Creative Writing

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.

Waterlily Fire

February 5, 2013 by mthunter22 Leave a Comment

Posted on February 5, 2013 by Joe Sacksteder

Elisabeth Däumer’s post Context for Waterlily Fire rightly points out the theme of interrelatedness that runs through the Living Archive’s featured poem this month. When I first read “Waterlily Fire,” I was struck even more by the idea of impermanence and change, which is the actual bridge (to use Rukeyser’s image) that might be relating everything together in this poem. As I wrote in the post Synecdoche, West Virginia, Rukeyser wants her readers to see a kinship between localized disasters, whether it’s the Spanish Civil War or an outbreak of silicosis, and various other crises at home and around the globe. In relating the loss of Monet paintings to an urban upbringing, feminist themes, and anti-war rallies, “Waterlily Fire” is a poem that opens at the end (like a flower, sure) and invites readers to relate the poem’s content to current events and to their own personal struggles. The last line, “I speak to you You speak to me” invites us to engage, keeping the poem alive and mutable, like the “city of change,” rather than monolithic in its genius observations. This is generosity on the part of the author and shows a modernist interest in reader interpretation and a distrust of rigid, artist-imposed meaning.

I have not yet taught “Waterlily Fire” but am thinking of working it in this year. Likely, my creative prompt would ask my class to “speak back” to this poem, to consider the themes of interrelatedness and ephemerality, and to append a sixth section to this work. This poem invokes the idea “Whatever can happen to ________ can happen to ________” four times; I would present students with this formula and ask them to adapt it to their vignette. It’s difficult to read section two, especially as an American, and not think of 9/11: “Whatever can come to a city can come to this city,” and “Towers falling. A dream of towers.” But perhaps students would connect our recent economic hardships to those of the past (consider Rukeyser’s equally-prophetic stock market crash poem “Paper Anniversary”) or to what other countries are experiencing, especially in Europe. Many of my students have recently left home and high school, so perhaps they would connect the end of that era of their lives with other losses and culminations. I would probably write about Calvin and Hobbes or the last episode of Seinfeld… but that’s just me.

Calvin and Hobbes snow art

The Brilliant Truth, Rukeyser vs. Oprah

January 14, 2013 by mthunter22 1 Comment

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Joe Sacksteder

Against all sage advice from my colleagues, I’m thinking about proposing a class. I want to call it “True Lies: Untruth in Nonfiction,” a creative writing class that explores the gray area that Elisabeth called attention to in my last post: the various ways that artists define truth. The first thing that comes to mind is James Frey’s Oprah-enraging “memoir,” A Million Little Pieces. What I’m more concerned with, though, is the unflinching, unapologetic notion of how we can make stuff up and claim that it’s somehow truer than what actually happened. Of course distrust of capital-T-Truth is a central tenant of modernism, so I know this is nothing new, but I first became interested in this subject via Werner Herzog’s concept of “the ecstatic truth,” which he defines thus:

There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

Most of the artists invested in exploring this alternate truth supply us with its antithesis, the Oprah Winfreys who want their genre boundaries distinct. In Herzog’s case, the opposite of the ecstatic truth is what he calls “the accountants’ truth”:

By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.

Once this idea wormed its way into my mind, I started seeing it everywhere. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried would be a big part of my proposed class:

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

Oprah would have trouble screaming at Tim O’Brien since his fabrications are so blatant – for example, book-Tim has a daughter and real-life-Tim does not – and because he has resisted imposing a genre label onto his most famous book.
From Adam Gopnik’s article, “What Did Jesus Do?” in The New Yorker:

A real, unchangeable difference does exist between what might be called storytelling truths and statement-making truths—between what makes credible, if sweeping, sense in a story and what’s required for a close-knit metaphysical argument. Certain kinds of truths are convincing only in a narrative. The idea, for instance, that the ring of power should be given to two undersized amateurs to throw into a volcano at the very center of the enemy’s camp makes sound and sober sense, of a kind, in Tolkien; but you would never expect to find it as a premise at the Middle Earth Military Academy.

And Adam Novy’s novel, The Avian Gospels:

The tale about the knife wasn’t true, but that kind of truth was not the most important truth now.

At the risk of thrice-exposing some students to my ruminations on The Book of the Dead, I think Muriel Rukeyser would fit nicely into my proposed course. The ecstatic truth / story-truth / storytelling truth / knife truth – whatever you want to call it – is a great way to frame her decision to recount the Hawk’s Nest Disaster via poetry rather than her previous line of work, journalism. Newspaper and magazine articles would have forced their genre characteristics onto her account, leaving readers with something ostensibly more factual and less biased, but less poetic. Since I don’t believe Rukeyser came up with a cute name for her manipulation of truth (Did she?), I will do so for her, using one of her favorite adjectives: poetry allowed Rukeyser to give us “the brilliant truth” of the incident. In the brilliant truth, every word of the poem “Absolom” poured from the bereaved mother, Dora Jones, rather than from a variety of sources. In the brilliant truth, quotes from Paradise Lost cry out, suns declare midnight, and a power plant transforms into hell as she spirals downwards in the poem “Power.” In the brilliant truth, you can turn to your readers at the end with a wishful moral:

And you young, you who finishing the poem
wish new perfection and begin to make;
you men of fact, measure our times again.

And perhaps this phrase, “men of fact,” which appears throughout The Book of the Dead, is Rukeyser’s antithesis to the brilliant truth, her version of Herzog’s accountants’ truth, O’Brien’s happening-truth, Gopnik’s statement-making truth, or even Oprah’s truth. In Rukeyser’s case, it seems to be more insidious; the men of fact hold up the truth of numbers and dollar signs and stock quotes and blueprints at the expense of a worker’s truth, or a mother’s truth.

I would be very interested to hear of other texts that I might look at for my projected “True Lies” syllabus. The class would also deal with the ways we all fudge the truth whenever we sit down trying to write non-fiction; for example, exaggeration, privileging our own point-of-view, and dialogue we can’t possibly remember. There would also be a week or two on/of misinformation.

Synecdoche, Minnesota

December 14, 2012 by mthunter22 3 Comments

Posted on December 14, 2012 by Joe Sacksteder

My bio on the homepage for “Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive” states that I just completed a novel partly inspired by The Book of the Dead, and I wanted to use this post to relate how Rukeyser’s poetry has influenced my creative work. Back in undergrad at St. John’s University, I was lucky enough to be able to do volunteer work at the Minnesota Correctional Facility in St. Cloud, an institution with a very unique history.

Most of my initial knowledge was word-of-mouth, and it disturbed me in a gut-level way that I found difficult to articulate. Pulling up to the mammoth structure, you can’t help but admire the prison wall – the largest granite wall in the world (other than some sections of the Great Wall of China), I’ve heard from questionable sources. Whether or not it belongs in the Guinness Book, the wall is three feet wide at the top, four feet at the base, and a mile and a half long. What’s truly interesting is that it was built by prisoners from granite mined within the prison yard. St. Cloud’s nickname is Granite City, and the Breen and Young Quarry was the very first to be established in Minnesota, this back in 1868. Twenty years later, the state purchased 240 acres of land, which included the Breen and Young, for the purpose of building what would become the St. Cloud State Reformatory.

I don’t have a date for when they stopped using inmate labor in the quarry, but eventually the hollowed land suffered the same fate as any abandoned quarry; it filled with rainwater. The resulting body of water is not the same as a normal lake. In addition to its great depth in proportion to its breadth, something about the granite prevents algae and other plant life from growing in the water. As I found on swimming trips in college to other quarries, the water is cold, and you can see a great distance into its depths. Perhaps if you stood on the edge of the Breen and Young, you could see the steam-powered derrick they abandoned at the bottom of the quarry. It might even be the light-colored “island” in this Google Earth photograph of the yard:

Minnesota Correctional Facility

Some people might find this history lesson unremarkable. But it presented itself to me as a horror story with ghastly implications. Something about the land itself yielding the materials that would isolate it, something about the containment-within-containment-within-containment, something about the workers…

It wasn’t until I read Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead in graduate school at Eastern Michigan University that I began to gather a means to express what bothered me so much about the Breen and Young. Rukeyser, I felt, surveyed the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster, and the actual land where it played out, with a similar feeling of horror – which she expresses most abstractly but urgently in what I like to call the “industrial trilogy” of “Alloy,” “Power,” and “The Dam.” Try to keep the above image in mind during these words from “Alloy”:

Forced through this crucible: a million men.
Above this pasture, the highway passes those
who curse the air, breathing their fear again.

The roaring flowers of the chimney-stacks
less poison, at their lips in fire, than this
dust that is blown from off the field of glass;

blows and will blow, rising over the mills,
crystallized and beyond the fierce corrosion
disintegrated angel upon these hills.

In my third post, my open letter to the objective correlative, I quoted from Shoshana Wechsler’s essay “A Ma(t)ter of Fact and Vision: The Objectivity Question and Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead,” a quote that might help explain what nagged at Rukeyser’s mind and continues to nag at mine:

For the scientific observer as for the poet, what is important is the overriding fact, and fate, of invisibility – the invisibility of occupational disease and its ravages, the social invisibility of a mostly black, marginalized labor force – which led to the laborers’ brutal exploitation and death as well as their erasure from memory. The submerged tunnel neatly lends itself as the perfect objective correlative for Union Carbide’s corporate obfuscation.

And maybe comparing Wechsler’s observations about the submerged tunnel and my uncanny vibes from the submerged crane give me another perspective on the objective correlative, one that gets at Elisabeth’s comment on my objective correlative post; namely, that these compounding images hit us on a pre-rational level, a feeling that further research and examination sometimes uphold.

For, back when I first heard about the Breen and Young, it bothered me solely in an abstract way. I didn’t yet know about silicosis, didn’t consider that the conditions for inmate labor in the late 1800s probably weren’t better than those at Hawk’s Nest. While the work of Rukeyser and others has preserved the tragedy in West Virginia, I haven’t been able to find any real research regarding the inmate workers at the Breen and Young site. Perhaps you think that this is where I, Joe Sacksteder, sweep in and devote my life to resurrecting this history. Alas, my aspirations are that of a cowardly novelist, and it was far simpler to fabricate an exaggeration of what the history might have entailed… you know, so that responsible researchers might become interested and do the real work.

The current novel I’m shopping around revels in the horror film convention of what I call the “research montage,” that moment three-quarters of the way through many horror films where the protagonists have to figure out what event from the past is continuing to plague them. My version of the Breen and Young became the historical locus of my characters’ research, the root of evil. But the real horror story would be the actual truth, the evidence itself – and that’s the power of objectivist literature at its best.