Muriel Rukeyser Website

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Synecdoche, West Virginia

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Posted on November 16, 2012 by Joe Sacksteder

This past spring I was attending a Creative Writing Department meeting here at Eastern Michigan University, and one of my colleagues mentioned a list of literary terms that we’re supposed to make sure all of our Intro students are familiar with. I immediately became nervous and scouted the room for other people who looked like they might have never heard of this list. Either everyone was pretty good at pretending–Ah yes, the list!–or I was the only one who missed the memo. I discreetly obtained a copy of the list without anybody finding out (until this incriminating blog post, I suppose), but seeing the chosen terms didn’t completely alleviate my nervousness. I wasn’t sure I could define all of them. Referent, mimesis … aporia!?! I mean, I could nod when other people used them in conversation, but I thought I was teaching creative writing so I didn’t have to explain tough terms like these. But, no, I realized–this is a good thing. The time has come to finally untangle signifier and signified.

My colleagues take various approaches to the list. Some give students the list right away and send them to the nearest dictionary of literary terms. Some, I believe, give a test. Some ask students to use the terms when providing workshop feedback to their peers. I decided that I would pepper the words throughout my semester’s syllabus, matching them up with lessons and readings where they seemed most applicable.

There was Googling involved. Wikipedia was consulted once or twice. Donation pleas from Jimmy Wales were ignored. While trying to figure out how exactly synecdoche and metonymy weren’t the same word, some baffling hopscotch of hyperlinks landed me on an essay I read in graduate school, Shoshana Wechsler’s “A Ma(t)ter of Fact and Vision: The Objectivity Question and Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead.” Wechsler allowed me to check yet another tricky word off the list:

Rukeyser’s poem narrates the story of one particular and localized catastrophe, which is presented as a synecdoche for the larger whole.

I drew a circle on the board–my sister’s the art teacher–labeled “Disasters of the 1930s,” and a smaller circle within it to represent the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster. If the word synecdoche itself, in Greek, means “simultaneous understanding,” Rukeyser wants us to understand that specific people (with names!) died in a specific disaster from specific, preventable neglect while simultaneously getting us to realize that she’s not just talking about one instance of corporate carelessness, greed, and cover-up, but any situation in which the weak are subjugated by the powerful. (We eventually erased “of the 1930s”.) When she sets up her objectivist camera of poetic consciousness in the dingy town of Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, she wants to preserve how that one town looked at that point in history, but at the same time point out that “any town looks like this one street town.” And not just any one-street, American town. Any town.

But metonymy. Oh dear. My interpretation is that, while synecdoche uses the part to represent the whole (pars pro toto), as in “heads of cattle,” metonymy represents the whole by using something the whole is intimately connected to, but of which it’s not physically a part. I searched The Book of the Dead for an example, and came up with one I think is pretty good. In “Absolom” Rukeyser lists victims and towns, then funnels them into the line “the whole valley is witness.” Though I wouldn’t put it past Rukeyser to be saying the land itself is witnessing the disaster, she really means the people. Here’s the whole thing:

There was Shirley, and Cecil, Jeffrey and Oren,
Raymond Johnson, Clev and Oscar Anders,
Frank Lynch, Henry Palf, Mr. Pitch, a foreman;
a slim fellow who carried steel with my boys,
his name was Darnell, I believe. There were many others,
the towns of Glen Ferris, Alloy, where the white rock lies,
six miles away; Vanetta, Gauley Bridge,
Gamoca, Lockwood, the gullies,
the whole valley is witness.

She gives the names in order to resurrect them and pay tribute, but she distills (or even buries) them into the image of “the whole valley” so that we the readers simultaneously understand she’s talking about any low place on planet Earth.

I’d love to hear anyone else’s thoughts or examples on synecdoche and metonymy. Perhaps my definitions might need some tinkering …

Important Poetry

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Posted on November 10, 2012 by Joe Sacksteder

One good thing about the gym that I go to is that people are always leaving behind old issues of Harper’s and The New Yorker, allowing me to cancel both of my subscriptions in exchange for getting them like a month or two late. Last week somebody left behind the September 2012 issue of The Sun (score!), and a piece of non-fiction called “Ten Days in November” by Eric Anderson caught my eye. In the first of the ten days, Anderson is addressing an Intro to Poetry class:

The worst thing you can do is talk about how important poetry is. In reality it isn’t all that important. It doesn’t save lives very often (except perhaps the lives of the poets themselves–a fact negated by all the poets that poetry has actually killed). It’s not often inspirational. It doesn’t topple regimes or bring justice. It’s not penicillin. It’s not timeless, because poets fall in and out of favor, and most poems disappear the moment after they’re written, and anyway the whole planet will be devoured by the sun in a few billion years, and when that happens, no one is going to run around screaming, The poetry! Save the Poetry!

The timing was great and it was lousy, because it was–I swear–the night before I planned to step in front of my own Intro Creative Writing class and try to convince them that poetry is indeed important. Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead–a piece of documentary poetics exposing the treachery and pathos surrounding the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster, 1930-1935–is my ultimate trump card for those students who think that the only kind of poetry is the personal expression kind and that all of it is just whining and that we’d all be better off excising the poetry unit from Intro to Creative Writing. I was simultaneously irate with Eric Anderson for hijacking my sermon … and more than a little worried that he was right.

The next day I shared the above quote with my classes and pitifully bartered with Anderson, suggesting that The Book of the Dead is at least as close as we can get to important poetry. But once we got to “Absolom,” a poem in which Rukeyser quotes from heartbreaking court documents to resurrect the voices of the victims, I realized I should have stuck to my sermon. I’ve taught The Book of the Dead to perhaps three hundred students in my time at Eastern Michigan, and perhaps five of them had heard of Hawk’s Nest–arguably the greatest industrial disaster in the history of our country–before our time together in the classroom. And nobody, not one of us, would ever have heard 17-year-old Shirley Jones’s words to his mother:

Mother, when I die,
I want you to open them up and
see if that dust killed me. Try to get compensation,
you will not have any way of making your living
when we are gone,
and the rest are going too.

To me, Anderson’s words come across as impoverished and selfish after reading a work like The Book of the Dead. It’s true that we could all dedicate our lives to scientific and medical causes that might keep our species alive long enough to not scream for the poetry when the earth is devoured by the sun–but this mindset looks at humans as numbers rather than individuals, and it ignores the idea that there are different types of health. Of course William Carlos Williams’s “Asphodel” invaded my mind as I stood there in the gym:

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

With Rukeyser we get the news–or history made news again–and the men who died miserably speak again to the living.

It strikes me now that this website, like teaching Rukeyser in the classroom, contributes to an act of re-resurrection for workers like Shirley Jones. “I shall give mouth to my son,” Rukeyser ends the poem “Absolom.” Perhaps this website can give an online mouth to Rukeyser.

What do you think? Is poetry–or any form of art–important?

Why Muriel Rukeyser? Why a website just for her?

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Posted on June 16, 2012 by Elisabeth Däumer

Friends, colleagues, and students have asked me: Why Rukeyser? What’s so special about her? Why create a Muriel Rukeyser website? Why make her the focus of an interdisciplinary online “meeting place”?

I’ve been thinking how best to say this and have come up with four primary reasons:

1. Her poetry makes things happen–it has a peculiar type of energy which emerges when it’s read in groups.
2. We still don’t know how to read her work. We seem to figure out how to read some of her poems–for instance “Book of the Dead,” but the fruitful approaches to one poem don’t necessarily transfer to our understanding of other poems of hers. Although there is clearly continuity between her poems, there is also great diversity. Her work is very heterogeneous, her interests surprisingly broad and specific at once.
3. There is no tradition of critical commentary on Rukeyser’s work. There are spurts of commentary, but no continuous critical tradition. This accounts for our difficulties of reading her. A major goal of this website is to create a continuous tradition of commentary on her poetry and prose.
4. Her relational vision lends itself to web technology. I am convinced Rukeyser would have appreciated and used web technology to articulate her ecological sense of the inter-relatedness of all things, all cultural activities. Poetry was never “separate” for Rukeyser from other language and other cultural activities. Also, she thought of poetry as a form of knowing profoundly related to other forms of knowing like science and philosophy. She would have been alive to the democratic capacities of web technology–the way it creates access and counteracts the walls and hierarchies that define academe.

I am going to expand on each of these reasons in future posts.

Thoughts on “Searching/Not Searching: Writing the Biography of Muriel Rukeyser”

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Posted on June 15, 2012 by Elisabeth Däumer

I just read Kate Daniels’ piece “Searching/Not Searching: Writing the Biography of Muriel Rukeyser” (Poetry East 16-17, Spring/Summer 1985, pp. 70-93). It’s a great essay! One of the most honest essays I have read about Muriel Rukeyser. Daniels reflects upon the curious desire to write the life of somebody else–what draws us to that task, what is it we are looking for, what do we see, what do we not see, and why. She asserts that “the biographical method is a self-reflexive one, depending as much on the character and experience of the biographer as on the life of the subject.” Her essay is a stellar example of the fruitfulnes (but also difficulty) of such self-reflexiveness when she admits to her profound unease, even it seems to me disappointment, with the course of Rukeyser’s life after the birth of her son in 1947:

I had described for myself the pattern of Muriel Rukeyser’s early life with the words “independent, active, and spontaneous” — the best “ingredients” for a narrative biography. But going on to assemble the rest of the lifeline, I found a very different pattern from that of the first 3 years: something more static, something more staid. I felt dismayed by this and for the first time, I found myself approaching Muriel and her life as an abstraction, as an exercise in biographical structuring, as a problem, rather than a phenomenon to be dealt with however and exactly as it appeared.

“After an early promising start as a political activist and poet of social protest,” Daniels concludes, “Muriel Rukeyser had taken on the ancient and familiar role, that of self-absorbed motherhood.”

Perhaps because I myself–a teacher, scholar, and mother fairly late in life–have wondered about the transformation motherhood has wrought in my own life, I found myself arrested and even disturbed by Daniels’ assertion. I, too, have sensed that Rukeyser’s work was deeply affected by the experience of motherhood, but (perhaps for self-serving reasons) I tend to put a more positive spin on that change. I wonder, for instance, if her enthusiasm for technology and its potentials waned after world war two, the atomic bombing of Japan, and the birth of her son. In her 1962 poem “Waterlily Fire,” Rukeyser appears to embrace pacifism and a commitment to the work of peace grounded in her appreciation for Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, and the archetypal role of women as the bearers and preservers of life. I tend to think of this transformation as a redirection, rather than abandonment, of earlier energies and commitments.

Still, I found myself troubled when Daniels points to the

immediate decline in literary output after the birth of [Rukeyser’s] son, the way in which she chose not to become involved in the San Francisco poetry renaissance which was underway during the time she lived there (she was too busy “pushing a baby carriage,” she later explained).

Although Daniels admits that her overwhelming sense of the “limitations in the second half of Rukeyser’s life … might in fact have something to do with my own limitations,” her perspective, so honestly put, arrives at insights that I find useful. For instance, she wonders about Rukeyser’s role in the 1960s in the civil rights and anti-war protests:

I began to feel that she had been sometimes used by those organizing such activities: an old warhouse trotted out for the occasion at the airings of pro-feminist or anti-Vietnam sentiments. She seemed to have fulfilled something more akin to a figurehead role during the last 15 years of her life than to the truly generative role she had taken on during her early career…

Certainly this insight helps explain why the apparent resurgence of interest in Rukeyser in the 1960s and 70s did not result in scholarship and critical discussions of her work, not even among feminist critics.

Daniels’ essay leaves me with a lot of questions, both about Rukeyser’s life choices and about the curiously unstable place of other women poets in American Literary History. Most of all, I find the honesty of Daniels reflections galvanizing. Daniels discontinued her biographical project–it will be interesting to find out why, but perhaps this essay offers a clue? Fortunately, somebody else, Jan Heller Levi, has taken on the task of writing a biography of Muriel Rukeyser. Last I heard, the biography will be published by Knopf, in 2013.

Rukeyser’s indentations

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Posted on May 15, 2012 by Elisabeth Däumer

So, I am curious, why are the lines indented the way they are in Rukeyser’s poem “For My Son”? What is the difference between:

You come from poets, kings, bankrupts, preachers,
attempted bankrupts, builders of cities, salesmen,
the great rabbis, the kings of Ireland, failed drygoods
storekeepers, beautiful women of the songs,
great horsemen, tyrannical fathers at the shore of ocean,
the western mothers lookng west beyond from their
windows,
the families escaping over the sea hurriedly and by night–
the roundtowers of the Celtic violet sunset,
the diseased, the radiant, fliers, men thrown out of town,
the man bribed by his cousins to stay out of town,
teachers, the cantor on Friday evening, the lurid
newspapers,
strong women gracefully holding relationship, the Jewish girl
going to parochial school, the boys racing their iceboats
on the Lakes,
the woman still before the diamond in the velvet window,
saying “Wonder of nature.”

and:

You come from poets, kings, bankrupts, preachers,
attempted bankrupts, builders of cities, salesmen,
the great rabbis, the kings of Ireland, failed drygoods
storekeepers, beautiful women of the songs,
great horsemen, tyrannical fathers at the shore of ocean,
the western mothers lookng west beyond from their
windows,
the families escaping over the sea hurriedly and by night–
the roundtowers of the Celtic violet sunset,
the diseased, the radiant, fliers, men thrown out of town,
the man bribed by his cousins to stay out of town,
teachers, the cantor on Friday evening, the lurid
newspapers,
strong women gracefully holding relationship, the Jewish girl
going to parochial school, the boys racing their iceboats
on the Lakes,
the woman still before the diamond in the velvet window,
saying “Wonder of nature.”

The first thing that I notice is that the indented version of the poem (Ruk’s version) suggests the flow of the poem over time. This is one long sentence, one list of ancestors and their identities, professions, deeds. Since the lines don’t all begin “justified” on the left, the indentations suggest the heterogeneity, even quirkiness of this list, and somehow, for me at least, a sense of time and space–perhaps even generations.

“Space on the page,” Rukeyser wrote in The Life of Poetry, “can provide roughly for a relationship in emphasis through the eye’s discernment of pattern” (117).

The white space at the beginning of lines does not, I think, function as a pause; instead it compels the eyes to move right, and to keep moving with the flow of the indented lines. In addition, many of the lines are enjambed, further compelling eye and ear to move with the sense from one line to the next.

But what do you think? To what extent does indentation function as “punctuation” in this poem? And how is it a “physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge” (The Life of Poetry, 117). And how do we, as readers, acknowledge these “body-rhythms”?

How to read Rukeyser?

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Posted on May 15, 2012 by Elisabeth Däumer

It seems right to begin this blog on the new Rukeyser website by exploring the different ways of reading that Rukeyser’s poetry invites or compels us to engage in.

This semester, I am guiding an independent study on Rukeyser with Chelsea Lonsdale, a student who will join EMU’s graduate program in Written Communication in the fall (2012) and who is currently completing an undergraduate thesis on craft–the “craft” of composition and “craft” if I understand her correctly in general.
So part of what we’ll do together is to “read” individual poems by Rukeyser; in fact, since Chelsea expressed her dissatisfaction with the practice of “close reading,” as defined and practiced by the New Critics, we are trying to figure out what reading Rukeyser’s poems “closely” might imply–and how else to read her poems, with an emphasis on “closely.”

Does it mean, for instance, that we assume the poem as “fixed” object? and if not, if, for instance, we think, like Rukeyser herself did, of poetry as a process, an event, a meeting place, what does that mean for our attention to the formal elements of her poems–line breaks, line indentations, punctuation. Should we treat them as “fixed” as “fluid” as subject to change or intervention by the reader?

If, as Rukeyser affirmed in The Life of Poetry,”Punctuation is biological and it is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge,” then, it seems to me, we need to pay close attention, not only to how she uses, but, equally importantly, to how she conceives of “punctuation” in her poetry:

…punctuation in poetry needs several inventions. Not least of all, we need a measured rest. Space on the page, as E.E. Cummings uses it, can provide roughly for a relationship in emphasis through the eye’s discernment of pattern; but we need a system of pauses which will be related to the time-pattern of the poem. I suggest a method of signs equivalating the metric foot and long and short rests within that unit. For spoken poetry, for poems approaching song, and indeed for the reading of any of these–since we are never without the reflection of sound which exists when we imagine words–a code of pauses would be valuable.

Elisabeth Däumer, Context for “Waterlily Fire”

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By Elisabeth Däumer, Eastern Michigan University
Published 2012/05/10

Rukeyser composed this five-part poem over the span of four years (1958-1962) in response to a fire at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, which destroyed two of Monet’s Waterlily panels. Beloved by New Yorkers, the paintings had been acquired just three years prior, during the Monet revival that seized Europe and the United States, and that inaugurated a radical revaluation of the painter’s late work previously rejected as formless and passé. Now these same paintings, among them the waterlilies that the aging Monet had painted, again and again, over the last three decades of his life, were celebrated for the freedom of their brushstroke and a luminescent openness credited with shaping the new way of “seeing” introduced by Abstract Expressionists.1

Both the acquisition of the paintings and their destruction, which provoked an outpouring of sympathy from people across the nation, was captured in two issues of Life Magazine.2 As an artist, New Yorker, and friend of a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, Richard Griffith, Rukeyser was deeply attuned to the poignant story of the paintings and their loss.3

In the paintings’ dissolution of fixed forms, their attention to the changing movement of water and the play of color and light that constitutes their endless appeal, Rukeyser found a pictorial analogue to her own poetic search for a “language of water,” undergirded by a relational vision in which everything is connected in fluid, sometimes mysterious, ways.4 “Due to their openness,” as art critic Sagner-Düchtung explains, “Monet’s late paintings defined a new relationship” (59) both between nature and self and between viewer and work. In this new way of seeing, inspired by Monet’s effort to “represent the various phenomena of reality in their close interweaving with unknown reality” (29), clear demarcations between nature and self as much as between viewer and work are dissolved; the increasingly abstract and unfinished style of Monet’s late waterlily paintings creates an impression both of infinite openness and luminous unity between water, sky, flowers–a unity into which the viewer herself, deprived of the firm anchor of a stable perspective, is compelled to partake. Grasping for ways of describing the effect of Monet’s late impressionistic paintings, contemporary critics of his late work turned to Far Eastern Religions “in order to express forms of consciousness for which [they] could not find other words” (Monet and Japan 60).5 Although “Monet was no Buddhist,” art critics Virginia Sape and David Bromfield remind us, “he had been inspired by Japanese paining, whose very meaning lay in breaking down the boundaries between the self and nature” (60). That Rukeyser was deeply responsive to the painting’s implicit Bhuddist consciousness is apparent in her poem’s association of the waterlily with the Lotus, the sacred flower of Buddhism, which in part of four of “Waterlily Fire” epitomizes not only enlightenment, but a dialogic ethics rooted in the non-coercive gift of language: “I speak to you . You speak to me.”6

Rukeyser’s poem brings her multiple identifications with Monet’s waterlily panels into play, immediately, when she depicts the destruction of the paintings as a life-altering event with inescapable ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual meanings: —“Noontime of my one hour”—through which “the moment walks” (CP 405-6). In addition, by relating the ravaging force of fire with the fragile beauty of the waterlily and its Asian counterpart, the lotus, the title’s surreal image of burning waterlilies is charged with the disturbing echoes of two recent historic traumas: the searing fire of the atom bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, designed to kill a people, whom President Truman, defending the atomic attack, dismissed as “savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic”; and, if more obliquely, the Shoah, the total fire that almost annihilated the Jewish people.7 In subsequent sections of the poem, the resonance of its central paradox, fusing beauty and destruction, East and West, nature and technology, women and men, extends to the terrifying specter of global nuclear disaster and the war in Vietnam.

Significantly, in Rukeyser’s panoramic poem, the eruptive fire at the museum serves as catalyst for a poetic meditation in extremis, less on the destructive violence of war than on the fragility of human boundaries, the primacy of relation, and on Rukeyser’s responsibilities as woman, poet, and activist. The poem’s movement from local event to global awareness, from female solidarity to an all encompassing humanism, and from a childhood steeped in the antagonistic history of Manhattan to an anti-nuclear protest, is accentuated by refrains of ever expanding consciousness, beginning with “whatever can come to a wall can come to this wall” in part one (CP 406), to “Whatever can come to a woman can come to me,” in part five (409); this feminist insight into our shared vulnerability as women leads to the speaker’s more expansive humanist recognition of universal relatedness, “Whatever can happen to anyone, can happen to me” (410): We are related passively, through our shared (if often denied) vulnerability to disaster and violation, but also actively, when in our willingness to embrace this recognition, we engage with each other in dialogue and communal action.

Despite her proverbial faith in language, Rukeyser never underestimated the tremendous effort required to fulfill its communicative potential, its promise of truth. “Speech between people,” as one of her early poems suggests, is an “effort,” and the fear of openness and self-revelation as strong as the longing for intimacy (CP 9). Nor does the consciousness of our existential interrelatedness facilitate the task of communicating across entrenched social and cultural divisions, whose long histories include the atrocities of racism and genocide. Thus in “Waterlily Fire,” Rukeyser’s explicit invocation of dialogue—“I speak to you. You speak to me. Is that fragile?”—becomes the subject of reflective inquiry (of a koan or puzzle) rather than solely a fact to be proclaimed, suggesting a sharpened awareness of the tenuousness of language and its stunted role in the wake of Cold War insistence on a starkly binary vision of human coexistence, according to which the demonized “other” can only be held in check by nuclear arms and compulsively erected barriers, both physical and mental.

Notes
1 See Michael Leja’s “The Monet Revival and New York School Abstraction” in Monet in the 20th Century, by Paul Hayes Tucker with George T.M. Shackelford and MaryAnne Stevens (London : Royal Academy of Arts; Boston: Museum of Fine Arts; New Haven: Published in association with Yale University Press, 1998), pp.98-108.2
2 “Old Master’s Modern Heirs,” Life December 2, 1957, pp. 94-99; “Fiery Peril in a Showcase of Modern Art, Life April 28, 1958, 53-56.
3 On the day of the fire, Rukeyser, as she recalls in the extensive footnote to “Waterlily Fire,” “was coming to keep an appointment with my friend the Curator of the Museum’s Film Library, Richard Griffith, to whom this poem is dedicated” (CP 621).
4 For a discussion of Rukeyser’s language of water see Trudi Witonsky’s essay “’A Language of Water’: Back and Forth with Adrienne Rich and Muriel Rukeyser” Women’s Studies 37 (2008): 337-366.
5 “A New and Strange Beauty. Monet and Japanese Art,” in Monet and Japan. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACT 2601, 2001, pp. 1-63.
6 Collected Poems of Rukeyser, ed. Janet Kaufman and Anne Herzog (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), p. 409. All further references to Rukeyser’s poetry will be marked in the text as CP.
7 Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, “1945, August 6, 10:45 a.m. The atom bomb.” A New Literary History of America, ed. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollers (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 2009), p. 781.

Site Under Construction

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This site is still under construction, but more poems are added each week. Once the site is complete, it will serve as a lively and comprehensive resource for reading, exploring, and teaching the poet Muriel Rukeyser’s multi-facetted work and broad range of interests, from poetry and the visual arts to religion, history, science, and technology. Let us know if you are interested in contributing to the site–for instance, by writing short essays about individual poems or submitting other original work on Muriel Rukeyser, including pedagogical resources.

We are regularly adding Poems, Prose, Long Poems written by Rukeyser to the website. With those poems, we have commentaries, related poems, essays, and further resources. We are also accepting proposals for the Rukeyser Conference on March 15-16, 2013.