Between 1920 and his death in 1933, Harry Alan Potamkin wrote poems for literary magazines, workers' newspapers and Black newspapers. He was first inspired by the example of modernist poets, and as America changed in the days of the Great Depression, so too did Potamkin's poems, striking an uneasy balance between social vision and aesthetic experimentation. Potamkin's poems fused elegy, outrage and reportage with the concerns of the ancients. "In the Embryo of All Things" is the first collection of Harry Alan Potamkin's poems. This volume gathers his complete poems, including a speculative arrangement of his unfinished Spectacle Negre and his lyrics for children's songs written for the Pioneers, a Communist youth organization.
 
Author Biography
Harry Alan Potamkin (1900-1933) was a poet, social worker, publisher, revolutionist, and a critic of cinema, literature and society. His poems appeared in magazines such as The Fugitive, Tambour and Transition; workers' newspapers such as The Liberator, New Masses and the Daily Worker; and Black newspapers such as The Crisis and Opportunity. At the time of his death, he was widely acclaimed for his film criticism, which appeared in publications such as Experimental Cinema, Hound & Horn and Close Up. He was the Executive Secretary of the John Reed Club. His writings on cinema were previously published as The Compound Cinema: The Film Writings of Harry Alan Potamkin (Teachers College Press, 1977), compiled by Lewis Jacobs.
 
Stephen Broomer is a filmmaker and film preservationist.