“the historical movement of which it is the expression… the proletarian child is born into his class —into the next generation of his class— rather than into a family.”
Walter Benjamin, A Communist Pedagogy
Synopsis for Blue Lion Books, Lodz, Poland, 2005
Beginning by inflecting the memory of the Pisan Cantos and the Berliner Ensemble, the primary opposition of the early postwar period, the first volume of Proletariaria presents work written between 1995-1999, representing a range of forms and voices committed to the proposition that nothing is finished, no tendency has been closed, and history remains open, waiting to be re-made. The prevalent mode of Volume 1 interprets expressionism as making available a destabilized lyric subject saturated with imagination-as-experience, where interiority of reference and perception coincides with such objectifying influences as the transcriptive tracings of working-class voices in Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony.
The second volume of Proletariaria, presenting work written between 1999 and 2001, sets out by stating the letter “B” as postscript and descendant of Zukofsky’s “A”-8. This initial, generative identification expands across various trajectories, among them a hacked Western/Central European lexical index re-mixed by way of the archive fever of Prighov’s futurism, Stein-like percussion from the shopfloor of a Cleveland factory, online hot-swapping of virtual identities, a serial meditation on the traditional media of poetry and painting and their conceptual affinities, and close attention to marginalized voices and experiences crossing and cross-dressing racial and gender boundaries. The signage of Volumes 1 and 2 of Proletariaria might be said to belong to the multiple or composite signature, where intertextuality and street-sound recordings combine to reverberate previous acts of authoring in a projective effort to open instead of close the past.
