"Of things related": network assemblages in the longform poems of Muriel Rukeyser, Melvin Tolson, Langston Hughes and Louis Zukofsky

This study addresses four mid-twentieth-century American poems: Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead” (1938). Melvin Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953), Langston Hughes Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961), and Louis Zukofsky’s “A” (1978). It is my argument that these longform poems evidence a balanced tension between the particular and the whole. This balanced tension is created through a heterogenous, multi-vocal assemblage of sourced material networked together as a single structure: the poem. The network assemblage structure of the poems speaks to each of these poets’ midcentury concerns related to topics such as the environment, race, class, personhood and the nature of democracy. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Bruno Latour, Manuel DeLanda, Gilles Delueze, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, I explore the socio-political, aesthetic and ontological outcomes created by a dual state, promoting both the individual and the whole. It is my additional argument that Rukeyser, Tolson, Hughes and Zukofsky do not seek to resolve this tension, but instead regard its outcome – organization without organizing principle – as a necessary feature of a prosocial and democratic society.