{"title":"“Trace your grave”: On the poetry of The Communist Manifesto’s grave-digger thesis","authors":"Jayson Althofer","doi":"10.52086/001c.88241","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.88241","url":null,"abstract":"The Communist Manifesto (1848) was written by two erstwhile poets, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who dedicated themselves to working-class self-emancipation, which requires the forcible overthrow of capitalist society. Poetry vitalised their revolutionary politics and impelled them beyond poetry to critico-practical class struggle against the bourgeoisie. Using Samuel Moore’s 1888 English translation, which Engels assisted and authorised, this paper presents new readings of famous images and passages in the Manifesto by demonstrating the significance of poetry to its representation of working life and living-dead extremity in bourgeois society. It focuses on the poetry of the Manifesto’s thesis that the bourgeoisie produces its own grave-diggers. Marx and Engels wove poetry into their thesis, including blank verse by Shakespeare and works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Hood and Heinrich Heine. The paper addresses Marx and Engels’s critical assimilation of one poem in particular: Shelley’s “Song to the Men of England” (1819). It also regards, through poetry, their critique of the extremity of capital – its infinity – which necessitates proletarian revolution for human liberation. The coda posits the Manifesto as a “barricade-poem” in prose form.","PeriodicalId":36392,"journal":{"name":"Text (Australia)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135313679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Poetry’s upper limit","authors":"Etienne Garnier","doi":"10.52086/001c.88234","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.88234","url":null,"abstract":"Louis Zukofsky’s poetic work has always been noted for its difficulty. Throughout his career, he kept in mind the principles created by Ezra Pound, and he made music the focus of his poems. This focus is all the more visible in his major work “A”. Composed of 24 movements, “A” is the culmination of its author’s capabilities. There, Zukofsky famously expressed his poetic views using the integral speech ∫ music where speech and music are the limits defining the interval in which poetry is bound. “A”-24, the poem’s last movement, is an illustration of Zukofsky’s will to create a musical poetry. Written with the help of his wife, Celia, and otherwise titled L.Z. Masque, the poem is composed of four different lines of text, all quotations from works by Zukofsky. Marked T for thoughts, D for Drama, S for story, P for poetry, Zukofsky’s different works are there set to music, using Handel’s Harpsichord Pieces. The superimposition of these different works leads to a shift in the perception of the poetic work. In this radical challenge to the practice of reading, Zukofsky’s movement pushes poetry to the limit, one that needs to be questioned.","PeriodicalId":36392,"journal":{"name":"Text (Australia)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135313684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Poems","authors":"Kristian Patruno","doi":"10.52086/001c.88246","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.88246","url":null,"abstract":"In these poems Kristian Patruno cofessionally narrates autobiographical events which deal with the issues of extreme drug use, homelessness, and poor socio-economic conditions. “Coastal Drowning” narrates how swamped by myriad personal family and health issues a young (or any) person drowns in the extremities of circumstance. “Wildfire” narrates the extremities of heroin addiction and the complexities of a co-dependant relationship therein, while giving voice to the human cost of, and testament to, the will to survive drug addiction. “Slaughter House” also narrates extreme drug abuse occasioning homelessness and other extremities arising from such. Together these poems narrate in a confessional mode the extreme taboos of poverty and drug addiction. The power inherent in these poems underlines the power of poetry as testimony/witness to traumas such experiences purvey. They also give testament to the strength of human will to survive.","PeriodicalId":36392,"journal":{"name":"Text (Australia)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135313692","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Tomar Santan Jano Thake Dudhe-Bhaate”: Exploring the Naxal movement through Bengali protest poetry","authors":"Shriya Dasgupta","doi":"10.52086/001c.88236","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.88236","url":null,"abstract":"The Naxalite Movement was a radical left wing extremist movement that started in 1969 in the Indian state of West Bengal. Inspired by the ideas of Mao Tse Tsung, the combatants engaged in guerrilla warfare aiming to capture state power through armed insurgency, “annihilation line” that included the assassination of the representatives of the state administration and mass mobilisation. In the early 1970s, Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal, witnessed large-scale student participation in the conflict. It was suppressed by the State through the Operation Steeplechase, brutal police repression including widespread human rights violations. No political movement in post-independent India spawned as much literature, ranging from poetry to autobiographical narratives, as the Naxal Movement. Through a qualitative study, this paper attempts a critical analysis of the representative artistic expression by the Naxalites during the first phase of the conflict between 1969 and 1975. Drawing upon the poetry of revolutionaries such as Dronacharya Ghosh, Saroj Dutta and Timir Baran Sen, all of whom were killed by the police, along with the works of Naxal sympathiser poets like Sankha Ghosh and Birendranath Chattopadhyay, this paper aims to fill the research gap that exists in academia in the sphere of literary representation by the Naxal combatants.","PeriodicalId":36392,"journal":{"name":"Text (Australia)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135313677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Creative companionship as we face the apocalypse – an essay in conversation","authors":"Shady Cosgrove, Christine Howe","doi":"10.52086/001c.88239","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.88239","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores how a commitment to poetic collaboration, with daily writing and reading, changed the ways we perceived and lived our lives, particularly in light of living through the extremity of climate change (characterised by Australian bush fires and floods), and the isolation and stress caused by the pandemic. We explore collaboration, prose poetry and the creative process in the context of extremity, arguing that writerly collaboration can engender hope beyond the page. We discuss these topics in an essay-conversation format, moving back and forth between authors, building/ expanding/thinking and re-thinking through matters of process in light of the poetic and the extreme. Some of our creative works from this time are also included.","PeriodicalId":36392,"journal":{"name":"Text (Australia)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135313683","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Editorial April 2023","authors":"","doi":"10.52086/001c.75215","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.75215","url":null,"abstract":"Engagement with TEXT; In this edition; Acknowledgements.","PeriodicalId":36392,"journal":{"name":"Text (Australia)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135713373","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}