Muriel Rukeyser

Synecdoche, West Virginia

November 16, 2012 by mthunter22 2 Comments

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Joe Sacksteder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Important Poetry

November 10, 2012 by mthunter22 5 Comments

Posted on November 10, 2012 by Joe Sacksteder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Muriel Rukeyser? Why a website just for her?

June 16, 2012 by mthunter22 4 Comments

Posted on June 16, 2012 by Elisabeth Däumer

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

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

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

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

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

June 15, 2012 by mthunter22 1 Comment

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Elisabeth Däumer

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

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

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

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

Still, I found myself troubled when Daniels points to the

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

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

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

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

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