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“Every elegy is the present”: Listening to Muriel Rukeyser

February 13, 2021 by Katherine McLeod Leave a Comment

Posted by Katherine McLeod on February 12, 2021

On the night of January 24, 1969, Muriel Rukeyser read from Elegies at a reading that took place in Montreal, Canada. But she didn’t read all of Elegies. She only read “Elegy in Joy” and, before reading it, she commented on the fact that she had never “cut it up” but that she would that night:

Here’s one piece of a long poem, it’s the last of a group called Elegies which one hardly dares name anything anymore. It’s called “Elegy in Joy” and this is just a beginning piece, I wanted to do it tonight this way, I’ve never cut it up. – Muriel Rukeyser

She then proceeds to read “Elegy in Joy,” and she ends the poem after the first section (which explains why, even though she says that it is “the last of a group called Elegies,” it is “just a beginning piece”). As a result of ending the poem where she does – due to having “cut it up” – the audience hears these lines as though they were the end of the poem:

Every elegy is the present: freedom eating our hearts,
death and explosion, and the world unbegun.

We too can hear Rukeyser reading these lines because this reading of Rukeyser’s was recorded, and it has been digitized as part of SpokenWeb. We’ll hear more about SpokenWeb shortly, but let’s start with the sound of Rukeyser reading “Elegy in Joy”:

Muriel Rukeyser introducing and reading “Elegy in Joy”
at the SGW Poetry Series, Montreal, on Jan 24, 1969

What was the occasion for Rukeyser’s reading and how was the recording archived? This blog post explains how we came to have this recording of “Elegy in Joy” and, as part of that explanation, I will tell you about the process that led to my “unarchiving” (Camlot and McLeod) of this recording through the making of ShortCuts (released monthly on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed). ShortCuts listens closely and carefully to short clips of audio from SpokenWeb’s audio collections. It launched in January 2020 (first as Audio of the Month) and it is produced by myself, Katherine McLeod, hosted by Hannah McGregor, and mixed and mastered by Stacey Copeland. When devising the concept of ShortCuts, I wanted the series to be informed by the analogue techniques of cutting and splicing tape, but to consider how these ‘cuts’ work in the digital format of the podcast as literary criticism.

When making a ShortCuts minisode in November 2020, I selected a clip from this 1969 Rukeyser reading, not knowing that it would lead to a connection with Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive and not knowing that it contained a rare recording of “Elegy in Joy.” I was not coming to the recording as a Rukeyser scholar, but I was coming to the recording as a scholar writing a book on recordings of Canadian women poets on the radio and having published on poetry and performance – and I was captivated by Rukeyser’s performance during this reading. Rukeyser begins the reading with a long, somewhat improvised, reflection upon what the poetry reading is as an event: a moment in time, with the listener encountering the sound of the poem as the speaker speaks it, and hearing that sound fully and through the body. It was compelling to hear how Rukeyser then enacted this concept of the reading through her poetry, and to consider what this recording could teach us about archival listening. I ended up creating three minisodes devoted to Rukeyser’s 1969 reading, with the third being released during the same week as the symposium Revisiting Rukeyser’s Elegies. My hope is that these ShortCuts minisodes, along with the sharing of the recording itself and the story of how the recording came to be, contribute to your listening to Rukeyser, for this symposium and for the future.

Sir George Williams University, The Poetry Series (1966-1974)

At Sir George Williams University, now Concordia University, in downtown Montreal, Canada, there was a poetry series held from 1966-1974 for which the recordings have now been digitized and made accessible by SpokenWeb. Here is the description of that series and audio collection:

SGW POETRY READING SERIES
Between 1965 and 1974 members of the Sir George Williams University (SGWU, now Concordia University) English Department in Montreal hosted a series of poetry readings that was conceived as an ongoing encounter between local poets and the avant-garde poetics of some of the most important writers from the United States and the rest of Canada. Sponsored by “The Poetry Committee” of the Faculty of Arts and the SGWU English Department—and organized primarily by English professors Howard Fink, Stanton Hoffman, Wynn Francis, Irving Layton, Roy Kiyooka, and (from 1967-71) George Bowering—these readings involved more than sixty poets from across North America.
Known simply as “The Poetry Series”, audio recordings of these readings were made on Mylar 1 mil. tape using mobile reel-to-reel tape machines. The Concordia University Archives received a grant in 2007 that has allowed all 65 reels of tape (more than 100 hours of audio) to be digitized. So, this sound from an interesting period of transformation in Canadian poetics, and of self-scrutiny for Montreal poetry, represents a rich and useable archive for scholarly research. (“SGW Poetry Series”)

Over 60 poets read in the SGW Poetry Series, with a mix of American and Canadian poets: Margaret Atwood, Margaret Avison, Ted Berrigan, Earle Birney, bpNichol, Robin Blaser, bill bissett, George Bowering, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Maxine Gadd, Allen Ginsberg, Maria Gladys Hindmarch, Daryl Hine, Barbara Howes, Kenneth Koch, Roy Kiyooka, Irving Layton, Dorothy Livesay, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Daphne Marlatt, Jackson Mac Low, Al Purdy, Joe Rosenblatt, F.R. Scott, Charles Simic, Gary Snyder, Diane Wakoski, Phyllis Webb, James Wright, among many others, and – most pertinent to this blog post and as one of the 10 women to read in the series – Muriel Rukeyser.

Rukeyser read at the SGW Poetry Series in downtown Montreal on January 24, 1969. That reading was recorded. The recording sat with all of the other recordings of the series until they were deposited into the university archives in the early 2000s and then were digitized and made accessible through SpokenWeb as literary audio recordings.

The story of how these specific recordings came to be part of SpokenWeb and how they informed the valuing and conceptualizing of literary audio is best told by Jason Camlot, primary investigator of SpokenWeb as a SSHRC-funded partnership grant. You can read the story, as told by Camlot, in a transcribed conversation with Al Filreis and Steve Evans in “Beyond the Text: Literary Archives in the 21st Century” a piece that appears in an entire issue of Amodern devoted to the SGW Poetry Reading Series (Amodern 4, 2015). Or, you can listen to Camlot tell a similar version of this story to producers Cheryl Gladu and Katherine McLeod in the first episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast:

Jason Camlot tells the story of finding the SGW Poetry Series recordings for
“Ep. 1: Stories of SpokenWeb” (The SpokenWeb Podcast)

The story of finding the tapes of the SGW Poetry Series is part of the story of how the Rukeyser recording came to be here today. At the top of this blog post, you will see a photograph of the tape from 1969 that was digitized and made accessible in its entirety here, with comments between poems carefully transcribed by student research assistants. Making the tape accessible is one part of the story, and then listening to it is another. As a critical listening, Rukeyser’s reading in the SGW Poetry Series is examined at length in an attentive close-listening-as-article written by Jane Malcolm (and published in that previously mentioned issue of Amodern). I had not read Malcolm’s article when I first listened to the Rukeyser recording, but, having read it now, I agree with her that, on that January night, the reading provided a space for the poem to become a meeting place: “[T]he SGWU reading series presented Rukeyser with the ideal forum to create the ‘poetry of meeting-places’ she argued for in The Life of Poetry. From the moment Rukeyser asks the audience members (and recording auditors) to summon what we might call their inner poets, she works to destroy the illusion of hierarchy poetry readings tend to reinforce” (Malcolm). That dismantling of expectation is exactly what Rukeyser does at the start of this reading when she speaks at length about why we go to poetry readings – what are we going to listen to – and establishes a sense of shared community through the reading.

The way that Rukeyser began her 1969 reading in Montreal was what caught my attention while selecting an archival audio clip for ShortCuts, and I had to listen to this poet’s voice. Who was this voice? What was this voice? And how was this poet, Rukeyser, not only asking us to consider what a poetry reading can do but also how is she showing us what a recording of a poetry reading can do – then and now? These are the questions that I explore in three ShortCuts minisodes based on this recording.

What follows are transcribed excerpts from ShortCuts that aim to demonstrate how the minisodes have evolved through acts of listening to Rukeyser’s voice, and how connections through this listening have led to “Elegy in Joy.”

ShortCuts 2.2 The Poem Among Us

Welcome to ShortCuts – short stories about how literature sounds. Our ‘short cut’ this month is an archival recording that manages to transport us into the feeling of being at a live poetry reading. […] Poet Muriel Rukeyser puts it beautifully and inquisitively when she says that we go to poetry readings […] to experience something created in that space and and that time that we all share together: “something is what we call shared, something is arrived at – there.” […] Rukeyser’s opening statement [to her reading in 1969 in Montreal] helps us to understand what we are listening to when listening to an archival recording, one that is far removed from the event itself. Following Rukeyser’s line of thought, in archival listening, we listen to a recording of relationality unfolding, creating space for the poem to be among us, between us, there.

Listen to the full audio of this ShortCuts minisode here.

ShortCuts 2.4 You Are Here

In [Rukeyser’s 1969] reading, there are poems in which one is acutely aware of being together, listening, even while listening to the recording apart. So how did her reading create that effect? Let’s listen to one more short cut from that same reading – a poem called “Anemone.” It’s one that not only exemplifies the creation of connection between the poet and audience but it’s also one that expresses the ecological attention of her story: the ways in which we are bound to each other through the earth and, in this case, through the ocean. […] Listen to how she creates a relationality through this poem. Listen to the breath that the poem creates. Listen with your body as the poem breathes in and out. It is breathing. Hear it forge a connection with the audience, and ask yourself what it would feel like to hear it in 1969, and what it feels like to hear it now […] “Anemone” [is] a poem that creates a space of listening that is, at once, oceanic and intimate, and a poem that says to the listener: “You are here.”

Listen to the full audio of this ShortCuts minisode here.

ShortCuts 2.5 Connections

In this season of ShortCuts we’ve spent some time in a 1969 recording of poet Muriel Rukeyser, and we’re going to stay in that recording for this minisode, partly due to the depth of material within this single recording and partly as an opportunity to reflect upon what a minisode can do – through archival listening – to make connections. Rukeyser once said that poetry is “a meeting place” and this minisode suggests that, like poetry, a podcast is a meeting place. Listen to find out how we arrive at this meeting place through a recording of “Elegy in Joy” and listen again, now, to the words: “Every elegy is the present.”

Find this ShortCuts minisode here after its release on Feb 15, 2021.

Resources

Camlot, Jason. “The Sound of Canadian Modernisms: The Sir George Williams University Poetry Series, 1966-74.” Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 46 no. 3, 2012, p. 28-59.

Camlot, Jason and Katherine McLeod. “Introduction: Unarchiving the Literary Event.” CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019.

Camlot, Jason, Al Filreis, and Steve Evans. “Literary Archives in the 21st Century.” Amodern 4 (March 2015), https://amodern.net/article/beyond-text/.

Gander, Catherine. Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection. Edinburgh University Press, 2013.

Gladu, Cheryl and Katherine McLeod, producers. “Stories of SpokenWeb.” The SpokenWeb Podcast, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/stories-of-spokenweb/.

Malcolm, Jane. “The Poem Among Us, Between Us, There: Muriel Rukeyser’s Meta-Poetics and the Communal Soundscape.” Amodern 4 (March 2015), http://amodern.net/article/poem-among-us/.

McLeod, Katherine. “Connections.” ShortCuts 2.5 (Feburary 2021), https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/shortcuts/.

—. “The Poem Among Us.” ShortCuts 2.2 (November 2020), https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-poem-among-us/.

—. “You Are Here.” ShortCuts 2.4 (January 2021), https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/you-are-here/.

Mitchell, Christine. “Again the Air Conditioners: Finding Poetry in the Institutional Archive.” Amodern 4 (March 2015), https://amodern.net/article/again-air-conditioners/.

Rukeyser, Muriel. “Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969.” SpokenWeb, 24 January 1969, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/muriel-rukeyser-at-sgwu-1969/.

“SGW Poetry Series” SpokenWeb Montreal, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/.

SpokenWeb, https://spokenweb.ca/.

Dr. Katherine McLeod (@kathmcleod) researches archives, performance, and poetry. She has co-edited the collection CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Jason Camlot, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). She is writing a monograph (under contract with Wilfrid Laurier University Press) that is a feminist listening to recordings of women poets reading on CBC Radio. She produces monthly audio content for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts as part of The SpokenWeb Podcast feed. She is the 2020-2021 Researcher-in-Residence at the Concordia University Library. http://katherinemcleod.ca/

Trudi Witonsky and Elisabeth Daumer: A Visit with Louise Kertesz–Pioneer of Rukeyser Studies

August 11, 2019 by Elisabeth Daumer 5 Comments

When we told Louise she was a pioneer of Rukeyser Studies, she didn’t quite believe us. It took some time to convey to her just how influential her book, The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser, has been. Published in 1980, it has served as a touchstone for those of us who’d stumbled onto Rukeyser during our student days, and, wondering why no one had told or taught us about this remarkable poet, turned to Louise’s book, the first monograph devoted entirely to a serious discussion of Rukeyser’s sprawling oeuvre and its critical (mis)reception. After its publication, however, Louise disappeared from academic circles and became both the most consequential and least known of Rukeyser scholars.

We, two long-time Rukeyser aficionadas, were encouraged by Louise’s personable emails in response to our question about whether we could meet with her sometime. A bit shy, we were reassured by her warmth and self-deprecating candor when she welcomed us in her new home in Grosse Pointe, a leafy suburb of Detroit, where she lives with her daughter Nina, grandson Dominic, and Leo, the dog.

Our expectations of Louise had been shaped by the correspondence we had read between Louise and Muriel (available at the Library of Congress archives). The determination and confidence that manifested in her first letter to Muriel Rukeyser, prepared us for someone impressively capable and slightly formidable.

“Dear Miss Rukeyser”

“Dear Miss Rukeyser,” the first letter begins. “While preparing a talk on contemporary women writers a few months ago, I was surprised to find no substantial study of your work, which I admire very much.” She commenced to compile a bibliography of reviews of Muriel’s work, and to read the limited number of critical works that mentioned the poetry. “Wading through some of this material which is helpful but far from satisfying, I have decided to write a book-length study of your work.”

She asks Muriel if there are any other projects like this under way, and explains her qualifications and situation: “I am a former college English teacher at home with two small children. I hold the Ph.D. (1970) from Illinois. Contemporary poetry by American women is my main interest, and I would like to devote my scholarly energies to demonstrating its vitality and importance and its rightful though neglected place in literary history.”

The task I am setting myself is a great one: understanding the development of your work in its historical, political, and philosophical contexts and in a context of literary history in which the work of women poets is not slighted. I will learn a lot. I hope to teach it well.

How daunting a task! All of Muriel’s work? When one has two small children at home? In the pre-Internet era, lacking access to online journals, email, and sophisticated computers?

Louise editing her dissertation with Nina by her side

Subsequent letters to Muriel which included organized lists of questions and reports on progress further revealed Louise’s ability to analyze, organize, and to produce from almost nothing! There had been so little published on Muriel; Louise had been forced to rely on herself in completing this project.

In her living room, Louise had assembled her Rukeyser stash—copies of her many books of poems, articles, and reviews, and a folder of her own correspondence with the poet. She began at the beginning—by reading to us from her first letter to Rukeyser. And then there were the bad reviews! Louise read to us from the ones that had most galvanized her – the sexist ones that commented on Rukeyser’s appearance, the dismissive ones where the reviewer seemed merely to list topics – “there are planes” – without engaging the work itself. This sense of entitled disdain, it became clear, had motivated the book, Louise’s defense.

We found ourselves jumping from topic to topic – there was so much to ask, so much to say, so much to connect! At one point we asked about the number of times that Louise had met Muriel, and, in an offhand way, she mentioned that she had three tapes of conversations with the poet. Tapes??!! Cassettes, three of them, double-sided, not of very high quality, Louise explained, self-deprecatingly. Money was tight at the time. A vigorous discussion of digitization possibilities commenced!

“Maybe there should be a category called Book”

And then there was more — the genres, how Louise had read Willard Gibbs, the difficulty of coming to understand thermodynamics, scientists’ reactions to the book, the reception of The Traces of Thomas Hariot, and how, in the face of repeated questions about what these texts were, Muriel responded: “Maybe there should be a category called Book.”

During lunch preparations we talked about how each of us found her way to Rukeyser—or, more like it, how Rukeyser found us. Always, it seems by coincidence or serendipity, never as part of a course, or required university reading, but circuitously, by way of a sudden encounter, a friend’s comment, another poet’s remark, or a book we happened to pick up. Louise remembers her friend from college, Mary Philbin, discovering and reciting from “The Ballad of Orange and Grape” with infectious delight.

Eventually we asked what had happened–why she hadn’t pursued academia and teaching. How was it that she could write such a fine book and then leave? Louise had had an interview in the university English department where she was part-time teaching; she had brought her book, listed it on her CV. But the all-male committee clearly hadn’t read it. They asked questions about sixteenth-century authors; she did her job talk on Richard Eberhart. The committee ignored the book. Only one person—Charles Baxter–approached her after the interview and said, with what she recognized as a smile of sympathy, ‘They just didn’t get it.”

“That’s what Muriel gave me, though . . . a sense of possibility when the way seems blocked.”

A practical person, she had to go on. She was going through a divorce, she had two young children, she found editorial work and eventually became a writer for Automotive News. “That’s what Muriel gave me, though,” she said, “a sense of possibility when the way seems blocked.” So she found herself traveling in the Midwest and South, covering United Auto Worker activities as well as the new Japanese auto plants. Later she became an editor, took on topics such as business insurance and healthcare, and finally, as an independent, took on copy editing (of scholarly books!) and ghostwriting.

Repeatedly, throughout our lively conversation, Louise would halt and say—I haven’t talked like this in ages, with anyone! You both, she said looking at us, still belong to the “essay” generation. Having just moved from Chicago, she’s tried a couple of book groups for intellectual stimulation. She got blank stares at a reading group when she commented that she thought the writer under discussion needed a better editor: “‘Memories of the past’? What else are memories of?” A second group that stuck to searching out symbolism in “The Dead” wasn’t much more satisfying. Louise feels she created a meaningful life for herself working with words– although she has regrets about not pursuing a profession in literature and teaching.

Trudi Witonsky and Louise Kertesz, August 1, 2019

And we began reading her poems together, marvelling at their continued–no!– renewed urgency. Lamenting the lack of appreciation for “creative disorder” in contemporary U.S. politics, Louise read from Rukeyser’s ninth elegy, “The Antagonists,” in which she celebrates the creative power of conflict:

The forms of incompleteness in our land
pass from the eastern and western mountains where
the seas meet the dark islands, where the light
glitters white series on the snowlands, pours its wine
of lenient evening to the center. Green
on shadows of Indiana, level yellow miles . . .
The prairie emblems and the slopes of the sky
and desert stars enlarging in the frost
redeem us like our love and will not die.
All origins are here, and in this range
the changing spirit can make itself again,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
and form developing
American out of conflict. (qtd. Kertesz, Rukeyser’s Poetic Vision 215)

We read Rukeyser’s “The Ballad of Orange and Grape,” grappling with the persistent ambiguity of its meanings and the question it raises about teaching “the young ones”:

How can we go on reading
and make sense out of what we read? —
How can they write and believe what they’re writing,
the young ones across the street,
while you go on pouring grape into ORANGE
and orange into the one marked GRAPE —?
(How are we going to believe what we read and we write
and we hear and we say and we do?). (Kaufman and Herzog, Collected Poems 492-93)

And, asked about Rukeyser’s time in Mexico, Louise read to us “A Charm for Cantinflas,” an homage to the Mexican comedian, actor, and filmmaker Maria Fortino Alfonso Moreno Reyes, known as “Cantinflas,” and to the power of dance, laughter, eros, art, ice cream, comedy, bourbon, and beer:

After the lights and after the rumba and after the bourbon
and after the beer
and after the drums and after the samba and after the
ice cream and not long after
failure, loss, despair, and loss and despair
There was the laughter and there was Cantinflas at last
and his polka
doing the bumps with a hot guitar

Louise repeated, with warm appreciation and wonder, Rukeyser’s final stanza, where

on this stage always the clown of our living
gives us our sunlight and our incantation
as sun does, laughing, shining, reciting dawn, noon, and down,
making all delight and healing all ills
like faraway words on jars, the labels in Protopapas’ window:
marshmallow, myrtle, peppermint, pumpkin, sesame, sesame, squills.
(Collected Poems 263-64)

What an offering of riches! We tasted the words and, as Rukeyser might say, became whole again.

Finally one of us looked at a clock. Almost seven hours had passed as we talked, laughed, asked questions, petted Leo, had lunch, read and debated poetry together. There was still so much to discuss! We corralled Louise’s grandson, Dominic, on his way out the door, into taking photos of us. He took three snaps in a mere second. (Did you finish already? He smiled, yes.) We said goodbye to Leo, and Louise walked us out. It was hard to leave, hard to say goodbye after such an exhilarating day. Hours later we exchanged emails – we were still coming down from it all. Even days later, our elation persists.

Elisabeth Daumer, Trudi Witonsky, and Louise Kertesz

We hope Louise will return to Rukeyser scholarship! We need her–especially now, when her insights and first-hand encounter with Rukeyser will prove invaluable for anyone taking on the daunting task of composing a biography of this twentieth-century maverick whose life, and work, defied compliance and “narrow success” for the adventure of uncharted roads and creative largesse.

The Power of Suicide: Muriel Rukeyser’s Poetic Responses to Sylvia Plath

December 15, 2016 by mthunter22 1 Comment

Posted on December 15, 2016 by Arica Frisbey

When it comes to Sylvia Plath and her death, the creative response from fellow poets is so very different. Ted Hughes, her estranged husband, wrote an entire book of poems in regards to her (Birthday Letters). Meanwhile, her friend/rival, Anne Sexton, composed a two paged elegy in her honor (“Sylvia’s Death”).

Then there is Muriel Rukeyser, a female poet who does not make an appearance in Plath’s journals (though Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich, who associated with and praised Rukeyser, did make it in), who wrote six lines between two poems, in concerns to Plath. These poems, which shall be discussed, are “Not to Printed, Not to be Said, Not to be Thought,” “The Power of Suicide.” Notably, she also wrote a poem called “Suicide Blues,” where Rukeyser’s speaker is reminiscent of Plath, though it was published about twenty-two years before Plath’s suicide. Due to this, the poem will also be discussed in this context.

Rukeyser was a matriarch of many things–a son, poetry, feminism, and the list continues. Yet, many do not know her name, let alone her work. When asked, “Who is the most influential feminist poet of the 20^th century?,” you do not get a chorus of “Rukeyser, of course!” The answer is Plath, almost always Plath (with a bit of Sexton, and Rich thrown in for good measure). I feel that Rukeyser recognized that lack of recognition: that despite a career of almost forty-five years, with over ten volumes of poetry, a novel, and countless other pieces, she was going unnoticed.

Was it perhaps because she was not quite as willing to impart personal feelings and details in her writing, like Plath? That she instead wrote of social and political issues and spoke out against a woman’s lower position in society, and thus did not fit a mold, whereas Plath was a superwoman–mother, career-woman, good looking and tragic, right down to her sometimes blond, sometimes brown hair, curled just so? Or was it because Plath defected to suicide, and Rukeyser was still alive? The answer is most likely a combination of all of the above, the amounts differing and equaling, but I feel that of the above options, Rukeyser felt that it was mostly the last. Why else would she have written “Not to be Printed, Not to be Said, Not to be Thought”?

She was aware that the poem’s opinion was unpopular–the title reflects that the topic is “not” proper. Yet, as always, Rukeyser continues her thought: “I’d rather be Muriel/than be dead and be Ariel”(Rukeyser, 2005, p. 554). It’s a bold thought, and a thought that could be seen as blasphemous, especially by the feminist movement, who had crowned Plath as their literary martyr, with her fierce, feminine voice (Passin). (This was back in the days when Ted Hughes was violently disliked and misunderstood for his part in Plath’s demise, to the point of feminist fans desecrating their figurehead’s grave to remove “Hughes” from her name.)

Yet, this was Rukeyser quietly calling out the worship and mythologizing of Plath. By using the name of Plath’s last collection to reference the late poet, Rukeyser is, in effect, using synecdoche (substituting a part for the whole) to reflect exactly what happened to Plath– her dissolution as a person, now simply a past personality. Plath was no longer there to set any record straight. She wasn’t available to coax any interpretation of her work–and so it had outgrown the person, and thus, personified the poet (Passin). This is a sentiment that has been expressed by other writers analyzing the work, one of the more recent being Laura Passin in her essay, “The Power of Suicide and the Refusal of Mythology–Sylvia Plath and Muriel Rukeyser,” published on this website.

The “Ariel sensation” would probably not have occurred if Plath had been alive to see the book’s publication. In a way, Rukeyser recognized this with her line “I’d rather be Muriel/than be dead…” (lines 1-2, “Not to be Printed…”). This line is a way to say that, because she is alive, Rukeyser can call the shots on how she is perceived. She can correct rumors, or coax perceptions, but all around she is responsible for how her work and her person is received and perceived. She is herself, and not what others have painted of her, based on a few facts and a collection of poems.

This is not to say that Rukeyser disdained Plath–rather, I think the lines were written with sympathy, and sadness, for both herself and Plath for their conundrum. This enigma is rooted in that Plath died young and did not see her massive success, whereas Rukeyser would experience only short bursts of massive success throughout her longer life.

Rukeyser, when it came to Plath, seemed to wish for a new way to remember her. She wrote a few poems- not anguished and apologetic (like Hughes) or wistful for the past (like Sexton)–but deeply mournful, like a grandmother who lost a grandbaby too soon to the world. Her poem, “The Power of Suicide” isn’t a rant, an extended “I’m sorry,” or a reminiscence. It reminds me most of a vision sparked by intuition–a mother senses something is amiss with a child before she disappears. It is that, as well as a vision of inspiration, an urging of muses to produce and write:

The potflower on the windowsill says to me

In words that are green-edged red leaves:

Flower flower flower flower

Today for the sake of all the dead Burst into flower.
(Rukeyser, 2005, p. 430)

If we read this poem as a memoriam to Plath, then we can also read it as Rukeyser taking on a crusade–it is as if Rukeyser declared that “Plath cannot write any more- but I will write to try to fill the void her words left.”

Rukeyser could have taken to writing after Plath’s death with the view of Plath as an enemy stealing the spotlight, but she did not because she could not. She recognized that they wrote on different topics–while Rukeyser wrote of love and work during the Spanish Civil War in her novel Savage Coast, Plath published an account of madness in an American Golden Girl via The Bell Jar. Their preferred pronouns even differed–Plath lived in a first-person singular world, Rukeyser in a first-person plural or a-third person world.

It is notable, however, to consider the poem, “Suicide Blues” (Rukeyser, 2005, p. 216). Based on the title alone, one may assume that Plath wrote it–but no, this is a Rukeyser work. However, she does seem to be speaking for Plath, echoing various sentiments and perhaps retelling the story of Plath’s death, despite the poem having appeared in 1941. She begins with the declaration “I want to speak in my voice!/I want to speak in my real voice!” (Lines One-Two, “Suicide Blues”).

This reminds me of Plath, both when she’s complaining about how her writing is only “lyrical sentimentality” (Plath, 2000, p. 38) and when she’s telling her mother that “these poems will make my name” (Plath, 1975, p. 468) because Plath’s main concern in both cases was her voice–the first was weak, and then it strengthened with Ariel. Then in lines four and five, Rukeyser seems to note Plath’s hesitation initially with adopting a harsh empowered voice: “I am not ready to go there./Not with my real voice.” (Lines four-five, “Suicide Blues”)

The “tall man” and “singing woman” in stanzas three and four could be read in two different ways. The man and woman could stand for other male and female poets with “his” and “her real voice” (line eight, and eleven, respectively). Or, specifically, they could stand for Hughes (a tall man who had no problem being rugged with his words) and either Anne Sexton (whom Plath considered a literary rival and friend) or Assia Wevill, who wished to be recognized as a poet, but after Plath’s death became known as only Hughes’s mistress.

Then there is a shift in the fifth stanza, that could be the speaker, as Plath, simply speaking to the audience, or perhaps it is Rukeyser speaking to Plath: “Are you able to imagine truth?/Evil has conspired a world of death,/ An unreal voice.” If read as Rukeyser speaking to Plath, then this stanza is a warning that has arrived too late. It reads, to me, as a warning of what will happen to a real voice “in a world of death” (line thirteen)- it will be misread, and therefore, become “unreal” (line fourteen).

And thus, when this “death-world” again appears in stanza six, it is to help tell of the world’s perception of Plath’s death “in front of the little children” (line sixteen), taking notable details and pumping them up for effect. Because of this, we get Plath “burning” (line seventeen), with the remainder of the line, “out of the window” bringing to mind reports of Frieda and Nicholas’s cries being heard out on the street. There are enemies calling friends (line eighteen)–or in this case, the Hughes, who were the primary informers of Plath’s death to the rest of the family and friends, and often are perceived as the enemy after Plath died. And of course, “my legs went running around that building/ dancing to the suicide blues” (lines nineteen- twenty) recalls Plath’s downstairs neighbor’s memory of Plath pacing in the flat above him on the night she died.

As for the second to last stanza, the sea imagery reminds me of Plath’s works “Full Fathom Five” and “Lorelei,” as well as “The Earthenware Head” being conjured up via “and my severed head swam around that ship/ three times around and it wouldn’t go down” (Lines twenty- four and twenty-five). Notably, these are all poems from Plath’s first book, The Colossus, which only had a modest reception compared to Ariel, which is when Plath was spotlighted.

Now, the last stanza reflects Rukeyser’s other mentioned work, “The Power of Suicide,” with its quatrain and the presence of flowers. However, in this instance, the flowers are not “for the sake of all the dead” (line four, “The Power of Suicide”). Now there is “too much life, my darling” (line twenty-six), evoking the grandmother image again at the use of pet-names; “too much life to kill” (line twenty-nine).

This line, I believe, sums up Rukeyser’s universal feeling among the poems. Yes, Plath was in part lost due to the Suicide Blonde myth. Yes, a great poet was lost before she could produce more, and another great poet is lost despite the production of more work. But, as Rukeyser asserts, there is “too much life to kill” in the voice of Sylvia Plath by the power vested to her by suicide, and Rukeyser seems more than proud to record memoriams and reminders of humanity for female poets, even for one who never met “Muriel, mother of everyone.”

Works Cited

Passin, Laura. “Laura Passin: The Power of Suicide and the Refusal of Mythology–Sylvia Plath and Muriel Rukeyser.” Muriel Rukeyser. Web. 5 Dec. 2015.

Plath, Sylvia, and Aurelia Schober Plath. Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950-1963. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. 468. Print.

_____. The Colossus. London: Faber and Faber, 1972. Print.

_____. Ariel. London: Harper & Row, 1966.

_____. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Karen V. Kukil. New York: Anchor Books, 2000. Print.

Rukeyser, Muriel. The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Ed. Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog. Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 216, 430, 554. Print.

Discovering Muriel Rukeyser as a Young Writer

September 8, 2014 by mthunter22 2 Comments

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Laura Passin

On her 16^th birthday, my best friend Jess received a copy of Out of Silence: Selected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser from her mother. Jess and I didn’t live in the same state, so we were avid letter writers; after that birthday, her letters always included at least a snippet of mesmerizing, spiky poetry:

For sensual friction
is largely fiction
and partly fact
and so is tact
and so is love,
and so is love.

The best way to describe my reaction to Rukeyser’s poetry is to say I got a raging crush on it, the kind of crush only teenagers get. I would turn lines over in my head and try to figure out how the unsettling oddness of the punctuation and spacing worked with the powerful emotions the poem created in me.

“When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning,
two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered,
Man. You didn’t say anything about woman.”
“When you say Man,” said Oedipus, “you include women
too. Everyone knows that.” She said, “That’s what
you think.”

I started scouring bookstores and libraries for Rukeyser, eventually finding a copy of Out of Silence at a Borders, nestled into the tiny poetry section whose spines I had already memorized. Many of the poems in it were beyond my understanding, though they still captivated me with their unusual music and imagery. It was Kate Daniels’s introduction, though, that brought Rukeyser into my personal history. I was a budding feminist, an aspiring writer, and a semi-out queer girl living in the South, lonely as hell and wondering if there really was a world where I would get to be myself without apology. Here was an openly bisexual woman who lived life entirely on her own terms, even when the political and social costs to her career were staggering. I read Out of Silence until it started to fall apart. It was more than a book: it was proof. I could be a poet; I could be smart and political without being cruel; I could find a community; I could love women as well as men. I could choose my life.

Out of Silence: Selected Poems — My battered copy: dog-eared, note-littered, spine-broken.

Of course, not everything worked out exactly as planned — but those things I learned from Rukeyser were all true. I am a poet; in fact, I’m a professor of literature, and I teach Rukeyser whenever I get the chance. I am an out queer woman; I am part of a lively world of feminist writers online. I took off the masks and mythologies that seemed inevitable when I was a teenage girl, and I became myself.

Part of the joy of studying Rukeyser’s work is becoming part of an ad hoc community of scholars, all of whom arrive at her poetry and prose through different stories. Some, like me, stumbled onto her poems by accident; others find her name popping up again and again in the history of second wave feminists like Adrienne Rich, who reclaimed her as a kind of living patron saint for women writers. What continues to astonish me about Rukeyser’s writing is that it doesn’t feel dated; my college students, reading her for the first time a century after her birth, find her as revelatory as I did. As I wrote in an essay for The Toast, Rukeyser scholars also tend to be devotees:

I recently attended a symposium celebrating the 100th anniversary of Rukeyser’s birth, and let me tell you, you have not really experienced academia until you’ve found yourself at a conference where you realize that everyone is secretly a fangirl as well as a scholar. You let your guard down. You imagine extravagant, international galas celebrating your idol. You talk honestly about what a privilege it is to teach something this brilliant, and you enjoy your own humility. (My student, last quarter, on reading “The Book of the Dead“: “I’ve never read poetry like this. I’ve never read anything like this.”)

One of my former students, a poet himself, changed his cover photo on Facebook to a black and white photo of Rukeyser. She watched over his digital world.

Now that I’m no longer that misfit teenager, my relationship to the poems in Out of Silence (and, of course, the indispensable Collected Poems, edited by Anne Herzog and Janet Kaufman) has changed. Rukeyser’s writing about speech and silence has new meaning for me after watching my mother suffer from dementia—I can no longer read “The Speed of Darkness,” with its complex celebration of individual life in the midst of mass death and war, without thinking of my mother, born during WWII, losing her own singular voice. Rukeyser implores us to recognize that silence can also be a presence—“this same silence is become speech / With the speed of darkness.” Reading this poem for me now, as a 35-year-old woman, becomes a reminder that being fully present for another human being is to take a powerful stand against oblivion:

I look across at the real
vulnerable involved naked
devoted to the present of all I care for
the world of its history leading to this moment.

I read Rukeyser for many reasons, but I teach her to answer this call. She’s been an integral part of my personal history for twenty years; I owe it not to her, but to “the present of all I care for” to continue her legacy.

Muriel Rukeyser and Other Writers

May 19, 2014 by mthunter22 Leave a Comment

Posted on May 19, 2014 by Catherine Gander

In just a few days, I will have the pleasure of chairing a panel at the American Literature Association’s annual conference at Washington, DC. The panel, organised by Elisabeth Däumer (herself a force of intellectual connectivity of the sort Rukeyser celebrated) will bring together five established and emerging Rukeyser scholars including myself and Professor Däumer: Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, whose diligent scholarship recently brought Rukeyser’s ‘lost novel’ Savage Coast to light and publication; Laura Passin, whose work on the politico-aesthetic strains of contemporary American poetry traces valuable lines of influence to the lyrical, subjective voice of earlier confessional verse, and Stefania Heim, whose attention to Rukeyser’s mythic historicism has uncovered illuminating points of contact with the experimental hybrid writings of (to my mind) one of the greatest living literary innovators, Susan Howe.

As Däumer has explained, this wonderfully diverse and interconnected panel is assembled in response to Rukeyser’s own multivalence. Resisting classification into any strict subset of writer, scholar or activist, Rukeyser embodied and espoused a pluralism that at once related her to, and set her apart from, most of her peers. As the majority of scholarship on Rukeyser (including my own) addresses in some way the elements of her temporal and ideological dislocation – enforced most strongly by her being a lion-hearted, strong-voiced woman as well as a Jew – I will not linger on the matter here. The panel, and the work that runs into and out of it, intends to celebrate and explore the rhizomatic nature of Rukeyser’s work in all of its pragmatic inclusivity.

I use the word ‘pragmatic’ because it strikes me that Rukeyser’s legacy is one to be used. Rukeyser’s richly original and intellectually provocative text, The Life of Poetry, emerged in 1949 as a meeting-place (I employ Rukeyser’s term to avoid the word ‘collection’ due to the book’s overriding dialogic spirit) of ideas, lectures and essays previously gathered under the title ‘the usable truth: communication and poetry’. I have written elsewhere about Rukeyser’s commitment to the use-value of poetry, her tireless crusading for the overcoming of the fear of it, embedded in the conviction that the systems of the social can be addressed at root in the workings of the individual; that the failures of democracy can be located in the fears of the unconscious self. In a 1941 essay for Poetry magazine entitled ‘The Usable Truth’, Rukeyser bemoaned the fact that despite its pragmatic tradition, American education retained an attitude to poetry that located it as something ‘to be memorised and stored…[but] not to be used’:

There is just this one learning, this one branch of your heritage, left. It is very precious, it is to be preserved – in fact, it preserves us, whole ages are given to us by its grace alone… This, of course, is poetry. In a utilitarian culture, this one knowledge is to be taught as being Not for Use.[i]

Rukeyser’s words here connect strongly with Heim’s understanding of her living legacy in Howe. If ‘whole ages are given to us’ through poetry, we are, according to Rukeyser, able to live and learn through the biographies of our ancestors, absorbing and using their words and lives to educate and inform our own. As Heim rightly acknowledges, Rukeyser blends myth and history, shaping the lives of representative others into symbols and paths for present and future generations. Rukeyser’s poetic biographies – her series of ‘Lives’ that include Anne Burlak, Käthe Kollwitz, Akiba and Albert Pinkham Ryder – are such symbols and sign-posts; as are her prose biographies on Wendell Willkie, Willard Gibbs and Thomas Hariot. Heim connects Rukeyser’s aim towards ‘collecting the lives of the dead’ with Howe’s invocation, after Creon in Antigone, to ‘go to the dead and love them’; her approach sets Rukeyser’s neglected play Houdini alongside Howe’s The Liberties (1990) to explore the ways in which, in Heim’s words, ‘these two texts attest that biography has as much to do with the life of the communal imagination, myth, and mind, as it does with the lived lives of the individuals in question; as much to do with the stories we make up and tell each other, as with what has taken place.’ In this way, then, Rukeyser’s own exemplary life joins the host of known and anonymous dead, the ‘packed and leafdrift earth of centuries of falling lives, fallen under our feet’[ii] that constitutes the grounding of all future imaginative experience.

Currently working on a separate (albeit related) project involving pragmatism and intermedial artworks, I can see how Rukeyser’s deeply pragmatic stance to the life of poetry aligns with what Richard Shusterman, in the tradition of John Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, has termed ‘somaesthetics’: ‘a critical, meliorative study of the experience and use of one’s body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation and creative self-fashioning’ that impacts on the self’s relation to society.[iii] Much of Rukeyser’s poetry stems from the memory or documentation of her on-site experience of social realities. As Jane Cooper has noted, ‘she wanted to be there. One way of witnessing was to write. Another was to put her body on the line, literally.’[iv] Forging a meeting place of practice and imagination, site and sight, Rukeyser dismantled traditional mind/body dualisms just as she demolished established binaries of art and science, poetry and prose, myth and history. Like the revisionary, feminist and repossessed voice of the poem ‘Absalom’, Rukeyser spoke an embodied and empowered poetry: ‘I have gained mastery over my heart/I have gained mastery over my two hands… I open out a way.’ Through her work, as Heim attests, Rukeyser reveals the ‘potential for enacting knowledge beyond the borders of the strictly aesthetic’; more than this, Rukeyser resituates poetry as a site and enactment of all human experience, understanding the inextricability of art from the practice of everyday life in a manner championed by Dewey as the key to individual and social improvement (Art as Experience, 1934).

Deweyan pragmatism (Rukeyser was an avid reader of both Dewey and William James) involves a blending of the immediate moment with past experience:

The process of living… is an everlastingly renewed process of acting upon the environment and being acted upon by it together with institution of relations between what is done and what is undergone. Hence experience is necessarily cumulative and its subject matter gains expressiveness because of cumulative continuity.[v]

Rukeyser’s approach to poetry, which is also her approach to being-in-the-world, is Deweyan at core. The reason for this is related to her strong conviction, also shared with Dewey, that our tendency to separate the experience of everyday human existence from the discourse of art and aesthetic experience creates a dangerous isolationism that locks art away in institutions, ossifies poetry, and disables us from treating life artistically. When I read Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics, steeped as they are in the importance of positive valence in emotive responses to the world, I am reminded always of Rukeyser’s imperative to strip the fear from the experience of poetry: ‘Art throws off the covers that hide the expressiveness of experienced things; it quickens us from the slackness of routine and enables us to forget ourselves by finding ourselves in the delight of experiencing the world about us in its varied qualities and forms.’[vi] Rukeyser’s life’s works are what Dewey calls ‘cumulative continuity’, continually enacting her dynamic interaction with her environment and others, and constituting a lesson in living and a celebration of it that extends to a renewed relation with the reader – or, to use Rukeyser’s preferred word, the witness. Her writing is profoundly informed by immediate and by past experience, and although she was, in her own words, an ‘axiom-breaker’, she was also profoundly concerned with the vitality of tradition, with the lives of the ‘many-born’ who ripple through oceans of time, and charge ‘our latest moment with their wave.’[vii]

Rukeyser argues in The Life of Poetry that freedom (a human right) involves the ability to ‘choose a tradition,’ and select representatives of that tradition.[viii] In an essay entitled ‘Under Forty’ (1944) for a Jewish publication, Rukeyser expounds on the idea: ‘if one is free, freedom can extend to a certain degree into the past, and one may choose one’s ancestors, to go with their wishes and their fight.’[ix] Her position chimes with Martin Buber’s, whose writings Rukeyser also read and absorbed. Buber argued that ‘tradition does not consist in letting contents and forms pass on, finished and inflexible,’ but that ‘a generation can only receive the teachings in the sense that it renews them.’[x] Rukeyser’s commitment to renewing and choosing a tradition – an ancestry – relates her in many ways to T.S. Eliot, with whose poetics she had a complex relationship. Elisabeth Däumer’s paper addresses Rukeyser’s readings of Eliot, tracing his rhythms and resonances in her writings, and exploring her reformulations of his criticism, including his attention to ‘the place of tradition, the limitations of art, and his theory of emotion.’ Däumer’s scrutiny falls particularly on this latter aspect, rethinking standard critical responses to Eliot’s objectivism by reading his interest in the affective agencies of poetry in the light of Rukeyser’s ‘concept of total response.’

Affective and somatic aesthetics in the context of tradition also provide pathways into Rowena Kennedy-Epstein’s and Laura Passin’s papers. Kennedy-Epstein focuses on the cross-currents between the lives of Rukeyser and Virginia Woolf, tracing the lines of connection through shared fields of ‘textual, sexual and political radicalism’ and aligning both women’s treatments of the experimental novel as an arena for the espousal of new ways of thinking about war, nationalism and art in times of social upheaval. Rukeyser’s Savage Coast and Woolf’s The Pargiters – daring works of genre hybridity and radical thought, documenting ‘the lives of women in contexts of war, nationalism, education and sexual subjectivity’ – were both ultimately abandoned by their authors, their ideas unpicked and rewoven into the fabric of other, more publishable works (Woolf’s Three Guineas, Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry and several poems). Kennedy-Epstein explores the position of the female experimental writer as offering vital (yet largely ignored) perceptions of state violence and sexual hierarchies.

Passin’s perspective on Plath returns us to feminist revisions of mythology in which Rukeyser advocates a strong female voice arising out of the maternal body (see ‘Absalom’ in its entirety, for example). Critics have tended to position Plath and Rukeyser at opposite ends of the somatic spectrum when it comes to creative impulses, particularly in relation to motherhood. Louise Kertesz, for example, has noted how Rukeyser’s attentions to the subject are ‘quite different’ from the ‘horror’ and ‘lost belief in the value of living’ that accompanies the ‘motherhood poems’ of Plath and Anne Sexton, quoting a line from Rukeyser’s ‘Breaking Open’ to reinforce her point: ‘I’d rather be Muriel than be dead and be Ariel.’[xi] Passin, however, wishes to recontextualise Rukeyser’s responses, addressing her ‘suicide poems’ in particular, and arguing that through these poems, Rukeyser ‘frames and revises the cultural narratives around Plath.’

Both Kennedy-Epstein’s and Passin’s approaches can be said to examine Rukeyser’s Deweyan commitment to art as experiment and experience, her proclivity for embodying and questioning the multiplicity of social selves that one’s interaction with the world requires and enables. Reference to the act of suicide becomes, conversely, an act of creation for Rukeyser, for her reimagining connects to her wider understanding of the poem as a continually renewing process: as an ongoing event, not a finished object. The interconnected variety of the ALA panel brings me, therefore, to another unfinished project of Rukeyser’s, and one that – one day – I hope to be able to bring to light in a more accessible form. In the Rukeyser archives at the Library of Congress is a work, suitably in-progress, entitled In the Beginning. The proposed book is, according to Rukeyser, ‘an anthology of creation’, bringing together extracts of works from a wealth of writers, thinkers, scientists, filmmakers and artists. Rukeyser explains the importance of humankind’s ‘glimpses of understanding’ of the nature of creation:

Whether it is the root in fire or in word, in the lightning flash or the great dreaming and active cycle that springs out of central rest, whether we see it reflected in the act of love or the entrance of birth, it illuminates the world and ourselves to us.[xii]

In the end, In the Beginning allows us our own glimpse of what the ALA panel will no doubt bring into more sustained focus: that the way to understand and illuminate ‘the world and ourselves to us’ is not through aesthetic enclosure or the possessive grasping of knowledge, but through active, intersubjective experience, and the forging of new, creative paths that share our lives with the living words and images of others.

[i] Rukeyser, ‘The Usable Truth’, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 58 (July, 1941), 206-209, 206.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, second edition (Roman and Littlefield, 1992; 2000), 267.

[iv] Cooper, ‘And Everything a Witness of the Buried Life’, in How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?, eds. Herzog and Kaufman (New York, 1999), 3-16, 7.

[v] John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934) (Perigee Books, 2005), 108

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, eds. Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 182.

[viii] The Life of Poetry (1949) (Ashfield, Massachusetts: Paris Press, 1996), x.

[ix] Ibid, x; Rukeyser, ‘Under Forty’, Contemporary Jewish Record, VII (February, 1944), 4-9, 8.

[x] Buber, ‘Teaching and Deed’, in Will Herberg, ed., The Writings of Martin Buber (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), 317-324, 318.

[xi] Kertesz, The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 225, 344.

[xii] MR Papers, Library of Congress, 1:21.

On the centenary of Muriel Rukeyser’s birth: the lives of a poet

December 14, 2013 by mthunter22 1 Comment

Posted on December 14, 2013 by Catherine Gander

This post, in celebration of the centenary of Muriel Rukeyser’s birth (15.12.13), is a more personal one than my last. I want to evoke, as far as I can, a feeling as well as an understanding of the enormous influence Rukeyser has had on the lives of those who knew her, and those who have read her. Encountering her work, whether it is her poetry, her prose biographies, her dramatic scripts, or her essays, is invariably an intellectually invigorating experience. The act of reading becomes, with a Rukeyser text, simultaneously an act of reception and response – an act of witness, as she termed it – that sends the mind flying in several directions; that instantly instigates curiosity; that generates a conversation between text, writer and reader, seemingly started eons ago and yet constantly fresh and exciting. If this sounds gushing, so be it. There are some things (admittedly, very few) I find in Rukeyser’s work that aren’t particularly ‘good’; there are some efforts that even fail (and this was seldom her fault; she was vastly undervalued and even feared; she was almost buried by the academy: she was significantly ahead of her time). But, aside from the fact that the overwhelming majority of Rukeyser’s oeuvre is exceptionally good and still strikingly resonant, I’m not sure she would have had it any other way. As her friend and student Laura Manuelidis noted to me, Rukeyser knew full well that to produce something good involved on occasion producing something ‘bad’: ‘Being bad is part of it’, she used to say to me, ‘don’t erase the bad; let it be’. The result renders Rukeyser’s writing a true gift to the world, because it communicates not only the deepest and sharpest and most vital (in both senses) messages of human life in all of its forms and motions, but that it also articulates the ‘coming into being’[1] processes of that life.

The effect of Rukeyser’s work, I am trying to argue, is in large part what it creates, and continues to create long after her books have been closed (only waiting to be reopened). I am reminded most, as Marian Evans and Christine White have been, of her much-quoted poem, ‘Islands’, the first short stanza of which is:

O for God’s sake

they are connected

underneath

Each piece of writing, each artistic endeavour of Rukeyser’s, encourages us – the ‘bathers’ in the sea surrounding the ‘islands’ – to plunge our heads under the water we are treading and see the truth. ‘The bathers think / islands are separate like them’, Rukeyser ends the poem, in two of the most simple yet eye-opening and heart-breaking lines in modern poetry. Her works are calls to connective conversation. ‘If we could touch one another, /if these our separate entities could come to grips’, wrote Rukeyser in the poem ‘Effort at Speech Between Two People’, when she was just 22 years old.

Her cumulative works are a life narrative in which we all have a role; in which every life is connected, from the lives of the Gauley Bridge miners and their families, from Thomas Hariot to Willard Gibbs, from Houdini to Wendell Willkie, from Käthe Kollwitz to Anne Burlak, to the life of the reader/witness. I am emphasising the vitality of connective stories here, not only because Rukeyser tirelessly did the same thing throughout her own life, but because this blog is in commemoration and celebration of that life. ‘The universe is made of stories, / not of atoms’, she wrote in ‘The Speed of Darkness’ in 1968.

The stories that Rukeyser lived, made, and continues to influence are innumerable, and they connect in ways that it would take more than several lifetimes to discover. I have found, however, that those people who take in Rukeyser’s works and words, and who live by the same standards of passionate curiosity, of openness, equality, and moral and intellectual fortitude, cross each other’s paths and connect with each other in extraordinary ways. The series of coincidences that have (so far) occurred in my life after I began to research Rukeyser is both remarkable and somehow naturally expected. I wrote in my last post that I was delighted to hear from Bill Rukeyser, Muriel’s son, that he had lived in the street next to mine in Belfast, when he was producing his excellent journalistic work on the Northern Irish conflict in the early 1970s. In direct relation to my work here, when I received news from Elisabeth Däumer (without whose insight, intelligence and industry this site would not exist) about my article in the Journal of Narrative Theory Rukeyser special issue, I was visiting a friend in Berlin, sitting in a café in Kollwitzplatz, having spent a good while looking at the statue of Kollwitz, and admiring several examples of her work. Elisabeth, of course, knows the place well. Those readers not familiar with Rukeyser’s biographical poem of Kollwitz will no doubt recognise its most famous lines: ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open’.

The most wonderful set of coincidences happened this summer. Rukeyser’s insistence on ‘a poetry of meeting-places’ extended not only to the connection of mistakenly disparate disciplines such as the ‘two cultures’ of art and science, but to all forms of media, and her dedication to the dual and collaborative work of words and images has informed my academic writing since I first picked up The Life of Poetry as a Masters student. In August this year, I took a research trip to America; my route went from Dublin to New York, to New Haven, to Philadelphia to Mexico City, where I ended my excursion with a paper on William Carlos Williams, ekphrasis and cognitive perception at an ‘Aesthetics and Naturalism’ conference at UNAM.

On the Dublin-New York flight, I sat next to someone with whom I soon struck up a conversation. He saw I was reading a paper about visual poetry; he took from his bag a book of visual poems he had written and published. I told him I was researching a paper – an inquiry that involved consideration of the way the brain processes reading images and reading poems; he told me he had spent much of his life working as a professor of psychology, specialising in neurophysiology. He had then developed and directed the UNESCO Culture of Peace programme, and now spends his time as an advocate for world peace. I told him I would be visiting the Beinecke library at Yale in a week’s time; he told me he lived in New Haven. His name was David Adams. We discussed brain activity, perception, peace activism and poetry, and of course, I spoke of Muriel Rukeyser, whereupon he told me that one of his good friends, the Yale physician and neuropathologist Laura Manuelidis, used to be a student of Rukeyser’s and knew her well. Laura, who is also an excellent poet, was unfortunately out of town the next week, and could not take advantage of David’s generous offer of dinner (it was delicious Peking Duck and lasted me for most of the week). David’s indefatigable campaigning for a better world can be accessed here: http://cpnn-world.org/

When I was able to speak with Laura (and speaking with her is as enriching an experience as speaking with David), I discovered not only that we shared a common ground of poetic and political preferences, but that we also shared a friend: Professor Clive Bush, a tutor of mine when I was at King’s College London, and the person who had introduced me to the work of Muriel Rukeyser. How apt that it was Rukeyser who had brought our paths to meet. I was immediately put in mind of the symbol of the spiral, a motif of extreme importance for Rukeyser; ‘the life-giver and carrier, the whirlpool, the vortex of atoms, and the sacred circuit’:

The history of a symbol, traced in this way, will show the history of human passion for a relationship – in this instance, between growth and form. Passion it is, deeper, more eager to use and be used, and in its love and play making art, games, talismans, out of an expression of the most deep connection.[2]

I’d like to give the last part of this post to a few recollections of Rukeyser, by Laura and by Clive. I’d also, in keeping with Rukeyser’s spirit of openness, generosity and exposure, like to share their poems, infused with and inspired by the voice of their friend.

Laura met Muriel Rukeyser in 1960, when she took her class at Sarah Lawrence. She remembers the impressive and commanding presence of the poet: ‘the building hardly seemed large enough to fit her inside of it.’ That several students seemed at first afraid of her, but that Laura was not, was perhaps one of the reasons that Muriel was immediately taken with Laura. ‘I remember her saying to me, “I like you – we’re going for a walk”, and we walked and talked for two hours, leaving all the other students waiting.’ From that moment, a close and mutually rewarding friendship began, and Muriel would cook for Laura (‘she gave me my first mixed grill!’), read and critique her poems non-prescriptively (‘never anything like “we do this, we don’t do that”’), and spend countless hours discussing the need and the power of poetry.

Muriel’s unceasing curiosity for all aspects and elements of life left a deep imprint in Laura’s memory of her. ‘She worked all the time,’ Laura recalls, ‘she was always interested in things. She was always reading, and getting me to read things too. She said during our first meeting: “I think you will like Lorca.” I went to the library directly afterwards, found all the Lorca I could read, and of course, I loved it. But she knew that when I was a poetry student of hers, I never read her work, and she understood. She knew I needed to find my own voice.’ Later, when Muriel offered to help Laura, who was now in her second year of medical school, publish her book of poems, she asked whether Laura had come up with a title. ‘I replied “Poems for the Matriarchy”. “Oh no!” she said. I was surprised but understood later. No confinement.’

The poem I am posting below is one that Laura worries slightly does not communicate the strength, passion and resilience of Muriel Rukeyser. It might not. It does, however, apart from demonstrating what an excellent student she had in Laura, communicate Rukeyser’s grace and humanity. Laura wrote it in response to seeing her friend and mentor in a hospital bed after a stroke; she pulled the curtains around her and was thanked with the remark that she was a ‘real lady’.

Sunday hat (for Muriel Rukeyser, 1980)

(in Out of Order, 2007)

And now, at last, to remove this Sunday hat

Wilted with flowers, and circa

1898,

And loose the stiffened neck of lace

Down until the shoulders are not hemmed

And the chest is also not embraced.

Then slowly, to unsnap the cuffs—

But do not glance upon the veins or brown

Irregular spots:

The skin is not the soul

(The sermon master told me so);

And then the bodice, like a brick

And then the belt

And then the skirt.

Oh I will kick my feet as I once did!

But first, I must undo the crush

Of garters and of mesh

Upon my hips,

Hooks and buttons that make a lady straight

Down to the crimp of stockings

On my toes.

At night, would that I could

The dye upon my hair

Undo

And in this fallen condition be

And breathe

And drown into my bed and sleep.

And if I dream

And then undo my skin

Am I a lady underneath?

My joints are hard

My heart is small and weak.

Will they love me laid upon these sheets?

I am gay, I am dancing

And those who care are laughing

With me.

Unlatch my jokes

—Here I am!

Able to flirt with nothing on.

My inelastic corset laced with pain

All gone.

Yes, I promise I will

My used and mottled hat

Place on my head

This one last time;

Arrange my dress—and let my face be rouged—

Compose my hands across my waist

Before I’m cramped within this narrow space.

My eyes alone

Behind a veil of light

Caress you with all my freedom, and my might.

Rukeyser used to ‘send’ people to Laura, and one of them was Clive Bush. A great and lasting friendship began between the two ‘disciples’, when in 1973, Clive, on a research fellowship at Yale, was despatched by Rukeyser to Laura, her husband and children for intellectual companionship and general ‘looking after’. Muriel had a sharp sense for compatible personalities.

Clive’s seven-year friendship with Muriel (ending in her death in 1980, but of course in many ways extending far beyond it) began via the American Studies scholar and writer, Eric Mottram. Having dinner with Clive, Eric mentioned that the author of The Traces of Thomas Hariot was coming to London for its launch. When the British press thrashed the book – still misunderstood, but one of the most intriguing, clever and well-researched biographies I’ve read – Clive was incandescent with anger. He obtained the number of Monica McCall, Rukeyser’s agent (and partner), called it, and released a torrent of heated opinion on the state of literary journalism in the UK into the ear of the person who picked up. When he had finished, there was a pause, and a low voice chuckled and replied, ‘Do you think you could write all that down and send it to me?’ Realising that Muriel, not Monica, had answered the phone, Clive agreed, on the proviso that she gave a reading to his students at Warwick University, where he was then teaching. The favour was returned.

When I ask Clive what he learnt most from his friend, his reply is very similar to Laura’s. ‘Her emphasis on combination was extraordinary’, he asserts. ‘She had such an openness to all knowledge, and not out of some intellectual objective, but out of the understanding that it is absolutely vital to all human beings.’ Muriel’s capacity to recognise and open paths of connection between forms, disciplines and people was aided by her ability to enjoy life to the full. ‘She was very humorous’, Clive remarks, ‘and she loved to tease and be teased. She was playful, too. I remember when she discovered I knew Wiltshire (England) well, she boasted to me that she had stopped on the way to Corsham Court to play darts in the Methuen Arms, a pub with which I was also very familiar.’

Muriel introduced Clive to numerous artists, academics and writers, as well as a variety of Jewish food – a particular favourite in New York being lox and bagels – and whiskey. The description of a delight in sensual pleasures fits: Rukeyser enjoyed the give-and-take of all types of pleasure, whether intellectual, emotional or sensorial. The poem I am reproducing of Clive’s is one that evokes this synaesthesia, allowing at once glimpses of the interests he and Rukeyser shared, and echoes of her own strong voice.

IX Penance

(from Pictures after Poussin, 2003)

they ran through her hands like water

but in this exchange money was no object

and she of a relative profit

an illusion of the public good

rioted in Roman columns

she kissed his feet as if the proportion of services

did not belong to the costs of consumption

he said if debt could be figured then small debts

were small terrors

she had come out in a board room of ironic men on their sides

who were about to eat perfect bread with arranged knives

memory became memorials between their eyes

there were tears on bare feet

the letter of the law was bespoke

so that they could all look up to themselves in telling

the yellow and white

of their oldest professions

fell off her shoulder

became a source of light

she had received and suffered what came from the noise of meteors

her breasts and hair touched his feet outside a table whose still life kept its nourishment as vertical

depth in an unvarying centre of groping arms

the boy on his knees

poured wine under the open eyes

of the only man who could extinguish

that forgiveness of the shroud’s fold

through which he never saw

I will finish this post, however, with poetry from Rukeyser. The themes of birth, rebirth and life are prevalent throughout Rukeyser’s entire oeuvre; lest we forget, one of the greatest gifts she gave to literature is entitled The Life of Poetry. In the connections I have traced along this post, however, I thread my own life, touched not only by hers, but by the lives of those she knew and loved, and who loved her in return. In some ways, the recently emerging scholarship on Rukeyser is a thankful bringing back to life – a reawakening, if only in some small parts of the world (that, we know, are not discrete) of witness to Rukeyser’s writings. The following poem is entitled ‘Born in December’, written by Rukeyser for a friend, but pertinent to herself, born on the 15^th December, and also, gratifyingly, to me, born on the 20^th.

Born in December for Nancy Marshall

(in Body of Waking, 1958)

You are like me born at the end of the year;

When in our city day closes blueness comes

We see a beginning in the ritual end.

Never mind: I know it is never what it seems,

That ending: for we are born, we are born there,

There is an entrance we may always find.

They reckon by the wheel of the year. Our birth’s before.

From the dark birthday to the young year’s first stay

We are the ones who wait and look for ways:

Ways of beginning, ways to be born, ways for

Solvings, turnings, wakings, we are always

A little younger than they think we are.

Muriel Rukeyser, born 100 years ago, always a little younger than they think, yet always ahead of her time. Her legacy stretches onward in the memories of those she touched, in the lives and works of those who continue to be touched by her presence and her words. I shall leave, therefore, the last word to her:

Then

(The Gates, 1976)

When I am dead, even then,
I will still love you, I will wait in these poems,
When I am dead, even then
I am still listening to you.
I will still be making poems for you
out of silence;
silence will be falling into that silence,
it is building music.

[1] From ‘Absalom’ in The Book of the Dead (1938)

[2] The Life of Poetry, 37.

‘Islands’: Dragging Our Heads Back

December 14, 2013 by mthunter22 Leave a Comment

Posted on December 14, 2013 by Marian Evans

The latest draft of the Throat of These Hours radio play, now with a rigorous reader, was hard and slow. I had to reduce – drop storylines, drop characters, drop themes, drop dialogue – and distill. Reduce and distill again. Sometimes I lost Muriel Rukeyser. Sometimes I lost the story. Sometimes I lost heart. Often I had to drag my head back to the play, most easily through listening to one of Christine White’s draft compositions, for part of The Speed of Darkness and for Then. What a blessing they’ve been. What a blessing Chris has been. Re-reading her Muriel Rukeyser posts – all listed below – also helped me in this re-working time. And the other day, I read in Chris’ blog that she too had to drag her head back to the project, to compose the music for Islands.

And then I went to a workshop where Jane Campion spoke about John Keats and negative capability. And began to understand that Muriel Rukeyser’s negative capability inspires my visceral response to her work, that negative capability in Chris’ compositions reinforces and extends that viscerality. To complete the radio and stage plays I will have to make friends with negative capability.

This post is an interview with Chris, to go with her first sketch for Islands, here to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Muriel’s birth. On the day itself, on our islands and with you, we’ll both have Muriel in our hearts – Chris walking her dog Tai, rehearsing for a gig and teaching and I filming a woman about her experience of serial violation: rape; the insertion of vaginal mesh; and within unhelpful institutions. – Marian Evans

Islands composition (mp3, click on link)

Marian Evans: I love the way you’ve documented your composition process for Throat of These Hours. At the beginning, you responded to the ‘confronting nature and honesty’ of Muriel’s poems. What did you find particularly confronting and honest?

Christine White: I was given a collection of poems and to be honest, the first line ‘Whoever despises the clitoris despises the penis’ (The Speed of Darkness) grabbed my attention right away. Yes, nowadays people can talk about penises, cunts and fucking on all manner of forums – enough for them to cease to be confronting and to become rather boring instead. However, when written in the medium of the poem, in such a succinct way and as an opening line…well, I’m beginning to understand how brave it is to do something like that in an artwork. Of course one needs honesty to accompany a statement like that or else you won’t get away with it….you won’t be believed or believable and the statement will lose its power.

The other aspect of Muriel which I found confronting and honest was her commitment to activism. She travelled great distances to protest (as in the lone action of sitting outside the door of prison gates in South Korea in protest of the incarceration of poet Kim Chi-Ha). She visited the miners of the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel disaster. These actions were confronting to me because Muriel didn’t just make comment from afar. She placed herself in the situations or as close to them as she could.

What effects, if any, have the confrontation and the honesty and the activism had on your work for the project, or generally?

Muriel has struck a chord with me, mainly because of her commitment to go to straight to the sites of activism as part of her work.

The Hawk’s Nest miners incident in particular took my interest, possibly because in New Zealand we have recently had a mining disaster (Pike River Mine) where 29 miners were killed. This brought it closer to home – particularly the knowledge that as an artist, if you really want to delve deeper into a work or to make a comprehensive work about something, you need to be there. You need to experience as much of it with all of your senses in order for powerful honesty to come forth.

I can’t see directly how the activism has affected my work on the project, other than that I am aware of the lengths Muriel has gone to in deepening herself in a work, and therefore, I am encouraged to do the same.

It’s interesting though, as I haven’t been a politically active person in my life. I find conflict and opposition confronting enough and, I guess, my world views have developed in such a way that I have tended to place more emphasis on the path of a person’s individual life rather than the societal context they are in. Sure, these things are influenced by societal trends, influences, rights and abuses and this is the level where people are active in facilitating change, but this is an area I am still trying to reconcile in my life.

I am also allergic to, and have a complete knee-jerk reaction to some things which I think keep me away from activism. One is group-think (having had to unlearn group-think from childhood), and the other is a certain form of verbal-disagreement, which usually surfaces as sarcasm, cynicism and negative complaint – which to me just adds up to mouthing off.

Have your responses to Muriel’s work changed over time? Have other elements of her life and work also become important to you?

The difficulty with the work I have been doing in response to Muriel’s work is that I have had times when I have delved deeply into her work and life, and other times where I have felt strangely distant from it. This is due to the fact that I am self-employed as an artist/teacher and so constantly juggling projects and trying to maintain income and sanity – the quintessential artistic life that Muriel herself lived and wrote about! (Though she did it much harder – I’m certain!).

I feel extremely privileged that I was invited by you to be involved in the project. I, who as a farm girl who grew up in the Waikato region of New Zealand in the 1970’s, was invited to explore the life and work of a remarkable woman who lived on the other side of the world in the 1940’s.

I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home, and came out as lesbian (with much difficulty) in my 20s and 30s – though I was fortunate enough to live in a time of relative freedom and equality through the ground-breaking efforts of both the women’s and gay movements in Aotearoa, New Zealand. However, for much of my life, I have been more interested in male histories, stories and influences. I have been afraid of both the women’s and gay movements, and, in terms of my area of interest (music and composition), have tended to adopt male role models. Such a contradiction!

The irony and universal humour of the arrival of this project wasn’t lost on me. And yet, Muriel was fascinating to me – following the beat of her own drum. I love that she learnt to fly, that she was interested in the sciences, that she had to evaluate what being a Jew meant to her. While she was an activist, there was something about the tone of her work that drew me in.

I loved that she would integrate her experiences into her work and that she had an assemblage-type approach to her work overall. Nothing was in isolation, but rather, they were all part of a large body, a whole being that was free to be interpreted and reinterpreted. Knowing this has given me great freedom in working with her words – as I know that she fully supported the musicality of word-sound, of breaking and re-constituting across media. This suits the explorations I have made with looping words, breaking them through the use of glitch – all of these methods have only strengthened her words and their impact on me, not weakened them.

These aspects of her world-view have been with me a lot over the year, even at times when I have been distracted from the exact work – it has been so lovely that you and I can remind each other of the spirit of Muriel, and acknowledge the presence of that spirit in our lives and in whatever has been transpiring.

There were also parts of The Life of Poetry that helped you early on. Can you remember what they were?

I think the main thing I took from that book, was the sense that Muriel wasn’t constrained by poetry as being merely words on a page for a specific time. She seemed to have a sense of freedom – of not being bound to a specific form, and there was a possibility of the form, sequence and rhythm changing or altering – of words latching onto other words, revisiting, breaking apart, recontextualising – of developing new rhythms and flow…I am certainly not quoting the book here and am only working off an internalised memory or interpretation.

But from the portions of the book I quoted in my blog, and my sense about Muriel now (without that book in front of me), it seemed that she wanted her work (not just one portion), to be alive, to be malleable, to have the qualities of a physical entity which was something akin to a sci-fi being, or a thing of nature that would have chemical, physical reactions and would change form, morph – alter its appearance somehow.

She was interested in relationship, and the connections her work would make with people, the conversations that would be generated, and the complete arc of her life’s work – a sense of the organic whole rather than an isolated piece.

All of these aspects are helpful to me when translating Muriel to music form – the rhythm, flow, relationship to others, the part-ness and one-ness.

In relation to the radio play, I have a vision of the old tape recording days where, in the end, the pieces of tape all fall out of the machine, cascading out like a waterfall. The words are jumbled, re-ordered, and sing out in a cacophony – Muriel’s lifetime of words spewing out of a jammed up machine and fluttering around the room, flooding it in sound.

When you started work on the poems, do you remember how you first responded? How does your response fit with your reference to two extracts from William Packard’s interview with Muriel (The Craft of Poetry Interviews from The New York Quarterly 1974)?

People ask me why I don’t rhyme and I find it impossible to answer. Because I rhyme, and go beyond rhyme. The return once is not enough for me. I will carry a phrase through. Or a sound, that may not be at the end of the lines, but I try to carry any sound that is important in the poem so that it comes back many times. I find returns very romantic things. I love the coming back at different times of all things, including sounds, including words.

The phrase in a different position is new, as has been pointed out by many poets. But I think I use this as other poets use rhyme. It’s a time-binding thing, a physical binding, a musical binding, like the recurrence of the heartbeat and the breathing and all the involuntary motions as well. But in a poem I care very much about the physical reinforcement, the structure in recurrence.

As much as my work is with sound, my initial readings are often sight first and more from the cerebral trying-to-understand-aspect. Whilst I wouldn’t consider myself an academic, I love knowledge, the feeling of acquiring knowledge or learning and, therefore, of trying to understand. So my initial approach to a work is very much from a left brain space, trying to ‘make sense of it’, find meaning etc etc…

This is my default position so I sometimes need to train myself out of this thinking. When I first read, it is silently. I tend to be more cerebral initially and more introvert, so I tend to take the words inward rather than speak them straight outward. Of course speaking them and hearing them as sounds adds immeasurably to the receiving of a work, but it is still not the first route I take.

In terms of the poems I have worked on initially, it has been an interesting journey for me. Particularly with Then and Islands, on paper the poems look really straightforward – basic even. So, I could have easily moved onward from them without experiencing them at a deeper level.

I must confess, I read them, and thought, well, they are simple, there’s not much to see here. How can I translate them in a way that is satisfying to me? Knowing the larger scale of Muriel’s life – her interest in cross-pollinating different areas of thought, her interest in the mechanisms of flight – these somehow kept me hanging in with what seemed like simpleton words. I wish I could say I understood the layering of these poems on the reading of them, but it was actually reading some of the background works and interviews, including the excerpt above, that helped me to feel free to experience her work in a new way.

I haven’t worked very often with other people’s lyrics, and certainly not on this scale, but there is a sense that a poem’s integrity needs to be retained and it needs to be interpreted in a clear way that honours the words, the order of the words, and the perceived meanings of the words. On reading the above passage, I gained a freer sense of what Muriel’s work meant to her in a broader context.

I could relate to her sense of the musicality of words – in music a theme can morph, expand, veer off and return. Muriel had an understanding of the fluidity of words and sound. I felt that she had an understanding of sound as distinct from meaning. It also meant for me that she would maybe relish the idea of sound play and recontextualisation – it’s hard to explain, but that the words are no longer just words, no longer in one dimension but could take their place as musical beings in flight.

This informed the way I worked with the poems, as I could stretch the words, layer them on top of each other, make them disappear and reappear…and in the act of doing this – of breathing the work through the medium I relate to – I found a life to the words that I otherwise couldn’t see on a white page.

When I’m writing my own lyrics I feel I can be less careful with them. It’s quite daunting working with someone else’s words, especially if you feel they are fixed in their intention. My lyric writing has changed in recent years – I feel less sure of what-I-want-to-say or wanting-to-say-anything-at-all, and so my approach is to compose music and lyric quickly in a collage-type way. The songs have been more like sketches in some instances, or at least the meanings of them have been less clear even to me.

In your latest blog, you wrote about your relationship with writer and musician Hinemoana Baker and how Hinemoana has investigated and written poetry where ‘meaning and narrative are secondary to the sounds of words’ and how, ‘because she understands the world of sound, and the world of words’ she can sometimes cross-translate for you. Has that been helpful in making your response to Muriel Rukeyser’s poems?

As already mentioned, the poems I have worked with predominantly present as more narrative with emphasis placed on meaning. Although this is in contrast to ‘sound poetry’, it has helped me to use the medium of sound to reveal another layer to the work.

Through being with Hinemoana I have gained more of an understanding that poetry can be a trinket, a message (like a fortune cookie), a mantra, or a puzzle. It can, aside from the surface layer of the message, evoke a mysterious world created by the combining of consonants and vowels and tones. It is our first instinct, often, to want to know what a poem means and if the meaning appears obvious, sometimes we can forgo the journey of sitting with the poem further and allowing it to seep more into the core of our being.

I was tempted on first reading of these poems, to do just that – take them at face value – which, had I done so, would have resulted in an equally accessible musical translation…a simple folk song or ditty. Whilst these can be powerful, I don’t think it would have added to the poem or my investigation of it in this instance…and I would feel that I have merely translated, rather than explored.

Two things helped me to delve deeper – one was the learnings I have had from Hinemoana’s approach to poetry, and the other was Muriel’s own fascination with sound and with the deconstruction / reconstruction of words and meaning. She was totally up for having her work be malleable and water-like, and to regenerate in different form.

These then freed me up to approach the work of exploring the poems differently and gave me permission to allow, not necessarily new meaning or undiscovered meaning, but an unfolding of layers. You know how when intellectually you get something, and then one day you really GET IT in a different part of your being.

In your blog about composing for Islands you record your questions to yourself: ‘Am I anticipating my style based on what I’ve done?’ ‘Am I anticipating the effects of Muriel’s writing on me?’ What does this mean?

It is important to me not to anticipate too much – I don’t want to assume that I am going to feel the same way about this poem as I did about the last – or that it will have the same affect on me and therefore, that I will produce a similar response. I want my response to be as fresh as possible and to allow for the unknown aspect to enter.

I think, having worked with two poems previously (Then and The Speed of Darkness), I was concerned that I would feel familiar with the work, the process, the outcome. Yes of course, there will be a similarity as the composition comes from the person of Muriel mixed with the person of me – and we are both finite beings with a ‘voice’ and ‘style’ that is particular to us, but I didn’t want to make an assumption because that may cause me to miss the ‘unseen’ ‘magical’ aspect of what could result.

And in the approach to Islands, I really felt that I was going headlong into a preconceived outcome – maybe a result of fatigue, or laziness, or a mass-production-type approach – and that wasn’t going to honour Muriel or myself, or what could eventuate.

This concern actually nearly paralysed me, and there was much procrastination (an important creative act sometimes I think if one learns not to panic), dilly-dallying, and beach-walks, combined with intellectually trying to formulate an approach (not a great place to start!).

What actually helped me out of this a great deal, was the added knowledge that I was composing for Throat of These Hours. This was fantastic because based on the themes and settings of the play, I had earlier drafted a palette of materials that would suit the play. From memory the key ones were the voice (expression), water (fluidity and environmental issues), and electricity (radio, static waves, communication). The previous two song interpretations had concentrated on voice mainly and to a smaller extent water and electric guitar.

So there was a further aspect in the palette, I hadn’t explored in depth, and that was the use of electronic sound (glitch, static) – and this wonderfully gave me the freshness I needed to elude anticipation.

If I approach a work completely knowing what I am about then I may miss the opportunity to allow something in that will give the poem a different tone or layer. I would prefer to get out of the way even just a little bit and to trust that to feel blind a bit and to explore a bit will unearth something unpredicted and more true to the work.

Can you summarise your musical influences for this project? Where does John Psathas fit?

I have always referred to whatever is currently interesting to me musically when composing something new and I tend to believe wholeheartedly in the collision – that whatever has captured me in the present is a necessary in-road to a new work. It’s like THIS style, person or band will be relevant in this new situation and will become a third collaborator.

When I started the Throat of These Hours project, top of mind was the composer Scott Walker. Formerly of The Walker Brothers fame, in recent years he’s released three solo albums of songs which are cinematic, visceral and intense! Scott Walker approaches his arrangements from the starting point of the lyric and treats every instrument as a voice that supports the lyric of the piece. His approach to his work gave me a more open sense of how poetry can be interpreted in music. He has a very classical / operatic voice and layers a rich tapestry of sounds over it.

Another composer who I think may be creeping into view for this project is Laurie Anderson which is fantastic! She is also from New York and combines poetic / political / storytelling voice with layers of unique and interesting sound. She is an inventor of instruments and creator of sound art. She uses the spoken voice in her performance and I’m sure Muriel would have loved her play on words, her use of simple ideas, repetitions and the political nature of her work.

The other recent influence was the soundtrack of the Gravity movie composed by Steven Price. The spaciousness, connectedness, bigness, and isolation conveyed by this soundtrack was fantastic and just what I needed when moving into the composition for Islands.

John Psathas is an internationally renowned New Zealand composer whose work I was introduced to in 2004 by Steve Garden (the co-producer of my album Pirouette). I find it very difficult to describe the affect of John’s music on me and that may now be because I am very fortunate to know him personally and so I have a certain self-consciousness as a listener, but I will try. Firstly what struck me was the intense energy of John’s work – he utilises the orchestra like a rock band and my spirit soars when engulfed in a live performance of his work. His pieces can be grand and engaging, and also intimate and, quite frankly beautiful. He manages to infuse his music with a strong sense of energy – whether it is energy bursting forth, or energy gently held in suspension. I could go on struggling to find descriptors….

John is a professor at Victoria University so I came to know him also in the capacity of lecturer and supervisor. I am so grateful to have met him – his dedication to his craft inspires me to be the best I can be with mine. Though he is a million miles from me in terms of technical expertise, his love of music and his engagement with it makes it so easy and exciting to talk with him about it. He is certainly one of my favourite people to talk about music with. He has a generosity in listening that is difficult to find nowadays – if he is listening to a piece of music, he gives his total being to it. He is then able to articulate what the music is doing, and maybe what it needs to do. Conversations with him are like manna to me.

I don’t wish to take advantage of his expertise unnecessarily, but if I have needed guidance, he has generously given it – and this is hugely valuable to me because he is able to decipher where the work is needed in the realisation of a piece of music. This has been invaluable to me in working with Muriel’s poems. When I feel I have reached the limits of my understanding about what I am doing, John is able to articulate what he hears is happening with the piece. It gently encourages me to dig deeper than I otherwise may do.

We also talk movies, family, philosophy, and generally shoot the breeze and you can’t ask much more than that!

Chris in performance (Annie McMullen photographer)

When you focused on Voice, Water, Radio Signal/Electricity, because they fitted with the themes of the stage play, how did this work?

Voice was an obvious one for me as it was informed by the title of the play (Throat of These Hours) and by some of the content / themes – two women in conversation trying to reconnect, explain themselves and express themselves. I wanted to use a full range of vocal sounds however in order to cover the many nuances of self expression and have touched on these in the demo for The Speed of Darkness. Possibilities for vocal soundings which reflect the story include throat clearing, gargling, sighing, speaking, muttering, and breath.

Water as an environmental issue was a recurring theme in the stage play. There is also an emergency kit which is referred to in the play and as the play is set in a radio studio, there would obviously be glasses of water present so it seemed fitting to include water in the palette of sound possibilities. As a metaphor, water also represents fluidity and is a substance that can appear in a number of forms (liquid, air, ice), so it can also be a character that adapts or changes form – something which the protagonists have chosen to do or have had to do. It is nice to have a natural element in the play too.

The fluidity of water also provides a good companion to Muriel’s work and her view of the fluid possibilities of words and ideas. This translates easily with the energy, rhythms and flow of water.

Water is also one of our key sustainers of life, and is intimately connected with the human mouth so, once again, a good fit. We are transformed and transforming in our interactions with the stuff of life.

Electricity is also intertwined with water use and availability, and with the play being set in a radio station a nice loop of interlocking pieces (water, humans, electricity) is created. It makes sense to include the electrical motif in the sound palette. As a sound generator, electricity isn’t always as controllable and predictable as playing an instrument. The use of feedback allows for this untamed energy to have a place in the play. To me, electricity is about impulse, energy, sparks and connections, and we have strong electrical components within our bodies (as with water), so once again, these sound components reflect basic elements that are present both in our internal and external worlds.

The story of Meredith and Tina in the stage play Throat of These Hours, is very much a story about finding equilibrium in nature and in oneself and ones relationships. I am very keen for the music to reflect this, and also to reflect Muriel’s forward-thinking about the presence of her work in the world.

All of life is affected by interactions and change, and it is only through allowing these interactions that freshness continues in the work. I am sure Muriel would want aliveness in this way and so at times I am wondering how to create conditions in the music that both represent Muriel’s words, and also allow the words to be freed in some way to create anew themselves.

I am hopeful that incorporating the looper, or some kind of effects-generating software and electronic instruments of some sort, will allow this recreation to occur in the play. Hopefully I can work more towards that at some point as for now I have been creating fixed pieces for the poems. I think, and am hopeful, that Muriel would love to hear her poems self-generate new word combinations and poems within poems!

You’ve been experimenting with a style of performance where songs, stories and parts of songs are interweaved. Has it hampered you that although Muriel’s poems are fixed I haven’t finished either play, so there’s no certainty for you to weave with beyond the poems themselves?

This is a nice question to follow on from the previous. The short answer is no I don’t feel hampered. I think the main reason for this is that through my time in writing/performing and composing, I have come to a point more and more where I wish to allow a ‘gap’ for a type of synchronicity or unknown to occur.

This thinking was fostered at the extreme end of the continuum by American avant-garde composer John Cage, who often created pieces using chance operations. He collaborated with choreographer (and life partner) Merce Cunningham and one of their main innovative approaches was the concept that although the music and dance would occur in the same space and time, they would be created independently of each other.

I have taken this approach often when creating music for another medium (theatre, film) as I believe that when combining two such elements, there should be a space where the audience person or perceiver can add their own thought processes to the perception of the work – and it is this which completes the work. If the combined work is tied down so-to-speak, then the creators possibly will have covered off any possible ambiguity i.e. ‘we need to be clear here that this piece of music is supporting the dialogue in this way…’

Certainly in the composing process, unless I have a clear direction given, I prefer not to try and mould what I do for the overall play.

Of course – this can create possible challenges, and there have been some instances where I have written from instinct and then found myself asking questions that probably only you could answer. Like the fact that Then and Speed of Darkness are two quite different pieces with different voices – ‘would Meredith create them both?’ I found myself asking at one point….. ‘well Chris, you just did,’ was my reply.

I am hopeful that if I follow my instincts and the direction the work seems to take me, then I will generate enough possibility that can be refined if need be as your end of the work takes shape. And we both tend to see our work in a fresh way with each new discussion or draft version which is nice.

I think it must be difficult to write compositions that match a character’s own arc within a play. Tina’s a rusty composer/singer at the beginning of the stage play (when she sings the Speed of Darkness excerpt) and far more confident and accomplished at the end when she sings Then. What are your thoughts about this?

Yes, as stated in the previous question, this did come up and I dealt with it mainly through knowing that if I was able to write in these different voices, then it was possible for Tina to do the same. I wasn’t conscious of the arc when writing the songs, but we did definitely have that discussion afterwards as I started thinking ‘hang on, Tina’s character seems quite rustic and earthy – would she write something as dense as Then?’

I wouldn’t have described Tina as rusty versus accomplished but rather raw versus intricate – or something like that….and maybe with Tina’s increasing contemplation of the way her life has gone, she would become more introspective. I think fragile was how John described Then, and I can see that because, as a work still in development and me recording it very early on in its development, it does sound delicate or fragile because I’m reaching in the newness of it. I like that stage of a composition – but maybe it will be more settled and simultaneously have a confidence and delicateness about it. I would love to hear another singer do it – as it is in the higher register of my voice where I may not be as strong.

Again though, I think I need to respond to the poems however they present, and not worry about whether Tina is at the beginning of her character arc or the end. It would suffice for me to know that both of these possibilities exist within the one person and can be called on at any time. Muriel encapsulated over the course of her body of work the use of different form and style, and also traversed a number of themes and emotions from delicacy to rage.

I find my own voice to be in the middle of the two songs I have written, I would love to hear a really raw voice sing Speed of Darkness and a confident classical-type voice sing Then and maybe Islands – I guess that is where the personality of Tina’s voice will be interesting to uncover in relation to the songs – in the finding of whoever it is that sings them and how they sing them.

As a composer, your work seems to highlight your own body, as a participant and as an instrument. You played with the ‘throat’ for the excerpt from The Speed of Darkness, and wrote about it like this:

The throat – the sounds of the throat can be many and varied…and can communicate a variety of emotions – the feeling of constriction, of not being able to speak/communicate – throat clearing, trying to make a way through obstacles.

Even the act of sighing and iterations of the breath can give signals as to the state of mind of the communicator – the body in the act of communicating, or trying to…

You refer in one post, Water, water, water, to your body as a (maybe polluted?) river in relation to one of the Throat of These Hours themes. And in another, (unDer the islaNds are stArs, with some stunning images of Kapiti Island) you write about your body in movement in a particular landscape, on the Kapiti Coast and in relationship with Hinemoana and Tai. Is this how you understand yourself as a composer, that it’s a ‘whole body’ thing, which sometimes highlights one part more than the other?

As the throat is a central theme in the play, and seemed to be a theme in Muriel’s own writings, I thought it is an obvious instrument. Its use in the presentation recording isn’t as subtle as it could be in the context of the whole play.

Chris White (Annie McMullen photographer)

It is interesting that you have mentioned all those references to the body as I have in general considered myself more cognitive in my approach over the years, but it is quite possible that this has been slowly changing with a growing awareness of my relationship to the physical.

I was quite physically active when I was young – I played a lot of sports – and enjoy a certain amount of co-ordination – let’s face it, it can be quite a physical pursuit hauling a guitar around onstage with a band! For all that, it has always been the temptation for me to consider ‘composing’ as an intellectual pursuit. Fortunately, I have the physical means to thrash ideas around when sitting staring at a computer seems futile.

I can’t really imagine performing only and negating the composing experience, which feels more like the essential component for me in bringing me to myself and out of myself. However, I think it is in performing (on a good day) that I express more in my whole body as it requires full attention and presence.

I have been keen to compose more for other performers as my composing tends to get bound together with my own ‘voice’ and limitations as a performer. I am thinking (and hoping) that it would bring different results and look forward to opportunities to do this and to find ways to do this. Throat of These Hours was obstensibly one of these instances, but as the singer in the play wasn’t fixed, I have gone down the route a little bit again of using my voice as the instrument and, therefore, composing in the realms of my voice.

I have found it refreshing writing with someone else’s words as it adds a dimension I wouldn’t otherwise have. It can be a little nerve-wracking, but also exciting at the same time. Muriel’s generosity of spirit as shown in her writings, and the generosity of her son Bill, have enabled me to feel more at ease with translating her work into music.

I know from what you’ve written that you’re familiar with ‘mystery’. And I wondered about the role of ‘mystery’ for you when I read what you wrote about breath and the afterlife–

In terms of sound design (in The Sixth Sense), the breath was used in layers – many many layers…human breath, animal breath – sometimes pitch shifted and slowed down – always running almost as if in the subconscious of the film – creating an undercurrent signal of the afterlife.

What’s mystery for you? Are you familiar with its role in negative capability? Does negative capability make sense to you and do you have it in mind as you investigate possibilities?

Mystery allows for an ‘other’ – and in a collaboration such as with you and with the writings of Muriel it seems to be an even more important component.

It allows me to be part of something greater over which I don’t have complete control. This something is a combination of the thoughts and feelings of Muriel which have been captured in a specific time and place, the thoughts and feelings of you and her characters from a particular time and place, and from my thoughts and feelings from my time and place. This something will also include the thoughts and feelings of the actors and the audience from their times and places.

The mystery is that these will all intertwine in similar and different ways in the context of peoples’ lives in ways that won’t be known completely by any of us.

Negative capability is a new term for me and I only seem to understand it when I’m staring at some writing about it 🙂 but yes I identify with it on a level.

I guess one thing I am mindful of is the fine line between mystery and being laziness…how do I know if I have selected these words or notes because they will work in the realms of mystery, or because I am not taking the time to delve to find a better series of words or notes. This is a conversation I would do well to have with John Psathas – he appears to be at the opposite end of the spectrum from me in that he diligently goes through all possibilities before selecting what he considers is the best one.

One could argue Scott Walker is the same in his work and yet I would like to believe that mystery works for all compositional approaches and in all stages of the work. The key is having the flexibility to recognise when mystery arrives.

Is there a conflict between controlling the message and allowing mystery I sometimes wonder.

I have certainly experienced mystery many times in my composition work – a particular instrument beckons use without clarity as to why, a series of words that seem out of place – and yet when the process is finished, all comes into clear view. One example was when I was composing for an assignment at university – I initially set out to try and record a song with no backing instruments – only the use of found sounds. The sounds I used consisted mainly of a guided tour I had recorded (lots of footsteps in big rooms) plus some street scenes (cross signals etc). In the middle of the process my dear grandmother died at the age of 93. I was very close to her and found one archive recording of me interviewing her about her life. I decided to put elements of this into the piece. The excerpts I ended up using were of her talking about having had polio which had affected one of her legs so she had a limp most of her life. This blended well in the end with the footstep recordings and the song which was called Dancing Slow.

I don’t think you can conjure the mystery – the best you can do is be open and to work with anything that is happening rather than trying to fight against it. For example – I feel tired today so my singing is of a certain energy – use that energy, or choose not to record voice that day…I have forgotten a piece of equipment – what will replace it? Each scenario will add to the final composition in a positive way if they are allowed to co-exist with the ‘original’ idea you thought you had.

The final part of the mystery is the part that is completely out of our hands, and that is when a work is received and interpreted by someone else. One person’s perception may be different to another’s, and also may be different at a different time or with different surrounding circumstances.

Your output and collaborations are so varied. What attracts you to so many and varied collaborations? How do they feed into your work? (I couldn’t do it, don’t have enough flexibility and patience, would lose my centre.)

It’s quite possible I do lose my centre!! I think what happens is I get inspired by various aspects of sound and music-making and so want to incorporate them into what I do – or at least explore how a particular aspect of work would look/feel/sound like if produced through the funnel that is me.

It helps me to feel fresh and revitalised and gives an element of difference that (I hope) facilitates a slight difference in my approach to the composition. The downside I guess is that my development as a musician or composer could get diluted so my learning curve is a lot slower. For now I relish the variety though.

I remember having a dilemma years ago of wondering whether I considered myself a performer, a composer, or a musician. I felt the need to focus and so decided I needed to know which aspect of my playing / singing was the most important. I concluded that my main interest was in composition – the generating and expressing of musical or philosophical ideas. Ten years ago, I wrote a ten year vision statement and it began with ‘I am a composer’…it continued on to say that I would have a variety of projects that I could choose – be it film, albums, musical theatre etc. So I’m happy to look back ten years on and see that I have done that (though not with the income I had in mind!)

When I moved from Auckland to Wellington, I remember telling my friends that the move would give me a chance to make music in a different way. I had no idea how I would do this (nor even really believed on a level that I would), but as it turned out studying Sonic Arts Composition at Victoria University opened up a massive new world of sound and composition to me.

I also became aware a few years ago that I have tended to work individualistically and that collaborating would be good for me. It would take me out of myself and would force / enable me to be open to other ways of working, help me to create in a new way, to learn to work with difference, and to feel more that I was contributing in the world rather than being in an isolated bubble. I have tended to shy away from groups and while this can be ok, I recognise the need to be part of community, or at least something bigger in the world that isn’t just revolving around me. So I’m grateful again that I have had opportunities for collaboration come my way – certainly with my students who teach me a massive amount – with fellow sound artists Chris Black and Jason Wright, with Tape Art New Zealand, with Hinemoana, with Tim Bray Productions, and with you and Muriel Rukeyser.

Collaborating with Muriel has a particular specialness for me – I certainly hadn’t factored in the possibility of collaborating with someone from the other side of the world, who lived in another time, whose life was so different to my own, and whose words and work remain for me to explore and experience.

So thank you Marian for the introduction, and thank you Muriel for continuing to inhabit the earth, ‘still making’ in the lives of people everywhere.

Chris’ MOLLY PLANET RAW FOOD – RAW SOUND [discoveries and experiments] blog – the Muriel Rukeyser posts

Water, water, water
“I will bE sTiLL maKing” – MuriEL RuKyeSer
ScOtt WaLkEr meet MuRieL RukEyseR
unDer the islaNds are stArs

Chris’ compositions for The Speed of Darkness (video embedded in post); & for Then (ditto).

All photographs by Christine White, except where otherwise attributed.

Throat of These Hours on Facebook
Throat of These Hours blog

Crisis, hope, and the life of poetry

October 3, 2013 by mthunter22 1 Comment

Posted on October 3, 2013 by Catherine Gander

I’m delighted to be blogging for this website for several reasons. Foremost among them is the great pleasure I have in being part of a growing community of scholars, students, readers, writers, artists, musicians, performers, filmmakers, activists and more who share a deep, inclusive appreciation for the life and legacy of Muriel Rukeyser. My first exposure to Rukeyser’s work was not to her poetry, but to her poetic philosophy. In a Master’s class at King’s College London, I had been assigned to read The Life of Poetry by someone who had once known her and considered her a friend: Professor Clive Bush. I remember our discussion extended far beyond its allotted time, transferring to the Lyceum Tavern across the Strand when the seminar room had to be vacated and, after time was called at the pub, infusing several conversations and classes until the end of term. In many ways, though, I’m still having that discussion. And the exciting thing about it is that it is always evolving and involving, always connecting me to new ideas, perspectives, experiences and people. This is, of course, the essence that we all extract from Rukeyser’s writing: a connective human exchange, an ethical responsibility to witness and respond to the lives of others, and a conviction in the vitality and life-giving power of poetry.

In this spirit of connection, I’d like to pay homage to another poet. Here in Northern Ireland, from where I write, the sadness felt at the death of Seamus Heaney (13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) seeped into every crevice of waking life; the loss, for several days, was both palpable and inexpressible. Perhaps this is because, as Harry Eyres recently wrote for the Financial Times, ‘something strange happens when a poet dies. [It] is felt profoundly, at deep levels close to the centre of our being, or of being itself.’ The key to this profundity of feeling lies, I think, in what Rukeyser was so keen to communicate: that poetry is itself a vital force – democratic, courageous, indispensable. When we lose someone whose gift to life is poetry, we are afraid to lose an essential element of life itself. Of course, the poems of Heaney and of Rukeyser diverge in many ways. Yet they also speak to each other across divides of time and geography. Both poets taught through their writing that fear could be confronted and assuaged by poetry; both believed, in Rukeyser’s words, in ‘a poetry of meeting places, where the false barriers go down’. And both poets lived through times of immense national and international crisis, where barriers, however ‘false’, at times seemed insurmountable.

The barriers that Heaney saw were the ideological and physical ones erected during the Troubles – a bloody era of civil war that is so recent in history as to colour many people’s perceptions of life today in Northern Ireland. Heaney was born and worked in the North, but in 1972, the year of the Bloody Sunday shootings in Derry and the Bloody Friday bombings in Belfast, he moved from the capital to Co. Wicklow in the South. In an interview, Heaney spoke of how the disadvantaged homes and impoverished conditions exacerbated by the civil unrest were ‘a barrier to growth and self-realisation’ for the youth caught up in the fighting. ‘The sectarian realities, the unemployment, the eventual presences of the British army, the IRA recruiting machine, the peer pressure – hard to see teenagers who were simply returned from the school to the street corner being able to transcend all that’.[i] Yet Heaney’s poetry continues to speak with a voice that aims not to transcend social and personal realities, but to bore into the core of them, cutting through barriers, ‘vowels ploughed into other: opened ground’ (‘Glenmore Sonnets’). His poetry is taught and loved in schools, translates to street corners, digs into the earth[ii] and runs a rare thread between flights of imagination and memory, and grounded, nourishing actuality.

When Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, he spoke of how language had reached him as a small child, in its codes and cadences, through his family’s wireless set. Transmitting news of war, the radio’s static stuttering of the ‘solemn and oddly bracing words, “the enemy” and “the allies”’ prepared him not only for news broadcasts relating to the sectarian conflict, but for ‘a journey into the wilderness of language, a journey where each point of arrival – whether in one’s poetry or in one’s life – turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination.’ Rukeyser’s similar understanding of life as a series of stories, of points of contact, likewise connects poetry’s communicative force with what Heaney calls ‘a truth to life’: Heaney and Rukeyser shared a deep conviction in ‘poetry’s ability – and responsibility – to say what happens.’[iii]

This commitment to bearing witness – to saying what happens – is the driving force behind Rukeyser’s entire poetics. For Rukeyser, the term ‘witness’ replaced that of ‘audience’, ‘listener’, or even ‘reader’ in the relationship between poet, poem and receiver, invoking as it does ‘an overtone of responsibility […] announcing with the poem that we are about to change, that work is being done on the self’ (The Life of Poetry, 175). Through such truth-saying witness, the barriers to ‘growth and self-realisation’ that Heaney noted are dismantled, slowly, piece by piece. The ‘false barriers’ to which Rukeyser referred throughout her life, and which she repeatedly advocated the removal of, are constructed by those who mistakenly believe that segregation – of cultures, disciplines, genres, religions, races, people – represents the cornerstone to a functional way of life. Such barriers are particularly resistant in times of crisis, during which, as Rukeyser states in the opening lines of The Life of Poetry, ‘we summon up our strength’. I find it interesting that in describing the existential pain at the loss of a poet, Eyres draws parallels between Heaney, as the voice and conscience of the Troubles, and Federico Garcia Lorca, the execution of whom by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 ‘represented the death of a liberal, open-minded Spain, tolerant of sexual and racial differences that would not revive again until after the death of Franco.’ Returning to the beginning of The Life of Poetry, we find Rukeyser returning to the beginning of her own speaking out. Rukeyser recalls her evacuation from Barcelona via boat, as civil war erupts across Spain. Having been sent in 1936 by Life and Letters Today to document the People’s Olympiad (a politically conscious alternative to Hitler’s Berlin Games), Rukeyser instead witnessed the start of open warfare:

On the deck that night, people talked quietly about what they had just seen and what it might mean to the world. The acute scenes were still on our eyes, immediate and clear in their passion; and there were moments, too, in which we were outsiders and could draw away[…] Everything we had heard, some of all we loved and feared, had begun to be acted out. Our realisation was fresh and young, we had seen the parts of our lives in a new arrangement. There were long pauses between those broken images of life, spoken in language after language.

Suddenly, throwing his question into talk not at all leading up to it – not seeming to – a man – a printer, several times a refugee – asked, “And poetry – among all this – where is there a place for poetry?”

Then I began to say what I believe. (The Life of Poetry, 3)

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein’s timely bringing to light of Rukeyser’s previously unpublished genre-hybrid novel, Savage Coast, along with other numerous references in Rukeyser’s writings to her brief time in Spain indicates how important this episode was to Rukeyser, personally, politically and poetically. She believed strongly in the truthful communication of poetry, as both a vehicle for social responsibility and an expression of profound, connective humanity. In the same way, Heaney considered poetry’s power to reside in its ability to ‘satisfy the contradictory needs which consciousness experiences at times of extreme crisis, the need on the one hand for a truth telling that will be hard and retributive, and on the other hand, the need not to harden the mind to a point where it denies its own yearnings for sweetness and trust’ (Nobel speech). At base, then, poetry opens a way to hope. Heaney’s lines from ‘The Cure at Troy’ have been quoted countless times by world leaders, activists for peace, and educators alike:

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Like Heaney after her, Rukeyser could see hope in the savage coast of a land fraught with bloody political crisis. The last small section of The Life of Poetry is entitled ‘Poetry and Peace.’ ‘As we live our truths, we will communicate across all barriers, speaking for the sources of peace,’ it begins. More than anything, the book (which ought to be read by everyone) is an extended paean for poetry, and for the very human hope for peace.

Rukeyser, Heaney and Ireland are connected, inevitably, in further ways. In 1958, Rukeyser travelled alone to County Kerry, Ireland, to document the pagan festival of drink and sex, Puck Fair – the result was the book, The Orgy. Thirteen years later, her son William Rukeyser was to travel to Northern Ireland for an entirely different experience. The internationally scrutinised Belfast and Derry were a world away from the remote rural gathering in Kerry, and William was there in the capacity of a radio reporter and freelance journalist covering the Troubles. In periods between 1971 and 1972, William lived in a flat on Fitzroy Avenue, which is, coincidentally, the same street on which Heaney lived while studying and subsequently lecturing at Queen’s University Belfast in the School of English (incidentally, my first flat in Belfast was the next street to Fitzroy, convenient for Queen’s, which is where I now lecture). William Rukeyser’s evocative and distressing documentary photographs and sound recordings of the now infamous Bloody Sunday shootings in Derry can be found here: http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/rukeyser/. In an email to me, Bill Rukeyser notes:

In terms of my mother and me, the striking similarities are these: She went to Barcelona and I went to Derry expecting to report on news events. We both ended up participating in tragedies. The events stayed with and affected us our entire lives.

We each carry with us and are shaped by the high and low moments of our own lived experience – what Rukeyser termed ‘moments of proof’ – in which imagination and memory work in conjunction. Rukeyser and her son’s separate encounters with the tragedies wrought by war fused personal and public life in a way that would result in both of them turning the documented fact into a communicated response – an appeal for truth, transparency and justice. In the poem ‘Searching/Not Searching’, (Breaking Open, 1973) Rukeyser returns to the theme, and explores further the connections between her own encounters with tragedy, those of her son, and the wider implications of bearing witness to the truth in times of crisis. Her take on ‘the artist as social critic’ is similar to Heaney’s, who maintained, like Rukeyser, that the value in poetry was not in any didacticism or mirroring of the world, but in its status as both testimony and creation: ‘not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself’ (Nobel speech).

From: ‘Searching/Not Searching’

9 THE ARTIST AS SOCIAL CRITIC
They have asked me to speak in public
and set me a subject.

I hate anything that begins : the artist as . . .
and as for “social critic”
at the last quarter of the twentieth century
I know what that is:

late at night, among radio music
the voice of my son speaking half-world away
coming clear on the radio into my room
out of blazing Belfast.

Long enough for me to walk around
in that strong voice.

It is ‘that strong voice’ that is so vital to the power and proof of poetry in times of political upheaval. The voice of the poet, Rukeyser realised, needs to be strong enough to be heard across the false barriers, strong enough to create a meeting place in which those barriers come down, strong enough to level a field of action (as William Carlos Williams called the poem) in which one may walk within that voice, at once guided by it and in active exchange with it. As Bill Rukeyser noted to me, his mother’s hope was not unfounded. ‘She lived to see the death of Franco and the flickering rebirth of democracy in Spain. I have lived to see the Good Friday Agreement and the English government admit its guilt in Bloody Sunday.’

And so this post is in celebration and in hope; hope for peace, responsibility and communication in a time of new civil wars and political and financial crisis, and celebration of the lives of the poets to which it is dedicated, in the year of Heaney’s death and the centenary of Rukeyser’s birth. Finally, of course, it is in celebration of the life of poetry – a type of creation that cannot die, for as Rukeyser reminds us, ‘all the poems of our lives are not yet made’ (The Life of Poetry, 214). I continue to assign The Life of Poetry in my classes. I’m hopeful about what a new generation of Northern Irish youth will make of it.

[i] Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (London, Faber and Faber, 2009), 71

[ii] The closing line of one of Heaney’s most famous poems is his decision to choose as his vocational tool a pen, over his father’s spade: ‘I’ll dig with it’ (‘Digging’).

[iii] Heaney’s Nobel Prize speech can be found here: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1995/heaney-lecture.html