Kristin Grogan

The labor of literature is often thought of as a specialized craft, distinct from everyday work. In Stitch, Unstitch, Kristin Grogan traces an alternative vision of writing and the writer, arguing that modernist poetry was deeply shaped by ordinary labor and the people who performed it. This relationship provoked powerful political and aesthetic experiments—and allowed modernist poets to imagine ways of life beyond the demand to earn a living. Poetic form, Grogan shows, offers ways to reflect on the meaning and worth of labor, particularly types of gendered labor that are typically unseen and undervalued. Her fine-grained readings locate modernist poetry within sites of social reproduction, factory work, craft labor, and other forms of manual labor, placing literary texts alongside objects such as constructivist posters and set design, household notes, and homemade books. Grogan considers Ezra Pound’s ideology of craft and artisanal labor; Lola Ridge’s immersion in the New York garment industry; Langston Hughes’s encounter with Soviet workers’ theater; Gertrude Stein’s gendered and queer domestic labors; and Lorine Niedecker’s employment as a hospital cleaner. Blending Marxist and feminist theory with attentive close readings, Stitch, Unstitch is a revelatory materialist account of the values of poetry.

Modernist Poetry and the World of Work

Stitch, Unstitch

Alec Marsh

Alex Niven

Peter Nicholls

Richard Parker

Mark Steven

Alexander Howard

Roxana Preda

Michael Kindellan

Alex Pestell

Mark Byron

James Dowthwaite

Archie Henderson

Sean Pryor

Miranda Hickman

GLOSSATOR 10 (2018) Astern in the Dinghy: Commentaries on Ezra’s Pound’s Thrones de los Cantares 96-109 Edited by Alexander Howard You in the dinghy (piccioletta) astern there! (CIX/788) Mr. Pound Goes to Washington Alexander Howard (University of Sydney) Some Contexts for Canto XCVI Richard Parker (University of Surrey) Gold and/or Humaneness: Pound’s Vision of Civilization in Canto XCVII Roxana Preda (University of Edinburgh) Hilarious Commentary: Ezra Pound’s Canto XCVIII Peter Nicholls (New York University) “Tinkle, tinkle, two tongues”: Sound, Sign, Canto XCIX Michael Kindellan (University of Sheffield) “In the intellect possible”: Revisionism and Aesopian Language in Canto C Alex Pestell (Independent Scholar) Deep Rustication in Canto CI Mark Byron (University of Sydney) Shipwrecks and Mountaintops: Notes on Canto CII Mark Steven (University of Exeter) Revised Intentions: James Buchanan and the Antebellum White House in Canto CIII James Dowthwaite (University of Göttingen) Exploring Permanent Values: Canto CIV Archie Henderson (Independent Scholar) Canto CV: A Divagation? Alec Marsh (Muhlenberg College) So Slow: Canto CVI Sean Pryor (University of New South Wales) ‘The clearest mind ever in England’: Pound’s Late Paradisal in Canto CVII Miranda Hickman (McGill University) Three Ways of Looking at a Canto: Navigating Canto CVIII Kristin Grogan (Exeter College, University of Oxford) ‘To the king onely to put value’: Monarchy and Commons in Pound’s Canto CIX Alex Niven (University of Newcastle)

Glossator 10: Thrones

Astern in the Dinghy: Commentaries on Ezra’s Pound’s Thrones de los Cantares XCVI—CIX

Kristin Grogan

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