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Few US poets invoke (and critique) the nature and role of capitalism in contemporary poetic practice more consistently and vehemently than Adrienne Rich. In her recent critical collections, What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Norton, 1993) and Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (Norton, 2001)—as well as in introductions she’s penned to a range of recent books, including James Scully’s Line Break: Poetry as Social Practice (Curbstone, 2005), Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon, 2005), and Manifesto: Three Classic Essays on How to Change the World (Ocean Press, 2005)—Rich has embarked upon scaffolding an anticapitalist poetics that is not averse in the early twenty-first century to invoking words like Marx, the market, and “an invisible collectivity.” Instead, as she insists in “Arts of the Possible,” “I’m a writer in a country where native-born fascistic tendencies, allied to the practices of ‘free’ marketing, have been trying to eviscerate language of meaning.” Later in the same essay, Rich asserts that “[w]e need to begin changing the questions. To become less afraid to ask the still-unanswered questions posed by Marxism, socialism and communism.”
Rich’s insistent critique of capital as it relates to issues of language, nationhood (and personhood), collective action, and American empire links her critical stance to a compelling wave of recent publications outside the world of official US verse culture (to borrow a term and characterization from Charles Bernstein). Samir Amin’s The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World (Monthly Review Press, 2004), for example, deftly assigns the link between capital accumulation and social pauperization (i.e., the growing disparity between the super wealthy and the poor) to the American pursuit of a liberal market agenda. Amin, an Egyptian-born economist and director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal, critiques American socialization practices—and the incumbent “low intensity democracy”—that function exclusively through (and for) “liberal” market forces. He argues that
