside. “Knowing in the Real World,” a poem first published in 1993, includes the following line: “I’m not outside anything: I’m not inside it either” (Selected Poems 53). Here, the problem seems to be one of lyric expression: what is being rejected is the idea that poetic expression involves a unidirectional movement from the private inside to the public outside. The poem, constructed in couplets with regular line-length, has, up to this point, described a day’s changing colors and textures as if looking out a window. The day also moves in



Institutional Geologies and Lonely Sociality

159

and out upon itself: “One afternoon hour burns away until a rust-/colored light sinks in towards evening.” The poem then, itself, turns quickly “inward”: or any time at all when I fall straight through myself to thud as onto the streaked floor of a swimming pool drained out for winter, no greeny depths but lined in blackened leaves.

The assertion that “I’m not outside anything:  I’m not inside it either,” which comes next, torques this dirty pastoral interior, and a demonstratively social language irrupts into the poem’s withdrawn reflections: I’m not outside anything: I’m not inside it either. There’s no democracy in beauty, I’m following human looks. Though people spin away, don’t be thrown by their puzzling lives, later the lives secrete their meaning. The red sun’s on the rain. Where do I put myself, if public life’s destroyed.

The question of where to place “myself ” among shape-shifting social relations responds to the faulty division between “inside” and “outside.” The essay on loneliness repeats this aphorism (“I’m not outside anything; I’m not inside it either”) in inverted form. In both cases, Riley queries the relationship between the “single” self and “the real world” where “public life’s destroyed.” The fact that public life’s destroyed might, perhaps, be a good thing from the perspective of a socialist-feminist critique of the public/private divide. The challenge for poetics, anyway, is “to put myself ” somewhere without reproducing and reinstituting the division between the social and the antisocial. But in order to work, any rhetorical displacement of the border between inside and outside would have to be part of a strategy for social change. Such social change would have to work at abolishing the “social” as a cordoned off—and cordoning off—field so that “I’ might not suffer the effects of the social’s emotive spatiality of inside and outside. Riley’s rewriting of her own words amounts to a performance of antisocial experience. If this writing seems antisocial, and it sometimes does, that is because it retraces the reproduction of the antisocial by way of the spatiality of the social. Riley’s efforts, in this poetry, to write such a transformative loneliness through and in its sociality have also taken shape in her engagements with painting. Robin Purves has argued along these lines in his reading of “Red Shout”; the poem is titled, according to Riley, after a painting, “I think by Gillian Ayres”

160

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

(Mop Mop 72). “Red Shout” begins by admitting a worry about the vibrancy and vitality of solitary experiences: Terrible to think it’s more alive here when I’m alone than when I’m not—that something might come right just where ‘the edges of a page begin to bleed and show that it is human’—and come more right than when I do the same. (Mop Mop 55)

This “something” is, apparently, the attribution of an autonomous agency to painting, an agency to which lyric poetry apparently can’t live up. On Purves’s reading, abstraction in painting presents a form of affective autonomy that Riley mines for lyric even as she notes the inability of lyric to attain to the heights of expressive, impersonal swoon that she attributes to the brushstroke and to color. Reading the opening lines of “Red Shout,” Purves explains that the ‘terrible’ predicament announced at the beginning of ‘Red Shout,’ that the speaker’s vivid pleasure in her solitary contemplation, or just in solitude itself, is pleasant in part because solitary, is redeemed as a social predicament that can be resolved by the stunning, invigorating recognition of a ‘really human sign’ made available by and during and throughout the writing or painting that is seen to bleed, the composition running off the trimmed page or stretchered canvas. (53)

In this sense, “Red Shout” appears to directly contradict the assertion that “there’s no democracy in beauty” from “Knowing in the Real World.” The “annunciation” provided in and as the painting comes “in democratic form”: I still wait for a really human sign as light and shocking as an annunciation– sometimes I get it and in democratic form: Red Shout

While this isn’t quite the same as saying, for example, that there is democracy in beauty, Riley’s treatment of painting in this poem does point toward the plastic arts as somehow inoculated against the contradictory privatizations of lyric pedagogy. Painting seems a more autonomous realm from the compulsions of “sociability.” The aspiration of Riley’s lonely sociality to such a “democratic” form is intrinsically contradictory, insofar as this form is “more alive here when I’m/ alone than when I’m not”; or, as the poem’s closing puts it, “all this means only/ it can work, the corrective of in this case paint/ for isolation—what works is just that someone/ possibly scared stiff and also living did it, no?” The democratic



Institutional Geologies and Lonely Sociality

161

force of painting “can work” precisely because it is an index of loneliness. Such “isolation” is then read as a mutation of lyric address away from the I-thou structure and into a “shout” that exposes the extent to which loneliness—an affect unaccounted for by ascriptive social democratic categories—is perversely conditioned by the cordoning off of the social that Riley seeks to mitigate.6

Shrimps and the falling rain “Red Shout” was first published in Stair Spirit, a chapbook released by Rod Mengham’s Cambridge-based Equipage Press in 1992. This limited edition volume, each copy featuring a colorful pastel smudge on its cover, includes many of the poems that would make up her second book-length collection of poetry, Mop Mop Georgette (the first being Dry Air). Both Stair Spirit and Mop Mop Georgette present a significant departure from the fragmentary, start-and-stop nature of a long poem sequence like Marxism for Infants. In this work from the late 1980s and early 1990s, we encounter a realization of the lyric continuity only hinted at—and rejected—in Marxism for Infants and some of the later poems from Dry Air. The social biology of lyric as the voicing of needs that I  analyzed in my second chapter has transformed, in the later work, into an oscillation between a will to be lonely and a will to belong; this is often rendered as the back and forth between the invocation and rejection of the reader-as-addressee. Riley’s experience of and research into the history of British feminism altered her already cautious embrace of the category of “the social” as a useful category for feminism; abstentions and refusals became in her writing increasingly prevalent modes of engagement with the problem of social individuality. Such maneuvers are accompanied, in Riley’s work, by a torqued treatment of the sociality of lyric and of language. There is an increasingly severe skepticism regarding all endorsements of ‘being with others’ that is continuous with her earlier argument against any ethics of intersubjectivity. This skepticism toward “the social” as a holistic framework for the production of persons reflects the treatment of “the social” in Am I That Name. This tendency is documented in many accounts of Riley’s poetics, although these tend to read her work back through an ethics of intersubjectivity, as in the case of John Wilkinson’s notorious 1994 review of Mop Mop Georgette, “Illyrian Places” which charged Riley’s poetry with a nagging, unsurmounted narcissism. A number of feminist critics have noted the similarity of Wilkinson’s judgment

162

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

to a long tradition of dismissing or diminishing women and women’s writing on the basis of narcissism or other pathological disturbances. Linda Kinnahan writes that the associations developed between self-reflexivity, narcissism, and pathology converge within the (unspoken) construction of Woman generalized in western metaphysical and philosophical thought and particularized, in psychological discourses, as deviant, undeveloped, narrow, self-involved. (‘Feminine Experiment’ 281)

I can only agree with this analysis. At the same time, sections of Wilkinson’s review-essay are much more ambivalent, nuanced and thoughtful than his conclusions would suggest. Wilkinson argues that Riley’s work is not, in fact, blind to its symptomotology, nor to its consonance with the much-discussed ‘postmodernist condition’– of the impossibility of the presence to oneself, or feelings as ideologically-interpreted physiological events which therefore have their truth only in an otherwhere-owned discourse, of the self as a party, a meeting place of discourses both intoxicating and alienating (Wilkinson 68)

Indeed, Wilkinson sees in some of Riley’s work “more modest, epiphanic chinks where a real exchange—with landscape, with another—briefly occurs” (76). Still, his appraisal of the book as a whole is much less generous: Faced with this writing and its self-knowledge one is right to demand a revolt against narcissism as such, rather than this working with the narcissistic grain which cannot divert or obstruct its pathological logic . . . [T]‌o read a collection is to feel resistance rise, to feel that something is being progressively taken away rather than given . . . [T]he poems do circulate . . . trapped within the narcissistic orbit; one yearns for release. (75)

Cathy Wagner points out how Wilkinson’s reading entirely misses the overarching aims of Riley’s poetic and critical writing: I’m not sure that for Riley there’s any thought of surpassing this condition, which for her is a condition of subjectivity. So, to request of Riley a ‘personal politics’ that would ‘apprehend and assert’ the ‘wholeness of others’ is to announce a desire to locate a subjectivity, both for oneself and for others, that is somehow not dependent on circulations through otherness. (Wagner 4)

Like Wagner, I object to Wilkinson’s argument not simply because he is incorrect in his specific charges of narcissism. Rather, I reject the entire framing of poetry’s sociality in terms of Winnicottian- and Kohutian-derived psychoanalysis and



Institutional Geologies and Lonely Sociality

163

the moralizing rhetoric of “healing,” “real exchange” and the “wholeness of others.” Indeed, Riley has militated against such a moralistic understanding of sociality-as-intersubjectivity since her earliest work, as I show in Chapter 2. To expect or hope for some “release” from such a condition entirely misses Riley’s aim to think sociality beyond the limits of intersubjective ethics.7 Lisa Roberston puts it best, for my purposes, when she identifies Wilkinson’s framework as part of a “social pedagogy”: The finally sad accusation of Wilkinson’s ‘sardony does prevail’—sardony as a method of managing narcissism—reaches for the same social pedagogy Riley succinctly chucks . . . Is it the poet’s role to heal, placate, nurture, feed—must the ethical poet nurse? (Robertson 394).

Cambridge English has a venerable tradition of such “social pedagogies,” running from Richards through Leavis and, in more complicated forms, into Forrest-Thomson and Prynne. Given his training in psychiatric nursing, Wilkinson certainly has come to such concerns through different means, but his expectations for Riley’s book are consonant with the expectations for poetry to provide moral training that I have tracked in this book. On my reading, Riley’s repetitions of words and phrases do more than fail to provide poetic “healing” or “release” from the “postmodern condition.” Riley’s rejection of “moral training” as poetry’s purpose has a political basis: it brings into the open the suppressed social politics of a lyric pedagogy that presents itself as nonpolitical and purely social, and it facilitates a materialist account of the social determination of “individual experiences” of reading and writing. Indeed, Riley’s work from the 1990s on is replete with echoes and returns of lines of prose, song and slogans, and these repetitions are part of an elaboration of the sociality of loneliness that might counter the institutionalization of forms of social ascription and refresh an articulation of socially produced need. It is through this framework that I understand the exchanges between her poetry and prose, particularly in the talismanic quality of the poetry’s afterlife in the prose. As I’ve also already asserted, The Words of Selves and Impersonal Passion can be read as a second-order discourse or abstraction from the particular histories catalogued in War in the Nursery and Am I  That Name. Contrary to some of her readers, I do not read these later prose works simply as apologia (adequate or not) for her poetics; the prose does sometimes describe the poetry, but it also reenacts it through these echoes. There are obvious instances of such self-citation and reworking, including the entirety of the third chapter of The Words of Selves, which interpolates prose analyzes with stanzas from two poems, “The Castalian

164

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

Spring” and “Affections of the Ear.” In this context, the verse provides critical commentary on the prose as much as vice versa (Words 93–112). But there are also many more subterranean instances of the resurgence of the poetry in the prose. For example, a single page from the book includes a line that is also the title of a poem (“it really is the heart . . . the heart does hurt, and that’s no metaphor” [Selected Poems 108]) and then includes almost the entirety of the short poem “Rayon” from Mop Mop Georgette with only an endnote to indicate that this is her own poem (Words 49). Riley’s critical apparatus is thoroughly suffused with such reworkings of lines and phrases: this, I argue, is how her theorizations of language and of irony are linked up with a thinking of the sociality of singleness and loneliness. To understand Riley’s linguistic materialism and her critique of “the social,” it is necessary to investigate this “talismanic” poetics of echoing and repetition. Indeed, the very talismanic operation that I am identifying here in the prose is already at work in the poetry, insofar as the poems of Mop Mop Georgette seriously play with the residues of phrases from popular songs in the inner ears and mouth of the poet. The short poem, “A Misremembered Lyric,” provides an exemplary instance of this tendency of Riley’s lonely sociality to feature talismanic echoing. As the acknowledgments to Mop Mop Georgette note, the poem ‘uses a phrase from “Rhythm of the Rain” written by Gummoe, sung by the Cascades, and from “Something’s Gotta [sic] Hold of My Heart” by R. Cook and R. Greenaway, recorded by Gene Pitney; the poem also quotes a line from Graham Greene’s version of a 1930s song” (72). “A Misremembered Lyric,” like some of the other poems collected in Mop Mop Georgette,8 lacks stanza breaks and alternates enjambment with full-stopped lines. The composition resembles a sort of rectangle on the page, and the various quotations from song are tucked firmly into the brick of verse with little prosodic ring-fencing: A misremembered lyric: a soft catch of its song whirrs in my throat. ‘Something’s gotta hold of my heart tearing my’ soul and my conscience apart, long after presence is clean gone and leaves unfurnished no shadow. Rain lyrics. Yes, then the rain lyrics fall. I don’t want absence to be this beautiful. It shouldn’t be; in fact I know it wasn’t, while ‘everything that consoles is false’ is off the point – you get no consolation anyway until your memory’s dead: or something never had gotten hold of your heart in the first place, and that’s the fear thought.



Institutional Geologies and Lonely Sociality

165

Do shrimps make good mothers? Yes they do. There is no beauty out of loss; can’t do it – and once the falling rain starts on the upturned leaves, and I listen to the rhythm of unhappy pleasure what I hear is bossy death telling me which way to go, what I see is a pool with an eye in it. Still let me know. Looking for a brand-new start. Oh and never notice yourself ever. As in life you don’t. (Mop Mop 51)

The poem begins by describing the talismanic pull of song lyrics along the lines that Riley elaborates in works like “A Short History of Some Preoccupations” and The Words of Selves. In this case, we are told that the song is incorporated, however improperly (“misremembered”), and becomes a singing, too, as it becomes the poem: “a soft catch of its song/ whirrs in my throat.” Song has caught me but it’s in me, too, and it is now what I do as it is done to me, in me, a catch in the throat, an involuntary physiological register of emotion. Next, we have the first misremembered lyric rehearsed for us (with “Gotten” changed to “Gotta”)9, and the speaker immediately hands the song over to the phenomenologist of language: “long after presence/ is clean gone.” This is not, however, the end of the singing; instead, a different song arrives: “Yes, then the rain lyrics fall,” and it is here that the poem begins its dialectical incorporation, rejection and expression of “the rain lyrics,” about which I will say more shortly. Aaron Deveson reads this poem primarily as an exposition of Riley’s theoretical work on “language as affect”: The poem is a high art/low art poem that hovers around what Riley in Impersonal Passion calls the ‘unholy coincidence between beauty and cruelty in their verbal mannerisms’ (13), in the way that the wound-touching pleasure after the ‘presence’ of love has gone is further felt through the hearkening, nostalgic ‘what I see’/‘what I hear’ structure. (Deveson 142)

Moreover, Deveson notes that this structure “certainly comes from the end of W. H. Auden’s hymn to mineral constancy and human mutability, ‘In Praise of Limestone,’ which, he notes, closes with ‘when I try to imagine a faultless love / Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur / Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape” (Auden, Collected Poems 542). While Deveson describes the close of the poem as “fad[ing] out rapidly through jerkily prosaic notes-to-self from somewhere or other” (143), I would argue that there’s a great

166

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

deal more composition involved than this description allows. The line, “looking for a brand-new start,” is taken directly from the song “Rhythm of the Rain,” which is the real heart of the poem and its mislearned-by-heart lyric. “Listen to the rhythm of the falling rain/ telling me just what a fool I’ve been/ I wish that it would go and let me cry in vain/ and let me be alone again”: ambivalence already floods the Cascades’ original song, and ambivalence of this sort cannot simply be taken to heart. Go away, rain, but also let me talk to you; and you, you talk to me, too, and talk to her while you’re at it: “Rain won’t you tell her that I love her so/ Please ask the sun to set her heart aglow/ Rain in her heart and let the love we knew start to grow” (Gummoe). You’re here, rain, so I can’t be alone to cry in vain; you comfort me, and I wish you wouldn’t; I wish you would fix things for real instead of just making everything painfully beautiful. The speaker of the poem would like to banish the song, much as the singer in the original wishes the rain would leave him alone: “I don’t want absence to be this beautiful,” Riley writes. But the speaker then twists away from this; she is too clever to reject beauty because it has supposedly “consoled” her.10 In this vein, lines 6–10 engage, and ultimately reject, arguments drawn from aesthetic theory that see aesthetic pleasure as only an ideological con job:  “I don’t want absence to be this beautiful./ It shouldn’t be; in fact I know it wasn’t, while/ “everything that consoles is false” is off the point –/ you get no consolation anyway until your memory’s / dead: or something never had gotten hold of / your heart in the first place, and that’s the fear thought.” That is, the consolatory magic that, say, certain interpreters of Adorno might object to in popular song doesn’t work anyway, at least not if you were really and truly injured in the first place. In other words, it’s not a matter of whether or not the songs are lying about the injured world: they don’t fix it, and the speaker of the poem is not duped into thinking they do. In this sense, Mop Mop Georgette embraces popular song with less awe than it does the brushstroke of abstract expressionist painting, even as the songs make just as many returns as painting does, and often with greater affective intensity. But “A Misremembered Lyric” is not reducible to such argufying:  while aesthetic theory forms a strand of the poem’s discourse, it is only one thread in the writing’s talismanic poetics, one voice tested. Indeed, it is precisely at this point that another song interrupts, suggesting an entirely different trajectory for popular song: “Do shrimps make good mothers? Yes they do.” In her acknowledgments, Riley credits this as “Graham Greene’s version of a 1930s song”; the original song is, in fact, an exemplar of the “silly comic song” and was recorded in 1924 by The Two Gilberts. Riley herself did not have occasion to hear this recording at the time of writing, but even without it, the



Institutional Geologies and Lonely Sociality

167

line clearly departs from the loose metrical scheme that has been in force up to this point in the poem. While previous lines have hovered around the alexandrine or twelve-syllable, six-beat line, “Do shrimps make good mothers? Yes they do” indisputably contains only nine syllables. In the 1924 recording, the line has seven beats: “DO SHRIMPS MAKE good MOTHers? YES THEY DO.” Whether or not it is scanned in precisely this manner, this line is proportionally more heavily stressed than any others in the poem, and it is broken by the questionand-answer format into a single, end-stopped line. The wholly different tradition of comic song is tried out here, and its claims are not directly disputed in the poem, unlike most of Riley’s trial aphorisms, which are generally submitted to critique and dialectic. The mechanics of loss are put to the side for the duration of a line as a mock-moral judgment is ridiculously trumpeted through a parodic sociology of intimacy. While the line is unremarked upon in the remainder of the poem, it lingers as a sort of alternative to the poem’s unhappy pleasures. Neither obviously beautiful nor mournful, “Do shrimps make good mothers? Yes they do” has a certain truth content in that by subtracting from feeling to a sort of comic sublime it resists any easy metaphorization or sociological content. That said, the line is consistent, on its own terms, with Riley’s treatment, throughout Marxism for Infants and War in the Nursery, of the history of the “good mother” as category. The poem moves back at this point to its argument with aesthetics and, more specifically, with “Rhythm of the Rain”:  “There is no beauty out of loss; can’t do it  –” as, in fact, the poem just hasn’t done it, moving instead toward the bathos of the comic song. But the other popular song form continues to exert its beautiful pull: “and once the falling rain starts on the upturned/ leaves, and I listen to the rhythm of unhappy pleasure.” This last line is fifteen syllables long, with five or six beats, depending on whether one stresses the “UN” in unhappy; the rain lyric, at any rate, has a different rhythm from the shrimp. The rhythm of unhappy pleasure, then, becomes a longer-lined, wordier sort of paranoia, replete with bossy death and a pool with an eye in it. Riley’s reworking of Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone” suggests that the bottom of “a faultless love” is not just any geological substance but is, more specifically, some rock of the self, as I will discuss in the next section. “Still/ let me know.” We’re not done here—the return to a vulgar materialism in Auden isn’t the end; the rain is asked again to provide news, and the song returns:  “Looking for a brand new start.” Even if the schmaltzy “Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart” was almost an incidental entrée to the rain lyrics, it is recalled here through a suggested rhyme (heart/start) that fuses the two songs

168

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

into a complex of beautiful (or not) loss. But it also turns the lyric away from the place of hurt, imagining, through the slip of a rhyme, the trajectory of the lost lover. It was she, in the first place, who chose to look for something else in the Cascades song: “the only girl I care about has gone away/ looking for a brand new start/ but little does she know / that when she left that day/ along with her she took my heart.” Pace Deveson, then, I would argue that it is only at this point that Riley parrots the rhetoric of the tossed-away afterthought (“Oh and”), but the imperative that she throws out has, in fact, been buzzing throughout the poem: “Oh and never/ notice yourself ever. As in life you don’t.” As Susan Schultz writes, “The self cannot “notice” itself because it comes to us out of so many fragments of quoted language, so that even during what one imagines is an intensely personal moment of grieving, the speaker is spoken through” (n.p.). But the admonition to “never notice yourself ever” also seems to mock its own moral-pedagogical pretensions, given its “never-ever” redundancy (much as “there is no beauty out of loss” was mocked by the steady return of the captivating rain lyrics). The poem’s final sentence (“As in life you don’t”) is also demonstrably false if measured against almost the entirety of Mop Mop Georgette, which seems to notice itself all the time. Still, the poem’s ending echoes a voice that suggests that this is not what poetry should do because it is not what some “you” does “in life.” Perhaps, in life, you sing instead about crustaceans, or the rain sings you into someone else so you can, after all, go on “looking for a brand new start.” But the poem won’t go on this easily; it searches for a comic song but can do so only to the steady rhythm of the rain. It is this persistent reiteration of sonic talismans that Riley’s prose seeks to explain, and this talismanic poetics is part and parcel of the sociality of loneliness.

A “rock of the self ”: Geology and lyric pedagogy How does Riley’s theoretical prose account for the movements of lonely sociality written into “A Misremembered Lyric”? To address this, we have to consider not only what Riley’s prose says but also how it works: it works by repeating the poetry in a manner continuous with the poetry’s repetition of popular song. Moreover, these repetitions are rhetorically framed by a theory of language that I will describe here as a ‘geology’: her explanations of how loneliness and nonbelonging relate dialectically to the production of political solidarity are consistently accompanied by a vulgar materialist or geological rhetoric. This



Institutional Geologies and Lonely Sociality

169

geological rhetoric can be seen as an implicit reflection of the talismanic returns that take place across her writing. What I will attempt to show in what remains of this chapter is that this geological rhetoric might also teach us about the contradictory resources of lyric pedagogy for uncovering social needs after its official purchase has been superseded. In Am I That Name?, Riley distinguishes between “women” as a “massification”— something materially produced—and “women” as an empirically existing unity or simple gathering of “real women” in the world (110). But the “massification” of women-as-metaphor is not just a production demanding acts of interpretation; it almost becomes a force of nature. That is, throughout the first and last chapters of Am I That Name?—the most obviously “theoretical” ­chapters—a biological, chemical and geological rhetoric buzzes continuously. There are “petrifications,” “icebergs,” “outcroppings” and “precipitations” (7, 9, 107, 110). These terms are used to figure both words and their effects on people. Elective solidarity and its frightening underside, the massing together of the dispossessed, both seem to result from a quasi-geological materiality of categories and marks—in this case, this massing accompanies the word “women,” as a name and as language. Solidarity is formed and deformed through and in such language, then, and Riley figures this language that in the vulgar materialist terms that might as well be called a “geological” rhetoric. Riley returns to this complex dynamic in The Words of Selves, arguing that the materiality and historicity of language and rhetoric have a bearing on the production of subjectivity as it takes place through acts of self-description. By way of specifying the contours of her materialist account of language, Riley travesties some other explanations of language’s “materiality” (I quote at length): To assert that language is itself ‘material’ might cause dismay, if this claim is taken to mean that a noisily wild and booming depth, all howls, whoops, echolalic gabble and babble, are what you must espouse. Its antithesis, equally exaggerated, is an ostensible post-Saussureanism . . . glossing language as the realm of mastery and cool deliberation, a perfected, refined instrument. Its floating veil is nonetheless credited with mesmeric powers; an ectoplasm, yet tough and rubbery enough to determine being. So unsatisfying a notion invites the counterassertion about language’s materiality, which soon gets distractingly yoked to its presumed irrationality. Next a resulting heavily hypostatised Language gradually becomes hot, a smouldering or sweaty thing, a mass dried out in patches, oozing in others; granite in some places, swamp elsewhere, fed by bubbling rivulets or else sluggish with sedimented toxic waste. (Words of Selves 37–38; emphasis mine)

170

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

This curiously arresting passage is not only a travesty and critique of rival theories of language. It is also an instance of what I earlier termed an “afterlife” of a poem from Mop Mop Georgette. Both the passage above and the poem “Dark Looks” parody the affectively charged theories of language and writing that they all the same engage in. Such theories of language are presented as the products of socially lonely subjects who struggle to explain their existence as social without eliding the often solitary meditations that accompany such efforts at explanation. “Dark Looks” takes on, in particular, the affective dimensions of poetic performance for a “middle-aged” woman standing in as the author of writings that exceed her grasp: Who anyone is or I am is nothing to the work. The writer properly should be the last person that the reader or the listener need think about yet the poet with her signature stands up trembling, grateful, mortally embarrassed and especially embarrassing to herself, patting her hair and twittering If, if only I need not have a physical appearance! To be sheer air, and mousseline! (Mop Mop 54)

The drive to remove the author from any material presentation of the work is expressed even as it is parodied in these exceptionally long lines that nearly fill the page, as if there were no line breaks (no poetic control) at all. Language is shown to do some work behind the back of this anxiety or as a side effect of its blind spots: “and as she frets the minute wars scorch on through paranoias of the unreviewed/ herded against a cold that drives us in together.” The anxiety of the lonely writer attends the enforced sociality or “herding” of the small-press coteries (“paranoias of the unreviewed”). But then, a bit later, the conditions of this sociolinguistically produced “we” are shown to produce further spasms in the medium of collectivity: To fall from anglo-catholic clouds of drifting we’s rammed up against the nose cascading on Niagara, bobbed and jostled, racing rusted cans of Joseph Cotten reels charmed with his decent gleam:  once we as incense-shrouded ectoplasm gets blown fresh drenched and scattered units pull on gloss coats to preen in their own polymer.

The writing “we” is announced to be a production of unquestioned, quasireligious social practices and rhetoric. “Ectoplasm” refers to a semi-material substrate extruded by psychic mediums or, alternately, a component of a cell’s cytoplasm; etymologically, it connotes something shaped or shaping from the outside. In Riley’s poem, the “ectoplasm” seems to produce “polymers,” or



Institutional Geologies and Lonely Sociality

171

protective, synthetic surfaces that coat each “scattered unit” of the social group who then “preen” in the gloss of this magical belonging. This “ectoplasm” returns, as Riley’s poetry so frequently does, in the passage cited above from The Words of Selves: “[Language’s] floating veil is nonetheless credited with mesmeric powers; an ectoplasm, yet tough and rubbery enough to determine being.” This example illustrates again how Riley’s sociolinguistic theorizing, including her parodies of faulty sociolinguistic theories, includes tropes and phrases drawn directly from her poetry. Riley’s vulgar materialist account of language is, then, largely formed through a particular relation to her own poetry:  her poetic diction and phraseology carries some of the affective intensity of the lyric, even when her own work is unmarked as source. These returns of the poems in the prose, through direct citation and also through more subterranean lexical nods and slips, are a part of the talismanic operation that Riley insists is an unavoidable fact of political thought. If, in the discourse of “lyric reading,” lyric is what supposedly “outlasts” the material circumstances of its production, here we have that “outlasting” ironically taking the form of theoretical prose. Am I  That Name? began the work of explaining this sort of talismanic, geological operation by turning toward the thinking of metaphor proposed by William Empson in The Structure of Complex Words. In this sense, Riley’s materialist theorization of language involves at the outset an ambiguous return to the resources of lyric pedagogy. Riley writes that ‘women’ are always differently re-membered, and the gulf between them and the generally human will be more or less thornily intractable. One measure of that gulf is the depth of ‘women’s’ resonances . . . Can it be claimed that the collective ‘women’ possesses a virtually metaphorical force, in the way that the theatrical Woman does? And if it does, this force would change. Linguistic studies of the 1950s contemplated the ranges of metaphor. William Empson examined I.A. Richards’ proposal that all language was indeed radically metaphorical, but found this wanting; ‘cat,’ Empson objected, was a hopeless candidate for metaphor status. (108)

Indeed, Empson had insisted that a definition of metaphor needed to be significantly more specific than this in order to be of use for analysis. Metaphor status, for Empson, is to be restricted to word uses that incite some degree of “psychic resistance”: The only trouble about this as a defining property is that we hear nothing about other cases where there is a psychic resistance . . . Surely a man reading a bill

172

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

often feels a strong psychic resistance to absorbing the meaning of the figures, and yet without any tendency to treat them as metaphorical . . . The kind of psychic resistance in view, therefore, needs defining more narrowly. I  submit that it is the feeling of resistance to a false identity, which we have already found fundamental in the equation form. The reason why resistance is called for is that you have to pick out the right elements from the vehicle, the parts of it which are treated as ‘typical and essential’ for the case in hand; if you merely accept the false identity you may fall into nonsense. And when the vehicle is typified it becomes pregnant by definition. (Structure of Complex Words 334)

For our purposes, the precise Empsonian definitions of terms like “equation form” and “pregnant” can be sidelined.11 Instead, we can look at his focus on the variations of word usage that force us to “pick out the right elements” so as to pacify the “feeling of resistance to a false identity.” It is in this sense, Empson insists, that each nomination of “metaphor” requires a prior or simultaneous work of interpretation so as to stem the “feeling of resistance” that comes from the perception of false identity. Metaphor is a production of reading, then, a production made possible by the particular way in which words holding “compacted doctrines” are being used in a given case. Riley’s précis of Empson then insists on the historical and social processes of generating complex words: But where there could be fullness, so there could be contraction; the historical ‘hardening of a convention’ might narrow the range of a word. Here Empson offered the example of Chastity, which gradually became restricted in its reference to women’s conduct. This alteration came about, he thought, because ‘what changes in the language are, so to speak, practical policies.’ If it were true that ‘a word can become a “compacted doctrine” or even that all words are compacted doctrines inherently’ then it would be vital to grasp these means ‘by which our language is continually thrusting doctrines upon us, perhaps very illconsidered ones’. (Am I That Name 108; quoting Empson 39)

This political grasping at language is, for Riley, an integral part of any feminist politics; the whole of Am I That Name demonstrates why the history of feminism in Western Europe demands this kind of thinking. In a curious way, then, Riley derives part of her politico-linguistic approach from Empson’s lyric pedagogical practice, and she explains how such methods can indeed be directly useful tools for feminist political thought and even for socialist feminist organizing and direct action (via slogans, debates and demands).



Institutional Geologies and Lonely Sociality

173

Riley, then, picks up some aspects of lyric pedagogy, particularly its directive that reading requires a distancing of oneself from one’s social identity, but this is not as straightforward an inheritance as it might seem. Irony surfaces in her work as the privileged trope for a politics of solidarity, but it is not the postRomantic ironic stance required for Practical Criticism. Irony for Riley, instead, is what opens the possibility that an engagement with an identity category may undo the stultifying and rigidifying effects that it itself installs. Riley treats irony as an objective fact of politics and of language’s production in a social matrix; it is not a subjective stance that an ethical lyric pedagogy can teach us to inhabit. Irony is an effect of the capacity to hear one’s own language, which is again, for Riley, a result of language’s compactable and corrodible materiality. On the one hand, then, Riley describes irony as a sort of blessing for those who find themselves badly interpellated; the victims of misinterpellation can, through reiteration, hope for irony to wear down the category that they would prefer not to be identified as belonging to. On the other hand, irony can also undo the force of affirmative identifications and is, in this way, the limit of any solidarity premised on shared self-descriptions. Irony rises above the solemn chronology of descriptions, always poised to wrench a phrase out of its context. It commits this linguistic violence of dismembering, not gratuitously but as it exposes the contingent formation of that very context—and so, ultimately, restores its history to it. That salutary deflation of some excessively vaunted category, so that it suddenly seems bizarre to itself and from then onward cannot endure its own repetitions, just is irony at work. Here irony’s political astringency, ruthlessly democratic, acts on the side of the angels. Insofar as the corrosion of the monuments of selves can sensibly be described as ‘ethical’ at all, that is where the ethical aspect to irony lies. (183)

Irony’s “political astringency” and ethics lie in its ability to “corrode the monuments of selves.” I see Riley’s work on such an ironic corrosion of self-ish geologies as an extension and reinscription of the lonely sociality at work in her poetic production. Riley aligns irony with the ethos of Echo, in an oblique rerouting of the charge of narcissism; Echo, after all, was in love with Narcissus, and it is by virtue of her compulsive repetition that his voice resounds and retains its power (157). For Riley, Echo’s ironies demonstrate how those of us who would counter the interpellations that produce the worst subjection can have recourse to speech that might even articulate and shape our social needs, even if and as this speech is never really our own.

174

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

In order to fully account for the political implications of this argument in the context of the institutionalization of sexual and ethnic difference, on the one hand, and professional creativity, on the other, it is necessary to distinguish Riley’s lonely-social irony from the “private” ironies celebrated by Richard Rorty in Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, from which Riley seems to have cribbed her own subtitle (“Identification, Solidarity, Irony”). Rorty explains that liberal societies have provided “liberal ironists” with the freedom to use “the vocabulary of self-creation” which is, he claims, “necessarily private, unshared, unsuited to argument” (xiv). Indeed, he goes on to assert that “irony seems inherently a private matter” (88) and that “within our increasingly ironist culture, philosophy has become more important for the pursuit of private perfection rather than for any social task” (94). In other words, Rorty seeks primarily to “broaden the reach” of liberal institutions so that all fall under the sway of “our” liberal community, which belongs, for him, to the “we” of his implied audience. He is pleased that such a community has allowed for what are, on his reading, the “private” ironizations of continental philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida.12 This endorsement of “privatizing” irony is a complete anathema to Riley’s life work and, more broadly, the work of feminists to contest the categories of public and private. Rorty’s recommendation for the “privatization” of irony is, indeed, incomprehensible and incoherent in light of Riley’s descriptions of the operations of language and of irony in particular. Riley insists, in one of many passages that is readable as an unmarked but direct rejoinder to Rorty, that a public irony must flourish, for the sake of the political and ethical vigour of language; lurking inside a self-categorisation, ideally it can inspect the limits of any expansionist identification, can check hyperbole, can puncture any overblown claims from within to arrive at a sounder measure of them. (162).

Such a flourishing of irony is not a gift bestowed by “liberal” institutions; it is, rather, a possible site for contesting the ways in which such “liberalism,” in fact, works to cover over social needs for the benefit of the capitalist state. In this sense, The Words of Selves is a work of tactics rather than a program, but it does not for this reason preclude the possibility of strategic politics. Riley expounds on the tactical dimensions of solidarity grounded in and ungrounded by irony, but this does not imply that such ironic tactics are the whole of politics (nor does it suggest that such tactics are apolitical or private). In this sense, The Words of Selves is distinct from lyric pedagogy’s tradition of seeing linguistic and literary training as a necessary moral foundation for politics, but it is also



Institutional Geologies and Lonely Sociality

175

distinct from work like Rorty’s that sees training in ludic irony as a purely private privilege gifted to us by “liberal” (i.e. imperialist capitalist) societies. Rather, Riley sees irony, and especially the irony attendant to the lives of the lonely and misinterpellated, as a fact of public life. If the mechanisms of poetic language have ethical “lessons” for political and civic life, and these lessons recommend irony and its chance, this is not because irony is a stance— it requires a wide variety of stances. In other words, irony is not a stance at all; it is, rather, a mode for understanding historically the shifting categories of persons that engage in politics, the ever-whirring socialization and deracination of “individuals” who are declared and who also declare themselves to belong to particular categories of personhood and of subhumanity in order to navigate the meeting of various socially inscribed needs. Riley’s myriad examples demonstrate that she understands irony not as a solid preparatory foundation for civic engagement but as a tactic in the work toward enumerating, sharing and ultimately meeting needs. Returning to her early works’ example of the “single mother,” which she here characterizes as “a catchall category marked out for critical attention by the current British government of New Labour as well as its conservative predecessor,” Riley outlines how a variety of stances, sensitive to particular circumstances, might prove tactically useful or deleterious: If, identified as a single parent, I  also decide to take on this categorisation, however vexing it is, as my own project—if I also want to make something out of it–then something very different is happening through my act of consent to that bracket, as distinct from my assignment to it by others. To make it into a productive difference would need an emerging and officially bestowed and homogenising identity. But here diffused opprobrium is hard to counter, since its true targets are never openly specified, hiding in an unadmitted distinction between the “deserving” respectable casualties of marriage breakdown who cost the government nothing by way of support, and the “undeserving” welfare claimants who draw on state funds. Then some wider solidarity might, across this divide of economic differences, seize back and prise apart the withering designation to expose its economic basis—and in full anticipation of that designation’s pitfalls if instead it were to slide, as everything entices and provokes it to slide, into a defensive identity. (139)

While not explicitly invoking irony here, Riley outlines a number of subtle yet considerable shifts in social formations that might render the name of “single mother” ironic in the mouths of certain speakers. The irony that emerges,

176

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

however, is not the endpoint or goal, nor is it the special property of those already trained in poetic criticism. Rather, it has particular effects that may or may not be politically desirable, depending on one’s needs, aims or program. Such irony is not to be understood, Riley insists throughout, as a political good because it is a form of preparatory intersubjectivity; in this, The Words of Selves can be said to pick up directly from War in the Nursery: “I’d place my own relentless impulses towards optimism elsewhere altogether:  in the actual operations of irony, rather than in any hope of its ultimate sociability as achieved through its ‘intersubjectivity’—a thesis which seems prematurely to assume the best” (167). All the same, Riley does not operate according to the maxim that a materialist account is one that only or immediately refers to the productive activity of humans. The question of value and its production is left to the side, perhaps so as to avoid the conclusion that questions of language are “merely superstructural.” So, what kind of materialism is it that defines the historicity of social institutions by figuring such history as geology, botany and synthetics—what happens to language in this kind of thinking, and what happens to history? Is this somehow the dialectically logical result of thinking language through a socialized biology? Riley’s geological rhetoric has, I insist, been a feature of her prose for decades, but she has also very recently theorized a more particular relationship between writing, stone and irony—or between composition and material constraint—in a short essay “On the Lapidary Style,” in which she engages with writing that is literally carved in stone: The stiff immobility of the carved letters throws the word into relief, so to speak. It’s this very petrifaction—a literal ‘turning to stone’—that lets any aspect of irony come to the fore. Irony will establish itself in the self-noticing word, the word made prominent as such. (30)

The analysis of the lapidary here confirms the importance for Riley of geological rhetoric for getting at the mechanisms of irony. It matters that irony is not strictly a matter of willed human production, that it inheres in the materials with which writing and speaking must work. In a sense, this a corollary to the fact that political thought is dependent on talismanic returns, and that the delineation of needs can be frustrated by the historical fixings of such needs with petrified sociological identifications. Riley’s take-up of Empson is, then, crucial here—analyzing metaphor requires for Riley, as for Empson, an unpicking of compacted doctrines, one that attends to the shifts in the social production of words and descriptions and of the material remains of older histories that outlast their original use values. Riley’s attempt to figure the workings of self-description



Institutional Geologies and Lonely Sociality

177

requires her reader to think how a figure (such as “the single mother”) is socially produced and to seek out a “nonmetaphorical” explanation for this production.13 In this sense, Riley seeks to understand the social in such a way that both its consistencies and its transformations are evident through processes that are not based in simple reproduction or change (I do this once, I do, or don’t do, it again) but rather as the movement through overdetermined contradictions. In other words, Riley’s geological models describe the historical embeddedness of metaphor in critical discourse as a human production that engages with resisting materials. The task, then, is to work at and to understand the returns and repetitions of words, which will always be complex. Such a task is, for Riley, neither a private exercise in liberal irony nor a preparatory exercise for social life or for sanctioned forms of civic engagement. Riley’s distinct accounts of the sociality of loneliness and singlehood provide a critical framework for the transformation of atomized and privatized social formations. Her accounts insist that poetic writing can work to articulate needs that are obscured (even as they are produced) by practices of social ascription and that it can and must do this without relying on lyric as a prepolitical moral pedagogy for the social conduct of the individual.

CODA As I  argued in the introduction to this book, the context of late capitalist disinvestment in social reproduction, including disinvestment in public institutions of poetry, has enabled those writing under the sign of “poetry” to articulate social needs against both liberal and conservative forms of social privation. As it becomes patently clear that poetry is not “needed” by the nation-state or by capital, poetry is reopened as a fresh zone for exploring and articulating the contradictions of social need under conditions of austerity. Two contradictory tendencies militate against the exploration of social need, however. On the one hand, “lyric” and “poetry,” as normative and cordoned-off categories of language use will inevitably fail to articulate needs insofar as lyric pedagogy is premised on the idealist disconnecting of the subject from social need. On the other hand, poetry has lost this officially underwritten function of producing an ideal, classless citizenship (aside from a handful of prize-winning and aggressively marketed items) and has been reframed as “creative writing”— individually and sociologically representative expression. What threatens to get lost between these moments is poetry as one among other practices for

178

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

articulating socially forged capacities that are not necessarily identical to the needs assumed on the basis of categorical ascription. We have seen how Riley’s work is animated by the assumption that language might be a medium for discovering the shared needs of concrete social individuals. This is another way of saying that lyric reading sometimes proves to be a useful fiction for Riley, but only insofar as it can be separated as far as possible from the nationalist moralisms of lyric pedagogy. Such an endeavor is not Riley’s alone, but she has been pivotal, I think, in the development of such a practice of poetry. For a glimpse of the contemporary configuration of lyric pedagogy and social reproduction in the United Kingdom, I turn in closing to a very recent poem by Amy De’Ath, written “after” Denise Riley for collection of poems called The World Speaking Back . . . : To Denise Riley. De’Ath’s “The Pleasure and Satisfaction of Living” is formed of couplets that rhapsodize about the various ways that people imagine and narrate their likes, desires and needs: There are still wild berries bitter but edible And root vegetables generally disliked Turned on their heads without realizing There are still people who do not want to Know what they want, there are still People who like me know how To earn enough money to reproduce Themselves but don’t want to reproduce Themselves that way or this way There are still clients and patients and colleagues all Waiting for their moment in the sun (10–11)

De’Ath explicitly engages here with the Marxist-feminist critique of social reproduction.14 But this poem also gets at the poetics of social reproduction—at the ways in which the articulation and the linguistic ordering of preferences and needs can form part of the realization, or the occlusion, of needs that might be socially determined and met by deliberate and free forms of social reproduction. The “know-how” that contributes to an academic salary (De’Ath is a newly appointed lecturer of English) may meet some needs, but of necessity the wage



Institutional Geologies and Lonely Sociality

179

form cannot meet the needs that the poet wants to realize and meet:  “The meagre turnip the meek rutabaga/ Can’t be the only impossible vision.” De’Ath clearly expresses a felt need for a different horizon of practical need. The naming of needs on the basis of existing identity categories is found to be confining— both for those inside and outside of the category: “I feel desperate to show you a category/But there are still people who have none/. . ./I resealed the box that made you better/There are still people locked out of it.” Finally, poetry has been set loose to redefine the “pleasure and satisfaction” of the most basic representation of need: not even roses, but bread—“I reinvented the loaf of bread/ There are still tactics like this roaming free” (12). In the wake of disinvestment in poetry, poetic tactics are motivated toward such startling reconfigurations. The weight of “tradition” is surely not entirely lifted, but perhaps it is lighter as the need for poetry to do work for capital and the state seems to be in near terminal decline. De’Ath suggests that the “moment in the sun” that “clients and patients and colleagues” are waiting for is unlikely to arrive. This poet has become a “colleague” at the very moment of the university’s seemingly fatal privatization and neo-liberalization. The baggage of the moral-pedagogical tradition dies hard, but the work of poets like De’Ath cannot but be grounded in a critique of the university as an institution that all the same seems worth fighting for, or rather fighting around. If literary education is a luxury and not a right, if nothing is demanded of poetry by society, then we would be fools, or worse, to expect salvation from it. But we might see poetry newly as a site for the collective project of articulating social needs at the limits of ascribed social categories. Such a practice of poetry doesn’t exist to provide moral lessons, but neither is it a simple expression of individual creativity: poetic making comes neither before nor after sociality. It doesn’t move from an outside to an inside or from an inside to an outside. If this poetry is antisocial, this is only insofar as it writes through the interweaving of what doesn’t count as “social” with the social’s process of dividing into inside and outside. If lyric pedagogy has historically been a part of processes of social reproduction, it has done so precisely by inscribing the reading of poetry as lyric in a restricted field of presocial activity. The Marxist-feminist critique of social reproduction that I have been at pains to follow in this book is the best framework for understanding how lyric pedagogy imagines poetic activity as always coming before or after political life. Lyric pedagogy reproduces its own reduction of the social to the presocial, intersubjective pedagogical scene. Higher education in the United Kingdom is, increasingly, a site of border controls,

180

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

surveillance, obsessively measured dissatisfactions and the accumulation of private and corporate wealth off the backs of state-regulated student debt. The university is a site of struggle, but the struggle is not to return to an imagined past or to a kinder version of the humanities. Riley and Mulford’s simultaneous critique of social reproduction and of lyric pedagogy must be reengaged by struggles surrounding the university as an institution, in order to strike at the material connections between the university and various strategies for meeting social need, official and covert, that are being ravaged by the minute.

Notes Introduction: Social Reproduction and Lyric Pedagogy 1 The work of Anna Mendelssohn is, perhaps, a glaring omission from this list. Mendelssohn was, indeed, a very fine avant-garde writer with a notorious history of leftist activism who lived and studied in Cambridge. However, she does not engage with the kind of innovative thinking on social reproduction that I find in Riley and Mulford, and her relationship to feminism is ambivalent, at best. Mendelssohn tends to double down on an ethics of individualism and especially on a conception of “art” in which the primary relation of art to the social is one of negativity and overcoming (see, e.g., the title of her book, Implacable Art). In many ways, I see this as more straightforwardly, and not particularly uniquely, in line with an ameliorative lyric pedagogy. 2 See the following for more elaborated summaries of this definition of social reproduction: Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (London: Pluto Press, 1983); Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012); Holly Lewis, The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection (London: Zed Books, 2016); Cinzia Arruzza, Dangerous Liaisons: The Marriages and Divorces of Marxism and Feminism (London: Merlin Press, 2013); and Tithi Bhattacharya, ed. Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (London: Pluto Press, 2017). For a different perspective (one that argues that the distinction between reproduction and production is less stable than ever given biopolitical developments), see Michelle Murphy’s essay on “Reproduction” in Marxism and Feminism, edited by Shahrzad Mojab. 3 In particular, Luxemburg points to Marx’s tendency, when explaining the reproduction of capitalist relations, to presuppose a society composed solely of capitalists and wage laborers. She argues that Marx’s formal explanations of extended or enlarged reproduction fail to account for the real social totality in which not all relations of production are reducible to the capital/wage relation. Luxemburg cites a number of instances in which Marx justifies his reduction, as, for example, in this moment from the second volume of Capital “there are only two classes in this case, the working class disposing of their labor-power, and the capitalist class owning the social means of production and the money” (Capital II 488).

182

Notes

4 Whether or not Luxemburg’s account of imperialism was correct in 1913, her emphasis on capitalism’s uneven and combined relations of reproduction addresses pivotal questions for internationalist Marxist praxis. Moreover, since at least the late twentieth century, the relative increase of finance capital in Europe and America and of concomitant forms of debt (student, housing, medical, governmental, international, etc.) mean that the composition of reproduction involves a tendency toward a relative drop in the global investment in reproduction of labor. 5 Michelle Murphy notes the coincidence of such theorizations of “relations of reproduction” with the “historic moment of economization” in which postKeynesian accounts of, for example, the GDP reduce the production of value to nationally bordered accounts of waged or productive labor (290–91). 6 It is now a commonplace to say that the Women’s Liberation Movement in the United States and the United Kingdom developed both within and in reaction to Marxist parties and the “New Left” and Civil Rights movements in those countries. For a now canonical version of this story in the US context, see Evans, Personal Politics. For a revised account of this story that argues that, in fact, many black women in the Southern Civil rights movement did not feel sidelined within their organizations, see Breines, The Trouble between Us. See especially Mitchell, Women’s Estate, and Rowbotham et al., Beyond the Fragments for writings contemporary to the WLM in the United Kingdom that discuss its origins; see also more recent historical studies such as Natalie Thomlinson, Race, Ethnicity, and the Women’s Movement in England, 1968–1993. 7 These groups included, in the United States, MF groups 1–5 in New York, the Chicago Women’s Union and Bread and Roses in Boston. In such settings, the division between “radical feminist” and “socialist feminist” tendencies was not always as fixed as it appears—some “radical feminists” also considered themselves to be socialists. In the United Kingdom, the Communist Party Great Britain and International Marxist Tendency, among others, were notable as political groupings with women’s liberation fractions. 8 Such claims can be found throughout the socialist feminist literature of the 1970s; of particular relevance to my discussion are those found in Eisenstein (especially Eisenstein’s introduction and essays by Heidi Hartmann and Ros Petchetsky), Rowbotham, Rubin and Batya Weinbaum. 9 Michèle Barrett’s Women’s Oppression Today gives a thorough account of the “Marxist/Feminist Encounter” in terms of competing “dual systems” and “functionalist” accounts of the relationships between patriarchy and capitalism. Barrett rejects explanations of women’s oppression as functional to capitalism, and she is suspicious of attempts to describe a capitalism and patriarchy as ‘dual systems’ without mutual interaction and influence. 10 The concept of “sex class” as elaborated by US radical feminist thinkers such as Shulamith Firestone suggested that the sexual division of labor was the primary

Notes

11

12

13

14

183

difference on which all other hierarchies and divisions of labor were historically based. This assertion was rejected by most on the left, including many feminists, as insufficiently historical and unhelpful for class struggle and revolutionary change. As Federici would later argue in Caliban and the Witch, reproductive labor will likely turn out to be an important site for resistance to capitalist exploitation well into the future, as “primitive accumulation” is alive and well. Federici here describes how reproduction is increasingly absorbed by the state, how the last vestiges of communal reproduction are eradicated through imperialist “structural adjustment” programs and how the genocide of indigenous peoples, and especially of women with collectivized reproductive practices, continues (Caliban 82). Federici’s work follows that of German sociologist Maria Mies, who argues in her 1986 Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale that “it was precisely through the existence of external and internal colonies (the housewife) that European capitalism was able to avoid the revolutionary disruption of the production relations, which Marx had expected to take place” (201). See, for example, the works of Hazel Carby, Gloria Joseph and Shabnam Grewal, et al., Charting the Journey. The Combahee River Collective famously argued for a recognition of the interlocking oppressions and revolutionary strategies that were realities for working-class black lesbians and which could not be explained without due consideration of racism and sexuality. Cf. Breines for an excellent history of the tensions between black and white socialist feminists in Boston in the early 1970s. See Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body, for an analysis of how “regulating Black women’s reproductive decisions has been a central aspect of racial oppression in America . . ., [and] the control of Black women’s reproduction has shaped the meaning of reproductive liberty in America” (Roberts 6). In her 2004 Wayward Reproductions, Alys Eve Weinbaum delineates the ways in which the Marxist-Feminist attempts to “resolve the hyphen” actually bracketed the fact that the key question of reproduction as it appears in Marx and Engels is also a question of race and nation: “The interconnected ideologies of racism, nationalism, and imperialism rest on the notion that race can be reproduced, and on attendant beliefs in the reproducibility of racial formations (including nations) and of social systems hierarchically organized according to notions of inherent racial superiority, inferiority, and degeneration” (4). Weinbaum thus insists that analyzes of reproduction parroting received versions of Marxism and feminism miss one of the most significant historical instances of the deployment of discourses of reproduction as a sort of foundation for the complicity of nationalism, racism and imperialism and their interconnections. She highlights the ideological work of any thinking of social reproduction as a philosophical concept by pointing toward its embeddedness in hierarchical racial formations at various historical conjunctures. The language of “reproduction” is thus dependent

184

15 16 17

18

19

20

21 22

23 24

Notes on an assumption of the unity of what is to be reproduced, a unity historically figured in racial and national terms. Of course, these would not necessarily have appeared to many as terminal changes at the time. See Brouillette’s Literature and the Creative Economy for a thorough discussion of the place of “creativity” in the UK economy under Thatcherism and especially New Labour. For a much more nuanced explanation of the ISA essay and of its place within French philosophical and political praxis, see Warren Montag, Althusser and His Contemporaries, esp. 118–70. Discussing Lenin’s analysis of the “crisis” situation that led to the possibility of an effective overthrow of capitalist rule in Russia, Althusser concludes that “if the “differences” that constitute each of the instances in play . . . “merge” into a real unity, they are not “dissipated” as pure phenomena in the internal unity of a simple contradiction. The unity they constitute in this “fusion” into a revolutionary rupture, is constituted by their own essence and effectivity, by what they are, and according to the specific modalities of their action. In constituting this unity, they reconstitute and complete their basic animating unity, but at the same time they also bring out its nature: the “contradiction” is inseparable from the total structure of the social body in which it is found, inseparable from its formal conditions of existence, and even from the instances it governs; it is radically affected by them, determining, but also determined in one and the same movement, and determined by the various levels and instances of the social formation it animates; it might be called overdetermined in its principle” (For Marx 100–1; emphases in original). Althusser’s theory of overdetermination has been derided for being waffling and logically inconsistent, as it claims both determination in the last instance and that “from the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the last instance never comes” (113). Cf., for example, Laclau and Mouffe, “Post-Marxism without Apologies.” Large portions of Mitchell’s book, including the one from which this passage is drawn, were revised from her earlier essay “Women: The Longest Revolution,” which appeared in the New Left Review 40 in December 1966, one of the earliest extended expressions of second-wave Marxist-feminism. Cf. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, and Ted Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered. Eagleton makes this observation in a footnote to Criticism & Ideology: “Arnold’s description of the English class-structure—Barbarians, Philistines, Populace—itself rests on an essentially aristocratic notion of “rank”; he has no concept of social class as an inherently relational reality” (107 n. 19). See Baldick, ­chapter 4, “Literary Critical Consequences of the War.” English literary study had developed in workingman’s and women’s colleges, as well as in Scottish Universities, long before it was made an official part of Oxbridge curricula (see Miller, The Formation of College English).

Notes

185

25 Conversations with author, October 2015. 26 All quotes from Raha are taken from unpaginated, unpublished manuscript for £/€xtinctions.

1 Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge 1 As we will see, Richards, for his part, understands the “healthy” individual to be one whose exam results are original enough not to be “stock” responses but which still adhere to the normal cognitive parameters of human intelligence. 2 Veronica Forrest-Thomson did her undergraduate work at the University of Liverpool before doing her doctoral thesis at Cambridge under the supervision of Prynne and Graham Hough. John James and Douglas Oliver were both central to this community of practice as well, although neither of them was trained in English at Cambridge and both worked in other fields; James worked as a professor of Communications at Anglia Ruskin University, formerly Anglia Polytechnic, in Cambridge, and Oliver was a freelance journalist and adjunct lecturer for most of his adult life. The Cambridge Faculty of English website provides an “Introduction to Practical Criticism,” available at https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/classroom/ pracrit.htm. 3 Louis Goddard’s PhD thesis, on Prynne’s prose work will elaborate on some dimensions of Prynne’s pedagogical practice. I also do not have space here to go into the fascinating critical and creative practices of many other British mid-century writers such as Donald Davie, Elaine Feinstein, Roy Fisher and Charles Tomlinson, or Americans Karl Rakosi, George Oppen, William Bronk, Charles Olson and Edward Dorn, all of whom would interrupt the trajectory I am drawing from Practical Criticism to Cambridge poetry (not to mention the more popular British “Movement” poetry of Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and others against which some innovative British writing has antagonistically reacted). An additional problem concerns the distance between critical and poetic discourse, since part of what is at stake in all of these texts is, indeed, to what extent poetry can be reduced to statements and paraphrased in the form of criticism. The very act of “writing about” poetry brings with it a set of propositions about the relation between criticism and literature, or commentary and text, or discourse and object. Finally, I must note the persuasive arguments of Alan Sinfield that English studies in the late-twentieth century have, in fact, “been informed only residually by Leavisism; its Englishness has been pressured not by imperial ambitions but by economic, political, military and cultural deference to the United States” (Sinfield 225). 4 For Richards’s rejection of the “aesthetic,” see “Chapter 2: The Phantom Aesthetic State” in Principles of Literary Criticism.

186

Notes

5 As Ian Hunter writes in Culture and Government, “In Richards’s work, it would appear criticism had at least taken the first steps towards theorising its own possibility as a knowledge. If the Romantic antinomies remain (i.e., feeling vs. idea), they are not . . . deployed in the form of an exemplary reading. Instead, their job in Richards’s theory is to harmonise and articulate the organisation of impulses—the unconscious structure of subjectivity—on which such a reading depends. In short, it seems that with Richards criticism has entered the realm of the human sciences posing, if not solving, the problem of how meaning and value are given to consciousness” (162). So we find, in Richards, the combination of this Romanticist (idealist and humanist) Schillerian model of literary study as functional for society and a scientific development that seeks to understand rationally the grounds of literary knowledge. 6 Cf. Baldick (145) for a full exploration of “imaginal action” in relation to Richards’s concept of the “attitude.” 7 As Francis Mulhern writes, ‘It was necessary now, [Richards] argued, to cast off the lingering vestiges of the old philosophies and religions, and to turn for existential “assurance” to a discourse that equaled them in affective power without renewing their hopeless claim to literal truth. The sciences would henceforth rule alone in the domain of knowledge, but in order to maintain the psychological coherence of existence, men and women “would be thrown back, as Matthew Arnold foresaw, upon poetry. It is capable of saving us; it is a perfectly possible means of overcoming chaos” ’ (Mulhern 27, quoting from Science and Poetry 82–83). 8 Cf. Leavis, For Continuity. 9 As Mulhern thoroughly documents, Leavis’s cohort tended to suspect and even actively denounce political programs that did not account for the moral training that only literature and its study could possibly inculcate in an otherwise totally alienated industrial civilization. 10 If, as seems to be the case, this function has significantly waned along with the diminution of the welfare state, then arguments strategically pitted against austerity reforms that assert the moral and ethical value of humanities education will fall on deaf ears. For Hunter, this may not be such a bad thing. One of his final recommendations, which is echoed in recent mandates for a move away from “symptomatic reading” toward “surface reading,” seems especially flippant: “Historical philology is, in principle at least, capable of dissolving the Romantic aesthetic and the (cultural) human sciences. It can do so by deploying a description of texts—of their compositional technologies and historical deployments—which is not contingent on the ethical or theoretical transformation of the bearer of the description. In other words, it deploys a description which does not generate a “pedagogical imperative,” and is not therefore part of the system of sensibility training or self-problematisation.” (289) Unlike Hunter, I can see no

Notes

11

12 13

14 15 16

17 18 19

187

persuasive reason why “positive sciences” such as rhetoric and philology would not ‘generate a “pedagogical imperative” ’. Eagleton argues that de Man misunderstands Empsonian contradiction by rendering it ontological rather than social: “Paul de Man is not wrong to claim that Empson’s work thus manifests a “deep division of Being itself ”; he is mistaken rather in appearing to assimilate Empson’s category of “contradictory meanings” (the seventh type of ambiguity) to his own model of semantic deadlock . . ., and in appropriating the English critic’s essentially social notions of conflict to his own ontologizing impulse” (“The Critic as Clown” 156). Cf. Creasy, especially, for a thorough account of the appearance of the word “tact” throughout Empson’s critical oeuvre. As Paul Fry puts it, “He confirms what we knew instinctively, that his unbuttoned rhetoric embodied the tactless tact of the gentleman’s fireside conversation” (“Empson’s Satan” 156). This distinction is likewise reminiscent of Matthew Arnold’s proposal that culture replace the analytic with the affective. See Evan Kindley, Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture, for an excellent explanation of the twentieth-century development of the “poet-critic.” “The concept of intentionality is neither physical nor psychological in its nature, but structural, involving the activity of a subject regardless of its empirical concerns, except as far as they relate to the intentionality of the structure” (Blindness and Insight 25). See especially Farmer 2009. Cf. Emily Witt’s “That Room in Cambridge” for a humorous first-person account of the transmission of such mythology. A more holistic account would need to consider Prynne’s more overt engagements with politics in order to understand the thick overdetermination of his cultural politics. Indeed, his Maoist political tendencies are seldom brought directly to the surface of his criticism, but his continuing confrontation with the necessary contingency and indirection of revolutionary movements could be drawn out in relation to his pedagogical, poetic and critical practice, probably with interesting and informative results. See Donald Davie’s Thomas Hardy and British Poetry for a fascinating reading of the politics of Prynne’s early poetry. Davie attempts therein to insert Prynne into a trajectory of British poets working in the tradition of Thomas Hardy, which for Davie means a tradition of lowering political expectations, in precisely the form of a turn away from thinking the social and toward an ethics of intersubjectivity: “Prynne’s emphasis is frequently on patience, on lowering the sights, settling for limited objectives . . . [L]‌ove of others is a matter of recognizing their right to exist, and that comes about from accepting them and yourself in relation to elemental and uncaring presences like wind and sun” (113–14). By

188

20

21

22

23

24

25

Notes including Prynne in the Hardyesque tradition, Davie covertly implies that Prynne is like the “Movement” poets, rather than noting that Prynne and the poets around him were working to reject precisely the “lowering of sights” and “settling for limited objectives” that so readily characterizes poets like Larkin, Hughes and Heaney. Andrew Crozier argues that many of the characteristics of the Movement poets that Davie attributes to Prynne have seriously limited the scope and value of mainstream contemporary poetry: “Poetry has been turned into a reserve for small verbal thrills, a daring little frill round the hem of normal discourse; objects and relations in the natural and social worlds have an unresistant, token presence; at its most extreme, they serve as pretexts for bravura display. It does not wish to influence the reader’s perceptions and feelings in the lived world: its intersection with that world is attenuated and discourages reading back; transformation is confined within the surprises and routines of rhetoric” (“Thrills and frills” 229–30). Cf. They That Haue Powre to Hurt (2001), Field Notes: The Solitary Reaper and Others (2007) and George Herbert, Love [III] (2011). These commentaries are, however, far more concerned with philological detail than are any of Empson’s published analyzes. This letter was printed just one year before Prynne would publish his own Wound Response (1974), which works at many of the themes and operations that he identified in Oliver’s novel. It is most notable that Oliver himself published an essay in the 1979 volume of Grosseteste Review analyzing “Of Movement Towards a Natural Place,” a poem from Wound Response, with reference to many of the same criteria that Prynne identified in The Harmless Building. Prynne is not the only one to use the moral language of “goodness” to describe Oliver’s work. John Wilkinson, for example, writes, “I cannot think of another writer becoming a good person as an outgrowth of his or her project of writing or whose goodness animated his writing” (Wilkinson 104). The poem’s title refers to the interim president of France and opponent of Charles de Gaulle in 1969, Alain Poher, notable in this case for his opportunistic and vacillating rhetoric of national unity and political moderation (e.g. “preserve the unity of the nation,” or, “there is good and bad in everything”). I draw these references from Keston Sutherland’s meticulously researched “Hilarious Absolute Daybreak.” The editorial for the first issue of the journal, published in 1982, recounts the origins of the “informal network” with the statement, “There is a crisis in literary studies.” The editors go on to explain of this crisis that “inevitably it has been intensified by the education cuts, but it was not produced by them. The fight against the destruction of education is not a fight to preserve it as it is now” (1). In addition to socialism, Belsey insists that defenses of public education have a great deal to do with the struggles of “ethnic minorities and women to free

Notes

26

27

28

29

30

189

themselves from domination” (79). I focus on these materials in part to indicate just how much this not-so-distant-past of academic-activist thought has been rendered invisible, and especially for those living in the wake of McCarthyism and of the culture wars which, as Christopher Newfield thoroughly recounts in Unmaking the Public University, have rendered such histories of radical thought and struggle invisible or quaint. For a much more in-depth reading of the relationship between Prynne’s prose writings and the work of F. R. Leavis, see Louis Goddard’s unpublished 2017 PhD thesis, J.H. Prynne in context, 1955–1975. Cf. Keery for criticism of Forrest-Thomson’s interpretation of Prynne’s poem “Of Sanguine Fire.” Keery also notes that Empson, Forrest-Thomson and Prynne have each written at length on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94 (Keery 12). Empson devoted a chapter of Some Versions to the sonnet’s connections to Measure for Measure, Forrest-Thomson in Poetic Artifice complained that Empson had failed to attend to the poem’s formal features and Prynne composed a lengthy close reading of the poem spanning nearly ninety pages and detailing the historical usage and linguistic complexities of every word and phrase in the poem in sequence (They That Haue). Interestingly, Prynne does not mention Forrest-Thomson’s reading, though he does briefly touch upon Empson’s. Keery: “Prynne devotes 86 pages of small print to a single sonnet. It is an exhaustively scholarly production, in which constant “external reference” is made both to theology and to speech-act theory, yet Prynne is prepared to risk a spectacular “bad naturalisation” in order to make his crucial point about immortality.” An in-depth comparison of these three readings (among others) would certainly make for a fascinating study of the protocols of Cambridge criticism. John London reads this poem as borrowing from another of Empson’s villanelles: “Her castigation of William Empson returns continually to what she regards as his excessive concern with sense at the cost of form. “Not Pastoral Enough,” cleverly written in the exact metrical pattern of Empson’s “Reflection from Anita Loos,” expresses this criticism in poetic form” (London 82). Norris suggests the political value of Empson’s frustration with Wordsworth: “We will be much better equipped to resist the more sinister forms of manipulative rhetoric, those that likewise achieve their effect by inducing an attitude of uncritical acquiescence in all manner of paradoxical truth claims or “profound” pseudowisdom” (Norris and Mapp 75). Alan Durant and Colin MacCabe also view the chapter on Wordsworth as an exception to Empson’s general project in Complex Words to assert the rational, propositional continuities between poetry and “ordinary language”: “Words accumulate strata of senses and implications and assert propositions or arguments, even as they conceal such complexities by appealing to common-sense

190

Notes understanding. This is true not only of “ordinary language,” but also of poetry, which for Empson does not (as Richards and others had claimed) by-pass questions of truthfulness with its own forms of “pseudo-statement.” On the contrary, poetic language in Empson’s view simply extends the resources of sense-making characteristic of language use more generally (though Empson works through his own complex qualifications to this position in relation to the meanings of the word “sense” in Wordsworth, and “all” in Milton)” (Durant and MacCabe 173).

2 Denise Riley’s Socialized Biology 1 Riley suggested as much in a private conversation with me in August 2010. 2 By the time of Am I That Name, Riley had come to question the gesture of repairing voicelessness through speaking “as” any particular identity or sociological category. 3 Cf. Barrett and McIntosh (1982) for a trenchant critique of Christopher Lasch’s Haven in a Heartless World (1977). 4 Cf. Collections of British feminist poetry such as Licking the Bed Clean, Cutlasses and Earrings and One Foot on the Mountain. 5 See “Waiting” for a chillingly elliptical account of Riley’s early family life and schooling. 6 Email correspondence, 22 September 2010. 7 The group was not University based, although many of its members were affiliated in one way or another. 8 This essay, “Fertility, Abortion, “Choice” — Towards a Positive Politics of the Family” was co-authored by “Denise [Riley], Jo [Bradley] and Val [?]‌” and appeared as a position paper for the Socialist Women’s Regional Workshop in 1976. Portions of this essay are reproduced in Riley’s own “Feminist Thought and Reproductive Control.” 9 That is, Riley was not one to demand the immediate dissolution of the state. Leftlibertarian socialist feminism certainly did exist, but Riley was not obviously one of its proponents. See Lynne Segal’s contribution to Beyond the Fragments (Rowbotham et al. 1979) for a now canonical expression of left-libertarian feminism. 10 I read Duncan’s seemingly idiosyncratic gloss of Riley’s politics as a symptom of a more widespread lack of knowledge regarding the history of the women’s liberation movement and particularly of its relationship to socialism and Marxism. Many on the literary “left” seem unaware of the fact that the women’s liberation movement argued for decades over the nature of the capitalist state and whether and how to integrate feminist, anti-racist and anti-imperialist demands into contemporary tactics of class struggle. 11 For example, the imbrication of contraceptive provisions with eugenic discourses or more generally of the welfare state with biopolitical forms of discipline and control.

Notes

191

12 In this, her work is a far cry from her contemporaries’ attempts to create “unified” theories of capitalist patriarchy. See Eisenstein (1979) and Vogel (1983) for such attempts, and Barrett for a trenchant critique of both “unified” and “dual systems” approaches to understanding the relations between capitalism and women’s oppression. 13 I discuss War in the Nursery at length in part because this material has not been adequately treated in other readings of Riley as a poet and has been eclipsed by many other materialist-feminist accounts of social reproduction. 14 The chapter was revised from its original 1975 version (which was part of her postgraduate work) for publication in the journal Ideology & Consciousness in 1978; it was rewritten again as ­chapter 2 of War in the Nursery. 15 Riley’s anxiety and shrewdness regarding the limitations of criticizing theoretical presuppositions while using their own terms is reminiscent of Louis Althusser’s early writings on Marx (Althusser 1965). Riley’s essay is littered with such skeptical gestures, most notably (and most notably following Althusser) in her querying of “spatial metaphors” such as those of “base” and “superstructure” in Marxist philosophy and historical materialist methodology. See my “L’espacement de la lecture” for an analysis of Althusser’s ambivalent treatment of spatial metaphors. 16 According to Riley, the common socialist-feminist account of Bowlbyism at the time of her writing saw it as instrumental in reconfiguring policies on childcare after the war. Riley herself contests this received wisdom, demonstrating that the timing didn’t work out in quite this way, and that “the state” never worked as a single entity in concert with psychoanalysis. Rather, this particular narrative is, she argues, a back-formation of the 1950s, and the closure of wartime nurseries also had to do with many other ideological formations, most notably those surrounding the “mother” as a separate entity from the woman worker (though these could be collapsed for the sake of expediency to correspond with the necessity for temporary women’s work in munitions). These ideological formations, she argues, predated and extended far beyond the reach of developmental psychology, and they were often to be found in avowedly socialist and feminist discourses. 17 The above passage also indicates Riley’s ongoing interest in slogans as effective agents in the world worthy of analysis not only on the level of signification but also of distribution and effects. For Riley, rhetoric is perhaps the central stumbling block for political analysis; neither ideological struggle nor materialist correctives are sufficiently able to understand the workings of rhetoric. The explicit lesson from War in the Nursery, then, is that the gaps between intention, speech act and effect need to be respected and held apart even as they bleed into each other. On the power of pronatalist rhetoric, “Rhetoric doesn’t make women have more children through the sheer power of the word—the word narrowly conceived. Its presence matters, though, to put it mildly, and has to be assessed, irrespective of whether it “works” in the most detectable sense” (War 151–52). The way in which the

192

18

19 20

21

22 23

Notes “presence” of rhetoric and language “matters” and “works” is a source of continual curiosity for Riley, in her prose and in her poetry. Orwell writes, “The birth rate . . . is not likely to rise to the replacement level until those in power, as well as the ordinary people in the street, come to feel that children matter more than money” (Wigan 49–50; quoted in War 156). Thomas Butler argues this last point at more length in Writing at the Edge of the Person (2005). Most readers have taken the title as a directive to read “savage” only as a metaphor for “women.” At least one reader has questioned the racist and imperialist overtones of this figuration, insofar as it is used for the deconstruction of gendered rather than racialized discourse: “The co-optation of the metaphors to a feminist project, which does not yet specifically engage race, is problematic because the conflation of gender and race denies the specificity of the colonial experience. But because this language does not reappear elsewhere in Riley’s work, its use in her poem is arguably part of her critique. Nonetheless, Riley never makes this criticism explicit through the theoretical discourse of the poem in the way that she does with gender so that the enactment of the gesture of co-optation within “A Note on Sex” verges uncomfortably on a repetition of the colonization process” (Buck 95–96). I would argue that the poem actively engages the intersection of gender and colonial race, insofar as inverts the troping of land/Savage as woman. In this way, Riley’s work echoes that of one of her favorite poets, W. S. Graham. Riley’s poems are particularly reminiscent of Graham’s Implements in Their Places, which was published in 1977, the same year as Marxism for Infants, although this influence is much more pronounced in the later poems from Mop Mop Georgette and in the philosophical works The Words of Selves and Impersonal Passion. Two of Graham’s titles from Implements will schematically serve to indicate these resonances for now: “What is the Language Using us for?” and “Language Ah Now You Have Me.” Watts is an exception to this general tendency. Riley consistently explores this thinking of lyric address and subjectivity through the work of Merleau-Ponty. Another poem directly quotes five lines of Phenomenology of Perception (97) and then adds on two additional lines (“Marxism” 11).

3 Forms of Reproduction in the Early Work of Wendy Mulford 1 Cambridge Women’s Liberation Newsletter, January 1979. 2 See Dowson and Entwistle, and Kinnahan, for an elaboration of this distinction.

Notes

193

3 Neither Riley nor Mulford made much “explicit use of poststructuralist theory” in their poetry from the 1970s, even if, in prose from those years, Mulford did reference Cixous and Lacan and Riley wrote on Foucault. 4 Mulford also wrote two books of prose during the 1980s and 1990s: a biography of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland (This Narrow Place 1988) and a co-authored study of women saints (Virtuous Magic, with Sara Maitland, 1998). 5 As a 1978 Workers’ Action pamphlet titled British Road to Nowhere put it, ‘In short: the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat is inconceivable without the working class throwing up the potential organs of its undivided power in the period of the struggle against capitalist domination and carrying these over, enlarging and perfecting them, as the form of the new workers’ state’ (5). 6 Unlike Rowbotham, who left the Trotskyist organizations with which she had been aligned, Mulford remained a member of the Communist Party through the 1970s, not thereby rejecting the political party as a basis for revolutionary organizing. 7 As Michèle Barrett asks in Women’s Oppression Today, what if the various fragments really do have fundamentally conflicting interests: “Important though questions of organization are, I would not see the potential benefits of some kind of alliance as consisting in what each movement could learn from the other in these respects. The more urgent question to be asked is whether there are political objectives in common that might constitute a basis for a relationship” (257). 8 In this sense, Mulford’s tack is more in line with Balibar and Macherey’s later essay “On Literature as an Ideological Form.” Mulford, however, is less concerned with literary education as a relatively autonomous ideological form and more with literary production as continuous with other social movements, broadly defined to include “ideological” and more directly political-economic struggles. 9 The latter is concerned to challenge both “bourgeois” and avowedly Marxist readings of nineteenth-century literature with an emphasis on the tensions between sex and class belonging: “Bourgeois criticism should be read symptomatically: most of its so-called “evaluation” is a reinforcement of ideological barriers. Wollstonecraft’s, and later Bronte’s, ambivalent relation to Romanticism, usually described as clumsy Gothicism, is bound up with their feminism” (MarxistFeminist Literature Collective 31) 10 This was part of Street Editions turn toward issuing chapbooks by women: one year earlier, Mulford had published Alice Notley’s For Frank O’Hara’s Birthday and Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s posthumous On the Periphery, and 1977 also saw her release of Riley’s Marxism for Infants. Bravo to Girls & Heroes features numerous drawings by Julia Ball: these printed collaborations should form the basis for a separate study. 11 The phrase “reclaim the language,” even in scare quotes, indicates a discussion between Mulford and Denise Riley. Riley had used a similar phrase ironically in

194

Notes the title of her poem “a note on sex and the reclaiming of language.” Back issues of the Cambridge Women’s Liberation Newsletter provide further background, as Ruth Craft’s note on the “Women and Writing Workshop” in the June 1976 issue indicates: “Wendy has some provocative but positive feelings about the need for women to “repossess the language” or “their language.” I’m not sure.” In her 1979 essay, “Notes on Writing: A Marxist/Feminist Viewpoint,” Mulford argues thus, Some women have argued that the first act must be to remake language itself. Yes, we must break through our silence. But we cannot create a language. We can make a lexical selection, designed to exclude, for example, the obvious phallic metaphors of penetration, thrust, etc., for forceful action, for energy and desire. Such a lexical pruning and substitution of new items (such as chairperson) is part of the process of thinking our language, realising its subtle articulations of male dominance, making some redress and calling the female into presence in verbs, qualifiers, substantives, and pronouns. But this is a small linguistic process. (33–34)

The work of “reclaiming” the language can only be a local, piecemeal process of “thinking our language” (she goes on to discuss syntax as another possible locus for feminist intervention), of recognizing the unconscious work that language does and the social content of such a linguistic unconscious. Moreover, it means recognizing that we have a semi-privative relationship to language: we both have it and don’t; we cannot create it but we can instead think, and perhaps even subvert, its possession of us. To use the Lacanian-feminist idiom that Mulford deploys in her essay, we can remake some “laws” of language but not its Law. 12 See Wilkinson’s essay “Following the Poem” in The Lyric Touch for his application of Winnicott’s writing to poetic criticism. 13 Varying the stresses of these pronouns might, in fact, shift the referents that they designate; “THEY exclude IT” would suggest that children exclude the possibility of “living simply” and “eating well,” while “they exCLUDE it” would, by not marking the “they,” imply a continuity between “they” and the “we” that came before—”they” (among whom I am no longer included) exclude the possibility that children might be included in living simply and eating well. “THEY exCLUDE it” hovers somewhere between these options, as does the ridiculously emphatic “THEY exCLUDE IT,” further unsettling the designation of each pronoun through a mocking overemphasis. 14 As Peter Middleton writes, “In these poems the windows are dangerous, breaking, blowing out, letting in the street. Outside these words/windows is not some established real, but a language where people’s lives are going on, in the street” (“Breaking” 5). On my count, windows show up in eight of the poems in Bravo to Girls & Heroes, more often than not threatening to break or to otherwise cause pain.

Notes

195

15 See the essay by Cartwright, one of the artists on display, for an account of the exhibition. 16 Thanks to Pete Smith for aiding in this “Fairex” sleuthing. 17 Cf. Booth 71. 18 The women’s peace movement was not always in accord with the WLM, and in fact the two were sometimes opposed; as Jill Liddington writes, “Much of WLM equal-rights anger in the early 1970s was a reaction against narrow maternalist values. Practical campaigns for childcare ran alongside a critique of the family and its oppressive structures . . . Feminism and anti-militarism seemed a million miles apart” (Liddington 202). Still, the peace and antinuclear women’s movements were not entirely discontinuous from some of the small groups of the WLM—the small group structure allowed for such political differences to coexist as part of the same movement, which may have ultimately contributed to its dissolution. 19 As Hazel Carby insisted in 1982, “In Britain, strong female support networks continue in both West Indian and Asian sex/gender systems . . . Female networks mean that black women are key figures in the development of survival strategies, both in the past, through periods of slavery and colonialism, and now, facing a racist and authoritarian state” (Carby 127). Carby describes survival as a collective undertaking among black and Asian communities in the face of racist UK state apparatuses (aggressive policing of black people, unequal access to education, employment and living wages, as well as white supremacist violence across the United Kingdom). She explains that it is migrant women who provide the frameworks for this survival, which is not only the survival of individual migrants but of collective forms of living and relating with roots in from Africa, South Asia, the West Indies and elsewhere. 20 Kum-Kum Bhavnani, for example, questions the uncritical use of the phrase “male violence”; she points to the failure of this vocabulary to recognize and allow for the fact of state violence, particularly in its racist and imperialist forms. Likewise, she critiques the language of “peace” as it showed up among some Greenham Common women’s activists who claimed that “we have a peaceful past” (as if “Pax Brittanica” were actually peaceful) (267). 21 By 1988, when Charting the Journey was published, however, the editorial collective expressed a sense that the promise of a black women’s movement in the United Kingdom had not quite been realized: “Instead of at least the semblance of a Black women’s movement, the futile “politics” of victim and guilt tripping runs rampant” (3). At the same time, the editors insist that black women still learned crucial political lessons in the 1980s, refusing to “settl[e]‌in, almost comfortably, to the mists of political depression . . . No longer do we succumb to spurious notions of unity when that “unity” is based on conservative or even reactionary ideas” (3). Similarity, the volume as a whole suggests, cannot be the sole basis for solidarity or

196

Notes

even for organizational autonomy, even as the latter are both necessary for survival and for social transformation. Experiences of racism within the WLM pushed some women of color out of interracial feminist organizing, but not necessarily out of women’s political groups or feminist action: autonomous black and Asian women’s organizations preexisted and sometimes existed alongside explicitly feminist organizations (See Natalie Thomlinson’s Race, Ethnicity, and the Women’s Movement in England, 1968–1993 for a full scholarly study of the history of racial tensions and alliances in British women’s and WLM organizing). Performer and poet Lennie St Luce’s self-published volume of poems, Through Lennie’s Eyes, also from 1988, features two poems that reflect the disillusionment of a black woman in an interracial socialist feminist collective: “Working with Women (Reflections from a socialist feminist collective)” and “Lament (Reflections on a socialist feminist collective)” describe the jealousies, judgments and betrayals involved as well as the tragedy of a loss of sisterhood (11–12). While this pair of poems is by no means representative of the political conclusions of all black British women, presumed unities between and among women did frequently come under refreshed and sometimes terminal scrutiny during the later Thatcher years. This poetry is certainly worthy of further study. 22 See Kinnahan, and Dowson and Entwistle. “The composition is dated 1979–83 and reflects the poet’s efforts over those years to bring together a Marxist-feminist perspective with poststructural theories of language and subjectivity, a poetic exploration of the female body’s textualization” (Lyric Interventions 203). “ “How do you live?” finds Mulford moving more plainly into the realm of poststructuralism” (A History 162). 2 3 In Kinnahan’s account, “placeness” signals “a question dually directed toward patriarchy”s use of women’s bodies and toward Cixous’s exhortation of the female body as source for subjectivity” (205). It is surely right to focus on the resources of “the female body” in order to explain the “fear of placeness” in question, but the earlier text doesn’t have it this way. 2 4 Moreover, Mulford’s 2002 version of the poem, published in her selected poems And suddenly, supposing, excises the final seven lines entirely (And suddenly, supposing 92).

4 Institutional Geologies and Lonely Sociality 1 As Mark McGurl argues in The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, the teacher of creative writing functions pedagogically as an exemplar of creativity. 2 This is the name of the regular column where Riley was the guest writer.

Notes

197

3 See Brady, Thomas Butler, Critchley, Deveson, DuPlessis, Herd, Huk, Kennedy, Kinnahan, Krishnamoorthy, Lecercle, Middleton, Pattison, Presley, Purves, Schultz, Skoulding, Uziell, Wagner, Watts, Wheale and Wilkinson for a range of perspectives on Riley’s Mop Mop Georgette and Selected Poems. 4 This approach also explains the ironic phrase “the social democracy of loneliness” that shows up in her long poem, “A Shortened Set” (Selected Poems 41) 5 In this sense, Riley’s interest in loneliness might have an analogue in Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s poetics of the “undercommons,” wherein they explain that the “professionalism” of the academy declares itself at war with the asocial, working to root out and forcibly socialize “the undercommons.” They reject professionalism’s declaration of war: “it is professionalization itself that is devoted to the asocial, the university itself that reproduces the knowledge of how to neglect sociality in its very concern for what it calls asociality.” Against this, the opposite of professionalization is the “fugitive impulse”: “not asocial but against the social . . . this is what disturbs and at the same time forms the undercommons against the university” (40) 6 These lines also echo bits from the close of “A Shortened Set,” which appears earlier in the volume: “The evening lightens./ A friend’s shout/ blown inaudibly.// . . . // Curved to this view/ the gleam of a moment’s/ social rest.” (Mop Mop Georgette 24) 7 As Peter Middleton writes, “Wilkinson reads Riley’s volume of poems as a mirror for studying her self-inventions because he conceives of all relations in psychoanalytic terms as forms of incorporating identification, and assumes that self-consciousness is specularity” (“Imagined Readerships” 139). 8 See especially “Lure, 1963,” “Red Shout,” “Dark Looks” and the four poems first collected in Poetical Histories under the heading Four Falling: “Well All Right,” “A Drift,” “Cruelty Without Beauty” and “So Is It?” (Mop Mop 46–53). 9 As Zoë Skoulding suggests, “The substitution of “gotta” for “gotten” suggests a mishearing that subtly Anglicizes the phrase, giving the song a physical and social context as language that has lodged in the ear, via a 1960s radio in Britain, rather than the eye” (270) 10 Susan Schultz points out that “Riley has not only “adopted” a portion of the lyric, as “rhythm of the rain” becomes “rhythm of unhappy pleasure,” but she has also adopted a mode of inquiry into the fact of loss.” (Schultz, n.p.) 11 For Empson’s equations, see Chapter 1 of The Structure of Complex Words, “Statements in Words”: “A word may become a sort of solid entity, able to direct opinion, thought of as like a person; also it is often said (whether this is the same idea or not) that a word can become a “compacted doctrine,” or even that all words are compacted doctrines inherently. To get some general theory about how this happens would clearly be important; if our language is continually thrusting doctrines on us, perhaps very ill-considered ones, the sooner we understand the

198

Notes

process the better” (39). Empson goes on to develop how a word can contain compacted doctrines through “four types” of equations, these among five ways in which a word can carry a doctrine (the “existence assertion” being the first and not, it seems, amounting to an equation). See Chapter 12 for a discussion of “Pregnancy.” The gendered dimensions of this term are not lost on Empson, who seems to enjoy playing with them: “It is true that in general manly and the pregnant man are ‘virile,’ whereas the pregnant humanity and human, not having their sex to consider, are ‘humane’” (327). 12 Rorty on Derrida: “I take Derrida’s importance to lie in his having had the courage to give up the attempt to unite the private and the public, to stop trying to bring together a quest for private autonomy and an attempt at public resonance and utility. He privatizes the sublime, having learned from the fate of his predecessors that the public can never be more than beautiful” (125). 1 3 Much of Riley’s most recent—and most widely read—book of poetry, Say Something Back, and her brief book-essay, Time Lived, Without Its Flow, respond to the sudden death of her son and seek to describe a perceived freezing of time, of words, and of selves. The essay on the lapidary integrates this more literal relationship to death with her early 2000s theorization of the impersonal affects and geological nonhumanity of language. 1 4 See De’Ath’s PhD thesis, “Unsociable Poetry: Antagonism and Abstraction in Contemporary Feminized Poetics,” for a groundbreaking Marxist-feminist account of poetic making.

Bibliography Alpers, Paul. “Empson on Pastoral.” New Literary History 10.1 (Autumn 1978): 101–23. Althusser, Louis. For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Verso, 2005. Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001. Arnold, Matthew. “Culture and Anarchy,” in Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, ed. A. Dwight Culler. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1961. Arnold, Matthew. The Popular Education of France: With Notices of That of Holland and Switzerland. London: Longman, 1861. Arruzza, Cinzia. Dangerous Liaisons: The Marriages and Divorces of Marxism and Feminism. London: Merlin Press, 2013. Auden, W. H. Collected Poems. Edited by Edward Mendelson. London: Faber & Faber, 1994. Baldick, Chris. The Social Mission of English Criticism: 1848–1932. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Balibar, Etienne and Pierre Macherey. “On Literature as an Ideological Form,” in Untying the Text, Trans. I. McLeod, ed. R Young, 79–99. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. Barrett, Michèle. Women”s Oppression Today: The Marxist/Feminist Encounter, Revised Edition. New York: Verso, 1988. Barrett, Michèle and Mary McIntosh. “Ethnocentrism and Socialist-Feminist Theory.” Feminist Review 20 (Summer 1985): 23–47. Beardsley, Monroe C. and William K. Wimsatt. “The Intentional Fallacy,” in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, ed. William Wimsatt. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954. Belsey, Andrew. “Robbins Reversed: The Challenge of Snibborism.” Literature Teaching Politics 6 (1987): 66–80. Bernstein, Charles. Artifice of Absorption: An Essay. Buffalo, NY: Potes and Poets Press, 1988. Bevis, Matthew, ed. Some Versions of Empson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Bhattacharya, Tithi, ed. Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. London: Pluto Press, 2017. Bhavnani, Kum-Kum. “Is Violence Masculine? A Black Feminist Perspective,” in Charting the Journey: Writings by Black and Third World Women, ed. Shabnam Grewal et al., 263–68. London: Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1988. Booth, Charles, ed. Life and Labour of the People. Volume 1: East London. London: Williams and Norgate, 1891.

200

Bibliography

Brady, Andrea. “Echo, Irony, and Repetition in the Work of Denise Riley.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 7.2 (2013): 138–56. Breines, Winifred. The Trouble between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1947. Brouillette, Sarah. Literature and the Creative Economy. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Buck, Claire. “Poetry and the Women’s Movement in Postwar Britain,” in Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Theory and Criticism, ed. James Acheson and Romana Huk, 81–111. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996. Butler, Thomas. “Writing at the Edge of the Person: Lyric Subjectivity in Cambridge Poetry, 1966–1993.” PhD Diss., University of Notre Dame, 2005. Cambridge Women’s Liberation Group. Cambridge Women’s Liberation Newsletter (1973–85). GCIP CWLA 0/6, Girton College Archive, Cambridge. Cambridge Women’s Liberation Group. “Women’s Place in the 1980s.” Cambridge Women’s Liberation Newsletter. GCIP CWLA 0/6, Girton College Archive, Cambridge, January 1980. Cambridge Women’s Studies Group. Women in Society: Interdisciplinary Essays. London: Virago, 1982. Carby, Hazel. “White Women Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood,” in Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women’s Lives, ed. Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham, 110–28. London: Routledge, 1997. Carey, Judy. “Some thoughts on Women’s Week.” Cambridge Women’s Liberation Newsletter. GCIP CWLA 0/6, Girton College Archive, Cambridge, April 1979. Cartwright, Peter. ‘“Art Is a Balm to the Brain/ & Gives a Certain Resolution”: The Impact of, and Engagement with, the Visual Arts in John James’ Writing’, in The Salt Companion to John James, ed. Simon Perril. London: Salt, 2010. Combahee River Collective. ‘A Black Feminist Statement’, in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, ed. Zillah R. Eisenstein, 362–72. New York: Monthly Review Press. Communist Party Great Britain. The British Road to Socialism: Programme of the Communist Party, 5th ed. London: Communist Party, 1978. Craft, Ruth. “Women and Writing Group.” Cambridge Women’s Liberation Newsletter. GCIP CWLA 0/6, Girton College Archive, Cambridge, July 1976. Creasy, Matthew. “Empson’s Tact,” in Some Versions of Empson, ed. M. Bevis, 182–200. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Critchley, Emily. “Denise Riley: Writing Our Difficulties.” Poetry Review 102.2 (Summer 2012). Crozier, Andrew. “Thrills and Frills: Poetry as Figures of Empirical Lyricism,” in Society and Literature 1845–1970, ed. Alan Sinfield, 199–233. London: Methuen & Co, 1983.

Bibliography

201

Crozier, Andrew. Printed Circuit. Cambridge: Street Editions, 1974. Jonathan. “Apostrophe,” in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction, 135–54. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981. Dalla Costa, Mariarosa and Selma James. The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community. New York: Falling Wall Press, 1974. Davie, Donald. Thomas Hardy and British Poetry. London: Routledge, 1973. Day-Lewis, Cecil. The Poetic Image. Oxford: Alden Press, 1947. De’Ath, Amy. “The Pleasure and Satisfaction of Living,” in The World Speaking Back…: To Denise Riley, ed. Àgnes Lehoczky and Zoë Skoulding, 10–12. Norwich: Boiler House Press, 2018. De’Ath, Amy. “Unsociable Poetry: Antagonism and Abstraction in Contemporary Feminized Poetics.” PhD Diss., Simon Fraser University, 2017. de Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Deveson, Aaron. “Affect in the Writing of Denise Riley.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 35.1 (March 2009): 131–58. Dowson, Jane and Alice Entwistle. A History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Duncan, Andrew. Centre and Periphery in Modern British Poetry. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “Knowing in the Real World.” Parataxis 8 (1996): 63–69. Durant, Alan, and Colin MacCabe. “Compacted Doctrines: Empson and the Meanings of Words,” in William Empson: The Critical Achievement, ed. Christopher Norris and Nigel Mapp, 170–95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Eagleton, Terry. “The Critic as Clown,” in Against the Grain: Essays 1975–1985. London: Verso, 152–66. London: Verso,1986. Eagleton, Terry. Criticism & Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: Verso, 2006. Eagleton, Terry. “The Rise of English,” in Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 15–46. 2008. Eisenstein, Zillah, ed. Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979. Empson, William. The Complete Poems. London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2001. Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. New York: New Directions, 1966. Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral. New York: New Directions, 1974. Empson, William. The Structure of Complex Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 3rd ed. New York: International, 1975. Evans, Sara. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left. New York: Vintage.

202

Bibliography

Farmer, Gareth. ‘“The Slightly Hysterical Style of University Talk”: Veronica ForrestThomson and Cambridge’. Cambridge Literary Review 1.1 (2009): 161–77. Farmer, Gareth. “Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s “Cordelia,” Tradition, and the “Triumph of Artifice” ’. Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry 1.1 (2009): 55–77. Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004. Federici, Silvia. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012. Fell, Alison, Stef Pixner, Tina Reid, Michèle Roberts and Ann Oosthuizen. Licking the Bed Clean: Five Feminist Poets. London: Teeth Imprints, 1978. Ferguson, Roderick. The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: Morrow, 1970. Forrest-Thomson, Veronica. Collected Poems. Edited by Anthony Barnett. Exeter: Shearsman, 2008. Forrest-Thomson, Veronica. Cordelia: or, “A Poem Should not Mean, but Be”. Leicester: Omens Poetry Pamphlet, 1974. Forrest-Thomson, Veronica. On the Periphery. Cambridge: Street Editions, 1976. Forrest-Thomson, Veronica. Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978. Forrest-Thomson, Veronica. Selected Poems: Language-Games, On the Periphery, and Other Writings. Edited by Anthony Barnett. London: Invisible Books, 2001. Fortunati, Leopoldina. The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital. Trans. Hilary Creek. New York: Autonomedia, 1995. Foucault, Michel. “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, Trans. Rosi Braidotti and reviewed by Colin Gordon, 87–104. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Fry, Paul. “Empson’s Satan: An Ambiguous Character of the Seventh Type,” in William Empson: The Critical Achievement, ed. Christopher Norris and Nigel Mapp, 156–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Fry, Paul. William Empson: Prophet against Sacrifice. London: Routledge, 1991. Goddard, Louis. “J.H. Prynne in Context, 1955–1975.” PhD Thesis. University of Sussex, 2017. Graham, W. S. New Collected Poems. London: Faber & Faber, 2005. Greenaway, Roger, and Roger Cook. “Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart.” New York: Columbia Records, 1967. Grewal, Shabnam, Jackie Kaye, Liliane Landor, Gail Lewis and Pratibha Parmar, eds. Charting the Journey: Writings by Black and Third World Women. London: Sheba, 1988. Gummoe, Jean Claude. “Rhythm of the Rain.” Los Angeles: Valiant Records, 1962. Gungaloo, Rada. “The Nuclear Question: A Third World Perspective,” in Charting the Journey: Writings by Black and Third World Women, ed. S. Grewal et al., 277–79.

Bibliography

203

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013. Hayward, Danny. “Adventures in the Sausage Factory: A Cursory Overview of UK University Struggles, November 2010 – July 2011.” January 2012. http://www. metamute.org/editorial/articles/adventures-sausage-factory-cursory-overview-ukuniversity-struggles-november-2010-%E2%80%93-july-2011 (accessed 3 September 2017). Hennessy, Rosemary. Fires on the Border: The Passionate Politics of Labor Organizing on the Mexican Frontera. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Hennessy, Rosemary. Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism. New York: Routledge, 2000. Herd, David. “Occasions for Solidarity: Ashbery, Riley, and the Tradition of the New.” The Yearbook of English Studies 30 (2000): 234–49. Holmstrom, Nancy. The Socialist-Feminist Project: A Contemporary Reader in Theory and Politics. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002. Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Vintage, 1994. Huk, Romana, ed. Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2000. Huk, Romana. “Feminist Radicalism in (Relatively) Traditional Forms: An American’s Investigations of British Poetics,” in Kicking Daffodils: Twentieth-Century Women Poets, ed. Vicki Bertram, 227–49. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. Hunter, Ian. Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education. London: MacMillan, 1988. Jackson, Virginia. Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. James, John. Collected Poems. Cambridge: Salt, 2002. James, John, Tom Phillips and Andrew Crozer. In One Side and Out the Other. London: Ferry Press, 1970. Johnson, Barbara. A World of Difference. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Joseph, Gloria. “The Incompatible Ménage à trois: Marxism, Feminism, and Racism”, in Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, ed. Lydia Sargent. Boston: South End Press, 1981. 91–106. Keery, James. ‘“Jacob’s Ladder” and the Levels of Artifice: Veronica Forrest-Thomson on J.H. Prynne’. Jacket 20 (Dec 2002). Kennedy, Christine, and David Kennedy. ‘“Expectant Contexts”: Corporeal and Desiring Spaces in Denise Riley’s Poetry’. Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry 1.1 (2009): 79–101. Kindley, Evan. Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Kinnahan, Linda. “Feminist Experimental Poetics in America and England,” in Assembling Alternatives, ed. Romana Huk, 275–83. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.

204

Bibliography

Kinnahan, Linda. Lyric Interventions: Feminism, Experimental Poetry, and Contemporary Discourse. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004. Krishnamoorthy, Srishti. “Denise Riley and the Thermodynamics of the Experimental Lyric.” Feminist Spaces 2.2 (2016): 10–20. Kuhn, Annette and AnnMarie Wolpe, eds. Feminism and Materialism. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Lasch, Christopher. Haven in a Heartless World. New York: Basic Books, 1977. Leavis, F. R. For Continuity. Cambridge: Minority, 1933. Leavis, F. R. Mass Civilization and Minority Culture. Cambridge: Minority, 1930. Leavis, F. R. New Bearings in English Poetry. Middlesex: Cambridge, 1932. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. “Unpoetic Poetry: Affect and Performativity in Denise Riley’s “Laibach Lyrik, Slovenia, 1991”’. Textual Practice 25.2 (2011): 345–59. Lewis, Gail. “Who Feels It Knows It: Rethinking the Peace Movement”, in Charting the Journey: Writings by Black and Third World Women, ed. S. Grewal et al., 271–76. London: Sheba Feminist Press, 1988. Lewis, Holly. The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection. London: Zed, 2016. Liddington, Jill. The Road to Greenham Common: Feminism and Anti-Militarism in Britain since 1920. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989. Liron, Jonny, Francesca Lisette, Joe Luna and Timothy Thornton. Poems, Written between October and December 2010. Brighton: Grasp Press, 2011. Lloyd, David, and Paul Thomas. Culture and the State. New York: Routledge, 1997. London, John. “Veronica Forrest-Thomson and the Art of Artifice.” Fragmente 4 (1991): 80–88. Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital. Trans. Agnes Schwarzschild. London: Routledge, 1951. Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. Trans. Geoffrey Wall. New York: Routledge, 1978. Maitland, Sara, and Wendy Mulford. Virtuous Magic: Women Saints and Their Meanings. London: Continuum,1998. Mark, Alison. Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Language Poetry. Devon: Northcote House, 2001. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1976. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. II: The Process of Circulation of Capital. Ed. Friedrich Engels. Trans. Ernest Untermann. Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr, 1909. Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. New York: Penguin, 1973. Marx, Karl . Theses on Feuerbach. Trans. C. Smith, 2002. 1845. Available at http://www. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/index.htm (accessed 19 August 2017). Marxist-Feminist Literature Collective. “Women’s Writing: Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, Aurora Leigh.” Ideology & Consciousness 3 (Spring 1978): 27–48.

Bibliography

205

McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. New York: Routledge Classics, 2002. Middleton, Peter. “Breaking the Perspex.” Many Review 1 (1983): 3–9. Middleton, Peter. “Imagined Readerships and Poetic Innovation in U.K. Poetry,” in Assembling Alternatives, ed. Romana Huk, 128–42. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. Mies, Maria. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. New York: Zed, 1986. Miller, Thomas P. The Formation of College English. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. Mitchell, Juliet. Women’s Estate. New York: Vintage, 1971. Mohin, Lilian. One Foot on the Mountain: An anthology of British feminist poetry, 1969– 1979. London: Onlywomen Press, 1979. Montag, Warren. Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy’s Perpetual War. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Mojab, Shahrzad, ed. Marxism and Feminism. London: Zed, 2015. Mulford, Wendy. The A.B.C. of Writing and Other Poems. Southampton: Torque Editions, 1985. Mulford, Wendy. And Suddenly, Supposing: Selected Poems. St Leonards-on-Sea: Etruscan, 2002. Mulford, Wendy. Bravo to Girls & Heroes. Cambridge: Street Editions, 1977. Mulford, Wendy. The East Anglia Sequence: Norfolk 1984 – Suffolk 1994. Cambridge: Spectacular Diseases, 1998. Mulford, Wendy. Late Spring Next Year: Poems, 1979–1985. Bristol: Loxwood Stoneleigh, 1987. Mulford, Wendy. “Notes on Writing: A Marxist/Feminist Viewpoint,” in On Gender and Writing, ed. Michelene Wandor. London: Pandora Press, 1983. Mulford, Wendy. “Socialist-Feminist Criticism: A Case Study, Women’s Suffrage and Literature, 1906–1914,” in Re-Reading English, ed. Peter Widdowson. New York: Methuen, 1982. Mulford, Wendy. This Narrow Place: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland 1930–1951. London: Pandora, 1988. Mulford, Wendy. “WARNING: HM GOVERNMENT DEFENCE POLICY CAN SERIOUSLY DAMAGE YOUR HEALTH/ YOU ARE IN A NUCLEAR DANGER ZONE.” Cambridge Women’s Liberation Newsletter. GCIP CWLA 0/6, Girton College Archive, Cambridge, December 1979. Mulford, Wendy, and Denise Riley. No Fee: A Line or Two for Free. Cambridge: Street Editions, 1977. Mulford, Wendy, and Denise Riley. Some Poems 1968–1978. Cambridge: C.M.R. Press, 1982. Mulhern, Francis. The Moment of “Scrutiny”. London: NLB, 1979.

206

Bibliography

Murphy, Michelle. “Reproduction”, in Marxism and Feminism, ed. Shahrzad Mojab, 287–304. London: Zed, 2015. Newbolt, Sir Henry, et al. The Teaching of English in England. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1921. Newfield, Chris. Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. Norris, Christopher, and Nigel Mapp, eds. William Empson: The Critical Achievement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Notley, Alice. For Frank O’Hara’s Birthday. Cambridge: Street Editions, 1976. Oliver, Douglas. The Harmless Building. London: Ferry Press, 1973. Oliver, Douglas. In the Cave of Suicession. Cambridge: Street Editions, 1974. Oliver, Douglas. “J.H. Prynne’s Of Movement Towards a Natural Place.” Grosseteste Review 12 (1979): 93–102. Oliver, Douglas. Oppo Hectic. London: Ferry Press, 1969. Orwell, George. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. 3. London: Harcourt, 1971. Orwell, George. The Road to Wigan Pier. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1958. Pattison, Neil. ““The Ex-Poet” and The Solipsist: On Poetry and Abolition.” Unpublished manuscript, 2011. Pattison, Neil. “The Mirrors Are Tired of Our Faces: Changing the Subject in the Poetry of Veronica Forrest-Thomson.” Veronica Forrest-Thomson: A Retrospective. Kenyon Review Online Feature: https://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/index-2/ (accessed 29 August 2018). Pattison, Neil, Reitha Pattison and Luke Roberts, eds. Certain Prose of the English Intelligencer. Cambridge: Mountain Press, 2012. Perry, Seamus. “Coleridge, Christ, and Contradiction in Empson,” in Bevis. 104–30. Presley, Frances. “The Grace of Being Common: The Search for the Implicit Subject in the Work of Denise Riley.” How 2 1.2 (September 1999). Prynne, J. H. Brass. London: Ferry Press, 1971. Prynne, J. H. Field Notes: The Solitary Reaper. Cambridge: Privately published, 2007. Prynne, J. H. “From a Letter To Douglas Oliver.” Grosseteste Review 6.1–4 (1973): 152–54. Prynne, J. H. George Herbert, Love [III]. Cambridge: Privately published, 2011. Prynne, J. H. Poems. Freemantle: Freemantle Arts Centre Press, 2005. Prynne, J. H. Wound Response. Cambridge: Street Editions, 1974. Prynne, J. H. They That Haue Powre to Hurt. Cambridge: Privately published, 2001. Prynne, J. H. “Tips on Practical Criticism, for Students of English.” Available at http:// babylon.acad.cai.cam.ac.uk/students/study/english/tips/praccrit.pdf (accessed 20 May 2011). Purves, Robin. “Denise Riley passim.” The gig 9 (2001): 42–54. Raha, Nat. £/€xtinctions. Leith, Edinburgh: Sociopathetic distribution, 2016.

Bibliography

207

Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Richards, I. A. Poetries and Sciences. New York: Norton, 1972. Richards, I. A. Practical Criticism. New York: Harvest, 1929. Richards, I. A. Principles of Literary Criticism. New York: Harvest, 1925. Riley, Denise. “Am I That Name?”: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Riley, Denise. “Developmental Psychology; Biology and Marxism.” Ideology & Consciousness 4 (Autumn 1978): 73–91. Riley, Denise. Dry Air. London: Virago, 1985. Riley, Denise. “Feminist Thought and Reproductive Control: The State and the “right to choose’,” in Women in Society: Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Cambridge Women’s Studies Group. London: Virago, 1982. 185–99. Riley, Denise. “Fertility, Abortion, “Choice”: Towards a Positive Politics of the Family.” GCIP CWLA 0/3, Girton College Archive, Cambridge, 1976. Riley, Denise. “The Force of Circumstance.” Red Rag 9 (June 1975): 26–28. Riley, Denise. “Four Falling.” Poetical Histories 26 (1993). 8pp. Riley, Denise. “Historic Passions: Reflections in the Archive?” History Workshop Journal Issue 44 (1997): 238–42. Riley, Denise. Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Riley, Denise. “Left Critiques of the Family,” in Women in Society: Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Cambridge Women’s Studies Group, 75–91. London: Virago, 1982. Riley, Denise. Marxism for Infants. Cambridge: Street Editions, 1977. Riley, Denise. “Marxism in Infants.” Cambridge Poetry Festival Collection. Recorded April 15, 1977. Sound recording. British Library, London. 1CDR0006894 BD7-BD8;BD10 NSA. Riley, Denise. Mop Mop Georgette. London: Reality Street Editions, 1993. Riley, Denise. “Notes Toward a Women’s Self Help Therapy Group.” Cambridge Women’s Liberation Newsletter. GCIP CWLA 0/6, Girton College Archive, Cambridge, October 1976. Riley, Denise. “On the Lapidary Style.” Differences 28.1 (2017): 17–36. Riley, Denise. ‘“The Serious Burdens of Love?” Some Questions on Child-Care, Feminism and Socialism’, in Feminism and Equality, ed. Anne Phillips, 176–97. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Riley, Denise. Say Something Back. London: Picador, 2016. Riley, Denise. Selected Poems. London: Reality Street Editions, 2000. Riley, Denise. “A Short History of Some Preoccupations,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, 121–29. New York: Routledge, 1992. Riley, Denise. Stair Spirit. Cambridge: Equipage Press, 1992. Riley, Denise. Time Lived, Without Its Flow. London: Capsule Editions, 2012.

208

Bibliography

Riley, Denise. War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother. London: Virago, 1983. Riley, Denise. “Waiting,” in Truth, Dare, or Promise: Girls Growing Up in the Fifties, 237–48. London: Virago, 1993. Riley, Denise. The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Riley, Peter, ed. The Last-Minute Choice, or, Further Exfoliations, or, An Amount of Duplicating Paper, Ink and Elbow-Grease Quickly Disposed of, or, Collection Five, or, An Essay by Peter Riley and Poems by Wendy Mulford, Lewis Warsh, Pete Bland, John James, Thomas A. Clark, Douglas Oliver, Paul Green, Lee Harwood, Nick Totton etcetera, or, Brer Rabbit Lives. Hove, 1969. Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Pantheon, 1997. Roberts, Michèle and Michelene Wandor. Cutlasses and Earrings. London: Playbooks, 1977. Robertson, Lisa. “My Eighteenth Century: Draft towards a Cabinet,” in Assembling Alternatives, ed. Romana Huk, 389–97. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Robinson, Peter. “Review of Marxism for Infants.” Perfect Bound 4 (1977): 82–85. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Rowbotham, Sheila, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright. Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism. London: Merlin Press, 1979. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter, 157–210. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975. Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. Trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Schultz, Susan M. ‘“Unlock a Marvell Karaoke”: Quotation as Adoption in the Work of Denise Riley’. How2 3.1 (2007): n.p. Available at https://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/ how2journal/vol_3_no_1/ (accessed 20 January 2018). Sinfield, Alan. Literature, Culture and Politics in Postwar Britain, 3rd revised ed. London: Continuum, 2011. Skoulding, Zoë. “Misremembered Lyric and Orphaned Music”, in The Oxford Handbook to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, ed. Peter Robinson, 266–85. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Solomon, Samuel. “L’espacement de la lecture: Althusser, Derrida, and the Theory of Reading.” Décalages 2 (2012). http://scholar.oxy.edu/decalages/vol1/iss2/4/. 25pp. St Luce, Lennie. Through Lennie’s Eyes. London: St Luce Productions, 1988. Sutherland, Keston. “Hilarious Absolute Daybreak.” Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary 2 (2010): 115–48.

Bibliography

209

Sutherland, Keston. Stupefaction: A Radical Anatomy of Phantoms. London: Seagull, 2011. Sutherland, Keston. “Veronica Forrest-Thomson for Readers.” Veronica ForrestThomson: A Retrospective. Kenyon Review Online Feature: https://www. kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/index-2/ (accessed 29 August 2018). Swinburne, Algernon Charles. “Hymn to Proserpine,” in Swinburne’s Collected Poetical Works, V1, 67–73. London: William Heinemann, 1924. Thomlinson, Natalie. Race, Ethnicity, and the Women’s Movement in England, 1968– 1993. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. The Two Gilberts. Do Shrimps Make Good Mothers? London: Regal Records, 1924. Underwood, Ted. Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. Uziell, Laurel. “The Inadequacy of Irony: Poetics and Politics in the Work of Denise Riley.” MPhil Diss., Cambridge University, 2015. Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Vogel, Lise. Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983. Wagner, Cathy. “Identificatory Stances and Identificatory Trances: Denise Riley and the Legacy of Her Lyric Argument.” Unpublished Manuscript, 2012. Watts, Carol. “Beyond Interpellation? Affect, Embodiment and the Poetics of Denise Riley,” in Contemporary Women’s Poetry: Reading/Writing/Practice, ed. Alison Mark and Deryn Rees-Jones, 157–72. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Weinbaum, Alys Eve. Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Weinbaum, Batya. The Curious Courtship of Women’s Liberation and Socialism. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1978. Wheale, Nigel. “Colors – Ethics – Lyric, Voice: Recent Poetry by Denise Riley.” Parataxis 4 (1993): 70–77. Wilkinson, John. The Lyric Touch. Cambridge: Salt, 2007. Wilson, Amrit. Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain. London: Virago, 1978. Williams, Jeffrey J. “The Post-Welfare State University.” American Literary History 18.1 (2006): 190–216. Witt, Emily. “That Room in Cambridge.” n+1 11 (Spring 2011): 73–98. Workers’ Action. British Road to Nowhere: A Critique of the politics of the Communist Party of Great Britain. London: Workers’ Action, 1978.

Index accumulation 7, 8, 11, 17, 25, 35 see also capitalism adult development 29, 38, 82–3, 92–3, 191 n.16 aesthetics 16, 18, 19, 21, 35, 41, 54, 55, 58, 67–8, 73, 87, 112, 113, 125, 126, 138, 166, 167, 186 n.10 aesthetic state 19–20 Alpers, Paul 71 Althusser, Louis 14–15, 92, 184 n.18, 191 n.15 ambiguity 43–6, 48–9, 50, 54–5, 64, 75–6, 108, 133, 187 n.11 Amis, Kingsley 185 n.3 analytical criticism 45–6, 47, 57 Anderson, Perry 18 anti-austerity movements 1–4, 30 anti-Marxism 38, 68 apostrophe 103–4, 135 appreciative criticism 45–6, 48–9, 55, 57 Arnold, Matthew 18, 19, 20, 35, 36, 37, 41, 68, 187 n.14 asocial 155, 158, 197 n.5 atomized society 11, 12, 30, 157, 177 Auden, W. H. 165, 167 austerity, political economic situation of see anti-austerity movements Austin, J. L. 71 Baldick, Chris 18, 19, 21, 34, 39, 43, 186 n.6 Social Mission of English Criticism, The: 1848–1932 18 Ball, Julia 193 n.10 Barnett, Anthony 65 Barrett, Michèle 120, 190 n.3, 191 n.12 Women’s Oppression Today 182 n.9, 193 n.7 Barron, Frank 31–2 Barthes, Ronald 71 Beardsley, Monroe C. 66 Belsey, Andrew 62–3, 188–9 n.25

Bernstein, Charles 65 Bhavnani, Kum-Kum 195 n.20 biography 84, 94, 99, 100 black British feminism 12–13, 141–2, 195–6 n.21 Booth, Charles 136 bourgeois criticism 19, 20, 42, 95, 193 n.9 bourgeois familialism 87, 89 Bowie, David 127 Bowlby, John 93 Brady, Andrea 151 Breines, Winifred 183 n.14 Bronk, William 185 n.3 Brontë, Charlotte 123, 193 n.9 Brooks, Cleanth 66 “Heresy of Paraphrase, The” 66 Brouillette, Sarah 31, 32, 184 n.16 Browne, Lord John 1 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 123 Buck, Claire 100, 113, 192 n.20 Butler, Thomas 192 n.19 Cambridge University/Cambridge School 17, 18, 21, 28, 31–4, 39, 43, 51, 53, 61, 63, 112, 185 n.2 see also Practical Criticism Cambridge Women’s Liberation Group (CWLG) 30, 88, 111, 141 Cambridge Women’s Liberation Newsletter (CWLN) 88, 90, 98, 111, 123, 139, 194 n.11 Cameron, David 3 capitalism 4, 14, 33, 119, 182 n.9 accumulation see accumulation disinvestment 177 industrial capitalism 15, 34, 38 and outlawed need 23 and patriarchy 125, 133, 191 n.12 and social reproduction 7–8 uses of feminized “second skins” 25 Carby, Hazel 12–13, 195 n.19 Carey, Judy 111

212

Index

Cartwright, Peter 195 n.15 charisma 48–9 childcare 62, 87, 133 policies 29, 191 n.16 as a right and need 91 civic consciousness 49–50 civic engagement 68, 175, 177 Civil Rights movement 182 n.6 class collaboration 19, 22, 120 classes 11, 12, 18, 19, 38, 42, 182–3 n.10 classrooms 29, 42, 46, 112, 113, 120–1, 141 collectivity 23, 26–7, 170 colonized subjects 42 Combahee River Collective 183 n.13 communism 84, 91 128 Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) 118, 182 n.7 compacted doctrine 76–7, 172, 176, 197–8 n.11 compulsive sociability 158 conservatives, conservatism 1, 5, 83–4, 90, 95, 119, 138, 140, 145, 175, 177 consumption 117, 129, 130–1, 135 Craft, Ruth 98, 194 n.11 Creasy, Matthew 47–8, 187 n.12 creative economy 31 creative personality 33 creative writing 22, 146, 152, 177 Crozier, Andrew 65, 112, 115, 188 n.19 Culler, Jonathan 103 cultural education 15, 19, 41–2, 63 cultural materialism 18 cultural production 7, 13–14 and consumption 117 culture 13–14, 19, 20, 36, 38, 42, 61, 63 ideology of 41 importance of revolutionary transformation in 123–4 cynicism 116, 117, 126–7 Dale, Julia 111 Dalla Costa, Mariarosa 11, 12 Davie, Donald 185 n.3, 187–8 n.19 Day-Lewis, Cecil 31, 32 De’Ath, Amy 30, 178–9, 198 n.14 decolonial poetics 24 de Man, Paul 44, 187 n.11 Derrida, Jacques 174, 198 n.12

developmental psychology 82–3, 92–3, 191 n.16 Deveson, Aaron 165, 168 Dickinson, Emily 17 disinvestment 24, 28, 30 in lyric pedagogy 22 in social reproduction 5, 15, 22, 24, 28, 30, 177, 179 divisions of labor 4, 9 divisions of labor, sexual 11, 131, 182–3 n.10 domination 9, 12, 25–6, 41 Dorn, Edward 53, 185 n.3 Dowson, Jane 192 n.2, 196 n.22 Duncan, Andrew 89, 90, 190 n.10 Durant, Alan 189–90 n.30 dystopia 2, 89, 134 Eagleton, Terry 18–21, 34, 39, 120, 184 n.22, 187 n.11 Echo 173 ectoplasm 169, 170–1 Eisenstein, Zillah 182 n.8, 191 n.12 Eliot, T. S. 18, 32, 71 Empson, William 28, 32, 33, 35, 52, 57, 67, 69–72, 75–8, 171–2, 176, 189 nn.27, 28, 197–8 n.11 Complex Words 189–90 n.30 “Missing Dates” 72 “Reflection from Anita Loos” 72 Some Versions of Pastoral 71 Structure of Complex Words, The 75, 76, 171 tact 43–50 “Villanelle” 72–3 Engels, Friedrich 10, 11, 89 English literary study 17–21, 28, 32–3, 34, 40, 184 n.24 Entwistle, Alice 192 n.2, 196 n.22 equilibrium 36, 41, 47, 55–7, 63, 73 ethnocentrism 118 evaluation, textual 35, 36, 59, 120–1, 122, 193 n.9 family 10, 29, 89, 90, 157–8 positive politics of 88–9 security 84 Farmer, Gareth 51, 74 Federici, Silvia 8–9, 11, 12, 183 nn.11, 12

Index

213

Feinstein, Elaine 185 n.3 feminism 138, 147, 172 see also Marxistfeminism, black British feminism feminist left 9–10 feminist literature, contemporary production of 122–3 feminist organizing 149 feminization 24, 25, 27 Ferguson, Roderick 145–6 fiction 45, 67, 103, 121, 178 Firestone, Shulamith 182–3 n.10 Fisher, Roy 185 n.3 Forrest-Thomson, Veronica 4, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 50–2, 112, 115, 185 n.2, 189 n.27 Cordelia: or, “A Poem Should Not Mean, but Be” 50–1, 70 literary morality 65–70 “Not Pastoral Enough” 70–9 On the Periphery 70–1, 193 n.10 Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Contemporary Poetry 66–9, 70, 73 poise and sense 70–9 theoretical prose 65–6 Fortunati, Leopoldina 11, 12 Foucault, Michel 40, 41, 21 Fry, Paul 48, 187 n.13

School; English literary study; Oxbridge; Oxford University historical materialism 10–11, 18, 23, 29, 94, 121, 124, 148, 149, 150 home ownership 83–4 Hough, Graham 71 housing policies 87, 90 Hughes, Langston 107–8 Huk, Romana 97 Hunter, Ian 34, 40, 41–2, 121, 186 nn. 5, 10

geological rhetoric 147, 168–9, 176 Goddard, Louis 185 n.3 goodness 54–5, 69, 188 n.22 governmentality 41 Graham, W. S. 192 n.21 Grewal, Shabnam, et al. Charting the Journey: Writings by Black and Third World Women 141, 142, 195–6 n.21 Gummoe, Jean Claude, “Rhythm of the Rain” 167 Gungaloo, Rada 141

Jackson, Virginia 16–17, 147 James, John 112, 115, 127–32, 134, 185 n.2 “After Francis Amunatégui” 129–30 Berlin Return 129–30 “Fairex the Liberator” 131 Former Boiling, A 134 James, Selma 12 Johnson, Barbara 103–4

Hall, Stuart 18 Harney, Stefano 197 n.5 Hayward, Danny 2 hegemony 16, 17, 19–20 Heidegger, Martin 174 Hennessy, Rosemary 23, 25 higher education, in UK 1, 179–80 see also Cambridge University/Cambridge

ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) 14–15 ideology 13–15, 20, 33, 39, 41 imperialism 175, 182 n.4 industrial capitalism 15, 34, 38 infant 82–3, 92–3, 95, 96, 98 informal networks 62, 188 n.24 intentional fallacy 66 intentionality 50, 66, 187 n.16 International Marxist Tendency 182 n.7 intersubjectivity 22, 29, 39, 50, 79, 81, 86–7, 92–3, 103, 104, 110, 147, 153, 161, 163, 176, 179, 187 n.19 ironic stance 36, 37, 44, 45, 47, 50, 55, 57, 173 irony 44, 48, 50, 75, 150–3, 157, 173–7 politics of 153

Kant, Immanuel 20, 71 Kay, Jackie 141 Keery 189 n.27 Kelsh, Deborah 23 Kindley, Evan 187 n.15 Kinnahan, Linda 97, 143, 162, 196 nn.22, 23 Klein, Melanie 93 Kuhn, Annette 124 Labour Party 118 Landor, Liliane 141

214

Index

Larkin, Philip 185 n.3 Lasch, Christopher, Haven in a Heartless World 190 n.3 Leavis, F. R. 18, 32, 33, 35, 37–8, 39, 52, 55, 68, 71, 121, 186 n.9 Mass Civilization and Minority Culture 38 New Bearings in English Poetry 37 Leninism 118, 184 n.18 Lewis, Gail 141, 142 liberal feminism 145 liberalism 174 Liddington, Jill 195 n.18 linguistic materialism 150, 151, 164, 169–70 Liron, Jonny 1 Lisette, Francesca 1, 2–4, 30 literary education 4, 17–20, 41, 53 see also English literary study literary morality 39, 65–70 Literature Teaching Politics (LTP) 62–3 Lloyd, David 42 London, John 189 n.28 loneliness 30, 116–17, 152, 153, 155, 158–9, 164 of bourgeois familialism 87 Longville, Tim 54 Luna, Joe 1 Luxemburg, Rosa 8, 9, 181 n.3, 182 n.4 Accumulation of Capital, The 8 lyric autonomy 99 lyric pedagogy 15–22, 28, 35–6, 52, 65, 115, 133, 138, 147, 171, 179 definition of 5 nationalist moralism of 68, 69, 178 lyric reading 16–17, 21–2, 33, 147, 171, 178 MacCabe, Colin 189–90 n.30 Macherey, Pierre 120, 121 male supremacy 11 management theories 33 Maoism 187 n.19 Mark, Alison 65 Marxism 20, 41, 89, 90 and infants 95, 100 Marxist-feminism 9–15, 22, 92, 115, 138 activism 5

Anglo-American Marxist-feminism 6, 9, 11 European Marxist-feminism 6 materialist feminism 23, 191 n.13 organizing 119 socialist-feminism see socialist-feminism Marx, Karl 7–8, 86–7, 181 n.3 Capital 7–8, 181 n.3 Theses on Feuerbach 86 masses 39, 57 materialism 10–11, 18, 150, 176 see also cultural materialism; historical materialism; linguistic materialism McCarthyism 189 n.25 McGurl, Mark 196 n.1 McIntosh, Mary 190 n.3 McLean, Bruce 131–2 Mendelssohn, Anna 181 n.1 Mengham, Rod 161 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 101–2, 192 n.23 metaphor 32, 78, 152, 158, 164, 167, 169, 171–2, 177, 191 n.15, 192 n.20 microcriticism 59 middle class 7, 16, 18, 19, 38, 42, 63 Middleton, Peter 114, 127, 137, 194 n.14, 197 n.6 Mies, Maria, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale 183 n.12 migrant women 195 n.19 Mill, J. S 150 minority social movements 145–6 misinterpellation 153, 173, 175 Mitchell, Juliet 15, 184 n.20 moral criticism 38 morality, moralism 36, 37, 38–9, 51, 52, 58, 81 and poetry reading 35–6 moral training 58, 59–60, 64, 81, 163, 186 n.9 Morgan, Lewis Henry 10 Moten, Fred 197 n.5 mothers, motherhood 29, 82, 85, 86, 87, 91, 101, 104, 110, 129, 153, 166–7 Mulford, Wendy 4, 9, 28, 29–30, 94, 111, 112, 113, 180, 193–4 n.11, 193 nn.3, 4, 8, 196 n.24 A.B.C. of Writing and Other Poems, The 142

Index “Back-street rhymes” 134–8 Bravo to Girls & Heroes 115, 125–34, 193 n.10, 194 n.14 “Breaking It In Two, The Way It Goes” 135 and communism 193 n.6 early poems and political transformations 115–20 literary study and poetic practice 120–34 No Fee: A Line or Two for Free 29, 111, 113–14, 115, 134, 144, 149 “Notes on Writing: A Marxist/Feminist Viewpoint” 117, 122, 142, 194 n.11 on nuclear disarmament 139–40 Mulhern, Francis 18, 21, 34, 38, 39, 43, 186 nn.6, 9 multiculturalism 145 Murphy, Michelle 7, 182 n.5 mythology 53 narcissism 37, 161–2, 173 needs 154 enumeration of 22, 24, 148, 175 naming of 21–4, 27–8, 148, 175, 179 Newfield, Christopher, Unmaking the Public University 189 n.25 New Labour 31, 175, 184 n.16 New Left 9, 182 n.6 Nietzsche, Friedrich 174 Norris, Christopher 77, 189 n.29 Notley, Alice, For Frank O’Hara’s Birthday 193 n.10 nuclear disarmament 139–41 Oliver, Douglas 53–5, 56, 112, 115, 185 n.2, 188 n.21 Olson, Charles 53, 56, 185 n.3 Oppen, George 185 n.3 oppression and exploitation 12, 24 see also women’s oppression and resistance organizational autonomy 196 n.21 Orwell, George 95, 192 n.18 Osborne, George 2–3 outlawed needs 23–4 overdetermination 14–15, 34, 58, 92, 97, 177, 184 nn.18, 19, 187 n.19 Oxbridge 21, 61, 184 n.24 Oxford University 61

215

painting 159–61, 166 Parmar, Pratibha 141 pastoral 44, 71–5, 78, 129, 159 patriarchy 10–13, 119, 125, 133, 182 n.9, 191 n.12 Pattison, Neil 65, 151 Perry, Seamus 36, 43 personal politics 87–8, 90–1, 99, 119 pessimism 138 Poems, Written between October and December 2010 1–4 poetic production 4, 8–9, 15, 34–5, 43, 53, 61–2, 78, 173 poetry 22–30, 35, 177 political 30, 114, 142 as pre-political moral training 81 pseudo-statements 69 reading, moral dimension 35 scientific reading of 36–7 sociopolitical dimensions of 52–65 success or failure of a poem 69 Poher, Alain 188 n.23 political economy 13, 16, 31, 88, 149 political organizing 30, 90–1, 114 political solidarity 21, 119, 152, 168–9 political theory 2, 85, 91–2, 99 post-welfare state university 62 Pound, Ezra 71 Practical Criticism 21, 28–9, 33, 34–5, 43, 52–3, 55, 68, 72, 78, 99, 173, 185 n.3 balancing act 57 and judgments 59 and society 35–43 technical skills 58 tradition of 68 tutorial authority over the apprentice of 59–60 Presley, Frances 97, 98 primitive accumulation 183 n.11 privatization 3, 30 productive labor 11 professionalism 197 n.5 proletarians 25, 42, 88, 91, 138 Prynne, J. H. 4, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 52, 65, 71, 78, 112, 115, 133, 185 n.3, 187–8 n.19, 188 nn.21, 22, 189 n.27 Anglo team 52–65 Brass 56, 60–1, 64, 65, 133 Kitchen Poems 56

216

Index

“L’Extase de M. Poher” 60–1, 63–4 “Of Sanguine Fire” 133 “Tips on Practical Criticism” 59, 65 White Stones, The 56 Wound Response 188 n.21 public education 5, 19, 62, 188–9 n.25 Purves, Robin 159 queer Marxism 23 queer social reproduction 24–5, 26–8 race, racism 12, 118 within the WLM 196 n.21 racialization 24, 25, 27 radical feminism 9, 97, 182–3 n.10, 182 n.7 Raha, Nat 24–8, 30 £/€xtinctions 6, 24, 25–8 Rakosi, Karl 185 n.3 rationalism 69–70 relations of production 20 relative autonomy, of ideology 14–15 religion, and poetry 37 repetition 74, 104–5, 136, 137, 143, 144, 147, 163, 164, 168, 173, 177 reproduction, and poetry 12–13, 22–30, 144, 183–4 n.14 reproductive labor 6, 11–12, 128, 130–1, 183 n.11 rhetoric 5, 7, 19, 24, 33, 38, 43, 60, 77–8, 85, 94, 106, 127, 136, 147, 152, 157, 159, 163, 168–70, 176, 191–2 n.17 Richards, I. A. 18, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 44, 54, 55, 57, 69, 70, 185 n.1, 186 n.5 Practical Criticism 33, 57 Riley, Denise 4, 9–10, 21, 28, 29, 30, 81–4, 86–8, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 103, 108, 111, 112, 114, 115, 127, 134, 145, 146, 149–50, 166–7, 180, 190 n.9, 191 n.15, 192 nn.21, 23, 193–4 n.11, 197 n.5 account and practice of irony 151 “Affections of the Ear” 164 Am I That Name?: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History 96, 97–8, 150–4, 161, 163, 169, 171, 172 on Bowlbyism 191 n.16 “Castalian Spring, The” 164 critical self-reflection 151

“Curmodgeonly” 155–7 “Dark Looks” 170 Dry Air 98, 161 Echo 173 “Force of Circumstance, The” 83–7 geology and lyric pedagogy 168–77 and the Grundrisse 86 Impersonal Passion 151, 163, 192 n.21 interest in slogans as effective agents 191 n.17 “Is it enough like this as I am” 99–110 “Knowing in the Real World” 158–9, 160 “Left Critiques of the Family” 89–90 lonely social 152–61 Marxism for Infants 29, 84, 85, 87, 94–5, 97–9, 100, 108–9, 127, 161, 167, 193 n.10 “Misremembered Lyric, A” 164–5, 166 Mop Mop Georgette 98, 161, 164–5, 166, 168, 170, 192 n.21 No Fee: A Line or Two for Free 29, 111, 113–14, 115, 134, 144, 149 “Note on Sex and the Reclaiming of Language, A” 95–9, 100 “On the Lapidary Style” 176 “Rayon” 164 “Red Shout” 159–60, 161 rejection of “moral training” as poetry’s purpose 163 “Right to Be Lonely, The” 157, 158 Say Something Back 198 n.13 Selected Poems 155 “Serious Burdens of Love, The” 87–94 “Short History of Some Preoccupations, A” 150, 165 “sliver of the history of the present, A” 148 Stair Spirit 161 theory of linguistic materiality 151 Time Lived, Without Its Flow 198 n.13 vulgar materialist rhetoric 147, 168–9, 171 War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother 82, 83, 85, 87, 92, 93, 95, 99, 148, 151, 153, 154, 163, 167, 176, 191 n.17 Words of Selves, The: Identification, Solidarity, Irony 150, 151, 163–4, 165, 169, 171, 174, 176, 192 n.21

Index Riley, John 54 Roberston, Lisa 163 Roberts, Dorothy, Killing the Black Body 183 n.14 Robinson, Peter 96–7 Romanticism 41, 193 n.9 Rorty, Richard 174, 175, 198 n.12 Rowbotham, Sheila 119, 193 n.6 Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism 119, 142 Rubin, Gayle 11 “savage” metaphor 96, 192 n.20 Schiller, Friedrich 19–20, 37, 41 schools, and ideology implications 14, 15 Schultz, Susan 168, 197 n.10 scientific reading of poetry 36–7 Segal, Lynne 190 n.9 self-descriptions 96, 150–1, 169, 173, 176 self-help therapy group 90–1 sense 75–6, 77–8 Seven Types of Ambiguity 43–4 sex/gender systems 11, 195 n.19 sexism 15, 118, 123 sexual divisions of labor 11, 124, 131, 182–3 n.10 sexual oppression see women’s oppression and resistance silence 86, 136–8 simple reproduction 7, 177 Sinfield, Alan 38, 185 n.3 singlehood 30, 177 single mother 82–6, 175–6, 177 see also mothers, motherhood singleness 153, 155, 158, 164 Skoulding, Zoë 197 n.9 social and antisocial, division between 159 double feminization 154 social democracy 157, 158 social individuals 21, 86–7, 99, 161, 178 socialist family 89 socialist-feminism 12–13, 86, 88, 91, 118, 148, 149, 151, 152, 182 n.7 needs 91 organizing 142 politics 88–9 sociality of loneliness 147

217

of speech 86 socialization, and human development, distinction between 92–3 socialized biology 29, 81, 82, 86, 87, 93–4, 98, 99–100, 110, 154, 161 social need, and poetry 22–30 see also needs social pedagogy 48, 50, 79, 163 social production 78, 121, 122, 147 social relations 4, 6, 8, 9, 19, 79, 81, 118–19, 124, 148, 159 social reproduction 4, 6–9, 13, 15, 22, 33, 35, 65, 115, 122, 138, 147 and capitalism 7–8 definition of 4 poetics of 178 social services 13, 30, 62 social totality 14, 181 n.3 solidarity 21, 119, 152, 168–9, 173, 195–6 n.21 speech 86, 87, 99, 103, 104–5 spirituality 19, 21, 38, 54 Stalinism 118 state 10, 89 -funded education 30 -organized cultivation of attention to poetry 61 St Luce, Lennie, Through Lennie’s Eyes 196 n.21 suffrage movement 121, 123 surplus value 8, 11, 117 survival, rhetoric of 140–1, 142–3 Sutherland, Keston 56, 63–4, 68, 188 n.23 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 51–2 tactical irony 48 see also ironic stance; irony talismanic poetics 147, 150, 152, 164, 165, 171, 176 teacher–student model 42, 50 text-tutor and student-reader, imaginary relation between 64 Thatcher, Margaret 62, 138, 142–143, 144, 145, 184 n.16, 196 n.21 third-person narration 95, 98, 100, 104 Third World feminists 12, 141 Thomas, Paul 42 Thornton, Timothy 1 Tomlinson, Charles 185 n.3 Trotskyist organizations 118, 193 n.6

218 undercommons 197 n.5 United States 6, 10, 62, 146, 182 nn.6–7, 185 n. 3 New Criticism 70 unsupported mothers 87 see also mothers, motherhood Unsupported Mother’s Group 88 valuable experiences 36, 54–5 value 8, 11, 13, 31, 59 of poetry 37 of Practical Criticism as a pedagogy for life 63 Vogel, Lise 191 n.12 Wagner, Cathy 162 Watts, Carol 97, 99, 192 n.22 Weinbaum, Alys Eve, Wayward Reproductions 183 n.14 Wilkinson, John 127–8, 130, 161, 163, 188 n.22 Williams, Jeffrey J. 61–2 Williams, Raymond 18

Index Wilson, Amrit 12, 13 Wimsatt, William K. 66 Witt, Emily 56–7, 187 n.18 Wolpe, Ann Marie 124 women see also feminism; mothers, motherhood as a massification 169 oppression and resistance 10, 15, 111, 148, 182 n.9 see also oppression and exploitation peace movement 195 n.18 right to choose 92 Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) 9–15, 86, 88, 111, 117, 118, 119 123, 147, 148–9, 182 n.6, 190 n.10, 195 n.18 Wordsworth, William 77, 189 nn.29, 30 Workers’ Action, British Road to Nowhere 193 n.5 working classes 25, 42, 88, 91, 138 working mothers 91 see also mothers, motherhood