Stitch, Unstitch

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.

How is writing poetry like labor? Poets and their critics have toyed with this question for centuries, because it promises to answer larger questions about how humanity might address the curse of toil and the utopian promise of deep play. Kristin Grogan’s Stitch, Unstitch looks at this question with fresh eyes. Focusing on literary modernism and its long afterlife, she gives us ways to see that a wide range of twentieth-century poets came up with nimble poetic strategies for understanding the conditions of work that avoided blind celebrations of technology and uncritical nostalgia for imagined pasts. Work not only makes demands on our vitality, Grogan shows, but moves to complex rhythms—and it’s in those rhythms that Grogan finds forms of resourcefulness and invention that are poetic and, every now and then, political. Stitch, Unstitch is a truly clarifying study of an ancient social analogy. -- Christopher Nealon, author of Infinity for Marxists: Essays on Poetry and Capital
Through brilliant, expansive readings and careful archival analysis, Stitch, Unstitch illuminates the ways modernist texts investigate the varied sites and meanings of labor, including the work of poetry itself. Placing new interpretive focus on elements of social reproduction and unwaged work as central to modernist aesthetic and political horizons, Grogan offers an indispensable account of modernist poetry’s continuing potential for imagining life within and beyond waged work. -- Margaret Ronda, author of Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End
Stitch, Unstitch brings into focus forms of value obscured by capitalism’s imperative to work for a living. Through beautiful readings and ingenious arguments, Grogan uncovers a new history of modernist poetry’s engagements with the everyday life of labor to offer glimpses of a world beyond the lockstep demands of work. -- Brian Glavey, author of The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis
In Stitch, Unstitch, Kristin Grogan brings her unstinting research and careful attention to the task of detailing modernist poetry's self-conscious takes on labor, from Pound's dangerously abstracted conceptions of poetry as craft to Niedecker's revaluation of women's work as a sort of seemingly "unproductive" labor not unlike the writing of poetry. Offering us rewarding new lenses for reading canonical figures like Hughes and Stein, while also pulling the understudied Lola Ridge into focus, this volume is a rich syllabus of what early to mid-20th-century poetry can reveal about the work of poetry and the poetry of work. -- Evie Shockley, Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English, Rutgers University

Kristin Grogan is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University.

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