The “our times” that structure my reflections on Percy Shelley are highly cognizant of structural racism, white privilege, and racial divisiveness. They are less woke than distrustful of proclamations and practices of anti-racism. Consequently, my focus is on the relevance of Shelleyan poet-legislators to these times, by which I mean poet-scholar-activists of all shades (including the Dream Defenders, who were born in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder) who affirm the transformational powers of imagination – “artivists” in today’s parlance.² As the “dream defenders” and “inside songs” of my title suggest, these poet-legislators work the streets as well as universities in efforts to better realize and manifest social justice, interchanges that are simultaneously affirmed and challenged by “Percy Shelley.” They are affirmed by “Red Shelley,” long championed by the Left for his street credibility and uptake by numerous labor and suffrage causes, and challenged by the whiteness and Eurocentrism of “Shelley.” My essay dwells at this crossroads by asking whether the rationales for championing Red Shelley are applicable to a “Black” Shelley understood as not only anti-racist but also anti-antiBlack.³ For reasons that I hope become clear even while their outcomes are necessarily blurry, my way into this inquiry is via the “inside songs” referenced in and opened out by Fred Moten’s Shelleyan poem “barbara lee.”⁴

I Shellee

Moten’s “barbara lee,” whose third section begins with the statement, “According to Shelley, poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” is the most explicit engagement with Shelleyan poetic legislation by a Black radical US poet-philosopher that I know.⁵ Published in the volume B Jenkins in 2010, the poem commemorates US Representative for California’s Thirteenth Congressional District Barbara Lee, the second Black woman ever to serve in Congress when she was elected in 1996 and the only representative in either body of Congress to vote against President Bush’s military authorization act in the immediate aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. This extraordinary act is what “barbara lee,” a poem composed in three sections, elucidates and seeks to perpetuate. Sections one and three are written in prose and describe the disruptive workings of poetry in an updated (ante-) defense of poetry (as their section titles “[The Poetics of Political Form]” and “[The Unacknowledged Legislator]” suggest). These sections flank section two, “[Statement in Opposition],” that ventriloquates Lee’s congressional speech in a twenty-one-line ballad: “speaker, members / heavy, but risen / against muted, / I had to rely on / the inside songs. / welcome to the same / new world.”⁶ Thus, even the form of “barbara lee,” that encircles her poetic speech within prose descriptions of poetry’s political efficacy, enacts what the ballad states when lee credits inside songs with her capacity to resist the groupthink of xenophobic discourse. The signal difference from A Defence of Poetry is the concluding line specifying “The unacknowledged legislator is Barbara Lee.” This apparent tautology does not annul the Shelleyan circuitry of poet and legislator. For what makes Representative Lee an unacknowledged legislator is her poetry that, according to section three, bespeaks an ante-representational and therefore “ante-American” as well as anti-racist ethos.⁷

This assertion of poetry’s anti-racism addresses two topics posed by the poetic legislation affirmed in “barbara lee.” The broad topic concerns mechanics or how poetry upends the status quo, which section three presents as formal properties: “busting out of the sentence or cutting being-sentenced,” singing “the form of [an] endless running,” operating “on the edge of things,” turning “what is turned against into a vestibule, an ante-room,” taking “this turn in a cramped, cracked stanza, homelessly acting like she at home by taking flight, held still in forced movement.”⁸ In effect, an organized disruptor, “the unacknowledged legislator” is “compel[led]”

Such a poetic legislator “speaks the ethics that attend” a “history of displacement” by way of

In other words, her schooling in “bent poetics” prepares Representative Lee to oppose policies that promote us-versus-them mentalities that sanction bellicosity and identity-categorical thinking. Ears inclined to poetry pick up on seepage, outbursts, enjambed states, and jam sessions, even in the rare instances when they inhabit halls of power.

The specific topic is how Lee is able to stand alone in opposing the military authorization act at a time when to deliberate, let alone call for deliberation, was deemed equivalent to treason. For this, she says, “I had to rely on / the inside songs.” Inside songs sustain her because they in-form her, a “runaway” whose history of displacement knows firsthand the false promises of patriotism. Thus, they situate 9/11 in a context that is traumatic but unexceptional, the appropriate response to which is “suffering with” rather than causing more suffering through more killing¹¹:

Both modes of poetic in-formation are what keep lee “unmade,” not on the make, and unseduced by the “glaring hyper-visibility” periodically accorded by media politics to difference.¹³ In effect, she stands alone knowing that she is not standing alone by virtue of being backed by “the inside songs” of her constituents and that are constituents of her. In turn, electoral constituents hear in her “musicked speech” a “general responsibility of advance” that they take to the streets “where the poetics of political form lives” as “displaced social life, that outer space structured by inner sound.”¹⁴

This is a remarkable blurring of Lee, lee, and Shelley by a poet-philosopher-activist of the Black radical tradition. Like The Mask of Anarchy, “barbara lee” responds to an intra-international emergency by disseminating the mechanics and indirect directives of song. Shadowing forth, veiling, secreting open secrets of love via airborne underground sounds and balladic passages: such are the formal devices supporting Shelleean political transformation. Equally important, motivation and ability to act are reliant on inside songs that are choric, collective, and pitched toward futurity in loving the way to get to what hasn’t happened yet. But these commonalities are limited, perhaps even a limit case.¹⁵ After all, “barbara lee” is exceptional in Moten’s oeuvre for attending to a US elected official and a canonical British Romantic poet – each a rare occurrence. Then there is the emphasis on “black poetry” in the poem’s opening lines: “Ever since Plato, some poets remain surprised that they don’t run shit, that they ain’t even citizens. But black poetry suffers its politics of non-exclusion. Abide with this distress.”¹⁶ Reference to “black poetry” complicates any implied inherence of Shelley in Lee and in “barbara lee,” even granting Moten’s repeated insistence that “black” does not signify a racial identity but instead a racialized perspective that foregrounds those who are “under-privileged” and originarily displaced.¹⁷ Both facts about “barbara lee” raise the larger question of Shelley’s applicability to our racially divisive times. If the revolutionary aspects of even Red Shelley are suspect to non-white radical poet-scholar-activists, what value inheres in Shelley’s writings for anti-racist Romanticists? From inside the field, the question is whether the ethos undergirding the #Bigger Six Collective, “formed in 2017 to challenge structural racism in the academic study of Romanticism” by building “from it rather than within it,” can be extended to a canonical offender.¹⁸ Or, as the (virtual 2021) conference “Black Studies & Romanticism” asks, does Black Studies have anything to gain from studying the revolutionary praxis of British Romanticism?¹⁹ As embodied in “barbara lee,” the question concerns bodies. Are “the inside songs” perceptibly anti-racist and ante-American because their poet-Speaker is Black?

A roundabout answer exists in the ways that inside songs are mobilized in and via “barbara lee.” For “the inside songs” is a direct reference to free jazz composer and bassist William Parker’s I Plan to Stay a Believer: The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield (Aum Fidelity, 2010), a compilation of eleven Curtis Mayfield songs arranged by Parker that he and his eight-piece band performed and taped in various venues between 2001 and 2008.²⁰ Combining free jazz, soul, and gospel styles, it features Leena Conquest singing Mayfield lyrics, Amiri Baraka rapping his poems, a ninety-strong children’s choir from the suburbs of Paris (tracks 5, 11), and the New Life Tabernacle Generation of Praise Choir of Brooklyn (tracks 6, 7). The album disseminates “Curtis Mayfield” as the “soundtrack” of the 1960s that, in Parker’s words (cited in Aldon Nielsen’s), “brought all musical modes together into a circle marked ‘People’s Music,’ with lyrics mapping demands for ‘reclamation of land, self-determination, and right to change existing structure rather than assimilation into a quagmire called progress’.”²¹ Parker’s liner notes gloss the subtitle: “Every song written or improvised has an inside song which lives in the shadows, in-between the sounds and silences and behind the words, pulsating, waiting to be reborn as a new song.”²² The core track of this lyric potentiality is “People Get Ready / The Inside Song” (track 6), with “The Inside Song” being one of only two original compositions by Parker in Believer (the other being “Ya He Yey Ya” affixed to “I’m So Proud”).

In “barbara lee,” then, the efficacy of “inside songs” resides in the referrals that they set in motion. The phrase refers to a prior text that embodies an ongoing history of improvisational activism that ties reading to hearing and poetry to protest songs. It links “plan[s] to stay a believer” to the “People’s Music” of the 1960s to the rhythms and the blues that comprise freedom songs of an enslaved and believing people – songs that have kept those struggles other than a struggle and that link “meaning” to responsiveness. When “inside” a poetic legislator, these songs address constituents and conditions that officially Lee/lee does not represent, whether as a legislator or a Black cis woman – in this instance, Arab, Muslim, and Brown people living in and outside of the United States. They move her “out” from what “occurs inside, in the name of that other, outer interiority,” and they make that inside-outside opening bearable and sustainable over the long haul.²³ Encountered in the poem, however, “properly” apprehending “the inside songs” requires insider knowledge for their relaying capacity between word and sound, reading and believing, inside and outside, to occur. We have to begin somewhere.

Are Shelley’s “people” ready or readied by “Shelley” for this?

II Shelley Outside

The closest analogue to Black poetry’s inside songs is the “little volume of popular songs wholly political” that Shelley announces to Leigh Hunt as “destined to awaken and direct the imagination of the reformers.”²⁴ Red Shelleyans have prized this collection ever since for containing some of “the most famous protest poems in the English language,” especially The Mask of Anarchy, “England in 1819,” and “Song to the Men of England.”²⁵ Extensive documentation exists of their uptake by a host of nineteenth- and twentieth-century labor, suffrage, and freedom movements, including by Chartists, Owenites, Wobblies, union movements, suffragettes, and nonviolent independence campaigns in India, Africa, South Korea, and the United States.²⁶ More recent engagements are documented on Graham Henderson’s The Real Percy Bysshe Shelley website. We learn, for example, that English e-learning specialist and improv musician Mark Summers read “England in 1819,” The Mask of Anarchy, and “Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things” at #TakeBack Brum, a street protest in Birmingham in the UK organized by the People’s Assembly against austerity in early October 2016, and that the English fashion designer John Alexander Skelton, outraged over the authorities’ failure to memorialize the Peterloo Massacre adequately, produced a clothing line referencing the massacre and had runway models recite the entire ninety-one stanzas of The Mask of Anarchy.²⁷ In other words, these songs continue to arouse assembled comrades at various conclaves, and they are the chief – though by no means only – focus of scholarly commemorations of revolutionary Shelley. A series of recent Shelleyan bicentennials – of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (2018), of the Peterloo Massacre and The Mask of Anarchy (2019), of Percy Shelley’s death (2022) – attest to the world-transforming output of both Shelleys and the passageways that their works forge between (so-called) popular and academic audiences. At commemorative moments like these, “Shelley” becomes almost a household word, especially in the UK.

Radical claims made by Shelley for his little volume rest on solid, but also unsettled, grounds that become far shakier when claiming a white Red Shelley as Black. On the one hand, real accord exists between bent and Shelleyan poetics, starting with the street cred that preceded and ultimately eventuated in publication of his songs. As has been well-rehearsed, only two of the “destined” poems were published in his lifetime (“Ode to the West Wind” and “Ode to Liberty”), because even radical printers, some who were his friends, were unwilling to face the likely charges of seditious libel in printing them.²⁸ Delayed far longer was publication of them as a volume, not occurring until 1990 by Redwords, a socialist press that in 2019 reissued Shelley’s Revolutionary Year to coincide with the bicentennial of Peterloo, once again under the super-vision of Paul Foot.²⁹ Originally, however, these seditious poems were passed underground, where they became a groundswell that gradually began to operate as a political one. This history of censorship attests more broadly to Shelley’s outlier status as “atheist, republican, revolutionary, philosophical anarchist, leveler, feminist and vegetarian,” also exile, who was dismissed in his first year from Oxford for publishing with Thomas Jefferson Hogg The Necessity of Atheism and was one of only two men in the entire nineteenth century in Britain to be denied custody of his children.³⁰ Nor did the harshness of these sentences deter him from continuing to speak out or call out precisely those officials with the power to silence him. The Irish Marxist poet Ciarán O’Rourke states in a review of the reissued Shelley’s Revolutionary Year that Shelley’s “instinct in life was to resist all forms of entrenched authority (religious and political)”; his “concern was always to unmask the structures of power that dominated his society.”³¹

Yet tensions discernible in the texts and reception of Red Shelley expose an insider privilege that dogs his revolutionary vision and reputation. I mean less the obvious fact that he is a white cis-male born into an aristocratic family than how these qualities complicate two differing features of his reception as red. One relates to the disproportionate emphasis given to poems in this volume when affirming his radicalism – both their disproportion relative to his entire body of works and the generic emphasis placed on “songs” as manifesting populist sympathies. A related tension concerns acknowledged and unacknowledged oscillations between the “many” and the “few” as intended audiences for his works. Prefaces and letters written by Shelley to secure a publisher or readership for a particular work spell out the correlations he assumes among class position, textual competence, and comprehension of a figurative and allusive versus a straightforward or popular style. As William Keach pointed out long ago, these documents are startlingly blunt about how few of his texts are written for the many; virtually all of them, except for those in the little volume, are written “to the Sunetoi,” roughly equivalent to “cognoscenti” or “initiated,” though often claimed to speak on behalf of the many.³² As Keach goes on to say in “Rise Like Lions?” Shelley’s tactics are radically suspect. Why browbeat an audience if the aim is to encourage their uprising; why imply that they are to blame for the endurability of structures that they did not devise and have no investment in preserving?³³ As concerns Red Shelleyans, class and audience get even more entangled depending on which auditory arena is being envisioned and privileged: street or university; rising or waning poet-activists; potential converts or diehard professors. Perceived splits between and within these arenas highlight epistemological conflicts over the kinds of anti-racist appeal that songs make. A matter of word or sound? Which mode of sound system? Appeals to body or mind? Ear, pulse, or cortex? Manifested via deliberate indirection or direct action?

Fault lines are even easier to discover in claims for Black Shelley. As mentioned, Shelley is a rarity in Moten’s oeuvre. Few, if any, grassroots anti-racist projects in the United States acknowledge him as a major inspiration, despite remarkable resonances. The absence is hardly surprising, given growing impatience over hearing exclusively from or about white models and their presumed leadership capabilities. Still, the absence suggests that characterizing Shelley as an ally only adds fuel to the fire unless Shelleyans devise new ways of disseminating him. For the weak spot in Shelley’s lifelong efforts to “unmask the structures of power that dominated his society” is the priority he grants to the West as source, model, renovator, and amplifier of creativity, freedom, and inspiration. The avowed Occidentalism undergirding his “philosophical view of reform,” the ethos of the prose text meant to accompany the “little volume of popular songs wholly political,” positions him on the inside of an antiBlack conceptual system that keeps white-body privilege blowing through his texts, regardless of his intentions or cultural syncretism.³⁴ It buoys “his” imagination even in times of darkest despair because the concept of imagination is an endless source of renewable energy for those West-bound and identified.

Put bluntly, this critique leaves Shelley out in the cold and leaves many Shelleyans cold. Neither outcome invalidates the critique, but recognizing the reality of structural racisms should work to strengthen, not occlude, fugitive efforts to dismantle it. A less schematic line of questioning might ask what in Shelley sounds anti-antiBlack to non-white poet-auditors, and what besides dreaming ensures that attacks on “the system” by white poet-auditors are actually minority-serving? The works of Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah provide one such mixed-mediated diasporic approach to inside songs.³⁵ Self-described “poet, writer, lyricist, musician, and naughty boy,” Zephaniah calls Shelley “the original dub poet” and declares unabashedly that “I love the guy.” He works to “spread the word” about Shelley’s revolutionary energy by pairing Red Shelley and Bob Marley, reading his own poems along with Shelley’s poems at youth clubs and Rastafarian gatherings, and selecting as the one book he would bring to a desert island Edward Moxon’s 1853 edition of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley.³⁶ “There was never any guarantee that I would love this guy because our backgrounds are so different. He was the son of a baronet,” Zephaniah the son of Caribbean immigrants to the Handsworth district in Birmingham, the “Jamaican capital of Europe.” In fact, Zephaniah’s first encounter in school with The Mask of Anarchy went so poorly that he wrote off Shelley as “one of those dead white poets who write difficult poetry for difficult people” until he later happened upon Paul Foot’s Red Shelley, whose detailed contextualization of The Mask of Anarchy not only changed his view on Shelley but also forged an alliance between them on the activism of song. The “music” he heard in Shelley’s “lines” compelled him “to put my fist down and take up my pen” on behalf of folks “on the streets,” the place from where poets “write our legislation.”³⁷

Hugely influential in the UK and around the globe, and affiliating his poems with multiple causes (refugee crises, global human rights, anti-racism, veganism, prison abolition), Zephaniah’s “Black” encompasses “Romany, Iraqi, Indians, Kurds, Palestinians, all those that are treated Black by the united white states,” including “the battered White woman, the tree dwellers, and the Irish,” as he explains in the introduction to Too Black, Too Strong, the title of his third collection of poems.³⁸ Moreover, his incredible impact and popularity have not gone to his head. The Guardian published this reply to the notification in late November 2003 that his name was being submitted to the Queen for appointment to the Order of the British Empire. “OBE me? Up yours, I thought. I get angry when I hear that word ‘empire’; it reminds me of slavery […] and thousands of years of brutality.”³⁹ The reply also reprints the poem “Bought and Sold” that opens Too Black, Too Strong and whose opening lines specify how “Smart big awards and prize money / Is killing off black poetry […] The lure of meeting royalty / And touching high society / Is damping creativity and eating at our heart.” It concludes: “It’s sick and self-defeating if our dispossessed keep weeping / And we give these awards meaning / But we end up with no voice.”⁴⁰ Like “barbara lee,” then, which locates Black poetry “next to the buried market, at the club underneath the quay,” “planning to refuse until the next jam, at a time to be determined and fled,” Zephaniah takes poetry “everywhere,” especially to those who “do not read books” but appreciate a good performance. “barbara lee” is more and less categorical: “Poetry investigates new ways for people to get together and do stuff in the open, in secret.” “Getting together and doing stuff is a technical term that means X. Something going on at the sight and sound center of sweet political form.”⁴¹

Both Zephaniah and Moten, then, work to counter the “dead image that academia and the establishment” often convey of poetry but from differing stances, neither of which is wholly outside or within either sphere.⁴² Zephaniah stopped formal schooling at age thirteen, his struggles with dyslexia contributing to disaffection fanned by a hostile system. “If my teacher had taken time to explain the context [of The Mask of Anarchy], that would have turned me on to poetry then and there.”⁴³ Moten is a highly accomplished cultural theorist at the university, who cultivates “black study”through undercommons methodologies that at times instrumentalize, at times disinter, the values of higher ed. Zephaniah’s conviction that Shelley “would have been with us in the climate fight, Black Lives Matter, Me Too [movement]” is based on his extrapolating from the “so many” who “have looked to [Shelley’s] lines” for support confirmation that they also are pro-Black. Moreover, that conviction is generated out of Zephaniah’s near-exclusive focus on Shelley’s “popular songs wholly political” and how they disperse Shelley’s message in both senses of dispersal. Moten’s stake in Black-identifying Shelley is far less assured for reasons relating to pitched battles between “black study” and university training that he and Stefano Harney repeatedly wage.⁴⁴ AntiBlack manifestations are structurally endemic to university core values: meritocracy, textual literacy, privilege and tenure, publish or perish.

How Moten handles this problem is similar to his ante-oppositional approach to “the inside songs.” As mentioned, “/ the inside songs /” is Parker’s phrase which Moten identifies in the poem “william parker/fred mcdowell” that precedes “barbara lee” in B Jenkins. In “william parker/fred mcdowell,” “the inside / songs of curtis mayfield” are placed in an “inner ear” that achieves an “inside / outside opening” via “the ear’s folds, its courses / in the open space.”⁴⁶ In “barbara lee,” they perform these openings through the relays they set in motion: back toward freedom songs repeatedly readying people and toward potential songs looming “in the shadows, in-between the sounds and silences and behind the words, pulsating” of existing songs. Outside of “barbara lee,” Moten’s wording avoids “inside” more or less completely, preferring “interinanimation” and other veerings off “in the name of that other, outer interiority,” an outer interiority at once demarcated and invaded by the “surround” that de/composes it.⁴⁷ On a basic level, avoidance of the inside expresses Moten’s affiliation with outliers, fugitives, diasporic peoples, and outlaws as well as rejection of insider/outsider logics that theoretically have long been deconstructed but that keep showing up everywhere. More complexly, Moten’s avoidance bespeaks the composition of “black” song as ante-scriptorial and ante-individuated that reclaims (something like) political agency by disarticulating Blackness and objecthood while still affirming the materiality of both. “Knowledge of Freedom,” the opening chapter of Stolen Life, book two of Moten’s trilogy on how to “consent not to be a single being,” recasts this racist conceptual history via “black chant,” “wherein a terrible reality is lent to song and word in their interinanimation” that sonically disrupts the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant.⁴⁸ Because this enlightened knowledge system bases its freedom on the denial of freedom to persons cast as things, no one should want it until what freedom signifies is remade from the ground up.

It can sound as if this remaking is exactly what Shelleyan song is doing in its fugitive planning. Breaking up power structures by breaking through entrenched terminology, patterns, affects, and associations is Shelley’s style of subversion, the ethereality and abstractness of which techniques escaped detection by print censors, many critics, and allegedly most of his “popular” readership. At the same time, they are pronounced in scholarly accounts of his radicalism, where Shelley has served as a posterchild of deconstruction from the early ’80s onward and, lately, of posthuman-environmental entanglements. However, for all the potential that is unleashed via deconstruction, posthuman reconstructions in and of Shelley are not necessarily anti-antiBlack. White-body supremacy dwells readily in a subject restored to sheer potentiality, and the atmospheres and environments into which Shelleyan personae are often diffused are themselves suffused in racist histories and conceptualizations.⁴⁹ Thus, something more and less tangible is required of Shelleyan song in order for the futurity for which it is readying people to actually qualify as anti-racist and pro-Black. “Knowledge of Freedom” specifies two such in/tangibles: “ensemble” as a non-individualist and non-subordinating mode of agency, “commonality” or “the general” as the means and outcome of doing things. Both formulations work to reclaim the “honor of the whole” from universalisms or public universities by proceeding from a “Blackness” re-cognized as a “general theory of the generative.”⁵⁰ Again, this Blackness does not have to be one’s ontological or experiential reality, but it is claimable only by those who attend “to its paraontology, whose most prominent feature is […] ‘originary displacement.’”⁵¹ Good thing that “generativity,” one of Moten’s approximates for imagination, already exists in many: “the most important thing we have to imagine about the black tradition” is that “it is common. Blackness is (in) common.”⁵² But common is not the same thing as the “same” “thing,” especially when claimed by entitled poet-legislators whose dissatisfactions with the status quo, and pronounced outrage over feeling displaced, run roughshod over the needs of historically and economically displaced persons. With the entitled, the commonness associated with Blackness has to be lived manifestly. Evidence of this occurs “when we act like we can hear difference in common.”⁵³

III Inside Outside Opening

Manifesting through daily actions that poet-legislators hear difference in common is a good litmus test of anti-racism. Exercising differences in common is at the core of the Radical Imagination Gymnasium in Portland, Oregon, cofounded in the belief (a) that “radical imagination” is “not a ‘thing’ that we, as individuals, ‘have’” but instead “a commons of possibility” worked out “between people” and (b) that it is a “group of muscles,” currently “weak and underused,” that through “sustained routine” and regular workouts might “build enough muscle memory to reverse the dominant tendencies of the imagination dictated by market logic.”⁵⁴ Abilities to hear difference in common are strengthened through techniques of street activism and para-academic approaches to Shelley. Street protests amplify Black chant and innovate on calls and responses, as when Angela Davis asked crowd members in Occupy gatherings to repeat each sentence of her speech to ensure that everyone in the crowd could hear what was being said and have the experience of voicing it for themselves.⁵⁵ Chanting Shelley’s protest songs was how they first made themselves known; setting others to music broadcast Shelley in concert halls throughout nineteenth-century Europe.⁵⁶ Present-day para-academics like Zephaniah accentuate performance over reading in spreading Shelley’s words across the globe. Others, like John Webster, combine both into Shelley Songs: A Folk-Rock Song Cycle with Lyrics from Italy 1818–1822, released with Brindaband in 2021.⁵⁷ Many more launch songs of protest from a Shelleyan phrase or title – some fifty-three albums named “Ozymandias,” for example, according to Camila Oliveira.⁵⁸

Performative approaches to Shelley’s soundscapes are less practiced in university settings for understandable but increasingly counterproductive reasons. It is as if the unparalleled musicality of his verse and the involutions of its semantic upheavals have made Shelley scholars such expert readers that we fail to recognize their sonic features other than in print.⁵⁹ Such textual high fidelity hampers opportunities to hear difference in common and to encounter difference in common via exposure to Shelley. Imagine an entire class chanting The Mask of Anarchy on student picket lines and as preparation for them. Imagine common causes that might be forged through comparing one song-tradition of protest to another.⁶⁰ Restricting the use of either approach reduces Shelley’s appeal to the generation that radical pedagogues are hoping through his verses to inspire to rise up. Comparative indifference to audio formats bypasses students’ visual-sonic competencies. Comparative indifference to teaching non-Eurocentric texts limits student familiarity with the most unimaginable actual revolutionary event occurring in Shelley’s day in Saint Domingue/Haiti – an event that, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot has argued, was conceptually inaccessible to that age and, to a large degree, remains so to ours owing to literary-historical preconceptions.⁶¹

These realities need ears that can hear what they are and are not demanding. The demand is not that we jettison or denigrate the richness of Shelley’s textual legacy or the competencies that they cultivate. It is that we contextualize them as partial, situationally invested, hardly the whole story and that we explore their meaningfulness via less exclusively text-bound values and protocols. As Moten puts it, “textualism is never disconnected from the impulse to confirm the knowledge” being conveyed.⁶² For some knowledge traditions, the primary knowledge conveyed in texts is of the knowledges erased by textualism but that reside in flesh “tempered by experiences of profound depravation” and passed on through word of mouth and DNA.⁶³ Efforts to transcribe this knowledge have given rise to critical fabulation, theory in the flesh, treating the body as archive, methodologies that give words to somatic memories and facts that are recoverable only through imagination.⁶⁴ Recourse to these methods is less demanded by textually rich traditions such as British Romanticism, but they are hardly irrelevant to them. Indeed, they contextualize text as one medium among many that foregrounds some messages and silences others. Plus, they are integral to the special meaningfulness of poetry – both its materials (rhythm, breath, sound, pace, pattern, resonances) and purposes. “We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest” (SPP 530).

Actively approaching Shelley in these ways is more likely to activate Shelleean inside songs. This route takes account of physical dimensions of “approach” – that diverse bodies and minds are coming at “Shelley” with different reasons and abilities to engage or disengage. The fantasy that we are on the same page in reading the same poem is an affront to the (neuro-) diversities assembled in any classroom. At the same time, inquiring into the affects and associations evoked by the same poem in different individuals is a fruitful way to share an experience of experiencing a poem. I hear something like this in Moten’s call to produce a “performance of a text in the face of its unintelligibility” rather than “a reading” or “even an interpretation.”⁶⁵ The latter activities, however valuable and difficult to pull off, suggest a one-way flow of communication from one disembodied mind to another. Moreover, they presume intelligibility and the desirability of making intelligible very difficult textual realities, worthy goals that deliver a somewhat one-sided message about reality. By contrast, performance, especially as elucidated in Black performance studies, starts from embodiments of difference in affect, personage, thought, and society.⁶⁶ Its measure of success is not consensus but rather how much and how far a performance moves people.

This has implications for teaching Shelley’s poems so that they effect what his “poetry” envisions as “the generous impulse to act that which we imagine.” One could even claim that “performance of a text” allows us to get beyond the troubling words that Shelley often uses in imagining social transformation – like oneness, eternal, the beautiful, empire of love – to the plurality, entanglement, gender fluidity, and antiBlackness that radical Shelleyans perceive “in-between the sounds and silences and behind the words, pulsating, waiting to be reborn as a new song” in his songs.⁶⁷ But these perceptions have to be made and received in common and as common in order for their reality to begin to have an effect on reality. In my view, their salience is best apprehended by accentuating and combining the embodied and associational features fundamental to Shelley’s poetry. Embodied dimensions appeal to the body and aid in synchronizing a diverse assembly of bodies. Associational “logics” highlight dynamic interconnections between word and thought as well as language and community. The material for both exists in classrooms in potentia and as our future.

Learning to live with difference and to accommodate dissensus, then, is a “learning outcome” that anti-racist Shelleyans might get behind. The problem is that it provokes major anxiety in minds grounded in Western concepts of community and harmony, anxiety that is doubly triggered (so to speak) when confronting “race,” in Shelley and in the classroom. Here the somatic techniques at which Shelley’s poems excel in modulating breathing patterns, lulling through sound, regulating heartbeats and pulses are good places to start inquiry.⁶⁸ Exercised at the start of class, they can clear space for thought by regulating student agitation and by acknowledging how traumatic retention activates fight, flight, and freeze mechanisms that profoundly reduce the ability to learn or take risks.⁶⁹ Moreover, the contradictory affects triggered in interracial group discussions of race (fear, exhaustion, denial, anger, impatience) impede hopes of proceeding, let alone proceeding together.⁷⁰ The situation is equally fraught for teachers fearful of confronting angry reactions to their (perceived) lack of engaging actual classroom material – in this case, live bidirectional encounters between texts and people and what emerges, or can emerge, if those interactions are valued and orchestrated.⁷¹

Thus, class participants might “get together to decide how to get together to decide how to read [a particularly challenging text]. The implication of a collective enterprise is now explicit – I don’t think anybody can do it by themselves.”⁷² For one thing, the unintelligibility that is heightened by poetry is not unintelligible in the same way or for the same reasons for each auditor-reader. Exploring those differences pluralizes associational resonances – transport? Chains like dew? Asia? Hermaphroditus? – and establishes common ground through a shared process of unlearning different habits and traditions. For another, certain unintelligibilities heightened in poetry make manifest histories silenced by dominant textual regimes. The text that Moten’s students had to get themselves together in order to decide how to get together to read is M. NourbeSe Philip’s virtually incomprehensible Zong! It is so because of what it cannot and must not tell. Owing to the absence of first-person evidence, Philip resorts to “the text of the legal decision [Gregson v. Gilbert] as a word store” for the story of 150 “African men, women, and children thrown overboard in an attempt to collect insurance monies.” Being true to this material requires “a variety of techniques.” “I separate subject from verb, verb from object—create semantic mayhem, until my hands bloodied, […] reach into the stinking, eviscerated innards,” like “some seer, sangoma, or prophet who […] reads the untold story that tells itself by not telling.”⁷³ Such differences in the motivations for syntactic deconstruction have to be apprehensible even when teaching material from only one literary-historical tradition, especially one whose slippery signifiers stabilize racial hierarchies. This knowledge cannot be acquired in any one class, but its truth should inform the space and be open for exploration.

There is no simple way for established Shelleyans to unlearn the cultural-textual privileges that accompany Shelley studies or to demonstrate successful unlearning. Nor is there any definitive reason to encourage aspiring poet-legislators of all backgrounds to become Shelleyans. In our times, leftist Shelleyans have less concern to swell “our” ranks than develop passageways between us and rank-and-file activists. In fact, pursuing the latter is a surer way of achieving the former than declaring that these passageways exist. Such a defence of poetry combines the twin senses and arenas of performing: doing and professional acting. This “poetry” loosens defensiveness about the “self” and “Percy Shelley” but without leaving individuals or canonical authors wholly defenseless. Rather, it invites these entities to become ensemblic and find “new ways for people to get together and do stuff, in the open, in secret.”

Shelley’s associationism is a key method for tying unlearning to pro-Blackness. It not only revises concepts by improvising new terms but also links semantic associations to interpersonal associations and vice versa. More, it links expansion of the one to expansion of the other, widening the circumference of imagination in its joint exercising of aesthetic and moral outcomes. The deep connection between what we know and who we know either keeps us inside a self-fulfilling cognitive cycle or relays us onward and outward via encounters with difference. On a daily level, knowing people from different cultural-educational backgrounds broadens our familiarity with differing wants, tastes, and reasons to protest, a knowing that does not guarantee understanding or affection but whose lesser abstractness is pitched that way. Professionally, scholars tend to downplay the interconnection between what we know and who we know, but denying it hardly erases it. In fact, endnotes and acknowledgments broadcast the company we keep as a way of authorizing the validity of our research.⁷⁴ These acknowledgments no longer ratify our scholarship as good or a public good if the company they prize is monocultural and egocentric – qualities of “pint-pot” imaginations, the effects (but not causes) of which Shelley correctly assessed. “All things that Peter saw and felt / […] seemed to melt / Like cloud to cloud, into him. / And so the outward world uniting / To that within him, he became / Considerably uninviting / To those who, meditation slighting / Were moulded in a different frame” (273–282 [SPP 350]).

Here too, re-cognizing through diversifying the interplay between disciplinary logics and circles of friends gives scholar-poet-activists something more and less arduous to do. Blurring boundaries between work and play, research and socializing, this intersectional diversifying activates a full array of embodied exchanges – even in professional associations. Having a diverse circle of friends naturally amplifies what we are encouraged to read, watch, play, perform, or imbibe. Having a multiracial media library cultivates cultural competence that may lead to interracial solidarities and friendships. Intersecting the two has the added benefit that conscious choices of what and who to know begin to function on unconscious levels, unlinking habitual pathways of association, altering vectors of attraction and repulsion, forging new procedural memories that elicit new habits of acting. This is way easier said than done. But perhaps the relative ease of saying is why professors are more comfortable sticking to reading and writing, and why others have grown suspicious of talk.

“barbara lee” performs this updating, multi-mediating and relaying of Shelley’s (ante-) defense of poetry. Through “musicked speech” that renders audible this legislator’s backing and unmaking by the inside songs of her constituents, “barbara lee” enacts associational logic as “a general responsibility of advance.” And it credits Shelley with launching the performance. The rarity of Moten’s engagement does not diminish the terrible beauty of lodging Shelley in “barbara lee.” Instead, it contextualizes Shelley and temporary versus permanent dwelling. Moreover, reference to Shelley comes after rather than before the poem’s detailed description of “black poetry,” implying that bent poetic traits are more conducive than straight ones to achieving justice legislation in our times. As leaderless leaders, bent traits accentuate sound over semantics, fugitivity over stability, fleshiness over uplift, improvisation over heritage or legacy. Also, while “[The Unacknowledged Legislator]” singles out “Shelley” and “Barbara Lee,” lee’s ballad “[Statement in Opposition]” credits unnamed, collective, generative songs. This reduces Shelley’s impact, whose “popular songs wholly political” link achievement of greater freedom to “unwritten songs” rather than songs conceived for other voicings and instrumentation. Yet lee relies on these songs when venturing into hostile territory as invincible intangible fortifications. Loving the inside songs is not a problem but clinging to them obstructs their associational promise. The capacity to perform songs that turn insiders outward entails substantial revisions to career, success, scholarship, activism, classrooms, interpersonal relations, and perceptions of self, the massiveness of which changes cannot be minimized. Whether they seem worth the strain depends on what associational worlds Shelleyans are after.