“THE STAR, VENUS”
By:
June 25, 2026
A series dedicated to poems, published c. 1900–1935, the Radium Age sf-adjacent themes of which include: dystopia and utopia, far-out mathematics and the fourth dimension, Afro-futurism, catastrophe, future war, new technologies, scientific breakthrough, dehumanization, cosmic awe, disenchantment and unseen forces, unknowable aliens and singularity. Research and selection by Joshua Glenn; thematic index here.
“It is more pleasant and more useful,”
Said Vladimir Ilytch,
“To live thru the experience
Of a revolution
Than to write about it.”
The women held the world cornice,
The Red Army was buttressed by women.
The star, Venus, bathed
In the sunsets
of elegant, imperial islands —
Mr. — ‘we own your, this government
benefits by our protection…’ —
And in Haiti
Mars
Bloody
Tinkered with the other
Stars.
— Zukofsky’s epic poem A was written over nearly 50 years, from 1928 to 1974, with its twenty-four sections published piecemeal before the complete collection appeared in 1978. This is one passage from the sixth part.
The sixth part (“A”-6) of A was first published in 1932. The movement was part of the early sections of the poem that were written between 1928 and 1930. A collection containing the first seven parts of the poem was published in Poetry magazine later in the ’30s.
In Mark Steven’s Red Modernism (2017), we read:
- “There is an argument to be made that Zukofsky is witnessing 1917 through Sergei Eisenstein’s monumental restaging of the October Revolution, in which the women on the roof of the Winter Palace attain a similar architectural magnitude as this. But what these lines have that Eisenstein’s film does not is a properly cosmic sensibility. The architectural metaphors (“cornice” and “buttress”) used to describe the strength of the socialist women are also applied to the “world,” announcing that their revolution conceived of itself as inaugurating political reconstruction on a planetary scale.”
- “In Zukofsky’s unrhymed couplet, revolution is elevated to a worldwide undertaking that begins and ends with women […] The following lines transport those women and their political program from the terrestrial world to an extraterrestrial constellation.”
- “The cumulative effect of these figures is the reimagining of political history — specifically, of socialist revolution in Russia and of capitalist counterrevolution in Haiti — with reference to astrological and astronomical events. Historical particulars and phenomenal contingencies are supplanted by a vision of celestial boundlessness.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF POETRY: Stephen Spender’s THE PYLONS | George Sterling’s THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS | Archibald MacLeish’s EINSTEIN | Thomas Thornely’s THE ATOM | C.S. Lewis’s DYMER | Stephen Vincent Benét’s METROPOLITAN NIGHTMARE | Robert Frost’s FIRE AND ICE | Aldous Huxley’s FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG | Sara Teasdale’s “THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” | Edith Södergran’s ON FOOT I HAD TO… | Robert Graves’s WELSH INCIDENT | Nancy Cunard’s ZEPPELINS | D.H. Lawrence’s WELLSIAN FUTURES | & many more.