Communism and Poetry : Writing Against Capital

Communism and Poetry: Writing Against Capital addresses the relationship between an upsurge in collective political practice around the world since 2000, and the crystallization of newly engaged forms of poetry. Considering an array of perspectives―poets, poet-critics, activists and theorists―these essays shed new light on the active interface between emancipatory political thought and poetic production and explore how poetry and the new communism are creating mutually innovative forms of thought and activity, supercharging the utopian imagination. Drawing inspiration from past connections between communism and poetry, and theorizing new directions over the years ahead, the volume models a much-needed critical solidarity with creative strategies in the present conjuncture to activate movements of resistance, on the streets and in verse.

Ruth Jennison is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA.  She is the author of The Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins, and The Avant-Garde (2012) and articles and book chapters on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American  poetics, Marxism and the political economies of literary form.  

Julian Murphet is Scientia Professor of English and Film Studies at UNSW Sydney, Australia, where he directs study in English, Creative Writing and Film. He is the author of Literature and Race in Los Angeles (2001), Multimedia Modernism (2009), Faulkner’s Media Romance (2017) and Todd Solondz(2019).