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Clive Bush

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 15th December, and also, gratifyingly, to me, born on the 20th.

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.

Filed Under: Ruke Blog Tagged With: Clive Bush, david adams, laura manuelidis, Lives, Marian Evans, sarah lawrence

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

Filed Under: Ruke Blog Tagged With: Barcelona, civil war, Clive Bush, Muriel Rukeyser, poetry in crisis, Queen's University Belfast, Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, Savage Coast, Seamus Heaney, The Life of Poetry, The Orgy, The Troubles, William Rukeyser

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