Stitch, Unstitch

The labour of literature is often thought of as a specialised 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 labour 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 labour, particularly types of gendered labour that are typically unseen and undervalued. Her fine-grained readings locate modernist poetry within sites of social reproduction, factory work, craft labour, and other forms of manual labour, 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 labour; Lola Ridge’s immersion in the New York garment industry; Langston Hughes’s encounter with Soviet workers’ theatre; Gertrude Stein’s gendered and queer domestic labours; 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.