Zukofsky, Oppen, and Niedecker wrote with a diversity of formal
strategies but a singularity of purpose: the crafting of an
anticapitalist poetics.
Inaugurated in 1931 by Louis Zukofsky, Objectivist poetry gave
expression to the complex contours of culture and politics in America
during the Great Depression. This study of Zukofsky and two others in
the Objectivist constellation, George Oppen and Lorine Niedecker,
elaborates the dialectic between the formal experimental features of
their poetry and their progressive commitments to the radical potentials
of modernity.
Mixing textual analysis, archival research, and historiography, Ruth
Jennison shows how Zukofsky, Oppen, and Niedecker braided their
experiences as working-class Jews, political activists, and feminists
into radical, canon-challenging poetic forms. Using the tools of
critical geography, Jennison offers an account of the relationship
between the uneven spatial landscapes of capitalism in crisis and the
Objectivists' paratactical textscapes. In a rethinking of the overall
terms in which poetic modernism is described, she identifies and
assesses the key characteristics of the Objectivist avant-garde,
including its formal recognition of proliferating commodity cultures,
its solidarity with global anticapitalist movements, and its imperative
to develop poetics that nurtured revolutionary literacy. The resulting
narrative is a historically sensitive, thorough, and innovative account
of Objectivism's Depression-era modernism.
A rich analysis of American avant-garde poetic forms and politics, The
Zukofsky Era convincingly situates Objectivist poetry as a politically
radical movement comprising a crucial chapter in American literary
history. Scholars and students of modernism will find much to discuss in
Jennison's theoretical study.
