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Reproducing the line: 1970s innovative poetry and socialist-feminism in the U.K.

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Reproducing the line: 1970s innovative poetry and socialist-feminism in the U.K.

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REPRODUCING THE LINE:
1970s INNOVATIVE POETRY AND SOCIALIST-FEMINISM IN THE U.K.

by

Samuel Bernard Solomon
__________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE LITERATURE)

December 2012

Copyright 2012 Samuel Bernard Solomon
ii
Acknowledgements

An abridged version of Chapter Two is forthcoming from the Journal of British
and Irish Innovative Poetry, and an extended version of the epilogue has been published
on the Lana Turner Journal website.
This project has benefited from the work and activities of many people: it would
not exist without inspiration from friends, mentors, and comrades. It was in Ellen
Rooney's seminars at Brown University that I first read Denise Riley's The Words of
Selves, and Ellen's lasting support has been a tremendous boon to my work. Other
teachers and friends at Brown encouraged my interests and challenged my thinking; I'd
particularly like to thank Morgan Bassichis, Rey Chow, Jane Elliot, Jessica Kremen,
Wendy Lee, Jennifer Pranolo, and Emily Steinlight.
Of course, the project didn't come into being until my time at the University of
Southern California, largely through the influence of David Lloyd and Peggy Kamuf.
David's belief in this project and his provocations throughout have been a most welcome
challenge. His breadth of knowledge and ear for language have shaped the scope of the
project and sharpened my readings on almost every page. Peggy Kamuf is the best
dissertation director I can imagine; my ability to carry out the project came from her
confidence that I could. Most of all, she has been, as a writer, an exemplary model (if that
phrase can survive the arguments of this dissertation). Karen Tongson hopped on board
as a reader at just the right time with grace and seriousness, and her incisive questions
and generous advice are sure to shape whatever I do next. Other faculty and staff during
my time at USC deserve mention for their support, ideas, and encouragement: Alice
iii
Echols, Gabriel Giorgi, Akira Lippit, Natania Meeker, Panivong Norindr, Karen Pinkus,
and Peter Starr. Finally, thanks are due to Katherine Guevarra for guiding me through the
administrative mazes of graduate study. I'm also grateful to the institutional support I
received from USC in the form of a Provost's Fellowship and College Doctoral
Fellowship, and to the Josephine De Karman Fellowship Trust for funding my last year
of writing.
My work benefitted inestimably from the contributions of writers and scholars in
the U.K. Indy Bhullar of the Women's Library in London and Hannah Westall at the
Girton College Archives were tremendously generous with their time and expertise. The
following poets and critics all helped me to understand the conditions surrounding poetic
production in the past fifty years, and they welcomed me into their pubs, reading series,
journals, and homes, and my debt to each them is without measure: Sean Bonney, Andrea
Brady, Emily Critchley, Edmund Hardy, Jow Lindsay, Jonny Liron, Francesca Lisette,
Joe Luna, Rod Mengham, Marianne Morris, Neil Pattison, Frances Presley, J.H. Prynne,
Nat Raha, Denise Riley, Luke Roberts, Sophie Robinson, Pete Smith, Josh Stanley, and
Keston Sutherland.
Other graduate students and friends from my time at USC made the journey more
fun, challenging, and rewarding than I expected: Nicole Antebi, Nada Ayad, Chris
Barraza, Marija Cetinic, Catherine Clark, Justin Clark, Colin Dickey, Chris Farrish,
Emilie Garrigou-Kempton, Sean Grattan, Gabriele Hayden, Brian Jacobson, Sandy Kim,
Lizzy Klein, Molly Lambert, Ryan Linkof, Shaoling Ma, Mike Metzger, Will Meyrowitz,
Olanna Mills, Anjali Nath, Josh Rosenthal, Margarita Smith, Raphaelle Steinzig, Erin
iv
Sullivan, Mary Traester, and Lee Triming were all valuable co-teachers, work buddies,
and interlocutors at various points along the way. I'm especially grateful to Nisha Kunte
and Adrienne Walser for providing times and spaces for writing, along with kindness,
humor, intellect, and snacks.
Older friends deserve mention for tried and true support: Amanda Altman, Becky
Brown, Oriana Fox, Faith Jones, Jennifer Kronovet, and Caitlin Mitchell. And, to the
parade of people who have lived under the same roof as me while I researched and wrote
– Lauren Ng, Federico Rodriguez Gomez, Francesca Mirabella, Emma Heaney, Jessica
Stites, and Paul Chaikin – thanks for tolerating the sprawl of books and for making me
put them away sometimes. My comrades in Los Angeles have been the engine for this
work and have taught me so much about its necessity and its necessary incompleteness:
thanks to Yolanda Alaniz, Christine Browning, Mary Ann Curtis, Jeri Dietrich, Yuisa
Gimeno, Omar Hussein, Luma Nichol, Beatriz Paez, Noel Perez, and Alex Romero.
Muffy Sunde deserves special mention, and she surely knows why. My biological family
has been no less loving, challenging, and hospitable: Ellen Solomon opened her home to
me each time I was in London; Lila Solomon, Eleanor Gagne, and Tim Gagne in Maine;
Eric, Marci, and Matt Schoenbaum and Allison Linamen in Los Angeles. To my parents,
Mark Solomon and Judith Block Solomon, well, I won't even start.
Finally, I must thank two people who have been best friends, editors, comrades,
philosophers, providers, and just about everything else to me over the last 6 years: Emma
Heaney and Shaoling Ma. I'm impossibly grateful to share and reproduce joy and struggle
with you. Here's to more and more.
v

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements............................................................................................................. ii
Abstract.............................................................................................................................. vi
Introduction: Marxist-Feminism and the Reproduction of Contradiction .......................... 1
Chapter 1: Practical Criticism and Cambridge Poetry in the Mid-Twentieth Century..... 23
Chapter 2: Denise Riley's Socialized Biology ................................................................ 102
Chapter 3. Lines for Free: Wendy Mulford's Commitments .......................................... 151
Chapter 4. Denise Riley's Geology................................................................................. 211
Epilogue: What Pools Love to Arson ............................................................................. 257
Bibliography: .................................................................................................................. 265

vi
Abstract

This dissertation considers the experimental group of "Cambridge poets" in the
1970s and explains how and why their somewhat obscure body of work was a
battleground for cultural politics. I focus on the writing of women who bridged
Cambridge poetry and socialist-feminist politics even as they worked at the margins of
both communities. I argue that this poetry took shape at a unique conjuncture – the
history of literary study at Cambridge, the varied British reception of Marxist thought and
political action, the rise of Conservatism, and the increasing influence of feminism – that
made radical poetics a hotly contested site for the production and reproduction of social
relations, both in the 1970s and beyond. I follow the poetry's circulations between the
colleges of Cambridge University, poetic communities of practice, and revolutionary
socialist-feminist organizations. The poems and critical writings of Veronica Forrest-
Thomson, John James, Wendy Mulford, J.H. Prynne, and, in particular, Denise Riley,
form the backbone of this study; I read their work through the above-mentioned nexus of
formal, historical, political, and economic contexts and trajectories.
The dissertation considers the transformative possibilities of fields that produce
and reproduce ruling-class ideology, namely, literary education and poetry. It is my task
to explain how the writers in question navigated their contradictory commitments and to
outline the formal effects of such contradictions on their poetic output. I also consider
how the exigencies of socialist-feminist organizing were directly related to their work:
such social practices are not merely a "content" that fills autonomous literary forms; they
vii
are part of the formal fabric of the work and of its circulation. I argue that a narrowly
construed literary history cannot explain these texts; it is my aim, instead, to produce a
materialist account of feminist social movements and dialectically to bring such an
account to bear on the formal analysis of poetry.
My introduction provides a historical and theoretical sketch of the connections
between Marxist and feminist analyses of "reproduction" and cultural education.
Chapter 1 explores the history of poetry at Cambridge, tracing the movements from I.A.
Richards and William Empson to Veronica Forrest-Thomson and J.H. Prynne to
underscore how studying and writing poetry were seen as moral preparation for the
creation or restoration of a better society. From here, I turn in Chapters 2 and 3 to the
writings of Riley and Mulford, who were trained in this tradition and who also actively
engaged in socialist-feminist theory and practice. I track the continuities and differences
between the Cambridge-based, pedagogical-moral understanding of lyric's social worth
and socialist and feminist political ambitions for poetry. Chapter 4 returns to the poetry
and prose of Riley from late 1980s through the early 2000s. Finally, my epilogue outlines
the situation of contemporary British poets who have been influenced by the subjects of
the preceding chapters and who are currently involved in anti-austerity movements to
defend social services and state-funded education.

1
Introduction: Marxist-Feminism and the Reproduction of Contradiction

In his review-essay, "The Post-Welfare State University," Jeffrey J. Williams
suggests that the "protocols of criticism" may have something to do with American
literary professors' failure to engage in transformative work on and in the University.
Specifically, humanities professors have failed, he argues, to offer "practical solutions" to
the long-term defunding of public education and of the humanities in particular. Williams
exhorts professors to consider more transformative, action-oriented practices of thought
when it comes to the university and its relation to society. In order to do so, however, he
takes poetry as a foil:
We are trained, when we look at poems or cultural phenomena, to "read" them,
spotting unities or unpacking inconsistencies. We do not expect to fix them or to
offer prescriptions for poets to follow. We tend to take a similar stance toward the
university: we read and interpret the events and ideas they suggest, spotting
inconsistencies or showing how ideas deconstruct. We need to switch stances, I
believe, to a more pragmatic, prescriptive mode... I am content to leave poems to
poets but, for the university in which we work and have a stake, we need to
distinguish how it is made and what would make it better.... ("The Post-Welfare
State University" 208)

This passage recalls Marx's oft-repeated eleventh "Thesis on Feuerbach:" "The
philosophers [here, literary critics] have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the
point is to change it." Yet, in echoing Marx's aphorism, Williams proposes that
transformative knowledge can leave behind the field of literary criticism that has
provided the basis for his diagnosis of critical fatalism and inaction in the first place. I
read this leaving behind of poetry in the name of the University as a reinscription of the
very irrelevance of humanistic education that Williams exhorts academics to redress. One
2
of goals in this study is to demonstrate the extent to which literary criticism is social
practice and necessarily engages with the social dimensions of other forms of cultural
production. This understanding of criticism can help us to move literary criticism in
transformative directions, leaving behind neither poetry nor the transformation of
universities.
My dissertation takes off from the 1970s in England and from a moment at which
politically engaged poets, many of whom were committed to producing texts resistant to
capitalist and state-instrumentalist appropriation, perceived that poetry had been deemed
socially irrelevant; it had been, precisely, "left" to them. The state-organized cultivation
of attention to poetry had increasingly been left behind by a fully administered society in
which poetry was no longer instrumental in the ways that it had been purported to be at
least through the interwar period of British imperial decline. Cambridge University was
one of the primary institutions through which English study, and with it, literary culture,
had been made into a formal part of state curricula. The study of English poetry had been
understood in this earlier phase, as I will demonstrate, to be fundamental to the
reproduction of social and political relations and, with these relations, to the smooth
functioning of capitalism. But with the increasing globalization of capitalist production,
the weakening of the domestic labor movement, and the outsourcing of much productive
work, literary education was no longer deemed as necessary for the training of the British
proletariat and petty bourgeoisie.
My dissertation takes up the problem of capitalism's relations of reproduction in
this perhaps surprising context of 1970s British late-modernist poetry. The poetry under
3
consideration circulated between the colleges of Cambridge University, poetic
communities of practice, and revolutionary socialist-feminist organizations. Within some
of these groupings, poetic production and literary education were seen as dynamic nodes
in the production and reproduction of both capitalist relations and revolutionary social
movements. Throughout this project, I seek to explain the specific historical conjuncture
– the history of literary study at Cambridge, the varied British reception of Marxist
thought and political action, the rise of Conservatism, and the increasing influence of
feminism – that contributed to the perceived import of this somewhat obscure poetry. The
poems and critical writings of Veronica Forrest-Thomson, John James, Wendy Mulford,
J.H. Prynne, and, in particular, Denise Riley, form the backbone of my study; I read their
work through the above-mentioned nexus of formal, historical, political, and economic
contexts and trajectories.
Each chapter interweaves original archival research in socialist-feminist history,
debates in Marxist theory about aesthetics and higher education, anecdotal information
about the poets, and formal analysis of the poetry in question. The problematic of
reproduction links my considerations of literary education and poetic practice to an
analysis of class struggle and sexual politics in the U.K. Throughout, I bring to critical
debates about the social role of poetry a careful reading of revolutionary organizing itself
as a contradictory site of rupture and continuity, and I thereby provide a novel
explanatory framework for the contradictions that poetry expresses through the social
fabric of language.
4
In this introduction, I provide a historical and theoretical sketch of the
connections between Marxist and feminist analyses of "reproduction" and cultural
education. My aim here is to outline how the contradictions of reproduction were built
into the material conditions and social relations of Marxist-feminist organizing from its
origins. This genealogy of Marxist-feminism, in turn, explains the historical and
theoretical contexts into which my readings of 1970s British poetry subsequently
intervene. After this foundation has been laid, I sketch the contours of the dissertation,
providing a summary of each chapter and explaining some of the connections between
them, before embarking on detailed literary histories and formal analyses of British
innovative poetry.

* * *

In the first volume of Capital, Karl Marx explains that the capitalist mode of
production must reproduce itself as part of its functioning:
The capitalist process of production..., seen as a total, connected process, i.e. a
process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value,
but it also produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself; on the one hand the
capitalist, on the other the wage labourer. (Capital I 724)

Throughout all three volumes of Capital, Marx undertakes to explain how it is that
individual capitalists reproduce themselves as capitalists and how the capitalist mode of
production reproduces the capitalist and working classes in their relations of production.
The Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, in her 1913 The Accumulation of Capital,
5
followed Marx's effort to explain how the reproduction of a given mode of production
requires specific "technical and social conditions:"
At all stages of social development, the process of production is based on the
continuation of two different, though closely connected factors, the technical and
social conditions – on the precise relationship between man and nature and that
between men and men. Reproduction depends to the same degree on both these
conditions.... [R]eproduction is bound up with the conditions of human working
techniques... [I]t is indeed solely the result of a certain level of labour
productivity; but the social forms of production prevailing in each case are no less
decisive. (Accumulation 32)

Luxemburg seeks here to expand Marx's account of reproduction and to correct what she
perceives as problems with his methodological assumptions. In particular, Luxemburg
points to Marx's tendency, when explaining the reproduction of capitalism, to presuppose
a society solely composed of capitalists and wage-laborers. She argues that Marx's formal
explanations of extended or enlarged reproduction fail to account for the real social
totality in which not all relations of production are reducible to the capital/wage relation.
She quotes a number of instances in which Marx justifies his reduction, as, for example,
in this moment from the second volume of Capital "...there are only two classes in this
case, the working class disposing of their labour-power, and the capitalist class owning
the social means of production and the money" (Capital II 488). For her part, Luxemburg
argues that
Capitalism in its full maturity also depends in all respects on non-capitalist strata
and social organizations existing side by side with it.... Capital needs the means of
production and the labour power of the whole globe for untrammelled
accumulation; it cannot manage without the natural resources and the labour
power of all territories. Seeing that the overwhelming majority of resources and
labour power is in fact still in the orbit of pre-capitalist production – this being the
historical milieu of accumulation – capital must go all out to obtain ascendancy
over these territories and social organizations.... Yet if the countries of those
6
branches of production are predominantly non-capitalist, capital will endeavour to
establish domination over these countries and societies. (Accumulation 365)

Luxemburg insists that capitalism, for its very reproduction, relies on social relations that
are not, strictly speaking, "capitalist" (if that term is taken exclusively to mean the
relations between wage laborer and capitalist). Whether or not Luxemburg's account of
imperialism was correct in 1913, and whether or not it holds today, her emphasis on
capitalism's uneven and combined relations of reproduction has been a pivotal question
for Marxist praxis throughout the twentieth century. Moreover, since the late twentieth
century, capitalism's reliance on debt (student, housing, medical, governmental,
international, etc.) to reproduce its relations of production has become increasingly
evident, and this has been and will likely continue to be central to contemporary anti-
capitalist strategy.
Thus the question of reproduction highlights the contradictory nature of capitalist
relations of production. Reproduction in and of itself, that is, has no particular valence in
class struggle; it is, rather a process of repetition within a contradictory totality, and can
thus be read as a bolstering of the totality or a transformative exacerbation of the
contradiction. Additionally, "reproduction" names a conflation of a variety of social
practices, as it can refer to reproductive labor (primarily housework, childrearing, and
prostitution), biological reproduction (i.e. giving birth), technological and mechanical
reproduction, and the more properly ideological work of the "reproduction of the
relations of production."
Here we meet up with the women's liberation movement in England, and its own
internal debates over reproduction. The U.S. and U.K. women's liberation movements
7
originated in the "old" and "new" left. Many left women, frustrated by their roles within
both Marxist-Leninist parties and New Left civil rights, anti-war, and student movements,
found that in order to organize against capitalism, systematic racism, and the military-
industrial complex, it was necessary to fight within their organizations and movements
for recognition of their leadership and for an equitable division of labor. Such struggles
led many left women to focus on oppressive and exploitative social relations other than
those between worker and boss, which all the same contributed to the reproduction of the
capitalist mode of production and to the structures of domination that subtend it, notably
racism, xenophobia, patriarchy, homophobia, ableism, and ageism, not to mention the
more conspicuously economic questions of imperialism and decolonization. In many
cases, this also involved analyses of culture, the state, and the family under capitalism as
forces that contributed to the docility of subjects entering into wage-labor. In many ways,
this inquiry was continuous with the explorations Marxist thinkers like Gramsci,
Benjamin, Adorno, and others, insofar as it asked how working-class people could
believe in their freedom and rights in the face of what seemed, from the perspective of
revolutionary consciousness, massive evidence to the contrary. One of the women's
liberation movement's unique contributions to this question lay in detailed analyses of the
divide-and-conquer tactics that pit sectors of the proletariat against each other. It became
clear to feminists in the course of struggle that such relations of division within the
proletariat were not merely incidental tactics of capital but were, rather, deeply
entrenched within and effectively part of the labor-capital contradiction itself. Explaining
8
the reproduction of these divisions, then, required sustained consideration and historical
material analysis of relations other than those between the generic worker and capitalist.
Friedrich Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State served
as a foundation for many of these analyses. Originally a response to Ancient Society by
the North American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, Engels' work, drawn
selectively from Marx's own notes on Morgan, deploys an emphatically materialist
conception of history to explain the development of private property, the family, and the
state. The characterization of a particular society or social organization, for Engels, must
be grounded in its mode of production. Engels, following Morgan's developmental
schema, examines three principal stages of human development in conjunction with three
principal forms of marriage: "savagery" or food gathering corresponds primarily to group
marriage, "barbarism" or food production to gentile pairing marriage, and "civilization"
or industry proper to monogamy supplemented by adultery and prostitution. Engels' work
was of critical importance for the earliest debates in Marxist-feminism around the at-
least-dual structure of women's oppression in terms of both class and gender (and race,
sexuality, gender identity, nationality, and ability, although not all paid due attention to
these vectors of difference and oppression). Was women's oppression really always
directly determined by the mode of production? Many early second-wave Marxist- and
Socialist-Feminists in the U.S., U.K., and Western Europe struggled to use Engels'
categories of analysis to describe, explain, and ultimately overturn women’s oppression
under capitalist societies.
9
As I have noted, the Women’s Liberation Movement in the U.S. and U.K.
developed both within and in reaction to Marxist parties and the “New Left” and Civil
Rights movements in those countries.
1
Some early second-wave Marxist-Feminists
continued to fight for women’s liberation from within existing left organizations (such
women were called “politicos” by US radical feminists who preferred autonomous
women's groups); others began to form autonomous Marxist-feminist organizations that
were explicitly feminist and often integrated elements of "radical feminist" politics.
2
In
both cases, Marxist theories and the basic method of historical materialism remained
privileged forms of analysis. Analyses of women's specific oppressions under capitalism
came about as many women on the left expressed a practical need for an analysis of
women's oppression that was not immediately subsumable under the tidy narratives of
class struggle offered and often imposed by left groups. Many existing left groups,
feminists discovered, blindly reproduced the "bourgeois" oppression of women within
their own forms of organization; women in revolutionary parties were often relegated to
clerical tasks and childcare duties instead of leadership roles. The oppression of women
in the workplace was recognized by much of the left as only a special case of the general
problem of the exploited wage-laborer. Patriarchal power and ideology were explained
away as epiphenomena of capitalism that would disappear after the revolution and that
therefore did not need to be addressed within the left itself.

1
Cf. Breines, Eisenstein, and Evans for accounts of this development in the U.S.; Mitchell and Rowbotham
et al for the U.K.
2
These groups included, MF groups 1-5 in New York, the Chicago Women's Union, and Bread and Roses
in Boston.
10
Feminist academics and activists in the 1970s presented significant challenges to
the definition of historical materialism, specifically with regard to its proper domain of
objects. If “the materialist problematic is based on a conceptualization of human society
as defined specifically by its productivity: primarily of the means of subsistence and of
value by the transformation of nature through work,” as Annette Kuhn and Ann Marie
Wolpe argued in the introduction to their 1978 edited collection on Feminism and
Materialism, then a “feminist” historical materialism would have to make the connections
between the relations of production under capitalism and “the determinate character of
the sexual division of labor and the implications of this for power relations between men
and women at different conjunctures” (7).
3

The commitment professed here and elsewhere to a historical materialism that
would be both Marxist and feminist signals an opening of the category of relations of
production, which had among much of the organized left referred exclusively to
workplace relations, toward a broader consideration of the “sexual divisions of labor”
within the household and the relations of the reproduction of human life in social,
economic, and biological terms. As it became increasingly evident to socialist feminists
that women were not only oppressed through direct capitalist exploitation (i.e. underpaid
wage labor and the profit motive), feminists began to explore the influence of male
supremacy, patriarchy, and what Gayle Rubin called "sex/gender systems" in relation to
capitalism (but, and here is the crucial difference, not necessarily determined by or

3
Similar claims can be found throughout the socialist feminist literature of the 1970s; of particular
relevance to my discussion are those found in Eisenstein (especially Eisenstein’s introduction and essays by
Heidi Hartmann and Ros Petchetsky), Rowbotham et al, Rubin, and Batya Weinbaum.
11
functional to it).
4
This new viewpoint transformed the very meaning of the “material” of
historical materialism insofar as the category of class struggle consistently expanded
beyond the direct relation to the wage. The concept of “sex class” as developed by U.S.
radical and socialist feminist thinkers from Shulamith Firestone to Zillah Eisenstein
suggested that the sexual division of labor was the primary difference on which all other
hierarchies and divisions of labor were historically based. This assertion was rejected by
many on the left, including feminists, as ahistorical and irrelevant for class struggle and
revolutionary change. All the same, the focus on the exploitation of women as a division
of labor, as fundamental to the development and expansion of capitalism, and as a
primary site for the reproduction of capitalist relations held many (often unheeded)
lessons for the left.
Also during the 1970s, Italian feminist activist-intellectuals such as Mariarosa
Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, and Leopoldina Fortunati took on frontally the problem of
women's place in capitalism, arguing that reproductive labor was a site for the extraction
of surplus value for the capitalist, even though it was not directly waged work. These
arguments emerged alongside and in defense of the vibrant "domestic labor debates" that
reverberated across national borders. Fortunati and Federici called into question Engels'
speculative history of "Origins" arguing that the destruction of a commons of
reproduction (i.e. a collective social subject of reproduction as opposed to the atomized

4
Michèle Barrett's Women's Oppression Today gives a remarkably thorough account of the
"Marxist/Feminist Encounter" in terms of competing "dual systems" and "functionalist" accounts of the
relationships between capitalism and patriarchy. Barrett rejects explanations of women's oppression as
functional to capitalism, and she is suspicious of attempts to describe a capitalism and patriarchy as "dual
systems" without mutual interaction and influence.
12
houseworker) was simultaneous with and at least as important to the functioning of
capitalist "accumulation" as was the move within wage labor from absolute to relative
surplus value. Fortunati argues that relations between the classes are determined by the
divisions within them: "for capital, control over labor necessarily became control over the
composition of the class, and that class struggle is also the struggle against the class
composition that capital imposes" (Arcane 167). According to Fortunati, when relative
surplus value became the law for productive labor, reproductive labor (housework and
prostitution, primarily relegated to women) became the site for the production of absolute
surplus value – neither of these processes could have occurred independently of the other.
Thinkers like Fortunati, then, sought to understand the ways in which
reproductive labor, during the "transition to capitalism," was appropriated by the state
and separated from productive labor, made into unwaged and atomized labor. The logical
extension of this argument, and the one called for by Dalla Costa, Selma James,
Fortunati, and Federici, was that organization at the site of reproductive labor was a
necessary element in any struggle against global capitalism and for a communist society.
These thinkers saw women's refusal to uphold the community through unpaid
reproductive labor as integral to overthrowing capitalism. As Silvia Federici would later
argue in her Caliban and the Witch, reproductive labor will likely turn out to be an
important site for resistance to capitalist exploitation well into the future as "primitive
accumulation" is alive and well:
Today, these aspects of the transition to capitalism may seem (for Europe at least)
things of the past or – as Marx put it in the Grundrisse – "historical
preconditions" of capitalist development, to be overcome by more mature forms
of capitalism. But the essential similarity between these phenomena and the social
13
consequences of the new phase of globalization that we are witnessing tells us
otherwise. Pauperization, rebellion, and the escalation of "crime" are structural
elements of capitalist accumulation as capitalism must strip the work-force from
its means of reproduction to impose its own rule. (Caliban 82)

Federici describes how reproduction is increasingly absorbed by the state, how the last
vestiges of communal reproduction are eradicated through imperialist "structural
adjustment," and how the genocide of indigenous peoples, and especially of women with
collectivized reproductive practices, continues.
Federici, following Fortunati, James, and Dalla Costa, recognizes that oppression
under capitalism is not reducible to the workplace relations of production, and that anti-
racist, anti-imperialist, and feminist historical materialisms need to be equally attentive to
relations of reproduction and to forms of domination that may not appear to have
anything to do with industrialized production at all. Federici's work picks up from that of
German sociologist Maria Mies, who had argued in her 1986 Patriarchy and
Accumulation on a World Scale that
it was precisely through the existence of external and internal colonies (the
housewife) that European capitalism was able to avoid the revolutionary
disruption of the production relations, which Marx had expected to take place....
Lenin's model of a future society was that of an industrial nation with the highest
development of productive forces. For such a model, however, internal and
external colonies are necessary (201).

Federici agrees that the realities of race, gender, and colonial oppression call for analyses
that do not assume that all exploitation originates in the workplace and can be resolved
by nationalization (or even internationalization) under socialism.
14
Federici's work, like that of Mies, is salutary for overcoming some of the
limitations of earlier Marxist-Feminist attempts to address questions of race and racism.
5

Third world and women of color feminists rightly challenged the Marxist-feminist
narrative of "capitalism vs./and patriarchy," objecting to the ways in which race and
racism were deemed to be epiphenomena of the more primary "capitalist patriarchy" that
sought to be the totalizing theory of history where classical Marxism and radical
feminism had failed.
6
This union of two theories, they argued, merely reproduced
ethnocentric thought and its exclusions: while racism was almost always addressed as a
problem by early socialist-feminists, it was often tackled in an additive rather than
integral fashion, that is, lamented as a manifestation of class- or sex-based oppression
rather than recognized for as co-constitutive with them (as in the case of the forced
sterilization of women of color and the racist and sexist attacks on the welfare state that
were contemporary).
7

5
Federici and Mies are not alone in this. The Combahee River Collective, for example, argued for a
recognition of the interlocking oppressions and revolutionary strategies that were realities for working-class
black lesbians and which could not be explained without due consideration of racism and sexuality.
6
See, for example, the works of Hazel Carby and Gloria Joseph.
7
Cf. Breines for an excellent history of the tensions between black and white socialist feminists in Boston
in the early 70s. See Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body, for an analysis of how "regulating Black
women's reproductive decisions has been a central aspect of racial oppression in America..., [and] the
control of Black women's reproduction has shaped the meaning of reproductive liberty in America"
(Roberts, 6). In her 2004 Wayward Reproductions, Alys Eve Weinbaum delineates the ways in which the
Marxist-Feminist attempts to "resolve the hyphen" actually bracketed the fact that the key question of
reproduction as it appears in Marx and Engels is also a question of race and nation: "The interconnected
ideologies of racism, nationalism, and imperialism rest on the notion that race can be reproduced, and on
attendant beliefs in the reproducibility of racial formations (including nations) and of social systems
hierarchically organized according to notions of inherent racial superiority, inferiority, and degeneration"
(4). Weinbaum thus insists that analyses of reproduction parroting received versions of Marxism and
feminism miss one of the most significant historical instances of the deployment of discourses of
reproduction as a sort of foundation for the complicity of nationalism, racism, and imperialism and their
interconnections. She highlights the ideological work of any thinking of social reproduction as a
philosophical concept by pointing toward its embeddedness in hierarchical racial formations at various
15
Alongside the early discussions of reproductive labor and the vibrant domestic
labor debates there emerged, especially in the U.K. an analysis of ideology as central to
the reproduction of relations of production; this interest was derived in large part from
Louis Althusser's influential 1970 essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses."
Within the women's liberation movement in the U.K. (which was, on the whole, more
avowedly influenced by Marxism than its U.S. counterpart), the work of Louis Althusser
was particularly important for thinking through the problem of reproduction. Althusser
argued that capitalism needs to reproduce its relations of production in order to reproduce
itself:
in order to exist, every social formation must reproduce the conditions of its
production at the same time as it produces, and in order to be able to produce. It
must therefore reproduce:
1. the productive forces,
2. the existing relations of production. (86)

Althusser finds ideology and the "Ideological State Apparatuses" (ISAs) to be among the
prime means through which the state guarantees for the ruling class such a reproduction
of docile subjects (alongside the more easily recognizable "repressive state apparatuses").
At the same time, he argues for the "relative autonomy" of ideology from its economic
base. In other words, ideology is functional to capitalism and is rooted "in the last
instance" in an economic base, but it is not always immediately determined by the present
needs of the capitalist class at any given moment. According to Althusser, the educational
ISA, coupled with the family ISA, has become the dominant ISA by the mid-twentieth

historical conjunctures. The language of "reproduction" is thus dependent on an assumption of the unity of
what is to be reproduced, a unity inevitably figured in racial and national terms.

16
century, supplanting the previously dominant Church-family couple. He analyzes the
school as the means through which individuals are shuttled into specific positions within
the dominant capitalist relations of production, interpellated by ideology as subject-
citizens of the (ruling-class) state to reproduce the dominant ideology (of the ruling class)
and with it the existing relations of production. Some are trained in the Schools to be
producers, others to be managers, others repressive agents of the state. As Althusser
points out, such stratifications are reproduced not only by the relations of production
proper to wage labor and capital but also within and through other relations, relations of
reproduction that cannot be considered altogether "necessary" to capitalism but that are
all the same subsumed under its sway and control.
Althusser's assertion that ISAs are "relatively autonomous" is an extension of his
earlier work on "overdetermination" from his 1965 book Pour Marx, particularly the
essay on "Contradiction et surdétermination" (where he borrows the term
“overdetermination” from Freud's analytic vocabulary). For Althusser, one of Marx's
greatest interventions was to think contradiction and unity (beyond the "simple" Hegelian
model) in terms of overdetermination. Discussing Lenin's analysis of the "crisis" situation
that led to the possibility of an effective overthrow of capitalist rule in Russia, Althusser
concludes that
if the "differences" that constitute each of the instances in play... "merge" into a
real unity, they are not "dissipated" as pure phenomena in the internal unity of a
simple contradiction. The unity they constitute in this "fusion" into a revolutionary
rupture, is constituted by their own essence and effectivity, by what they are, and
according to the specific modalities of their action. In constituting this unity, they
reconstitute and complete their basic animating unity, but at the same time they
also bring out its nature: the "contradiction" is inseparable from the total structure
of the social body in which it is found, inseparable from its formal conditions of
17
existence, and even from the instances it governs; it is radically affected by them,
determining, but also determined in one and the same movement, and determined
by the various levels and instances of the social formation it animates; it might be
called overdetermined in its principle. (100-101, emphases in original)

This insistence on "society" as a complex totality allows for both the determination of
capitalist society by the capital-labor contradiction and the recognition that not all of
capitalist society's differences, inequalities, and tensions followed automatically from this
single contradiction. The dominant contradiction itself is overdetermined at the same time
that it is determining. Althusser's theory of overdetermination has been derided for being
waffling and logically inconsistent, as it claims both determination in the last instance
and that "from the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the last instance never
comes" (113).
8

However, it was precisely Althusser's combination of "relative autonomy" with
"determination in the last instance" that offered many Marxist-feminists a way to think
through reproductive labor and the not-directly-economic vectors of oppression affecting
women as important economic and ideological sites for the analysis and transformation
of capitalist relations. Juliet Mitchell explains women's oppression in terms of
overdetermination in her 1971 book Women's Estate:
Past socialist theory has failed to differentiate woman's condition into its separate
structures, which together form a complex – not a simple – unity.... In a complex
totality each independent sector has its own autonomous reality though each is
ultimately, but only ultimately, determined by the economic factor. This complex
totality means that no contradiction in society is ever simple. As each sector can
move at a different pace, the synthesis of the different time-scales in the total
structure means that sometimes contradictions cancel each other out, and
sometimes they reinforce one another. Because the unity of woman's condition at

8
Cf. for example Laclau and Mouffe, "Post-Marxism Without Apologies."
18
any time is in this way the product of several structures, moving at different
paces, it is always 'overdetermined.' (100-1)
9

Mitchell, like Althusser, sees "overdetermination" as a profoundly political category, a
necessary element of any explanatory theory of capitalist society and women's oppression
in it. Like Althusser, Mitchell and others saw "ideology" as a useful tool for
understanding how capitalist relations of production are reproduced – that is, they saw the
"relative autonomy" of sexism and racism as all the same functional to capitalism even if
not immediately determined by it.
This dissertation considers the transformative possibilities of fields that produce
and reproduce ruling-class ideology, namely, literary education and poetry. Left women
increasingly worked in higher education, and they published and performed poetry in the
late twentieth century. It is my task to explain how they navigated these contradictory
commitments and to outline the formal effects of such contradictions on their poetic
output. I also consider how the contradictions of socialist-feminist organizing were
directly related to their work: such social practices are not merely a "content" that fills
autonomous literary forms; they are part of the formal fabric of the work and of its
circulation. I argue that a narrowly construed literary history cannot explain these texts; it
is my aim, instead, to produce a materialist account of feminist social movements and
dialectically to bring such an account to bear on the formal analysis of poetry. But the
poetry itself is also recalcitrant in the face of my theoretical framework, and the

9
Large portions of Mitchell's book, including the one from which this passage is drawn, were revised from
her earlier essay "Women: The Longest Revolution", which appeared in the New Left Review 40 in
December 1966, one of the first extended expressions of second-wave Marxist-Feminism.
19
resistances posed by poetic form are also instructive lessons in the contradictions of
reproduction, as we shall see.

* * *

In my first chapter, "Practical Criticism and Cambridge Poetry in the Mid-
Twentieth Century," I explore the history of poetry at Cambridge, tracing the movements
from I.A. Richards and William Empson to Veronica Forrest-Thomson and J.H. Prynne. I
explore the origins and influence of the "Practical Criticism" developed at Cambridge and
explain how studying and writing poetry were seen as moral preparation for the creation
or restoration of a better society. Practical Criticism, I argue, understands the social
dimensions of poetry through the intersubjective model of the teacher/student dyad. I
undertake to explain the tensions between this moral-pedagogical understanding of poetry
and the more political, anti-moralistic aspirations of Prynne and Forrest-Thomson for a
transformative poetics.
In my second and third chapters, I track the continuities and differences between
the Cambridge-based, pedagogical-moral understanding of lyric's social worth and
socialist and feminist political ambitions for poetry. I turn in my second chapter, "Denise
Riley's Socialized Biology," to the early writings of Denise Riley, who began to publish
and read her poetry as a young single parent in the 1970s poetic coteries of Cambridge. If
Riley's work inherits the literary historical lineage and political focus of Cambridge
poetics, its social and political ambitions come not from the literary classroom but from
20
the experiences of childrearing and feminist struggle in a capitalist and patriarchal
society. I read Riley's poetry alongside her contemporaneous theoretical, historical, and
political prose, much of which focused on a critique of the institution of motherhood and
both left and liberal ideologies of the family. Through a historical materialist reading of
developmental psychology and state policies on childcare and women's labor, Riley seeks
to understand motherhood, including her experience as a single mother, historically and
socially, through what she calls a "socialized biology," rather than as a cocooned sphere
of intersubjective moral relations. I read her first collection of poetry, Marxism for
Infants, as working to produce such a "socialized biology," and I consider the distance
from this inscription of the social to the pedagogical moralizing of the Practical Criticism.
In my third chapter, "Lines for Free: Wendy Mulford's Commitments," I read the
poems and criticism of Wendy Mulford in the context of her membership in the
Communist Party, feminist organizations, and poetic communities. Mulford and Riley
collaborated on a chapbook, No Fee, published through Mulford's Street Editions Press;
they initially released it in 1978 for an art opening attended by poets and then produced
another edition one year later to coincide with "Women's Week" at Cambridge. I read
Mulford's work at the nexus of Marxist-feminist and late-modernist literary practices,
considering her membership in the Communist Party, the Cambridge Women's Liberation
Group, the innovative poetry and small press circles of Cambridge, and her work as a
lecturer of English writing Marxist literary criticism. In a sense, then, this chapter
provides a micro-history of British political poetry. What interests me is how her work
tests these commitments against a lyric impulse that often outruns them. Mulford's poems
21
from this period, I argue, expose the tensions between commitments to poetry and to
political organizing, and these tensions reflect already existing contradictions within the
socio-political field. That is, lyric's interruptions of political commitment – the
unwillingness and inability of Mulford's lyric simply to reproduce any single "line" – also
bespeak the difficulties of reproducing feminism and anticapitalism at the level of
political organizing. The end of the chapter traces the decline of militant Marxist-
Feminist politics and Mulford's transition into anti-nuclear and peace activism, and I
consider the different understandings of reproduction that each form of social resistance
carries.
My final chapter, "Denise Riley's Geology," returns to the poetry and prose of
Riley beginning in the late 1980s. I focus on Riley's development of an idiosyncratic
linguistic materialism, which is framed in geological and horticultural rhetoric, and I
explore the relationship between this apparently vulgar materialism and Riley's shift, in
the 1990s, to a concern with the workings of irony that brings her closer to the practical
criticism of Empson and Richards than her early writings ever were. I trace the verbal and
conceptual connections between Riley's poetry and prose, and I argue that such echoes
and repetitions illustrate her theory of linguistic materialism while producing an account
of the sociality of loneliness and singlehood that her writing has always sought to
explain.
Finally, my epilogue outlines the situation of contemporary British poets who
have been influenced by the subjects of the preceding chapters and who are currently
involved in anti-austerity movements to defend social services and state-funded
22
education. I consider how these younger writers maintain a commitment to the critique of
state-funded humanistic education while simultaneously defending it from the coalition
government's push for privatization. I close, then, with a consideration of how the
socialist-feminist poetics of Riley and Mulford can be reengaged by struggles within and
surrounding the University as an institution, struggles that engage the connections
between the University and other social safety net programs that are being ravaged by the
minute. These struggles, like those of socialist-feminists in the 1970s, hit at the heart of
the relations of reproduction of capitalism, and this fact is where arguments about higher
education and the role of the arts and humanities need to begin.
23

Chapter 1: Practical Criticism and Cambridge Poetry in the Mid-Twentieth
Century

In this chapter, I sketch a genealogy of poetry at Cambridge in the twentieth
century, tracing the movements from I.A. Richards (1893-1979), F.R. Leavis (1895-
1978), and William Empson (1906-1984) to J.H. Prynne (b. 1936) and Veronica Forrest-
Thomson (1947-1975). In doing so, I seek to understand how the discourses surrounding
so-called "Cambridge School" poetry have been and remain indebted to the Practical
Criticism, and how the questions asked by Cambridge writers in their polemical and
critical writings are delineated by critics like Richards, Empson, and even Leavis. Finally,
I consider how some poetic texts by Prynne and Forrest-Thomson respond implicitly to
the demands made for "valuable" poetry by Richards and Empson and, to some extent,
presuppose the kind of reading that Practical Criticism teaches; namely, a close encounter
with the text in clinical isolation that tests the moral fortitude of the reader. My goal
throughout is to understand the constellation of forces that overdetermine the perceived
social and political role of poetry at Cambridge, by interweaving considerations of three
bodies of work.
The first body of work that I consider includes the critical tomes of Richards,
Empson, and Leavis. My aim here is to trace the development of an ideological formation
in which close attention to poetic texts putatively functions as moral preparation for
social and political life. Richards delineated his experimental project in his 1929 book
24
Practical Criticism: he provided his students at Cambridge with poems, divorced of any
contextual information (he withheld authors' names and dates of publication), asked
students to analyze and evaluate them, and printed their responses, interspersed with his
own judgments of their aptitudes. This kind of examination soon became formalized at
Cambridge: to this day, students in the English faculty there (not to mention throughout
the UK and in some former British colonies) are required to take an exam in Practical
Criticism that follows similar protocols. Considering the valences of this pedagogical
practice throughout, I outline the ideological currents running through the polemics of
Richards, Leavis, and Empson, and consider their actual manifestations in pedagogical
and critical practice.
The second body of work at stake is the set of historical materialist accounts by
Terry Eagleton, Chris Baldick, Francis Mulhern, and Ian Hunter from the 1970s and 80s
that sought to explain the rise of English as a discipline. These critics traced the ways in
which literary study, and particularly the reading of English lyric poetry, was purported
to reconcile the divisions in man's (sic) being supposedly wrought by industrial
capitalism. Finally, I consider some of the poetic, pedagogical, and critical texts of the
"Cambridge School" poets, focusing on brief examples from the work of J.H. Prynne and
Veronica Forrest-Thomson. These poets in particular, but also their peers Peter Riley,
Andrew Crozier, Wendy Mulford, and others,
10
were trained under the English tripos at

10
Veronica Forrest-Thomson did her undergraduate work at the University of Liverpool before doing her
doctoral thesis at Cambridge under the supervision of Prynne and Graham Hough. John James and Douglas
Oliver were both central to this community of practice as well, although neither of them was trained in
English at Cambridge and both worked in other fields; James worked as a professor of Communications at
Anglia Ruskin University, formerly Anglia Polytechnic, in Cambridge, and Oliver was a freelance
25
Cambridge, a course in English literature brought into being through the efforts of
Richards and others that to this day maintains a focus on Practical Criticism.
11
My goals
for this chapter are to consider the relations between these three bodies of work and to
describe how the latter two respond to Practical Criticism and related British ideologies
of literary study. Throughout, I seek to illustrate, by reading all three together, how and
why poetry was viewed as an important social battleground in post-1968 Cambridge, and
the strengths and limitations of the social thinking of poetry and criticism formed at this
conjuncture.
Here I skirt some fundamental methodological difficulties. My outline of the
Cambridge ideology of lyric can hardly begin to exhaust the full range of poetic
production and literary criticism at Cambridge University, much less the city of
Cambridge, and even less the shorthand of "Cambridge Poetry" that encompasses writers
based in London, Sussex, East Anglia, and many places further North. Moreover, I run
the risk of implying that a few texts on literary criticism and pedagogy, primarily
produced in the1920s and 30s, somehow directly and monolithically determine the
poetics of Prynne, Forrest-Thomson, and some "Cambridge School" writ large from
roughly 1967 through the present. In fact, such a claim would require a great deal of
historical and sociological work that is not the task of this chapter and that would almost
certainly not hold up. This would also demand thorough documentation of Prynne's

journalist and adjunct lecturer for most of his adult life. Later generations of poets trained in the English
tripos included Rod Mengham, Ian Patterson, and John Wilkinson, among many others.
11
The Cambridge Faculty of English website provides an "Introduction to Practical Criticism:"
http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/vclass/pracrit.htm.
26
teaching (formal and informal) practices at Cambridge, a biographical project quite
distinct from what I am undertaking.
12
I also do not have space here to go into the
fascinating critical and poetic practices of British mid-century writers such as Donald
Davie, Elaine Feinstein, Roy Fisher, and Charles Tomlinson, or Americans Karl Rakosi,
George Oppen, William Bronk, Charles Olson, and Edward Dorn, all of whom would
interrupt the trajectory I am drawing from Practical Criticism to Cambridge poetry (not to
mention the more popular British "Movement" poetry of Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes,
Kingsley Amis, and others against which much innovative British writing has
antagonistically reacted).
13
In spite of these and other omissions, it should become
evident that Practical Criticism remains critical for understanding much twentieth-century
poetic production in England, and particularly those works that emerged in relation to the
Cambridge University English faculty.

Practical Criticism and Society

At roughly the same time that Prynne, Forrest-Thomson, Andrew Crozier, John
James, Wendy Mulford, Douglas Oliver, Peter Riley, and others were producing
philosophically, critically, ethically, and politically engaged journals and chapbooks, a

12
And about which Prynne is notoriously unforthcoming.
13
An additional problem concerns the distance between critical and poetic discourse, since part of what is
at stake in all of these texts is, indeed, to what extent poetry can be reduced to statements and paraphrased
in the form of criticism. The very act of "writing about" poetry brings with it a set of propositions about the
relation between criticism and literature, or commentary and text, or object and discourse.
27
number of Marxist Literary Critics were writing historical materialist accounts of British
literary criticism. These were in part spurred by the Cultural Materialist project of
Raymond Williams alongside Perry Anderson's forays into so-called Structural Marxism,
and they were most famously undertaken by Terry Eagleton, Chris Baldick, and Francis
Mulhern. These critics traced the continuities and mutations of literary criticism's "social
mission," beginning with German philosophical aesthetics via British Romanticism,
passing through the work of Matthew Arnold to the early critical writings of T.S. Eliot,
I.A. Richards, and F.R. Leavis and his journal Scrutiny. Eagleton, Baldick, and Mulhern
sought to explain how the rise of English as a discipline, most notably at Cambridge with
Richards and Leavis, was continuous with Matthew Arnold's belief that poetry needed to
replace religion as a reconciling and edifying social force. Each of these late twentieth-
century Marxist critics effectively works from the argument that literary studies, and
primarily tertiary education in literary criticism, was designed in part to serve as an
ideological diversion from class struggle.
Chris Baldick, in his 1983 book, The Social Mission of English Criticism,
undertook, as he put it,
to trace the contribution of Matthew Arnold to the literary-critical renaissance of
the 1920s and early 1930s represented by the writings of T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards,
and F.R. and Q.D. Leavis. The achievement of these critics will be examined as
part of a common development of the ideal of “practical criticism” – to be
understood here in a sense wider than that of the technical exercise to which the
phrase usually refers, denoting rather a “practicality” in which criticism seeks a
real practical effect upon society, directly or indirectly. (Baldick, 3-4)

In this way, Baldick and others sought to explain the rise of English as a discipline
central to the British University by revisiting the arguments that were made for the study
28
and practice of literary criticism as an important social force. English, that is, came into
being through ideological and political struggle, and it was only in relation to this
struggle that it adopted its self-representation as the disinterested appreciation of
literature. This claim of "disinterestedness" masks a varied set of interests that English
has been claimed to serve, and these factors need to be taken seriously to understand how
English came to be such a central and apparently natural part of national culture. As
Baldick insists,
It is insufficient, especially after Arnold, to regard literary critics' social, political,
or religious interests as separate pursuits outside their literary criticism 'proper'. A
critical history which adopted such a separation would be inadequate, if only
because it would involve ignoring what the acknowledged leaders of English
critical thought – Arnold, Eliot, Richards, the Leavises – did after all say about
the purpose of their work. (15-16)

Baldick's project, then, undertakes to explain how, and especially why, these various
critics worked at times in concert with the state to move English to the front and center of
public education curricula.
Both Baldick and Terry Eagleton find in Matthew Arnold, as a poet, Schools
Inspector, and critic, the most canonical formulation of the function that poetry and
literary education was meant to have in nineteenth-century society. Arnold's work
responded to the changing class structure of nineteenth-century society, specifically the
overtaking by the bourgeoisie of the aristocracy as ruling class and the near-total
dominance of the capital-wage labor relation (although he tended to see class more in
29
terms of rank than as a social relation of production
14
). Arnold feared that the bourgeoisie
had failed to replace aristocratic forms of social control and ideology – namely, religion –
with other forms of hegemony, and he argued that literary education and "culture"
(derived from the German aesthetic rhetoric of Bildung) was needed to replace it in order
to avoid what he called "anarchy" among the increasingly large and powerful working
class. Terry Eagleton rightly argues in his 1976 Criticism and Ideology that
For Arnold, the aristocracy is rapidly losing political hegemony, but its historical
successor, the bourgeoisie, is disastrously unprepared to assume it. He insists,
accordingly, on the need for the middle class to attain to more corporate,
cultivated forms, and to do so by enshrining itself in a civilising state educational
system.... The bourgeoisie is bereft of that pervasive spiritual predominance
which has ratified aristocratic rule; unless it can rapidly achieve such cultural
supremacy, installing itself as a truly national class at the 'intellectual centre' of
society, it will fail in its historical mission of politically incorporating the class it
exploits. (104-5)

As Eagleton explains here, Arnold argued for state-run "cultural" education as an idealist
solution to class antagonism and ultimately as a pseudo-spiritual vehicle for class
collaboration (Eagleton is drawing here primarily from Arnold's work on The Popular
Education of France). In this regard, Arnold's proposals seem to follow directly from
Friedrich Schiller's ideas about the "aesthetic state" as developed in his Letters on the
Aesthetic Education of Man. For Schiller,
our psyche in the aesthetic state [ästhetischen Zustande] does indeed act freely, is
in the highest degree free from all compulsion, but is in no wise free from laws;
...this aesthetic freedom is distinguishable from logical necessity in thinking, or
moral necessity in willing, only by the fact that the laws according to which the
psyche then behaves do not become apparent as such, and since they encounter
no resistance, never appear as a constraint (Schiller, 143).

14
Eagleton makes this observation in a footnote to Criticism and Ideology: "Arnold's description of the
English class-structure – Barbarians, Philistines, Populace – itself rests on an essentially aristocratic notion
of 'rank'; he has no concept of social class as an inherently relational reality" (107 n. 19).
30

It is according to the aesthetic dimensions of the psyche that we "act freely" in
accordance to laws that do not appear as constraints. It is no accident that this resembles
later Marxist descriptions of "ideology" and "hegemony": Schiller's aesthetic State is
indeed reminiscent of the Althusserian model of ideology as "imaginary relations"
covering over the "real relations of production." Thinkers at least as early as Schiller
responded to the threat of revolution with the proposal of literary education as a
disciplinary formation for providing citizens who docilely – as if without constraint –
appear to themselves to consent to their governance by others, whether monarchs and
lords or, increasingly, bourgeois forms of "representative democracy." By the end of his
Letters, Schiller's "aesthetic state" has indeed transformed the language of "situation" or
"state of affairs" [Zustande] into one of the political state [Staat], as the "aesthetic State"
names a realm in which men [sic] encounter one other not as constraining limits to
agency but as pure forms:
in the aesthetic State [in dem ästhetischen Staat], none may appear to the other
except as form, or confront him except as an object of free play. To bestow
freedom by means of freedom is the fundamental law of this kingdom... the
aesthetic State alone can make [society] real, because it consummates the will of
the whole through the nature of the individual.... (Schiller, 215)

Arnold takes Schiller's motif of the aesthetic state quite literally, arguing that the
divisions wrought in man's being require a centralized reconciling force of aesthetic play.
The generation of "sweetness and light" in every soul needs, for Arnold, to be achieved
non-coercively, through a pedagogical inculcation of "Culture" managed by the bourgeois
State: "culture indefatigably tries, not to make what each raw person may like the rule by
which he fashions himself; but to draw ever nearer to a sense of what is indeed beautiful,
31
graceful, and becoming, and to get the raw person to like that" (Culture and Anarchy
413). This "sense" certainly derives from the Kantian proposal of a sensus communus
formative of and formed by the experience of the beautiful, as extended by Schiller into
the ambiguous domain of the aesthetic State. As Eagleton explains, for Arnold,
The corporate state, then, is the social locus of culture – of that symmetrical
totality of impulses which is the organic form of a civilisation.... 'Poetry,' that is to
say, is the final resort of a society in dire ideological crisis, replacing criticism
with consolation, the analytic with the affective, the subversive with the
sustaining. As such, it comes to denote less a particular literary practice than the
mode of operation of ideology in general. (Criticism and Ideology 107-8)

Both Baldick and Francis Mulhern explain how this model of English study as social
force came to fruition at Cambridge. Humanist critics fought against the dominant role of
English as the cultivator of refined taste or a branch of specialized knowledge that it had
previously been in the belles-lettristic manner of Cambridge or the philological tradition
more dominant at Oxford. The new humanistic, spiritualizing mission of literary study
was first institutionalized, Terry Eageton writes, "not in the Universities, but in the
Mechanics' Institutes, working men's colleges and extension lecturing circuits. English
was literally the poor man's Classics – a way of providing a cheapish 'liberal' education
for those beyond the charmed circles of public school and Oxbridge" ("The Rise of
English" 23). English found its way to Cambridge in the 1920s, albeit not without
opposition and conflict, and the new English tripos was established there in 1926, not
long after the 1921 Report by Sir Henry Newbolt, The Teaching of English in England
argued that English should be central to the national curriculum as part of broader post-
32
war efforts to solidify British national unity and strength through culture in the face of
Britain's decline as a world power.
15

My sketch of a dominant nineteenth-century ideology of literary study has been
intended to lead us to the Practical Criticism, in order to illustrate how it inherits a
tradition of placing literary criticism within a distinct socio-political itinerary. Unlike
Arnold, however, Richards, Empson, and Leavis were not state functionaries; they were
men of letters with a deep interest in science and in the possibility of producing
knowledge about literature as it related to life. Richards made his name as a critic in
volumes such as Principles of Literary Criticism, Science and Poetry, and Practical
Criticism that wear their Arnoldian provenance on their sleeve. While Richards expressly
rejects the idea of an "aesthetic" faculty or organization of faculties, he maintains that
poetry has and ought to have a special place in society.
16
In particular, the reading of
poetry has a distinctly moral dimension for Richards insofar as it provokes the reader to
take up a stance in relation to the world through textual interpretation and evaluation:

the fine conduct of life springs only from fine ordering of responses far too subtle to be touched by
any general ethical maxims.... The basis of morality, as Shelley insisted, is laid not by preachers
but by poets. Bad taste and crude responses are not mere flaws in an otherwise admirable person.
They are actually a root evil from which other defects follow. No life can be excellent in which the
elementary responses are disorganised and confused. (Principles of Literary Criticism 62)

The "morality" that Richards finds necessary for and lacking in contemporary life is "a
morality which will change its values as circumstances alter, a morality free from
occultism, absolutes and arbitrariness," one that allows for individuals to have as many

15
See Baldick, Chapter 4: "Literary Critical Consequences of the War."
16
For Richards' rejection of the "aesthetic," see "Chapter 2: The Phantom Aesthetic State" in Principles of
Literary Criticism.
33
"valuable experiences" as possible (58-59). This explosion of valuable experiences is, for
Richards, a precondition for a "good life," both in terms of individual satisfaction and
social efficacy. That is, poetry trains readers to have sensitive and relevant responses to
situations that incorporate the whole personality in an equilibrium or poise in the face of
apparently incommensurate, divergent, or opposed experiences and attitudes. As Seamus
Perry writes,
[T]he foundational axiom of Richards's theory, to which he returned repeatedly in
the works of his Cambridge period, is wholly Coleridgean: poetry matters because
it brings into balance the heterogeneity of your otherwise conflicting attitudes and
interests. The good life, says Richards in Science and Poetry (1926), is when your
interests 'come into play and remain in play with as little conflict among
themselves as possible', a condition of being which is to be found in 'the
experience of poetry': poetry effects 'the swinging back into equilibrium of these
disturbed interests.' (Perry, 117; citations from Science and Poetry 38, 39, and 28)

Richards' "equilibrium" functions, in his argument, rather like the perfect "sweetness and
light" that Arnold sought from culture. It is the ability to organize all possible responses
through poise, balance, and an ironic stance that can reconcile various impulses to allow
for morally appropriate action, hypothetical or actual.
Richards, however, unlike Arnold and his predecessors, seeks to ground his
literary criticism in "scientific" praxis by explaining the grounds for both interpretation
and evaluation in cognitive and psycho-linguistic theories of communication and
evaluation. For Richards, it is only through such a scientific understanding, i.e. one
stripped free of subjective mistakes (such as sentimentality, stock responses, irrelevant
associations, etc.) that poetry can properly "lay the basis" for the humanistic morality that
he, like Arnold, hopes will "save us." Literary education, and particularly exercises in
Practical Criticism, which I am provisionally defining here as the close encounter with
34
poetic texts in clinical isolation as a means of testing the ethical integrity of the student-
reader, are the best way to spread this morality around, by removing the ends of literary
works and studies from any heteronomous "aims." The "aim of the poem comes first,"
and, he insists in a footnote,
I hope to be understood to mean by this the whole state of mind, the mental
condition, which in another sense is the poem. Roughly the collection of impulses
which shaped the poem originally, to which it gave expression, and to which, in
an ideally susceptible reader it would again give rise.... I do not mean by its "aim"
any sociological, aesthetic, commercial or propagandist intentions or hopes of the
poet. (Practical Criticism 195n6)

Thus the poem is to provide an experience of otherness removed from the worldly
ambitions of the poet, whether altruistic or careerist. But equally important to Richards is
the demand that literary criticism recreate this "mental condition" without reference to the
preconceptions, desires, or beliefs of the reader. As Richards says of narcissistic
responses to literature (which signal for him immorality in life more generally),
The only corrective in all cases must be a closer contact with reality, either
directly, through experience of actual things, or mediately through other minds
which are in closer contact. If good poetry owes its value in a large measure to the
closeness of its contact with reality, it may thereby become a powerful weapon for
breaking up unreal ideas and responses. (Practical Criticism 238)

That is, the proper, scientific reading of poetry involves a recreation of experiences of
"reality," and this reconstruction of experience via the example provided by poetry serves
to hone the general evaluative skills of individuals. The mutation that takes place in
critical discourse with Richards' Practical Criticism is the move toward a scientistic
35
discourse of literary criticism, albeit one that retains much of the humanistic belief in the
civilizing value of literary study that is dominant in Schiller and Arnold.
17

Indeed, Richards insists that the value of poetry lies not in its effective exposition
of doctrine, true or false, but rather as the representation of experience, and particularly
of feeling. He accordingly works to develop a scientific means for understanding how
language communicates affective experience:
Feeling... may take charge of and operate through Sense... When this happens, the
statements which appear in the poetry are there for the sake of their effects upon
feelings, not for their own sake. Hence to challenge their [i.e., poetic statements']
truth or to question whether they deserve serious attention as statements claiming
truth, is to mistake their function. The point is that many, if not most, of the
statements in poetry are there as a means to the manipulation and expression of
feelings and attitudes, not as contributions to any body of doctrine of any type
whatever. (Practical Criticism 179-180)

Richards argues that any good reading of poetry thus involves the "full personality" and
that this practice can help the reader to develop an ironic stance in relation to the world,
one that then allows for "imaginal action": "the difference between the intelligent or
refined, and the stupid or crass person is a difference in the extent to which overt action
can be replaced by incipient and imaginal action" (Principles of Literary Criticism 85).
18

17
As Ian Hunter writes in Culture and Government: "In Richards' work, it would appear criticism had at
least taken the first steps towards theorising its own possibility as a knowledge. If the Romantic antinomies
remain (i.e., feeling vs. idea), they are not... deployed in the form of an exemplary reading. Instead, their
job in Richards' theory is to harmonise and articulate the organisation of impulses – the unconscious
structure of subjectivity – on which such a reading depends. In short, it seems that with Richards criticism
has entered the realm of the human sciences posing, if not solving, the problem of how meaning and value
are given to consciousness." (162) So we find, in Richards, the combination of this Romanticist (idealist
and humanist) Schillerian model of literary study as functional for society and a scientific development that
seeks to understand rationally the grounds of literary knowledge.
18
Cf. Baldick, 145, for a full exploration of "imaginal action" in relation to Richards' concept of the
"attitude."
36
For the early Richards, in the modern world science might have replaced the
pseudo-knowledge of religion, but poetry needed to replace the latter’s affective intensity
in order to train the attitude for ironic judgment as preparation – or substitute – for action.
As Francis Mulhern writes,
It was necessary now, [Richards] argued, to cast off the lingering vestiges of the
old philosophies and religions, and to turn for existential 'assurance' to a discourse
that equaled them in affective power without renewing their hopeless claim to
literal truth. The sciences would henceforth rule alone in the domain of
knowledge, but in order to maintain the psychological coherence of existence,
men and women 'would be thrown back, as Matthew Arnold foresaw, upon
poetry. It is capable of saving us; it is a perfectly possible means of overcoming
chaos.' (Mulhern 27, quoting from Science and Poetry, 82-3)

If poetry is still granted the power to save in Richards' early writings, this is to be
achieved through an apparatus of pedagogical supervision achieved through rigorous
literary criticism and especially through the teachings of Practical Criticism in secondary
and tertiary education.
F.R. Leavis took to new heights of polemic Richards' project to replace the then
dominant form of literary criticism, characterized, as he saw it, by aristocratic
declarations of taste, with a discerning moral criticism. In his 1932 New Bearings in
English Poetry, he wrote that "adult minds could hardly take seriously" the "romanticist
Victorian answer" to "modern conditions [of] disillusion and waste.... An adult can
hardly, even in his poetry, always turn his back so directly and simply upon the world"
(New Bearings, 46-8). In an early pamphlet on Mass Civilization and Minority Culture,
Leavis had asserted that "the critically adult public... is very small indeed. They are a
very small minority" (20). What matters here is less the specific context of these
judgments than Leavis's consistent recourse to the moralizing, developmental language of
37
"adulthood" to gauge varying aptitudes for literary study. Moreover, this rhetoric is
extended to explain social stratifications ("the critically adult public"): Leavis argues that
literary intellectuals should play the part of the spiritual and moral vanguard in British
society. It is not enough simply to expand this circle of critical "adults;" he wants the
cultured "minority" to have a qualitatively different role in English society. As Francis
Mulhern argues in The Moment of 'Scrutiny', "The 'revolution' in the discipline" that
Richards called for and for which Leavis saw his circle as vanguard "was also a
revolution of literary criticism against the palsied cultural regime of post-war England"
(28).
The presupposition here, as in Richards's psychologically informed works, is that
human spiritual and moral development is a necessary precondition for the preservation
of what Leavis called "continuity," namely, the tradition or memory of a homogenous
community that preceded the industrial rise of mass civilization and its concomitant
destruction of a culture held in common.
19
The anti-Marxism of the Leavisite set was
largely maintained through this insistence on the spiritual and moral dimensions of "fine
living" that had been destroyed along with the pre-industrial rural "organic community"
through the enclosure of the Commons. Economic and political reforms alone could not
possibly ensure the return of a morally and spiritually advanced common culture.
20

19
Cf. Leavis, For Continuity.
20
As Mulhern thoroughly documents, Leavis's cohort tended to suspect and even actively denounce
political programs that did not account for the moral training that only literature and its study could
possibly inculcate in an otherwise totally alienated industrial civilization.
38
Morality is linked here to a mandate for "adult" development that consists of the
acquisition and maintenance of a discerning moral stance, which, under the conditions of
industrial capitalism, can only be acquired through literary instruction. Literature is, for
Leavis and his peers, the primary remaining stronghold for the maintenance of this
spiritual and communal tradition. "Poetry matters because of the kind of poet who is
more alive than other people, more alive in his own age. He is, as it were, the most
conscious point of the race in his time" (New Bearings, 19). It is the job of the literary
critic and English tutor to combat civilization's downfall by inculcating the moral
consciousness that only literary discernment can still provide. Chief among the many
obstacles to this thoroughly moralizing literary education is the perceived childishness
and narcissism of the "masses." Leavis, like Richards, conceives of the "masses," in their
"stock responses" to mass media and advertising, as narcissistic and childish, unable to
see anything but the stock images that are given to them as their own reflection but which
they play no active part in forming.
Both Leavis and the early Richards, then, find in the study of literature a site for
the inculcation of moral value, and in morality a precondition for any form of political
commitment or engagement that might eventually emerge. This literary morality relies on
the maintenance of a certain stance against the narcissistic masses who oil the machinery
of industrial civilization. In this Leavisian paradigm, criticism is the means for the
passage from literature to morality via an ethics of intersubjectivity, a morality that then
serves as a political alibi for a model of literary studies that has no truck with politics as
such. In Leavis's hands, morality is an endlessly deferred and deferring precondition;
39
literature is the moral foundation for a politics that ultimately never does arrive. Leavis'
criticism, however, does not utilize much of the critical rigor developed by Richards;
rather, it is an amalgam of judgments of individual poets' characters – poet and poetry are
thoroughly mixed up, that is, in Leavis's accounts. In this way, it has been customary to
denounce or brush aside Leavis without recognizing the extent to which some of the more
unsavory elements of his doctrine are there in germ in the work of Richards, as Baldick
and others have sought to demonstrate. The continuity between Richards's early claims
and their extension in Leavis's polemics seems to be overlooked for the most part in
contemporary teachings of practical criticism and at Cambridge in particular, as we shall
see in my discussion of Prynne below. The Cambridge Faculty of English website's
"Introduction to Practical Criticism" indicate as much: "In the work of F.R. Leavis the
close analysis of texts became a moral activity, in which a critic would bring the whole of
his sensibility to bear on a literary text and test its sincerity and moral seriousness"
(emphasis added).
21

What is not emphasized in the accounts of Baldick, Eagleton, and Mulhern,
despite their painstaking reconstructions of the ideological foundations of English literary
criticism, is the extent to which the form of Practical Criticism as pedagogy has social
and political implications far beyond their literary-critical or philosophical "content." As
a material practice, that is, Practical Criticism – as it is taught and reproduced by its
students – structures a particular relationship between student and teacher, and between
reader and text. As the Cambridge "Introduction to Practical Criticism" asserts, it is the

21
http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/vclass/pracrit.htm, accessed 4/20/11.
40
formal practice of Practical Criticism that remains without, apparently, the moral
assumptions of a Leavis:
Practical criticism in this form has no necessary connection with any particular
theoretical approach, and has shed the psychological theories which originally
underpinned it. The discipline does, however, have some ground rules which
affect how people who are trained in it will respond to literature. It might be seen
as encouraging readings which concentrate on the form and meaning of particular
works, rather than on larger theoretical questions. The process of reading a poem
in clinical isolation from historical processes also can mean that literature is
treated as a sphere of activity which is separate from economic or social
conditions, or from the life of its author.
22

The practice in question consists of reading texts "in clinical isolation," and its
practitioners will be genially encouraged to treat literature "as a sphere of activity which
is separate from economic or social conditions." But beyond this particular practice, these
ground rules for Practical Criticism will "affect how people who are trained in it will
respond to literature." That is, these teachings ought to and will have subjective effects
upon the responsiveness of readers to literature more broadly, even when they are not
provided texts "in clinical isolation."
Of course, this is all quite consistent with Richards' famed experiments in literary
pedagogy. This description of a course in Practical Criticism demonstrates the extent to
which the latter has outlived its original justifications; fewer pedagogues today would in
good conscience assert the messianic moral powers of reading poems without context.
Yet the particular pedagogical practices of evaluation and supervision, the exemplarity of
the good practical critic (as represented by Richards' reprimands to his students' poor

22
ibid.
41
judgment and management of experience throughout Practical Criticism) survives almost
completely intact.
This is the main thrust of Ian Hunter's argument in Culture and Government, a
fascinating Foucauldian account of British literary education that takes issue with the
central assumptions of works by Marxist critics such as Baldick, Eagleton, and Mulhern.
Hunter objects wholesale to the assumptions of post-Arnoldian criticism that literary
study has some salvational content, but he likewise rejects Mulhern's suggestion that, had
Leavis et al. not rejected Marxism, their literary critical practices might have had
revolutionary effects. Hunter explains that twentieth-century critics tended to use one of
two primary frameworks for explaining the political and social value of humanistic
education and criticism: the first (represented by Arnold, Leavis, and Raymond Williams)
idealistically posits culture as the site for the overcoming of man's alienation, while the
second (beginning with Richards but bolstered by the French – primarily Althusserian
and Barthesian – infusion of the "human sciences" into literary study) views art and
especially criticism as a privileged site for the unveiling of the unconscious rifts that are
the conditions of possibility of literature (and of something like "the modern subject").
According to Hunter's patently Foucauldian framework, both of these accounts fail to
look at the "actual" historical development of English literary education, which instead,
he argues, shows a piecemeal process contingently aligning governmental regimes with
"ethical practices" rather than any unilateral "function" of criticism for any unified "state"
or "ruling class."
42
As Hunter argues, literary Romanticism, the content of which infuses post-
Arnoldian criticism, began as a refined, caste-specific "ethical practice" and only later
came to be seen as the special property of aesthetic education or literary critical
"knowledge":
Romantic criticism... did not emerge as a knowledge but as an ethical practice: an
exercise of self-culture based not in some deeper knowledge of literature or
psychology, but in the special ritual of ethical division and the 'practice of the self'
that accompanied it. It is surely one of the more remarkable facts about the
modern humanities that, at the centre of their conception of 'man's' cultural
completion, we should find a formerly esoteric ethical practice generalised
through its re-deployment as an instrument of moral supervision in a
governmental pedagogy. (Culture & Government 286)

Hunter argues that Marxist arguments about the politics of culture are quite beside the
point, since cultural education never did have the functionalist power that writers like
Schiller and Arnold ascribed to it. Yet, all the same, he explains, this erroneous
attribution of a function to culture is precisely what has allowed for English to be such a
prominent part of state curricula, and it remains the dominant rationalization of
humanities education to this day:
23

The practice of the ethical dialectic is thus both a mainstay of, and an
embarrassment to, literary education: a mainstay because it marks the place of

23
If, as seems to be the case, this function has significantly waned along with the general projects of public
education and social services, then arguments strategically pitted against austerity reforms that assert the
moral and ethical value of humanities education will fall on deaf ears. For Hunter, this may not be such a
bad thing. One of his final recommendations, which is echoed in recent mandates for a move away from
"symptomatic reading" toward reading as "description," seems especially flippant: "Historical philology is,
in principle at least, capable of dissolving the Romantic aesthetic and the (cultural) human sciences. It can
do so by deploying a description of texts – of their compositional technologies and historical deployments –
which is not contingent on the ethical or theoretical transformation of the bearer of the description. In other
words, it deploys a description which does not generate a 'pedagogical imperative', and is not therefore part
of the system of sensibility training or self-problematisation." (289) I can see no persuasive reason,
following Hunter's account, why "positive sciences" such as rhetoric and philology would not "generate a
'pedagogical imperative.'"

43
English in the pedagogical 'government of populations', which is responsible for
its enrolments and importance; and embarrassment because this practice defies all
protocols for rational knowledge and proceeds as a species of sensibility training
with an inescapable disciplinary function. (286)

That is, the "Rise of English" was not, according to Hunter, related to any political or
social function immanent to literary criticism, but was rather a gradual and contingent
process dependent almost entirely on the rise of "governmentality," a concept that he
borrows from the late writings of Michel Foucault. Hunter's book, like much of
Foucault's writing, is avowedly "descriptive," and Hunter is suspicious of self-declared
"materialists" who believe that by uncovering or producing more knowledge they can
undo or overcome ideological hindrances. "Aesthetico-ethical power" does not
repressively block access to the truth of our domination; it is, rather, productive of
practices of the self and of knowledge:
In short, knowledge in modern criticism is inseparable from the instituted
relations and activities through which a special form of aesthetico-ethical power is
generated and exercised. We have already seen that this form of power does not
operate on individuals indirectly, through their unconscious, by blocking
knowledge. Instead, it takes hold of individuals directly (by requiring the exercise
of certain skills and techniques; by instituting certain relations of emulation and
correction between them) where it in fact produces knowledge (of the state of the
sensibility; of the level of theoretical awareness). (281)

This "direct" production of knowledge is indeed one of the aims and effects of the
Practical Criticism. As I have shown, the social aims of literary education are precisely
intended to work through the training of "states of sensibility" that allow the student-
reader-citizen to maintain a stance of equilibrium while fully undergoing a range of
affective experiences.
44
Hunter's engagement with practical criticism is, as he says, markedly different
from those of Baldick and Mulhern. Where those critics track the claims made for and
about literary education, Hunter seeks to describe the immanent ethical practices of
literary pedagogy (both in the English classroom and in the exemplary texts of literary
criticism). Reading Cleanth Brooks on Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn, for example, he
explains that
the real target of criticism is not the structure of the poem, but the aesthetico-
ethical organisation of its reader, for which the exemplary poem – but equally the
exemplary life – provides the pretext for the practice of self-shaping.... To say that
the poem does not make a (verifiable, 'ordinary', etc.) statement, is not to say that
it makes a special kind of statement, or that it states only its own structure. It is
simply to say that under certain special circumstances we do not attempt to use its
utterances as statements: that is, to paraphrase them, verify them, etc. And for this
reason it is quite misleading to claim that poetry provides access to a special kind
of truth – 'the imaginative perception of essentials' – and that we must therefore
read it in such a manner as to preserve this truth. Reading it in this manner – that
is, refusing to paraphrase; referring meaning to formal features like irony and
paradox – is simply what we call 'having access to a special kind of truth'. (236)

This nominalist approach to poetic truth lays bare the extent to which "aesthetico-ethical"
regimes amount to local practices of the self (i.e. stances in relation to the text) grounded
not in any particular rationality or truth-content but rather in pedagogical power. As such,
explanations of the specifically poetic should be reframed, according to Hunter, in terms
of descriptions of how we organize responses to poetry in subjective rather than objective
terms: "the formulation we need is not: Poetry cannot be paraphrased (and hence
constitutes its own metalinguistic description), but: Under these circumstances (that is, in
obedience to this regimen, using these techniques etc.) we do not paraphrase poetry."
(189) For Hunter, then, both the theoretical assertions (of Richards and Leavis) that some
split in the human can be reconciled through culture, and the Marxist criticisms of these
45
class-collaborationist, idealist, and bourgeois-moralistic mandates, completely elide the
actual genesis and functioning of English criticism and pedagogy. Hunter draws our
attention to the textures of literary pedagogy itself in its actual material history (the
architecture of the classroom, examination formats, relations to other governmental and
disciplinary practices, etc.).
While Hunter deftly describes the form of English pedagogical practice, his
insistence on the absolute contingency of literary education's development, like his claim
that so-called "ethical practices" are not amenable to historical materialist analysis, falls
flat as an explanatory framework. David Lloyd and Paul Thomas have most usefully
contested Hunter's account with their own Culture and the State, a work that seeks to
explain how these forms of literary pedagogy have in fact been part of a broader project
to "represent representation" for the working-classes alongside the rise of representative
democracy. Through the teacher-student relationship (alongside other exemplary
institutional dynamics), the working classes progressively learn to be represented as
abstract individuals by the bourgeois state, and to subsume their own particularities for
the benefit of the supposedly disinterested "universal" representation provided by the
state. Lloyd and Thomas's project is, on the one hand, to illustrate how this becomes the
dominant narrative of "culture" in nineteenth century; on the other hand, they seek to
illustrate how working-class cultural politics rejected this developmental, edifying notion
of "culture" and cultural education as preparatory for social life, insofar as working-class
radicals rejected precisely the divisions between aesthetic, political, educational, and
economic life that this model presupposes:
46
Working-class radicals of the Chartist period were not slow to see that there is, or
ought to be no separation between economic, political, social and educational
self-management. They tightly maintained their refusal to accept the division of
education, politics, and economics into separate, if inter-influential fields. Instead,
education was understood as something that ought to be directed at the attainment
of political knowledge of the kind that was to have enabled the transformation of
the material conditions of the working class – a transformation that was to have
freed them from oppression. (Culture and the State 149-150)

In other words, Lloyd and Thomas's very premise rejects Hunter's assumption that
education in culture is necessarily a part of an agentless process of governmentality.
Rather, they insist that class interests and other facets of social struggle need to be
seriously considered in order to describe and evaluate the political aims of educational
practices. Given this perspective, Lloyd and Thomas find Hunter's assertions of the
"contingent" development of literary education to be rather suspect. Responding to
Hunter's work, they write that
There is no doubt that the specific institutions of education that emerged in the
nineteenth century came about experimentally and gradually in a series of
measures; nor is there any doubt that the measures taken were so taken in
response to, not merely in anticipation of, an articulate working-class resistance to
and contestation of governmental and capitalist measures in general.... This does
not, however, imply that a merely ad hoc and accidental formation of educational
institutions took place. What strikes us in all the literature on nineteenth-century
education, whether historical studies or contemporary documents, is the
consistency of the subject imagined as the product of the institutions and the
regularity of the spaces and pedagogical relations that form that subject. (17-18)

Moreover, Lloyd and Thomas insist on the specific class composition of state and local
pedagogical initiatives: "why is the object of middle-class education reforms consistently
and specifically the working classes rather than what he loosely terms 'the population'?"
(18)
47
I wholly agree that Hunter too hastily rejects the various normative theoretical
tasks assigned to literary pedagogy (i.e. the “idea” of the state, or "representing
representation," as Lloyd and Thomas would have it). Despite these misgivings, I would
like to retain from Hunter his insistence on the specific forms of literary pedagogy rather
than merely on their varied (i.e., "progressive" or "reactionary") contents. Lloyd and
Thomas argue the same when they insist that the
very formality of what is held forth in the classroom–the exemplary abstract
subject that the teacher represents to and for the students–is permitted by the
materiality of that pedagogical space. That is why we regard the classroom as a
crucial space for the formation of the political subject for whom being represented
is self-evident: quite as much as the teacher self-consciously assumes the place of
the pater familias (in loco parentis), adopting a combination of authority,
remoteness and intimacy, he prefigures the yet more abstract role of the state as
ultimate representative of ethical subjectivity. The school, in other words, most
effectively permits the transfer of the subject from the private domain of the
family into the public world of the political, not by teaching civics but by
representing representation. (19-20)

It is this last terrain of pedagogical relationships that I take up in my work, albeit through
readings of poetry and criticism, in order to discuss how poets, teachers, and critics
consciously consider the mechanics of their literary praxis and in doing so cannot help
but express assumptions about the value and intended functions of their work. This is not
to say that each writer accurately or rigorously defines their pedagogical objectives, but
that the work consistently approximates normative ideas not entirely of the writers'
making.
Following from the sketch of Cambridge discourses of poetic production and
literary pedagogy that I have provided so far, the remainder of this chapter will comprise
three case studies to consider the legacy of the Practical Criticism on "Cambridge
48
School" poetics. I will begin with a partial account of William Empson's dalliances with
the rhetoric of "tact," followed by a consideration of J.H. Prynne's Practical Criticism and
poetics, and I will close with an extended reading of Forrest-Thomson's critical and
poetic engagement with the work of Empson.

Empson's Tact, Revisited

As my brief glosses of the work of Baldick, Eagleton, Mulhern, Hunter, and
Lloyd and Thomas have shown, a number of historical materialist accounts of English
studies and literary criticism were written in the last decades of the twentieth century.
Fewer critics, however, have attempted to extend such politically grounded readings to
the work of William Empson, which presents significant resistance to any – even
marginally – functionalist reading. Indeed, William Empson presents a curious case
compared to the early Richards or Leavis, insofar as Empson's writings extend Richards's
critical methods, stretching them to a point that calls their very foundational assumptions
into question. Few have been willing or able to claim Empson, that famed thinker of
"ambiguity," for any broad political project or to recognize in him the same idealist
assumptions that Baldick and Mulhern found so readily in Richards and Leavis,
respectively. That is, most political "evaluation" of Empson has been of primarily
historical or biographical interest and avoided the terrain of ideology critique, perhaps for
fear of being reductive. But this detailed focus on "the Man" hasn't necessarily helped to
49
explain the complicated political implications of his reception and legacy in
contemporary critical practice. I will seek to consider some of the social dynamics
attending Empson's critical praxis through a brief consideration of his use of the word
"tact" in Seven Types of Ambiguity.
As has often been observed, Empson's first book takes up Richards's critical
techniques and some of his theoretical underpinnings, but they take on a rather different
feeling in Empson's manic hands. Empson's temptation is to follow the track of
signification in poetry beyond the reconcilable dichotomy implied by “ambiguity” and
into a form of multiple meanings—its libidinal energy seems to recognize no bounds. As
Seamus Perry explains, "Where Richards characteristically emphasizes balance and
reconciliation, Empson tends to dwell on the oppositions and discords which are the
imagination's prerequisites: a poem is often a more war-torn phenomenon in Empson's
criticism than it is in Richards's..." (Perry, 118). Indeed, Seven Types of Ambiguity builds
up steam through tireless explorations of the different possible meanings of pieces of
poetry. Although some of the "types" tend toward the reconciliation of multiple meanings
or attitudes in a composed stance (as Richards had it), at least the seventh, or final, type
of ambiguity traces contradictions that remain unreconciled by poetic consciousness.
In an early essay, Paul de Man praises Empson for precisely this willingness to
follow formalist methods infinitely without the pretenses of moral posturing. The young
de Man seeks to find the "division of Being" that is a fundamental abyss into which all
reference falls: "chapter seven develops a thought Richards never wanted to consider:
true poetic ambiguity proceeds from the deep division of Being itself, and poetry does no
50
more than state and repeat this division" (Blindness and Insight 237). But, in his praise
for Empson's first and seventh types of ambiguity, de Man needs to ignore the eighth and
final chapter of Empson's book, which he dismisses as "rather pedestrian" (238). De Man
recognizes in Empson the impasse or "dead end" into which formalist criticism of
Richards's type drives itself when rigorously undertaken. In Empson's hands, that is,
Richards' rigorously formalist methodology piles up a multiplicity of possible meanings
that effectively undoes the certainty of a recognizable, single, and unified mental state or
experience, inevitably moving toward the revelation of an originary rift within being
itself.
24
For de Man, then, Empson's later work on pastoral (itself ambiguously positioned
in relation to Marxist criticism) has the virtue of ontologizing the gap between sensation
and intellect. For de Man, it is in irony as "permanent parabasis" that literary criticism
bravely risks encountering an infinite regress of meaning and, in so doing, becoming
itself undone. In other words, it is the good critic's drive to endless interpretation that
constitutes an ethical and true relation to the text, and this is an experience that does not
substitute for some other "valuable experience" but rather tears open the grounds of
experience itself.
But it is entirely possible that Empson's eighth chapter is not a mere relapse into
Richards' territory but is, rather, co-constitutive of the "reconciliatory" project set out first
by Richards and under the aegis of which Empson wrote Seven Types. This would be the

24
Terry Eagleton argues that de Man misunderstands Empsonian contradiction by rendering it ontological
rather than social: "Paul de Man is not wrong to claim that Empson's work thus manifests a 'deep division
of Being itself'; he is mistaken rather in appearing to assimilate Empson's category of 'contradictory
meanings' (the seventh type of ambiguity) to his own model of semantic deadlock..., and in appropriating
the English critic's essentially social notions of conflict to his own ontologizing impulse" ("The Critic as
Clown" 156).
51
project to sharpen critical sensibility through an engagement with textual ambiguity
managed through an ironic stance. In Richards, this engagement would go up to the point
where one has reproduced or represented a complex of experience, a total mental state
that may consist in complexity and ambiguity but which is, all the same, unambiguously
itself, whole, and reproducible through exegesis. Empson's seventh type of ambiguity
breaks through the containment of stance and teeters on the edge of irreconcilability. The
problem for Empson in his eighth chapter, however, is a pedagogical and social problem
– how can one teach the kind of reading of which he is the exemplary practitioner
without thereby producing massive confusion and aesthetico-ethical relativism? The
readily available tactic, as suggested by Richards and later to a far greater extent by
Leavis, was to promote an ironic stance in relation to such difficulties. This stance or
attitude amounts, I would argue, to the fiction of maintaining a certain degree of
subjective stability amidst an almost complete hermeneutic and affective shuffling of the
text-object. In the eighth chapter of Seven Types of Ambiguity, Empson vacillates
between gleefully plunging his readers into the infinite abyss of ambiguity and worrying
that this just may be too much for his less sophisticated readers, or, at least, too much too
soon.
A number of writers have noted Empson's use of the word "tact" for its
ambivalence: usually, in his writings, tact is dismissed as a form of intellectual snobbery
or laziness, but at times it is a valorized pedagogical strategy.
25
The final chapter of Seven

25
Cf. Creasy, especially, for a thorough account of the appearance of the word "tact" throughout Empson's
critical oeuvre.
52
Types of Ambiguity is readable as an attempt to demarcate the demands upon the critic of
different social and pedagogical situations (in which, by extension, tact might or might
not be necessary or appropriate). Empson summarizes these different situations by
heuristically describing a sort of split personality necessary to every good critic (I quote
at length):
On the face of it, there are two sorts of literary critic, the appreciative and the
analytical; the difficulty is that they have all got to be both. An appreciator
produces literary effects similar to the one he is appreciating, and sees to it,
perhaps by using longer and plainer language, or by concentrating on one element
of a combination, that his version is more intelligible than the original to the
readers he has in mind. Having been shown what to look for, they are intended to
go back to the original and find it there for themselves.... The analyst is not a
teacher in this way; he assumes that something has been conveyed to the reader
by the work under consideration, and sets out to explain, in terms of the rest of the
reader's experience, why the work has had the effect on him that is assumed. As
an analyst he is not repeating the effect; he may even be preventing it from
happening again. Now, evidently the appreciator has got to be an analyst, because
the only way to say a complicated thing more simply is to separate it into its parts
and say each of them in turn. The analyst has also got to be an appreciator;
because he must convince the reader that he knows what he is talking about (that
he has had the experience which is in question); because he must be able to show
the reader which of the separate parts of the experience he is talking about, after
he has separated them; and because he must coax the reader into seeing that the
cause he names does, in fact, produce the effect which is experienced; otherwise
they will not have anything to do with each other." (249-50)

In other words, the literary critic must show himself to be, as an appreciator, like the
reader, so that his exemplary analysis has the force of some hypothetical or provisional
belief to back it up. The balancing act between analytical and appreciative, or affective,
personalities, however, varies based on the situation. In the elementary classroom, for
example, the critic is often in the role of exemplary appreciator and therefore must use
tact so as not to overwhelm and alienate the uninitiated with baffling analyses. Speaking
to other professionals, who already possess certain critical capacities, however, "analysis"
53
might be called for more readily. Both approaches, however, run the risk of
condescendingly stating the apparently obvious, which is one of the situations that, we
will see, may necessitate tact. In light of this kind of partitioning of distinct social
situations, I will read two examples of Empson's invocation of "tact" from the eighth and
final chapter of Seven Types of Ambiguity, since it is precisely through the proximity of
these two utterances that the contradictory ramifications of these claims can best be
understood.
The first example is more recognizably Empsonian and is echoed frequently
throughout the later writings. Empson takes pride here in his comparative lack of tact, in
his willingness not to stop analyzing just because others may think he is on going at
ridiculous length in his analysis of ambiguity. He has no truck with the false "tact" used
as an alibi for critical faintheartedness:
Many people who would admit that there is a great deal of ambiguity in poetry,
and that it is important, will consider that I have gone on piling up ambiguities on
to particular cases till the 'whole thing' becomes absurd; 'you can't expect us to
believe all that.' I have, in fact, been as complete as I could in cases that seemed
to deserve it, and considered whether each of the details was reasonable, not
whether the result was reasonable as a whole. For these analytical methods are
usually employed casually and piecemeal, with an implication that the critic has
shown tact by going no further; if they are flung together into a heap they make, I
think, rather a different impression, and this at any rate is a test to which it is
proper that they should be subjected. If the reader has found me expounding the
obvious and accepted at tedious length, he must remember that English literary
critics have been so unwilling to appear niggling and lacking in soul that upon
these small technical points the obvious, even the accepted, has been said
culpably seldom. (244; emphasis added)

Tact, in this case, would be stopping before one has amassed a sloppy 'heap' of
ambiguities through analysis. Empson emphasizes the importance of giving up on tact, or
something like agreeableness, for the sake of critical rigor, as he had in the preface to the
54
second edition of the book: "My attitude in writing... was that an honest man erected the
ignoring of 'tact' into a point of honour" (vii). Likewise, in the passage cited above, "tact"
signifies critical laziness ("these analytical methods are usually employed casually and
piecemeal") and an eager-to-please sycophancy ("English literary critics have been so
unwilling to appear niggling and lacking in soul..."). Either way, tact is readily identified
as a form of culpability that holds back the progress of literary criticism, and Empson
positions himself, somewhat aristocratically, as the cavalier thinker who doesn't have
much need for tact and will just get on with it and say what he knows to be true.
26

On the other hand, however, Empson sees that when facing certain readers or
audiences, "tact" may be a necessary evil and even a good:
Many works of art give their public a sort of relief and strength, because they are
independent of the moral code which their public accepts and is dependent on;
relief, by fantasy gratification; strength, because it gives you a sort of equilibrium
within your boundaries to have been taken outside them, however secretly,
because you know your own boundaries better when you have seen them from
both sides. Such works give a valuable imaginative experience, and such a public
cannot afford to have them analysed.... Under these rather special circumstances
one should try to prevent people from having to analyse their reactions, with all
the tact at one's disposal; nor are they so special as might appear. The object of
life, after all, is not to understand things, but to maintain one's defences and
equilibrium and live as well as one can; it is not only maiden aunts who are placed
like this. (246-47, emphases mine)

The logic of this passage should by now be familiar: many works of art are of value
precisely because they force the reader or viewer to engage in an ironic stance by
accommodating experiences and views foreign to their own, and it is this encounter with
otherness that allows you to "know your own boundaries better." However, this "valuable

26
As Paul Fry puts it: "he confirms what we knew instinctively, that his unbuttoned rhetoric embodied the
tactless tact of the gentleman's fireside conversation..." ("Empson's Satan" 156).
55
imaginative experience" cannot be tolerably analyzed by "such a public" (i.e., Richards's
stupid person unable to engage in "imaginal action" or Leavis's suggestible "masses").
Empson here names tact as the tactic or faculty through which "such a public" can be
spared any awareness of the ironic distantiation they are supposedly experiencing.
Matthew Creasy uncritically writes in reference to this passage that
Empson's reference to the 'tact' with which maiden aunts need to be handled
indicates that it might be rude to point out truths or thoughts that are already
present either in the back of the mind or as unspoken assumptions.... Tact
becomes part of the general social conventions which keep unruly desires in
check. (Creasy, 195)

On this well-researched but cloyingly moralistic reading, "Empson's tact" is, then, a
blandly critical form of empathy or of sparing the feelings of the stupid; Creasy writes
that "a humane ability to disentangle meaning and retain regard for the wider social
situation represents Empson's true tact and his critical achievement" (200). This may be
an accurate depiction of Empson the Man, but do we really value (or believe in the
actuality of) a literary critical practice the effect of which is to "keep unruly desires in
check"? Creasy argues that the various senses and values accorded to "tact" by Empson
are ultimately more or less complexly reconcilable. I am a bit more inclined to agree with
Paul Fry, who has noted that the inconsistencies in Empson's deployment of the word
"tact" correspond to the latter's Seventh Type of Ambiguity,
"If 'tact' then can mean either cant or – less unequivocally – doing the humane
thing, it puts us in the grips of an ambiguity of the seventh type, 'when two
meanings of the word, the two values of the ambiguity, are the two opposite
meanings defined from the context, so that the total effect is to show a
fundamental division in the writer's mind.'" (William Empson 32; citation STA
192)

56
Indeed, the tact that Empson champions in the above passage is at odds with the tact that
he earlier derides, but I wouldn't go quite so far as to say that they are "two opposite
meanings." Rather, the contexts are different, indicating, perhaps, a "division" in
Empson's "mind" between his critical and social tasks.
The tact that Empson recommends is really a tactical wager – say what you know
is not quite true (that literature is simple, or that the feelings and beliefs it engages are
beyond the scope of analysis) for the purpose of, you hope, leading others to believe what
you know to be true (the opposite of what you've said). Tellingly, this passage follows
another one in which Empson explains that "the position of a literary critic is far more a
social than a scientific one.... It is the business of the critic to extract for his public what it
wants; to organise, what he may indeed create, the taste of his period..." (Seven Types
245). So, this "business" of the critic will, as discussed above, sometimes require
analysis, and sometimes require demonstrative shows of exemplary "appreciation;" this
distinction is reminiscent of what Eagleton describes as Matthew Arnold's proposal that
culture replace the analytic with the affective.
What Empson misses in some moments but clearly grasps elsewhere is the extent
to which "analysis" may also be an exemplary form of charismatic practice with the
intended effect of inspiring emulation:
in the last few generations literary people have been trained socially to pick up
hints at once about people's opinions, and to accept them, while in the company of
their owners, with as little fuss as possible; I might say, putting this more
strongly, that in the present state of indecision of the cultured world people do, in
fact, hold all the beliefs, however contradictory, that turn up in poetry, in the
sense that they are liable to use them all in coming to decisions. It is for reasons of
this sort that the habit of reading a wide variety of different sorts of poetry, which
has, after all, only recently been contracted by any public as a whole, gives to the
57
act of appreciation a puzzling complexity, tends to make people less sure of their
own minds, and makes it necessary to be able to fall back on some intelligible
process of interpretation. (243)

Here, then, "analysis" is proposed as a means of bringing "order" to some contemporary
anarchy of appreciation. So that, like Richards and Leavis, Empson is concerned about
the "public's" lack of discernment and of evaluative capacities. On the other hand, in the
face of this "indecision of the cultured world," tact might be a dangerous and unnecessary
burden when really clear-headed, rigorous analysis ought to prevail. Empson reaches an
impasse here, however, insofar as he fears that his analyses of ambiguity can all too
easily look like the "indecision of the cultured world."
Empson thus situates his literary critical project within a contemporary social
context by suggesting that certain aptitudes or capacities that are especially useful for
dealing with the demands of "today's world” can be acquired through the infinite regress
of his literary criticism. Unlike Richards and Leavis, however, Empson does not insist on
a return to the values of the "organic community," his understanding of what is socially
necessary is in fact considerably more open to the historicity and contingency of "the
social." As Empson goes on to insist,
it is widely and reasonably felt that those people are better able to deal with our
present difficulties whose defences are strong enough for them to be able to afford
to understand things; nor can I conceal my sympathy with those who want to
understand as many things as possible, and to hang those consequences which
cannot be foreseen. (247-8)

Empson does not here oppose knowledge to belief or science to religion, as Richards and
Leavis do. All the same, in Empson's text the complex of attitudes that are supposedly the
object of study of poetic criticism are folded into the pedagogical practices of the poet-
58
critic as person, or vice versa. In other words, attributes supposedly relevant to "the
object" are in fact, as Hunter insists, directed toward producing different modes of
attention, affects, and subjective practices in the student-reader. In this way, the problems
of pedagogical management and the building of civic consciousness are interwoven with
the hermeneutical projects of literary study. Ideally, everyone would be able to enjoy the
interminable analysis of ambiguity, but not everyone is prepared for this, and so some
provisional tact is required to allow for people to reach the stage at which to learn
tactlessness.
The ambivalence of "tact" in Chapter Eight of Seven Types, then, highlights the
contingency of the politics of literary critical procedures. Ultimately, the choice between
going on or not going on with analysis does not in and of itself have a particular moral or
political valence. If Leavis thinks it better to stop, and de Man insists on going on, and
Empson hesitates between the two – well, these decisions, as critical decisions (an almost
redundant phrase), are tactical questions. Neither is inherently "useful" or "resistant to
instrumentalization," and each may provide an important pause or a rallying call to arms
under certain circumstances. In the context of Arnoldian ideology, Empson's deferral of
reasoned meaning may have functioned as an interruption or refusal of sweetness and
light, a provisional insistence on imperfectibility and a tactical rejection of the logic of a
representatively ironic "stance." Likewise, in the context of ponderous New Critical
celebrations of poems as self-contained "paradoxes," Paul de Man's insistence on a
structural intentionality of language may have interrupted the fixity of one hermeneutical
59
regime,
27
even if only to replace it with another exemplary critical practice – this time
that of an endless irony without any subjective stance to back it. Empson's tact and
tactlessness may have often been on the side of the angels, but they were not in the case
of the maiden aunts, in which a social bias supposedly removed from the scene of critical
inquiry rears its ugly head and is managed by tact, or an evasion of antagonism.
Ultimately, what remains constant throughout all of the critical texts surveyed
thus far is that social and political problems are time and again remolded into the form of
an exemplary intersubjective encounter following the teacher-student model (among
others). Politicized literary criticism might not be able to will this model away, insofar as
it is materially instituted in and by the mode of production (including distribution,
exchange, and consumption) of literary criticism itself. Other social formations – such as
poetic communities of practice or radical social movements, as we shall see in the next
chapters– may echo, reproduce, and interrupt these same relations, which are neither
entirely "good" nor "bad" from an anti-capitalist standpoint but which must be recognized
as social relations rather than merely interpersonal or ethical ones.

27
"The concept of intentionality is neither physical nor psychological in its nature, but structural, involving
the activity of a subject regardless of its empirical concerns, except as far as they relate to the intentionality
of the structure" (Blindness and Insight 25).
60
Prynne's Anglo Team

I turn now to the work of J.H. Prynne (b. 1936). I make no claim to provide a
thorough reading of Prynne's poetic, pedagogical, or critical practice. Rather, I aim
simply to show how certain threads of the Practical Criticism discussed thus far leave an
indelible mark on a much more politically savvy writer, one considerably less sanguine
about the possibilities of "culture" than Richards or Leavis. What I seek to demonstrate in
my brief sketch, however, is the extent to which discussions among Cambridge poets
about the social and political content of poetry have in fact been continuous with the
ideas of Empson, Richards, and Leavis. That is, the protocols of practical criticism set the
terms of the discussion in a way that has at times eclipsed alternative understandings of
the sociality of poetic production and literary education. I will demonstrate this through a
brief reading of Prynne's celebrated 1971 poem "L'Extase de M. Poher" alongside a
consideration of some of his critical and pedagogical texts.
The standard narrative of Prynne's poetic and critical development is surrounded
with a great deal of mythology.
28
A bare-bones biography, tailored for relevance to my
discussion, would go something like this: Prynne studied in the English tripos as a
member of Jesus College at Cambridge University. After a year of study at Harvard, he
returned to Cambridge as a fellow at Gonville and Caius College, where he has since
remained, having also long been the college librarian. Prynne was personally acquainted
with Empson and Richards and has tutored Cambridge undergraduates in English since

28
Cf. Emily Witt's article for a humorous first-person account of the transmission of such mythology.
61
the 1960s. An avid reader, Prynne's poetic output from the 1960s developed in
conversation with the work of U.S.-based Black Mountain and San Francisco poets, most
notably Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson, and later with New York poet
Frank O'Hara, Boston poet John Wieners, Europeans such as Paul Celan and Georg
Trakl, and contemporary Chinese poets, among countless others.
The element of Prynne's work that I would somewhat tendentiously and
artificially like to extract from the complex unity of his oeuvre concerns his relation to
the Practical Criticism. By Practical Criticism I simultaneously refer both to the writings
and teachings of Richards and Empson, and to its ongoing, institutionalized teaching in
the Cambridge English faculty. Moreover, I seek to trace through Prynne's output an
engagement with questions of political economy enacted in the terms of culture. A more
holistic account would need to consider Prynne's more overt political practice rigorously
in order to understand the thick overdetermination of his cultural politics. Indeed, his
Maoist political tendencies are seldom brought directly to the surface of his criticism, but
his continuing confrontation with the necessary contingency and indirection of
revolutionary movements could be drawn out in relation to his pedagogical, poetic, and
critical practice, probably with interesting and informative results.
29
I will merely suggest

29
See Donald Davie's Thomas Hardy and British Poetry for a fascinating reading of the politics of Prynne's
work from the late 1960s. Davie attempts therein to insert Prynne into a trajectory of British poets working
in the tradition of Hardy, which for Davie means a certain lowering of political expectations, in precisely
the form of a turn away from thinking the social and toward an ethics of intersubjectivity: "Prynne's
emphasis is frequently on patience, on lowering the sights, settling for limited objectives.... [L]ove of others
is a matter of recognizing their right to exist, and that comes about from accepting them and yourself in
relation to elemental and uncaring presences like wind and sun" (113-14). By including Prynne in the
Hardyesque tradition, Davie covertly implies that Prynne is like the "Movement" poets, rather than noting
that Prynne and the poets around him were working to reject precisely the "lowering of sights" and "settling
for limited objectives" that so readily characterizes poets like Larkin, Hughes, and Heaney. In a brilliant
article from 1983, Andrew Crozier argued that many of the characteristics of the Movement poets that
62
that his particular engagement with cultural politics is also indebted to the inheritance of
certain Practical Critical assumptions about the role of moral and ethical life as the
primary political problems posed by and to poetry. Prynne admires Richards' and
Empson's critical works immensely as attempts to lay down positive contributions to the
knowledge of literature and language; it could safely be argued that he has emulated
Empson in some of his recently published works of criticism.
30
I will argue, however,
that Prynne's poetry does partake in a cracking open of the reader's "ethical" training to
expose its social and political underpinnings, even as the kind of discourse surrounding
his work, including much of his own criticism, maintains an ethical-pedagogical (as
opposed to social-political) emphasis through an insistence on questions of "attention."
To get a sense of the discursive field in which the poetic community of practice in
Cambridge found itself in the 1970s – a dispersed and changing community in which
Prynne seems to have functioned both as exemplar and peer – I will look at a few
remarks from Prynne's published "letters" (this is the main format in which his critical
writing has been published in English up until quite recently, usually in limited
circulation poetry and poetics periodicals). In a letter to Douglas Oliver from January
1972, originally published in the 1973 volume of Grosseteste Review (a poetry and

Davie attributes to Prynne have seriously limited the scope and value of mainstream contemporary poetry:
"Poetry has been turned into a reserve for small verbal thrills, a daring little frill round the hem of normal
discourse; objects and relations in the natural and social worlds have an unresistant, token presence; at its
most extreme, they serve as pretexts for bravura display. It does not wish to influence the reader's
perceptions and feelings in the lived world: its intersection with that world is attenuated and discourages
reading back; transformation is confined within the surprises and routines of rhetoric" ("Thrills and frills"
229-230).
30
Cf. They That Haue Powre to Hurt (2001), Field Notes: The Solitary Reaper and Others (2007), and
George Herbert, Love [III] (2011). These commentaries are, however, far more concerned with
philological detail than any of Empson's published analyses.
63
poetics journal edited by John Riley and Tim Longville and featuring many Cambridge
affiliated writers), Prynne remarks on his experience of reading Oliver's then-new novel
The Harmless Building.
31
The novel is perhaps rather obviously the work of a
contemporary poet, interweaving, as it does, lyrical, narrative, and dramatic forms. In his
letter, Prynne praises Oliver, most frequently by noting the "goodness"
32
of Oliver's
work, particularly with reference to the shifting frames of "attention" demanded by the
text:
I have just finished reading [The Harmless Building] and I need to write at once
because I am struck by how decisively good it is, I mean really powerfully and
toughly so. It was exhilerating [sic] to work with because it was so closely cross-
woven and under control. That kind of intellective deliberateness goes for
maximum vigilance in the arena, all the tendons under multiple stress, it
absolutely is fine. I had to go very carefully indeed over the surface
transformations, following the jolts of body syntax from the synthetic identities of
person as subject, ready for skew pieces of affect, wary for quickened wits: it is
rare and truly exciting to be asked for that kind of attention and to find it then
taken up and used. ("A Letter," 152)

A few motifs are worth drawing out from this passage. First, as mentioned above, is the
question of the "goodness" of the book, which Prynne describes as "decisively,"
"powerfully and toughly" good. Prynne quite accurately, I would say, recounts the
exhilaration of encountering this sort of "intellective deliberateness;" Oliver's writing has
demanded that he "go very carefully indeed," and it seems that it is precisely such a

31
This letter was printed just one year before Prynne would publish his own Wound Response (1974),
which works at many of the themes and operations that he identified in Oliver's novel. It is most notable
that Oliver himself published an essay in the 1979 volume of Grosseteste Review analyzing "Of Movement
Towards a Natural Place," a poem from Wound Response, with reference to many of the same criteria that
Prynne identified in The Harmless Building.
32
Prynne is not the only one to use the moral language of "goodness" to describe Oliver's work. John
Wilkinson, for example, writes "I cannot think of another writer becoming a good person as an outgrowth
of his or her project of writing or whose goodness animated his writing" (The Lyric Touch 104).
64
requisite stance that Prynne most values here. That is, reading this book requires that one
be "ready... and wary;" ultimately, it is the demand and reward for a particular "kind of
attention" that this reader has found so "rare and truly exciting." Thus the "goodness" of
the book signifies as an index not only of aesthetic but also of moral value, of inducing
particular stances and forms of behavior. Indeed, Prynne goes on to describe The
Harmless Building as "a novel deeply curled in around the experience of good."
The imputation that Oliver's novel relays such an "experience" of goodness
readily recalls Richards' ideas about literary study's powers to extend "valuable
experiences" discussed above. Yet Prynne simultaneously moves through the realm of
Empson's ambiguities, insofar as such "experiences" are presented through violence and
discontinuity:
The ethic vector is violent and discontinuous, developing schizophrenia of the
body-percept and the embedding of will within larger spiritual bodies, but also
revealing absolute moments of truth. "The flaw in goodness is also a wound in
your image of your body." (152-153)

Still, Prynne is, in a way, more Richardsian here than Empson is, insofar as Prynne's
quick reading (and certainly Oliver's work itself) indicates a sort of adjacentism between
mental and physical experience, a suggestion of parallelism rather than of combination,
contradiction, or semi-autonomy.
All the same, this bifurcation of levels of experience is itself put under significant
pressure by Prynne's phenomenological understanding of pain. It is by virtue of a
willingness to man up, as it were, to pain that Prynne distinguishes the "team" of British
(read: Cambridge-based) poets of the early 1970s from its American contemporaries (he
most likely has Black Mountain and some New York School poets in mind here):
65
How interesting it is to see, if one reads In One Side and Out the Other [a truly
remarkable collection by John James, Andrew Crozier, and Tom Phillips] or
Printed Circuit [Crozier] or Brass or Oppoetique [sic; Prynne is most likely
referring here to Oliver's 1969 chapbook Oppo hectic], that the Anglo team have
their teeth really sunk into pain, great physical gouts of it, as opposed to the
watercolour joys of the American art gallery nympholepts. Your novel confirms
this; its elegance is much too vorticist for the pre-sexual phenomenology
preferred in l'Amerique du Nord. Only Frank O'Hara had that pail of serpents
always in view." (153-154)

This sexual or post-sexual "vorticist" phenomenology, then, is one that brings language
through the embodiment of pain. Prynne has been drawn as a reader into a form of
attention that involves the dirty work of sinking one's teeth into pain (thereby inflicting
pain upon pain). Prynne narrates Oliver's work as demanding of the reader an embodied
relation to the text, a phenomenological admission of the corporeal (and with it of
vulnerability to pain) into the kinds of experiments that Oliver is undertaking. This is
achieved, for Prynne, precisely through ruptures in discourse that are not contained by
any prosodic or narrative smoothing over. We have come quite a ways, then, from the
ironic stance of "equilibrium" demanded by Richards and Leavis.Yet while Prynne's
appreciation of Oliver seems almost entirely devoid of tact, it retains the language of a
training of attention, or sensibility, to an ethical text that rewards the kind of attention it
demands.
Moreover, Prynne's quick attribution of this vorticist vulnerability to the "Anglo-
team" testifies to the powerful legacy of the Arnoldian notion of culture, and moreover,
to a Wordsworthian quasi-theology of loss and gain. While Prynne is arguably correct in
the distinction he is making, and while he is also being ironical with the mention of
"teams," Prynne's language bears witness to a pseudo-nationalism here that is consonant
66
with the paradoxically provincial cosmopolitanism of Cambridge and the implicit
valorization of British moral character that accompanied and spurred the polemics in
favor of the development of the Practical Criticism.
When Prynne wrote this letter, his most recently published book of poems was
1971's Brass, and he was in the process of composing Wound Response. Brass is
generally seen as a break with earlier works such as Kitchen Poems and The White
Stones, which adhered more (although not in any programmatic way) to the projective-
verse project of Charles Olson. Keston Sutherland describes this break as a movement
from "lamentation" to "satire against that lamentation:"
Our failure in The White Stones is sung in lamentation, confessed in melancholy
outcries, iterated in vignettes shaped to a private life that are compulsorily iconic
of universal abandonment. What happens throughout Brass, but is only hinted at
toward the end of The White Stones, is satire against that lamentation and savage
mockery of the idea of a cosmogenic agency of surrender. (Sutherland, 119)

So, Sutherland explains, Brass represents a move away from the more or less reason-
based ethical exhortations of the early poems' moral injunctions to the reader. The move
toward "satire... and savage mockery" accompanies what Sutherland characterizes as a
loss of faith in "the power of lyric to assert fluency:" "The earlier poems are for the most
part both rhetorically and propositionally coherent. Their prosody is sustained across
specimen and trial disruptions by an emphatic confidence in the power of lyric to assert
fluency. The poems of Brass satirise that confidence" (120). Sutherland is quite right to
point to the distinction between "trial" and fully satirical disruptions of lyrical fluency.
Indeed, the poems that comprise Brass are characterized by shifts in register, usually
marked by jolting changes from recognizably "poetic" language to apparently scientific
67
and business-industrial jargon; lyric seldom gets the final say in any synthetic sense.
These shifts can be quite difficult to countenance, requiring, as per his indications about
reading Oliver, a mode of attention that does not rush to synthetic judgments or
equilibrium, as the earlier work arguably might have. Rather, Prynne demands an
Empsonian reader willing to sustain an ironic stance that refuses to accommodate the
lyric urge for swooning transcendence. This is what Prynne in 1972 might have called the
"ethic vector" of Brass and of his subsequent work.
Much of this can be illuminated by a glance at Prynne's pedagogical practice. In a
recent article for N +1, Emily Witt quite usefully points toward a document written by
Prynne in 2004 for first-year undergraduates beginning an English course at Gonville and
Caius college. The document, entitled "Tips on Practical Criticism, for Students of
English," is an extraordinarily useful piece of pedagogy; it is generous and daunting in its
broad exposition of the experiences forthcoming for the close reader of poetic texts. As
Witt points out, the piece is indeed continuous with some of Richards' initial assumptions
about and claims for practical criticism. Prynne describes the balancing act required for a
good Practical Criticism:
Articulating arguments based on specifically localised effects requires both
accuracy in disinterested recognition and also a certain logic of enquiry and the
support of value-assessments by balanced discussion: 'balanced', that is, between
assertions of mere preference or personal taste in the context of disagreements,
and the attempt to base estimation of quality or success on supporting feature-
analysis and comparative appraisal: what might be termed 'evidence-based'
critical argument. ("Tips" 1)

Prynne's language here, with its references to "balance," "disinterest," and "value-
assessment" is clearly indebted to Richards; it is especially in keeping with Richards'
68
insistence on an equilibrium of different affective and cognitive responses. Prynne's work
also suggests the same division between "appreciative" and "analytical" criticism that we
saw Empson (unsuccessfully) attempt to resolve through the dialectics of tact. Here the
"empirical" and the "personal" are also treated as two contrary tendencies to be
"balanced" or combined, but there is no synthesis for Prynne in a third term through
which they are best to be handled.
Like Richards in Practical Criticism, Prynne enumerates many potential obstacles
to good reading. He likewise recommends that equilibrium be maintained through an
ironic stance and a developed capacity for self-distancing as a mechanism for correcting
errors in reading:
Sometimes, despite efforts to keep your mind fully open and receptive, a very
specific point of view can take command of your thoughts, too early or too
completely, and then you may need to argue against yourself, to rekindle your
uncertainties so as to discover other dimensions, maybe even working your way
out of a deep and comfortable pit into which you have all-unguardedly stumbled.
(5)

All of this should sound fairly familiar from Richards's attempts to isolate and correct the
sources of error in his students. Indeed, this kind of ironic distancing is key to the kinds
of reading that Richards demanded of his students. Prynne, however, does not venture an
amateur sociology of the "masses" as the locus of such erroneous tendencies; after all, he
is writing for the elite students of Cambridge, and the lessons in Practical Criticism that
await his readers will comprise intimate, sometimes one-on-one supervisions with faculty
that require a different form of address from the mass distribution of Richards' Practical
Criticism.
69
Still, like Richards, Prynne advances (however tentatively) the proposition that
the skills and experiences drawn from close encounters with texts can accompany us into
other parts of our lives. Writing about the effects of "unity in retrospect," i.e., when a text
presents a number of apparently divergent elements that are only united retrospectively,
after completion of and reflection upon the text, Prynne suggests that "reader-encounter
with such integrating closure may prompt large and deep reflection, on how such
experiences can affect and satisfy us; and, maybe, can alter or enhance our primary sense
of meaning in how we view the world and understand ourselves" (7). This is quickly
followed by the rejoinder that "of course our deep thoughts may be not without a certain
smugness, too," but his first point is not thereby rendered moot. Prynne here entertains,
like so many others, the belief that aesthetic education can serve as training for moral
living in the world.
In the pages that follow, Prynne goes back and forth between outlining the
technical skills to be gained by a training in Practical Criticism and suggesting the extra-
critical or extra-literary (i.e. more broadly ethical) applications of such skills:
...what is the final purpose of these exercises, to what end are they instrumental,
apart from developing certain study skills which can hardly be cultivated merely
for show, like prize marrows. What is Practical Criticism for? The short answer
must be, to strengthen discrimination in making judgements of value about works
of literature, so as to make reasoned decisions about what is good: whether a text
under consideration (briefly excerpted or a complete whole) has value, and what it
means to make claims of this kind. (9)

This quickly leads to an Empsonian exposition of the various ways in which "good" can
signify, suggesting that the tasks of practical criticism extend far beyond local exposition
to political and social questions of good living (10). Indeed, Prynne clearly takes from
70
Empson (among others) an insistence on the possibility of contradictions (such as those
attending the overdetermination of the "good") that are not resolvable simply through the
stance of the subject but that are either metaphysically or materially produced and that
require changes well beyond the stance of the reading subject: "Some large and important
ideas may indeed be intrinsically, permanently, characterised as not-clear" (9). In this
way, Prynne foregrounds the limitations that attend the Arnold-Richards-Leavis emphasis
on the preparatory nature of literary study as moral training for citizenship.
The question of the extension or application of Practical Criticism
("microcriticism") to the domain of judgment more broadly (aesthetic and otherwise)
remains suspended throughout Prynne's "Tips;" among the more surprising developments
in the document is the movement toward a relativist and pragmatist approach to value and
evaluation:
Judgements on a small scale, micro-criticism, are not essentially different from
those made more broadly or with a larger scope (macro-criticism); it may not be
plausible to claim that a judgement can be definitively right, but there are
certainly many ways to be wrong: unobservant, flimsy in argument, facile or
shallow as well as well-intentioned but not very bright. In using terms like good
and other language-forms making value-claims we attempt to develop a shared
discourse of judgemental acts which may strengthen a shared sense of the values
which we care about, and why we do so. (10)

The question of "value" is increasingly foregrounded as the document goes on, and it is at
this point that Prynne's conception of value becomes most apparent. Writing here about
the nomination of "the good," Prynne presents evaluation and even value itself as
contingent and social practices. This constructivist theory of value is, however, tempered
by the ambiguous recourse to the first-person plural. Does this "we" exist before the
dialogical articulation attempting to form the "shared discourse of judgemental acts," or
71
is it a byproduct of this scientific (i.e., collectively falsifying) activity of evaluation? This
question is unanswerable in its own terms, but its posing again marks the terrain of
microcriticism as a social space, however sociality is to be thought.
The final sentences of the document cement the sociality of reading within a
particular pedagogical relation, moving away from the ponderous interactive space
described in the passage above. As we have seen throughout my sketch of Practical
Criticism, hand in hand with this corrective pedagogical relationship comes a particular
form of moral training:
Whether during this course-work you are asked to produce written reports, or to
construct the argument orally during prepared discussion, it is only a full
engagement that will carry you strongly beyond your present horizons, and
awaken your latent insight into literary representation as deep evidence of human
life. Make much effort, and learn the ropes. (11)

The tutorial authority over the apprentice of Practical Criticism is bulwarked by the
promise of a movement "beyond your present horizons." The document preceding these
words is indeed a useful guide for the new student of University English, presenting as it
does a wide range of possible pleasures and difficulties along the road ahead.
Additionally, it is calculated toward a particular audience, and Prynne rather generously
estimates the critical capacities of his students: this is not an easy read, and it may
bewilder as much as comfort. These are, all the same, students who have chosen to study
English at Cambridge, and they are rather likely to fancy themselves included rather than
excluded by linguistic and conceptual difficulties. What I have sought to mark in my
reading of Prynne's text is the articulation of a tutorial pedagogical authority with a form
of preparatory moral training. In this, Prynne's writing is quite continuous with the work
72
of Richards and others surveyed above, and is vulnerable to some of the critiques
leveraged by Baldick, Eagleton, Mulhern, Hunter, and Lloyd and Thomas. But there is
also a movement within this document against the grain of its structural pedagogical
purpose, toward a consideration of the literary text and of critical reading as already
social processes and spaces and of reading and writing as forms of labor that produce
value. It is this move that I will seek to track through a brief reading of one poem from
Brass.
Most of Prynne's writing is more explicitly engaged than the pedagogical treatise
with the question of poetry's grounding in social materiality. I will turn here to a brief
reading of Prynne's oft-cited 1971 poem "L’Extase de M. Poher,"
33
which was composed,
like the rest of Brass, in a period of capitalist political regroupment following the
uprisings of 1968. I read in this poem a strong effort to query whether a politically
committed, demythologizing and socially relevant poetry might have any
epistemological, moral, or even rhetorical ground left on which to stand:

...No
poetic gabble will survive which fails
to collide head-on with the unwitty circus:
no history running
with the french horn into
the alley-way, no
manifest emergence
of valued instinct, no growth
of meaning & stated order:
we are too kissed & fondled,

33
The poem's title refers to the interim President of France and opponent of Charles de Gaulle in 1969,
Alain Poher, notable in this case for his opportunistic and vacillating rhetoric of national unity and political
moderation (e.g. "preserve the unity of the nation," or, "there is good and bad in everything"). I draw these
facts from Keston Sutherland's meticulously researched "Hilarious Absolute Daybreak."
73
no longer instrumental
to culture in “this” sense...

(Poems 162)

That is, to risk paraphrase: the only possibility for the "survival" of poetry hinges on the
negation of the naturalization of language as either aesthetic ("the french horn"), organic
("valued instinct") or rational ("meaning & stated order"). "We are too kissed &
fondled," that is, we poets are both pleasurably and coercively touched and brushed by
this multiplicity of cultural discourses, such that "culture" is no longer, if it ever was,
successfully instrumental toward any other end. And, more alarmingly, we are no longer
in any functional relationship to "culture." The poem draws to a close with a bold
assertion:
...Rubbish is
pertinent; essential; the
most intricate presence in
our entire culture; the
ultimate sexual point of the whole place turned
into a model question.

Here Prynne's ironical sermon (which Sutherland reads as parody of the politician’s
rhapsodic speech) also seriously suggests that the attempt to salvage poetry for culture
may miss the "essential" value of that which has been grotesquely discarded and left to
rot.
Prynne composed this poem contemporaneously with the death pangs of a long
tradition that had considered poetry to be formative of British national culture. The state-
organized cultivation of attention to poetry had increasingly been left behind by a fully
administered society in which poetry was no longer instrumental in the ways that it had
74
been purported to be at least through the interwar period of British imperial decline. As
Bill Readings narrates in The University in Ruins, the growth of multinational corporate
global capitalism in the second half of the twentieth century brought a decline in the
perceived importance of steeping citizens in a neatly groomed national culture: "The
decline of the national ideology means that capital no longer needs to offer the middle
classes this ideological sense of belonging and is happy to proletarianize them..."
(Readings, 52). This has been happening at the level of policy in the U.K. at least since
the rise of conservatism in the 1970s. Of course, Oxford and Cambridge remain today
somewhat exceptional in this regard, insofar as their wealthier students won't have to
worry as consistently about debt incurred by the recently introduced fees and so can
pursue the humanities with or without state funding. All the same, Oxbridge has not been
immune from the rise of state-mandated, value-added rhetorics of fiscal accountability
that have cut off state funding to the humanities and social sciences in Britain over the
past few years.
If Prynne's poetic production was and continues to be contemporaneous with the
state's devaluing of literary culture, then, it has also been coeval with the rise in Britain of
what Jeffrey J. Williams calls, in the U.S. context, "the post-welfare state university."
Primarily under Thatcher, the U.K. moved, like Reagan's America, away from cold-war
era concessions granted to demands for social services and civil rights such as affordable
housing, childcare, and accessible education in the fields of one's choice. In the U.K.,
however, a stronger indigenous strain of Marxist organizing, significantly less backed
into a corner than the U.S. left was by McCarthyism, organized at the site of the
75
university. While the socialist left was relatively large, it was also increasingly
fragmented and sectarianized along Stalinist, Trotskyist, Maoist, and left-libertarian lines,
among others.
34
Left scholars and academics in Britain, many of them employees at state-
funded universities, were more vocal and militant than their U.S. counterparts in linking
the fate of the university (privatization) to broader attacks on hard-won welfare-state
social services and reforms. At the same time, they often recognized that the very
institutions they were defending had developed through vested state interests in managing
the working-class populations of the U.K. and its colonies.
35

Beginning in 1980, in fact, several groups of British literary studies scholars and
students created an informal network based in an annual conference and resulting
publication under the name Literature Teaching Politics (LTP).
36
In the teeth of a
situation that is uncannily familiar in the context of current budget cuts in public
education (primary, secondary, and tertiary) and particularly in humanistic disciplines
and others that are perceived as productive of "radical" intellectuals, Andrew Belsey, an
organizing member of the original collective at University College, Cardiff, wrote:
In the face of reactionary attacks on education most teachers will of course defend
it. But many may do so without real conviction: being aware of its actual
ideological effect, or having read Illich, Freire and the other radical critics of
schooling, they will wonder whether it is in fact worth defending. And how can it
be, if it is simply reproducing the worst excesses of capitalism? And how can it be

34
Cf. Beyond the Fragments for the most prominent English call for a unified socialist-feminist movement.
35
See Viswanathan for a compelling account of the connection between the management of colonized
populations and the rise of English Studies in the context of nineteenth-century India.
36
The editorial for the first issue of the journal, published in 1982, recounts the origins of the "informal
network" with the statement: "There is a crisis in literary studies." The editors go on to explain of this crisis
that "Inevitably it has been intensified by the education cuts, but it was not produced by them. The fight
against the destruction of education is not a fight to preserve it as it is now" (1).
76
appropriated for the people, given its apparent impregnability as part of the
capitalist system, and that system's ability to recuperate and incorporate
apparently radical challenges? These are dilemmas, but if socialists thought that
they were inescapable they would not be socialists. Some contradictions in the
system are problems but others are opportunities. Every institution is in process,
as a site of struggle. Education is no exception. (Belsey, 78-79)

I refer to these materials in part to indicate just how much this not-so-distant-past of
academic-activist thought has been rendered invisible, and especially for those of us in
the United States, where the legacy of McCarthyism and the culture wars, as Christopher
Newfield so thoroughly recounts in Unmaking the Public University, have rendered such
histories of radical thought and struggle invisible or quaint. I highlight from the Belsey
passage, and from the very existence of LTP, both the antagonisms and the continuity
between, on the one hand, struggles in higher education and, on the other, broader social
movements.
37
Belsey insists that higher education is something people want and need, but
that in no way means the university ought to be preserved exactly as it is. We cannot
merely argue for a preservation of things as they are, since, as we have seen, institutions
like Cambridge have always colluded with broader projects to elide and suppress real
social conflicts and contradictions such as poverty, racism, colonialism, white supremacy,
and heteropatriarchy.
The question that I am bringing to Prynne's poem, then, which I hope exculpates
the partiality of my reading, is how it engages with the moral-pedagogical dimensions of
culture drawn from the Romantic tradition, nationalized in the early twentieth century,
and progressively abandoned starting at least in 1970s. This reflection of changes in the

37
In addition to socialism, Belsey insists that defenses of public education have a great deal to do with the
struggles of "ethnic minorities and women to free themselves from domination" (79).
77
state’s relation to cultural education are one concrete way in which "Brass is," as
Sutherland puts it, "a prophecy at the threshold" ("Absolute" 115), as "culture" returns
increasingly to the leisure time of the privileged castes. Such that a refusal to engage with
state institutions designed to instill good citizenship has become an almost meaningless
stance, since the state no longer needs the working class and other oppressed people to
have culture anyway. Or, as Sutherland rightly explains: "Resistance can no longer mean
self-exclusion through definition of a zone of moral austerity, not only because moralism
has slowed down, but because we are not included in 'this' culture in the first place"
(146).
As we have seen, Prynne's prose evinces a faith in the value of Practical Criticism
as a pedagogy for life. So, what is the Practical Criticism to do in relation to all this
rubbish, and with Prynne's refusal in this poem of the discourse of culture as moral
edification? And, moreover, why start with that question? Or, as "L'extase de M. Poher"
begins,
Why do we ask that, as if wind in the
telegraph wires were nailed up in some
kind of answer, formal derangement of
the species. Days and weeks spin by in
theatres, gardens laid out in rubbish, this
is the free hand to refuse everything.

"As if," that is, the method of revealing mistakes and their ostensible causes (viz. "formal
derangement") answered anything. The only "freedom" we have in responding to this
trashed cultural (note that "theatres" and "gardens" are the sites here for "spinning" and
"rubbish") condition is the "free hand to refuse everything;" that is, every question and
every proleptic answer. As Sutherland explains of the poem's final language of the
78
"model question," this "model" actually amounts in the poem's prosodic grid to a form of
refusal:
its offer of communion between reader and author... is damaged beyond
recuperation: it jolts from one scrap of verbal smash-up to another, as if the poem
were indifferent to whatever schedule for interpretation (or even basic sense-
making) the reader might want to stick to. ("Absolute" 138)

The poem, that is, provides no moral closure to the student of practical criticism; it
promises no new equilibrium of sense and feeling, even as what Sutherland calls the
"grid" form of its various indented sections implies a strong and reasoned reordering of
its materials. Take, for example:
who is the occasion
now what
is the question in
which she
what for is a version
of when, i.e.

Sutherland is right to suggest that the poem does not allow us to "reconstitute the whole,
unsplit locutions that are broken up in the grid," but he acknowledges that, "if we could...,
it appears likely they would be inquiring or pedagogical." All the same, for Sutherland,
"the value of the hypostatised 'whole' text is uncertain throughout our reconstruction of it;
and the value of our efforts to reconstruct it is uncertain too" ("Absolute" 139). This all
seems quite correct to me. But it does not quite account for the extent to which, all the
same, the poem actively pushes us in the direction of this kind of reconstruction; that is, it
is quite tailored to the reader ready and set to get going with a practical criticism. In fact,
the kind of satirical effect that Sutherland finds so prevalent throughout the poems of
Brass would seem to be lost on readers who are not expecting moral training from their
79
poetry– that is, perhaps, on readers skeptical of or untrained in the rigors of Practical
Criticism, particularly in its Cambridge incarnations.
This is not to criticize the poem for its failure to work the same for everyone, as if
that were possible or even desirable. It is, however, simply to indicate that Prynne's poem
does include a pedagogical movement, like most successful poetry. It leads its readers
toward a certain form of reading, that is, toward an attempt to reconcile, à la Richards, a
variety of apparently contradictory linguistic attitudes. That the poem ultimately thwarts
such efforts does not mean that it bypasses or refuses this approach; rather, it confirms
the need for an Empsonian response and a willingness to dwell in ambiguity and
contradiction. I maintain here, as I did in relation to Empson's tact, that such a technique
does not have a politics in and of itself, but that it depends on the particular provenance
and aims of the poem in the various conjunctures of its composition and reading. For
Sutherland, it would appear necessary for a poem to first invite the kind of reading that it
then rigorously thwarts and frustrates. I worry that this might preserve the imaginary
relation between poet and reader (tutor and student) in the ideology wherein poetry serves
in subject-formation for social and political life, even as this poem forcefully asserts the
futility of such efforts. This is not, then, poetry as successful in producing a closed-circuit
of liberal subjectivity, but it does, all the same, bear the traces of a national project to
train readers' attention through a putatively autonomous lyric morality. In this light, it
should not seem too peculiar that Prynne could write his "Tips on Practical Criticism"
more than thirty years after Brass demanded: "Why do we ask that?"

80

Polemical Artifice: Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Literary Morality

I turn now to the work of Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947-1975), as a second
instance of a celebrated "Cambridge School" poet whose work, I argue, was in large part
a response to her training at Cambridge in Practical Criticism. A number of younger,
U.K. based poet-critics have recently returned to the work of Veronica Forrest-Thomson,
arguing against the widely-held notion, in the U.S., that she was a proto-"Language" poet,
a writer "before her time" who was "discovered" by the Americans who have inherited
her linguistically innovative legacy. This dominant understanding of Forrest-Thomson as
a Language poet was spurred primarily by Charles Bernstein's remarks about her work in
his "Artifice of Absorption" and was codified in Alison Mark's Veronica Forrest-
Thomson and Language Poetry. The newer British critics have objected that this reading
of Forrest-Thomson neglects both the institutional and literary historical contexts of her
work and the actual character of her poetry. I agree, and believe that critical
understanding of Forrest-Thomson's work requires a consideration of the context of
Practical Criticism and late-modernist British writers as she would have encountered
them at Cambridge. Additionally, these recent critics have rightly pointed to the gap
between the sweeping claims of Forrest-Thomson's theoretical prose, which are more
amenable to language school polemics, and the much less sure-footed movements of her
poetry.
81
Neil Pattison has contentiously suggested, in a remarkable short essay, that Mark
almost completely elides the particularly British provenance of Forrest-Thomson's work
and particularly her close contact and dialogue with Cambridge-based poets J.H. Prynne,
Anthony Barnett, and Andrew Crozier. Pattison further argues that, contrary to Forrest-
Thomson's own critical assertions, her poetry is very much marked by and engaged with
"real human beings" and "the problem of love:"
Veronica Forrest-Thomson's work may be valued precisely for its late discovery
about lyric's second-guess; its recognition, brought about by love's crisis, that
lyric problems are also the no-less complex problems in the relations between
"real persons," and may require us to know them as such, without lyric being
itself "dissolved" by ironic depredations upon its notionally pristine sincerity.
(Pattison, 4)

Pattison here reads in Forrest-Thomson's last poetry a recognition of some continuity
between "lyric problems" and "problems in the relations between 'real persons.'"
38
This is
never for Forrest-Thomson a seamless continuity (and Pattison certainly does not claim it
to be); in fact, as Pattison insists, it suggests a semi-autonomous region for lyric
knowledge in what he calls its "second-guess." Pattison highlights lyric as a persistent
problem for Cambridge poetics, one that, I would argue, stems in part from the British,
and particularly Cambridge-based, tradition of practical criticism. Forrest-Thomson's
critical prose is, on my reading, largely a polemical response to the British tradition of
"cultural education", one that rejects some of its most dearly held presuppositions while
proceeding, all the same, with many of its assumptions and methods. It is my contention
that Forrest-Thomson's objections to other critical practices are actually continuous with

38
Pattison draws this language from Forrest-Thomson's "Preface" to On the Periphery, in which she writes
that "as to theme, this book is the chart of three quests. The quest for a style already discussed, the quest for
a subject other than the difficulty of writing, and the quest for another human being" (Selected Poems 168).
82
strands of the Practical Criticism against which she is reacting. Most specifically, I am
interested in how, in spite of her claims to the contrary, Forrest-Thomson's work
implicitly assents to the normative idea that poetry and literary criticism can and should
provide exemplary moral techniques to take a stand in what she calls "the awfulness of
the modern world" (Collected Poems 167).
Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Contemporary Poetry pits poetry's singular
constructions of knowledge against totalizing preconceptions of "the world." Many
elements of the Cambridge-based "Practical Criticism" and the American "New
Criticism" show up in Poetic Artifice, echoing seminal mid-century U.K and U.S.
theories of poetry as illustrated, for example, by Cleanth Brooks' essay "The Heresy of
Paraphrase," in which Brooks rightly rails against reducing poems to discursive
"statements" about the world. He proposes there a new conception of the "structure" of
the poem as an organization of material in a unity for the effect of an "achieved harmony"
(The Well Wrought Urn 193-95). Forrest-Thomson certainly does not espouse any such
"harmony," but the idea of Artifice as poetic ordering is present throughout her work, as
evidenced by the following passage:
[T]he 'message' in the old sense is not what is important; message in the new
sense is a product of the re-creation of the old orders, primarily through non-
semantic levels. The poet as tribal mediator does not himself know what world he
is in until the mediation has taken place (the poem is written). The worst
disservice criticism can do poetry is to try to understand it too soon, for this
devalues the importance of real innovation which must take place on the non-
semantic levels. Criticism's function is eventually to try to understand, at a late
stage, even Artifice. (161)

This refusal of human intentionality echoes Wimsatt and Beardsley's New Critical work
on the "intentional fallacy" while insisting that the "message" is "a product of the re-
83
creation of the old orders" (i.e., "Artifice"). This re-creation is accomplished without any
empirical agent: it happens in and as the poem, and it is only at "a late stage" that it can
be understood or its effects felt (i.e., that a reader can attempt a "good naturalisation" or
"thematic synthesis"). Forrest-Thomson's insistence on the "non-semantic" levels of
language is one of her strongest and most useful lessons, even as these "non-semantic"
levels are eventually "naturalised" through the critic's activity of finding meaning in the
new order's contours and structure. As Forrest-Thomson continues to insist,
Artifice tells us that selecting and ordering external contexts is one of the basic
manoeuvres in writing and reading poetry.... When we get behind the surface of a
poem we encounter not another kind of meaning nor a different non-poetic world,
but another organisation of the levels of language that produce meaning. Through
the relation between these levels, language and the world may be changed,
changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. Often, of course, the birth is slow and
obscured; it may seem a blur rather than a change. (36)

The imperceptibility of (good) poetry's "change" is here chalked up to its slow pace and
lack of visibility: "language and world may be changed, changed utterly" but this "birth is
slow and obscured." Thus there is no directly perceptible movement from the world into
the poem, nor is there any immediately visible movement back out into the world; all the
same there is an assertion of "utter change": "The world is not something static,
irredeemably given by a natural language. When language is re-imagined the world
expands with it" (19). This change takes place through an organization that is neither
determined by nor entirely autonomous from the "old order" of the "non-poetic world."
In order to attribute this power to poetry, Forrest-Thomson ascribes Artifice to
poetry rather than to prose, a distinction that can only be maintained through some at
least minimally operational dichotomy between poetry and prose. Since poetry seems to
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be defined here implicitly (and tautologically) as that which is made different by Artifice
(which is what poems are made of), "prose" becomes a fictional entity, a dialectical
negation of the poetic that is all the same ostensibly the very discourse (i.e., that of
criticism) through which a properly poetic recognition of Artifice can take place.
Rather than censuring Forrest-Thomson's distinction between poetry and prose, I
want to understand it, and most of her prose, as the attempt to navigate the impasse of
claiming an importance for poetry while distrusting, and even despising, previous
attempts to do so. For, all the same, this element of Forrest-Thomson's theory rehearses a
long tradition of literary critical thinking traceable at least as far back as German
philosophical aesthetics, and particularly Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of
Man, a tradition most famously formalized in England by Matthew Arnold. As I have
already argued, this post-Kantian tradition posits the aesthetic as a space in which
antinomies, and particularly the seemingly ineradicable distance between individual self
and civil or political society, can be reconciled through the "free play" of the mental
faculties. Part of my point here will be to show, through Forrest-Thomson's poetic
argument with Empson, just how much the terms of the discussion were set by debates
within the framework of philosophical aesthetics as instituted, in the context of
nineteenth and twentieth-century England, as a question of moral improvement and civic
management. The particular issues over which she argues with other critics (and
particularly Empson) tend to surround the question of the relation between poetic artifice
and the "external world." Forrest-Thomson's efforts to sever Artifice from the "non-
verbal world" seem to be largely responses to the moralizing facets of literary culture that
85
extend from Arnold through the Practical Criticism and culminate in Leavis's anti-
Marxist proposals for cultural struggle to preserve the great tradition of English
humanism.
Keston Sutherland has, like many of her readers, argued that the claims made by
Forrest-Thomson's criticism are belied by her poetry, which, on his account, frequently
attempts and fails to replicate the theoretical maxims in poetic form. He calls this an
"interesting" failure in that "the pleasure in [her poems] overrun[s] the strict limits of the
theory they are meant to demonstrate" (Sutherland, 4). Sutherland usefully glosses her
theories, as expounded in Poetic Artifice, in terms of their relation to the tradition of
literary criticism as a form of moral preparation for civic engagement. I will quote his
lucid account at some length:
Its question is "how we ourselves should behave... as readers," [PA 15] and its
answer is that we should not objectionably turn poems into stories about life,
history, and the world.... We might think that this question, "how we ourselves
should behave... as readers," must be a moral question..., but her emphatically
restricted interest, in Poetic Artifice, in our behaviour only "as readers," suggests
that Forrest-Thomson may intend, if not an outright dismissal of moral questions,
than at least a specimen question whose moral meaning is subversively isolated.
Subversively because her question tells us that how we behave "as readers" has,
radically at least, nothing to do with any other way we might behave in what she
was satisfied to call the external world, and indeed that the confusion of the two is
objectionable; and if that is true then what we call morality must itself be radically
discontinuous in order to exist in both separate contexts, that is, both in the
context of reading and in the context of living. How we behave in the context of
reading is not just an instance of how we behave in general. If there is a morality
of the text, it may be structurally homologous with, but will not be simply the
same thing as, nor simply capable of influencing or being influenced by, other
moralities. (Sutherland, 1-2)

Sutherland provides here an excellent description of Poetic Artifice's critical injunction
for the reader of poetry to abstain from moralizing. In this way, Forrest-Thomson seeks to
86
sever critical judgment from moral judgment, to repudiate the idea that reading poems
serves as preparation for action in the world. Sutherland glosses this position while
suggesting the difficulty of maintaining it:
Our knowledge that we are reading a poem must not be just that easy and implicit
knowledge we have of everything we do as we do it, it must be knowledge
continually recollected, named and owned as such. I am reading, I must think as I
read, and the fact is I'm reading a poem.... Bad reading leads, typically and
disastrously, not just to a stupid paraphrase or misinterpretation, but to the
specific occlusion of poetic artifice. Bad reading is a deeply objectionable and not
merely an irrelevant thing to do, because it is pre-eminently through the study and
enjoyment of poetic artifice and by keeping in the primary context of stressed and
recollected knowledge that a reader may "free himself from the fixed forms of
thought which ordinary language imposes on our minds." [PA 16] If Forrest-
Thomson had written nothing that contradicted or undermined this, there would
be little to distinguish her from a Language poet except that she was allowed to be
friends with J.H. Prynne. (2-3)

I think that further light is shed on these difficulties when the history of Practical
Criticism at Cambridge is more explicitly taken into account. To say this is not to fault
Sutherland; in fact, this point is probably so obvious to Sutherland, himself trained at
Cambridge, as to not require comment. So that what remains implicit in his essay is the
extraordinary force of the tradition against which Forrest-Thomson's polemic is directed:
namely, the tradition of Practical Criticism, the then–and still–institutionalized form of
English literary study that developed directly out of Cambridge faculty and alums, from
I.A. Richards and Empson to F.R. Leavis and the Scrutiny set.
In the introduction to Poetic Artifice, Forrest-Thomson complains about the
critical tendency to reduce poetry to propositional statements and to focus merely on
semantic-levels of language that belie the actual form of the poem. But alongside this
comes an assertion that Sutherland feels is comparable to the (in his view) dangerously
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euphoric consumerist "freedom" promoted by the American Language poets, the
assertion that through good, productive readings, poetry can change our world. Forrest-
Thomson writes:
Contemporary poetry has suffered from critics' disposition to make poetry above
all a statement about the external world, and therefore it is now especially
important somewhat to redress the balance, to stress the importance of artifice.
Poetry can only be a valid and valuable activity when we recognise the value of
the artifice which makes it different from prose. Indeed, it is only through artifice
that poetry can challenge our ordinary linguistic orderings of the world, make us
question the way in which we make sense of things, and induce us to consider its
alternative linguistic orders as a new way of viewing the world. (xi)

A murkiness emerges here between Artifice as a way of viewing the world and as a new
world in its own right. It is in the recreation and reordering of the world that Forrest-
Thomson sees the subversive and liberating potential of reading poetry, but this is still
referred to as a "way of viewing the world." Only now, the "world" is the internal world
of the poem, which no longer maps onto external referents. In this sense, Forrest-
Thomson reinscribes the moralism that she seeks to excise from her work, although the
new ways of ordering the world can no longer be translated neatly back into non-poetic
languages. Aporetic though this morality may be, it continues to operate via the
machinery of a pedagogical-ethical exemplarity: goodness is still attached to good
reading, and perhaps this is the only kind of goodness that remains ascertainable.
In many ways, Forrest-Thomson's work is continuous with the polemics of early
Richards, who had put forth the idea that poetry's "pseudo-statements" should not be
immediately referred to the outside world and judged as "true" or "false." At the same
time, Richards insisted that, while poetry was not a statement about the "external world,"
it was the communication of a mental state, however complex. The success or failure of a
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poem, then, lay in its ability to make recognizable and to reproduce in the reader, an
original mental state or structure of feeling. Empson, for his part, queried the unity of
such mental states or "attitudes," but held in his theoretical statements to the possibility
for rational reconstructions of poetic language. Forrest-Thomson rejects Empson's
rationalism, insisting that external standards of rationality do not apply to the new
orderings of poetic artifice.
I have argued here that Forrest-Thomson's resistance to the Richards-Empson
theory of communication is, however, not merely the result of her education in
structuralism, or in analytic linguistics, or her taste for poets like Ashbery and Prynne
(who provides, on her reading, an example of what she calls "tendentious obscurity"
39
). I
would argue that Forrest-Thomson's Poetic Artifice operates as much as polemic as it
does a faulty scientific study. For Forrest-Thomson, poetic artifice (and not the "state of
mind" based criticism argued for by Richards and even by Empson in Seven Types of
Ambiguity) must be asserted as a counterweight to the moralism that attends the
otherwise useful methods of Practical Criticism. While her own critical methods are very
much drawn from Empson, Richards, and the American New Criticism, the polemic of

39
Cf. Keery for criticism of Forrest-Thomson's interpretation of Prynne's poem "Of Sanguine Fire." Keery
also notes that Empson, Forrest-Thomson, Prynne have each written at length on Shakespeare's Sonnet 94
(Keery, 12). Empson devoted a chapter of Some Versions to the sonnet's connections to Measure for
Measure, Forrest-Thomson in Poetic Artifice complained that Empson had failed to attend to the poem's
formal features, and Prynne composed a lengthy close reading of the poem spanning nearly 90 pages and
detailing the historical usage and linguistic complexities of every word and phrase in the poem in sequence
(They That Haue). Interestingly, Prynne does not mention Forrest-Thomson's reading, though he does
briefly touch upon Empson's. Keery: "Prynne devotes 86 pages of small print to a single sonnet. It is an
exhaustively scholarly production, in which constant ‘external reference’ is made both to theology and to
speech-act theory, yet Prynne is prepared to risk a spectacular ‘bad naturalisation’ in order to make his
crucial point about immortality." An in-depth comparison of these three readings (among others) would
certainly make for a fascinating study of the protocols of Cambridge criticism.
89
her critical work seeks to unhinge such methods from the moralism of early Richards and
the Scrutiny set by redirecting the attention that these writers gave to "external" contexts
and "non-verbal elements" toward the "internal organization" of poetry. Thus, her work is
very much of and from mid-twentieth century Cambridge, even as its provenance extends
to Tel Quel, analytic linguistics (of course, Wittgenstein was a fellow at Cambridge), and
mid-Century American Modernist verse (John Ashbery in particular). That her poetry is
not amenable to her theory is one point to be made, but it also misses the extent to which
a moralizing discourse of literary education may be inevitable as long as one stays within
the discourses of literary criticism, attempting to justify and defend it using the dwindling
legs on which it currently stands.

Poise and Sense: Veronica Forrest-Thomson's Empson

I will close with an extended reading of Forrest-Thomson's poem "Not Pastoral
Enough," examining the difficulties encountered by a poet attempting to reject the
aesthetic tradition's understanding of literary morality while simultaneously staking a
claim for a politics of pure poetry. "Not Pastoral Enough" appears in Forrest-Thomson's
On the Periphery, published by Wendy Mulford's Street Editions Press in 1976, one year
after the author's death. On the Periphery consists of poems composed in the last years of
Forrest-Thomson's life, some of which had been published in journals and in the limited
chapbook publication of Cordelia: or, 'A Poem Should not Mean, but Be' in 1974. On the
90
Periphery includes a number of poems that make direct references to literary critics and
teachers: the first two poems consist of Oulipian-style exercises in excising and
rearranging words from the works of F.R. Leavis and Graham Hough (Forrest-Thomson's
thesis director at Cambridge); the third takes on Kant's Critique of Judgment. Other
poems rework texts by or include references to Pound, Eliot, J.L. Austin, Barthes, and
J.H. Prynne. But perhaps no single poet or critic is as central to these poems as William
Empson. Following the poem "Pastoral" (which Forrest-Thomson had the audacity and
good sense to quote and analyze in her also posthumous critical masterpiece Poetic
Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth Century Poetry) comes "Not Pastoral Enough," an
"homage to William Empson." That both poems allude to Empson's magisterial work of
1935, Some Versions of Pastoral, seems clear enough from this dedication.
In Some Versions of Pastoral, the 1935 follow-up to Seven Types of Ambiguity,
Empson argues for pastoral as a mode of writing that puts the complexity of the world
into a comparatively simple form without eradicating the contradictions that spawn it.
Additionally, pastoral is an attempt to reconcile social conflicts:
The poetic statements of human waste and limitation, whose function is to give
strength to see life clearly and so to adopt a fuller attitude to it, usually bring in, or
leave room for the reader to bring in, the whole set of pastoral ideas. For such
crucial literary achievements are likely to attempt to reconcile some conflict
between the parts of a society; literature is a social process, and also an attempt to
reconcile the conflicts of an individual in whom those of society will be mirrored.
(SVP 19)

As Paul Alpers has rightly noted, however, Empson never provides his reader with a
single total definition of pastoral: "Readers naturally seek Empson's 'definition' of
pastoral' and are frustrated when they find what seems to be a collection of brilliant
91
fragments" (Alpers 101). Either way, it was possible for Forrest-Thomson to suggest that
something might not be "pastoral enough;" the exact explanation for this failing,
however, is less clear. Does the poem announce its failure to reduce the complex to
something simple enough, or to attempt an aesthetic reconciliation of a social
contradiction? The answer seems to be both: Forrest-Thomson would not argue that
either of these are undesirable goals but would rather more radically insist that they are
both impossible and have nothing to do with the way that poetic language works. For
Forrest-Thomson, as we have seen, a good reading of poetry would first have to account
for the various non-semantic layers of artifice – rhythm, meter, sound patterning – before
trying to produce a "thematic synthesis" such as those that Empson attributes to pastoral.
"Not Pastoral Enough" is certainly readable as a parody of Empson's critical
method and a not-so-subtle recommendation that the student of Practical Criticism take
some of his readings with more than a grain of salt. The poem is also, however, a
rewriting of Empson's own poem, "Villanelle," which reads
It is the pain, it is the pain endures.
Your chemic beauty burned my muscles through.
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.

What later purge from this deep toxin cures?
What kindness now could the old salve renew?
It is the pain, it is the pain endures.

The infection slept (custom or change inures)
And when pain's secondary phase was due
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.

How safe I felt, whom memory assures,
Rich that your grace safely by heart I knew.
It is the pain, it is the pain endures.

92
My stare drank deep beauty that still allures.
My heart pumps yet the poison draught of you.
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.

You are still kind whom the same shape immures.
Kind and beyond adieu. We miss our cue.
It is the pain, it is the pain endures.
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.
(CP 23)

This poem is one of three villanelles that Empson published during his lifetime, alongside
"Reflection from Anita Loos" and the more famous "Missing Dates," which rather
resembles "Villanelle" (from "Missing Dates:" "Slowly the poison the whole blood
stream fills./.../ The waste remains, the waste remains and kills"; CP 62). Like the
narration of trauma's retention in "Missing Dates," "Villanelle" narrates the necessary
recurrence of the pain of love. In "Villanelle," a sense memory serves as a catalyst for the
dormant pain of lost love: "The infection slept (custom or change inures)/ And when
pain's secondary phase was due/ Poise of my hands reminded me of yours." The conceit
is not especially unusual: lost love is experienced somatically as pain and subsequently
figured as a traceable physical event, an external force acting on the body and the body
doing something to itself.
The poem's pseudo-scientific lexicon draws from archaic sciences, alternating
alchemical and early modern medical discourse to imply a primacy of physical, material
process over emotions. Upon closer examination, however, the dominion of the chemical
and biological is ironically staged through the moral-aesthetic language of "poise." That
is, the "poise" of hands is not merely a physical characteristic; it specifically implies a
position or gesture maintained in between, whether this is a tenuous balance or a peaceful
93
equilibrium. One might semantically expect the word "position" or "shape" or even
"repose;" while sonically "pose" would make the most of the sound patterning, creating
an internal assonant rhyme with "yours." There is no sonic reason why the "oi" phoneme
should appear here (except perhaps to suggest a "poison"), and the oddness of this
prominent word choice draws our attention to the semantics of "poise" as equilibrium or
balance – in other words, as what Forrest-Thomson calls artifice. The implication of form
is reiterated by the line "You are still kind whom the same shape immures," in which the
"shape" is not something comfortably or naturally borne by "you" but rather something
that constrains, perhaps even causing pain. Of course, the villanelle itself is such a
constrained shape or form, and for all "your" kindness, you are molded "beyond adieu"
by the form. The poem closes with "poise," with the aesthetic equilibrium of sense
impressions and feelings that is ultimately unsatisfying, immuring, painful. Formal
constraint and equilibrium are painful, that is, and not very good preparation for love.
What "endures" is precisely not a poised stance but the pain that attends it. I will take this
ambivalence of Empson's "poise" as a foundation for reading Forrest-Thomson's
rewriting.
The A1 line of Forrest-Thomson's "Not Pastoral Enough" echoes the syntax of
Empson's refrain, with a change in noun and verb ("pain endures" becomes "sense
controls")
40
:

40
John London sees this poem as borrowing from another of Empson's villanelles: "Her castigation of
William Empson returns continually to what she regards as his excessive concern with sense at the cost of
form. 'Not Pastoral Enough', cleverly written in the exact metrical pattern of Empson's 'Reflection from
Anita Loos', expresses this criticism in poetic form" (London, 82).

94

Not Pastoral Enough
homage to William Empson

It is the sense, it is the sense, controls,
Landing every poem like a fish.
Unhuman forms must not assert their roles.

Glittering scales require the deadly tolls
Of net and knife. Scales fall to relish.
It is the sense, it is the sense, controls.

Yet languages are apt to miss on souls
If reason only guts them. Applying the wish,
Unhuman forms must not assert their roles,

Ignores the fact that poems have two poles
That must be opposite. Hard then to finish
It is the sense, it is the sense, controls,

Without a sense of lining up for doles
From other kitchens that give us the garnish:
Unhuman forms must not assert their roles.

And this (forgive me) is like carrying coals
To Sheffield. Irrelevance betrays a formal anguish.
It is the sense, it is the sense, controls,
"unhuman forms must not assert their roles".

Here we have a neatly crafted villanelle built around the lines "It is the sense, it is the
sense, controls" and "Unhuman forms must not assert their roles," with all first lines
ending with variants of the "a" end-rhyme "oles" and second lines with the "b" end-rhyme
"-ish." Forrest-Thomson was certainly not averse to writing in fixed forms, although this
is her only published villanelle. The villanelle provides ample opportunity to ironize the
refrain, which makes it seem an apt vessel for the kind of parody the poem appears to be.
Most readers, indeed, have read the poem as simple parody; in a thoughtful essay on the
place of Cambridge in Forrest-Thomson's poetry, Gareth Farmer notes that
95
The emphatic repetition of "sense" in the opening line and refrain parodies
Forrest-Thomson [sic] conception of Empson (and others') critical method of
trying to catch a poem's sense too quickly without attending (or 'relishing') its
formal qualities. (170-71)

Indeed, Forrest-Thomson's poem is readily readable as such a parody. This is especially
so given that Forrest-Thomson has marked the poem as "Not Pastoral Enough," and that
she has elsewhere directly written on "the association of Parody with Pastoral":
Pastoral is the genre which asserts connection on the conventional level, which is
granted, by convention, the right to put the complex into the simple, to unify the
natural with the highly artificial, to bring together the tribe and the poet. Parody is
its counterpart, as a technique stressing connection on the thematic level by taking
another language as its theme. (Poetic Artifice 113)

But I'm not sure that she would have liked to have her poem so quickly reduced to parody
as a purely polemical operation. For starters, the poem itself frankly asks forgiveness for
this parodic quality, for "carrying coals/ To Sheffield," where Empson lived and taught
from the 1950s until he retired (and where, as this colloquial saying implies, there was no
shortage of coal), demonstrating some of the inadvertent interruptions of lyric
subjectivity that Pattison and Sutherland find throughout her later poems.
In fact, Forrest-Thomson's own critical recommendations suggest that this kind of
naturalization of the relationship between form and content (i.e., the villanelle is a good
form to choose if you want to write a parody) may be hasty:
If form must support content, it is no less necessary... that content should support
form. There must be as much or as little power in the theme as transmitted
through the image-complex—that is, through a mixture of meaning and the non-
semantic levels—as is appropriate for the formal convention. In other words,
themes appropriate for the villanelle will not suit the sonnet, still less the ode or
the epic. (Poetic Artifice 121)

96
Later in the same chapter, Forrest-Thomson refers, in an aside, to the "banality in content
necessary to such stylised forms as villanelle and sestina" (136). In other words, Forrest-
Thomson would insist that there is no sound reason to assume that a theme was found and
then a form chosen. Indeed, the correspondence between Forrest-Thomson's poem and
Empson's would suggest that she initially set out to write a villanelle, and the echoes of
Empson dictated the word choice as much as any "theme" or "idea" she may have
intended to convey.
Bracketing Forrest-Thomson's intentions, it is clear that this poem does indeed
ironize the semantically and sonically rich word "sense." But this is not just any word for
either Empson or Forrest-Thomson, and toward what end this irony ultimately works is, I
will argue, much more difficult than has so far been recognized. Empson himself wrote at
length about the complexity of the word "sense," most notably in a series of essays
published as chapters 12-15 in his 1951 The Structure of Complex Words. In Chapter 14,
"Sense in the Prelude," Empson provides an encyclopedic philological account of the
appearance of the word "sense" in Wordsworth's Prelude. Empson argues that, in
Wordsworth's poem, "the word... means both the process of sensing and the supreme act
of imagination, and unites them by a jump" over the "middle" meaning of "good sense"
or judgment (Structure 304). Sense can signify in other ways, too (as sensation, meaning
or interpretation, sense of humor, sensuality, etc.); Forrest-Thomson's poem bears the
multiple senses of "sense," creating what Empson called an ambiguity of the seventh
type, one in which a contradiction is expressed through a single word with at least two
different meanings (and, through the context of the word's placement, these meanings
97
seeming directly opposed). "Sense" is capable of playing this role, especially insofar as
the various "senses" of sense are not entirely unconnected; indeed, Empson argues that a
connection or likeness between the multiple meanings of the word is a necessary
condition for the seventh type of ambiguity:
Grammatical machinery may be assumed which would make the contradiction
into two statements; thus 'p and -p' may mean: 'If a=a
1
, then p; if a=a
2
, then -p.' If
a
1
and a
2
are very different from one another, so that the two statements are fitted
together with ingenuity, then I should put the statement into an earlier type; if a
1

and a
2
are very like one another, so that the contradiction expresses both the need
for and the difficulty of separating them, then I should regard the statement as an
ambiguity of the seventh type corresponding to thought and knowing one's way
about the matter in hand. But such contradictions are often used, as it were by
analogy from this, when the speaker does not know what a
1
and a
2
are.... (STA
196)

Whether or not Forrest-Thomson "knows" the difference between the different kinds of
sense is rather beside the point; the word carries these meanings insofar as "sense," in
Forrest-Thomson's poem, can refer to, among other things, what is available to the
senses–the "pure sound" or visual aspects of poetry on the page–or to the "meaning" of
the words. Forrest-Thomson's poem most obviously uses the word "sense" to signify
"meaning," and this is how Farmer and others have read it, but it carries with it notions of
sensation, sensibility, and sensuality. Like other complex words, according to Empson,
"compacted doctrines" necessarily attend the word "sense," in poetry as in ordinary
speech. For the younger Empson, ambiguity in literary language had been a reflection of
ambiguities in the world that extended beyond the linguistic. The Structure of Complex
Words would slightly modify this claim, insisting that literary complexity was continuous
with complexity in ordinary language and could be divided into the same types.
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Forrest-Thomson's whole critical apparatus, as we have seen, works to reject this
assumption that poems can represent any extra-linguistic (or "non-verbal") "state of
mind" or that they were primarily "continuous" with ordinary language. Indeed, she
seems to seize on Empson rather than Richards or Leavis precisely because he is (as in
chapter seven of Seven Types of Ambiguity) more interested than they in language's
capacity to avoid, defer, or, as Forrest-Thomson puts it, "suspend" semantic closure and
thematic synthesis. Empson still doesn't go nearly far enough in this direction for Forrest-
Thomson. At the very least, however, his analysis of "sense" in Wordsworth
demonstrates his occasional willingness to consider how the word avoids, through
Wordsworth's magisterially sophistic handling, crystallizing any particular compacted
doctrine into a theory of sense: "I think it is fair to say that Wordsworth had not got any
translation ready; he was much better at adumbrating his doctrine through rhetorical
devices than at writing it out in full" (Structure of Complex Words 299-300). In this way,
Empson's account of "Sense in The Prelude" forms an exception to the implication that
poetry or ordinary language actually do "make sense": "What is really in question, I
think, is not any theory in Wordsworth's mind about the word but a manipulative feeling,
of what he could make it do; a thing more familiar perhaps to poets than critics, and
which a poet easily forgets" (SCW 293).
On the one hand, this provides Empson with some grounds for censuring
Wordsworth, as he had in his reading of "Tintern Abbey" in chapter 4 of Seven Types
(151-154). Christopher Norris suggests that Empson
thinks it important not to let Wordsworth off too lightly by suspending our normal
logico-semantic 'machinery' of rational judgment, enjoying what the poem has to
99
offer by way of uplifting pantheist sentiment, and thus falling in with a suasive
rhetoric capable of other (less innocent or high-minded) uses. (Norris and Mapp,
73)
41

On the other hand, Empson does cautiously suggest in "Sense in the Prelude" that
Wordsworth's "manipulative feeling" may have a value distinct from the value of
"rational judgment." In this way, the word "sense" provides a moment in Empson's work
where poetry that does not "make good sense" is raised above the class of sophistry or
"suasive rhetoric"
It does not seem unfair to say that [Wordsworth] induced people to believe he had
expounded a consistent philosophy through the firmness and assurance with
which he used equations of Type IV [i.e., roughly, those in which two senses of a
word are used with equal weight due to their "similar relation to a third meaning
of the word, which may be only vaguely conceived" (SCW 52)]; equations whose
claim was false, because they did not really erect a third concept as they
pretended to; and in saying this I do not mean to deny that the result makes very
good poetry, and probably suggests important truths. (305)
42

In this way, Empson admits of a "poetic" value – that of "very good poetry" – that does
not make sense according to the rigors of rational judgment that he applies throughout the
majority of Complex Words. This may be precisely the kind of "reordering" that Forrest-
Thomson suggests as the achievement of poetic artifice.

41
Norris goes on to suggest the political value of Empson's frustration with Wordsworth:"we will be much
better equipped to resist the more sinister forms of manipulative rhetoric, those that likewise achieve their
effect by inducing an attitude of uncritical acquiescence in all manner of paradoxical truth claims or
'profound' pseudo-wisdom" (Norris and Mapp, 75)
42
Alan Durant and Colin MacCabe also view the chapter on Wordsworth as an exception to Empson's
general project in Complex Words to assert the rational, propositional continuities between poetry and
"ordinary language:" "Words accumulate strata of senses and implications and assert propositions or
arguments, even as they conceal such complexities by appealing to common-sense understanding. This is
true not only of 'ordinary language', but also of poetry, which for Empson does not (as Richards and others
had claimed) by-pass questions of truthfulness with its own forms of 'pseudo-statement'. On the contrary,
poetic language in Empson's view simply extends the resources of sense-making characteristic of language
use more generally (though Empson works through his own complex qualifications to this position in
relation to the meanings of the word 'sense' in Wordsworth, and 'all' in Milton)." (Durant and MacCabe
173)
100
To return to "Not Pastoral Enough": the "b" rhyme does seem to argue against
treating poems only by looking for sense-as-meaning: "Landing every poem like a fish"
suggests the threat posed to poetry by focusing only on the semantic functions of
language: "landed" fish will perish. The "b" rhyme centers around a set of gustatory and
culinary metaphors; the choice of "fish" may have been determined by the end-rhyme as
chosen in one of the other stanzas: fish has no semantic priority over the other end-words
(there is no reason to assume that the poem was composed sequentially in the order of its
appearance on the page). And so relish, wish, finish, garnish, anguish may have proven
just as decisive (there is no way to know, nor is it a sound assumption that one word was
"chosen" first at all, or solely on the basis of end rhyme rather than internal sound
patterning, syntax, theme, or one of the other "levels" of artifice that Forrest-Thomson is
so careful to delineate).
This gustatory rhetoric effectively brings the physicality and sensuality of "sense"
to bear on the poem: "....Applying the wish,/Unhuman forms must not assert their roles,//
Ignores the fact that poems have two poles/ That must be opposite. Hard then to finish/ It
is the sense, it is the sense, controls,// Without a sense of lining up for doles/ From other
kitchens that give us the garnish: /Unhuman forms must not assert their roles." That is,
this polemical "garnish" is actually given, the poem asserts, from "other kitchens" than
that of sense-making – most likely from the formal requirements of the villanelle. But the
thematic continuity of "other kitchens" and "garnish" reminds us of the fact that this form
of determination still has everything to do with at least one version of "sense," and that
perhaps "it is the sense, it is the sense, controls" after all.
101
My reading of "Not Pastoral Enough" has been intended to demonstrate the extent
to which Forrest-Thomson's work was even more of a response to the Practical Criticism
and the aesthetic tradition than has been thus far accounted for. The point, here as
elsewhere in this chapter, has been to highlight the political impotence of pedagogical-
moralistic justifications for literary criticism and for poetic production. Forrest-Thomson
managed to produce fascinating critical theory and some of the most incisive poetry of
her time precisely because she worked at the contradictions of the Arnold-Richards
traditions, but she could not resolve them within the terms of literary criticism alone. In
the chapters that follow, I turn to writers associated with "Cambridge" poetry who not
only rejected, but who also provided viable alternatives, to the assumption that poetry and
literary study serve only pre-political pedagogical ends.

102

Chapter 2: Denise Riley's Socialized Biology

This chapter surveys the work of Denise Riley (b. 1948) from roughly 1975-1985,
paying close attention to the formal textures of her prose and poetry alongside the
political and personal contexts that occasioned these writings and the ways in which
Riley intervened in them. Work on Denise Riley as a poet, even a "feminist" poet, has
tended to miss the actual texture of her critical writings in their political moorings, and
work on Riley as a feminist theorist has tended simply to note her status as a "poet" to
explain away the peculiarities of her prose. But her prose is not generically "poetic" — it
is tirelessly discursive in a manner that crosses with lyric, well beyond any vague notion
of what "poetic language" might sound like, in its investigation and deployment of
aphorisms and slogans and in its serious play with personal pronouns. The poetry and
prose seem to stem from the same set of questions and concerns, even as they each take
different kinds of responsibilities and linguistic approaches to them.
43
In this chapter, I
undertake a reading of the lyric work with the critical work, opening up each part of the
oeuvre to a depth that work on Riley in feminist and literary studies has generally
neglected. Read together, I argue, her early prose and poetry trace what she calls a
"socialized biology" at the heart of poetic and political language.
My aim is twofold: first, I want to provide an adequate account of the
interconnections between Riley's prose, poetry, and political work, which I don't believe

43
Riley suggested as much in a private conversation with me in August, 2010.
103
has been done adequately to date. Second, I seek to situate this portrait in the framework
I've developed in the preceding chapters about the social stakes of literary, anti-capitalist,
and feminist politics and pedagogies. Riley's work provides strategies for interrupting the
traditional view of poetry as pre-political moral training. One result, I argue, is the
effective disruption of the prevalent idea that some literary "morality" connects culture to
politics – precisely because Riley's two modes of writing from this period are, once
brought together, so difficult to separate.

The Force of Circumstance

In her 1983 War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother, Riley sought
to understand how developmental psychology, psychoanalysis, state social policies,
wartime economics, employers' production needs, and feminist and socialist organizing
intersected around the rapid rise and fall of municipal nurseries in and after the Second
World War in Britain. Riley's interest in this question sprang, in large part, from her own
experiences as a single mother with broadly socialist commitments active in the women's
movement in the 1970s and 80s. The problem that animated Riley's work can be stated in
a relatively straightforward way even as its implications open into a web of conceptual
and affective tangles: how to articulate the needs of single working mothers under late
capitalism without re-entrenching the ideology of motherhood as a fixed role separate
from the gender-neutral "worker" or "citizen." Riley's concluding remarks may sound
104
somewhat simple: "My conviction is that... there can be no version of 'motherhood' as
such which can be deployed to construct a radical politics" (War in the Nursery 196). But
what gets her to this point is a rather tremendous heap of historical and theoretical
material, all in order to understand how various discourses, ideologies, and material
circumstances intertwined, in the period in question, to produce the figure of a "mother"
that "effectively rendered invisible the needs of those working women with children" (7).
Riley begins with a chapter on "Biology, Psychology and Gender in Socialist and
Feminist Thinking" in which she points to the necessity for socialist-feminist praxis to
interrogate the categories of the biological and the social:
It is urgent to find productive ways of questioning the interplay of biology and
society, gender and work; for while this interplay was particularly convoluted at
the period this book dwells on, it continues, in different incarnations, to produce
political uncertainties and private strain now.... [T]here is a need, in the often
painful gap between the body politic and the individual body, for an idea of a
socialised biology. This would speak to problems adumbrated in slogans like 'the
right to choose', 'the right to sexual self-determination' 'control of one's own body'
— the language of campaigns concerning abortion and contraception, welfare and
population policies, or asserting sexual categories. The idea of a socialised
biology would also join broader questions about human capacities and wants,
growth, illness, ageing; and, instead of holding these at the margins of socialism,
would set them at the centre of its ethical nerve. At the same time, I want to
illustrate ways in which the history of psychology has in fact worked against this
kind of development, sometimes by acting as an inadequate representation of
socialised biology. (8-9)

The following chapters of Riley’s book do just that, moving through the literature on
developmental psychology that depict the infant as progressing from biological animality
to social "humanity" (chapter 2), understandings in child psychology of the basic needs of
infants (particularly Kleinian theories of infantile aggression — chapter 3), the
"popularization" of these ideas in Bowlby's theory of "maternal deprivation" (chapter 4),
105
how these psychological theories figured in policies on wartime nurseries alongside other
ideologies and material factors (chapter 5), and finally, in chapter 6, the rise of postwar
pronatalism and its relation to various sectors of the state, employers' demands, socialist
and feminist politics, and the continually mounting address to an isolated figure of "the
mother." I will return to some of these points in more detail later in the chapter; for now it
will suffice to gesture to the breadth of the material and the shape of her argument.
While War in the Nursery, the book version of her PhD thesis in Philosophy from
the University of Sussex, is an impersonal academic study, Riley concurrently wrote a
number of short prose pieces for feminist and socialist newsletters and journals that
supplemented this work and brought into focus the ways in which these questions crossed
with her own material and affective life. In "The Force of Circumstance," published in
the socialist-feminist newsletter Red Rag in 1975, Riley reflected on the "conservatizing"
effects that being a single mother had on her, even within the context of a leftist feminist
movement:
It's struck me that the single mother is effectively voiceless inside the Women's
Movement as a whole; that while some good practical work is being done by
various one-parent-family pressure groups tangential to the movement, and was
done some years back by women in the claimants' unions — cf The Unsupported
Mothers' Handbook — at the present we aren't talking as single mothers on any
broad basis. At the moment we fit in around the cracks in everyone's theorising
like so much polyfilla. I'm beginning to feel what I can only describe as the
profoundly conservatising effect of being a single mother now. I sense this
conservatising on all fronts at once; housing, geography, time, work, medicine,
sexuality, love. ("The Force of Circumstance" 26)

As we will see, Riley later came to question the gesture of repairing "voicelessness"
through speaking "as" any particular identity or sociological category. But the thread that
is continuous from this early piece through her later work is her hard-headed insistence
106
on the affective dimensions of lived material and ideological circumstances, feelings that
are not necessarily mitigated by a recognition of their ideological or historical
embeddedness. Take "the housing question," for instance:
Everything turns on the housing question as the most visible uniter ('home') of
structures of money and class. It's in respect of housing that my single motherness
pushes me back hard into the most overtly conservative position. I'd hoped to live
more or less communally with people I cared for and could work with (without
pushing the commune ideology too far; mutual support/convenience not
necessarily entailing good politics). But I never found/ co-made such a group.
Lacking one, I couldn't wait; and so I filled in such gaps as turned up in peoples'
flats on a need-a-roof-over-my-and-child's-head basis, (which many of us do). In
the event we have moved seven or eight times in his life-time; most of those
moves I didn't want, but were forced on us as a result of overcrowding, emotional
demands from people in a landlord position which couldn't be met, leases
expiring, and so forth. The obvious solution to having a child alone is to live with
people; but there are always a majority who can't or so far haven't had the massive
good fortune of making it work, who cannot be consoled by the diminishing
prospect of true communism. Though we know the utter brutal irrationality of
living alone. (26)

In this case, the "knowledge" that her newfound, "conservative" desire for private home-
ownership and family security is, in part, the result of a lack of socialized material
resources that might otherwise be available — or, indeed, fought for — does not lead to
any straightforward transformation of this desire. Riley recognizes the appeal of
prefigurative, libertarian-socialist communitarian ideals while feeling their inadequacy in
the absence of the material circumstances that would make them truly democratic
possibilities. We may "know the utter brutal irrationality of living alone," but we may
still need and even desire it in the absence of other practicable options. Riley also implies
the absence of the psychological circumstances that intertwine with the material ones in
awkward ways: “emotional demands from people in a landlord position which couldn't be
met”.
107
This kind of autobiographical reflection also shows up in Riley's poetry, albeit in
poetry that is hardly confessional or expressive in the crude sense of transcribing raw
lived "experience." Consider the following poem, from Riley's 1977 Marxism for Infants:
You have a family ? It is impermissible.

There is only myself complete and arched
like a rainbow or an old tree
with gracious arms descending
over the rest of me who is the young
children in my shelter who grow
up under my leaves and rain
In our own shade
we embrace each other gravely &
look out tenderly upon the world

seeking only contemporaries
and speech and light, no father.

(Marxism for Infants 15)

Here the exigencies of "living alone with children," as another poem calls it, are worked
through in various modes: having a family is impermissible for the single mother, who is
not accounted for or celebrated by familial rhetoric. This rhetoric quickly folds into a
more generalizable, if metaphysical question, namely, whether or not anyone ever has a
family, or whether, rather, "there is only myself." But this solipsistic humility and
caution, whether socially enforced or individually elected, immediately warps into a set
of stock attributes of the individual, "complete and arched" and then of motherhood "like
a rainbow or an old tree/ with gracious arms descending." And then, in another reversal,
the "complete" I folds over itself, "over the rest of me" which is, in fact, composed of
108
others: "who is the young/ children in my shelter who grow/ up under my leaves and
rain." And so a first-person plural emerges, but not in the form of a celebrated
universality; rather, it is the moment of a conservatizing familial-individualism, the
notion of a "haven in a heartless world" that many feminists rightly decried
44
: "In our
own shade / we embrace each other gravely &/ look out tenderly upon the world." This
grave embrace speaks to conservatizing forms of familialist attachment in the face of the
force of circumstances. Yet the hope for other forms of kinship based on mutual care and
respect remains in the "tender" gaze "out... upon the world/ seeking only contemporaries/
and speech and light, no father."
I have read this poem as a sort of laboratory or playground for the concerns
brought up by "The Force of Circumstance" and War in the Nursery. But Marxism for
Infants also opens well beyond the generic borders of political theory and personal
narrative, into a series of lyric poems that navigate the difficulty of voicing needs,
feelings, or desires through a social language and body that are both individuating and
alienating:
postcard; " I live in silence here
a wet winter the baby's well
I give her bear's names Ursula
Mischa Pola Living alone makes anyone crazy, especially with children"

I live in silence here
x is the condition of my silence
s/he

44
Cf. Barrett and McIntosh's trenchant critique of Christopher Lasch's book by this title in their The Anti-
Social Family.
109

the tongue as a swan's neck
full and heavy in the mouth

speech as a sexed thing

the speaking limb is stilled

(6)

The "I" that writes the "postcard" is effectively split and doubled, not only in the sense
that any "I" is already both mine and anyone's, but, more specifically, in the sense in
which the voice of the "mother" already speaks for her children; she is already more and
less than one. The apparent paradox of "living alone... with children" rehearses the
splitting off of the "mother" from liberal and social-democratic understandings of
citizenship, in which the putative equality of every "I" effectively erases the relationships
of dependence and exploitation that produce the "freedom" of some at the expense of
others (in this case, all those both relegated to and excluded from the figural status of
"mother").
Unlike much of the feminist poetry that surrounded her in the Women's
Liberation Movement, however, Riley's "I" does not break through its former silence as
some victorious, self-realized entity.
45
Silence is not experienced as an external force of
repression but rather as a constitutive factor in the production of language itself: "I live in
silence here/ x is the condition of my silence." The sexed silence in which the "I" comes

45
Cf. Collections of British feminist poetry such as Licking the Bed Clean, Cutlasses and Earrings, and
One Foot on the Mountain.
110
to speak is somatized in the form of non-human prosthetics: "the tongue as a swan's neck/
full and heavy in the mouth/ speech as a sexed thing." This silence is experienced both in
privative and possessive modes, as silence and speech are things one both does and does
not feel oneself to possess. But this kind of phenomenological investigation is also in
tension with socialist-feminist aims, insofar as such conspicuously sexed somatization
can, in the absence of Riley's "socialized biology," also elide the sociality of speech,
making speech appear as a matter of personal hygiene or self-care, as solely one's own
responsibility, however constitutively exterior the "self "may be. The poem shows how
this embedded practice of individualizing sociality, by somatizing speech, can help to
account for the loneliness of living with children in the celebrated intersubjectivity of
motherhood.
This poem, then, effectively illustrates the insufficiency of an interpersonal,
ethical understanding of social-sexual differentiation or of personal relationships more
generally. The mother is at once a single entity asked to speak for herself and the
container for an intersubjectivity that is her only allowable sociality: the preparation of
the infant for social life. The poem protests that sovereign expressions of feeling in the
confessional or consciousness-raising mode may only articulate needs that are already
recognizable as the province of the imaginary figure of "the mother." In which case, lyric
poetry seems like a curious place to turn in order to explore what one single mother's
needs might sound like (if this is, as I believe, one of the things that the volume seeks to
do). These are, after all, political problems generated well beyond the boundaries of any
111
"I"/"you" relationship, even as they are, significantly, experienced only through
interpersonal relationships and personal feelings.
Riley's work, then, in the tradition of Marx's telegraphic theory of the "social
individual" as developed in his Theses on Feuerbach and Grundrisse, breaks from an
understanding of the social as a sum of preexisting intersubjective relations. Marx instead
urges us to read those relations as expressions, at least in part, of more complex social
formations. Marx's Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach reads: "Feuerbach resolves the religious
essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each
single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations." This is where, in
breaking with a particular libertarian feminist aesthetics and ethics, Riley's poetry also
breaks away from the Arnoldian ideology, still palpable today, of poetry as a
prefigurative training ground for social and political being: the affects and addresses of
poetry are saturated with social and political content, and so it makes no sense to see
them as preparatory for these arenas. Poetry does not, for Riley, cultivate that primary
agency of liberal humanist social democracy, the ability to voice one's needs and respond
to the exigent demands of others, since the voice attributed to the social individual would
only be readable through what she tantalizingly calls a "socialized biology" of speech.
In what follows, I trace the idea of a socialized biology through Riley's critical work
before undertaking a reading of Marxism for Infants.

112
"The Serious Burdens of Love"

The circumstances of Denise Riley's life in the 1970s and 80s led her to remark on
inadequate housing policies, the loneliness of bourgeois familialism (whether inside or
out of "the family"), dwindling nursery provisions, and the moral invigilation imposed on
"unsupported mothers." These were never simply problems of social policy; they were
the material conditions of Riley's life.
Born in 1948 in Carlyle, Riley was raised as a Protestant by her adoptive parents,
who sent her to Catholic school.
46
Riley enrolled at Oxford to study English, but found
herself dissatisfied and transferred to Cambridge, where she studied philosophy and
graduated with a degree in Fine Art. She subsequently did an MA and DPhil, both in
Philosophy at University of Sussex. Her doctoral thesis, which turned into War in the
Nursery, was on the "history of theories in European and American child psychology and
psychoanalysis ... so roughly, in the area of intellectual history, querying the category of
'ideology.'"
47
Riley lived in Cambridge during much of this time while raising her young
children as mother in a one-parent household; childcare was never merely an academic
question for her. In her remarkable critical prose, these problems and conditions are
brought into direct contact with more global and revolutionary socialist feminist aims.
Riley brings the personal politics of feminist and libertarian work into contact with
questions of political economy and socialist strategy, illuminating the social and material

46
See "Waiting" for a chillingly elliptical account of Riley's early family life and schooling.
47
Email correspondence, 9/22/2010.
113
components behind personal politics without eclipsing the affective intensity that attends
them.
Riley's political outlook in the 1970s developed in conversation with the traditions
of Marxist-Leninist organizing and theory, the small group approach of the Women's
Liberation Movement, various forms of left libertarianism, and the direct action tactics of
particular campaigns such as the Unsupported Mother's Group. Riley does not fit neatly
into any of the categories or schools of socialist-feminist thought that surrounded her,
insofar as she was not a member of any vanguard party but, all the same, did believe in
the necessity of making concrete demands upon the welfare state in the hopes of
transforming society and was, in this way, rather more in line with socialism than
libertarianism. Riley's primary locus for political action was her work on specific
campaigns (pertaining to reproductive rights and nursery provisions) within the Women's
Liberation Movement, particularly the Cambridge Women's Liberation Group (a local
rather than student organization, although many of its members were certainly affiliated
in one way or another with the University).
From the mid- to late-1970s Riley contributed a number of articles to the
Cambridge Women's Liberation Newsletter, ranging from discussions of "A Woman's
Right to Choose" to the possibility of a women's self-help therapy group. In all of these
contributions, including those that are co-authored, Riley's characteristic dialectical style
is clear. Her prose provides the index of a profoundly self-critical mind and ear at work,
catching itself in false generalities but never paralyzed by the necessity of being wrong
sometimes. In a short piece written for the Socialist Women's Regional Workshop in
114
1976, Riley argued along with two co-authors that a "positive politics of the family" was
necessary for women and the working class in general:
Nineteenth and early twentieth-century socialists and feminists who did campaign
for the dissemination of information about birth control were plunged into a set of
contradictions — the Malthusian implications of contraception for the workers as
an alternative to any true political and social reform; eugenistic elements and
"social hygiene" currents tangled up with genuine attempts at progressive
reform.... From our vantage point, it's not hard to detect the eugenically
reactionary elements in earlier population control attempts. But what's more
interesting, from a feminist perspective, is to try to establish how far anyway
women's fertility is susceptible to State intervention at all, and how. ("Fertility,
Abortion, 'Choice'" 2)
48

The task of this work was to understand how socialist-feminist politics might take up the
vexed problem of "the family" without either simply deriding "bourgeois familialism" or
upholding the telos of a genuinely "socialist family."
Very few readers of Riley have engaged with these early political materials at
all.
49
The text that comes closest to dealing with Riley's early education and activism is
an odd chapter of Centre and Periphery in Modern British Poetry, in which Andrew
Duncan has speculated, in an oblique argument against "theoretical poetry," that Riley's
early education in the natural sciences left a mark on her work: "this early phase of very
close observation of nature (birds and plants) left a mark: she has ever since detested
generalisations and confusion and admired precise recording of phenomena" (Duncan,
94). As a result, he argues, Riley "never fell for Marx and Freud, but spotted them on first

48
This essay, "Fertility, Abortion, 'Choice' — Towards a Positive Politics of the Family" was co-authored
by "Denise, Jo, and Val " and appeared as a position paper for the Socialist Women's Regional Workshop
in 1976. Portions of this essay are reproduced in Riley's own "Feminist Thought and Reproductive Control"
(see citation below).
49
Andrew Duncan and Carol Watts are two exceptions; I discuss Duncan's work here and will address
Watts later.
115
reading as authoritarians whose paranoid love of system-building had led them away
from the sober rules of evidence.... I don't think she was ever a Marxist...; she was at the
libertarian-anarchist end of things." Duncan sees in this a salutary rejection of authority,
of political lines that proceed purely from theoretical doctrine and from
misrepresentations of consciousness that occlude the truths of politics as it is lived and
felt. While I think that Duncan does a better scholarly job than many critics of Riley's
poetry in tracking down her sources, his analysis departs from the poetic work and, more
disconcertingly, from Riley's stated positions, to construct a speculative politics that has
little relation to the actual history of Riley's political involvement. To call Riley's political
work libertarian is fundamentally incorrect (left libertarian socialist feminism certainly
did exist, but Riley was hardly one of its advocates),
50
insofar as it elides Riley's
investments in various state institutions and forms of social control and welfare and her
exploration of their widely variable relations of antagonism and collusion with feminist
and socialist aims and campaigns. In particular, Duncan ignores Riley's outright dismay
at anarchist rejections of "institutions" like "the state" or "the family," perhaps because
Riley does note places where the Labour and Leninist left in England failed to address the
"woman worker" and "mother" as possibly coinciding entities. I read Duncan's seemingly
idiosyncratic gloss of Riley's politics as a symptom of a more widespread ignorance of
the history of the women's liberation movement and particularly of its relationship to
socialism. The literary left seems particularly unaware of the fact that the women's
liberation movement argued for decades over the nature of the capitalist state and

50
Cf. Lynne Segal's contribution to Beyond the Fragments for one expression of left-libertarian feminism.
116
whether and how to integrate feminist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist demands into
contemporary tactics of class struggle.
Duncan is right, though, insofar as Riley does find fault with the Marxist tradition
from Engels through Lenin and, to a certain extent Kollontai and Trotsky, in its
assumption that "the family" is a coherent entity traceable across its historicization and
projected into its future as a "socialist" or "communist" family. The socialist family was
usually imagined in the utopian or dystopian terms of heterosexual monogamy (or
"individual sex love") that Engels championed as one of the moral advances of women
under capitalism, one that would be fully realized and extended to men after the
revolution. In a 1981 article taking on "Left Critiques of the Family," Riley maintains that
"when one adds Engels' famous pronouncement on women's liberation [i.e. that it could
only follow from the participation of women in public, large-scale industry] to his
supposition that love and economics stand in a roughly superstructure-to-base
relationship, then the limits and strengths of his position are clear" ("Left Critiques of the
Family" 79). Riley goes on to explain that "the historical specificity of family forms, on
which Engels usefully insists..., is nevertheless an argument which may serve to retain
orthodox conceptions of 'the family.' In itself it does not contain any challenge to the idea
of the family as a directly cellular unit of the body politic, a microcosm of society." This
dialectical critique of the Marxist treatment of the family is trenchant indeed, but it is a
far cry from Duncan's understanding of Riley's focus on the family, in which "the house
is the exact boundary where the natural and affective association of the family comes up
against the rational and alienated world of property" (93). This reading of Riley's
117
feminism is, like many understandings of women's liberation, unable to understand the
extent to which "housing" and "the family" are already political concepts in dialectical
relationships with the "world of property."
There is evidence that Riley was interested in organizational tactics drawn from
early radical feminist and left libertarian organizing, but she never takes these on as
adequate substitutes for active engagement in class struggle. In the October 1976 issue of
the Cambridge Women's Liberation Newsletter, she contributed to a discussion about the
possibility of forming a Women's Self Help therapy group. Riley writes, rather
sheepishly: "I am taking a deep breath to say that I'd like there to be some sort of
women's self-help, political/feminist, hmm, therapy group." Riley is quick to demonstrate
her distance from the libertarian and radical feminist version of self help that might
"conservatively substitute Psychology for politics" and "promise instant Joy." On the
other hand, Riley feels that much political organizing represses feelings in the name of a
politics that tends to "moralistically and repressively reduce all individual anxieties to
Politics with a monolithic P (or to History, or to Alienation) and to expect immediate
resolution of private conflicts in political action." Riley is characteristically pragmatic
and undogmatic in her approach to the possibility of a self-help group, rare qualities
amidst the bitter debates no doubt blustering around her between Marxist-Leninists and
left libertarians over the appropriate tactics for organizing. She makes no blankly anti-
authoritarian or messianic claims for collective self-help, but neither does she condemn it
as a distraction from the "real" work of party building. In the passage that follows, Riley
118
explains how personal politics might be addressed at the level of socialist and feminist
organizing:
The personal may "be" the political alright, but the relationship's fine and
complex and not one-to-one, e.g. for myself I can account for continuing feelings
of isolation, depression etc, in terms of "it's all because you live with just one
person who's out to work, and you have young children and no job which takes
you outside the house" and can analyse that ad infinitum in terms of sex roles,
nursery provisions, ideology, capitalism etc. But while this is fine as far as it goes,
the most detailed understanding of the sources of unhappines [sic] need not lead
to any increase in your capacity to act effectively; - years of communism and
feminism haven't stopped me from literally shaking in a roomful of people. It is
not that the sources of this are mysterious to me; amateur self-psychoanalysis may
inform - but not change, which is why I'd like there to be a practical group of
some sort, if others would too.

("Notes Toward")

In the proposed scenario, a self-help therapy group would be neither a replacement nor a
preparation for "real" political work; but neither are her own personal anxieties unrelated
to racism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy or to the organizing required to fight them. No
political theory (i.e. neither feminism nor socialism) can, Riley insists, cover the total
field of human relations without borrowing from other practices and frameworks that
remain at least somewhat autonomous; in this her work is a far cry from her
contemporaries' attempts to create "unified" theories of capitalist patriarchy.
51

This kind of pragmatic approach to organizing is reflected throughout her
remarkable essay from 1987, "The Serious Burdens of Love," in which Riley revisits the
question of how feminists and socialists might address child-care as a right and need:
There will be a kind of eclecticism about formulations on child-care. Political
thought always, in a way, comes from somewhere else; there's a necessary
stitched-togetherness at work, even though the dream of a pure and unique place

51
Cf. Eisenstein and Vogel for such attempts, and Barrett for a trenchant critique of both "unified" and
"dual systems" approaches to understanding the relations between capitalism and women's oppression.
119
of ideals is not to be forgotten in the name of a modest practicable daylight. For,
however much history can demonstrate our lack of originality, the recognition of
that need not entail a resentful surrender to 'common sense'.... You can derive
consolation, for instance, from the free-floating nature of the attachments of
socialisms and feminisms to psycho-analysis and psychology. The consolations
lie in the release from having to suppose that there is something necessarily
congruent between them which has at all costs to be 'worked out'; and also in
taking this very supposition of congruence to have a considerable history and
political interest in its own right. ("The Serious Burdens" 188)

The socialist-feminist desire to articulate and ultimately meet the needs of working
mothers through serious social provisions such as child-care require a socialist-feminist
theory of what needs are (184), but this theory will inevitably run up against its own
constitutive embeddedness in discourses that exceed and even oppose it (cf. the
imbrication of contraceptive provisions with eugenic discourses or more generally of the
welfare state with biopolitical forms of discipline and control). No amount of theoretical
maneuvering can get around this, and Riley insists that it is best to acknowledge the
necessary impurity of political theory in order to get on with it critically. As she writes in
War in the Nursery:
I take it that it's necessary both to stress the non-self-evident nature of need and
the intricacies of its determinants, and also to act politically as if needs could be
met, or at least met half-way. The benign if traditionally unimaginative face of
'socialist planning', is, at the least, preferable to its known alternatives, however
much its objects will always tend to be in excess of it and slip away. (War 193-
94)

Aside from the pleasures of Riley's prose, what comes across in all of these pieces
is an investment in going beyond the description of injustice or proceeding via single-
issue campaigns or moral exhortations for a "change of attitudes." Riley is always
scrupulous in indexing her understanding of the necessity for such single-issue defensive
120
slogans and reform campaigns (such as "a woman's right to choose") even as she
recognizes the practical limits and metaphysical impossibilities of this liberal language of
"choice:"
"The right to choose" must imply the right to choose to have (not merely not to
have) children; and this right is a very metaphysical assertion in a situation where
provisions for the myriad needs for bringing up those children in a humane way
are thin on the ground. And, of course, conspicuously thinner for some than for
others. To follow through the "positive" aspect of the right to choose would entail
a many-faceted campaign, a generalising of the issue which linked it to a wider
context of agitation for the reforms necessary to give more plausibility to the
notion of choice. Nevertheless, it seems to me to be wrong to criticise an
essentially defensive slogan, so heavily marked by its necessary strategical
locations, on the grounds of its incompleteness. ("Feminist Thought and
Reproductive Control" 191)

Riley refuses to stop short of opening to analysis the connections between these different
questions of social policy, highlighting the affective tangles from which they are
inextricable, and understanding the movements of these discourses and ideologies both
with and against their explanation in a simple economic base. In this she both follows and
departs from Althusser's notion of the "overdetermination" of the superstructure and base.
War in the Nursery is precisely such an effort, and a relatively forgotten one,
perhaps because it is no easy task to respond to a text that does new archival work,
revising contemporary academic and activist narratives while curtailing the immediate
transition from new discoveries to new demands. "Developmental psychology; biology
and marxism" was revised from its original 1975 version (which Riley wrote at the age of
27) for publication in the journal Ideology & Consciousness and was later reprinted as
chapter two of War in the Nursery. Like many of Riley's essays, this is a self-reflexive
121
piece that seeks to provide rigorous, dialectical accounts of concepts such as "biology,"
"the social," and "the individual."
The essay opens with a statement of purpose: "I want to try to describe some
conceptual problems concerning the 'relationship of biological and social factors', using
one particular area, the developmental psychology of children, as a touchstone"
("Developmental Psychology" 73). But Riley immediately follows this assertion with a
rejoinder: "my opening sentence has used scare-quotes, a pointer to the awkward
necessity of using a terminology to discuss its own restrictions." Her anxiety and
shrewdness regarding the limitations of criticizing theoretical presuppositions while using
their own terms is reminiscent of Althusser's early writings on Marx. Riley's essay is
littered with such skeptical gestures, most notably (and most notably following Althusser)
in her querying of "spatial metaphors" such as those of "base" and "superstructure" in
Marxist philosophy and historical materialist methodology.
52

Riley surveys existing models of accounting for the movement of the "infant"
from the category of biological animal to social human. Along the way, she seeks to open
up the question of the relations between "the biological" and "the social," calling out the
presupposition that each of these terms refers to a definite or unified terrain while
simultaneously recognizing their effective power as abstractions in the world. Riley's
interest in the infant here is as an odd transitional status in the chain of "socialization"
and "human development," two non-identical yet often conflated processes. As Riley

52
See my "L'espacement de la lecture" for an analysis of Althusser's ambivalent treatment of spatial
metaphors.
122
insists, socialization and the development of intersubjective relations are actually distinct
conceptual categories. Socialization, or the entry into a totality of relations, has yet to be
explained by theories of child development, especially those that look at mother-child
relations in a vacuum. Riley laments that, within developmental psychology, the "social"
is generally understood as synonymous with the "'interpersonal', and that within a
severely restricted field of persons anyway.... That these activities [those of the mother-
child couple] are read as uninterrupted by the exigencies of housing, class, etc. is to say
that 'social factors', anything beyond mere intersubjectivity, are unthinkable.
Development happens on a terrain of pure (inter)individuality" (75-76).
The child, or infant, is of such importance precisely because, while theories of
developmental psychology locate in the vague terrain of "infancy" or "childhood" the
emergence of human sociality, these discourses supposedly about the child always also
address "the mother." In the chapters that follow, this is traced through the
"popularization" of Kleinian-derived theories of infant psychology, beginning with
Melanie Klein's emphasis on innate and pre-Oedipal infantile aggression more or less
regardless of the mother's behavior, to John Bowlby’s theories of "maternal deprivation"
that argued for the almost total dependence of infantile well-being on the attentive
presence of the mother.
According to Riley, the common socialist-feminist account of Bowlbyism at the
time of her writing saw it as instrumental in reconfiguring policies on childcare after the
war. Riley herself contests this received wisdom, demonstrating that the timing didn't
work out in quite this way, and that "the state" never worked as a single entity in concert
123
with psychoanalysis. Rather, this particular narrative is, she argues, a back-formation of
the 1950s, and the closure of wartime nurseries also had to do with many other
ideological formations, most notably those surrounding the "mother" as a separate entity
from the woman worker (though these could be collapsed for the sake of expediency to
correspond with the necessity for temporary women's work in munitions). These
ideological formations, she argues, predated and extended far beyond the reach of
developmental psychology, and they were often to be found in avowedly socialist and
feminist discourses.
Without a working conception of socialized biology, Riley argues, socialist
feminism will fail to understand the complexities of reproductive experience and the
ways in which biology, psychology, policy and other disciplines work with and against
each other. Riley's interest in recuperating the category of the biological for socialist
feminist thought lies then in what she sees as a need for
any historical materialist account of the individual and society [to] include a sense
of the highly specific forms in which 'biology' is lived; and... the category of
'biologism' can serve to close off examination of areas that actually crucially need
marxist and feminist critical attention. These include, for example, reproduction,
fertility control, sexuality, child development, illness, ageing. (74)

Riley's claim is that "biology is simultaneously biography," and this demands a thinking
of "biography" that goes beyond the empirical description of experience or the narration
of feelings and of biology as other than a set of non-ideological facts:
to overlook the particular forms in which biology is lived out is to overlook the
fact that biology is simultaneously biography. For women in particular it is
evident that an extremely significant proportion of 'social' experience is socialised
biology handled in highly specific forms — all reproductive experience, for
instance — and these forms have at the same time a clear political dimension,
124
most obviously for the question of the conditions for a real control of fertility and
for the possible real content of slogans like 'sexual self-determination'. (89)

In Riley's feminist socialized biology, "all reproductive experience" must be read in
conjunction with specific social and political rhetorics, policies, and campaigns. It
remains, however, somewhat unclear exactly what the writing of this socialized biology
looks like: it is my contention in this chapter that it takes partial form in the poetry that
Riley was concurrently writing.
The above passage also indicates Riley's ongoing interest in slogans as effective
agents in the world worthy of analysis not only on the level of signification but also of
distribution and effects. For Riley, rhetoric is perhaps the central stumbling block for
political analysis; neither ideological struggle nor materialist correctives are sufficiently
able to understand the workings of rhetoric. The explicit lesson from War in the Nursery,
then, is that the gaps between intention, speech act, and effect need to be respected and
held apart even as they bleed into each other. On the power of pronatalist rhetoric:
"Rhetoric doesn't make women have more children through the sheer power of the word
– the word narrowly conceived. Its presence matters, though, to put it mildly, and has to
be assessed, irrespective of whether it 'works' in the most detectable sense" (151-2). The
way in which the "presence" of rhetoric and language "matters" and "works" is a source
of continual curiosity for Riley, in her prose and in her poetry. Thus the political stakes of
her philosophical and historical work extend to her poetry, which reads and interpolates
political slogans, casual conversation, the inner voice, and philosophy, not as some
generalized pastiche, but in order to elaborate and lay bear the dialectics of social and
biological, psychic and physiological, political and personal experience.
125

a note on sex

I will turn here to a consideration of the poetry that Riley was writing alongside
the papers that led to War in the Nursery. Riley's first volume of poetry, in which the
poems quoted above were published, was Marxism for Infants, published in 1977 by
Wendy Mulford's press, Street Editions, as a small-release staple-bound volume. The
collection begins, of course, with its title, framed explicitly in relation to the questions of
the reproduction of relations of production that animated much Marxist-feminist political
thought. The title is taken indirectly from George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, in
which a fictional "Comrade X," a bourgeois socialist, authors a volume called Marxism
for Infants all the while remaining marked by the "training of his childhood, when he was
taught to hate, fear, and despise the working class" (Wigan Pier 135-36). At her first ever
public reading of poetry (a joint reading with Wendy Mulford at the 1977 Cambridge
Poetry Festival), Riley explained that the title was in fact only unconsciously drawn from
Orwell:
I'd thought of the title for myself, but Wendy pointed it out that I hadn't, and it's a
submerged memory of what Orwell says in The Road to Wigan Pier, and I'll read
the way Orwell uses the title, I suppose because it's so much... he sells it short in a
way; it's such a lovely phrase and he uses it very undialectically.... I wanted to
retrieve that and use it, I suppose to say that if Marxism does not have to do with
infants and vice versa then there's not much hope for either infants or for
Marxism. (Riley, Cambridge Poetry Festival Collection)

Riley's version of the title also points to the persistence of conservative feeling in the very
effort to "retrain" consciousness via a moral and cultural indoctrination in early
126
education. The adoption of this title is at least doubly ironic in light of Orwell's own pro-
natalist writings from the 40s that Riley quotes at length in War in the Nursery : "the birth
rate... is not likely to rise to the replacement level until those in power, as well as the
ordinary people in the street, come to feel that children matter more than money" (quoted
in War 156). Riley's title also harbors reservations about the political purchase of her own
relatively "academic" socialist-feminist poetry, given its limited and rarefied
circulation.
53
Finally, the title riffs on Orwell's suggestion that a socialist would demand
some sort of swamp be made between Marxism and infants – in other words, bourgeois
intellectuals might exchange their Marxism for rearing children, or perhaps, according to
a eugenicist logic, the working classes should give up on having children and embrace
Marxism instead. Riley, for her part, will have none of this.
Calling itself a sort of handbook, then, Riley's sequence of nineteen poems is
nonetheless hardly didactic; it is accented, rather, by moments of doubt and uncertainty.
The lexicon flickers with the concerns of the time, as the discursive materials drawn from
feminist and Marxist political praxis are disorganized and reorganized, echoing each
other through sound patterning, an unconventional use of the page, and complex
slippages between the third-person pronoun "she," the first-person "I," and an impersonal,
generalized "you." From the opening poem, "A Note on Sex and the Reclaiming of
Language," Marxism for Infants calls into question lyric and feminist reclamations of an
authentic voice, all the while insisting on the necessity of grammatical personhood
developed alongside a constant disruption of lyric address with more impersonal

53
Thomas Butler argues this last point at more length in Writing at the Edge of the Person.
127
elements. "A Note on 'Sex'" has generally been read as a key to Riley's early work, and it
does indeed prefigure the political philosophy of language developed in her 1988 Am I
That Name: Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History:

a note on sex and the reclaiming of language

The Savage is flying back home from the New Country
in native-style dress with a baggage of sensibility
to gaze on the ancestral plains with the myths thought up
and dreamed in her kitchens as guides

She will be discovered
as meaning is flocking densely around the words seeking a way
any way in between the gaps, like a fertilisation

The work is
e.g. to write "she" and for that to be a statement
of fact only and not a strong image
of everything which is not-you, which sees you

The new land is colonised, though its prospects are empty

The Savage weeps as landing at the airport
she is asked to buy wood carvings, which represent herself

(Marxism 1)

This poem has been read by critics as a relatively straightforward polemical allegory for
the misrecognitions of categorical identifications and interpellations. Unlike most of
Marxism for Infants, "A Note on Sex" works within a restricted thematic, lexical and
syntactic range and sustains an extended conceit of the "Savage" as a critique of radical
128
feminist injunctions for women to "reclaim the language."
54
Riley is obviously skeptical
of this possibility; in all of her work, language has us as much as we can ever dream of
having it.
55
Self-descriptions are always, for Riley, appropriable to ends against one's
needs and wishes ("mother" being her early test case), not because we name ourselves
incorrectly but because language is radically privative. Hence the attempts of the
"Savage" to escape colonization by returning "home," in "native-style dress," are readily
commodified and sold back to her for a profit. Some of Riley's contemporaries seem to
have altogether missed this irony, reading the volume as attempting to "reclaim the
language." In 1977 a review published in Perfect Bound, Peter Robinson insists that the
volume earnestly believes this to be a desirable goal, and finds fault with the volume for
its absence of the "male pronoun:" "Until the man can be reintroduced upon terms that
are more evenly distributed the reclaiming of language remains a formulation defined in
the terms of a now absent male orientation from which the language has been reclaimed"
(Robinson, 85).

54
Most readers have taken the title as a directive to read "savage" only as a metaphor for "women." At
least one reader has questioned the racist and imperialist overtones of this figuration, insofar as it is used
for the deconstruction of gendered rather than racialized discourse: "The co-optation of the metaphors to a
feminist project, which does not yet specifically engage race, is problematic because the conflation of
gender and race denies the specificity of the colonial experience. But because this language does not
reappear elsewhere in Riley's work, its use in her poem is arguably part of her critique. Nonetheless, Riley
never makes this criticism explicit through the theoretical discourse of the poem in the way that she does
with gender, so that the enactment of the gesture of cooptation within ‘a note on sex’ verges uncomfortably
on a repetition of the colonization process." (Buck, 95-6) I would argue that the poem actively engages the
intersection of gender and colonial race, insofar as it inverts the troping of land/Savage as woman.
55
In this way Riley's work echoes that of one of her favorite poets, W. S. Graham. Riley's poems are
particularly reminiscent of Graham's Implements in Their Places, which was published in 1977, the same
year as Marxism for Infants, although this influence is much more pronounced in the later poems from mop
mop georgette and the philosophical works The Words of Selves and Impersonal Passion. Two of Graham's
titles from Implements will schematically serve to indicate these resonances for now: "What is the
Language Using us for?" and "Language Ah Now You Have Me."
129
Riley's more avowedly feminist readers have also tended to read this poem as an
attempt to "reclaim the language," but they have also more readily recognized the poem
as an allegorical ironization of any such effort. Linda Kinnahan reads in the poem an
attempt to voice "the female 'I' outside of dominant norms":
Just as public myths enter the domestic kitchen "as guides," the private woman is
neither separate from nor immune to the systematic othering of the "feminine"
within private, public, historical, and literary spheres... The language of the poem,
in evoking various narratives, seeks an alternative for the "she" to the cultural
representations available to her and suggests that the meaning "flocking densely
around the words seeking a way/ any way in between the gaps" occurs not
through mimetic means but through the "gaps" made apparent when seemingly
disparate narratives (travel, domestic, imperial) are brought together and their
interconnections foregrounded. (Kinnahan 211-12)

Kinnahan sees the poem, and Riley's work more generally, as enacting a primarily
negative movement of refusal while retaining the hope that the truth may come through
the "gaps" between different discourses, each of which is in itself too overdetermined.
Frances Presley reads the poem, and Marxism for Infants more generally, along similar
lines: "in Riley's feminism and her language it is easier to say what a woman is not, and it
is much more dangerous to start saying what she is" ("The Grace of Being Common").
Romana Huk has read the poem's ironic manipulation of a naturalizing language of
sexuality as evidence of Riley's critique of radical feminist affirmations of the
"feminine":
'Sex' as gendered essence is thus de-naturalised by the poem's parodic
naturalisation of the relentless and inevitable process of linguistic construction of
selfhood - all of which issued, when the poem appeared twenty years ago, a potent
early critique of romanticised projects in the female construction of identity.
("Feminist Radicalism" 241)

130
Carol Watts has also argued of Riley's early poetry more generally, that "it is easier... to
see what is being broken from than broken towards" (Watts, 159).
Each of these readings helps to explain what is happening in "A Note on Sex."
But too exclusive a focus on this poem and on its relationship to a more or less
schematized version of her 1988 book "Am I That Name": Feminism and the Category of
"Women" in History has tended to obscure what is happening in the remainder of
Marxism for Infants and the volume's relationship to the political and historical writings
that Riley was concurrently working on. For example, Presley is able to argue that the
title of Marxism for Infants "is undercut by the poems which follow in which the infants
are her own, and what she has to teach them has far more to do with feminism and
feminist linguistics, than with Marxism." This is a somewhat unhelpful distinction, not
only insofar as Riley's political milieu was working through the connections between
Marxism and feminism, but also because the poetry itself works in and at this connection
through its concentration on the "socialized biology" of "the mother's" voice.
In other words, "A Note on Sex" does prefigure Riley's later turn to a feminist
philosophy of language (about which I will have more to say in my fourth chapter), but it
does not exhaust the range of affects and relations to language, space, voice, and body
that are explored throughout the remainder of Marxism for Infants. This is not only
because other poems broach different subject matter; they are also formally quite
different. The other poems I've read above represent another tendency among the poems
of Marxism for Infants: the first type of poem, exemplified by "A Note on Sex," is a
relatively self-contained lyric artifact. Few of the poems that follow it really stand on
131
their own in the same way, which may explain their relatively minimal presence in
Riley's 2000 Selected Poems, published by Reality Street, which focuses much more on
the poems from the 1993 collection mop mop georgette. The majority of the poems in
Marxism for Infants do not lend themselves to being read as individual poems; they are
more numbers in a series best read in quick succession. Indeed, almost all of these poems
are untitled in Marxism for Infants, but a number of these are provided with titles when
they reappear in the 1985 collection Dry Air. Although the distinction I am drawing
between stand-alone lyric and verse sequence is contestable, I think it can help to
illuminate part of what is happening in the collection and to provide a corrective to the
reception of this work, which has for the most part been read according to a model better
suited to the short, self-contained lyric poem.
56
In the Cambridge Women's Liberation
Newsletter of July 1976, Ruth Craft in reporting on a meeting of the "Women and
Writing Group" noted that "Denise would like to attempt a sustained work but, for
example, finds conventional third-person narrative an impossibility." I would argue that
Marxism for Infants is such a work, even though the poems that comprise it were written
over a number of years. Indeed, when she read the work at the Cambridge Poetry
Festival, she introduced it as a single poem: "I want to read a poem of mine that goes on
for fifteen minutes. It's called Marxism for Infants." I will refer to the sections of the
poem as individual poems themselves, but they operate both alone on the page and as part
of a single serialized piece.

56
Watts being an exception to this general tendency.
132
The serialized quality of this work is relevant to the argument I am making about
Riley's socialized biology. To the extent that Marxism for Infants is a "sustained work,"
its shape is not reducible to the bounded, formal management of feeling and perception
that is often attributed, however spuriously, to the successfully autonomous lyric poem.
In this way, the poems are not miniaturized encapsulations of the political theory
discursively elaborated in the prose; they are, rather, leaky echo chambers in which
political and personal discourse are bounced across and through each other. Carol Watts
argues that, in the poems of Marxism for Infants that suggestively figure language in
domestic terms, "the lyric form is unravelled as topography.... If the house is synonymous
with the self, as in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, it cannot escape its gendered coding:
domesticity, hearth, shelter, prison, tomb" (160). I would extend Watts' comments by
arguing that, in Marxism for Infants, the walls of that great house of lyric autonomy are
also porous; each poem reflects an essayistic writing of the social individual captured and
recaptured in the contradictions and complicities of political and personal language, each
attempt echoing pieces of the others such that none can possibly contain the problem in
the wholeness of a single lyric.

"is it enough like this as I am"

I would draw two main themes and formal operations from what I'm calling the
"second kind" of poem: (1) the dislocation of voice and of bodily proprioception,
133
amounting to a querying of how one lives the biological and social as biography – as
writing life – through lyric address and versification, sound patterning, echoing; and (2)
the address to another, you, who is perceived only through the above series of dislocating
maneuvers. The way in which these two strands are formally linked and dispersed shows
a very different management of lyric from that proposed or analyzed by the Practical
Criticism; the poems work cumulatively by extending "the fine steely wires that run" not
only "between love and economics" (as a poem from No Fee has it) but also through and
around want, need, rights, speech, sex, voice, biology, and individuation. In what follows,
I read the remainder of Marxism for Infants in light of the materials I've covered so far,
considering how Riley's poetic text works on the analytics of socialized biology toward
which her critical work insistently gestures. As I've suggested, Riley's notion of a
"socialized biology" remains primarily gestural in War in the Nursery. I believe that this
reflects the necessity, for Riley, of thinking this notion through the language of first and
second-person lyrical subjectivity. That is, the biology that Riley seeks to understand is
only accessible through the personal and vocative registers of lyric poetry as a socialized
biography or writing of life. This means that there can only be an aporetic relationship
between "socialized biology" as a theoretical or discursive category and its enacting in
lyric as a biographical praxis. This tension will accompany all of my readings of the
poems: each time that I attempt to read them theoretically as expressions or developments
of "socialized biology," I risk appearing as though I don't notice the ineradicable
difference between these poems and the discourses of biology or sociology. But this
seems to be an unavoidable foolishness preferable to not noticing the ways in which
134
Riley's poetic and theoretical works actively supplement one another to write the sociality
of biology "as it is lived."
Like "A Note on Sex," the remainder of Marxism for Infants does not adhere to
the epistemological claims of consciousness raising, as Claire Buck notes in an essay on
"Poetry and the Women's Movement in Postwar Britain," but neither does any "Marxism"
get transmitted to any "Infants" through some sort of Leninist "training-" or "instruction-"
based political education (or, for that matter, through the authority of a mother or father
who knows best). Rather, the political and personal materials are circulated through
prosody; subjectivity is voiced in the echoes of intimate and political addresses. The
fourth poem reads

says I'm into cooking now
says I'm into taoism

absorbed by a shifting of bright globes serially

You have a family, then? No.

mothers hospitals
sex class housing
anchored flying
is it enough like this as I am
is the human visible through above &
completely in the material determinants

up

135
I cannot understand the function of the
living body
except by enacting it myself
and except in so far as I am a body
which rises towards the world

(Marxism 4)

The sound patterning of the middle section of this poem (beginning with "mothers" and
ending with "up") shifts from an emphasis on "o" and "s" (mothers hospitals sex class
housing) to "s" and "i" in "is it enough like this as I am." The effect is such that while
"Anchored"/"flying" would be a simple opposition without the work of sound patterning
that leads up to it, the -ing that links "housing" to flying calls into question the
"anchored" status of the former.
Finally the "n" and "m" phonemes gain dominance, with "i" remaining in the mix
by the underscoring of "in" such that "the material determinants" closes this image-
complex without any sonic or orthographic surprises, subtly echoing the question about
how "I am." But then "up" oddly irrupts in a hiccupped syllable with the "p" phoneme
which has not appeared at all in the densely alliterative poem thus far. A British hiccough
might better echo the "enough," but this is precisely not what happens, we are not "off"
but "up," in a moment that signals a decisive turn in a poem that already seems quite
vertiginous enough. This "up" also points "above" the material determinants sonically
and semantically rather than "in" or "through" them, to the above of the superstructure of
"culture." But this performative "up" also points back to the beginning of the poem on the
page and back to the names of those material determinants themselves. And it is also
perhaps "up" as in "time's up."
136
The question remains, however: "is it enough like this as I am"-- it, this, and I
linked in a question, this is as I am, but is it enough like this. It and I are crossed like
anchored and flying, and what I am is woven into the elements that precede and "house"
it. The first moments of this poem are, let's recall, a sort of anonymous reported speech:
"says I'm into cooking now/says I'm into Taoism" seem to have introduced the "I"
into the poem as a quotation from a third person, echoing the impersonality of all
strategies for meeting externally defined personal needs. But is this, is it, am I, enough?
Is this impersonality of the subjective "I" enough, even if the "I" is socialized and
therefore never a self-contained sovereign agency?
The effect of the crossing of it, I, and this is such that when we return to the "I" in
the final stanza, what "I am" (a body) is an "it" I enact, suggesting that the speaking and
enacting "I," the subject of enunciation, is itself something that is enacted. This final
stanza consists of a sentence taken directly from Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of
Perception, a philosophical work that greatly impressed Riley, as it did Prynne, Oliver
and many other Cambridge poets at the time. The sentence narrates the paradoxical
experience of the body simultaneously as object and subject of perception. Each of these
frameworks, the objective and the subjective, elides the other, but it is only in and as this
shifting back and forth that any understanding must take its place. This is what cannot be
understood of or by the living body, namely, its needs, at least not when society and
biology, subject and object, are understood as discrete regions of experience, however
mutually interacting they may be. But this theoretical statement cannot explain the poem
that includes it; it is also affected by the jolt of the poem's spacing ("up") and the lines
137
that precede it. The only possibility for knowledge is a rising of the (biological) body not
above the (social) world but towards it. In this way the "up" transforms and is
transformed by the end of the poem, as are all of the "material determinants" and the
theories that would seek to name them.
The poem on the next page traces another topography of the body in speech,
recalling Merleau-Ponty's account of phantom-limbs
57
in its efforts to understand the
I/you relationship in terms not reducible to an interior/exterior dichotomy:

the speaking, the desire to be heard
the hearing, the desire to be told

tongues piece the joints of scattered limbs
click lubricants of social grace
"articulacy" articulates

a flow, a dazzling mass

the speaking, the desire to hear
the hearing, the desire to be spoken

is thus sweet massy a diffused
glowing extension

to you (shaking)
to you (absence)

(5)

57
See Phenomenology of Perception, 87-102.
138
This poem moves between two interconnected experiences of direct address: speaking so
as to be heard and hearing to be told are followed by speaking as "the desire to hear" and
hearing so as "to be spoken." The first, in which "tongues piece the joints of scattered
limbs/ click lubricants of social grace" works, through such clicking articulation (and one
can hear in the hard consonants of "click lubricants" the socially graceful clucking of
tongues) to articulate "a flow, a dazzling mass" that quickly turns into a less venerated
tradition of speech. "The desire to be spoken/ is thus sweet massy a diffused/ glowing
extension/ to you": here the glow of desire is diffused and extended like a phantom limb
that neither excludes nor wholly encompasses "you."
Jonathan Culler has argued that apostrophe, the figure of speech in which some
inanimate or absent person or thing is addressed as if present and capable of responding,
is a feature of all lyric rather than a special case. This is so, according to Culler, insofar as
lyric works in vocative modes to produce textual events rather than merely to represent
events extrinsic to the action of the poem. For Culler, apostrophe has "a special
temporality which is the set of all moments at which writing can say 'now'" ("Apostrophe
149), and this temporality is foundational to lyric as a genre or mode of discourse; the
vocative call to another is the very stuff of lyric poetry. Culler further suggests that
one distinguish two forces in poetry, the narrative and the apostrophic.... Nothing
need happen in an apostrophic poem... because the poem itself is to be the
happening.... Apostrophes remov[e] the opposition between presence and absence
from empirical time and locat[e] it in a discursive time. The temporal movement
from A to B, internalized by apostrophe, becomes a reversible alternation between
A' and B': a play of presence and absence governed not by time but by poetic
power. (149-50)
58

58
This passage recalls Forrest-Thomson's quite suggestive, if almost incomprehensible, assertion that
"whoever is powerful outside a poem, only the poet is powerful within it" (Poetic Artifice 9). Culler was
139

Taking into account the hyperbolic, fictional power of apostrophe as outlined by Culler,
the "I" and "you" of lyric address cannot be reduced to empirical intersubjective
discourse. "I" remains, rather, an inanimate linguistic personhood that has no authority
except in relation to a "you" that it animates in order to be animated by it. It is this
discursive time of address that conditions the lyric power to produce a textual event, as
Culler suggests all apostrophe does.
Barbara Johnson's essay on "Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion" brings
Culler's theory of apostrophe into an encounter with political debates about abortion,
showing how the "poetic power" of apostrophe can have analogous effects in the (real)
"world of difference." For Johnson, apostrophe can function to animate another who will,
in turn, animate the first speaker (as in the case of the unborn "child" whose imagined
ability to be addressed and to respond lends the pro-life apostropher a considerable
degree of authority). Apostrophe's performative power works in this way against itself,
effectively destabilizing any empirical temporality of the speaking subject: “who, in the
final analysis, exists by addressing whom?” (World, 192) Indeed, the chiasmus of "the
speaking, the desire to hear/ the hearing, the desire to be spoken" inverts the primacy of
presence to self via a speaking to the other who is to animate the self's own mouth. "My"
voice in this poem comes from "your" mouth; voice is experienced as a phantom limb, a
diffused and massy "extension/ to you" who are an absent and shaking linguistic person.

married to Forrest-Thomson until her death; his work on lyric bears many interesting connections to her
conception of Artifice, although he tends to work on more traditional lyric forms (he cannot be found
reading Prynne, for example).
140
On its own, then, the poem might be read as an enactment of this deconstructive
movement of apostrophe. But here I would protest that my reading of this poem as an
application of Johnson and Culler's writings misses the particular social staging of lyric
address in Riley's work. This sociality of lyric is signaled not merely by the appearance
of the word "social" in the text but, as the poems work together to show, and as no single
poem can ever demonstrate on its own, this sociality is constitutively built into the body
and voice. The tripping movement across imagined and real borders between "I" and
"you" is not reducible to the stance of a "self" in relation to some "other," as in the ethics
of intersubjectivity; they are already soaked in the socialized biology of speech as they
are lived. Once again, Riley's work signals that socialization cannot be reduced to
intersubjectivity.
This model of speech is more fully elaborated in the antepenultimate poem in the
volume, in which speech is narrated in the third person, the objective experience of the
body as a set of objects:

A woman's head occupying the whole depth; a white ground.

Her head turning and the voice and the voice beginning.

The hand reaching, brushing slowly across the mouth and
withdrawing, thus describing an arc.

The voice repeating a phrase which the mouth shapes.

The mouth and the hand together encircling the words.

141
This impulse renewed over and over again.

(17)

This poem traces the emergence of "voice" as a phenomenological category terminating
and originating in repetition ("renewed over and over again"). The poem's third person
narration allegorizes the exteriorizing and objectifying nature of theorizing the body in
impersonal terms. The body in question is marked as a feminine impersonality,
alternating between the definite and feminine possessive articles ("A woman's head" and
"her head" interspersed with "the voice," "the mouth and the hand"). The poem traces a
movement from subjective experience to objective appearance, beginning with the
attempt to perceive a total immersion in subjectivity: "A woman's head occupying the
whole depth," and then the parts of the body that enact speech are parceled out as objects,
primarily hand and mouth. These are the agencies of speech as the body attempts to form
and shape a language that in fact gives it form: "The voice repeating a word which the
mouth shapes./ The mouth and hand together encircling the words." Finally, "This
impulse renewed over and over again," an impulse to speak coming from outside the
hands but within the world of the woman's head, in which language gives contour to the
hand and mouth within the total field of the "woman's head" that it simultaneously
constitutes. There is no mention, here in this poem, of you, but the conditions for any
address are shaped by this constitutive exteriority and iterability of "the voice."
Riley consistently explores this thinking of lyric address and subjectivity through
the work of Merleau-Ponty. The eleventh poem also quotes Phenomenology of
Perception and then tacks on two additional lines:
142
while I am overcome by some grief and wholly
given over to my distress, my eyes already stray
in front of me and are drawn despite everything
to some shining object and thereupon resume their
autonomous existence

the clearness that it must be you.
who cannot ever be arrived at

(11)

The entire first stanza is taken directly from Phenomenology of Perception; it occurs a
few pages after the passage included in the poem cited above (Merleau-Ponty, 97). This
is the same chapter featuring the discussion of phantom limbs, in which Merleau-Ponty
analogically equates the loss of a limb with the death of a loved one. Riley's poem infects
this analogy with the vocative registers of lyric poetry, so that the lost object is no longer
quite an object at all but rather a "you." "Some shining object" is ushered into the terrain
of personhood; it is transformed from an "it" to a "you" that can be addressed: "the
clearness that it must be you." But, just as quickly, it is removed from the scene of
reciprocal address: "who cannot ever be arrived at." Moreover, these last two lines are
shorter, as well, and might read almost as regular verse were it not for the metrically
awkward final "at." This "at" highlights the impersonality of the passive syntax through
which you are "clearly" recognized, and sounds out the impossibility of arriving at a you
who is always "in front of me," in both senses, facing me yet always a step ahead.
A few pages later comes a very different poem that inverts this equation of "you"
with "some shining object." This fourteenth poem narrates the affective intensity that
both "you" and "I" have felt upon meeting "people in rooms.../... burning.../ & alight with
143
eagerness and almost touch /& stay the night here and yes!" The poem is breathless,
briefly cathecting on different objects of promise as it passes between each "particular/
whatever.../ that shone to the eye immediately", including "your" own face in the mirror:
you've met I've met people in rooms before
we've gone into rooms burning with our own
rightness for now
& alight with eagerness and almost touch
& stay the night here and yes! the blazing
ever-realised vividness of that particular
whatever - stone postcard slow scarlet of
a paperback's creased edge sharp corner
of soap & at the mirror your face outdated
since you are already gone on ahead of it
to this on which you are embarked & goodbye
to your opened face as you turn
back to the lit room seriously - anyway
that shone to the eye immediately

before

touch

(14)

The first words of the poem assert a continuity between "you" and "I" ("you've met I've
met people in rooms before"), the vagueness of the action forcing a recognition that
indeed "you" and "I" have both had this same experience. The distinction between you
and I is then dissolved in the next line into we: "we've gone into rooms burning with our
own/ rightness for now," which might have been a bit harder to get "you" to ascertain had
the stage not already been set for "our" conflation. The next few lines speed up with the
casualness of opening ampersands echoed in the "ands" that follow later in each line, the
internal rhyme of "rightness"/"alight"/"night," and the consonance of "s" and "t"
144
repeating ("eagerness and almost touch/ & stay"). The opening affirmation culminates
with "& stay the night here and yes!" after which the poem is slowed down by "the
blazing/ ever-realised vividness of that particular/ whatever–." The use of
"particular/whatever" here dulls the "vividness" that the poem subsequently attempts to
articulate, and it announces the extent to which such detail and particularity masks the
fact that any details or particulars might be chosen to the same effect. The next lines'
relative lack of punctuation and abundant enjambment make them read quickly, if not
exactly "vividly:" "stone postcard slow scarlet of/ a paperback's creased edge sharp
corner/ of soap & at the mirror...." And right here, between these vivid objects and the
room "alight" with promise is "your face outdated." Once again "you" is the impersonal
you, directed to anyone listening and also more or less interchangeable with "I": "& at the
mirror your face outdated/ since you are already gone on ahead of it/ to this on which you
are embarked...." Here the lyric subject is, like the reader, burdened by its own necessary
retroactivity, as "you" are/"I" am already past as we turn toward another person or object,
and you experience this redoubling of self-presence by reading the poem's addresses.
At this point the poem gathers speed: "since you are already gone on ahead of it"
might almost be a sequence of dactylic tetrameter, depending on whether or not the "you"
is impersonal and unstressed or apostrophic and stressed. This is followed by the
metrically irregular and overly grammatical "to this on which you are embarked...," and
then a departure from this encounter with your anachronistic face and from the regular
meter that led away from it: "goodbye/ to your opened face as you turn/ back to the lit
room seriously." The high-speed intensity of these lines is rhetorically disregarded or
145
dismissed by an "anyway:" "anyway / that [i.e. "that particular whatever"] shone to the
eye immediately...." All of this has taken place "before/ touch," and so the "touch" of a
prospective lover emerges both as impetus and endpoint to the "vividness" of each
"particular whatever," much as it haunts the face in the mirror throughout. The touch of
sex is thoroughly interspersed with the self-regard that it both faces and follows after
(again in the double sense of "before").
This interplay of conversational and ecstatic tones reappears in the second-half of
the sixteenth poem, after three shorter stanzas, the first composed in vocative and almost
mystical lyric, the second listing fragmented figurations of some undefined entity, and the
third a single line further juxtaposing coolness with emotion:
hold fast in arms before astonished eyes
whom you must grasp throughout great changes
constant and receptive as a capital city

is now a fire now a frozen hand
a rainstorm white birds
a rotting log a young boy
a savaged sheep an indifference

a kind of seriousness, a kind of rage

and through each transforming
yourself to be not here whose
body shapes a hundred lights a
glowing strip of absence night's
noisy and particular who
vanishes with that flawless sense
of occasion I guess you'd have if
only I knew you at first light
leaving "the wrong body" , old, known

(16)
146

The stanzas diverge in structure and tone, but there are some clear continuities between
them. Beginning with the first line, there are unmistakable, if rather unexpected, echoes
of an early poem by Langston Hughes: "Hold fast to dreams/ For if dreams die/ Life is a
broken-winged bird/ That cannot fly// Hold fast to dreams/ For when dreams go/ Life is a
barren field/ Frozen with snow" (Collected 32). Not only are the opening words of each
poem the same, but each first line shares an end rhyme (die/eyes), and meter (iambic
tetrameter). Moreover, the "white birds" and "frozen hand" in Riley's second stanza take
on a new significance in light of this intertext, echoing as they do the barren fields of
Hughes's dreamless dreamland. Hughes' injunction to dream within the context of U.S.
racial oppression and economic exploitation positioned the sovereignty of imagination
ambivalently between escapist fantasy and revolutionary force. Riley's second stanza
ends with "an indifference," terminating the "great changes" in Hughes' bleak, affectless
landscape, that threatens to neutralize the charge of the antitheses that precede it (fire or
frozen, mineral or animal, rotting or young). But the grammar of Riley's first stanza is
ambiguous: in the second line, does "whom" correspond to the "eyes" or to whatever one
must "hold fast in arms" (perhaps a dream?) before the eyes? What is being modified by
"constant and receptive as a capital city?" Is it paradoxically the "great changes" from the
previous line? There is no punctuation to help us here, and the second stanza only
produces more ambiguity: what exactly is "now a fire," etc.? On what object are these
figural transformations enacted?
The challenge of the poem lies in its demand that this otherness without place,
this thing that must be held or must hold "fast in arms," must also somehow survive and
147
be survived. The final stanza speeds up again into that rapturous, breathless lyric stream
that we saw in the fourteenth poem, lacking punctuation and replete with enjambment
and suggestions of regular meter (the almost trochaic tetrameter and rhymes of "whose/
BOdy SHAPES a HUNdred LIGHTS a/ GLOWing STRIP of ABsence NIGHT'S...").
Again the poem is primarily addressed to an impersonal you who could also be an "I" or
a "one": "and through each transforming/ yourself to be not here." This otherness can
only be elsewhere, somewhere other than this lonely anonymous capital cityscape
"whose/ body shapes a hundred lights," and "you" are one who, like the capital city,
"vanishes." Still, the location of this otherness in transformation is unclear— indeed, the
very occasion of its/your transformation is unknowable since we don't know whose or
what entity's "wrong body" is being transformed or left behind in the first place: "with
that flawless sense/ of occasion I guess you'd have if/ only I knew you at first light/
leaving 'the wrong body....'" This "old, known" body, however, was never known or
even dreamed by the speaker. Here Riley takes on the problem of knowing the affective
struggles of anyone else. "The forces of circumstance" that guide anyone else seem to be
"a frozen hand... an indifference" to me. This attempt to know and to feel anyone else's
life will be the standard to which so much of Riley's later poetry will hold itself. For my
purposes, it is worth noting the movement from the assertion of indifference to the
rapturous lyric of the final stanza. Although the poem ends by recognizing the inability to
know from what interpellation another person has struggled to break away, the lines that
immediately precede it bespeak a passionate and compassionate movement that burns
with more "rightness" than the doubt that surrounds it.
148
I will close by reading the tenth poem from Marxism for Infants, in which Riley
narrates a less bleak dreamscape, albeit one that all the same "looks impossible." This
poem is quite distinct from the rest of the collection in that it reads as perfectly
grammatical (if imperfectly punctuated) prose. It is one of few poems in the volume other
than "A Note on Sex" to feature a sustained conceit and to provide a seemingly
straightforward narrative account. This very short story recounts an attempt to move from
one unlikely domestic setting, presumably brought on by the force of circumstance, to
something willed and genuinely chosen:

I lived with my children in a warm bright and
harmonious room which formed the crest of a high
timber scaffolding - a room on stilts. Outside
it was a black night, an old railway yard,
abandoned tracks, a high wind. Our room
although too small for our needs was glowing and
secure despite the fact that it had no roof,
that its walls led straight upwards to the
black clear sky.
I left there briefly and encountered x
who pointed upwards to show where we should both
go. A smooth platform hung in the sky, its
only access a long swaying cord joined to its
midpoint, the end of which drifted against my
face. It looked impossible but I was not
disheartened.

(10)

The first stanza provides a surreal portrait of a sort of squat: the surroundings are "old"
and "abandoned," and the atmosphere, following the pathetic fallacy that is perhaps all
that can be seen from within the "grave embrace" of the family, is a "black night" with
"high wind." The room is both removed from and a part of this world: it is "a room on
149
stilts" yet has "no roof." This housing report vacillates between pointing out the
shabbiness of the squat and emphasizing its miraculous sufficiency: this is the dream of
the family always being enough even as it is wide open to and propped up by "the
outside" that simultaneously abandons it to itself. Thus the room, "although too small for
our needs" and "despite the fact that it had no roof" appears "glowing and secure,"
"warm, bright, and harmonious." The poem does not simply demystify the bourgeois
comforts of security and harmony; they are presented as part of the same fantasmatic
reality that extends "upwards to the/ black clear sky."
At this point the poem shifts to its second act, in which the speaker recounts
having "left there briefly." What transpires is an encounter with "x," an ambiguously
authoritative figure who suggests "where we should both/ go." The "impossible"
architecture that follows ends the poem ambivalently. If "it looked impossible," then why
is the speaker not disheartened? Is it because she is plucky and believes that with effort
she will succeed? Or, alternately, because she does not want to leave with x at all but
would prefer to remain in the roofless house? Should we read the speaker as intentionally
withholding the reason for her perseverance? Or, reporting a dream, is she merely
recounting an affective state without any understanding of its cause? The poem leaves
these questions suspended, and in this way invites the reader to speculate on the affective
dimensions of housing and the as-yet-inscrutable nature of the needs of single mothers
within a regime of the figure of the mother as vessel of intersubjectivity.
Like much of Marxism for Infants, then, this poem lays bare a range of affects and
experiences for the reader's attention. This is not, however, because these poems invite
150
the reader to imitate the lyric subject or to find moral integrity by censuring her. Rather,
Marxism for Infants traces the production of speech through the matrix of its embodied
inscriptions. Lyric address, as the purportedly ethical management of otherness, is shown
to be coeval with and implicated in the institutional (linguistic, ideological, and
repressive) discourses of the capitalist nation-state. But what these poems bring to the
surface is the way in which wants and needs are, all the same, constantly produced within
and through this matrix, written onto and out of the socialized body: and they will
continue to be so even after any revolution. "Real" needs and wants are recuperable for
struggle only through their rehearsed expression, only through repeated, partial attempts
to share them with "you." This is the socialized biology of Riley's lyric, which cannot be
produced in expository discourse but only in the vocative registers of a lyric that
simultaneously decries the myth of a pre-political, ethical realm of pure intersubjectivity.
So no, it is not enough like this as I am, but it will even more certainly never be enough
as long as all that passes before touch is consigned to the realm of the ethical, of pure
intersubjectivity, of some mother's good sense to develop herself into the psychology of a
fantasmatic child.
151
Chapter 3. Lines for Free: Wendy Mulford's Commitments

In February 1979, Wendy Mulford's Street Editions released a 200-copy second
edition of No Fee: A line or two for free, a chapbook of poems co-authored by Mulford
and Denise Riley. No Fee had first been issued in 1978 for an art opening at the Institute
of Contemporary Arts in London; the second edition was released to coincide with the
inaugural "Women's Week" in Cambridge. Women's Week included film screenings,
talks, panels, workshops, and an art exhibition. The evening of Friday, 23 February
featured a "women only" performance of music and poetry, with readings by Wendy
Mulford, Denise Riley, Judy Carey, Julia Dale, and Angela Carter "or bring your own."
59
The thread connecting the headlining writers was their commitment to the
women's liberation movement; they were not necessarily bound by common literary
strategies or aesthetic principles. Angela Carter, a renowned feminist fantasy fiction
writer, had recently published her novel The Passion of New Eve, and her celebrated short
story collection The Bloody Chamber would be released just months later. Like Riley and
Mulford, Carter's writings engaged the problem of women's oppression. Unlike either of
them, she made a steady income from writing prose as a journalist and novelist. Judy
Carey was a fellow member of the Cambridge Women's Liberation Group, and her
poems, brief and whimsical pieces of the confessional free verse then common in the
U.S. and British women's movement, were quite dissimilar from the more ambitious

59
Cambridge Women's Liberation Newsletter, January 1979.
152
modernist compositions of Riley and Mulford. In fact, Riley and Mulford never had
poems published in the newsletter, in spite of the fact that they were actively engaged in
the CWLG and its "small group" focusing on Women and Writing. In the April, 1979
issue of the Cambridge Women's Liberation Newsletter, Carey herself appraised the
reading and art exhibition at Women's Week:
The poetry and art both went well I think. As I said earlier though I think there is
much more local talent which we should be reaching and encouraging. Women
are commonly shy of exhibiting their creativity particularly in a critical
atmosphere such as is generated by the art historians and literary fellows of
Cambridge University. We must be sure of informing them that there is equal
space for all women, regardless of intellectual expertise. (CWLN, April 1979)

Carey's comments reflect the avowedly non-hierarchical consciousness-raising ethic of
the Women's Liberation Movement in Britain. This openness to women's expression was
not, in Carey's view, to be limited to personal conversations; it also embraced the
exhibition of "creativity" in public, "regardless of intellectual expertise." Yet this
declared openness and creation of a safe space occludes the extent to which those who
were perceived to have "intellectual expertise" may have been viewed with some
suspicion.
By 1979, both Mulford and Riley were poets working in the academy (Riley as a
doctoral student at Sussex, Mulford as a lecturer of English). Indeed, they may well have
been among those whom Carey perceived as generating a "critical atmosphere." Mulford
especially was involved in the network of writers sometimes called the "Cambridge
School"; her Street Editions press had published chapbooks by Andrew Crozier, Veronica
Forrest-Thomson, John James, Douglas Oliver, and J.H. Prynne, and her own poems had
appeared in Cambridge-based poetry newsletters and journals, including the late-1960s
153
review The English Intelligencer.
60
Mulford was one of few women published in such
venues, which housed rigorous discussions about the political provenance and promise of
lyric poetry.
Indeed, Mulford's role in the Cambridge poetry scene was largely editorial, at
least through the mid-1970s. John Wilkinson, who was at the time an undergraduate at
Cambridge, has credited Mulford with what he calls her "feminist poetic activism."
Wilkinson describes the Cambridge poetry scene in the late-sixties through mid-seventies
not as a "School" but as a grouping of "powerful individuals:"
the generation of Prynne, Peter Riley, John James, Andrew Crozier seemed to me
to be powerful individuals rather than a group, despite the magazines and presses.
(Wendy Mulford linked these configurations through feminist-poetic activism.)
61

According to Wilkinson, that is, Mulford worked largely to connect and link male
writers, and Wilkinson attributes this administrative work to a feminist ethos. While this
may be true, it is not clear that Mulford's editorial work was entirely founded in her
feminism (or that feminist-poetic activism would be primarily editorial). Mulford herself
has suggested that her relatively limited publication record during this period was in fact
due to a lack of confidence and that she did not feel at home in the majority-male circles
of The English Intelligencer and Grosseteste Review. As she wrote in 1979:
My writing is read and heard mainly by men engaged in poetic practices of
differing kinds for whom my work has significance because of the attempt I have
been making to work at the level of the production of meaning. But I want to join

60
Not strictly based in Cambridge but with a circulation strongly tied to the literary scene of Cambridge.
See Pattison et al, Certain Prose of the English Intelligencer, for a well-curated sample of the prose
featured in the journal.
61
Email to UKPoetry listserv, 1/17/2011.
154
my voice with the voices of other women struggling to destruct [sic] the lie of
culture. (33)

Mulford's writing here suggests an affinity with Judy Carey's ideas about the radical
potential of a nonhierarchical creative community of women: "the coming together of
women to create art in many different ways, and the breaking down of the artist-audience
divide, together with experimentation, constitute the opening up of a real challenge to the
dominant culture" (35).
But Mulford's attitude toward her own work actually differed considerably from
those of poets working with the "consciousness-raising" aesthetic of women's movement
writing. As Clair Buck writes of other feminist British poets,
Women's movement poetry, of the kind I am discussing here, operates, on this
model, as a sustained form of cry, as consciousness-raising came to be called
within the women's movement. Every kind of day-to-day experience, and
women's feelings about the experiences, are included and explored in the poems:
work, friendships with women, domesticity and family relationships, abortion,
childbirth, and sexual relationships–heterosexual and lesbian – all become
appropriate subject matter for poetry." (Buck, 91)

As is implicit in Judy Carey's remarks, and as Buck notes, the women's liberation
movement did not readily provide a readership for the poetry of Riley and Mulford. As
many have noted, both writers actively questioned the authority of the lyric "I" to speak
authentically
62
and for forms of "culture" to express "truths," a questioning that, in some
ways, may have gone against the ethos of consciousness-raising. As Buck writes,
The relative cohesion of this grouping of feminist poets needs, however, to be
framed by an awareness of its exclusions. Wendy Mulford and Denise Riley are
poets whose uncertain relationship with the women's movement poets working
and publishing together in the late 1970s raises questions about the emerging

62
Cf. Dowson and Entwistle and Kinnahan for such arguments.
155
definition of a feminist poetics. Both define their work in feminist contexts, and
Riley's collection Dry Air appeared in the Virago series in 1985. However, their
self-proclaimed allegiance to a modernist concentration on formal and linguistic
experiment, together with a very explicit use of poststructuralist theory, set their
work somewhat at odds with the work of poets published in One Foot on the
Mountain.(83)
63

All the same, Mulford attempted to align her work not only with the collaborative aims of
the women's movement, as Wilkinson suggests, but also to connect innovative poetic
practice with the critical and theoretical perspectives of the women's movement. This is
evident from Mulford's editorial work, including her Street Editions publications of
works by Riley, Mulford, and Alice Notley, and from her critical prose (about which I
will say more). That is, Mulford did seek the recognition of the women's liberation
movement throughout this period of her writing, and her writing does engage in her own
sort of agitational poetics.
This is clear in one poem from No Fee, which closes as follows:
women on the streets in the raw-colour cold
men and women by the picket fires through the night

wheels and steel tongues crushing you

an image-nation hurls itself at us
& we pick holes in each other

it's enough to make you cry
to organise
(11)

While this poem is not confessional in any conventional sense, it is also not especially
obscure or difficult. So, why wouldn't work like this have had a greater purchase in the

63
In fact, neither Riley nor Mulford made "explicit use of poststructuralist theory" in their poetry from the
1970s, even if, in prose from those years, Mulford did quote Cixous and Lacan and Riley wrote on
Foucault.
156
women's liberation movement? The poem archives the fragmentation of the oppressed
("we pick holes in each other") by a "crushing" nationalism; and it recognizes that this
perhaps ought to provoke a cry to organize, but that it might just be enough to make you
cry, full stop. The poem does not itself enact either such cry; rather, it describes the
conditions that are "enough" to spur it on. In this sense, Mulford's poem is in direct
conversation with one by Denise Riley appearing four pages earlier in No Fee. Riley's
poem similarly ends in a couplet worrying about the political ambitions of her writing:
writing politics is a luscious glow
and gives a quick buzz to your style
(7)

Peter Middleton reads this, I think correctly, "as both approval and as warning of the
transience of the 'buzz'" ("Breaking" 6). Riley's couplet, even more than Mulford's,
considers "writing politics" as a question of "style" in addition to one of commitment;
both poems consider the distance between the question of "style" and the question of
organizing, insofar as the "cry" to organize is clearly not equivalent to the set of complex
and disciplined actions cried for. Both poems thematize commitment in a manner that
questions the authority of the lyric "I" to express such commitment, in a manner that does
not damn but still does not sit well with a poetics of consciousness raising.
Another strike against Mulford may have been that she taught and wrote about
literature within the academy; she did so within the context of a 1970s blossoming of
British Marxist aesthetic and literary theory. Mulford saw literary criticism and the
literature classroom as places that exposed the contradictory nature of ideological and
material reproduction. On Mulford's account, as I will show, literary study is both a site
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for the oblique reproduction of relations of production (through the moral techniques of
English study developed to serve the capitalist state) and a place for avowedly
anticapitalist and feminist ideological bolstering. Because it is an ideological space, that
is, literary study can generate ideological contestation and for interrupting the
reproduction of aesthetic ideology.
64

All of this is to say that Mulford's poetic, critical-pedagogical, editorial, and
political activity in the late-1970s presents a negotiation with various forms of ideological
commitment at a time when the popularity and force of the left was waning. Mulford is
an especially absorptive writer, which I take to be her strength and interest, and she has
taken on the styles and positions of friends and various other ideological and aesthetic
tendencies. In this chapter, I track the changes in her work through the 1970s and into the
early 1980s, at which point Mulford's expressions turn away from their grounding in
Marxist-Feminism and toward somewhat more metaphysical, if still identifiably feminist,
concerns. As she discusses in a brief note from 1982, this change in perspective
accompanied her involvement in the anti-nuclear proliferation movement. A newfound
terror of total annihilation shifts Mulford's thinking of "reproduction" away from
attention to the contradictions of capital as they are expressed in literature and toward the

64
Alison Light's "Feminism and the Literary Critic" provides a fascinating and lucid account of her
navigation of literary study and feminist activism. In particular, she reads the troubled politics of English
study and considers the possibilities for socialist and feminist transformations of literary studies practices:
"If feminist work in literature aims to make available a cultural discourse of resistance, it can only do so by
engaging with the institutions where such work is being produced.... Without wanting to overprivilege the
academy as a site of struggle, higher education in our society is still the source of money, status, and
choices, as well as informing and shaping the kinds of educational programmes offered in schools.
Feminists need, therefore, to be in the thick of any "crisis in cultural studies," and our awareness of the
ways in which our own areas of knowledge are organised and constructed within institutions has to be part
of the politics of our teaching and research" (77).
158
desperate survival of the human species in the face of nuclear catastrophe. At this point,
the university came to seem like a dead-end for Mulford, as did, apparently, some of the
specifics of Marxist and feminist organizing. Mulford moved away from her
investigations into the details of institutions such as Universities and political parties and
toward a feminist affirmation of life: "Without my life I shall not think or write. As long
as I write I must fight, for the life of all I love" ("Notes" 41).
By charting such shifting social and political commitments, this chapter provides
a study in miniature of late-1970s and early-1980s Cambridge poetry as it traveled
between the University classroom, local small-press editions and readings, and radical
political organizations. The upshot of such a micro-history is not primarily documentary;
rather, I structure my reading through the problematic of reproduction, viewing Mulford's
literary activity as both conveying and interrupting various "lines" and "traditions." In
this, I see her work as a test case for the effects of left fragmentation and large-scale
political loss on the techniques and themes of leftist innovative poetry.
Mulford's work from the mid to late 1970s attempted to create a Marxist-feminist
poetics attentive to the specifics of feminist and socialist organizational forms and the
demands that they made on the construction and expression of lyric subjectivity. I argue
that Mulford's writing from this period amounts to a navigation of her attempts to
maintain and reproduce forms of social belonging through and against the singular trials
of lyric. Her writing from this period engaged with debates in socialist-feminist theory
and praxis over the status of "reproduction" for thinking cultural production. This poetry
exposed the material and affective contradictions latent in "reproduction," a term that
159
simultaneously names, among other things, the persistence of capitalist relations of
production and the more hopeful building of feminist and anti-capitalist social
movements. Mulford tests the lasting power of such commitments in the face of lyric's
overdetermined expressions of subjectivity.
I proceed first by introducing Mulford's early poetry and her writing's placement
in the context of the Communist Party Great Britain and the Women's Liberation
Movement. I subseqently read poems from her 1977 Bravo to Girls & Heroes in light of
their connections to the poetry of John James, filtering their poetic dialogues through the
lens of her Marxist-feminism. Next I turn to a long poem from No Fee in light of the
preceding discussion; finally, I consider the changing nature of Mulford's political
commitments at the start of the 1980s with a reading of one poem from that period.

Early Poems and Political Transformations

Mulford was born in Wales in 1941 and moved to Cambridge to study English in
the 1960s. There she met poets John James, J.H. Prynne, Douglas Oliver, Andrew
Crozier, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, and Denise Riley (among others), all of whom she
published in the 1970s through her Street Editions Press. These writers and friends
encouraged her to write poems, while "English teachers at Cambridge did not, I think, aid
that process – and they certainly made it difficult for me to write with any confidence for
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many years" ("Notes" 38). Mulford credited other communities for the development of
her writing practice:
I've been writing for about twelve years, running a small press, Street Editions,
and for eight years I've been in the Communist Party and been an increasingly
bloody-minded feminist. I find it hard to estimate exactly what has happened to
my writing in this period, but certainly at the outset I found it impossible to value
what I was doing – to see it at all clearly. It just seemed to dribble out. Out of the
intensity of my feeling, I think I would have said. (31)

But this is not quite borne out by her early work. In fact, in her earliest published poems,
from the late 1960s, Mulford demonstrated her familiarity with continental European
culture (early poems reference Schwitters and Nolde, among others), and interspersed
such references with "dribbles" of feeling. The early poems take femininity as a
momentary and fragile disruption of public space, one that is fairly quickly swallowed up
by dominant logics of gender, as in the following poem:
to being a cynic - orange white & blue
striped sheets airing the civic scents over the bal
cony, so alone, in bright sun . . people
drawl the wide promenade tulip
trees blossom over a princess.
(The Last-Minute Choice 3)

This cynic's take on the lonely airing of bedsheets (which seem then to be a tricolor flag)
is accompanied by a light tone achieved formally through frequent ellipses and
enjambment, even mid-word (as in "bal/cony"); lines are rushed through and objects
change with line breaks (see, for example, tulip becoming tulip tree). Mulford's feminine
personae observe the "cultured" world's coldness in response to attempts at personal
expression. Better, then, for the poet to be a cynic, hiding behind her ironical
spectatorship, than to air any sheets. These poems are uncomfortable with the domestic as
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a space for social critique; the domestic breaks out into public spaces, but it is
emphatically not at home there, and it serves primarily as an index of alienation (one
poem is titled "The lady professionally alone").
The loneliness attested to in these poems (that of the young woman writer in the
public sphere) provokes fantasies of an aristocratic, private ownership of the means of
cultural production and consumption:
the tightly pursed mouth stares in the ornate hall
mirror, what happens
is none of my interest
except to be out of the sun in a tall well-polished room,
it is yours & the distances your
choosing.

That is: forget the outside, what "happens/ is none of my interest." Here is the fantasy of
owning culture and society, of safely withdrawing into aristocratic spaces that reflect only
tightly pursed lips and do not foster any vulnerability. But, of course, this fantasy cannot
be sustained; the "ornate" privacy of commodious interiors is yours, and the speaker can
only be a kept woman in this semi-feudal economy, much as she was a princess in public.
Professionally alone or feudally owned, then, are the options provided by reality and
fantasy, respectively: enter the cynic.
Over the course of her involvement in the women's movement and the communist
party, however, Mulford would begin to embrace "domestic" objects and relations as
basic elements for the composition of lyric poetry and not merely as occasional evidence
of alienation. That is, marks of the domestic are no longer peripheral to the dialectic
between the speaker and the social body that gives her a voice and addressees. This
change reflects, for the Mulford of the late 1970s, the basic facts of the capitalist
162
separation of reproductive labor from the production of surplus value and the
concomitant isolation of the reproductive worker. It would, however, take an active
involvement in the women's liberation movement for this kind of change to take shape in
her work.
In a 1979 prose piece, "Notes on Writing: A Marxist/Feminist Viewpoint,"
Wendy Mulford reflected on the various discursive materials that formed and framed her
writing:
In my head as I write are the reverberations of other parts of struggle, of other
kinds of consciousness; my place in the family, sounds of children's voices, of
work, of politics, shifts in sexuality and relationships, leading into and out of the
house, 'home,' and how we live. Small, material, local, domestic. The centre of
our politics. Ten years ago I would have seen that as triviality, not reaching the
important universal conditions. Now I see these material conditions as the reality
within which we work. ("Notes on Writing: A Marxist/Feminist Viewpoint," 36)

Mulford here sketches an account of political and personal struggles as "material
conditions" that determine the form of her writing. Mulford's designation of the "small,
material, local, domestic" as "the centre of our politics" echoes the insights and struggles
of second-wave socialist feminists who found that political economy did not stop at the
threshold of the home but worked in complex ways through the private and the personal.
But these "reverberations" did not, for Mulford, only determine the themes or lexicon of
her poems; the logic of "material conditions" implies that they conditioned the poetry
itself in terms of its expression of subjectivity, authorial agency, discursive materials and
elements of composition.
Mulford's and other feminists' concern with the problematic of reproduction and
with the domestic as a determining element of political economy was not, strictly
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speaking, new; feminists built upon questions already central to Marxist praxis. Many
Marxists, since at least the 1960s, sought to understand social relations other than those
of production that all the same contribute to the reproduction of the capitalist mode of
production. In many cases this also meant analyses of culture, the state, education, and
the family under capitalism as forces that contributed to the docility of subjects entering
into wage-labor. How could workers believe in their freedom and in the "equality" of
individuals in the face of what seemed, from the perspective of revolutionary proletarian
consciousness, like massive evidence to the contrary? These kinds of questions demanded
input from fields that were not, strictly speaking, the province of Marxist political
economy, at least as the latter was discussed in most left organizations and parties.
During this period, leftists attempted to respond to the perceived breakdown of
the organized left and to the reality that, after the heat of the late 1960s and early 1970s,
the revolution was not as close at hand as many had hoped. Marxist theorists sought,
then, to reconcile a number of apparently unrelated or contradictory explanatory systems
(psychoanalysis and Marxism, first and foremost) in order to understand not only why
capital reproduced itself so well, but also why revolutionary movements had so much
trouble doing the same. Socialist-feminist responses to the waning of left popularity
grouped mainly in two camps: the first response was to stick to the organizational forms
of Marxist-Leninism, armed with a strict understanding of the class-line at the possible
expense of other social divisions. The second found sexism, racism, and ethnocentrism
within Leninist democratic-centralism itself and urged the creation of decentralized
organizational forms.
164
The Communist Party of Great Britain, at least since the 1958 second version of
their programmatic document, "The British Road to Socialism," had argued for a
provisional alliance with the Labour Party, ultimately with the aim of moving it to the left
and thereby transitioning to socialism through electoral reforms rather than proletarian
revolution. Trotskyists and many others saw this as an opportunist, Stalinist selling out of
international revolutionary socialism for nominal reformism.
65
The CP's program also
took a waffling position on the women's liberation movement, stating that, should
socialism arise in the UK, "there would have to be a sustained effort, in which an
autonomous women's movement would have an important part to play, to end the sexual
division of labour between men and women in the family and at work" (British Road to
Socialism 60). This gesture towards autonomous women's organizing is hardly concrete;
while the authors argue that socialist revolution is not enough to ensure women's
liberation, the necessity for feminist organizing remains in the conditional ("there would
have to be").
At the time, then, the Communist party, of which Mulford was a member, would
have been a locus of rather eclectic political thought, and there was room within it for
creative experimentation; cultural endeavors were not necessarily dismissed out of hand
as bourgeois deviations. As John Wilkinson writes regarding to the 1970s work of John
James, "his greatest poetry remains the product of a fleeting time when the Communist
Party in the UK discovered a progressive force in youth culture and decided style was

65
As a 1978 Workers' Action pamphlet titled British Road to Nowhere put it: "In short: the establishment
of the dictatorship of the proletariat is inconceivable without the working class throwing up the potential
organs of its undivided power in the period of the struggle against capitalist domination and carrying these
over, enlarging and perfecting them, as the form of the new workers' state" (5)
165
important" (The Lyric Touch 123). But whatever cultural and personal advantages such
permissiveness may have had, it also accompanied an opportunist capitulation to
capitalist party politics (rather than anti-capitalist proletarian vanguardism) that arguably
contributed to the defanging of the British left throughout the 1970s.
Meanwhile, socialist-feminist groups, most of them very short-lived, sprouted up
across the U.S. and U.K in the early 1970s. Many of these groups struggled internally
over methods of political education and organizational form, arguing often in terms of the
reproduction of social relations (of production and of reproduction). While not all of
these arguments came directly out of readings of Louis Althusser, their concerns resonate
with his writings about ideology and reproduction, as I have discussed in my
introduction. In her 1979 Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism,
a fascinating work that argues the importance of left-libertarian practices for many
socialist feminists in the U.K., Sheila Rowbotham points to the need among socialists for
a dynamic theory of organization that can account for strategic oppositions and alliances.
Rowbotham argues that feminist organizations provide a good model for how this might
be achieved:
In the women's movement for nearly ten years there have been organizing
assumptions growing, mainly communicated by word of mouth. The difficulty of
translating these assumptions into a language which can touch current definitions
of organization on the left have been enormous. This is partly because these have
emerged from the practice of a movement in a piecemeal way. They challenge the
left groups implicitly rather than explicitly. But also they cannot be contained
within the accepted circumference of debate established by the male-dominated
left. Coming partly from the experience of feminist women's lives they reach
continually outwards towards new forms of expressing defiance and resistance.
(Beyond 39)

166
Rowbotham is especially critical of the vanguardism of those Leninist and Trotskyist
groups with top-down forms of organization, a blind adherence to party line socialist
“science,” and an emphasis on “productive labor” as the sole site of oppression.
Rowbotham's text serves as one example of how Anglo-American second-wave feminism
developed through the momentum of other social movements and of how feminist
politics reflect this as they retain and alter elements of these movements. In particular,
many feminists found non-Party-based social movements in which they participated to be
organized in ways that more effectively avoided the reproduction of non-capitalist
relations of oppression and domination (i.e., misogyny, ageism, racism). At the same
time, as Rowbotham recognized, these relations exist in capitalism, are interwoven with
capitalism, and are therefore capitalist. But, they are not necessarily of capitalism and
therefore may not merely "disappear" through revolutionary action, as indeed they did not
in most left groups and actions in which racism, patriarchy, and heterosexism remained
deeply entrenched in various forms.
For Rowbotham, the question of “who gets to be the vanguard?” is ultimately an
unproductive one that reproduces authoritarian structures through its focus on the
“leadership” and “training” of oppressed peoples. While Rowbotham argues that a
socialist-feminist perspective is needed among these groups, she does not believe that a
new “theory” will be enough to transform the psychology of leadership prevalent in the
predominantly non-feminist left in Britain. Rowbotham argues that organizational forms
are not politically neutral, and that the party form generally reproduces inequalities of
power rather than overcoming them. Specifically, she argues that socialists should learn
167
from feminism’s more personal and holistic approach to the problem of revolutionary
consciousness through consciousness-raising sessions, collective self-help, and directly
democratic forms of organization.
The place of the hyphen in the name "Marxist-Feminism," then, allowed both for
attempts to create a unified theory of "capitalist patriarchy" and for the acknowledgment
of many different systems of thought, not all of which were directed toward political and
economic revolution. For Mulford's work in the late 1970s, this eclecticism both enabled
and hindered feelings of solidarity. On the one hand, Marxist-feminist organizing
provided a setting for her to think through the political relevance of personal experience,
and to understand personal politics as part of an effort to transform society collectively;
experiences of oppression and marginalization as women were connected to the social
totality of late capitalism and to the history of its development. On the other hand, the
force of the left was waning at this moment, and the enthusiasms of the women's
movement were beginning to sour. Sectarianism blossomed, and differences within the
radical proletariat were not always accounted for or embraced. The inclusivity and
intimacy of women's liberation movement small groups provided some respite from this,
but this sometimes meant turning away from active engagement in class struggle and
toward separatism during the late 1970s and into the 1980s.
It remained quite unlikely, then, that any "fragments" could be gotten "beyond"
solely at the level of organizational form.
66
All the same, Rowbotham's emphasis on

66
As Michèle Barrett asks in Women’s Oppression Today, what if the various fragments really do have
fundamentally conflicting interests: "Important though questions of organization are, I would not see the
potential benefits of some kind of alliance as consisting in what each movement could learn from the other
168
leadership and political education highlights the ways in which the vanguard party form
was felt by many to reproduce oppressive relations. This line of thought was prevalent
among left-libertarian and radical feminists alike, among whom the transformation of
cultural institutions (including language) was seen as central to any social revolution.
What was at stake, both for left-libertarian feminists such as Rowbotham and for Marxist-
Leninist feminists, was the possibility of reproducing and maintaining a social movement
against capitalism. Such a movement needed, simultaneously, to respond to shifts in the
means and especially relations of production, broadly speaking, and to maintain its
integrity as a significant force in its own right, primed to topple and replace capitalism.
While some version of this contradiction is always a problem for the revolutionary left, it
was especially acute in 1970s Britain, given the perception that the left was fragile and
self-defeating and facing an increasingly bloodthirsty adversary with the rise of
conservatism.
Mulford's work reflects these developments, even as she remained a member of
the Communist Party through the 1970s, not thereby abandoning the political party as a
basis for revolutionary organizing (unlike Rowbotham, who left the Trotskyist groups
with which she had been aligned). Part of what Mulford's writing provides, then, is a
sense of the objective conditions of the left in the late-1970s. The fragments needed to be
gotten "beyond" not only because of the failings of organizational form but also because
the energy of revolutionary politics was waning due to extrinsic pressures. Mulford's

in these respects. The more urgent question to be asked is whether there are political objectives in common
that might constitute a basis for a relationship" (257).
169
tendency, in the late-1970s, was simultaneously to announce her social and political
commitments and to insist on the need for her writing to outpace such affiliations. That
is, Mulford's presentation of her work (mostly paratextually) openly declares her political
commitments. Yet, as I intend to show, Mulford's work from this period can be read as an
experiment with holding such commitments through and across the trials of lyric. Of
course, there is no simple litmus test for the survival or transformation of a political
stance, and Mulford's writings are not always legible in terms of her paratextually
declared political commitments. Mulford invites the reader, rather, to understand the
political purchase of the poems in terms of how they intervene in the semi-autonomous
regimes of lyric tradition and literary history.

Literary Study and Poetic Practice

Mulford saw the field of literary education as an opportunity for her Marxist-
Feminist practice to interrupt the reproduction of relations of production; Mulford
engaged in debates about the politics of teaching and studying literature. In contrast to the
socialist-feminist poet, she argues that the broadly socialist teacher of literature always
works in service of a socio-political agenda or movement. So that teaching and criticism
are meant, for Mulford, to be more directly committed to movement politics than is the
production of poetry. Like the Marxist critics discussed in my first chapter (Baldick,
Mulhern, and Eagleton), Mulford sought to move literary study away from its function
170
for the capitalist state as pedagogical moral preparation for "good citizenship," or, in
other words, class collaboration.
Mulford's recommendations for how this was to be done follow those of Marxist
critics like Pierre Macherey, Terry Eagleton, and Michèle Barrett, insofar as each writer
argues against the study of literary texts as discrete objects of evaluation and for an
analysis of literary production. For Mulford, as for these theorists, the category of
"production" carries both sociological and hermeneutic senses; it includes the production
not only of books and technologies of distribution but also of meaning in the
confrontation of the writer with various extra-literary discourses. In her 1982 article on
"Socialist-feminist criticism," Mulford argued just this, here in relation to the English
classroom:
Those of us who define ourselves as feminist and socialist teachers of English in
higher education need to shift the ground of our study, and the goals we set our
students, away from aesthetic and moral questions of the value of the text, to a
broader analysis of literary production in its period, and to see this as one of the
manifestations, and shaping forces, of the social and political reality of the time
("Socialist-feminist criticism" 182).

This proposed move from textual evaluation/explication to the analysis of production,
however, is not identical to Macherey's interest in "literary production" as the object of
theory. Rather, Mulford is interested in production, it would seem, largely as a means of
transforming the English classroom from a site of applied moral philosophy into one of
political history.
67
Mulford herself goes so far as to argue that such problems for literary

67
In this sense, Mulford's tack is more in line with Balibar and Macherey's later essay "On Literature as an
Ideological Form." Mulford, however, is less concerned with literary education as a relatively autonomous
ideological form and more with literary production as continuous with other social movements, broadly
defined to include "ideological" and more directly political-economic struggles.
171
theory do not in and of themselves depart from the problem of "training 'sensibility;'"
they may, in fact, extend such a project:
As long as we allow the major concern of our studies to be with the appreciation
and evaluation of the individual text, and the individual great writer's work,
however much we juggle with the canon and contextualise our texts, devise new
methods of analysis, ask new questions, the end result of our labour will not
greatly differ from that of New Critics, Leavisians, post-structuralists or any other
group of academic critics. We will be training 'sensibility' in an updated guise
(189).

In this sense Mulford's argument is continuous with the work of Ian Hunter, insofar as he
argues that most "historical materialist" analysis of literature and literary education
remains on the plane of governmentality, maintaining that the study of literature will
either, as with Leavis, restore man's authentic being or, in the mode of Macherey's
Althusserian critique, expose the ideological conditions of possibility for theoretical
thought.
Where Mulford departs from Hunter is in her insistence that the social production
of literature remains a legitimate object of study, and specifically that such study can
interrupt the disciplinary apparatus of sensibility-training insofar as it directly admits the
place of interest in the classroom. Her essay on the collective literary efforts of early
twentieth-century women's suffrage does just this, laying bare Mulford's own interest in
aesthetic-political problems such as how the novelists and playwrights in question
represented political commitment fictionally, the different generic and representational
modes used for personal and political content (melodrama and documentary,
respectively), and especially the problem of "the cause as a protagonist" in realist fiction
(184-6). Mulford then seeks to extend the logic of her "clear choice" of content in terms
172
of its focus on the "positioning of writers amongst the forces for change at any given
time:"
Our work in English in higher education should... proceed... towards a mapping of
the writers of a period in terms of the social and political force which they
constituted. We should be looking more fully and systematically than our present
contextual and period studies allow at the positioning of writers amongst the
forces for change at any given time, and we should be making it our clear choice
to study those periods, organisations and writers whose work is exemplary for us
in terms of our social and political struggles today. (188-189)

In this passage, Mulford implictly argues for a reconfiguration of scholarship beyond the
pale of literary-historical expertise (whereas Hunter had argued for philology as a modest
but inoffensive direction for literary study to take in order to avoid the traps of bad
disciplinarity) and toward the problematic of literary-political interest. According to
Mulford's polemic, literary scholars and teachers need to move beyond the evaluation,
appreciation, and even interpretation of individual texts; scholarship and teaching need
instead to declare their interest in literature as a process of social production:
we have as teachers and critics a particular and declared interest in the nature of
the interrelationship between literary production and the social matrix. So long as
our students are made clearly aware of the position from which we speak, and are
not bamboozled by any claims to exclusive and authoritative 'truth' by their
teachers, we need have no fear of the inevitable charges of 'bias' and 'coercion'
that will be made by those speaking from a different interest. To take as an
example for study a period when the relationship between literary work and the
society of which it forms part are [sic] necessarily and evidently acute, both in
terms of the social and political crises of the time and the self-conscious response
of certain sections of writers to those crises, is to make a deliberate choice of
terrain. (189; emphases mine)
68

68
Mulford's remarks here do resonate for me: indeed, my interest in Mulford's own writing is very much
related to its "exemplary" status within "a period when the relationship between literary work and the
society of which it forms part are necessarily and evidently acute, both in terms of the social and political
crises of the time and the self-conscious response of certain sections of writers to those crises." That is, my
work on Mulford, Riley, Prynne, etc. is indeed "a deliberate choice of terrain" in the face of contemporary
struggles over the value of literary studies in higher education.
173

Implicit in her argument is that teachers and critics of literature always have particular
interests in the social production of literature and that such interests cannot be divorced
from broader social and political struggles. Mildly proclaiming that literary study serves
in the "training of sensibility" is a classic disavowal of such interest, insofar as it reduces
the social dimensions of language to a composite of individual sensibilities. Such a
reduction masks the social forces at stake in the production and dissemination of
literature and of subjectivity. It is in contrast to such pedagogical-moral understandings
of the social that Mulford poses the social value of literary study as a remarking of
writers' responses to crises and contradictions. That is, the production of writing is
situated within a complex of contradictions to which it responds. To focus on "a period
when the relationship between literary work and the society of which it forms part are
necessarily and evidently acute" in terms both of the intensity of crisis and the self-
consciousness of the writer's response would naturally have been appealing to writers like
Mulford working as radical poets between the university, the literary critical
establishment, and the women's liberation movement.
Yet, as Mulford remarked in her "Notes on Writing," such inquiry was too seldom
directed by feminist critics and academics to the contemporary production of feminist
literature:
Contemporary experimental Marxist/Feminist writing is also untouched by the
critical activity of those Marxist/Feminists best placed to understand it, whose
work in related theoretical areas on the symbolic and the construction of the
subject, for example, is directed towards the mainstream, nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century texts of the 'great tradition' taught in universities. And many of
them don't care to read contemporary writing, unless it is offering representations
of women today in a positive way. I may be being less than wholly fair here but it
174
does seem to me that there's a remarkable absence of cross-fertilisation between
women working in the theoretical field and those producing certain kinds of
contemporary fiction and poetry, both here and in America, a cross-fertilisation
which I for one would very much welcome. ("Notes on Writing" 33)

Indeed, a survey of avowedly Marxist-feminist literary criticism from the period uncovers
no critical work on contemporary women's experimental writing in the U.K save
Mulford's piece. Instead, Marxist-feminists tended to focus on nineteenth and early-
twentieth century literary production, as in the case of Mulford's own article on the
literary collectives of the suffrage movement or the Marxist-Feminist Literature
Collective's article on Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
69
But Mulford
actively sought to change this by working at the intersections of the Cambridge poetry
scene, literary studies, and the women's liberation movement. The May 1979 issue of the
Cambridge Women's Liberation Group Newsletter includes a notice for an upcoming
"Reading/ Discussion Event... On Women and Writing which is part of the 3rd
Cambridge Poetry Festival. Anne Waldman, Carmen Caull (Virago Press), Hélène
Cixous & The Local Kids, D. Riley and W. Mulford will be a few of the many taking
part. This will be a mixed event." The next lines of the notice read: "We are hoping to
organise an informal women-only event amongst ourselves possibly on the Sunday: when
Helene Cixous would like to meet/read/discuss with us, as a kind of fringe event, & we
might consider what our attitude to the male-dominated festival is."
70
This kind of

69
The latter is concerned to challenge both "bourgeois" and avowedly Marxist readings of nineteenth-
century literature with an emphasis on the tensions between sex and class belonging: "Bourgeois criticism
should be read symptomatically: most of its so-called 'evaluation' is a reinforcement of ideological barriers.
Wollstonecraft's, and later Bronte's, ambivalent relation to Romanticism, usually described as clumsy
Gothicism, is bound up with their feminism" ("Women's Writing" 31)
70
Cambridge Women's Liberation Newsletter, May 1979.
175
organized event, taken with the Women's Week reading, indicates Mulford's attempt to
bring together the different spheres of activity through which she worked to interrupt
particular relations of production (sexism and the pedagogical-moral view of literature)
and to cultivate others (radical women's experimental writing).
For Mulford, poetry was an exemplary locus for synthesizing such fragmented
interests. But, Mulford very explicitly did not demand that poetry reproduce the line of
any particular party, group, or tendency. Rather, in her writings about her own poetic
practice, Mulford emphasized the importance of revolutionary transformation in the field
of culture. As she wrote in 1979,
I started to discover what I was doing about 1974-5, at the time that I was
publishing some key 'modernist' texts by contemporaries and when I hadn't yet
published anything myself except in magazines. I started to find out through my
involvement in the women's movement, and my friendships with particular
women. That was the time when the whole question of the 'construction' of the
self started to form mistily on the skyline. Who was this 'I' speaking? What was
speaking me? How far did the illusion of selfhood, that most intimate and
precious possession, reach? How could the lie of culture by broken up if the lie of
the self made by that culture remained intact? And how could the lie of capitalist
society be broken if the lie of culture were not broken? ("Notes" 31)

For Mulford in 1979, poetry was a privileged site for contesting the "lie of culture" as a
means to contesting the "lie of capitalist society." That is, poetry's job was not to contest
society tout court, but rather to "transform" poetic subjectivity. The logic was that this
kind of cultural change was an enabling condition for changing society. Mulford thus
posits politics as immanent to poetry, not merely supplying thematics or polemics but
rather as the set of social and linguistic conditions through which poetic form works
materially. Mulford goes on, in her 1982 postscript to the "Notes", to explain that
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What I am thinking of is not the kind of poetry that "services" the women's or any
other movement, not words for marching songs and hallelujahs for meeting-halls,
though we need those too (and ballads, satires, odes, lyrics, epigrams, pop lyrics,
choruses, and, and), but poetry that is transformative, that compels us to
recognitions we would prefer not to see, and makes us aware of choices we had
denied. (38)

Thus poetry itself ought to and can transform consciousness to "make us aware" and
"compel... us to recognitions." Mulford endeavors to counter the "particular lie of the
universal transcendent nature of art and of art's function to 'coax on stage' the truth
known already elsewhere, in which art acts as confirmation of knowledge we possess by
other means, representation of enduring human truth." In this way, Mulford imputes a
pedagogical and epistemological dimension to poetry as a practice that both transmits and
produces knowledges: "I have been concerned to produce meaning across and in
defiance of the repressive codes of everyday, communication-ready language" ("Notes"
31-32; emphases in original).
One "transformative recognition," and the one most stressed by Mulford in the
1979 piece, is a recognition of the structuring of "material reality" along "the sexual
divide":
Perhaps some people will see what I have said in its emphasis on the specificity of
women's struggle and women's place as divisive, but I think in order to transform
society from this inhumane, partial, literally murderous state we have to recognise
first that material reality, to see laser-sharp how it is structured at the deepest level
on the sexual divide in order to be able to work together, as men and women, to
change it, a task as urgent for artists as for workers in any other field. (36)

This "recognition" of an apparently natural sexual division and its structuring of material
(i.e. lived social) relations was a significant legacy of feminist struggles as they
developed alongside Marxist politics. These struggles evidently both shape and take
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shape in, to some extent, Mulford's poetry. Yet Mulford's claims here and above
concerning the political import of poetry bespeak a paradoxical temporal relation
between poetic and social transformation, since writing seems to be both productive of
and secondary to critical political analysis (i.e., "recognition"). According to this logic,
Marxist-Feminist political praxis needs to come before the poems, while at the same time
the poems themselves are to transform rather than to serve or reproduce "the movement."
This means, somewhat paradoxically, that the possibility of reproducing an anti-
patriarchal and anti-capitalist cultural politics relies precisely on avoiding service to this
movement, insofar as said service would ratify the "lie" wherein "art acts as confirmation
of knowledge we possess by other means." So that the radical potential of poetry depends
on a certain indirection in relation to capitalist patriarchy rather than a face-on opposition
along the lines of other forms of political action.

Bravo to Girls & Heroes: Wendy Mulford's John James

The political and social developments that I have outlined above are revealed
through the contrast between Mulford's earliest poems and some of those contained in
Bravo to Girls and Heroes, which collects poems written between 1968 and 1976.
Mulford published the volume, her first full-length collection of poems, through her
178
Street Editions Press in 1977.
71
She frames the collection in explicitly feminist terms,
following the main text with a handwritten note explaining that the
poems were written between 1968 and 1976. They represent a very small
selection of the poems of the past 10 years, which I have put together here for the
following reason:
that these poems indicate some of the problems facing a ♀ poet today, + that they
include some of the strategies I've used to confront these problems, + to attempt to
"reclaim the language", for myself, as a ♀. (Bravo 36)

Mulford's logic for selecting the poems for the collection was explicitly feminist, and the
poems' feminism is drawn from the complex of problems "facing a ♀ poet today."
Mulford glosses her confrontation of such problems in terms of an "attempt to 'reclaim
the language,'" a phrase that indicates an argument between Mulford and Denise Riley.
The latter, as I have discussed in my previous chapter, had used a similar phrase
contentiously in the title of her poem "a note on sex and the reclaiming of language."
Back-issues of the Cambridge Women's Liberation Newsletter indicate that Mulford had
indeed been thinking through the problem of reclaiming language, as Ruth Craft's note on
the "Women and Writing Workshop" in the June 1976 issue indicates: "Wendy has some
provocative but positive feelings about the need for women to 'repossess the language' or
'their language.' I'm not sure."
In her 1979 essay, "Notes on Writing: A Marxist/Feminist Viewpoint," Mulford
reflected further on the task of reclaiming language:

71
This was part of Street Editions turn toward issuing chapbooks by women: one year earlier, Mulford had
published Alice Notley's For Frank O'Hara's Birthday and Veronica Forrest-Thomson's posthumous On
the Periphery, and 1977 also saw her release of Riley's Marxism for Infants. Bravo to Girls & Heroes
features numerous drawings by Julia Ball that are variations on grids rather distinct from her more well-
known abstracted East Anglian landscapes. The printed collaborations between Ball, Riley, Mulford, and
James, among others, should form the basis for a separate study.

179
Some women have argued that the first act must be to remake language itself.
Yes, we must break through our silence. But we cannot create a language. We can
make a lexical selection, designed to exclude, for example, the obvious phallic
metaphors of penetration, thrust, etc., for forceful action, for energy and desire.
Such a lexical pruning and substitution of new items (such as chairperson) is part
of the process of thinking our language, realising its subtle articulations of male
dominance, making some redress and calling the female into presence in verbs,
qualifiers, substantives, and pronouns. But this is a small linguistic process. (33-
34)

Mulford here cautions against grand claims for "remaking" or "creating" language; for
her, the work of "reclaiming" the language can only be a local, piecemeal process of
"thinking our language" (she goes on to discuss syntax as another possible locus for
feminist intervention). That is, "reclaiming" or "repossessing" language means, for
Mulford in 1979, first and foremost recognizing the unconscious work that language does
and the social content of such a linguistic unconscious. Moreover, it means recognizing
that we have a semi-privative relationship to language, such that we both have it and
don't; we cannot create it but we can instead think its possession of us and "select" and
subvert it locally. In other words, we can remake some "laws" of language but not its
Law (to use the Lacanian-feminist idiom that Mulford employs in her essay).
As should be clear by now, I am not reading Bravo to Girls and Heroes simply
according to this indication, insofar as Mulford's achievements in lyric are not, in fact,
reducible to an attempt to "reclaim the language," however modest in scope. Or rather, I
don't think that such a reading would say much about the specific value of Mulford's
work in the late-1970s; it would be possible to find such local subversions of masculinist
language in the work of many poets, and not only women, from almost any period.
Rather, as I've indicated above, I read Mulford's work at the conjunction of left feminist
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trajectories and late-modernist aesthetic practices; what interests me is how her work tests
these commitments against a lyric impulse that often outruns them. Mulford's poems
from this period, I argue, expose the tensions between political and lyric commitment,
and these tensions redouble already existing contradictions within the socio-political
field. That is, lyric's interruptions of political commitment – the unwillingness and
inability of Mulford's lyric simply to reproduce any single "line" – bespeak the
difficulties of reproducing feminism and anticapitalism at the level of political
organizing.
In one poem from Bravo to Girls and Heroes, Mulford puts the "mirror" to quite
different use from what we saw in her poem from 1969, using it now not to frame the
ponderousness of the private hall but rather as an interrogative goad, satirizing the
privacy of lyric self-reflection:
BREAKING IT IN TWO, THE WAY IT GOES

yet again the music ends & I'm forced to switch
I do not believe in chance slow down slow
down someone must have said lets slow him
down but we are already moving off &
a pale blur of light indicates the past –
you love her & I love she & we & here we
go up against the big blue roof look
no hands no nets no ropes
& the few spectators looking away

we walk the streets boldly hand in hand
currents of extra-terrestrial prescience
spilling out of our impassive bodies:
there are other spaces
of knowledge and desire concealed
behind our copper eyes. You
check your body – what do you see
in the bathroom glass? are those nipples
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real? underneath the skin are we all
monsters timeless glistening and taut?

Thematically, the difference between this poem and the earlier "to being a cynic" is
striking; "what happens" is clearly of interest to the speaker in this poem, which is, on
one reading, a romantic melodrama (as in the "I am the walrus"-reminiscent line "you
love her & I love she & we & here we..."). Beginning with the title in all caps, this poem
exhibits a prosodic confidence; moreover, the poem announces itself as "broken" into two
stanzas; that is "the way it goes." The title bolsters the defiant bravado of the simple line
"we walk the streets boldly hand in hand." This attitude is built in part through the speed
of the poem's middle lines which move ahead of any commands: "slow down slow/ down
someone must have said lets slow him/ but we are already moving off." These lines are
taken from David Bowie's song "Karma Man," and they also echo Riley's poem from
Marxism for Infants featuring the line "since we are already gone on ahead of it," a poem
that pauses for a glance in the mirror before returning, passionately and uncertainly, to a
lover.
But Riley doesn't write as stridently as Mulford, at least not without immediately
shifting into doubt, and then shifting back, in the general dialectical movement of her
lyric. Mulford, for her part, breaks her poem in two, though this time not along the stanza
line; it is within the second stanza that the speaker's braggadocio halts after the colon in
the third line: "there are other spaces/ of knowledge and desire concealed/ behind our
copper eyes." The eyes turn to the mirror ("You/check your body"), and from it flows a
somewhat ridiculous interrogative voice. The questions are still breathless: "what do you
see/ in the bathroom glass? are those nipples/ real? underneath the skin are we all/
182
monsters timeless glistening and taut?" The mirror ("bathroom glass") of the aristocratic
lyric is no longer any sort of refuge, but neither does it launch the reader into cynicism.
Peter Middleton writes that this ending expresses a "hope that there is something
underneath the words," that language bears a force more powerful than its surfaces
("Breaking" 4). While this is certainly one part of what is happening here, the language of
the "extra-terrestrial" also ironizes the Christian and humanist rhetoric of transcendence
as the basis for human solidarity ("timeless") that it simultaneously introduces. Yes, the
alien is also a goad to move beyond the "impassive" body. But the alien interrogative that
closes the lyric is also a satire of such idealist goading, a satire that is more honestly and
damningly self-indicting for including itself in the "we" that is its object.
Much of what I am asserting about Mulford's poetry – that it works at the
contradictions of lyric (dis)pleasure and political commitment – can be demonstrated
through a comparison of her work with that of John James, then her husband. John
Wilkinson's writings on the poetry of John James from the 1970s deftly navigate the
deceptive simplicity of James' work and particularly his poems' celebration of sensual
(primarily sexual and culinary) pleasure alongside his unflagging commitment to class
struggle and revolutionary politics. Wilkinson argues that there was no contradiction for
James between Marxism and an appreciation of the "finer things" in life; communism
meant a democratization of abundance.
As I have suggested, Mulford's poetry developed in conversation with other poets
around her; in her work from the 1970s, Mulford echoes and repeats lines and phrases
from those writers closest to her, particularly John James and her good friend Denise
183
Riley (and they echo and repeat her, too). I believe that Mulford's work in Bravo to Girls
& Heroes and No Fee can profitably extend and complicate Wilkinson's groundbreaking
accounts of James' lyric simplicity. That is, the tensions held together in Mulford's
Marxist-feminism provide an alternative explanation for the movement between political
economy and the "personal" that Wilkinson identifies in James' work. Wilkinson
identifies in James's culinary poetics a salutary appreciation of objects of pleasure and
desire, one that allows such objects to remain other while loving them for their survival
of aggression and desire (Wilkinson's reading is markedly Winnicottian in this sense)
72
;
such an appreciation of objects is deemed useful for its ability to be simultaneously
intimate and impersonal. Mulford's work, however, features a different sort of
impersonality in relation to objects, an impersonality trained in the ambivalence of a
particular, enforced identification and the pleasures and constraints that accompany it.
That is, her version of the simplicity of reproductive pleasures, borrowed from or shared
with John James, continually runs up against a weariness in the face of the domestic as a
sphere of "objects" of consumption.
Mulford tries out her own appreciation of the "finer things" in life, that category
of part-objects that Wilkinson draws out of James's work, in the second poem of Bravo to
Girls and Heroes. But in Mulford's hands, these things cannot but be immediately
implicated in reproductive politics, both through the fact that "children" threaten their

72
See Wilkinon's essay "Following the Poem" in The Lyric Touch for his application of Winnicott's writing
to poetic criticism.
184
enjoyment and because her catalogue of domestic items of reproductive pleasure always
bear the ambivalence of reproductive work:
we like to live simply & we like to
eat well. that does not include children.
definitely. they exclude it. if we could
include curtains & carpets, where would
you go, to make that the best place,
the most pleasant in the late afternoon sun.
clouds, clouds, he sleeps through the cuckoo clock
marks of the great ouse alas upon the covers
a complete collection of ice-creams sleep,
the window is in pain again to the tune of
below their stamping feet greet the extra,
english, homework hour, is it, no I do not
think it will be just now till sundown, calm
deriving precious & little
(2)

This quasi-sonnet (many of the poems in Bravo hover around 14 lines) is composed
through a constantly moving pattern of predication with subjects and objects
continuously switching places. The opening declaration that "we like to live simply & we
like to/ eat well" is immediately complicated by the problem of inclusion and exclusion
of the "we" who are able to declare this so simply. You might imagine some sort of mild
gentlemen's club, or perhaps a radical feminist CR group that rails against the demands of
Kinder, Küche, Kirche: "that does not include children. definitely." But then, "they
exclude it" shifts the agent of exclusion and inclusion, unsettling whether it is "we" or
"children" or "that" or "it" that excludes or is excluded. "They exclude it" is also
prosodically indeterminate, hovering between a single stress on "clude" and the possible
stressing of both "they" and "it." Varying the stresses of these pronouns might, in fact,
shift the referents that they designate; "THEY exclude IT" would suggest that children
185
exclude the possibility of "living simply" and "eating well," while "they exCLUDE it"
would, by not marking the "they," imply a continuity between "they" and the "we" that
came before – "they" (among whom I am no longer included) exclude the possibility that
children might be included in living simply and eating well. "THEY exCLUDE it" hovers
somewhere between these options, as does the ridiculously emphatic "THEY exCLUDE
IT," further unsettling the designation of each pronoun through a mocking overemphasis.
All of these possibilities are held together in the chiasmus of exclusion, breaking
apart the swaggering "we" who declare our preferences, definitely, in repose, now
admitting that the realization of such preferences requires making decisions and, more
importantly, making the pleasant places that "we like" to inhabit: "if we could/ include
curtains and carpets, where would/ you go, to make that the best place,/ the most pleasant
in the late afternoon sun." The poem shifts here to a catalogue of domestic objects and
persons, each one an overdetermined node in networks of pleasure and travail. The
sequencing of these elements is primarily justified through sound patterning: a hard "c"
dominates lines 7-9 and extends the earlier "curtains & carpets": cf. "clouds, clouds...
cuckoo clock... covers... complete collection ... creams), long vowels are interspersed
with sibilants in these lines ("the great ouse alas," "ice-creams sleep"). These objects are
as if lost on the child (or post-coital male) figure who "sleeps through" it all, "alas," even
as the River Great Ouse has marked the covers. What's more, the maternal pastoral is not
a source of pleasure: "the window is in pain again"– that is, the window "pane," as
liminal space between the domestic and the street, as potential source of sunlight, is in
fact a source of danger and displeasure, of missing the afternoon sun altogether: "no I do
186
not/ think it will be just now till sundown."
73
This non-arrival of the present, of the "just
now" is a non-arrival of the fantasy of "living simply"– Mulford does not merely join in
the chorus now to exclude children. The poem, instead, extends the overdetermined
contradiction signaled by the chiasmus of exclusion. Finally, the poem's last enjambed
bit, "calm/deriving precious & little," reenacts the paradoxes that have not been resolved
in the course of the poem. "Deriving" here works as transitive and intransitive, indicating
both the origination of "calm" and its products; "precious & little" echoes the phrase
"precious little," both in the sense of "very little" and as an endearment. The ampersand
signals the coexistence of each of these possibilities and their chiastic crossing in
insoluble contradiction. What is eminently clear at the close of this poem is that at least
two structures of desire, expressed initially as preferences, cut across each other and
interpenetrate: motherhood and the "finer things", the pleasures of consumption and
simple intimacy, cannot peacefully coexist. Moreover, the antagonism borne by this
contradiction does not here, as Wilkinson suggests it does in James's work, consolidate a
poetic attitude with very much swagger.
Wilkinson focuses particularly on the "appearance of a sausage" in James' poem
"After Francis Amunatégui," collected in 1983's Berlin Return, the entirety of which runs
like so:
The appearance
of a hot sausage
with its salad

73
As Peter Middleton writes, "In these poems the windows are dangerous, breaking, blowing out, letting in
the street. Outside these words/windows is not some established real, but a language where people's lives
are going on, in the street" ("Breaking" 5). On my count, windows show up in eight of the poems in Bravo
to Girls & Heroes, more often than not threatening to break or to otherwise cause pain.
187
of potatoes in oil
can leave nobody
indifferent...

It is pure, it
precludes
all sentimentality.
it is
the Truth.
(Poems 208)

On Wilkinson's reading, James's language "oscillates between referentiality and self-
containment: the poem tells the truth or embodies the truth. These two readings can be
accommodated, but cannot be reconciled into stability." That is, there is some sort of
sausage in reading the poem, whether it is referred to or is somehow stuffed in the
processed casing of the poem itself:
Taking the poem at face value might ask us to eat the full-colour plate of a
sausage; or do we have a taste for textual presence verging on sententiousness, but
surely amused? Whether the sausage is pixilated or half-screened or a textual
hallucination, we know when we read this poem that here –somewhere – is the
wanted sausage, the ceaselessly found and removed hot sausage grail. It is an
honest feint, an open secret, an unexpected excellent sausage. (The Lyric Touch
64)

As Wilkinson notes, another poem, from 1979's War contrasts the powerlessness of
"names" with "certain things in life/ which have the power to restore you to your senses/
such as chorizo sausage." For Wilkinson, James's treatment of objects of appetite is
unique for conjoining their "elusiveness" and "vivid presence;" sausage provides the
exemplary case of James' skill at
keeping appetite alive but its objects complete, even and because their elusiveness
is conjoined with their vivid presence, their consumption with their sustaining
power. This simplicity precludes attitudinising and literary showiness as well as
sentimentality, and poetic resources must be deployed with extreme discretion.
(64)
188

Wilkinson here rightly links consumption to sustaining power; however, this kind of link
can obscure the fact that the wage, under capitalism, does not immediately turn into
objects of appetite. Most often the wage is transformed into sustaining objects of
consumption through unwaged reproductive work, and the archetypal reproductive
laborer is the mother and wife.
Indeed, a short poem from Bravo to Girls and Heroes presents quite a different
sausage from those that Wilkinson admires in James:
when I am alone the pigeons drop down on our garden
knowing I cannot cock the hammer they walk like mandarins
& make a leisurely choice of what to eat.
all day I watch them secretly from my tiny kitchen window
& plot ambuscadoes with slings snares & catapults.
even when I'm dreaming I always miss.
when you return they vanish fatly into thin air
shot from a gun, attached to a string of sausages

(9)

While this is clearly not the "same" sausage that we found in James, Mulford's poem can
still complicate Wilkinson's reading, insofar as it shows how the "vividly present"
appearance of products of reproductive labor serves to fetishize them as mere objects of
consumption. While they are generally not operative as commodities (with the exception
of the peculiar commodity called labor power), products of reproductive labor are all the
same implicated in the capitalist mode of production precisely by virtue of their exclusion
from direct engagement in the capital/wage-labor relation. Mulford here expands the
"culinary" from a simple mode of pleasurable consumption (that thereby reproduces
human life and labor power) to a problem of a sexual division of labor. She renders from
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sausage the problem of sexual difference, here rather jokingly, by pulling both at the
figurative resources of the phallic and by placing the sausage in a domestic setting.
Indeed, someone makes the sausage, and that someone is not usually a celebrity chef. But
this string of sausages has only appeared with the arrival of the addressee. Presumably,
some man, perhaps James, brings a sausage home, then, and with it the ability to shoot a
gun ("cock the hammer") and jettison the bureaucratic pigeons. "You" are not limited to
the vantage point of the tiny kitchen window, that is; you come and go, and with that
mobility comes a certain sovereignty over the borders of the home. But "you" are not
wholly responsible for this sexual division of labor; it is thoroughly internalized in the
speaker: "even when I'm dreaming I always miss."
One of the volume's less straightforward poems indicates that James and Mulford
did indeed compose their works in conversation during the 1970s. The title, "Fairex the
Liberator," also appears in the text of a long poem by James published in 1979 to
coincide with a visual art exhibition that he curated, both called Toasting.
74
James' poem,
which served as the exhibition's catalogue, intersperses semi-autobiographical stanzas
that contextualize James' interest in visual art and producing such an exhibition (lyrics
describe his teaching at Anglia Ruskin Polytechnic as well as Cambridge town-gown
relations) with what Wilkinson calls "hectic improvisations" responding more directly to
the artworks and artists (The Lyric Touch 40). The phrase in question appears with regard
to the work of Bruce McLean, in a stanza that seems to list various titles by McLean,
inventing and cataloguing absurd phrases:

74
See the essay by Cartwright, one of the artists on display, for an account of the exhibition.
190
Jerry Lee Lewis Killer & Iron thief of Banal Gesture as
Arousal Assassin Banger of the lover of the Deep Freeze
Murderer of Monumental Aspiration
Slayer of the Merely Mercantile & P & I
Gothic Vandal of the Over-Posed Home
Fairex the Liberator of the Chair Person from the Hedgemony
of the Angelpoise Lamp Habitat & Sainsbury Time Out Curfew
& Founder Leader of the SFPHBIA
(Poems 177; misspellings in original)

S.F.P.H.B.I.A. was the "Society for Putting Humour Back Into Art," a goal shared by
McLean and James; McLean was a founding member of the "Society," which suggests
that James here is dubbing his friend "Fairex the Liberator of the Chair Person...," etc.,
and that the name "Fairex the Liberator" is some sort of obscure in-joke. Yet the phrase
also clearly refers to Mulford's poem, coming as it does two years after the publication of
Bravo to Girls & Heroes.
A bit of sleuthing can more readily illuminate the title of Mulford's poem. Here it
seems to refer to a Heinz-issued line of baby food products called "Farex," which
Mulford (whether intentionally or not) puns on to gesture toward some technology of
justice, perhaps a "fair exchange," or else a "fair ex-" as she and James would soon be to
each other. The first stanza of this quasi-sonnet (it has 16 lines, two of which are
truncated) thematically bears out the reference to prepackaged baby food, even as it
paratactically shifts to other possible readings of the title (perhaps "Forex" sheepskin
condoms, or else maybe just another obscure non-referential phrase, such as those found
in James' poem):
FAIREX THE LIBERATOR

I have lost the coast to my dressing
gown pardon me these shifts stole
191
up & they can say what they like
about that. how tired he is
under cover & milk stains trans-
posed on condition of a twelve
pound trace. a fine return to
the tonic, for the start of the
autumn season.

I've lost the thread to my lumpy bag
& what to throw away presents great
problems. pie & ashes. parallel lines
can be counted on, how does the grass grow?
seeing us off without a punch for a
chilly presence is closing in hot pursuit
of moral flare.

The poem opens by flaunting various improper uses of feminine garments: "lost the
coast" echoes "coats," which previews "dressing/gown" and especially "shifts stole/ up."
"Coast" also implies an element of transgression or "coasting," accompanied by a blasé
attitude toward sexual morality: "they can say what they like / about that," which prepares
the reader for the closing "of moral flare."
The poem next describes a third-person, "he," at first seemingly a lover ("how
tired he is /under cover"), at which point it becomes evident that he is also, or rather, an
infant: "& milk stains trans-/ posed on condition of a twelve/ pound trace." Perhaps the
speaker has been liberated by Fairex from the burden of constant breast-feeding, allowing
for sexual intercourse. The feminist movement had long encouraged the application of
technological developments to the sphere of reproductive labor, and readily accessible,
affordable baby foods would certainly count toward this end. But Mulford doesn't let
things rest with her elegant and baffling feminist account of the contradictions of
motherhood: there is, instead, "a fine return to/ the tonic, for the start of the/ autumn
192
season." The "fine return" implies that the twelve-pound trace may instead be some sort
of loan or payment, but then "a fine return to the tonic" suggests the musicality of her
verse, or perhaps some sort of cocktail, and also, with our provisional reading of the title
in mind, the tonic would be the baby food, perhaps to stop the crying that has returned.
Only we are here returned "for the start of the/autumn season," which seems to parrot the
language of the fashion industry. So that the first stanza produces a strange rhythm
through the pauses that accompany ambiguities, yet the enjambments urge a movement
onward so that the rhythm is rather like a harried moment of childcare that opens into
multi-valence by interrupting any long thought with a cry and return of the tonic.
Which is precisely what the second stanza seems to achieve, a return to the start:
"I've lost the thread to my lumpy bag" reenacts the brilliantly distracted maneuvers of the
previous stanza and the loosening and losing of garments and accessories, but then moves
toward the resulting difficulty of such an accumulation of meanings: "& what to throw
away presents great/problems." Next comes something like a volta, as the syntactical
fluency of the preceding lines is interrupted by the end-stopped "pie & ashes," both of
which would be rather unpleasant to have tumble out of a lumpy bag but which also
curiously echo the names of the protagonists, Pie and Outwash, in J.H. Prynne's
celebrated poem "Of Sanguine Fire," published in his 1971 volume Brass. Mulford's
poem here shifts rather drastically away from the tight multi-valence of the lines
preceding it and toward a sort of obscure metaphysics: "parallel lines/ can be counted on.
how does the grass grow?" These lines are both blades of grass growing up and the
parallel lines of verse on the page which can be counted (is this a sonnet?) and,
193
apparently, counted on emphatically. This kind of play on the spurious reassurances of
organicist accounts of the extension of the poetic line (from Whitman to Olson) is indeed
reminiscent of Prynne's whole project in Brass to satirize the poetic lament, as I discuss
in my first chapter, following the indication of Keston Sutherland's writings on Brass.
The final lines return to the multivalent fluency of the first stanza, but the tone has shifted
perceptively: "seeing us off without a punch for a /chilly presence is closing in hot
pursuit/ of moral flare." We return here to the cadence of the fashion spread, only it has
been mutilated. The departure or "closing" links contraries (chilly/hot, presence/pursuit)
through the double-duty usage of "in" as both "closing in" and "in... pursuit."
The final line, "of moral flare" again harkens to Prynne's "Of Sanguine Fire" and
to Brass more generally, which opens with the epigraph "On eût crié bravo! Ouvrage
bien moral! Nous étions sauvés" and which savages the moral ambitions for poetry
throughout (Poems 149). The allusion is unmistakable: the first stanza in "Of Sanguine
Fire" features the lines "a fierce vacancy guarded/ on legal & moral grounds which/ run
to the limits of perfect zeal" and, later, "fierce vacancy lies/ in the ground./ Eyes with
love with/ fortitude, flaring/ to the idea brushed past the cheek" (175-178). This can help
to account for the odd spelling of "flare," since one might expect to read "flair" in the
context of Mulford's mock fashion-ese. Moreover, Prynne's poem consistently figures
permutations of bread, including the line "at appetite they knead into a lump" (176),
which is echoed in Mulford's "lumpy bag." The Farex line of products specializes in the
production of cereals for infantile consumption, and such cereals connect back to
Prynne's hyperfocus on the material "substrate" of cooked grains.
194
This is not the place for a reading of "Of Sanguine Fire," but, as I have shown, it
seems likely that Prynne's poem was a source-text for "Fairex the Liberator." The
connection to Brass helps to explain what follows the volta of "pie & ashes" and the
poem's transition from an engagement with recognizably feminist concerns to the more
obscure terrain of mock-metaphysics. The two parts of the poem, before and after the
volta, are thematically connected only through the declared deferral or rejection of
moralizing. That "moral flare" is pursued implies its absence, and any "liberation" turns
out to be more quotidian than the title's promised romance. The incommensurability of
the poem's sections is gathered in the title's obscurity, and this gathering of
incommensurability amounts to a lyric trial of Mulford's commitments to women's
liberation. Lyric pursues a moral flare, but the flare of lyric continuity is not, in fact,
coextensive with the partial and paratactic experience of liberation that the first part of
the poem enacts. In this sense, Mulford threads Prynne's satire through the contradictions
attending any commitment to Marxist-feminism under the conditions of capitalist
patriarchy. Such commitments cannot survive lyric's lumpy accumulation of affect
unchanged, and the poem obliquely expresses this gathering fragmentation of political
and personal commitments, stubbornly linking incommensurables by prosodic means.
Mulford's poetics here is one of dialogical borrowing: rather than asserting poetic
autonomy, she seems instead to produce her poems by grafting together pieces of others.
There may be a certain feminist ethic behind this, insofar as Mulford seems to avoid
declaring her aesthetic autonomy and to instead inhabit the space of other poems,
occupying and traducing their potential patriarchal effects.
195

"back-street rhymes"

Such commitments are tried out as a collaborative project in No Fee: a line or two
for free. So, what is this book that Mulford produced and distributed, along with Riley, at
Women's Week in February? No Fee is a set of A4 pages copied and stapled together, as
were most publications from Street Editions and other small-run poetry presses at the
time. The cover page is handwritten, featuring a simple pen-and-ink drawing probably
done by Riley. At the bottom of the page are the authors' names, handwritten without
much spacing, as if a single name: "Denise Riley Wendy Mulford." This is indicative of
the attitude toward authorship displayed throughout: the poems are not individually
attributed to either author, although the subsequent reprinting of many of them (in the co-
authored Some Poems and in Riley's Dry Air) signals that the first seven are by Riley and
the remainder by Mulford. The poems are also mostly untitled, and it is sometimes
difficult to tell whether a poem ends at the bottom of the page or continues onto the next,
which adds to the potential confusion over the proper borders of each poem and of each
poet's work.
If Bravo to Girls & Heroes riffed on the sensual abandon of John James' earlier
writings, some of Mulford's contributions to No Fee move, as did James's 1978 A Former
Boiling, toward a more militant, heavier verse. Mulford's contributions here are
transitional, on the way to her engagement in the 1980s with the work of Hélène Cixous
196
and French feminist thought but certainly not there yet. There is a steady use of color
throughout, as if Mulford were a pastel John James ("you are free of my heart/ in
however many yellow rectangles/ & ships of blue"), and some terrifically funny bits: "am
I the only person here looking/ although it is dinner time/ is that a sneaky delaying
orange?" (No Fee 13). Mulford, like Riley, engages with phenomenological inquiry, but
she ironizes it with an ugliness of image ("detached rat/of the retina").
Mulford's strongest contribution, and the one that I will focus on, is the
antepenultimate poem, a suite titled "back-street rhymes." The "rhymes" are divided into
various segments, each differently lineated and employing distinct tones, grammars, and
idioms. It looks something like a chant sheet for a march or rally, and does indeed open
with what might be a chant (or perhaps some especially dystopic Springsteen lyrics):
we're unashamed but it's not true we're
unafraid we're strong
terraced in rural streets by day we
choke in garage land
(15)

But this sort of sloganeering is interrupted by the obstinacy of a lyric negatively insisting
on its separation from such easy belonging. The next stanza shifts to a singular first-
person address to the crowd; the absence of apostrophes in "dont" marking an informal
voice worried about the "we" of the first stanza while simultaneously eliding any
affirmative individuation from it:
dont make me a miracle woman keep
on playing the sounds
dont rule dont guess dont buy dont lay
anything on my voice

197
These are the sounds of defiance wrought by feminist consciousness raising, but they are
also the showiness of an anarcho-punk aesthetic – these strands intersect in the next
stanza through a frank sexual and gustatory rhetoric. Mulford writes in drag as John
James:
could the risen bread
have a simpler flavour
beneath the skin
the crawlies creep
shut up wedge tight
guzzle yr meat
late nice slice
& masturbate

Here the "simplicity" of consumption gives way to the uncanny body-snatching of
"Breaking It In Two, The Way It Goes" ("beneath the skin/ the crawlies creep"). The
sonic and syntactic fluency of these first four lines is cut off by the tensed monosyllables
"shut up wedge tight" and the crudeness of "guzzle yr meat." The effect is that the return
to sonic fluidity comes with "masturbate." We have been prepared by the opening ("we
are unashamed"/ "dont make me a miracle woman...") not to read masturbation as a moral
problem but rather as a phase in the dialectic of individuation and solidarity.
The short lines of this second fragment exert a vertical pull downward to the
suite's most musical section, a quatrain of verse composed in a slurring idiom that works
through cumulative negation to outline the valences of the street:
snot love snot hate snot riot kniver
s'us sitting still seventy seven frever
head rockin snot here snot there kniver
snot in the street silently nor sweet

198
The repetition of "s" and "n" sounds, the idiosyncratic end-rhymes of the first three lines,
and the relatively regular meter all refer the quatrain to the near-doggerel chant of the
poem's first fragment. "Snot" is repeated as both negation and mucus; the negative
ambivalence of the lines is disgusting and intimate rather than coolly indifferent. No
sublimation follows from the repeated negation, however: "s'us sitting still seventy seven
frever" (most likely referring to the year of the poem's composition). This insistence on
stillness and the stopping of time syncs with a refusal of any traditional sociology of the
street: there is no opportunity ("snot in the streets silently nor sweet") for temporal or
spatial distancing by which to analyze "us." This is a pluralizing, marked by its idiom as
distinct from universalizing, of the admonition not to "lay anything on my voice." The
streets will be neither romanticized nor decried; we may not even be in the streets at all.
The quasi-caesura of "snot in the street // silently nor sweet" enacts a transition to what
follows on the next page, where silence appears as a delicate masque of self-protection:
the silence a thin skin
if you could turn your steps
springcold light breaking
turf greening under broken brick
tenants running to shelter
all these years:

Here Mulford's poem shifts to the sociological rhetoric of rental housing in conditions of
so-called urban blight. She inserts a long quotation adapted from philanthropist and
proto-sociologist Charles Booth's late-nineteenth century Life and Labour of the People
in London:
75

75
Cf. Booth, 71.
199
"desolate streets
spring into existence
decay with startling rapidity
any tenant will do
who will give the house a start
by burning a little coal in it -
a vast township raised
on hollow land levelled
with foul rubbish breeding fevers & profit"
in silence

Mulford's versification of Booth's muckraking study starkly isolates his phrases such that
her subtle addition of "profit" seems plausible in context. Bookending the noisy
description with "silence" highlights that something, perhaps "profit," is both noisily
raised and yet somehow, for this very reason, unanalyzed, unspoken and ultimately
unaccounted for in the copious discourses surrounding the streets. The negative rhetoric
of the back-street rhyme, then, is born out of this silence.
The poem closes with a series of couplets that manage to hold the silence borne of
the previous refusals (from "dont lay anything on my voice" to the repetitions of "snot"):
drive out again onto the streets
echoes derisively

splitting the head in
search of replete cultural forms

of late capitalist aggression & the
ultimate anodyne of absence

The lines seek a way around the impasse between "replete cultural forms" that belong to
"late capitalist aggression" and what is called the "ultimate anodyne of absence." That is,
silence won't quite cut it here. Peter Middleton writes rather curiously of these lines that
The nod at 'replete cultural forms' could easily be a nod at the shocking
tactlessness of the open admission in the next line [i.e., "late capitalist
200
aggression"?]. The metaphorical self-approval of the intense mental effort
required in the search for culture reveals its violent methods of hegemony when
the expected verb falls off the end of the line and 'in' transfers itself violently to
the head. ("Breaking" 5)

I would expand Middleton's subsequent suggestion that "these holes are poetic method"
to note the absent presence of silence throughout the poem as a component part of
Mulford's back-street lyric. Middleton is right that the poem's emphatic negation does not
culminate in "replete cultural forms," but it does still open a "near impossible.../ gaping"
from which to "make a little outing:"
under the near impossible
wishing, gaping, we make a little outing

perhaps to return
at full tide or ebb

once again drifting
our hearts have leaped aboard

a bemused smile at our lips
waiting the turn to speech

The "bemused smile at our lips/ waiting the turn to speech" evokes the power of
abstention rather than opposition, but neither is this abstention entirely unrelated to the
negativity of protest. The poem holds both refusal (silence) and opposition (negation)
together; it doesn't sanction one or the other as the correct political method for the back-
street rhyme. Doggerel and elevated style mix, and neither one nor their combination
resolves the contradictions of political commitment. "Back-street rhymes" sounds out the
near-impossibility of a collective and individuated lyric negation of what is, leaving how
"we" will reproduce or abolish ourselves somewhere between sing-song and silence.

201

CODA: Enter the 1980s and the End of the World

The cover page of the January 1980 issue of the Cambridge Women's Liberation
Newsletter featured a note from Adele McSorley titled "Women's Place in the 1980s."
The note marks a significant shift toward pessimism in the pages of the Newsletter; with
the 1979 electoral victory of the Tory party and Thatcher's accession to the role of Prime-
Minister, feminist progress looked more unlikely than it had for some time:
New year gloom. We are in reverse gear. Gone are the happy days of the 1970s
when we moved ahead on the 7 demands of the women's movement, where we
could proudly say women are in charge of their reproduction and free to take on
half the world. We now face reductions in abortion rights – family planning –
nursery places – research into safe alternatives to the not so perfect contraceptive
pill – the free day of the mother of school children with the cuts in school meal
facilities – the widening gap in male/female pay – T.O.P.S. courses for women
returning to work being curtailed. This together with the public opinion
advertising campaign saying married women should not work outside the home
thereby solving the unemployment problem.

Economic problems are being solved on the backs of poor women, McSorley laments,
and the bold demands of the Women's Liberation Movement seem increasingly unlikely.
The task is now to defend the gains of the previous decade rather than to "move ahead."
The catalog of threatened and eliminated social programs is disconcerting indeed, and
necessarily leads to a defensive posture; but, McSorley insists, this means that building a
broad collective movement is as necessary as ever:
How shall we stop that reversal? As individuals we do all we can – we work in
small groups on different aspects of it, but is the strength of the movement
coming across – how easy is it for new women to put their energy into our
fragmented groups. Not everyone can see a way out of the maze on their own. Let
us help each other.
202

But the changed objective situations were not enough to change the organizational forms
of the women's movement– the small group continued to dominate, and feminists groups
tended either toward separatism or else toward liberal reforms.
Mulford herself shifted political orientations in the early 1980s, like many women
in England developing a focus on antinuclear campaigns as the most vibrant and urgent
expression of her Marxist-Feminist politics. One month earlier, in the December 1979
issue of the Cambridge Women's Liberation Newsletter, Mulford had published a short
piece with the headline "WARNING: HM GOVERNMENT DEFENCE POLICY CAN
SERIOUSLY DAMAGE YOUR HEALTH/ YOU ARE IN A NUCLEAR DANGER
ZONE." The piece sardonically outlines the latest NATO policies regarding the cold war
arms race. Mulford emphasizes the aggression of US, UK, and Western European forces
directed toward the Soviet Union:
The Soviet "threat" to Nato is used by the Tories to increase arms spending at the
same time that they are closing hospitals, cutting school meals, attacking the
Nationalised industries and the Trades Unions, threatening abortion rights,
creating unemployment & trying to drive women back into the home, etc, etc.
CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament] points out that in reality the Soviet
armed superiority in Europe is a myth, from troops to tanks to boats to nuclear
missiles. In other words, the warmongering starts right here.... East & Central
England, & other areas near American bases, could, if need be, be sacrificed.
WITH EACH STEP IN THE GAME THE CREDIBILITY OF LIMITED
NUCLEAR WAR & ITS ACCEPTIBILITY [sic] TO THE MILITARY & THE
GOVERNMENT INCREASES. In this game there are only losers.

Mulford's tone is both urgent and sardonic. There is a jokey casualness to "East & Central
England... could, if need be, be sacrificed." The jauntiness of such declarations is
bolstered by the seemingly random bursts of all-caps. This typographical unorthodoxy
reflects the uncanny unreality of total destruction.
203
WHAT SHOULD WOMEN IN THE MOVEMENT BE DOING AGAINST THE
NUCLEAR ARMS RACE? HOW CAN WE TRY TO CHANGE THESE
CRAZY POLICIES TOGETHER WITH OTHER FOLK WHO DONT FANCY
FRYING? That's what I'd like to ask everyone at Eden St on Dec 4 Wendy (M).

That is, thinking the total abolishment of the world is practically impossible but it needs
to be done, Mulford suggests, in order to get on with anything at all. This incites some
bullying rhetoric and prosody ("FOLK WHO DONT FANCY FRYING"), and this
special pleading insists that fighting total annihilation is a necessary task for the
movement and it is absolutely incumbent on all who want radical movements to survive
to join with antiwar activists.
In 1982, Mulford wrote a postscript "Three years on" to her earlier "Notes on
Writing" that cements this oblique shift in her politics from a "Marxist/Feminist
Viewpoint" to a fascination with and dread of nuclear apocalypse. I do not mean to
suggest that nuclear disarmament is a frivolous or unnecessary political project of no
importance to Marxists and feminists; instead I aim to register the shift toward more
metaphysical concerns that accompanied Mulford's movement away from a critique and
rejection of peacetime capitalism. In fact, Mulford's this was hardly an isolated incident:
the Women's Peace Camp at Greenham Common (where there had been a "temporary"
U.S. and Royal military base since World War II) developed in 1981 when groups of
women set up encampments to protest the government's decision to allow cruise missiles
to be based at the Common. The women's peace movement was not directly connected to
the Women's Liberation Movement, and in fact the two were quite opposed in certain
respect; as Jill Liddington writes:
204
Much of WLM equal-rights anger in the early 1970s was a reaction against
narrow maternalist values. Practical campaigns for childcare ran alongside a
critique of the family and its oppressive structures.... Feminism and anti-
militarism seemed a million miles apart....(Liddington, 202)

Still, the peace and anti-nuclear women's movements were not entirely discontinuous
from some of the small groups of the WLM – the small group structure allowed for such
political differences to coexist as part of the same movement, which may have ultimately
contributed to its dissolution.
In 1982, Mulford returns to the topic of "gender and writing" but is
now writing angrily, desperately, about survival and what possible place women
writers could have at this present juncture, how we could use our voices to help
build resistance to the threat of nuclear genocide. Since that is what I care about
most today, what I originally intended to talk about, my personal shaping as a
woman and as a writer doesn't any longer seem terribly interesting, or relevant.
("Notes" 37)

What Mulford "care[s] most about today," then, is how writers can "use our voices to
help build resistance to the threat of nuclear genocide." Survival is the watchword, and it
signals the literal survival of the human species and of life on earth. This shift away from
a progressive politics and toward a conservation of what is echoes McSorley's remarks
about the dismaying need, at the dawn of the 1980s, for a defensive posture and attitude
toward reproductive politics. While the "resistance" that Mulford seeks to drum up could,
presumably, be revolutionary, that is not, in 1982, what most concerns Mulford. Personal
politics, or a focus on the interruption of dominant ideologies, "no longer seem terribly
interesting, or relevant." The challenge for feminist poets is now one of "being alive in
language to the imagined reality of the destruction of our world.... What would a feminist
205
poetics and practice be that was strong to take on such a challenge? I think that's an
important question to ask, even though it's unanswerable" (37-38).
Both revolutionary and reformist politics are now a byproduct of the struggle for
simple survival. The possibility for a transformative Marxist-feminist writing is now
submitted to the metaphysical exhortation to "imagine our deaths:" "We have to imagine
our deaths... that is almost impossible to do, precisely because we are so committed to
our lives...." But the imagination of death amounts, for Mulford, to an affirmation of life.
This does not preclude the recognition of injustices, but it does mean that there is no time
for dillydallying with resignation and dismay:
As writers perhaps all we can attempt to do is to fight and refight this struggle
[against the "acutely reactionary power we face"] in language, to reach out to the
furthest limit of the murdering geopolitical abstractions of Reaganism or
Thatcherism and imaginatively help to create the conditions for their refusal, by
calling upon our deepest and most passionate desire for life, and by celebrating
and recreating our strength. (40)

Curiously, this kind of celebration and recreation required, for the Mulford of 1982, that
she stop teaching: "I was a teacher until quite recently and my decision to give up
teaching was influenced by my sense of the urgency of this present moment, that I must
work and write where I can wholly commit myself" (39). It is as if in the face of the
"almost certain" destruction of the world ideological struggle within the classroom or in
the field of literary criticism impedes the affirmation of life that poetry must take up. This
is a new age for reproductive politics, construed now primarily in an affirmative mode,
although the contradictions cannot be too far from the surface. All the same,
Any other perspective right now seems academic, in the pejorative sense. Without
my life I shall not think or write. As long as I write I must fight, for the life of all I
love. (41)
206
So, political thought and writing must not elide the condition of possibility for thought
and writing; for Mulford, this condition is "my life" as it is transformed by the
imagination of "our deaths." This avowed struggle "for the life of all I love" threatens to
flatten the particularities of such loves and to obfuscate the particularities of murderous
contradiction had necessitated a transformative poetics in the first place. Such a flattening
is not, however, in evidence in Mulford's poetry from the early 1980s, which somewhat
less grandly takes on the peculiarities of subjectivity as they are called forth by lyric
grace and its disruption.
To close this chapter, I will look briefly at "How do you live?" the first poem
from Mulford's 1985 collection "The abc of Writing and other poems." The poem is
dedicated "for Hélène Cixous, who gave me the question," and it is dated 1979-1983. As
many have noted, "The abc of Writing" is Mulford's most explicitly "theoretical" poem,
but only insofar as "theory" is conflated with a particular moment of French literary-
philosophical prose also called – in the Anglophone world – "poststructuralism."
Previous readings of "How do you live?" have focused almost exclusively on the
dedication as the source of the poem's approach to political poetry and have read from
this a "poststructural" turn in Mulford's feminism and in her poetry: the poem begins in a
promising vein for this sort of reading:
no clear answer. ambivalently.
reciprocally. in
oscillation. lurching in surprise &
wonder.

Linda Kinnahan reads this through the lens of 1990s academic feminist debates about
"essentialist" feminisms, which she sees Mulford as engaging: "the composition is dated
207
1979-83 and reflects the poet's efforts over those years to bring together a Marxist-
feminist perspective with poststructural theories of language and subjectivity, a poetic
exploration of the female body's textualization" (Lyric Interventions 203). Jane Dowson
and Alice Entwistle concur: "'How do you live?' finds Mulford moving more plainly into
the realm of poststructuralism" (A History 162).
While I don't think that these categorizations are impertinent, I would like to track
some of the objective conditions that could help to explain the emergence of this
differently theoretical emphasis from what was evident in Bravo to Girls & Heroes and
No Fee. Written in 1979-1983, the poem corresponds almost exactly to the historical gap
between the sections of Mulford's "Notes on Writing" and to the years after "Beyond the
Fragments" and the beginning of Thatcher's premiership. That is, the poem's
"ambivalence" is legible not only as an Anglophone imitation of Cixous (even in the
more generous sense of imitation-as-translation). It is also part of Mulford's project to
write against nuclear apocalypse by affirming life, however damaged it may be. As I have
implicitly argued throughout, Mulford's political ambitions for poetry risk being reduced
to a voluntaristic individualism without some understanding of her poetry's
overdetermined relationship to the fragmentation of the left in the late 1970s. That is, this
poem forms part of Mulford's turn toward thinking social reproduction as a simple
survival of human life against the threat of annihilation amidst an infighting left with
diminished hopes for major change:
after-effect of too much pricy
delegation, herein described as
daringly / close to
disaster, danger's cousin.
208

In this passage, all distinct administrations of power threaten to fade into the dim fate of
disaster. "herein described" marks this shift whereby Mulford will locate in late capitalist
warfare an irresistible drive towards total destruction. The job of a socialist-feminist
poetics alive to language is now to stop this disaster and to reproduce life, precisely so
that an answer to the question "how do you live?" might survive the "surprise & wonder"
that it can be asked at all.
The poem's second half threads together the problem of feminist poetry with the
threat of total destruction:
...oh there is
too much talk & what is shared in timid
in timid recoil does not nor ever can
satisfy the heart, these ultra-private
accomodations
76
between person &
politics negotiating survival while
the sea rises hold on for what you can
I sd

The space in which person and politics, or, analogously lyric and feminism,
"accommodate" each other is "ultra-private" and cannot ever "satisfy the heart" even
when it is shared "in timid/in timid recoil." The repetition seems to force the ear to hear
“intimate” in “in timid”. Kinnahan argues that these lines "momentarily highlight... the
interiority of the self, another conventional voicing of the 'feminine,' only to assault it
with 'politics negotiating survival'" (205). But this bypasses the problem of total
destruction. How do you live: "negotiating survival while/ the sea rises." That is, "hold on
for what you can." Here is a reactionary poetics; fuck "too much talk" and hold on. But

76
sic
209
this will not do: this is not a poetics, this is not a politics, this in fact comes all too close
to an earlier line's chilling injunction to "lie back my sweet/ & take it" which Kinnahan
rightly reads as "a voice linking economic and sexual power through an image of rape"
(204).
The poem, then, actively resists the politics of simply affirming life that it now
finds as the only available choice; it greets the 1980s with a longing for the days when
"the movement" forged ahead with demands. This is a poetics of resignation, and
Mulford will not have it even as "there is no alternative," in the notorious words of
Thatcher. The poem closes with what "I sd" wrapped in quotation marks:
I sd
"a woman's place behind the home
everywhere & nowhere fear
of placelessness, hold on
for what we can, cradling
cuddling care. home love
tucked body refuge will satisfy what part ?"

In the 1987 selected poems volume late spring next year, Mulford has changed
"placelessness" to "placeness," and all of Mulford's readers have referred to this version,
indicating that they are quoting from late spring next year even when they refer to the
earlier volume. This may account for the fact that they miss the fear of annihilation that
clearly moves the poem's dialectic between the reproduction of life and disgust for the
concomitant survival of living oppression. Kinnahan's account:
Suggesting through fragmentary lines the pieces of discourse that define this
female "placeness" and its conventional rationale as a kind of biological destiny...
these lines seem to ask what parts of a woman's subjectivity will the experience of
body as refuge "satisfy," a question dually directed toward patriarchy's use of
women's bodies and toward Cixous's exhortation of the female body as source for
subjectivity. (205)
210

It might be right to focus on the resources of "the female body" if it was indeed a "fear of
placeness" in question, but the earlier text doesn't have it this way. Dowson and Entwistle
push against Kinnahan (without correcting the mistake) by suggesting that
the dilemma is anchored in the push-pull dynamic of the home, locus not so much
for the kind of fixed, culturally proscribed sense of female identity which
Mulford's work has resisted from the outset (the 'fear/of placeness'), as for the
mutually sustaining emotional relationships (rather than bodily transactions) in
which the competing claims of public and private, inner and outer life finally meet
and converge, 'hold[ing] on for what we can, cradling/cuddling care'. (163)

This seems correct, but "fear of / placelessness" should supplement this reading with a
different one altogether – placelessness also signals that there may be no "home" at all on
our planet, and so "hold on for what we can" is not so much a rallying cry for an ethics of
collective care as it is a frozen, debilitated ("tucked body refuge"), last-ditch effort at
reproduction as simple survival. Get under your desks, kids. This poem, then, mourns the
loss of "reproduction" as a problem for the internal machinations of left organizations:
reproduction now covers the bare survival of life. Whereas "back-street rhymes" mixed
idioms and styles of refusal (abstention and opposition) to open the possibility for
reproducing collective transformative negations, "how do you live" simply repeats the
desperation of the individual in the form of a "we"– what binds "us" here is not a
generative negation of what kills us but rather the dismal hope for bare survival.
211

Chapter 4. Denise Riley's Geology

"A Sliver of the History of the Present"

Writing in the early 1990s, Denise Riley reflected on the collective forces that had
led her, two decades earlier, to conduct research for what would be her first book of
socialist-feminist scholarship, War in the Nursery. At the time of her earlier writing, she
explains, she was one of many in the women's liberation movement who saw historical
materialist analysis as key to contemporary feminist struggle. Socialist feminists, and not
only those few firmly lodged in the academic disciplines legislating historical work, were
driven to enter "the archives." Riley describes the efforts to create histories and political
economies of women's oppression and resistance in the face of
a general uncertainty about what 'the State' was, and what 'rights' might be; the
British women's liberation movement formulated demands to a (solidly
unresponsive) State, so that there was nothing academic about this interest; it was
understood to be sharply political. Those of us who could somehow manage to
research these questions saw our investigations as "at the service of" feminist
politics and campaigns. In this we continued an aspiration of the late-1960s
libertarian socialism which hoped for critical intellectual work to be done outside
of the universities, to have an independent base. ("A Short History of Some
Preoccupations" 124)

Riley testifies to the manner in which this socialist-feminist understanding of historical
method productively opened the field of materialist analysis to questions of specific
importance to women. But the slogan "the personal is political" carried rather complex
addresses and affects. For those engaged in socialist-feminist activism, Riley claims,
212
feminist historical materialism was an urgent political undertaking to be fueled by the
experiences of women in the present. From the vantage point of the 1990s, however,
Riley worries that this tendency sometimes amounted to an attempt to synthesize and
universalize at the level of theory (albeit theory based in historical materialist research)
the contemporary trajectories of power and domination that faced mostly white women
with some experience in higher education.
77
Participants in the women's liberation
movement understood historical work itself as a potential domain for democracy, and the
act of private research was quickly aligned to such visions of prefigurative social
relations:
the questions which were then agitating the women’s liberation movement could
be felt vividly enough to determine many working trajectories, and could fire our
"historic passions"
78
as surely as any more conventionally historical
enthusiasms.… That conviction, that a collectivity of public action did exist into
which some shreds of private work could be fed, was perhaps a last kick of the
longing of 1968 for a democracy of criticism, for an unwalled invisible university
so free that all could drift in and out at will. (“Historic Passions” 238)

Ironically, this "libertarian socialist" incitement for all to conduct historical materialist
research may have also forced too quick a jump between the "archives" and the present
feminist moment – that is, it may have amounted to a smoothing over of historical
differences. In retrospect, Riley is skeptical of the tendency to align the political content
of historical research with the prospect of freedom to do the research; the women's

77
Cf. Breines for an analysis of the failed attempts of white socialist-feminists to incorporate women of
color into their groups, Carby for a critique of socialist feminist’s ethnocentrism, and Barrett and McIntosh
for self-critique regarding this issue.
78
This is the name of the regular column where Riley was the guest writer.
213
liberationist explanations of history as subject to change were, she suspects, too easily
understood as analogous to the exhilarations of inquiry and composition.
The shift in Riley's work from historical materialist research toward more
reflective and linguistic-philosophical concerns is not simply the product of a change in
temperament or of Riley's "maturing" as a thinker and scholar. It is also the result of
objective changes in feminist organizing and political economy more broadly that I have
sketched in my previous chapter. Throughout the 1980s, the popularity of the Women's
Liberation Movement waned; women's liberation organizations tended toward liberal
single-issue programs or else toward cultural feminist separatism, and the heyday of
socialist feminism was over. Socialist-feminism had become, for most, a matter of
academic debate and went largely unchecked by the experiences of extra-curricular
organizing or direct action.
Riley's project in the 1990s, then, was to historicize the affective dimensions of
her earlier historical materialist passions, to query and delineate the links between the
political histories being written and the affective dimensions of writing politics (here we
can recall the closing lines of "To The Islands" from No Fee: "writing politics is a
luscious glow/and gives a quick buzz to your style"). As Riley reflects,
once you have realized that some inescapable leaven of self-fascination is busily at
work under the banner of reinterpreting oneself as a sliver of the history of the
present, then you are forced to speculate about exactly what it's up to there. How
someone will speak about herself is, deeply and immediately, historical. To
overhear one's self, though, is to witness it singing an aria, the evaluation of which
demands the hardest criticism and a knowledge of every rhetorical trick in the
book. (“Historic,” 241)

214
Riley attempts, in these reflections, to "overhear" her own writings from the late-1970s.
Reconstructing her place in history, she fears, will lead to a freezing of the past in her
reified self-image rather than an animation of the self as a "sliver of the history of the
present." Seeking to find herself everywhere, she worries, will eradicate any particularity,
any material analysis that might approach an understanding of her research and writing as
historical agents themselves. Riley instead attempts to reconstruct the conditions of her
earlier writing and to bring her own process of composition into the field of historical
materialist analysis, and she implies that any truly dialectical materialism requires this
sort of detour.
To this end, Riley delineates the theoretico-political context of her academic prose
on multiple occasions. In "A Short History of Some Preoccupations," she provides a sort
of encyclopedia of the theoretical and political texts that haunted her own writings:
Certain phrases and formulations take on a talismanic quality, rattle at the back of
one's brain for years. Perhaps, or even probably, they are not deployed, not
formally worked up and digested into a coherent theory; none the less they keep a
powerful presence on top of which later "influences" lie only lightly.... I imagine
that many of "us," especially the bookish ones, felt ourselves to be hung around
with talismans or mottoes, which we'd collected and which could be fingered like
rosaries for guidance in the tumult. The new feminism gave us the ubiquitous "the
personal is the political" and the slogans (like "No women's liberation without
socialism! No socialism without women's liberation!") but these were new
accretions which fell upon the older layers; the formulations about the State and
the individual, Marx and Freud and why 1917 had failed. It is these formulations,
these talismanic memories, which possess a powerful and continuing presence in
the work done perhaps a decade or fifteen years later, even where they are not
consciously remembered, or are refined, or indeed are repudiated. (123-25)

Unlike Wendy Mulford, for whom, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, literary texts were
to be transformative in a manner analogous to Marxist critique, paralleling and
contributing in a dialectical manner to the developments of Marxist-Feminist theory,
215
Riley attends to the "talismanic" quality of formulations that are not fully worked through
but rather clung to as magic keys that do not necessarily determine a textual politics in
any rigorously consistent manner. Such talismanic returns will prove a key element of
Riley's poetic composition into the 1990s, and they will also be crucial to the politics of
irony and theory of linguistic materialism that Riley elaborates in her later prose, as we
will see.
These two self-reflections mark an interval between Riley's prose works Am I
That Name? (1988) and The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (2000).
While the earlier text is a historical-theoretical monograph on the collective name
"women," The Words of Selves and its follow-up, Impersonal Passion (2005), present a
second-order discourse or abstraction from the particular histories of the names
catalogued in Am I That Name? and War in the Nursery. The stakes have shifted from
interventions in particular historical determinations (i.e., the myriad forces convening to
produce and then collapse wartime nurseries or the shifting valences of the name
"women" for feminism) to more properly philosophical engagements with the
vicissitudes of self-description and the affect attendant to speech acts tout court. If
specificity is sacrificed for the sake of generality, however, The Words of Selves marks
this loss throughout with its shifts and doubts, its self-negating tendency, and its
nomination of irony as the unreliable thread linking varied forms of political speech. In
this chapter I will consider the valences of such an irony, and the rhetorical and stylistic
apparatus that attends it in Riley's account, in terms of the analytic categories that my
preceding chapters have centered on, such as literary pedagogy, socialist feminism, poetic
216
collectives, and divergent commitments. I will parse this through Riley's linguistic
materiality as she conceives and performs it by echoing earlier writings in her later prose.
That is to say, Riley's move from a philosophical practice of history to a historical
practice of philosophy is also mediated by her poetic output from around 1985 through
2000. "Reflections in the Archive" and "A Short History" demonstrate an explicitly
literary thinking of historical and political writing; they bring the writing subject into
direct contact with the political contents broached and speculate on the mutual
determinations of these domains. They offer a lyrical thinking of polemic through the
consideration of slogans and theoretical formulas as announcements and performances of
the self as "a sliver of the history of the present." Riley's readings of such slivers are not
without the resources of lyric, and they partake in a similar practice of making concrete
the particularities of "impersonal passions."
Still, more than a few poet-critics have noted the failure of Riley's prose to match
the affective intensity of her poetry. Andrea Brady writes that "There is... a significant
gap between the pragmatic but optimistic conclusions of Riley’s theory, and the dark
aggressions of her verse" (Brady, 4), while Neil Pattison wonders at how "the cool,
diffident authority of Riley’s critical self-reflection is difficult to reconcile with the
extravagance and vulnerability of the work it recalls" (Pattison, 2). In contrast to these
appraisals, I argue that The Words of Selves and Impersonal Passion offer an extension or
afterlife of the poetry that, for its part, performs the processes described in the prose. The
theory does not simply explain or fail to explain the poetry; rather, contradictions teased
out in the poetic work return uncannily in the prose, often in the form of "talismanic"
217
words or phrases that seem not to have been exorcised by Riley's lyric composition. In
this sense, the poetry bears on and into the prose, contributing to the thick historicity of
the particular "words of selves" that are proffered for and by Riley's political philosophy
of irony. These lonely echoes of the verse are often unmarked, but, I argue, they perform
the "echoing" loneliness that Riley outlines as a limit case to social thinking. In this
sense, the poetry and the prose intermingle in a diffuse but coherent account of this limit
case and its linguistic mechanisms and affects.
In this chapter, then, I do not provide a comprehensive reading of Riley's poetic
output from the 1990s, although I do benefit from and amend some excellent accounts of
this work.
79
Rather, I follow the afterlives of Riley's poetry in her prose so as to outline
how her theories of lonely sociality, talismanic politics, and metaphor and rhetoric
intersect to form a unique account and performance of linguistic materialism. Riley's
practice of carrying materialist poetics into her prose is, I argue, continuous with the
Empsonian trajectory of a near-infinite querying and process of interpretation. All the
same, Riley's engagement with socialist-feminism, and the kinds of political struggle and
literary production that I have traced in my second and third chapter, have severed the
reflexive connection of such rigorous interpretative methods from their "civilizing" bases
in moralistic aesthetic practices. For Riley, rather, the talismanic effects of complex
words are the very stuff of political thought and organizing, and her lyric learns from and
echoes such contradictions rather than pretending to resolve them.

79
See Brady, Thomas Butler, Critchley, Deveson, DuPlessis, Herd, Huk, Kennedy, Kinnahan, Lecercle,
Middleton, Pattison, Presley, Purves, Wagner, Watts, Wheale, and Wilkinson for a range of perspectives on
Riley's Mop Mop Georgette and Selected Poems.
218

The Lonely Social

Am I That Name?, Riley's second book of prose, documents a range of moments
in modern European history when the category of women underwent significant
mutations alongside (proto-)feminist agitation. The book's argument is that such shifts
and mutations are not aberrant but rather endemic to feminism's multifaceted relationship
to the category "women" in the first place. The book asks how the name of women – as a
name and as language – has interacted and will continue to interact with feminist political
formations as both an irritant and a necessity. Riley follows the historical oscillations, in
feminist and proto-feminist movements, between claiming and disavowing the name of
“women.”
80
Her goal is never simply to insist on some heterogeneity of women, as if the
category contained an empirical mass, however variable, but rather to show how the
category of “women” itself, as language, amasses and gathers forces that sometimes do
violence to those who call themselves or find themselves called “women.” All the same,
the name “women” is not something to be abandoned, and not only because refusing to
name oneself hardly prevents oneself, or anyone else, from being named:
It is not that a new slogan for feminism is being proposed here – of feminism
without ‘women’. Rather, the suggestion is that ‘women’ is a simultaneous
foundation of and an irritant to feminism, and that this is constitutionally so. It is
true that the trade-off for the myriad namings of ‘women’ by politics, sociologies,

80
Ann Snitow’s “A Gender Diary” follows up on this aspect of Riley's work through a survey of some
contemporary feminisms.
219
policies and psychologies is that at this cost ‘women’ do, sometimes, become a
force to be reckoned with. But the caveat remains: the risky elements to the
processes of alignment in sexed ranks are never far away, and the very collectivity
which distinguishes you may also be wielded, even unintentionally, against you.
Not just against you as an individual, that is, but against you as a social being with
needs and attributions. (17)

The continuity with War in the Nursery is clear: in the earlier text, Riley showed how the
sociological identification of "mothers" functions, in many instances, to obviate the needs
and desires of those who find themselves called "mothers." The bulk of Am I That
Name?, for its part, traces the fixing and unfixing, hardening and melting away, of the
category of "women" in modern European intellectual and political history. Riley outlines
the oscillations between refusals and avowals of a categorical name that will not go away
but that nonetheless changes, that is historical and thus subject to mutations. The feminist
must navigate the twin threats of responding and not responding to a misinterpellation: to
refuse, to say “no, we are not women” risks being utterly unintelligible and being swept
up along with the definition that was presupposed in the first place, whereas a strategic
affirmation of “women” may underwrite rather than transform the operations of the
category that it seeks to modify (112). The tactic that Riley proposes, in light of this
oscillating threat, is a politics of irony and its chance as a working from within that may
or may not be audible, even to its speakers, who will never control the historicity of the
classifications that they repeat or refuse. This is not only because identity categories
preexist the subjects that speak them, but also because these categories are, as language,
historical through and through.
But Am I That Name? also challenges some of the categories that animated Riley's
analysis of war-time nurseries, women's employment, and pronatalism in War in the
220
Nursery. The most significant amendment comes in the third chapter on "'The Social',
'Women', and Sociological Feminism." Here, Riley tracks the development of "the social"
in the long nineteenth century in the U.K., considering how it came to nominate a
feminized sphere of human life artificially severed from the political. This investigation
leads Riley to amend some of War in the Nursery's claims for thinking the social, even as
these had already been tendentiously modified by "the biological" in the earlier book.
Now the designation of the social must also be understood as a historical dynamic and
event in its own right:
Once the seemingly neutral and vacant backdrop of 'the social' presents itself for
scrutiny, it appears as a strange phenomenon in its own right. This is another
matter from that familiar questioning by today's social historians as to the
'ideological' deployments which are carried out in the same of the social. On the
contrary, once the authenticity of 'the social' is called into question in itself, it
cannot function as a neutral site upon which progress or reaction may win the day.
(49)

That is, "the social" has been an object and agent of historical change. The standard usage
of "the social" as a neutral site or empty field upon which to compose politics elides this
history and with it the historical and political force imposed by the nomination and
delineation of "the social" itself.
Most significantly for Riley, "the social" emerges as a doubly feminized sphere by
virtue of its proximity to domestic life and by its subsequent openness to the virtuous
interventions or deleterious failings of individual women, for better and for worse in the
eyes of those who would seek to manage it (often themselves women). Riley writes:
One of the peculiarities of 'women' in its proximity to "the social" is a doubled
feminisation. In so far as the concerns of the social are familial standards – health,
education, hygiene, fertility, demography, chastity and fecundity – and the heart
of the family is inexorably the woman, then the woman is also solidly inside of
221
that which has to some degree already been feminised.... One striking effect of the
conceptualising of this "social" is its dislocation of the political. The latter takes
on an intensified air of privacy and invulnerability, of "high politics" associated
with the juridical and governmental power in a restricted manner. (50-51)

That is, the contents of the "social" are feminized in advance of their ascription to the
influence of women, and this ascription enacts a redoubling of this femininity. But it also
means, Riley insists, that the invention of "the social" was part of a dialectical
"dislocation of the political" away from the sphere of women's participation and
influence. This is part of a project of divorcing political thought and practice from the
conditions and concerns of exploited and oppressed people, in this case from the lives of
women and/as workers:
The question of poverty, for instance, becomes divorced from politics and
assigned... to the social sphere. The associations of 'women' with this sphere
accompany a displacement and a permanent erosion of older distinctions between
the 'public' and the 'private', at the same time as the constriction of the 'political' is
refined. 'Women' are overwhelmingly sociological and therefore, given these new
definitions, not political entities....The social is in this sense constructed, rather
than being the universal agent which bathes everything else. (51)

There were, then, significant obstacles to attempts to make "sociality" or "the social" into
the privileged entry point for women, and for feminists in particular, to "the political."
Indeed, as Riley writes: "How 'women' might become candidates for translation from the
social to the political sphere depended not only on how 'women' were conceived, but on
how the understandings of those spheres themselves were altered" (55). In this sense, Am
I That Name? supplements Riley's thinking of "socialized biology" by unpacking more of
the contradictions historically embedded in conceptions of the social, such as the tenuous
divorcing of women from the political through the putatively apolitical field of the social.
222
Part of Riley's effort in Am I That Name? is, then, to reconfigure "the social" by
thinking about how and when refusals to assent to the category of "women" might have
some cumulative effect upon its constitution as an implicitly political category disguised
or veiled by the ideology of "the social." For Riley, this is partly to be attempted by
thinking rigorously through the political implications of seemingly asocial experiences
and relations. In her poetry from the late 80s and early 90s, and in her prose from the late
90s and after, she considers loneliness and non-belonging as political wedges against the
forced gregariousness of social and familial femininity. As I will later argue, Riley
approaches such tenuously social forms through what I will call a vulgar materialist and
"geological" rhetoric that attends her explanations of how loneliness and non-belonging
relate dialectically to the production of political solidarity.
Riley's 2004 essay "The Right to Be Lonely" addresses these problems head-on in
an attempt to consider "alternative" forms of kinship that sometimes pass, in the new
millenium, as legitimate variations on "the family." She then springs from her
consideration of loneliness into a description of an “emotive topography” of sociality:
“There is an emotive topography in that spatial conceptualization of inclusion and
exclusion; it is this linguistic emotionality which suffuses all political philosophies of
who is in and who is left out” (Impersonal Passion 50-51). Riley argues that a certain
affect of loneliness is set up in the very structures by which selves are routinely inscribed.
According to this argument, the ineluctable fact of such a spatial rhetoric produces a
structurally necessary loneliness, whether it is at the center of a self cut off from the
world or on the fringes of an ever-expanding sociality:
223
Whichever way the movement across the imagined membrane which separates the
inner and the outer, it is envious and full of pathos. In such discursive spatiality
there is, immediately, an affective topography of being excluded: you are where I
myself would prefer to be: that is what I would like to have. (55)

The affective strife produced by spatial rhetoric is, Riley argues, radically
overdetermined; it belongs neither to the inside nor outside, but to the very fact of this
excluding division in language.
In contradistinction to this pervasive figuration of loneliness as a cutting-off from
the social, Riley challenges her reader to imagine loneliness not as a pre- or non-social
state but as the social form adhering to those who refuse or are refused the call of
legitimation that finds its form in the word “family:”
But there’s a stronger solitude which refuses to be understood as merely presocial
and which rejects the benevolent will to make everything, and it too, familial.
This solitude has no time for any plangency about its own “exclusion.” Indeed, it
groans at the prospect of being tenderly ushered into the domain of the new
social.... How might such singleness neither be considered pathological nor be
swept up, in an ostentatious depathologizing, into a compulsive sociability? (58)

This loneliness refuses to endorse the language of inside and outside, and with it the
affect attendant to all talk of inclusion and exclusion. Such a singleness rejects a
"compulsive sociability" but is not for that reason non-social; the refusal is part of a
dialectical relationship to and within, so to speak, the social.
Here Riley insists on the necessity of thinking, politically, a singleness that places
itself neither outside nor inside of the social. The essay closes:
Might a properly recognized state of singleness (to wrench the notion of
“recognition” away from its usual oppressively gregarious tone) recast that
desolate and resentment-prone metaphoricity of social exclusion – and might it
also somewhat allay the burden, or at least the embarrassed self-reproach, of those
who may find themselves effectively living in solitude at the very same time as
they live inside the family? (58)
224

"The Right to Be Lonely" picks up the contradictions that animated War in the Nursery
and Marxism for Infants, but the newer work focuses its investigation of such
contradictions on the terrain of language, in this case on metaphor. This metaphoricity is
not only a question of some metaphysics of language, it is a reflection of social
contradiction. Riley writes: "I'm not inside anything. I'm not outside it, either. Yet the
public/private distinction, which has such solid realities in its effects, tends in its
topographical conceptualization to underwrite the affective metaphoricity of inner and
outer. This cuts many ways." (54)
This passage is one of the many instances I have mentioned in which Riley's
poetry resurfaces in her prose. "Knowing in the Real World," a poem first published in
1993 in the journal Parataxis and shortly thereafter in the collection Mop Mop Georgette,
includes the line "I'm not outside anything: I'm not inside it either." The poem,
constructed in couplets whose lines vacillate between iambic pentameter and hexameter,
has, up to this point, followed a day's colors and textures as if looking out at the world:
"One afternoon hour burns away until a rust-/coloured light sinks in towards evening,"
but it turns quickly "inward" before these spatial notions are deconstructed:

or any time at all when I fall straight through
myself to thud as onto the streaked floor of

a swimming pool drained out for winter, no
greeny depths but lined in blackened leaves.

225
The assertion that "I'm not outside anything: I'm not inside it either" does, then, torque
the poem's rhetoric – it introduces a social language into the poem's more withdrawn
reflections:

I'm not outside anything: I'm not inside it either.
There's no democracy in beauty, I'm following

human looks. Though people spin away, don't
be thrown by their puzzling lives, later the lives

secrete their meaning. The red sun's on the rain.
Where do I put myself, if public life's destroyed.

This tracing of the placement of "myself" within shape-shifting social relations cannot do
without the language of "inside" and "outside," and this argument returns through the
talismanic aphorism, in inverted form, in the later essay. In both cases, Riley queries the
relationship between the "single" self and "the real world" where "public life's
destroyed," which may in fact be a good thing from the perspective of a socialist-feminist
or queer critique of the public/private binary. The challenge is, then, to put myself
somewhere even as such a conceptual placement redraws the dividing line between inside
and outside that aids in producing social divisions, disenabling attempts to change society
in order that "I" might not suffer the effects of this emotive spatiality quite so keenly.
Riley's efforts, in the poetry, to write such a transformative loneliness through and
in its sociality have also, as many have noted, often come through her engagements with
painting. Robin Purves has argued along these lines in his excellent essay "Denise Riley
passim." Purves centers his reading on the poem "Red Shout," which appears a few pages
after "Knowing in the Real World" in Mop Mop Georgette; the poem is titled, according
226
to Riley, after a painting, "I think by Gillian Ayres" (Mop Mop 72). "Red Shout" begins
by admitting a fearfulness or worry about the vitality of a solitary experience:

Terrible to think it's more alive here when I'm
alone than when I'm not – that something might
come right just where 'the edges of a page begin
to bleed and show that it is human' – and come
more right than when I do the same.... (Mop Mop 55)

This "something" is, apparently, the attribution of an autonomous agency to painting.
Purves describes Riley's treatment of abstract painting, throughout the poems of Mop
Mop Georgette and elsewhere, as a sort of model or foil for lyric. On his reading,
abstraction in painting presents a form of affective autonomy that Riley mines for lyric
even as she notes the inability of lyric to attain to the heights of expressive, impersonal
swoon that she attributes to the brushstroke and to color. Reading the opening lines of
"Red Shout," Purves explains that
The "terrible" predicament announced at the beginning of "Red Shout," that the
speaker's vivid pleasure in her solitary contemplation, or just in solitude itself, is
pleasant in part because solitary, is redeemed as a social predicament that can be
resolved by the stunning, invigorating recognition of a "really human sign" made
available by and during and throughout the writing or painting that is seen to
bleed, the composition running off the trimmed page or stretchered canvas.... (53)

In this sense, "Red Shout" appears to directly contradict the assertion that "There's no
democracy in beauty" from "Knowing in the Real World." The "annunciation" provided
in and as the painting comes "in democratic form:"

...I still wait for a really human sign
as light and shocking as an annunciation–
sometimes I get it and in democratic form: Red
Shout...

227
While this isn't quite the same as saying, for example, that there is democracy in beauty,
Riley's treatment of painting in this poem does point toward the plastic arts as somehow
inoculated against the contradictory privatizations of lyric. Painting seems a more
autonomous realm from the compulsions of "sociability." Purves writes that, in the poem,
painting's "democratic" annunciation
is said to enjoy a peculiar force, the force of colour, violently racing, slicing and
ripping over the canvas when the eye attempts to follow its violent intercepts of
bands and swathes. The force is registered as affects that travel through the body
of the speaker with an immediacy and velocity that Riley has elsewhere compared
with what must be the relatively dull force of literature: at least some of her
poems exist to aspire, however ineffectually, to the condition of painting. (43)

The aspiration to such a "democratic" form is intrinsically contradictory, insofar as this
form is "more alive here when I'm/ alone than when I'm not;" or, as the poem's closing
puts it, "all this means only/ it can work, the corrective of in this case paint/ for isolation
– what works is just that someone/ possibly scared stiff and also living did it, no?" The
affective, democratic force of painting "can work" precisely because it is an index of
loneliness. Such "isolation" is then read as a mutation of lyric address away from the I-
thou structure and into a "shout" that exposes the extent to which the lonely expression of
impersonal affect is always also social.
81

81
These lines also echo bits from the close of "A Shortened Set," which appears earlier in the volume: "The
evening lightens./ A friend's shout/ blown inaudibly.// ... // Curved to this view/ the gleam of a moment's/
social rest." (Mop Mop Georgette 24)
228
Shrimps and the Falling Rain

"Red Shout" was first published in Stair Spirit, a chapbook released by Rod
Mengham's Cambridge-based Equipage Press in 1992. The limited edition volume
contains many of the poems that would make up her second book-length collection of
poetry, Mop Mop Georgette (the first being Dry Air). Both Stair Spirit and Mop Mop
Georgette present a significant departure from the fragmentary nature of a long poem-
sequence like Marxism for Infants. In the work from the late 1980s and early 1990s, we
encounter a realization of the lyric fluency hinted at in Marxism for Infants and in some
of the later poems included in Dry Air.
The social dialectic of lyric that I analyzed in my second chapter has transformed,
in the later work, into a dialectic of willed loneliness and belonging; this is often rendered
as the oscillation between invocation and rejection of the reader-as-addressee. As I have
already discussed, Riley's research into the history of British feminisms altered her
already cautious embrace of the category of the social; abstentions and refusals became
for her more welcome modes of engagement with the problem of social individuality.
Such maneuvers are accompanied, in Riley's work, by a torqued treatment of the sociality
of lyric and of language. There is an increasingly severe skepticism regarding all
endorsements of "being with others" that is continuous with her earlier dismay at the
ethics of intersubjectivity. This skepticism towards "the social" as a holistic framework
for the production of persons reflects the treatment of "the social" in Am I That Name.
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This kind of movement is indeed documented in accounts of Riley's poetics,
although these tend to read her work back through an ethics of intersubjectivity, as in the
case of John Wilkinson's notorious 1994 review of Mop Mop Georgette, "Illyrian Places"
which charged Riley's poetry with a nagging, unsurmounted narcissism. A number of
feminist critics have noted the similarity of Wilkinson's judgment to a long tradition of
dismissing or diminishing women and women's writing on the basis of narcissism or
other pathological disturbances. Linda Kinnahan writes that
the associations developed between self-reflexivity, narcissism, and pathology
converge within the (unspoken) construction of Woman generalized in western
metaphysical and philosophical thought and particularized, in psychological
discourses, as deviant, undeveloped, narrow, self-involved ("Feminine
Experiment" 281).

I have to concur with this cautionary note. All the same, Wilkinson's review-essay is
more ambivalent, nuanced, and thoughtful than many of his critics have allowed.
Wilkinson argues that Riley's work is not, in fact,
blind to its symptomotology, nor to its consonance with the much-discussed
'postmodernist condition'– of the impossibility of the presence to oneself, or
feelings as ideologically-interpreted physiological events which therefore have
their truth only in an otherwhere-owned discourse, of the self as a party, a meeting
place of discourses both intoxicating and alienating (The Lyric Touch 68)

Indeed, Wilkinson sees in some of Riley's work "more modest, epiphanic chinks where a
real exchange–with landscape, with another–briefly occurs" (76). Still, his appraisal of
the book as a whole is rather less enthusiastic:
Faced with this writing and its self-knowledge one is right to demand a revolt
against narcissism as such, rather than this working with the narcissistic grain
which cannot divert or obstruct its pathological logic.... [T]o read a collection is to
feel resistance rise, to feel that something is being progressively taken away rather
than given.... [T]he poems do circulate... trapped within the narcissistic orbit; one
yearns for release. (75)
230

Cathy Wagner points out how Wilkinson's reading misses the general thrust of Riley's
poetic and critical writing:
I’m not sure that for Riley there’s any thought of surpassing this condition, which
for her is a condition of subjectivity. So, to request of Riley a “personal politics”
that would “apprehend and assert” the “wholeness of others” is to announce a
desire to locate a subjectivity, both for oneself and for others, that is somehow not
dependent on circulations through otherness. (Wagner, 4)

Like Wagner, I object to Wilkinson's argument not simply because he is incorrect in his
specific charges of narcissism. Rather, I reject his entire framing of the work in terms of
Winnicottian and Kohutian derived psychoanalysis and his moralizing rhetoric of
"healing," "real exchange," and the "wholeness of others." Indeed, Riley has militated
against such a moralistic understanding of sociality-as-intersubjectivity since her earliest
work, as I have argued at length in my second chapter. To expect or hope for some
"release" from such a condition seems like a betrayal of Riley's aim to think sociality
beyond the limits of intersubjective ethics. As Peter Middleton writes, "Wilkinson reads
Riley's volume of poems as a mirror for studying her self-inventions because he
conceives of all relations in psychoanalytic terms as forms of incorporating identification,
and assumes that self-consciousness is specularity" ("Imagined Readerships" 139). Lisa
Roberston puts it best, for my purposes, when she identifies Wilkinson's framework as
part of a "social pedagogy:"
The finally sad accusation of Wilkinson's "sardony does prevail" – sardony as a
method of managing narcissism – reaches for the same social pedagogy Riley
succinctly chucks.... Is it the poet's role to heal, placate, nurture, feed– must the
ethical poet nurse? ("My Eighteenth Century" 394).

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As I have argued in my first chapter and elsewhere, Cambridge English has a venerable
tradition of such "social pedagogies," running from Richards through Leavis and, in more
complicated forms, into Forrest-Thomson and Prynne. As a trained psychological nurse,
Wilkinson certainly has come to such concerns through different means, but his
expectations for Riley's book are consonant with the expectations of poetry as moral
training that I have tracked in my first chapter. I aim, rather, to read Riley's poetry and
prose jointly, with the grain of their repetitions and not to view such repeated forms as
simply pathological. Such repeated operations, words, and phrases do more than fail to
provide poetic "healing" or "release" from some "postmodern condition."
Indeed, as I have already explained, my framework in this chapter for reading
through Riley's poetry from the 1990s consists in an exploration of the echoes and returns
of lines of prose, song, and slogans. It is through this framework that I understand the
exchanges of the poetry and the prose, particularly in the talismanic quality of the
poetry's afterlives in the prose. As I've also already asserted, The Words of Selves and
Impersonal Passion can be read as a second-order discourse or abstraction from the
particular histories catalogued in War in the Nursery and Am I That Name, and they
present a synthesis of the earlier prose and of the whole of her poetic output. Contrary to
some of her readers, I read these later prose works not simply as apologia (adequate or
not) for her poetics; the prose describes the poetry's performance, but it also reenacts it
through these echoes. There are some obvious examples of this self-citation and
reworking, such as the entirety of the third chapter in The Words of Selves, which
interpolates stanzas from two poems, "The Castalian Spring" and "Affections of the Ear"
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with prose analysis. In this chapter, the verse seems as to be as much critical commentary
on the prose as vice-versa (Words 93-112). But there are also some more subterranean
instances of the resurgence of the poetry in the prose. For example, a single page from the
book includes a line that is also the title of a poem ("it really is the heart... the heart does
hurt, and that's no metaphor") and then includes almost the entirety of the short poem
"Rayon" from Mop Mop Georgette with only an endnote to indicate that this is her own
poem. Riley's critical apparatus is, I argue, thoroughly suffused with such reworkings of
lines and phrases, and an understanding of her linguistic materialism requires that we
investigate these textual and extratextual relations.
Indeed, the same talismanic operation that I identify in the prose is already at
work in the poetry, insofar as Mop Mop Georgette seriously plays with the residues of
popular song in the inner ears and mouth of the poet. The short poem, "A
Misremembered Lyric," provides an exemplary instance of this tendency. As the
acknowledgments to Mop Mop Georgette note, the poem "uses a phrase from 'Rhythm of
the Rain' written by Gummoe, sung by the Cascades, and from 'Something's Gotta [sic]
Hold of My Heart' by R. Cook and R. Greenaway, recorded by Gene Pitney; the poem
also quotes a line from Graham Greene's version of a 1930s song" (72). "A
Misremembered Lyric," like some of the other poems collected in Mop Mop Georgette,
82

lacks stanza breaks and alternates enjambment with some full-stopped lines. The

82
See especially "Lure, 1963," "Red Shout," "Dark Looks," and the four poems first collected in Poetical
Histories under the heading Four Falling: "Well All Right," "A Drift," "Cruelty Without Beauty," and "So
Is It?" (Mop Mop 46-53).
233
composition resembles a sort of rectangle on the page, and the various citations are
tucked firmly into the brick of verse with little or no prosodic marking-off:
A misremembered lyric: a soft catch of its song
whirrs in my throat. 'Something's gotta hold of my heart
tearing my' soul and my conscience apart, long after
presence is clean gone and leaves unfurnished no
shadow. Rain lyrics. Yes, then the rain lyrics fall.
I don't want absence to be this beautiful.
It shouldn't be; in fact I know it wasn't, while
'everything that consoles is false' is off the point –
you get no consolation anyway until your memory's
dead: or something never had gotten hold of
your heart in the first place, and that's the fear thought.
Do shrimps make good mothers? Yes they do.
There is no beauty out of loss; can't do it –
and once the falling rain starts on the upturned
leaves, and I listen to the rhythm of unhappy pleasure
what I hear is bossy death telling me which way to
go, what I see is a pool with an eye in it. Still let
me know. Looking for a brand-new start. Oh and never
notice yourself ever. As in life you don't.

The poem begins with an index of the talismanic pull of phrases that Riley elaborates in
works like "A Short History of Some Preoccupations" and The Words of Selves. The song
is incorporated, however improperly, and becomes a singing, too, as it becomes the
poem: "a soft catch of its song/ whirrs in my throat." Song has caught me but it's in me,
too, and it is now what I do as it is done to me, in me, a catch in the throat, an involuntary
physiological register of emotion. Then, we have the first misremembered lyric rehearsed
(with "Gotten" changed to "Gotta"), and the speaker immediately hands the song back to
the phenomenologist of language: "long after presence/ is clean gone." But this is not the
end of the song; instead, a different song arrives: "Yes, then the rain lyrics fall," and it is
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here that the poem begins its dialectic of incorporation, rejection, and expression of "the
rain lyrics," which I will explain shortly.
In an interesting article on Riley's extensions of the Deleuzian theory of affect,
Aaron Deveson reads the poem primarily as an exposition of Riley's theoretical work on
"language as affect" in Impersonal Passion:
“A Misremembered Lyric” tackles the problem of our radically spoken
contingency right from its opening.... This is a high art/low art poem that hovers
around what Riley in Impersonal Passion calls the “unholy coincidence between
beauty and cruelty in their verbal mannerisms” (13), in the way that the wound-
touching pleasure after the “presence” of love has gone is further felt through the
hearkening, nostalgic “what I see”/“what I hear” structure... (Deveson, 142).

Deveson usefully notes that this structure "certainly comes from the end of W. H.
Auden’s hymn to mineral constancy and human mutability, “In Praise of Limestone,”
which, he notes, closes with "when I try to imagine a faultless love / Or the life to come,
what I hear is the murmur / Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape”
(Auden, Collected Poems 542). Whether or not this is a "nostalgic" structure, it
demonstrates the omnipresence of the misremembered lyric and the captivation of its
listener and singer in its rhythms and affects.
Deveson goes on, however, to read the poem's ending as Riley disparaging her
own lyric grace:
Riley cancels out her own lyric’s expansive movements... [T]he poem fades out
rapidly through jerkily prosaic notes-to-self from somewhere or other and what is
perhaps a sullen echo of Van Morrison’s “Listen to the Lion” (“Looking for a
brand-new start”), as if it were embarrassed by how deep in the self-admiring
postures of Poetry it had sunk (143).

But I'd argue that there's a great deal more composition involved than this description of
rapid, jerky fading allows. The line, "looking for a brand-new start" is taken directly from
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the song "Rhythm of the Rain," which is the real heart of the poem and its mislearned-by-
heart lyric. "Listen to the rhythm of the falling rain/ telling me just what a fool I've been/
I wish that it would go and let me cry in vain/ and let me be alone again:" ambivalence
already floods the Cascades' original song, and such ambivalence cannot simply be taken
to heart. Go away, rain, but also let me talk to you; and you, you talk to me, too, and talk
to her while you're at it: "Rain won't you tell her that I love her so/ Please ask the sun to
set her heart aglow/ Rain in her heart and let the love we knew start to grow." You're
here, rain, so I can't be alone to cry in vain; you comfort me and I wish you wouldn't; I
wish you would fix things for real instead of just making everything painfully beautiful.
The speaker would also like to banish the song, much as the singer wishes the rain would
let him alone: "I don't want absence to be this beautiful." But the speaker then twists
away from this; she is too smart to reject beauty because it has supposedly "consoled"
her.
In this vein, lines 6-10 engage, and ultimately reject, arguments drawn from
aesthetic theory that see aesthetic pleasure as only an ideological con-job: "I don't want
absence to be this beautiful./ It shouldn't be; in fact I know it wasn't, while/ 'everything
that consoles is false' is off the point –/ you get no consolation anyway until your
memory's / dead: or something never had gotten hold of / your heart in the first place, and
that's the fear thought. " That is, the consolatory magic that, say, certain interpreters of
Adorno might fear from popular song doesn't work anyway, at least not if you were really
and truly injured in the first place. In other words, it's not a matter of whether or not the
songs are lying about the injured world: they don't fix it, and the speaker of the poem is
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not duped into thinking they do. In this sense, Mop Mop Georgette embraces popular
song with less trust than it does the brushstroke of abstract expressionist painting, even as
the songs make as many returns, and often with greater affective intensity. In any event,
"A Misremembered Lyric" is not reducible to such argufying; while aesthetic theory
forms a strand of the poem's discourse, it is only one part of her dialectical lyric, one
voice tested.
Indeed, it is precisely at this point that another song interrupts, suggesting an
entirely different trajectory for popular song: "Do shrimps make good mothers? Yes they
do." In her acknowledgments, Riley credits this as "Graham Greene's version of a 1930s
song;" the original song is, in fact, an exemplar of the "silly comic song" and was
recorded in 1924 by The Two Gilberts.
83
Riley may not herself have had occasion to hear
this recording, but even without such aural evidence, this line clearly departs from the
loose metrical scheme that has been in force up to this point in the poem. While previous
lines have hovered around the alexandrine or 12-syllable, 6-beat line, "Do shrimps make
good mothers? Yes they do" indisputably contains only 9 syllables. In the 1924
recording, the line has seven beats: "DO SHRIMPS MAKE good MOTHers? YES THEY
DO." Whether or not it is scanned in exactly this manner, the line is proportionally more
heavily stressed than the rest of the poem, and it is broken by the question-and-answer
format into a single line without any enjambment. The wholly different tradition of comic
song is tried out here, and its claims are not directly disputed in the poem, unlike most of
Riley's trial analects, which are generally submitted to critique and dialectic. Loss is put

83
http://www.rfwilmut.clara.net/musichll/xgilberts.html, accessed 7/20/2012.
237
to the side for the duration of a line as a mock-moral judgment is ridiculously trumpeted
through a bathetic sociology of intimacy. While the line is unremarked upon in the
remainder of the poem, it lingers as a sort of alternative to unhappy pleasure; neither
obviously beautiful nor mournful, it has a certain truth content in its subtraction from
feeling to a sort of comic sublime that resists any easy metaphorization or sociological
content even in light of Riley's extensive writings on motherhood. And it somehow
manages to be consistent, on its own terms, with Riley's treatment, throughout Marxism
for Infants and War in the Nursery, of the history of the "good mother" as category.
The poem moves back at this point to its argument with aesthetics and, more
specifically, with "Rhythm of the Rain:" "There is no beauty out of loss; can't do it –" as,
in fact, the poem just hasn't done it, moving instead toward the bathos of the comic song.
But the other popular form continues to exert its beautiful pull: "and once the falling rain
starts on the upturned/ leaves, and I listen to the rhythm of unhappy pleasure...." This last
line is fifteen syllables long, with five or six beats: "LEAVES, and i LISten to the
RHYthm of UNHAPpy PLEAsure," depending on whether or not one stresses the "UN"
in unhappy; the rain lyric, anyway, has quite a different rhythm from the shrimp. The
rhythm of unhappy pleasure, then, becomes a longer-lined, wordier sort of paranoia,
replete with bossy death and a pool with an eye in it. Riley's détournement of Auden's "In
Praise of Limestone" suggests that the bottom of "a faultless love" is not just any
geological substance but is, more specifically, some rock of the self, as I will discuss in
the next section.
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"Still/ let me know." We're not done here – the return to a vulgar materialism in
Auden isn't the end: the rain is asked again for its reportage, and the song returns:
"Looking for a brand new start." Even if the schmaltzy "Something's Gotten Hold of My
Heart" was almost an incidental entrée to the rain lyrics, it is recalled here through a
rhyme that fuses the two songs into a complex of beautiful (or not) loss. But it also turns
the lyric away from the place of hurt, imagining, through the slip of a rhyme, the
trajectory of the lost lover, for it was she, in the first place, who chose to look for
something else: "the only girl I care about has gone away/ looking for a brand new start/
but little does she know / that when she left that day/ along with her she took my heart."
Pace Deveson, then, I would argue that it is only at this point that Riley parrots
the rhetoric of the tossed-away afterthought, but the imperative that she throws out has, in
fact, been an interlocutor throughout: "Oh and never/ notice yourself ever. As in life you
don't." The admonition to "never notice yourself ever" seems to mock its own moral-
psychoanalytical pretensions, given its "never-ever" redundancy (much as "there is no
beauty out of loss" was mocked by the steady return of the captivating rain lyrics). The
poem's final sentence is also demonstrably false if measured against almost the entirety of
Mop Mop Georgette, which seems rather to notice itself all the time. Still, the poem's
ending echoes a voice that suggests that this is not what poetry should do because it is not
what some "you" does "in life." Perhaps, in life, you sing instead about crustaceans, or
the rain sings you into someone else so you can, after all, go on "looking for a brand new
start." But the poem won't have it this easily; it searches for a comic song but can do so
only to the steady rhythm of the rain. It is this persistent reiteration of sonic talismans that
239
Riley's prose seeks to explain, and, as we will shortly see, it repeats the very operations
that it describes.

A Rock of the Self: Denise Riley's Geology

How does Riley's theoretical prose account for and follow up on the movements
of lonely sociality inscribed in "A Misremembered Lyric"? Following the lead of Brady
and Pattison, I agree that it cannot do so completely, insofar as the terrain of critical
"explanation" cannot ever repeat the movements of a poem without also changing them. I
seek, then to consider here not only what Riley's prose says, but how it works. As I have
discussed, Am I That Name? investigates how the category of “women” exerts a force
beyond its intended meanings. This is not, for Riley, because it designates a
transhistorical and totalizing monolith. Rather, Riley distinguishes “women” as a
“massification” — something produced — from some empirical unity, or simple
gathering of "real women" in the world (110). In order to understand how to read this
massification, Riley turns toward the thinking of metaphor proposed by William Empson
in The Structure of Complex Words, which I have discussed in my first chapter. Riley
writes that
'women' are always differently re-membered, and the gulf between them and the
generally human will be more or less thornily intractable. One measure of that
gulf is the depth of 'women's' resonances.... Can it be claimed that the collective
'women' posses a virtually metaphorical force, in the way that the theatrical
Woman does? And if it does, this force would change. Linguistic studies of the
1950s contemplated the ranges of metaphor. William Empson examined I.A.
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Richards' proposal that all language was indeed radically metaphorical, but found
this wanting; 'cat,' Empson objected, was a hopeless candidate for metaphor
status. (108)

Indeed, Empson had insisted that a definition of metaphor needed to be significantly
more specific than this in order to be of use for analysis. Metaphor status, for Empson, is
to be restricted to word uses that incite some degree of "psychic resistance:"
The thing is felt as a sort of break in the flow, requiring interpretation, exciting
attention and perhaps other feelings. The only trouble about this as a defining
property is that we hear nothing about other cases where there is a psychic
resistance.... Surely a man reading a bill often feels a strong psychic resistance to
absorbing the meaning of the figures, and yet without any tendency to treat them
as metaphorical.... The kind of psychic resistance in view, therefore, needs
defining more narrowly. I submit that it is the feeling of resistance to a false
identity, which we have already found fundamental in the equation form. The
reason why resistance is called for is that you have to pick out the right elements
from the vehicle, the parts of it which are treated as "typical and essential" for the
case in hand; if you merely accept the false identity you may fall into nonsense.
And when the vehicle is typified it becomes pregnant by definition." (Empson,
334)

For our purposes, the precise Empsonian definition of terms like "equation form," and
"pregnant" can be sidelined.
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Instead, I want to focus on his delineation of a variation of
word usage in which it is necessary to "pick out the right elements" so as to pacify the
"feeling of resistance to a false identity." It is in this sense, Empson insists, that any
nomination of "metaphor" requires a prior or simultaneous work of interpretation so as to

84
For Empson's equations, see Chapter 1, "Statements in Words:" "A word may become a sort of solid
entity, able to direct opinion, thought of as like a person; also it is often said (whether this is the same idea
or not) that a word can become a 'compacted doctrine', or even that all words are compacted doctrines
inherently. To get some general theory about how this happens would clearly be important; if our language
is continually thrusting doctrines on us, perhaps very ill-considered ones, the sooner we understand the
process the better." (39) Empson goes on to develop how a word can contain compacted doctrines through
"four types" of equations, among five ways in which a word can carry a doctrine (the "existence assertion"
being the first and not, it seems, amounting to an equation). See Chapter 12 for a discussion of
"Pregnancy." The gendered dimensions of this term are not lost an Empson, who seems to enjoy playing
with them: "It is true that in general manly and the pregnant man are 'virile', whereas the pregnant humanity
and human, not having their sex to consider, are 'humane'" (327).
241
stem the "feeling of resistance" that comes from the perception of false identity.
Metaphor is a production of reading, then, spurred by a particular way in which words
holding "compacted doctrines" are used: "The stimulus to interpret the false identity
ought to come at once from the 'psychic resistance' to it, and the combination of these two
processes, I am maintaining, is the only equipment we have for absorbing and starting to
digest an unexpected metaphor or equation" (345).
Riley's précis of Empson continues:
But where there could be fullness, so there could be contraction; the historical
'hardening of a convention' might narrow the range of a word. Here Empson
offered the example of Chastity, which gradually became restricted in its
reference to women's conduct. This alteration came about, he thought, because
'what changes in the language are, so to speak, practical policies." If it were true
that "a word can become a 'compacted doctrine' or even that all words are
compacted doctrines inherently" then it would be vital to grasp these means "by
which our language is continually thrusting doctrines upon us, perhaps very ill-
considered ones." (Am I That Name 108; quoting Empson, 39)

This kind of grasping is, for Riley, an integral part of any feminist politics; the whole of
Am I That Name demonstrates why the history of feminism in Western Europe demands
this kind of thinking. In a curious way, then, Riley retrieves part of her politico-linguistic
method from Empson's practical criticism, and she explains how such methods can
indeed be directly useful tools for political thought and even for socialist feminist
organizing and direct action (via the language of slogans, debates, and demands).
With this Empsonian thinking of "metaphor" in her arsenal, Riley considers how
“Women,” as a massification, remains a force to be reckoned with, bearing a social
history that produces a compacted doctrine and concomitant psychic resistances. But the
"massification" of women-as-metaphor is not just a production demanding acts of
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interpretation; it almost becomes a force of nature. For, throughout the first and last
chapters of Am I That Name?—the most avowedly “theoretical” chapters—a biological,
chemical, and geological rhetoric buzzes continuously, perhaps extending Empson's
geomorphological recourse to "compaction." There are “petrifications,” “icebergs,”
“outcroppings,” and “precipitations” (7, 9, 107, 110). These terms are used to figure both
words and their effects on people. Elective solidarity, and its frightening underside, the
massing together of the dispossessed, both seem to result from a geological materiality of
categories and marks—in this case, this massing accompanies the word “women,” as a
name and as language. Solidarity is formed and deformed through and in such language,
then, a language that is figured in vulgar materialist terms by what I am calling Riley’s
geological rhetoric.
Riley turns to this complex dynamic in The Words of Selves, arguing that the
materiality and historicity of language and rhetoric have a bearing on the production of
subjectivity as it takes place through acts of self-description. By way of clarifying the
contours of her linguistic materialism, Riley travesties some other explanations of
language's "materiality:"
To assert that language is itself 'material' might cause dismay, if this claim is
taken to mean that a noisily wild and booming depth, all howls, whoops, echolalic
gabble and babble, are what you must espouse. Its antithesis, equally exaggerated,
is an ostensible post-Saussureanism... glossing language as the realm of mastery
and cool deliberation, a perfected, refined instrument. Its floating veil is
nonetheless credited with mesmeric powers; an ectoplasm, yet tough and rubbery
enough to determine being. So unsatisfying a notion invites the counterassertion
about language's materiality, which soon gets distractingly yoked to its presumed
irrationality. Next a resulting heavily hypostatised Language gradually becomes
hot, a smouldering or sweaty thing, a mass dried out in patches, oozing in others;
granite in some places, swamp elsewhere, fed by bubbling rivulets or else
sluggish with sedimented toxic waste. (Words of Selves 37-38; emphasis mine)
243

This curiously arresting passage is not only a travesty and critique of rival theories of
language. It is also an instance of what I earlier termed an "afterlife" of a poem from Mop
Mop Georgette. Both the passage above and the poem "Dark Looks" parody theories of
language and writing that they all the same participate in. Such theories are the
productions of socially lonely subjects struggling to navigate the pressures of compacted
doctrines and to explain their social production without eliding the often solitary
meditations that accompany such efforts at explanation. "Dark Looks" takes on, in
particular, the affective dimensions of poetic performance for a middle-aged woman
standing in as the "author" of work that she feels exceeds her grasp:
Who anyone is or I am is nothing to the work. The writer
properly should be the last person that the reader or the listener need think about
yet the poet with her signature stands up trembling, grateful, mortally embarrassed
and especially embarrassing to herself, patting her hair and twittering If, if only
I need not have a physical appearance! To be sheer air, and mousseline!
(Mop Mop 54)

The desire to dematerialize the author out of the presentation of the work is expressed as
it is parodied in these exceptionally long lines that nearly fill the page, as if there were no
line breaks. Language is shown to do some work behind the back of this anxiety or as a
side-effect of its blind-spots: "and as she frets the minute wars scorch on through
paranoias of the unreviewed/ herded against a cold that drives us in together...." The
anxiety of the lonely writer attends the enforced sociality or "herding" of the small-press
coteries ("paranoias of the unreviewed"). But then, a bit later, the conditions of this
sociolinguistically produced "we" are shown to produce further spasms in the medium of
collectivity:
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to fall from anglo-catholic clouds of drifting we's rammed up against the nose
cascading on Niagara, bobbed and jostled, racing rusted cans of Joseph Cotten reels
charmed with his decent gleam: once we as incense-shrouded ectoplasm gets blown
fresh drenched and scattered units pull on gloss coats to preen in their own polymer...

The writing "we" is announced to be a production of unquestioned, quasi-religious social
practices and rhetoric. "Ectoplasm" refers to the semi-material substrate extruded by
psychic mediums or, alternately, a component of a cell's cytoplasm; etymologically, it
connotes something shaped or shaping from the outside. In Riley's poem, the "ectoplasm"
seems to produce "polymers," or protective, synthetic surfaces that coat each "scattered
unit" of the social group who then "preen" in the gloss of this magical belonging.
This "ectoplasm" returns, as Riley's poetry so frequently does, in the passage cited
above from The Words of Selves: "[Language's] floating veil is nonetheless credited with
mesmeric powers; an ectoplasm, yet tough and rubbery enough to determine being." I use
this example to illustrate how Riley's figuration of language, and even her parodies of
faulty sociolinguistic theories, are composed through tropes and phrases that return from
the poetry. Riley's vulgar materialism, then, is largely formed in relation to her poetry, its
figural lexicon and phraseology bring along the affective intensity and "Dark Looks"
from the lyric, even when the sources are unmarked. Such returns of the poems in the
prose, through direct citation and also through more subterranean lexical nods and slips,
are a part of the talismanic operation that Riley insists is unavoidable for political
thought.
Through such a talismanic materialism, Riley's account of linguistic affect
elaborates some other theories of subjectivity’s production through address, confession
and self-description (think of the frequently rehearsed versions of Foucault-on-confession
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or Althusser-on-interpellation). Riley emphasizes that rhetoric does work within these
performative discourses above and beyond “producing” the subject. For Riley, any
statement attesting to the truth of the self, any response to an interpellation, is subject to
the force of rhetoric not merely as a performative, that is, not only as a structural
placement of the subject, but also as a form of its undoing. Thus the subject, in its very
constitution through address, is also vulnerable to the historicity of a thoroughly material
language of self-description. The speaker herself can enlist the force of rhetoric,
complicating the truth-value of her confessions. Self-descriptions can counter unfortunate
interpellations, but, as Riley writes:
That even the most progressive self-description can make an ambiguous kind of a
weapon is not only historically clear but is anchored in its structure. Temporality
and affect are also embodied as the syntactic musculature of language itself, and
together these support its forcefulness. But the meanings of the unquiet language
of the self are liable to be corroded through reiteration, and in that lies its own
undoing, as what should underline and reinforce it may, gradually, eat away at it.
Syntax’s affect emerges through its very regularity and predictability, which also
holds its potential for ironic deflation; then the shape of the sentence becomes
devalued and tarnished through its repetitions, and the old cadences begin to ring
mechanically and without conviction, such as furious exchanges of ‘Is! Isn’t!’
(Words 11-12)

It is worth noting, for my purposes, that the self is here figured, in its undoing, as a quasi-
metallic substance that can be “corroded,” “eaten away at,” and “tarnished.” Riley
repeatedly asserts that language and rhetoric are “historical,” which for her means that
both are subject to change as a result of their intractable materiality, a materiality that is
something like the process whereby "compacted doctrines" are amassed. Riley's text
consistently figures this materiality in nonhuman terms; indeed, with some botanical and
246
synthetic exceptions, it is consistently figured as inorganic matter.
85
And, most
frequently, it turns out to be rock: "Some calcified solidarity or a decaying essence show
some past lapse of irony. Any collectivity which can't examine its own massifications and
their deployment enacts the risk of petrification, or worse" (164).
Irony surfaces here as the privileged trope of Riley’s geological politics of
identification, but this is not the post-Romantic ironic stance argued for in the Practical
Criticism. Irony for Riley is, instead, where the subject crosses with the mutations of
speech in its iterability – irony opens the possibility that a single self-description may
operate to undo the stultifying and rigidifying effects that it itself installs. Irony actualizes
the virtual non-identity that structures identification. On the one hand, Riley describes
irony here as a sort of blessing for those who find themselves badly interpellated; the
victims of misinterpellation (and every interpellation is also a misinterpellation) can,
through reiteration, hope for irony to wear down the category that they would prefer not
to be identified as belonging to. On the other hand, irony can also undo the force of
affirmative identifications and is, in this way, the limit of any solidarity premised on
shared self-descriptions.
Irony thus names the deconstruction of the division between affirmations and
refusals of identity categories, and it continually threatens the efficacy of a certain
version of solidarity. It is radically inappropriable to any subject, and we all must wait for
it to come:

85
In addition to the synthetic components of acrylic and oil painting, Riley frequently works with a lexicon
drawn from various fabrics and garments. For examples of Mop Mop Georgette's recurring figuration of
surfaces as synthetic fabrics, see the poems "Wherever You Are, Be Somewhere Else," "Lyric," and "Well
All Right," as well as the titles "Rayon" and "Shantung."
247
Despite its spasmodically poor reputation, irony does operate ethically, although
necessarily without a manifesto. This is not irony as a deliberating parody or as
the irritating knowingness which so easily tips into being arch—but irony as
language presenting itself to itself. (14)

Riley introduces irony as a objective fact of politics and of language's production in a
social matrix; it is not a subjective stance that an ethical pedagogy can teach us to inhabit.
Still, it can find its place and time in the practice of self-description, whether we plan it or
not, and, for Riley, this is cause for a cautious optimism. She never argues that speakers
can control or own their rhetoric; rather, they can play on it and listen to it – hear and
repeat and hear it again, differently. This capacity for hearing one’s own language is, for
Riley, a result of its compactable and corrodible materiality.
Irony, for Riley,
rises above the solemn chronology of descriptions, always poised to wrench a
phrase out of its context. It commits this linguistic violence of dismembering, not
gratuitously but as it exposes the contingent formation of that very context—and
so, ultimately, restores its history to it. That salutary deflation of some excessively
vaunted category, so that it suddenly seems bizarre to itself and from then onward
cannot endure its own repetitions, just is irony at work. Here irony’s political
astringency, ruthlessly democratic, acts on the side of the angels. Insofar as the
corrosion of the monuments of selves can sensibly be described as ‘ethical’ at all,
that is where the ethical aspect to irony lies. (183)

Irony’s “political astringency” and ethics lie in its ability to “corrode the monuments of
selves.” I see Riley's work on such an ironic corrosion of self-ish geologies as an
extension and reinscription of the lonely sociality at work in her poetic production. But
how does irony, testifying as it does to the historicity of language, present itself to itself?
Can irony be a self at all? Riley answers this question affirmatively when she aligns the
figure of Echo, herself a stone, with the ethic of irony:
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Echo is unsparingly condemned to passivity—and yet her very passivity possesses
its own strong agency. The effectivity I propose for Echo is that of the initiator of
the ironic.... This irony fingers strangeness simply through listening to what it
overhears being reiterated. It is hearing something said all too much, and that
makes it uneasy.… Condemned like Echo herself to listen attentively, irony hears
and takes note when the language around it, like the lady, doth protest too
much…. Iterability is no more than the ordinary capacity to be repeated. Its
outcome, though, is not inert.
86
(157)

Irony, then, is a sort of hearing that accompanies the production of speech. It introduces
the possibility of a speaker who is also an auditor, who is attentive to her own rhetoric
without the delusion that it is hers or that she can control it. Riley aligns this speaker with
the ethos of Echo, in an oblique rerouting of the charge of narcissism; Echo, after all, was
in love with Narcissus, and it is by virtue of her compulsive repetition that his voice
resounds and retains its power. For Riley, Echo's ironies demonstrate how those of us
who would counter the interpellations that produce the worst subjection can have
recourse to speech, even if this speech is never really our own. In order to fully account
for the political implications of this turn, I must distinguish Riley's lonely-social irony
from the "private" ironies promoted by Richard Rorty in Contingency, Irony, Solidarity,
the text from which Riley seems to have cribbed her subtitle ("Identification, Solidarity,
Irony").
Rorty explains that liberal societies have provided "liberal ironists" with the
freedom to use "the vocabulary of self-creation" which is, he claims, "necessarily private,
unshared, unsuited to argument" (xiv). Indeed, he goes on to assert that "Irony seems
inherently a private matter" (88), and that "within our increasingly ironist culture,

86
Riley is here recognizably working with a Derridean thinking of iterability.
249
philosophy has become more important for the pursuit of private perfection rather than
for any social task" (94). In other words, Rorty seeks primarily to "broaden the reach" of
liberal institutions so that all fall under the sway of "our" liberal community, which
belongs, for him, to the "we" of his implied audience. He is pleased that such a
community has allowed for what are, on his misreading, the "private" ironizations of
continental philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida.
87

This endorsement of "privatizing" irony is, I will insist, a complete anathema to
Riley's life work and, more broadly, the work of Marxists, feminists, and other resistance
movements to contest the categories of public and private. Rorty's recommendation for
the "privatization" of irony is, indeed, incomprehensible and incoherent given Riley's
descriptions of the operations of language and of irony in particular. Riley insists, in one
of many passages that is readable as an unmarked but direct rejoinder to Rorty, that
A public irony must flourish, for the sake of the political and ethical vigour of
language; lurking inside a self-categorisation, ideally it can inspect the limits of
any expansionist identification, can check hyperbole, can puncture any overblown
claims from within to arrive at a sounder measure of them. (162).

Such a flourishing of irony is not a gift bestowed by "liberal" institutions; it is, rather, a
possible site for contesting the ways in which such "liberalism" in fact works to cover
over and produce the subjection of groups for the benefit of the capitalist state.
In this sense, The Words of Selves is, I insist, a work of tactics rather than a
program, but it does not for this reason obviate the possibility or even necessity of

87
Rorty on Derrida: "I take Derrida's importance to lie in his having had the courage to give up the attempt
to unite the private and the public, to stop trying to bring together a quest for private autonomy and an
attempt at public resonance and utility. He privatizes the sublime, having learned from the fate of his
predecessors that the public can never be more than beautiful" (125).
250
programmatic politics. Riley expounds on the tactical dimensions of solidarity grounded
in and ungrounded by irony, but this does not imply that such ironic tactics are the whole
of politics. Neither does it suggest that such tactics are apolitical or private. In this sense,
The Words of Selves is quite distinct from the Richardsian and Leavisian tradition of
seeing linguistic and literary training as a necessary moral foundation for politics, but it is
also distinct from work like Rorty's that sees such training in ludic irony as a purely
private privilege gifted to us by "liberal" (Western capitalist) societies.
Rather, Riley sees irony, and especially the irony attendant on the lives of the
lonely and misinterpellated, as a fact of public life. If the mechanisms of poetic language
have ethical "lessons" for political and civic life, and these lessons recommend irony and
its chance, this is not because irony is a stance – it is a mode of being and not-being that
requires a wide variety of stances. In other words, irony is not a stance at all, it is, rather,
a mode for understanding historically the shifting categories of persons that engage in
politics, the ever-whirring socialization and deracination of "individuals" who are
declared and who also declare themselves to belong to particular categories of
personhood and of subhumanity.
Riley's myriad examples demonstrate that she understands irony not as a solid
preparatory foundation for civic engagement. Returning to her early works' example of
the "single mother," which she here characterizes as "a catch-all category marked out for
critical attention by the current British government of New Labour as well as its
conservative predecessor," Riley outlines how a variety of stances, sensitive to particular
circumstances, might prove tactically useful or deleterious:
251
If, identified as a single parent, I also decide to take on this categorisation,
however vexing it is, as my own project – if I also want to make something out of
it–then something very different is happening through my act of consent to that
bracket, as distinct from my assignment to it by others. To make it into a
productive difference would need an emerging and officially bestowed and
homogenising identity. But here diffused opprobrium is hard to counter, since its
true targets are never openly specified, hiding in an unadmitted distinction
between the 'deserving' respectable casualties of marriage breakdown who cost
the government nothing by way of support, and the 'undeserving' welfare
claimants who draw on state funds. Then some wider solidarity might, across this
divide of economic differences, seize back and prise apart the withering
designation to expose its economic basis – and in full anticipation of that
designation's pitfalls if instead it were to slide, as everything entices and provokes
it to slide, into a defensive identity." (139)
88

While not explicitly invoking irony here, Riley outlines a number of subtle yet
considerable shifts in social formations that might render the name of "single mother"
ironic in the mouths of certain speakers. The irony that emerges, however, is not the end-
point or goal, nor is it the special property of those already trained in poetic criticism.
Rather, it has particular effects that may or may not be politically desirable, depending on
one's needs, aims, or program. Such irony is not to be understood, Riley insists
throughout, as a political good because it is a form of preparatory intersubjectivity; in this
The Words of Selves can be said to pick up directly from War in the Nursery: "I'd place
my own relentless impulses towards optimism elsewhere altogether: in the actual
operations of irony, rather than in any hope of its ultimate sociability as achieved through

88
The preceding lines read: "To declare oneself a single parent carries a mechanical note of defiance,
springing from the vilification of this thoroughly commonplace condition. The vast group of single parents
are designated as a social condition defined only negatively, by what you do not have (even though 'the
double parent' is, in Britain, such an endangered species as to attract governmental conservation). Because
it masks a range of circumstances, blending those alone from the onset by preference, or alone
intermittently, or consequent on abandonment, the grounds for shaping a counteridentity of single parents
'from within' are limited" (138-139).
252
its 'intersubjectivity' – a thesis which seems prematurely to assume the best. Murder is
equally intersubjective" (167).
As a final explanation of Riley's "irony" and of its relationship to the "materiality"
of language in The Words of Selves, I will discuss the apparently divergent but not, in
fact, incompatible recent writings of another prominent British poet trained at
Cambridge. Keston Sutherland's Stupefaction considers how works of poetry and
philosophy use satire as a mode of discourse and performance that produces figures of an
"absolute value nil." His essay, "What is called 'bathos'?" elaborates a rhetorical mode for
such figurations: "bathos"
is put into words by the satirist who attackingly discovers to public view the
absolute destitution of truth or beauty.... What Pope, Marx and Engels
emphatically diagnose when they make the speculative concept 'bathos' out of
other people's poetry and philosophy is a specific pathological social type: the
person whose account of reality must compulsorily be destitute of truth. (208-209)

Sutherland undertakes a materialist account of bathos instead of seeing it as a stable
rhetorical category. For Sutherland, "materialism" requires that such an explanation not
merely attribute the operations of "bathos" to any properties of language "as such" but
rather that they be explained as social productions and that the dynamics of their
production be explained.
This bears, I think, on Riley's descriptions of language's materiality and
historicity, and especially on what I've called her geological rhetoric. Sutherland's
writings on bathos present reservations about whether or not such a rhetoric should, in
fact, be properly considered materialist. Earlier in his chapter, Sutherland writes about the
process whereby the rigor of words used with theoretical acuity may diminish over time:
253
it is, I think, a convenient fallacy to say... that words do these things: that they
grow mean, or that they lose their vibrancy. Words are treated here in the way that
Marx argued ideas are treated in speculative Hegelian philosophy, that is, as the
subjects of propositions, as agents and actors, not as predicates, and not
emphatically enough as the objects or material of human activity. Food eaten
vulgarly does not grow shit, but the scientifically explicable digestive activity of
real men makes it so... What's not clear from their [i.e., the authors under
discussion's] accounts of the decay or drainage of language is how they might
speak otherwise than figuratively, or what they would say about language itself if
they did. What needs to be explained for the purposes of an essay on bathos is
how the misuse or overuse of words, or the appearance of words in contexts they
don't belong to, may end in a total loss of 'vibrancy', if it is not by the agency,
entropy or decay of the words themselves." (171-172)

Sutherland here seeks out a materialist explanation of how words change, and he seeks
one that does not attribute false agency to "language." In this passage and those that
follow, Sutherland comes surprisingly close to Louis Althusser, who struggled with
intrusions of spatial rhetoric into his writing, worrying that such irruptions of spatiality
were not sufficiently "scientific" because they obviated the extent to which the objects in
question were, in fact, productions.
89
As I mentioned in my first chapter and in my
discussion here of "The Right to Be Lonely," Riley has also considered the affects and
associations that sneak in by way of language's inevitably figurative or metaphorical
dimensions; in the later text she attends especially to the spatial rhetoric of inside and
outside.
Sutherland argues that such figurations of language as agential are suspect in that
they effectively curtail rigorous materialist analysis:
Language does not grow mean or lose its vibrancy through any activity of its own,
despite the poetical uses that may be found for that explanation. Rather, meanness

89
See my "L'espacement de la lecture" for a reading of this tendency in Althusser's For Marx and Reading
Capital.
254
and deadness are produced in words by people speaking and writing.... To speak
figuratively of words losing their meaning or their beauty is perhaps implicitly to
acknowledge (or otherwise to wish) that it is not in my own power (or should not
be), no matter how famous I might be, or whatever cosmological or mythopoetic
function I conceive for my writing, to prevent or even significantly to retard the
large-scale production of deadness in language, so that it feels natural enough to
say that language is just doing this...." (183-184)

For Sutherland, then, figurations of language as having "any activity of its own" often
serve as an alibi for avoiding rigorous materialist analysis of language as a social
production. Riley shares this concern, but, as I have illustrated, this cannot stop her from
consistently figuring language in terms of an inhuman and quasi-geological materiality.
For Riley, who reads Althusser sympathetically (Sutherland does not), such figurations
will happen whether we will them or not, but this is not the same as saying that
"language" just is "out there" like some unforeseeable natural disaster. As she writes
early in The Words of Selves:
Musing about the entrenched peculiarities of self-description, I've found myself
referring to something distinctive there, which I've wanted to think of as its
linguistic affect. But doesn't this intuitive formulation unhelpfully bestow an
agency of its own upon some exaggeratedly hypostatised entity of 'language'? The
notion that there is a stealthy language which gets up to things behind the backs of
its speakers, distorting their intentions, has clear drawbacks; although a venerable
body of thought does suppose just this. (38-39)

All the same, Riley does not operate according to the maxim that a materialist account is
one that only or immediately refers to the productive activity of humans. The question of
value and its production is left to the side, perhaps so as to avoid the conclusion that
questions of language are "merely superstructural," whereas Sutherland seeks to provide
a labor theory of poetic value and to show how the bathetic production of an absolute
value nil is indeed a form of human social labor.
255
So, what kind of materialism is it that defines the historicity of social institutions
by figuring such history as geology, botany, and synthetics – what happens to language
with this kind of thinking, and what happens to history? Is this somehow the dialectically
logical result of thinking language through a socialized biology? Both Riley and
Sutherland seek to understand repetition in language as a problem for materialism, but
they figure these materialities quite differently. Keston Sutherland advocates for a non-
metaphorical language of production (in its modes, forces, means, and relations most of
all). Denise Riley, on the other hand, installs an alternately organicist and geological
rhetoric; rhetoric is for her a problem, not a solution, for materialist literary criticism and
poetry.
In this sense, Riley's interest in Empson is quite pressing here – analyzing
metaphoricity requires for Riley, as for Empson, a fractal questioning of compacted
doctrines, one that attends to the shifts in the social production of words and descriptions.
Riley's attempt to figure the workings of self-description requires her reader to think how
a metaphor (such as "the single mother") is socially produced and to seek out a "non-
metaphorical" explanation for this production. The latter is what Sutherland is leaping
after in his efforts to "speak otherwise than figuratively" of the production of language
and of figuration in particular. This is an urgent undertaking insofar as he wants linguistic
materialism to be at least potentially centered around social class, defined in terms of
relations to the means of production. Social class, for Sutherland, is never just one other
category or one other possible self-description among others.
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But Riley has complicated the field of the social so as to counter its severing from
the biological and political. Riley seeks to understand the social in such a way that both
its repetitions and its transformations are evident through processes that are not based in
simple reproduction or change (I do this once, I do, or don't do, it again) but rather as the
overdetermination of combined and uneven contradictions. In other words, Riley's
geological model describes the historicity of metaphor in critical discourse as a human
production that engages with some resisting material. Such "production" is not directly
productive for capital but is productive in the sense of a broader conception of human
and inorganic productivity. As a response to Sutherland's concerns regarding the
figuration of language as active, Riley's geology would assent that yes, that's right, and
that such this thinking of production would still need to be a thinking of production as
socialized biology or, now, in Riley's later work, as a geologized-sociality. Particular
materialist rhetorics are, for Riley, as much a matter of tactics as of ontology, and the
tactical field on which such work takes place is already determined by compacted
doctrines and socially produced metaphors. The task, then, is to work at the returns and
repetitions of words, which will always be complex. Such a task is, for Riley, neither a
private exercise in liberal irony nor a preparatory exercise for public civic engagement. It
is, rather, the permanent stuff of politics.

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Epilogue: What Pools Love to Arson

In an interview from 2010, Andrea Brady explains how her poetry's political
ambitions relate to a "humanist belief in the utility of textual interpretation as a moral and
interpretative training ground:"
I don’t believe the visible landscape of power and its attachments – which are
cognitive as well as material – can be simply dissolved by imaginative revision.
But certainly my poems are part of a general poetic movement, which takes up the
humanist belief in the utility of textual interpretation as a moral and interpretive
training ground for the independent ethical engagement of the reader or writer
with the world. And which does not recognise barriers between forms of
discourse which can be permeated by feeling and disentangled by critical
thought.... ("Andrea Brady Interviewed By Andrew Duncan")
90

For Brady, a U.S.-born poet living in London since completing her graduate studies at
Cambridge University in the 1990s, this "general poetic movement" would necessarily
include those called the "Cambridge School." The "humanist belief" that Brady suggests
such poetry "takes up," however, is not, as I have illustrated, shared by all of these poets.
Brady announces her allegiance to the moral-pedagogical logic of the Practical Criticism:
textual interpretation is "a moral and interpretive training ground for independent ethical
engagement." All the same, the phrase "takes up" connotes some contention, and Brady's
remarks from the same interview on her 2007 web-poem Tracking Wildfire (published in
2010 as a book) register her distance from the logic of Practical Criticism:
The text is linked to pages which reveal and explain the source of the language,
images. The project is bloody-minded, willing the reader to synthesise the history

90
http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Brady%20interview.htm; accessed 7/21/2012.
258
of the use and manufacture of Greek Fire, phosphorus, and other obscurant
munitions. I had no desire to force readers to replicate my labour in collecting this
research; the poem’s moral expectations do not lie in the reader’s self-
improvement by following an unspecified paper trail.

In other words, the poem's "moral expectations" are no longer tied to the idea of "the
reader's self-improvement," at least insofar as this would be accomplished by philological
investigation. Brady does not aim to train some abstract reader to manage diverse textual
materials, or at least she does not view this as an exercise in self-improvement or civic
training. Her aims are both more and less grandstanding; they come from a recognition
that poetry exists "in isolation" in a society that has no room for it:
Poetry in isolation can only “want”: want things to go in a different direction. But
a redeemed society would have room for poets, in articulating the limitless
capacity of human desire, using the most sophisticated technology humanity has
developed: language. Maybe that is the tiny crevice we are working on, and in, to
keep drawing attention to the freedom of language which resists totalizing
exploitation, as a sign of the possibility of a genuine lived freedom....

Brady's distance from the civilizing logic of twentieth-century English study is manifest
in her diminution of literary practice to a "tiny crevice" of possibility. Brady embraces an
Adornian dialectic in which poetry, by withdrawing into its powerlessness, indicates the
possibility of a redeemed society that might have room for it. Not only are the humanities
increasingly deemed irrelevant hobby pursuits, but the entire foundation of publicly-
funded humanistic education is also being dismantled. Brady's notion of language as a
"tiny crevice" is one framework taken up by materialist British poetry today, but the
tactics that follow as consequences are varied. I will close by looking at one example of a
recent grouping of British left-feminist poets to indicate some of the possible directions
259
that might be taken by poetry engaged with the politics of reproduction and with the
legacies of Prynne, Forrest-Thomson, Riley, and Mulford.
In late 2010, unprecedented austerity cuts enacted by the dubiously empowered
coalition government set into motion a series of protests throughout the U.K. The cuts in
question embraced almost every sector of the already whittled-down welfare state, and,
perhaps predictably, those targeting higher education aroused special ire amongst artists
and intellectuals. These policies followed the game-changing recommendations of Lord
John Browne (former CEO of BP), who proposed to shift state debt onto students by
cutting all funding of non-priority subjects (humanities and social sciences foremost
among them) and raising student fees by well over 200% by 2012-13. So that, more than
ever, studying these subjects now means, for many, signing up for a life of debt. The
protests that followed were massively attended and featured a range of tactics from
marches to the destruction of corporate and state property. In response to these
developments, four young Brighton and London-based poets put together a pamphlet
called Poems, Written Between October and December 2010. The writers start out from
the dispossession wrought by the neoliberal state, and they candidly ask what, if any, is
the appropriate poetic response to the structural violence that renders many lives and
livelihoods precarious and that makes lyric's deliberative care and love seem patently
superfluous.
Poems written comprises the work of four rather different poets, Jonny Liron,
Francesca Lisette, Joe Luna, and Timothy Thornton, each of whom are in their twenties
and based in Brighton or London. All of the poems are titled with dates, presumably of
260
composition, and they are printed in chronological order. This kind of dating gives the
pamphlet a documentary quality enhanced by the multiple keywords drawn from media
and the writers' own first-hand accounts of the protests; this includes place names and
words like "kettling," the police practice of holding demonstrators entrapped for hours
until the energy of the street dissipates. This sort of documentation immediately presents
a set of problems for reading, namely, of the social location of the documenting subject
and her audience. In other words, to whom would the fact of police violence be "news"?
Does the pamphlet make kettling news in a way that goes beyond the liberal shock at
instances of repressive violence that have been documented for centuries? Writing about
the primarily middle-income student movements that reacted, Danny Hayward, a poet
and political-theorist-friend of the pamphlet's writers, has critiqued the practice among
protesters of proudly proclaiming that they have been kettled and of assuming that this
street cred assures that all working class youths aim to be like them. As he writes:
By imputing to working class teenagers the desire to ‘protest’ up to the point
where they resemble us in the cracked mirror of our own (bourgeois) sociological
concepts (i.e., up to the point when they possess the minimal resources required to
compete with us – at a safe disadvantage – in education and labour markets), the
conception tells us nothing about the real complexity of class based impulses or
aversions or about how they might be put to work ‘on the ground’ in the
production of a real movement against capital and its servant institutions.

I cite this by way of highlighting the dangerous limitations of viewing the anti-austerity
movement as a "new" kind of response to wholly "new" social experiences. Poems
written... smartly navigates this perspectival quality of violence through the interstices of
antagonism and tenderness that are built into their collaborative authorship. This does not
mean that the fold is a dramatic dialogue, nor does it mean that collective authorship
261
automatically ameloriates the embarrasing passions of the lyric ego through some
beneficent relationality; it works, rather, through the pull of distinct lyric modes taking
each other on, and not without resistance and contradiction.
I will look at the two opening poems, both of which are by Francesca Lisette. The
first, the only poem dated from October, sounds a dystopian, inauspicious start,
mockingly asking for the stark conditions that spurred the protest:
...Make me lie in a
dark bed stripped with froth; outer
town stationary pet rumours there are
no people left and zombies parade
their dice heads serving Osborne's
roulette wheel, all the $ replaced with %.

Here, as elsewhere, the documentary tone is interrupted, through the use of symbols
rather than words, by a skeptical attitude toward such accounting and recounting, as if the
straightforward narration of violence would be complicit with the crippling realism of
financial rationality– better instead, it seems, to ironize the symbols that reduce lives to
numbers. Lisette's taunts to the Cameron government issue a trembling bravado that then
gives way to more ambivalent assertions:
where have your eyes gone back to,
dreamed under curricula leaf solos still
shaking the impossible X wants to
wipe you out like a fishy fanny
never was
the difference is unrecountable.

With "the difference is unrecountable," Lisette sounds a near whisper against the logic of
"accountability" that shores up the vampirism of capital and the depredations of the
privatizing state that threatens, all the while using the beneficent language of liberty, to
262
"wipe you out like a fishy fanny." One phrase that follows is a grotesque rendition of
romantic lyric's impulse to embrace anything: "o loveable debt!" This first poem thus sets
up a central problem for Lisette and her collaborators to take on; namely, to create a lyric
that can live up to and past the logic of austerity.
By the second poem, dated November 2-8, the protests are well under way, and
with them the psycho-geography of London has been unfixed. Lisette's focus has shifted
from despair to the feverish sensuality of mass action; an apparently sincere first-person-
plural has also emerged in this shift:

dare to breathe, i'm sorry we cant
limit push beyond oil-well slip
pulled up at midnight, your blue slender
taskforce unhooking and papering silver crosses on aching trees

The embodiment of oppression and of passion alike are figured here through prosthetic
layering: apparel comes on and off with the manipulation of slips, covers, skins and
marks, substances that burn these coats off or cover them further, and Lisette watches it
all get thrown in the pot to stew:
souped in a stink of bone & brevity
what loses face to maul, what pools
love to arson, shifts light ungathered
to a narrower acid track.

Here the designation "what pools/ love to arson" queries the implications of incendiary
poetic passion;
91
"pooling" reduces the finely differentiated textiles that precede it into a
fluid susceptible to indifferent combustion. So that the net effect of lyric care may be its

91
See Brady's Wildfire: A Verse Essay for a brilliant performance of this problem.
263
own annihilation – but this possibility goes unevaluated at this point, insofar as the
valences of "arson" or even a "narrower acid track" depend on the social content of that
which they seek to abolish. Lyric cannot solve this sort of puzzle, even as it can track its
shifts and layers.
Struggles over higher education, then, are the terrain on which many poets will
continue to engage the contradictions of social reproduction.
92
If Forrest-Thomson and
early Prynne wrote in the aftermath of poetry's devaluation, today's poets face a total lack
of social value placed on their work, even as symbolic moral force. More and more
sectors of society witness the state ensuring compliance through police measures when
ideological ones fail. This objective situation has brought into focus some of the
contradictory commitments of academically trained leftist and feminist poets,
contradictions that it has been the work of this dissertation to tease out by engaging
histories of organizing alongside close readings of poetry.
Part of my aim in this dissertation, then, has been to read the work of Riley and
Mulford in order to locate strategies for struggle. I have sought to understand the
connections between critiques of literary education and the Marxist-feminist critique of
reproduction. My work does not seek to erase the contradictions and conflicts between
and within these fields, but it can trace them and seek out fatal faults and opportunities
for solidarity, whether through irony, identification, or both. Lisette and her peers draw
their formal procedures in part from the complexes of feeling and meaning that are

92
Other younger poets working at this conjuncture in the U.K. include Sean Bonney, Andrea Brady, Justin
Katko, Laura Kilbride, Frances Kruk, Jow Lindsay/Francis Crot, Marianne Morris, Neil Pattison, Nat Raha,
Luke Roberts, Sophie Robinson, Josh Stanley, Keston Sutherland, and Samantha Walton/Posey Rider. See
my "What Pools Love to Arson" for further discussion of work by a number of these writers.
264
generated by organizing against the reproduction of capitalism. The baggage of the
moral-pedagogical tradition dies hard, but the work of poets like Lisette cannot but be
grounded in a critique of the University as an institution that all the same seems worth
fighting for, or at least fighting around. If literary education is a luxury and not a right, if
nothing is demanded of poetry by society, then we would be fools, or worse, to expect
salvation from poetry. These writers know, like Riley and like Mulford in her early work,
that material struggle is what is demanded – if poetry can reflect this need through real
and sometimes violent force of contradiction as it is felt, then perhaps there is something
to be done with it.
265

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Asset Metadata

Creator Solomon, Samuel Bernard (author)

Core Title Reproducing the line: 1970s innovative poetry and socialist-feminism in the U.K.

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publication Date 11/21/2012

Defense Date 09/26/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag aesthetics,contemporary literature,feminism,literary theory,Marxism,OAI-PMH Harvest,poetry

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kamuf, Peggy (committee chair), Lloyd, David C. (committee member), Tongson, Karen (committee member)

Creator Email ssolomon@oxy.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-114056

Unique identifier UC11289322

Identifier usctheses-c3-114056 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-SolomonSam-1321.pdf

Dmrecord 114056

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Solomon, Samuel Bernard

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA