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1: The Poet’s Feet

The quintessential anarchist poetry might be the deliberately obscure verse of Stéphane Mallarmé or the entirely indecipherable “sound-poetry” of Hugo Ball. Significantly, both of these are marked by a certain contact with political anarchism: Mallarmé welcomed some anarchists to his circle, spoke publicly in their defense, and occasionally adopted their imagery to describe his own poetic enterprise, while Ball was an assiduous reader of Bakunin.159 An analogy between anarchist politics and avant-garde poetics as “individualist politics,” on the one hand, and “individualist aesthetics” on the other, has been argued for.160

Fig. 1: Portrait of the avant-garde artist as anarcho-poseur (or mere “dilettante”): “Yes, my dear, this gentleman is an anarchist!” (Le Communiste: Organe du propagande libertaire 1.9 [Feb 29, 1908])

Fig. 2: Front page of an Italian anarchist journal, Il Piccone (May 1, 1905), with Olindo Guerrini’s poem, “Aurora.” Note the central placement of the poem.

Much attention has been lavished on these traces of anarchism in the experiences and experiments of the avant-gardes. However, it may be objected that their poetic revolt is not so analogous to political revolt as it is to other generational “swerves” of poets from their precursors. If, as Harold Bloom suggests, “strong” poets are always engaged in a struggle, this struggle may always be, on some level, a struggle against the elder poets from whom they have learned, a systematic attempt to cover up the extent to which they are subject to the “influence” of their literary forebears.161 Thus, by 1933, Lucía Sánchez Saornil (1895–1970), subsequently one of the founders of the anarchist-feminist Mujeres Libres, came to repudiate her early participation in the avant-garde Ultraísmo movement as a futile exercise in “snobbery,” declaring, in a tone of wry exasperation: “The avant-gardists were ‘sons of the bourgeoisie.’” Not in spite of, but because of the avant-garde’s constitutive hostility to “bourgeois” philistinism: “New and old, bourgeois and anti-bourgeois, are properly, eminently bourgeois terms.”162 This kind of opposition is all too closely tied to what it opposes. Avant-garde “Revolutions of the Word” might fall into the very pattern that anarchism sought to break, whereby revolutionaries come to mimic and identify with the authorities they overthrow, becoming the new bearers of authority—“the re-writing of the father,” as Bloom puts it.163

Accounts of the avant-gardes that seek to write them into the history of anarchism face another embarrassment: their engagement with anarchism rarely amounted to participation in or “commitment” to the anarchist movement.164 Mallarmé maintained a gingerly distance from anarchist action, and Ball flatly declared, “I am not an anarchist.”165 Moreover, the anarchist movement, which refused to nullify social commitments in the name of the autonomous individual, was not, on the whole, welcoming toward these experimenters, whose work they often saw as willfully obscure at best, more suited to the narcissistic enjoyment of a self-appointed élite than to the needs of working-class people in struggle (fig. 1).166 As Georges Poinsot and Mafféo-Charles Normandy bluntly conclude, in their review of the “social poets,” with regard to the Symbolists: “They are not social.”167 If the avant-garde poetics of the early-twentieth century were less quietistic and more confrontational than their Symbolist forebears, they were no more inclined to position themselves as speakers in a public arena of discourse: faced with a “crowd,” as André Breton famously put it in 1929, “the simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly”—the only alternative being to accept a “well-defined place in the crowd,… belly at barrel-level.”168 As a means of dismissing “the crowd” from the poet’s room (since, in truth, few Surrealists ever took up arms), the signature Surrealist technique of trance-writing, écriture automatique, was both less violent and more effective, letting the writer disavow public responsibility for the published word.

However serious these literary bohemian allies were in their political commitments, a search of the international anarchist press during the period of the greatest avant-garde ferment—the flourishing of Dada, Imagism, Futurism, Surrealism—reveals few traces of their work. These periodicals are not bereft of poems; on the contrary, as Pessin notes, it was quite common for them to print poetry alongside reportage, opinion pieces, correspondence, and statistics (fig. 2).169 Nonetheless, the anarchist movement did not depend on the productions of the avant-gardes for its poetry. Rather, the movement developed its own poetics—a poetics that, in many respects, appeared intent on affirming and even reinforcing the very kinds of symbolic relations that the avant-gardes had set themselves against. At the same time, these poets, at least at the movement’s peak, seem to have been largely unconcerned with the problem of influence in Bloom’s sense.

It is this other poetic tradition, the poetry of the anarchist movement, in its broadest historical dimensions, that this chapter is intended to investigate. I would like to ask: What is the relationship of this anarchist movement poetics 1.) to the speech of the past (i.e., to poetic legacies or traditions), 2.) to the adult speaking subject that emerges from this past speech, and 3.) to the public sphere that the speaking subject is supposed to found?

Within anarchist counter-communities, as Clara Rey has observed, poems are usually identified as “anarchist” not by virtue of revolutionary experimentation with form, but by their revolutionary content.170 Anarchist movement poetics, which has been termed “traditional” or “classical in form,” “filled with stereotypes,” “rather banal,” “unoriginal,” “staid,” is quite at odds with Pound’s “make it new.”171 Even in 1896, while anarchists were rubbing elbows with Symbolists and Decadents in Paris, an anarchist poet like André Veidaux (a.k.a. Adrien Devaux, 1868–1927) could face criticism from peers for too much stylistic “novelty” and “originality.”172

In East Asia, as Kim Gyoung-Bog notes, “modernity seemed to wear a double face”: colonial, mechanical, and oppressive in many respects, but potentially also rational, emancipatory, and utopian.173 Asian anarchists often felt the attractions of literary modernity outweighed its tainted association with the humiliation of colonialism; in particular, for a China repeatedly humiliated and colonized not only by the West but by neighboring Japan, the stigma of backwardness was of pressing concern. Native literary traditions were sometimes too closely identified with the patriarchal, Confucian culture that anarchists, as modernizers and advocates of “New Woman” discourse, were trying to overthrow. Tradition was felt, particularly by students such as Li Shizeng (1881–1973) in the “Paris group,” as a constraint, something to be shed, e.g., by importation (the translation of Western political and literary texts into Chinese), simplification (the adoption of baihua over old-­fashioned “literary” writing), universalization (the replacement of Chinese by Esperanto), or rationalization (shifting from centuries-old forms of poetry to nineteenth-century Western-style narrative prose). “All the classical texts,” cried Wu Zhihui (1865–1953), “should be thrown down the toilet.”174 Whereas traditional Japanese poetics had often emphasized simplicity and immediacy, Chinese poetry was associated with a “classical” (yulu) literary diction so far removed from everyday speech as to be almost unintelligible to ordinary workers—a “hierarchy of genres” reinforcing the class hierarchy that the anarchist educators aimed to overcome.175 Thus, in Japan, anarchist poets formed avant-gardes modeled after Western Dada and Futurism, such as the “Mavo” group and the short-lived journal Aka to Kuro (Black and Red, 1923), while Chinese anarchists like Ba Jin (a.k.a. Li Feigan, 1904–2005) tended to retreat from poetry altogether, striving instead to produce a modern prose, modeled after the Western social novel of Zola and Tolstoy, that would be maximally accessible.

Tradition, too, wore a double face: it could represent the ideology binding women and children to patriarchal families, but it could also stand for collective spirit and anti-colonial resistance.176 Anarchist poets in Korea and Japan seem to have readily drawn on national traditions. If Western anarchists often attempted to root movement poetry in historically deeper cultural traditions, using these to gain leverage against a degraded and “decadent” industrial modernity, so too did Korean anarchist poets turn to their oral traditions, using the centuries-old musical and performance-based lyrical (sijo), folk-song (minyo), and ballad (minyosi) forms, which had the additional benefit of linking them to peasant communities who had been on the move well before the arrival of Western anarchist ideologies.177 Meanwhile, traditional poetic forms like kanshi (Japanese poems written in Chinese characters) and tanka were intimately habitual modes of expression for Japanese anarchists, such as Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911), Kanno Suga (1881–1911), and Kaneko Fumiko (1903–1926).178 Japanese anarchist-feminist Takamure Itsue wrote in the waka tradition, and her compatriot Ishikawa Sanshirō took inspiration from epics like the Sangokushi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms).179 At times, we even find Chinese anarchists, such as the Esperantist and anti-Confucian Liu Shifu (1884–1915), advocating a certain traditionalism against modernism, paradoxically aligning themselves with their political enemies, the conservative Confucian scholars. “One is left,” remarks Pik-chong Agnes Wong Chan, “with the picture of an individual who, after having smashed the pedestal on which he had been standing, tightly holds on to one of the pieces of debris that have fallen around him, as if not to be totally bewildered by the consequences of his act of destruction.”180

Instead of dividing into rival avant-gardes competing to be the most modern, anarchist poets often differentiated themselves by the various ways in which they borrowed from the past. In some contexts, anarchist movement poetics presented a revival of romanticism—idealist, sentimental, without modernist reserve. Percy Bysshe Shelley, for example, who stood for all that was embarrassing about romanticism in the eyes of T.S. Eliot, was for German anarchist Ret Marut (a.k.a. B. Traven, ca. 1882–1969) “the greatest lyric poet of world literature.”181 Such a judgment is echoed by Scottish comrade Thomas Hastie Bell (1867–1942), who wrote, in praise of the American philosophical anarchist Charles Erskine Scott Wood (1852–1944), “I put you among our Anarchist poets, such as Burns, Shelley, Whitman, Wilde, Carpenter”182—virtually an anarchist canon, judging how often they were subjects of anarchist lectures and essays, their poems reprinted in anarchist journals such as Mother Earth and L’Endehors.183 “Walt Whitman, the Liberator of Sex,” as Emma Goldman called him in the title of one of her lectures, became a touchstone of movement poetry more for his declamatory, prophetic style than for his free-verse experimentalism. “Every Bavarian child,” declared Landauer, German translator of his Leaves of Grass, ought to “know Walt Whitman by heart”; in the pages of The Libertarian, Leonard D. Abbott wrote that “the Anarchist in Whitman is revealed on almost every page he wrote.”184 Similarly, Victor Hugo was embraced by Francophone anarchists such as Louise Michel (1830–1905), while Jewish anarchist poet Joseph Bovshover (1873–1915) committed to memory the verse of Heinrich Heine, a poet equally lionized by German-speaking anarchists.185

In the Anglo-American context, this quite frequently meant that, even in the period of high modernist revolt against the “genteel tradition,” anarchists such as Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) were continuing to produce poetry on something like a Victorian model, pairing didactic, sentimental content with an ornamental, “oratorical” or prophetic style.186 “Sometimes the idiom is definitely that of Whitman, sometimes that of the Bible,” wrote Louis Untermeyer, describing Wood’s poetry—an observation that could be borne out by a reading of passages such as this one, excerpted for the 1929 Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry by anarchist editor Marcus Graham (a.k.a. Shmuel Marcus, 1893–1985) from Wood’s The Poet in the Desert:187

Oh, Revolution, dread angel of the Awful Presence,

Warder of the gate of tears,

Open and set the captive free.

Dark, silent, loving, cruel and merciful one,

Hold yourself not aloof.

….................................................................

Pitch head-long from the cloudy battlements

And, with heavenly-fire, utterly destroy

This distorted and mis-shapen world.188

Here, it is Biblical language (e.g., the use of archaic senses of the words “dread” and “Awful,” the images of an “angel,” “heavenly-fire,” etc.) that accomplishes the task Theodor Adorno assigned to modernism—the evocation of “perspectives” to “displace and estrange the world, reveal[ing] it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.”189 From such “messianic” perspectives, it is not the anarchist who is aberrant, eccentric, deviant; it is the botched, the corrupt and broken world.

The search for premodern poetic models brought anarchists such as Gustav Landauer in Germany and Edouard Rothen in France to look to the Middle Ages as a high point in the integration of the arts with society.190 In other national contexts, such as that of Brazil, where the sonnet flourished in the pages of anarchist journals such as O Sindicalista and A Plebe, anarchist poets such as José Oiticica took the ancient Greek poets as their model, embracing a classical ideal in defiance of “decadent” modernity.191 Similarly taking the side of the classical against the romantic school, the Proudhonian worker-­educators of L’Atelier: organe spécial de la classe laborieuse, who in 1843 declared that romanticism had “done nothing” for the people—a judgment that made sense, perhaps, in a country where a late-arriving romanticism had quickly aligned itself with counterrevolutionary forces, and where the left-wing “social romanticism” of the mature Victor Hugo had yet to emerge.192 In still other instances, anarchist poetics entailed a turn away from both the “ancient” and “modern” poles of the Western tradition in favor of “primitive,” folkloric forms: for instance, Louise Michel drew on the pagan tradition of the Gauls of her native Haute-Marne and her fascination with the Kanak songs and stories she heard in the penal colony of New Caledonia, while the Spanish anarchist poets drew on folkloric traditions of the verso de romance, a kind of popular ballad, which linked contemporary realities with the mythic past. Even such a champion of avant-garde modernism as Herbert Read (1893–1968) insisted that Surrealism itself had a precursor in “ballads and anonymous literature.”193

In nearly all of its varieties, whether romantic, classical, or primitivist, anarchist poetics favored what the German-Jewish anarchist poet Erich Mühsam (1878–1934) called the “tendency-poem” (Tendenzlyrik) or “poem of struggle” (K ampflyrik), what others would call “committed” poetry—that is, poetry with a clear rhetorical function.194 Moreover, much anarchist poetry was written not by traditionally educated poets of the middle and upper classes but by working-class men and women, often autodidacts, who self-categorized their work as “proletarian poetry,” “workers’ poetry,” “social poetry,” or “popular poetry.”195 This, in turn, implied that whatever elements of exalted style might be borrowed from past schools of poetics, the diction of anarchist poetry had to remain accessible and plebeian.

Whereas modernist poetics declared, in the words of Mallarmé, that a poem should express itself “in words that are allusive, never direct, reducing themselves to the same silence”—or, as Archibald MacLeish put it, that it ought to be “mute”—the urgencies of speech, of establishing communication and community against an enforced silence, made directness and accessibility central poetic values for anarchists.196 Accordingly, anarchist poets would forgo modernist obscurity in favor of “transparency” and “simple symbolism,”197 emphasizing “narration, affirmation, and basic truths.”198 In short, anarchist poetry was “thetic” with a vengeance—a poetics of the intact, adult speaking subject, staking a place in the public square.

Who, then, is speaking to whom in anarchist poems? It was a Romantic poet who insisted that the poet is “a man [sic] speaking to men [sic]”—a speech situation not unlike the ones we encounter every day.199 However, if ordinary speech almost always entails a specific somebody addressing a specific somebody else, what Jonathan Culler has called “the extravagance of lyric” consists in the lyric poet pretending to address almost anyone and anything but the actual reader—speaking as if to Death, the wind, an urn, or a flower—while the actual reader pretends to have “overheard” the poet’s voice.200 All of this is supposed to distance the lyric from the language of politics, i.e., from rhetoric: in Yeats’s famous formulation, if “we make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric,” then poems spring from “the quarrel with ourselves.”201 We hear an echo of the old lyrical address in Charles Erskine Scott Wood’s poem hailing a personified “Revolution,” asking it, in quasi-religious tones, to “destroy / This distorted and mis-shapen world,” and so on. Is this a pretense on the order of imagining that Blake is actually addressing a tiger? Or might Wood be asking the actual reader to identify himself or herself with the fictive audience, to—in some impossible way—incarnate the idea and become “Revolution”?

The case of Lola Ridge (1873–1941), “our gifted rebel poet,” as Emma Goldman called her, and founder of the anarchist Modern School magazine, might at first appear simpler.202 It is easy to read Ridge’s “Reveille,” appearing in Graham’s Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry, as relatively straightforward propaganda—“a call to the workers of the world to rise up in the name of justice against their oppressors,” as Daniel Tobin characteristically puts it:203

Come forth, you workers!

Let the fires go cold—

Let the iron spill out, out of the troughs—

Let the iron run wild

Like a red bramble on the floors204

Ridge’s poem asks us to become something that we are not yet; it speaks to something that is not congealed in the self, to formative forces.205 Likewise, in “The Song of Iron,” Ridge addresses a never entirely tamed force, asking it to make her into something she is not, almost as John Donne once asked God to “break, blow, burn, and make me new”: “Oh fashioned in fire … Behold me, a cupola / Poured to Thy use!”206 In Ridge’s anarchist lyric, then, what appears to be speech addressed to an impossible other is perhaps to be understood instead as evoking the impossible other that is within oneself. Conversely, we might question whether the “simplicity and immediacy” of an address to “you workers” is quite so simple. Consider, for instance, that the version Tobin quotes, with its breathless dashes reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s, is not actually the original form in which “Reveille” was published. In fact, its first appearance, in 1919, was in The Dial—a journal that would shortly become famous for its showcasing of modernists such as Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. Here, Ridge’s poem is printed shorn of dashes and outfitted with more thoughtful ellipses, the onward rush of certain phrases (“Let the iron spill out, out of the troughs”) blunted by more sedentary lines (“Let the iron cleave to the furnace”):

Come forth, you workers!

Let the fires grow cold…

Let the iron cleave to the furnace…

Let the iron spill out of the troughs…207

This is a version of “Reveille” that might do more to elicit a Yeatsian reading, even if there is still something smoldering inside it that threatens to spill out of containment. Moreover, The Dial makes an unlikely medium in which to encounter working-class readers. It even seems a strange place—an estranging place—to find working-class writers: witness Conrad Aiken’s patronizing review of Ridge’s “The Ghetto” in an earlier issue (“one must pay one’s respects,” Aiken admits grudgingly, while complaining that the verse “seems masculine,” that it “scream[s]” and is “sometimes merely strident,” lacking in “subtleties of form”).208

However, in this period, its political and aesthetic boundaries are very much in play, as the editorial direction is split between the anarchisant pacifist Randolph Bourne and his onetime mentor, the pro-war John Dewey.209 For a time, the magazine hosts poets in the Imagist line, some of whom will later turn to fascism, alongside poets and other writers from across the spectrum of the Lyrical Left, such as Carl Sandburg, Kenneth Burke, and Mina Loy; anarchist fellow traveler Margaret Anderson is another collaborator. Nevertheless, “Reveille” seems curiously out of place in The Dial; reprinted in Graham’s Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry, it is as if, exiled from the aesthetic domain, it has been repatriated to its own political nation.

But anarchy is a politics without a territory, without an “own”; witness Ridge herself. It is difficult to “situate” her geographically: should she be read as an Irish poet, since she was born Rose Emily Ridge in Dublin? Is she a New Zealander, since she emigrated there as a child, or an Australian, since her first poems signed “Lola” appeared in the Sydney Bulletin in 1901? Or is she really an American poet, since she spent most of her life in the United States, where she published her first book of poems, The Ghetto, documenting life among the Jews of Manhattan’s Lower East Side? Poems, of course, cross borders even more readily than the poets themselves. Perhaps every time a poem or a poet shifts its ground, encountering different readerships, the question of whom it addresses is raised again. What might this mean for the poetry of anarchists as creatures of movement, pushed around the world by currents of migration?

I am only passing through, but I like to speak your language. Forgive me if I seem distracted. It’s because three quarters of myself spills over every word and collapses into the depths. I only recognize what comes to the surface.

I have not traveled much; on the contrary, a whole host of peoples and centuries have chosen to make their journeys in my person. They stroll about in me, make themselves at home.

...............................................................................................................

I am nowhere entirely, but I also want a bit of myself in that place; nowhere; for that is where we find grace, and it is there that I met you, that I began to speak your language.210

The author of these lines, Giovanni Baldelli (1914–1986), born of an Italian father and a French mother, expelled for antifascist activities, then interned by the British in Australia as an enemy alien, now writing in French from his exile in Southampton, where he teaches Russian, knows whereof he speaks.211 For many an anarchist, “grace” is to be found, if at all, in placelessness. As Jens Bjørneboe wrote, in “Emigranten”: “I am a child of strange and alien planets.”212

Not that efforts haven’t been made to put these poets in their place. “Brothers, I salute you,” writes José Oiticica (1882–1957) from a military jail outside of Rio de Janeiro, after the failed anarchist insurrection of 1918, concluding that “We must welcome our pain, / the pain that does not oppress just men / and that renders the most humble superior.”213 The sonnet he composes “To the Companheiros in Prison,” however, will only be published nearly three years later, in O Sindicalista of Porto Alegre. To whom is this admonition or wish addressed? The lapse in time and place between composition and publication complicates things. Oiticica writes to imprisoned comrades, but he is in prison when he writes; he would have had no guarantee that anyone else would ever read it. Does he then address himself, counseling stoic patience, compensating for present suffering with the promise of a “superior” self-in-construction?

Poetic self-address as a mode of resistance forms the premise of much anarchist verse. We might compare this with Miyamoto Masakichi’s (birth and death dates unknown) “To the Poets” (1932), in which the isolated poet cries out, “Oh, my Self! / Become a hot fire and burn / or freeze and summon your friends / ten million of me facing the tempest / Hear me, you lonely Me among them!”214 So might Oiticica have been speaking from the perspective of an imagined future self, a self that has lived through and surpassed his present suffering. On this level, the sonnet would represent a promise addressed from the future to the present: if you live through this, you will be stronger. On the other hand, when Oiticica publishes his sonnet in 1921, in shifting from a private to a public speech-situation, might it not change its address as well, so to speak, becoming another kind of promise, a gesture of empathy for the suffering of others and a testimony: I have been where you are? And in the dimension of “overhearing” that is brought into being by readers who are not and have never been in prison, could it be that Oiticica invites them to imagine themselves as stoic prisoners, so that the message becomes the grim promise: You may be where we have been? In constructing a plural first person, a “we” composed of many prisoners—present, past, and potential—suffering together, the poem enables all of these readings, dissolving the walls between self and others, between the horror of “today” and the future of the “pure dream,” between captivity and freedom.215

Perhaps, though, the material context of anarchist poetry is always a kind of captivity. “Poetry,” for the anarchist Octavio Brandão (1896–1980), “makes its muse from pain and anger, vehemence and indignation.”216 We often find anarchist poets hurling invective at adversaries real or imaginary—false gods, exploiters, rulers, perpetrators of deception and murder. In “The Gods and the People,” originally issued as a pamphlet in Scotland, Voltairine de Cleyre asks, “What have you done, O skies, / That the millions should kneel to you?”217 Brazil’s Ricardo Gonçalves (1883–1916) pours wrath upon the owners of the earth: “Tremble, disgusting vampires! / Tremble in your opulent / golden palaces!” he thunders in the pages of São Paulo’s A Plebe.218 Here, poetry acts as a kind of “rehearsal for the revolution,” a dramatization of the possibility of one’s own power, from the perspective of present powerlessness, as Augusto Boal recommends in his Theatre of the Oppressed—or, in the language of syndicalism, as a “revolutionary gymnastics.”219 In the poem’s rhetoric, the enemy can be cut down to size—the inverse of the mental operation by which the enemy has been imagined as superhuman and omnipotent.

On the other hand, the adversary is not always simply them (the bosses, the generals, the priests and proprietors); it is quite often also us. Under the pseudonym of “Basil Dahl,” in Boston’s Liberty, Joseph Bovshover chastises the vampires’ all too willing victims—“I hate your superstition, workingmen, / I loathe your blindness and stupidity”—while fellow Yiddish anarchist poet David Edelstadt berates them: “Wake up, working brother, wake up!”220 And just as often, as Ridge and Oiticica demonstrate, anarchist poets address real or potential allies against the common foe. From Rosario, Argentina, in the pages of the anarcho-communist La Voz de la Mujer, Josefa M. R. Martínez (dates of birth and death unknown) greeted her potential comrades in arms: “Salud, Compañeras! Anarchy / Raises the liberator’s banner; / Hurrah, dear brothers, to the fight! / Strong be your arms, serene be your heart!”221 Barbaric exhortations indeed.

And who is doing the exhorting? Quite often, this is an anonymous voice, or someone who conspicuously and self-consciously identifies as a non-poet. “I don’t write literature!” declared Antonio Agraz (1905–1956), author of countless poems published in the newspaper of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT union.222 Nor was he alone in such a declaration. “I am not a poet—I am a worker,” declared Edelstadt; “I am writing … so that every worker will understand me.”223 In statements like these, it is easy for us to hear the echo of anarchist obrerismo (“workerism”)224 and to miss what else they tell us about how an anarchist might conceive of poetry and poets.

First, Edelstadt claims to write as a worker—a garment-­industry sweatshop worker, at that—rather than on behalf of workers.225 In other words, despite the prophetic tone, the anarchist poet disavows any unilateral right to speak for others: in rejecting vanguardism, anarchists forswear poets’ traditional privilege of “prophesying” in an authoritarian mode. Where Shelley ends his Defence of Poetry by declaring that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” Goodman’s Speaking and Language: Defence of Poetry asks, “What does he intend? That they should be acknowledged? Then what would they do?”226

Secondly, the anarchist poet, frequently a working-class autodidact rather than a traditional intellectual or even a declassé bohemian, is writing for an audience of peers. Consequently, the anarchist poet shares with the audience an expectation of understanding—a serious departure, as Nelly Wolf reminds us, from traditions that made the poet a keeper of mysteries: whereas novelists were expected to write in the language of the “new,” poets were expected to write in a language of symbols, establishing “a tangible border between the language used inside the poem and the language used outside.”227 An anarchist poet writes without this prophylactic, contaminating an elevated, “poetic” vocabulary and imagery drawn from the past (romantic, medieval, classical, folkloric) with contemporaneous, everyday language. In his study of the anarchist romance poems of the Spanish Civil War, for instance, Serge Salaün notes the combination of quasi-medieval archaisms and “epic” features with “popular turns of phrase, puns, old saws, proverbs and sayings, the use of dialect or familiarisms, swearing and trivial words,” and so on.228 In this way, anarchist movement poetics resisted fetishizing the “purity” of genres and national languages and embraced hybridity.229

Quite frequently, the mutual understanding of anarchist poets and their audiences could be verified, as anarchists tended to favor the oral circulation of poetry in face-to-face settings—a tradition echoed later in the “Revolutionary Letters” recited by Diane di Prima (b. 1934) from the back of a truck in New York City.230 It is only in the age of print culture, as Victor Méric (1876–1933) noted in his entry on “Poésie” for the Encyclopédie anarchiste (1934), that “poetry is separated from the song,” shedding its communal character along with its orality: “Among the contemporaries, verse is tortured, dislocated, gives forth only vague assonances and an approximative music. Poetry willingly flees into the abstruse, escapes all rules, and rejoins prose in its absence of clarity as well as in its offenses against the most elementary syntax.”231 The lack of immediacy in the print medium presented a problem in other ways, too: even if the “enthusiasm and applause” elicited by the spoken word can be superficial, argued an anonymous contributor to the anarchist workers’ journal Le Ça Ira in 1888, “written thought also has its limitations; whoever reads too much of it loses their ability to act.… What’s needed is a balance between the two, so that the spontaneity evoked by the spoken word is joined with the kind of reflection that induces thought itself.”232 Finally, oral modes of circulation accorded well with anarchist critiques of property: whereas the technologies of print culture were concentrated in relatively few hands, everyone had the potential to participate in the production of oral culture—to add or subtract verses as the occasion and the spirit dictated, exercising a collective creativity.233 The written word, subject to copyright law, was private property; the spoken word, particularly before the advent of recording technologies, refused to present itself as an ownable, commodifiable object.234 Accordingly, a re-oralization of poetry was in order.

Even when circulated purely in written form, anarchist poems often took on some of the characteristics of oral culture. Joseph Labadie (1850–1933), for instance, often wrote occasional poems to present as gifts to friends, sometimes in individually hand-copied chapbooks. A typical sample, To Mr. & Mrs. Mehan, On Their Return from the East, dated “Detroit, June, 1901,” begins: “We welcome you with arms awide, / Greet you as morning’s golden gleams, / Your happy smiles like eventide / Bring rhythmic cheer & tranquil dreams.”235 The language and imagery are trite, the rhythm and rhyme mechanically tidy. It cannot be denied, however, that the resources of a certain poetic tradition have been mobilized in the interest of specific, intimate relationships; this is “occasional poetry,” lauded by Goodman, following Goethe, as “the highest [form of] integrated art.”236 It is “applied” poetry, poetry that has not fled into a separate realm, as Méric complains, but that renders service to life.

The example of Labadie’s occasional poetry—reminiscent of the practices of “poets such as Emily Dickinson” lauded by Simon DeDeo, “whose poetical work merges seamlessly into private communication through letters and notes”—is indicative of another dimension of anarchist movement poetics: the mixture of “private” and “public” forms to evoke a realm that is neither conventionally “public” nor “private.”237 In the correspondence, articles, and speeches of anarchists such as Berkman and Goldman, too, as Kathy Ferguson notes, we find “blurred distinctions between letters addressed to a specific individual and public speech addressed to the generalized other.”238 In so doing, anarchist poets helped to construct a sphere of relations sufficiently opaque to the larger publics inhabited by anarchists to resemble the private realm, and at the same time translucent, “indefinite” in its extent, “mediated by print, theater, diffuse networks of talk,” to borrow the language of Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics.239 We might extend Ferguson’s observations to conclude that anarchist poets are vital architects of an “emergent anarchist counterpublic”—a social world “defined by [its] tension with a larger public,” its constituency “marked off from persons or citizens in general.”240

Such a counterpublic, while maintaining a vigilant and at times painful consciousness of its subordinate or subaltern relationship to the larger (and hostile) public within which it is embedded, would appear to have a number of advantages over the grand public. Its smaller scope—perhaps especially important for anarchists caught up in movements of displacement and migration, whether fleeing from Russian shtetls to the Argentine pampas or from rural Catalonia to seek factory work in Barcelona—could retain something of the intimacy of village life (even the intimacy of personal bickering), as against the anonymity and impersonality of the great urban centers. Like other counterpublics, as Warner notes, it permits “discussion … understood to contravene the rules obtaining in the world at large, being structured by alternative dispositions or protocols, making different assumptions about what can be said or what goes without saying.”241 Anarchist counterpublic discourse, thus, can unfold partially outside the range of locally tolerated opinion and expression, the little space between official orthodoxy and the outer limits of heterodoxy—the invisible boundaries of “free” public discourse.

It is when outsiders peer into the counterpublic conversations taking place in an anarchist newspaper like Golos Truda (The Voice of Labor, 1911–1918) or Khleb i Volia (Bread and Freedom, 1917–1918) that these conversations, constituted by a universe of references not shared by outsiders, appear to be, as Karen Rosenberg says, “arcane,” “a body of esoteric knowledge,” reserved for the “initiated,” etc.242 The apparent mysteriousness of anarchist counterpublic discourse is accentuated when it unfolds under intense surveillance, censorship, and repression (e.g., under the Czarist and Communist regimes in Russia). In such conditions, when the only “safe” public discourse is that which mirrors “the flattering self-image of elites,” anarchist discourse might be expected to take on the kinds of cryptic, inaccessible forms—carefully coded exchanges of subversive signs—so evocatively described by James C. Scott in his studies of peasants’ resistance culture. Sometimes, anarchists did resort to encrypted speech: Bakunin, for instance, was an avid user of ciphers, foreshadowing today’s cryptoanarchists.243 However, the police were all too often capable of countering such evasive maneuvers, as in 1892, when a group of French anarchists using a fairly sophisticated code were arrested, their messages intercepted and deciphered.244 At other times, anarchists experimented with class-­specific dialects that facilitated easy communication among equals while eluding the comprehension of “hostile informatives”: such was the case with the use of French argot in Émile Pouget’s (1860–1931) fin-de-siècle newspaper, the Père Peinard (1889–1902).245

But even in Russia, where anarchism was an illegal, underground movement, as Michaël Confino observes, the anarchists’ vocabulary is no argot; it is “not a clandestine language, the utility of which consists in not being understood by those not privy to the ‘secret.’”246 More often, especially under regimes with even limited freedom of speech and assembly, anarchists chose to openly defy bans and constraints, to make these into the occasion for struggle—the “free speech fights” of Emma Goldman and the IWW, for instance, holding meetings in public and challenging the laws. Anarchist movement poetry, by and large, pursues just this strategy, pushing the boundaries of acceptable public discourse rather than surrendering the field.

159 Mallarmé qtd. in Richard Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin De Siècle France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 225, 332n28, 255; Ibid., 22; Rosemary Lloyd, Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 207, 212. See also Mallarmé’s response to Jules Huret’s political questions in his Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire (Paris: n.p., 1891), 61–62; and Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 10, 12, 24–25, etc.

160 Weir, Anarchy and Culture, 4.

161 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

162 Lucía Sánchez Saornil qtd. in Poetas del Novecientos: entre el Modernismo y la Vanguardia, Tomo I: De Fernando Fortún a Rafael Porlán, ed. José Luis García Martín (Madrid: Fundación BSCH, Fundación Santander Central Hispano, 2001), 159.

163 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 19.

164 For an extended argument on this point, see Hubert van den Berg, “Anarchismus, Ästhetik und Avantgarde,” in Anarchismus und Utopie in der Literatur um 1900, ed. Jaap Grave et al. (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005), 22–45, and “Anarchismus für oder gegen Moderne und Avant-garde?,” Avant-Garde 3 (1989): 86–97.

165 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 195; Catherine Coquio, “Le soir et l’aube: Décadence et anarchisme,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 99.3 (mai–juin 1999): 454; Uri Eisenzweig, “Poétique de l’attentat: anarchisme et littérature fin-de-siècle,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 99.3 (1999): 443; Ball, Flight Out of Time, 19.

166 E.g., Lazare, L’Écrivain et l’art social, 23–25; Fernand Pelloutier, “L’Art et la révolte,” in Fernand Pelloutier et les origines du syndicalisme d’action directe, ed. Jacques Julliard (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971), 507; Luigi Fabbri, Bourgeois Influences on Anarchism, trans. Chaz Bufe (Tuscon, AZ: See Sharp Press, 2001), 8.

167 Georges Poinsot and Mafféo-Charles Normandy, Les Poètes Sociaux (Paris: Louis Michaud, 1909), xxv. This judgment might have to be considerably complicated by a consideration of the Korean case. During the period of anti-Japanese resistance, poets such as Hwang Seok-Woo (1895–1959) and Kwon Ku-hyeon (1898–1938), while concretely engaged with anarchist projects and organizations like the Heukdo Hoe (Black Wave Society), sometimes drew on Symbolist resources to articulate a utopian vision. Moreover, Symbolist coterie poetry journals like Jangmichon (Rose Village) often blurred the lines between poetry and political militancy. However, in the 1920s and 1930s, Korean anarchist poets were increasingly pulled in the direction of proletarian literature. See Cho Doo-Sub, “1920nyeondae hangug sangjingjuuisiui anakijeumgwa yeonsogseong yeongu [A Study on the Relationship Between 1920s Korean Symbolist Poems and Anarchism],” Ulimalgeul tong-gwon 26 (2002): 331–385; and Cho Young-Bok, 1920-yeondae ch’ogi si eui inyeom kwa mihak (The Ideology and Aesthetics of Korean Poems in the Early 1920s) (Seoul: Somyeong Ch’ulp’an, 2004).

168 André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 125.

169 Alain Pessin, “Anarchisme et littérature au XXe siècle,” Proudhon, anarchisme, art et société: Actes du Colloque de la Société P.-J. Proudhon, Paris, 2 décembre 2000 (Paris: Société P.-J. Proudhon, 2001), 81.

170 Clara Rey, “Poesía popular libertaria y estética anarquista en el rio de la plata,” Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana 15.29 (1989): 186.

171 Serge Salaün, La poesía de la guerra de España (Madrid: Castalia, 1985), 34; Granier, Les briseurs de formules, 82; Eric Arthur Gordon, Anarchism in Brazil: Theory and Practice, 1890–1920 (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1979), 219; Rosemary Chapman, Henry Poulaille and Proletarian Literature: 1920–1939 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), 47.

172 Granier, Les Briseurs de formules, 84–85.

173 Kim Gyoung-Bog, Hangug anakijeum simunhag yeongu [A Study of Korean Anarchist Poetry] (Diss., Pusan National University, 1998).

174 Qtd. in Peter G. Zarrow, China in War and Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2005), 137.

175 Merle Goldman, Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 25; Dietrich Tschanz, “Where East and West Meet: Chinese Revolutionaries, French Orientalists, and Intercultural Theater in 1910s Paris,” Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies 4.1 (June 2007): 100.

176 Kim Gyoung-Bog, Hangug anakijeum simunhag yeongu.

177 Ibid. Gang Hyejin, Kwon Ku-hyeon si yeongu: anakijeumgwaui gwanlyeonseong-eul jungsim-eulo (MA Thesis, Yeungnam University, 2010), (Gang Hyejin notes that the Korean anarchist poet Kwon Ku-hyeon used “the traditional form of poetry and folk songs.”)

178 Libertaire Group, A Short History of the Anarchist Movement in Japan (Tokyo: Idea Pub. House, 1979),107; Helene Bowen Raddeker, Treacherous Women of Imperial Japan: Patriarchal Fictions, Patricidal Fantasies (London: Routledge, 1997), 42, 86.

179 E. Patricia Tsurumi, “Feminism and Anarchism in Japan: The Case of Takamure Itsue, 1894–1964,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 17.2 (April–June 1985): 5; Maeda Ai, “From Communal Performance to Solitary Reading: The Rise of the Modern Japanese Reader,” in Text and the City, trans. James A Fujii (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 224.

180 Pik-chong Agnes Wong Chan, Liu Shifu (1884–1915): A Chinese Anarchist and the Radicalization of Chinese Thought (Diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1979), 66.

181 T.S. Eliot, Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 81–86; Ret Marut, trans. Michael L. Baumann, qtd. in Michael L. Baumann, B. Traven: An Introduction (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976), 100.

182 Thomas Hastie Bell, “On Freedom and Bolshevism: A Letter by T.H. Bell to Charles Erskine Scott Wood,” Freedom 1.1 (Jan. 1, 1933): 8. The term “philosophical anarchist” generally denotes an embrace of anarchist ideas without a corresponding anarchist practice beyond the conduct of one’s personal life.

183 Interestingly, apart from a few early appreciations—e.g., among participants in New York’s Ferrer Center (1911–1914), such as the American anarchist James Huneker (1857–1921), who had included him in his Egoists: A Book of Supermen (New York: Scribner, 1909)—William Blake seems to have joined this “canon” very belatedly, in the late-twentieth century, well after his rediscovery by early-twentieth century modernists like Yeats.

184 Gustav Landauer qtd. in Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), 306; Leonard D. Abbott, “The Anarchist Side of Walt Whitman,” The Libertarian 2.5 (March 1926): 232.

185 Charles J. Stivale, “Louise Michel’s Poetry of Existence and Revolt,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 5.1 (Spring 1986): 41; Julian Levinson, Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 128; Anonymous, note to Heinrich Heine, “The Weavers,” Liberty 5.10 (Dec. 17, 1887): 1; Michael Schwab, “Autobiography of Michael Schwab”, in The Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Monad Press, 1977), 111.

186 Joseph Harrington, Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 106.

187 Louis Untermeyer, The New Era in American Poetry (New York: H. Holt, 1919), 235.

188 Charles Erskine Scott Wood, “This—Our World,” in An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry, ed. Marcus Graham (New York: Active Press, 1929), 288.

189 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), 247.

190 Landauer, Revolution, 127–137; Rothen, “Littérature.”

191 Edgar Rodrigues, O Anarquismo na escola, no teatro, na poesia (Rio de Janeiro: Achiamé, 1992); Tereza Ventura, Nem Barbárie Nem Civilização! (São Paulo: Annablume, 2006), 18.

192 Georges Duveau, La Pensée ouvrière sur l’éducation pendant la Seconde République et le Second Empire (Paris: Domat-Montchrestien, 1948), 63–64.

193 Louise Michel, The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel, eds. and trans. Bullitt Lowry and Elizabeth Ellington Gunter (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1981), 16–17, 111–117; Salaün, Romancero libertario, 19–20; Read, The Philosophy of Modern Art (New York: World, 1953), 119.

194 Walter Fähnders, Anarchismus und Literatur (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987), 98, 64.

195 Ferran Aisa, La cultura anarquista a Catalunya (Barcelona: Edicions de 1984, 2006), 264; Gonzalo Espino, La lira rebelde proletaria (Lima: TAREA, 1984), 34; Joseph Déjacque, Les Lazaréennes. Fables et chansons, poésies sociales (Nouvelle-Orléans: J. Lamarre, 1857); Rey, “Poesía popular libertaria,” 179.

196 Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Maréchal (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 309; Archibald MacLeish, “Ars Poetica,” Poems, 1924–1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933), 1.

197 Ventura, Nem Barbárie, 16; Daniel Armogathe, “Mythes et transcendance révolutionnaire dans la poésie de Louise Michel,” in À travers la vie et la mort: œuvre poétique, eds. Daniel Armogathe and Marion V. Piper (Paris: F. Maspero, 1982), 10.

198 Salaün, Romancero libertario, 35.

199 William Wordsworth and Samuel T. Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads, ed. R.L. Brett (London: Routledge, 2007), 300.

200 Jonathon Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 76; and The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 137.

201 William Butler Yeats, Mythologies (London: Macmillan, 1959), 331.

202 Goldman, Living My Life, Vol. 2 (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1931), 706; Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006), 170–171.

203 Daniel Tobin, “Modernism, Leftism, and the Spirit: The Poetry of Lola Ridge,” in Light in Hand: Selected Early Poems of Lola Ridge, ed. Daniel Tobin (Florence, MA: Quale Press, 2007), xxx.

204 Lola Ridge, “Reveille,” The Dial 66.791 (May 31, 1919).

205 See Colson, Petit lexique, 121–123 and 257–272 on what he calls “force plastique” and, after Deleuze, “the power of the outside.”

206 Lola Ridge, “The Song of Iron,” The Ghetto, and Other Poems (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1918), 15, 17–18; John Donne, “Holy Sonnet XIV,” in Metaphysical Poetry: An Anthology, ed. Paul Negri (New York: Dover, 2002), 4.

207 Ridge, “Reveille.”

208 Conrad Aiken, “The Literary Abbozzo,” The Dial 66.782 (January 25, 1919): 83–84.

209 Nicholas Joost, Scofield Thayer and The Dial: An Illustrated History (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964), 10–11.

210 Giovanni Baldelli, “Épanchement,” Le Pied à l’étrier: poèms (Rodez: Éditions Subervie, 1969), 13–15.

211 Henry de Madaillan, “Introduction,” in Giovanni Baldelli, Quand l’aube se survit: poèmes (Rodez: Éditions Subervie, 1965), 7.

212 Jens Bjørneboe, “The Emigrant,” trans. Esther Greenleaf Mürer, 8 (web).

213 José Oiticica, “Aos companheiros de prisão [To the Comrades in Prison],” in O Anarquismo na escola, 307–308 (originally published in O Sindicalista, 1921; written in prison, 1918).

214 Miyamoto qtd. in Filler, Chaos From Order, 213, trans. Filler.

215 Oiticica, “Aos companheiros de prisão,” 8.

216 Yara Aun Khoury, “A Poesia Anarquista,” Revista Brasileira de História 8.15 (February 1988): 216.

217 de Cleyre, Selected Works, 50.

218 Ricardo Gonçalves, “Rebelião [Rebellion],” in O Anarquismo na escola, 57–59 (originally in A Plebe, 1917).

219 Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. McBride and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985), 122; Émile Pouget, La Conféderation Générale du Travail (Paris: M. Riviére, 1908), 59.

220 Basil Dahl (Joseph Bovshover), “To the Toilers,” Liberty 11.22 (March 7, 1896): 5; Edelstadt, “Shnel loyfn di reder [The Factory Wheels Run Fast],” trans. Helena Frank and Rose Pastor Stokes, in The Yiddish Song Book, ed. Jerry Silverman (New York: Stein and Day, 1983), 168.

221 Josefa M. R. Martínez, “Brindis [A Toast],” La Voz de la mujer: periódico comunista-anárquico, 1896–1897, ed. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 1997), 44. Originally published in La Voz de la mujer, 1896.

222 Agraz qtd. in Steinbeiß, “‘Meine Verse sollen Bomben sein.’”

223 Edelstadt qtd. in Melech Epstein, Jewish Labor in the U.S.A.: An Industrial, Political, and Cultural History of the Jewish Labor Movement, 1882–1914 (New York: Trade Union Sponsoring Committee, 1950), 288.

224 This is a dangerously inexact translation of a Spanish term that has more accurate cognates in Catalan (obrerisme), Italian (operaismo), and French (ouvrierisme), even though they came into circulation at different times. The Spanish word, as David D. Gilmore explains, can mean “worker culture,” “class cohesiveness,” “working-class ideology,” or simply “the common denominators of working-class life,” “laborers’ routine, style of life, and self-images” (The People of the Plain: Class and Community in Lower Andalusia [New York: Columbia University Press, 1980], 87); it names, in short, allegiance to a non-branded, non-sectarian politics articulated from the perspective of workers. However, the English term “workerism” is mainly used, in contemporary anarchist discourse, to denote a fetishism of the working classes and ultimately of toil as a good in itself—an ideal that many anarchists of earlier periods, laborers by necessity rather than choice, would have seen as perverse. Even in reaction to the Stalinist cult of work, Camillo Berneri criticized not “operaismo” per se but “operaiolatria,” i.e, “workerolatry,” the uncritical celebration of workers per se: see his L’Operaiolatria.

225 Morris U. Schappes, The Jews in the United States: A Pictorial History, 1654 to the Present (New York: Citadel Press, 1958), 136.

226 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Prose: Or, The Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (London: Fourth Estate, 1988), 240; Goodman, Speaking and Language, 230.

227 Nelly Wolf, Le Roman de la démocratie (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2003), 23.

228 Salaün, Romancero libertario, 34–35.

229 Cf. Robert F. Barsky, “Bakhtin as Anarchist?: Language, Law and Creative Impulses in the Work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Rudolph Rocker,” South Atlantic Quarterly 97.3 (Summer 1968): 629.

230 Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letters (San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2007), 164.

231 Victor Méric, “Poésie,” in Encyclopédie anarchiste, 2070–2071, trans. mine.

232 Qtd. in Howard G. Lay, “Réflecs d’un Gniaff: On Emile Pouget and Le Père Peinard,” in Making the News: Modernity and the Mass Press in Nineteenth-Century France, eds. Dean de la Motte and Jeannene Pryzblyski (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 85–86.

233 Neil Birrell, “Notes on Culture and Ideology,” The Raven 10.39 (Summer 1999): 193–201.

234 Granier, Les Briseurs de formules, 77. Cf. also Proudhon’s critique of the very notion of “intellectual property” in Majorats littéraires (Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1868).