Commune Editions, Revolutionary History, and the Infrastructures of Poetry

Abstract

Abstract:This essay offers an account of the small press Commune Editions, which emerged from Occupy Oakland. It analyzes the ways that the press and its publications—a number of collections of poetry—build various forms of infrastructure. These forms of infrastructure include the material apparatus of editing and publishing, the representation of infrastructure (those that belong to the status quo and those that are revolutionary), and the experience of historical limits in political struggles. The essay makes a case for the relevance of the poetry of Commune Editions in its imagination of a post-capitalist infrastructure and in its recognition of the infrastructural conditions of the capitalist present. It reads poetry by a number of poets, including Joshua Clover, Wendy Trevino, Juliana Spahr, Sean Bonney, and Heriberto Yépez. It engages with Marxist theories of poetry and poetics, as well as accounts of radical traditions of poetry in the US (especially of the Language poets and of social movement poets).