Red Emma’s

Poetry in General 

In the second half of the twentieth century, poetry leapt out of books and became an interdisciplinary public form. Poetry entered bureaucratic systems of organization like index card catalogues; it pushed the boundaries of privately owned public parks. Keegan Cook Finberg argues that poetry became an increasingly capacious force during this period because it could speak directly to the degradation of the social-democratic notion of the public.

Poetry in General explores how poets expanded their practice into the realms of politics, work, and everyday life from 1960 to the present, from the apex of the welfare state to an era of privatization and austerity. It considers a compelling array of figures—including Yoko Ono, George Brecht, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, Bernadette Mayer, Eleanor Antin, Adrian Piper, and M. NourbeSe Philip—whose works draw on conceptual techniques to transform official documents and spaces. Finberg shows how these public texts expose the mechanisms of the neoliberal consensus about work and leisure, the state’s facilitation of capitalism, and enduring racial and gender inequities. She also provides politically charged ways to interpret and critique racial capitalism, antiabortion legislation, and mass debt. A new literary and institutional history of postwar poetics, this book shows how poetic experiments address the privatization of collective life and rethink the category of the public.

Stitch, Unstitch

The labor of literature is often thought of as a specialized craft, distinct from everyday work. In Stitch, Unstitch, Kristin Grogan traces an alternative vision of writing and the writer, arguing that modernist poetry was deeply shaped by ordinary labor and the people who performed it. This relationship provoked powerful political and aesthetic experiments—and allowed modernist poets to imagine ways of life beyond the demand to earn a living.

Poetic form, Grogan shows, offers ways to reflect on the meaning and worth of labor, particularly types of gendered labor that are typically unseen and undervalued. Her fine-grained readings locate modernist poetry within sites of social reproduction, factory work, craft labor, and other forms of manual labor, placing literary texts alongside objects such as constructivist posters and set design, household notes, and homemade books. Grogan considers Ezra Pound’s ideology of craft and artisanal labor; Lola Ridge’s immersion in the New York garment industry; Langston Hughes’s encounter with Soviet workers’ theater; Gertrude Stein’s gendered and queer domestic labors; and Lorine Niedecker’s employment as a hospital cleaner. Blending Marxist and feminist theory with attentive close readings, Stitch, Unstitch is a revelatory materialist account of the values of poetry.

Keegan Cook Finberg is a scholar, teacher, and writer of literature. Her book of criticism, Poetry in _General: How a Literary Form Became Public, _about the transformation of the welfare state in the United States after 1960, is out now from Columbia University Press. She is currently an assistant professor of English at University of Maryland, Baltimore County where she teaches classes on modern and contemporary American literature, aesthetic and cultural theory, and poetry.

Kristin Grogan is an Assistant Professor in English at Rutgers University. Her research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, labor history and theory, and gender and sexuality. She is finishing her first book, an account of the dynamic relationship between poetry and labor of various kinds—artisanal, mechanical, clerical, and reproductive work—with chapters on Langston Hughes, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Lorine Niedecker. She is beginning a new project on feminist and queer poetics and anarchism in the USA, from Emma Goldman to now. Her writing has appeared in American Literature, Critical Quarterly, Social Text Online, and Post45; most recently, she edited, with David B. Hobbs, a special issue of Post45 Contemporaries on Bernadette Mayer.

Christopher Nealon, Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, teaches American literature, aesthetic theory, and the intellectual histories that bear on the history of poetry. He also regularly teaches courses that explore how the humanities have conceived of capitalism. He has written three books of criticism:  Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (2001), The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century (2011), and Infinity for Marxists: Essays on Poetry and Capital (2023). He is the co-editor, with Colleen Lye, of the collection After Marx: Literature, Theory and Value in the 21st Century (2022). He is also the author of five books of poetry, including The Shore, which was a finalist for the 2020 National Critics’ Book Circle Award. His latest volume of poems is All About You (2024). He is currently completing a book called The Concept of Capital, which examines the limits of three 20th- and early 21st-century attempts to offer “big-tent” arguments for the political relevance of Marx’s work: the idea that we’re all alienated; that capital makes everything abstract and impersonal; and that we are in a terminal crisis for capitalism. In contrast to these arguments, he develops an account of how the thing about Marx’s work that seems most esoteric — his theory of value — is actually the gateway to a stronger approach to solidarity and political organization.