Okay. We have a poem by Genevieve Taggard called Interior. It was published in the Proletarian Literature in the United States which was an anthology of communist and communist affiliated and communist movement poets at the height of, or the very beginning of the popular front in the mid '30s, in 1935. And Genevieve Taggard altered her aesthetic practice. She'd been more of a modernist, more of an experimentalist at the level of the line in this stanza, prior to the Depression. But once she got into the Depression, she began affiliating with political leftism and radicalism and wrote in a more traditional kind of way. So, we have a poem here called, Interior. What's the Interior, Ali? What does Interior refer to? >> Well, mainly the inside of the subject's house. >> A house, right, but we don't use, now we don't know if that's the subjects house. >> Someone's. >> Someone's house, probably not, this, Taggard is probably herself had in street calling for the person who is in the house to come out. Okay, so Interior means inside the house. What else does it mean, Molly? >> Inside the mind, I guess. >> Right, there's a nice ITY word we use in poetic studies and then it would be interiority. We talked about this a little bit with respect to Whitman, who is calling for first-hand experience which led him to call for us to get out of our perfumed rooms and outside. So, there's a certain amount of proletarian muscularity associated with being outside, as opposed to inside. What else might be, Max, I'm just going to ask you a sort of a historical question, or economic question, what, not too, don't worry, not too focused on economics. >> Mm-hm. >> About which none of us probably knows much at all. >> [laugh] >> But, we have the Depression in the United States, in the 1930s, arguably from 29 to 39. >> Sure. >> Or 29 to 41. Or possibly 32 to 40, 1941. Anyway, this is a period in which houses are kind of a big deal. Why would that be? >> Because of, I mean it was a time, kind of like recently, of foreclosure, and the banks were failing and. >> Right. Eviction. >> Eviction. >> And foreclosure. >> And possession. Yeah. >> One of the, one of the main issues for the Communist Party of the United States and for other leftists anti, you know those who want, anti-establishment radicals was to stem the flow of foreclosures and evictions. The unemployment rate in the United States in 1934 was 21.7%. And in 1932, it was 23.6%. By the time of this poem, it was still very high, not quite that high but, very high. So, what does that, back to you, Max, what does that have to do with this at all? The houses interior. >> Well. >> What's Taggard calling for? >> If she's, if she's writing on behalf of the proletariat, then there, there's a sort of irony in which these people don't have their own interior space. Or that she's, she's, she's writing about these sort of interiority and interior spaces being kind of a privilege. >> Indeed. It's a privilege. Yeah. >> Lot of people don't have at this point. >> Molly, I'll read the first two lines, and you tell me what you think they mean. A middle class fortress in which to hide, draw down the curtain as if saying No. I'll read the next line, While noon's ablaze, ablaze outside. >> Well. >> Who is inside, who is outside? >> Well, somebody from middle class is inside and the house sort of. >> Why does it's called a fortress? >> Well, the house sort of protects them from the, the discord outside and it seems like it also keeps out the people who are provisional to have a home. >> That's a great answer. I love the word discord. Can you do anything more with discord? And if not, I'm sure Anna can. >> [laugh]. >> What do you think it, why did you say discord? >> Well, I think of protests. I think of, you know, picketing in the streets and rioting, and sort of people wanting to get in. And, this person alone trying to keep them out. >> Is it, is it decorous and quiet? Or is it? >> Outside, no. Inside, yes. >> Inside, yes. The reason I'm so interested in your use of the word discord is the, the, phrase, rising noise of the streets in the last line. >>, Let me read the middles section, Anna, and ask you what you hear, poetically in terms of sound, maybe meter, And maybe rhetoric. Any of those things. While noon's ablaze, ablaze outside. And outside people work and sweat. And the day clings by and the hard day ends. Whose hard day is that, by the way? >> The workers. >> Yeah. They're people outside sweating, and they're working. The 99 percent are outside, and the one percent is inside. I mean, in, in terms we would use today, the percentages were not the same. Middle class, middle class was certainly larger than one percent. This is middle class. And the day clings by and the hard day end. And after you doze brush out your hair. Who's you? >> The middle class again, who are inside their, you know. >> Right. >> Bathrooms closed, or brushing their hair and. >> Yeah, specifically people in this house. >> Mm-hm. >> You doze, brush out your hair, and walk like a marmoset to and fro. That's not a positive. The marmoset is not a positive, right? You're, you're an instinctive PA, you just pace around. And look in the mirror at middle-age and sit and regard yourself stare and stare. And hate your life and your tiresome friends and last night's bridge where you went in debt. >> What, what does that sound like? >> I mean, that line, you know, you hate your life and your tiresome friends. Like, oh, poor you, you spent the evening playing bridge with your friends, you know? If I'm a. >> What happened during that bridge game? >> You went in debt, you had money to go in debt with. >> Yes, in debt, and debt is in quotes, you know, debt, just a little bit of debt. >> Mm-hm. >> You owe five dollars from last night's bridge game. But I didn't ask you about content. You answered about content. >> Yeah, no. >> I asked you about how it sounded poetically. How does that work? >> Well, starting. >> Is it discordant? >> I don't know about discordant. I mean, it's discordant a little bit in, in content but then it is. >> No, I'm not asking about content. >> [laugh] But in form, I think it actually works with these repetitions to kind of build these parallelisms. >> Yeah, it builds, it's rhetorically building, right? >> And the and, and, and, and. >> The and, and, and might lure us into thinking of it as Whitmanian or something like that. The piling of ands seem to loosen the rhetoric, but in fact, it's building up a kind of lyric momentum to make a case. It seems, it's heading toward a certain didacticism. I ask again Ali, Dave. Does it sound discordant to you? >> No, it's pretty evenly metered. >> Evenly metered. Pretty, some of it is quite regular. Yeah, Dave? >> Yeah, I agree with that. It's a, a catalog that builds on itself. It's, it's regular. It seems to mirror the, you know, the organized nature of being inside this fortress. >> Wow, what did you just say? Say that again. >> It seems to mirror the organized. >> The poem itself. >> The poem itself, what? >> It seems to mirror. >> Oh, the organized nature of what she's portraying inside this fortress? >> Which she hates. >> Which she hates, which she wants to contrast with the. >> Uh-oh, uh-oh. >> The prose outside the blaze. >> Okay. Uh-oh. So, all this is happening while around you, while all around you, Amaris, question for you, while all around you gathers the rage of cheated people, that's the 99 percent out there. Will we hear your fret? So, what's being asked here. This turn now, we turn from inside back to out. Tell us a little more about this. What's happening? >> It seems that all the light of the noon's ablaze and out and the sound of the rising noise of cheated people is outside. Whereas, inside the fortress, everything is monotonous, as Dave was saying, and sort of quiet and people are gazing at their own reflections as supposed to, looking at the situation around them. >> So, interiority is affirmed. In the self gaze, not looking, you know, and the curtain's closed. >> Exactly. >> And where does the poem stand? Where does the, speaker stand? Where does the, subject position of the poem stand? On which side? >> She's obviously trying to encourage people to exit this fortress. To go outside and join the crowd. >> Mm-hm. >> But seems a little doubtful. Perhaps, all over. >> So, the content of the poem. The story of the poem is arguing what? You just said it but it's okay to repeat. >> It's arguing for a revolution. >> It's arguing. >> For the masses to gather together, unite. >> Join together with us outside, you, join with us outside. I don't think she uses us. Well, will we hear your fret? Yeah. >> I think so. >> Okay, now, what is the form? And I don't mean just stanza form. Form includes tone, line length, meter rhetorical choices. Where does the form of the poem stand? On which side is the form of the poem? >> I mean. >> Is it? Go ahead, Anna. >> That's kind of where the poem falls flat for me, because the form of the poem is so much in the living room. So, much in the interior that, you know, even, I mean, Molly used the word, discord. You know, talking about, gathers the rage of cheated people. But there's still, I mean, even though the, the lines shorten up to maybe sig, like, signal a break with the interior. >> It does try to do that. Yeah. >> But I still, there's still internal rhyme and. >> It's still formally of the piece with what it was. >> Yeah, It's still formally on the side of. >> It is attempting to be self conscious enough to break the formal choices that lead to the non-discordant representation of interiority. And now, it must, in those formal choices break from that, and doesn't. Will we hear your fret in the rising noise of the streets? Okay, so let's talk about rising noise of the streets. >> Well, fret is a very sort of like uptight worry sort of pearl clutching ... >> [laugh] >> Whereas rising. >> Fret is a, an interior. It's a middle class word for anxiety. >> Right. >> Fear. >> Right, where the rising noise of the streets. I mean, rising kind of gives that feeling of a wave where all these voices and chants are sort of coming together and, and getting louder and angrier probably. >> And fret and rising noise don't seem to go together at all. >> Yeah. >> You know, like, if you have the middle class people out there in the street with you, I mean, are they going to be fretting, or anything, you know? [laugh] It doesn't. >> So, fret is a word that's been dragged forward out from the middle class fortress out, outward. Either, either hinting at the fact that Taggard is more comfortable in the thinking and rhetoric and vocabulary of the middle class fortress herself. Or, you know, creating a kind of easy irony. The answer to the question is oh, no, which is very emphatic and angry. So, I want to conclude this by asking you a couple of questions. One is, does the form of the poem take the side of the rising noise outside? Emily. >> Well, no, right? I mean, it may not be a sonnet, but it's almost definitely more traditional than it is nontraditional in terms of form. >> And just being a little wider, thinking a little more widely than stanza choices, stanza form choices. Do you hear a lot of rising noise in it? >> Well, no, it's. >> I mean, oh, no, might be bit of rising noise. Anybody else want to answer that question? Max? Does the form of the poem take the side of the rising noise which the content does? The content takes the side of the rising noise. The kind of poems that we've been admiring in this course, would seek to reproduce the rising noise, the chaos, and the discordance. I guess it's kind of at this point, in this session, a rhetorical question I ask you but do you want to comment on that? >> Well, I think, it, well it doesn't. In some ways, it's still on the side of, of that noise if it's not formally. Even if it's not formally reproducing exiting there's a way in which it is sort of marking this traditional forms, and in so, doing, subverting them a little bit to, to turn them back on to, to make them a sort of a vehicle for this, for this invective against, against the bourjois. And to turn it back against them and to say, well, this is, you know this is, this is your language, this is, this belongs to you but we can, or I can hear Genevieve Taggard can take this and use it to kind of get into your house and threaten you and, and, and try to get you out on the street. >> Is the poem open as opposed to closed? Think back to a Dickinson poem, where we could go in any, almost any direction by the end of it. Think about the revolution that wipes out the mills. It's a revolution of thinking about where you're supposed to put the means of production. >> I think it's pretty close. I mean. >> Why close? >> Well, I mean, to me, this is even another way in which she's traditional is that, the poem is very traditional. It takes a, takes a position and explains that position and. >> Right. >> You know. >> It's didactic. >> It is didactic. >> It's didactic. >> It does. It tells something pretty specific and uses the form and the, in the content. >> In the context. >> So. >> And why couldn't she say that awesome years, to the people she's trying to speak to by making it so intentionally accessible? >> Yes. And I think that the poem, you'll, if you go to the Proletarian Literature in the United States Anthology, you'll find many adept writers like Taggard, trying to make their poems accessible. For the purpose of reaching the greatest number of people. So, the question we want to conclude with is, it's a version of the question I just asked. Is, does the revolution that's hoped for in the content of the poem extend to other aspects of the poem? I think we've decided that it doesn't. But what might it extend to? If it were not, if it were a poem that participated in the discordance and the open endedness, that's really out there in the streets. What, what other kind of revolution could there be? This is a tough question but we just finished Chapter two. What kinds of, what kinds of revolutionary aspects order besides the story, content they take a shot? >> Is she trying to sort of imply that an egalitarian approach that if it was all discordant, you know, it would be anarchy, but socialism is a lot more egalitarian. >> Well no, I, I, I'm, I'm not quite sure what you just said, but I think I disagree. I think that this, this, the faux egalitarianism of this poem is really just that. That the, the poem is very closed. And it knows what it wants, and it knows what its position is. The poetic equivalence, formally speaking, aesthetically speaking of, of egalitarianism is a kind of anything goes-ism that you find in modernist, right, or a Dickinsonian, right? In which, the poem is open ended as to its meaning. In which, the position is not clear and you, you participate in the coming to, coming to that position. So, the revolution that's hoped for in the poems content, must extend to a revolution in the means of rep, of representation. And in this poem, in my opinion, we're nowhere near a revolution in representation. This is a fairly traditional way of representing a postition.
