Language poetry was the first example of a self-professed Marxist avant-garde in the US since Objectivism, and the country's first nationally organised movement to overrun the institutions of poetry it assailed from its inception. Language writing continues to dominate Anglophone discourse around the politics of poetry, and its influence on the major current in political poetry today, the New Conceptualism, is direct and thorough. Its central figures (Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Ron Silliman, Bruce Andrews, Bob Perelman) have shaped poetic taste and practice, while its central ideas (the politics of poetic form, the materiality of language, the readerly production of meaning) remain important in the writing, reading and scholarship of poetry, in some cases becoming its naturalised doxa. But why did the 1970s give rise to a Marx-inflected, experimental poetics of Language? Why was Language the first example of a movement since the war, at a time when the idea of avant-garde grouping seemed moribund? Why has its effect on American poetry been so great? There are various keys to answering these questions: here I intend to examine the movement at its beginnings in the mid-seventies to its full emergence in Andrews and Bernstein's L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, exploring why commodification was so important to the movement's avant-garde positioning, its strategies for countering commodification and, within this, its attitude to audience. I will finally detail how Language eventually, into the mid-eighties and nineties, extricated itself from projects of direct political activism and avant-gardism, and how its formal discoveries were put to their fullest use outside of such projects. This will, of necessity, involve generalising the commitments of individual writers and placing them in a grouping many now deny ever existed. As a movement that constantly declared its political and avant-garde credentials, however, it will brook no other approach. If the achievements and interest of particular poets or poems is glossed over in what follows, it is only to throw the character of the wider phenomenon of ‘Language poetry’ into relief.

Olson's positioning as a political poet was rare in the 1950s, even within the burgeoning avant-garde renaissance that became known as the New American Poetry. Events in Vietnam in the 1960s, however, at once a culmination of post-war foreign policy and a shock to the system of the body politic, would soon change attitudes to artistic political commitment. Olson's convictions on these issues would turn out to be prescient of what many Americans came to feel Vietnam represented: that US post-war internationalism was an imperial force all along. Nonetheless, the attempt by poets to work out a relationship with US imperialism in the wake of the war was a famously troubled episode. On the one hand, the uncritical patriotism implicit in Donald Allen's description in The New American Poetry of ‘our avant-garde’ no longer held water, but on the other the nature of the distance from the nation threatened to alienate poets from politics altogether. The late sixties’ various enthusiasms for and disillusionments with politically detached and politically committed poetry raised questions about the priorities of the only recently rebegun experimental project in American poetry, making the event central for evaluating the post-war response of avantgarde aesthetics to political crisis. Evaluations of the period have tended to focus on the splitting effect the war had on poetics, and the damage a polarised poetic community did to poets’ critical thinking about poetry's public function. Though antagonism was undoubtedly keenly felt, and a dominant note in arguments as they unfolded, I want also to explore here how apparently irreconcilable differences were exacerbated by agreement. That is, avant-garde poetry's response to Vietnam can show us the often uninterrogated premises on which argument about political poetry took place, such as the opposition between individual conscience and realpolitik, at a certain point in the history of vanguard poetics (and possibly its endpoint).

Critical consensus has long been reached on the trajectory of Louis Zukofsky's literary career. The story of the poet's move from a selfdefeating political verse in the 1930s to a liberating poetics of pure form after the war is well rehearsed. As the world continues to face the deleterious effects of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, it is a good time reconsider the priorities implicit in this narrative, and in doing so the literary history that has been forgotten in its construction. This chapter will chart the development of one of Zukofsky's key preoccupations: the presentation of historical particulars, seen here as a dialectic rooted in tensions between a materialist revolutionary politics on the one hand, and a modernist sense of tradition with Poundian, reactionary aesthetics on the other. In the argument below, Zukofsky's primary value lies in his work's embodiment of conflicts that go to the heart of the relationship between political vanguardism and the particular inheritance of Anglophone modernism. The lessons that Zukofsky offers the contemporary reader are in how his experimental political poetry straddles Anglophone modernism and social realism, whose separate tensions with avant-gardism are brought together to occasion a vanguard poetics in the fullest sense of the word. This chapter suggests that the overcoming of these difficulties in Zukofsky's later career, in large part through the celebrated trope of music, is less a solution to than an elision of the political, a surrender to formalism that we might see as the inevitable outcome of attempts to reconcile modernist ideals of aesthetic order with a radical political impulse to change the world.

Historic and contemporary particulars

Since the first essays on the Objectivist poets by Hugh Kenner and Cid Corman there has been an anxiety among commentators to decant the poets associated with the movement from the revolutionary cultural milieu that gave rise to their unique fusion of modernism and left-wing politics but at the same time made them seem naïve, political and topical.

In 1968 Muriel Rukeyser wrote a poem called ‘Myth’, responding to Gustave Moreau's 1864 painting Oedipus and the Sphinx:

Oedipus fails to recognise the mother because he refuses to acknowledge the feminine. He gives ‘the wrong answer’, a revision that changes the entire story: the patriarchal ‘correct’ answer is refigured as a mistake, a blindness to female difference that is shown to be the origin of Oedipus's misfortunes. The sphinx, meanwhile, both reclaims woman from the hegemonic category Man and rejects the presumptuous universalism of Oedipus's second person pronoun: the you that speaks of Man, she tells Oedipus, is only your you, and certainly not me as a woman. Rukeyser's version is an alternative explanation for Oedipus's blindness, but also a troubling of mythic origin itself: where Oedipus's victory over the man-eating femme fatale ‘made everything possible’ in the original, his mistake here has a doom-laden legacy, in itself a counter to the Old Testament origin-myth of the Fall through Eve, but perhaps also refusing the Oedipus narrative in general. Inverting and undermining Oedipus at the same time as using his story to make a point distorts the usually unsullied window onto human consciousness myth is assumed to be.

In 2012, the Californian poet Joshua Clover, recipient of the Walt Whitman Award, professor of English at University of California Davis and regular contributor to The New York Times and The Nation, had this to say about the politics of poetry:

Clover was arrested in 2009 for his participation in student protests at his workplace and has been one of the most involved activists in and sensitive commentators on social movements flourishing in the wake of the 2008 global recession. His conclusion – that recent theoretical politicisations of poetry be dismissed as ‘bullshit’ – is likely not, then, the bluff refusal of the reactionary, rejecting any political force falling outside the status quo. The targets of Clover's engaged statement, those particular Theory-based and language-centred conceptions of the poetic, are more carefully addressed than the sweep of his list would seem to imply. As Clover has put it elsewhere, ‘Certain things will have to be actively destroyed on the side of capital … And they will not be destroyed with language.’ The one-word critique of the grand potencies of poetry we have come to learn ‘by heart’ is a response to a tradition, active since Romanticism, that treats the political efficacy of poetry as an already existing fact.

After Amiri Baraka died at the age of seventy-nine in January 2014 he was lauded or attacked for his output in the 1960s – variously for that work's wholly original conjoining of poetic voice and political expression, for its black potency in an era of increased persecution and dispossession, for its supposed inverted racism, for its male chauvinism and anti-Semitism. What is remarkable about the post-mortem on Baraka's career is that it paid no attention to the subsequent forty years of work that revised these positions and processes but mark an equally radical contribution to the power of poetry in the late twentieth century. All obituaries of Baraka effectively stop in 1974, the moment Baraka announced his turn to Marxism and moved away from the black cultural nationalism that had made him famous. The Poetry Foundation biography's ratio of 147 words on Baraka's output after 1974 in a 2,500-word article is typical, and mirrored in the focus of criticism on Baraka generally. Ignoring three-quarters of Baraka's considerable achievement is especially lamentable since his work from the mid- seventies onwards represents one of the first Marxist poetic responses to the post-war economic crisis, and one of the earliest projects for a vanguard art that explicitly rejected the claims of the traditional avant-garde. This chapter will explore these two related matters, suggesting we see both projects as developing Baraka's constant use of musical performance in poetic process, and the complex sense of audience related to it. The best commentary on Baraka's poetry has placed music at its centre, employing tropes in music to repudiate readings of the poet as didactic and dogmatic. This is an important perspective on Baraka, best shown in work by Nathaniel Mackey and Kimberly Benston, who demonstrate how a musical, improvisatory cast of thought defines the restless energy of Baraka's poems, informing a poetic voice that is ‘centrally an agon for utterance itself’ in Benston's words, or preoccupied with ‘resisting any effort to arrest … expressive vision’ in Mackey's.

In a key episode of his legend, Charles Olson was born as a poet when he died as a political organiser. Beyond this, the relation between Olson's two careers has gone unspecified in narratives of his creative development. The clean break described in Tom Clark's detailed biography has been countered only by perverse portraits such as Robert von Hallberg's otherwise shrewd account, which presents the poet as an uncritical politically centrist defender of US imperialism, unreconstructed from his days as a New Dealer – a view that has persisted to the present day, as in Heriberto Yépez's less incisive Empire of Neomemory. All accounts either see Olson breaking from politics or continuing already established liberal-democratic convictions in the humanities. The key question regarding Olson, still, concerns what he considered himself to have left behind, and what aspects of the category ‘political organiser’ we might consider him to have pursued in poetry, prose and wider cultural practices where, famously, ‘the affairs of men remain a chief concern’. The argument of this chapter is that Olson abandoned what he called ‘the trick of politics’ being staged in an increasingly corporate and bureaucratic party-political system for a more meaningful sense of the political where his agency could register actively in a particular constituency. Explaining his decision to become a poet in a letter to Ruth Benedict, Olson makes such a motive clear from the outset:

This early vision of polis, and of the role the poet might play in ‘social action’ from within it, gives us the germ of a concern that would occupy Olson throughout his writing career.