Handmade by Poverty: Worker Correspondence, Objectivist Poetics and the Pathos of the Readymade.

Worker correspondence was a form of found poetry employed by radical left writers during the 1930s. Readers' letters to publications such as New Masses and the Daily Worker were reworked with end stops and presented as free verse. This essay examines the practice of worker correspondence as a form of readymade, a consciously avant-gardist collision of politics and “high” culture. This examination is put forward as a reflection on current thinking on the literary left of the Depression decade and – along the way – suggests points of contact with the Objectivist poetics of George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Reznikoff. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]