Muriel Rukeyser

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

Throat of These Hours

June 6, 2013 by mthunter22 4 Comments

Posted on June 6, 2013 by Marian Evans

from The Speed of Darkness

13
My night awake
staring at the broad rough jewel
the copper roof across the way
thinking of the poet
yet unborn in this dark
who will be the throat of these hours.
No. Of those hours.
Who will speak these days,
if not I,
if not you?

Throat of These Hours is two plays, one for stage and one for radio. Both now in second draft, they have long-ago beginnings, when a lover gave me a photocopy of The Speed of Darkness. I don’t remember why she gave me the poem, but it stayed in my file box of precious documents when I moved to France with my youngest son, to Texas on my own, back to New Zealand and between its two main islands. I don’t keep stuff; I own only a dozen books and when I accumulate more I give them away. So now and then I took my copy of The Speed of Darkness out of its box and asked Do I Need This? Read it again. Got its thump to my heart again. Put it back in the box.

Then, last year, a friend suggested that I write a play. I’d written only one, ever, a short exercise during my scriptwriting MA studies, at Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters. My apprenticeship was in screenplays and my Creative Writing PhD (for which I wrote three feature-length screenplays) was about screenplay development for women writers and gender inequities in the state funding system. But I decided to try a full-length play, partly because I’m interested in media convergence. What elements are necessary in and unique to a literary form and what aren’t? Why write a play rather than a film or a game or a book of essays or a comic or a collection of poems? And I thought of my tattered photocopy of The Speed of Darkness with its rusty staple. I’ll investigate why it means so much to me, I decided. I couldn’t have made a better choice. The Speed of Darkness, other writing by and about Muriel Rukeyser and the writing itself challenge, nurture and transform me.

Throat of These Hours is set in a present-day radio station in Wellington New Zealand. Tina-the-techie, in her late fifties, used to be a backing singer and – when she could – a composer. A single mother, a lesbian, whose grand-daughter Kate has recently come to live with her. One of those women artists whose interrupted creativity is the subject of Tillie Olsen’s Silences (1978). Looking for cultural mothers to learn from, she rediscovers Muriel Rukeyser’s poetry and sets some of it to music. Early in the play she says:

I sat down with Muriel, ‘beautiful Muriel, mother of everyone’ as fellow poet Anne Sexton called her. Here I am Muriel, I said. Another single mother. A single grandmother now. And I want to become a throat of these hours– I want to learn from you. From your poems. From your fiction. From your other prose. From what people write about you. I want to latch onto your breast. Absorb courage from you. Here I am. Help me.

The stage play is influenced by a New Zealand classic, actor and writer Cathy Downes’ solo show The Case of Katherine Mansfield (1978) a portrayal of Katherine Mansfield that draws on her journal, letters and stories. In Throat of These Hours, Tina struggles to understand Muriel Rukeyser’s life and work and to develop a show about them, while she makes a living, cares for her grand-daughter and deals with anxiety about her health. The reappearance of her former nemesis, radio host Meredith, after twenty-five years’ absence, adds more complications. Once an activist and a well-regarded poet, childless Meredith stopped writing and focused on a broadcasting career and is recovering from breast cancer.

Muriel Rukeyser is not a character in the play, but she is ever-present, in the poems and in excerpts from prose – The Life of Poetry and various essays. Tina shares these with Meredith, with her grand-daughter Kate and with Grace, the much younger entrepreneurial host of the Mother’s Milk programme, who makes and sells breast milk yoghurt and has a concern for toxicity in breast milk that matches Meredith’s concern with abuse of water.

Composer Christine White and I presented a session on the stage play as a work-in-progress at the Rukeyser Symposium. It included a filmed reading of three scenes from the first half of the play to show the arc of the relationship between Tina and Meredith, and film of Chris performing two of her compositions-in-progress. The first of these was for the stanza from The Speed of Darkness placed at the top of this post. Responding to the viscerality of Muriel Rukeyser’s poems from Tina’s own musical starting point – singers like Janis Joplin, Marianne Faithfull, Patti Smith – it begins the play. Clips of the scene where Tina and Meredith meet again and Chris’ performance of The Speed of Darkness are below.

Chris has written about her work on the poems here (re influences) and here, where she says:

The play explores two women who, for various reasons have struggled with their art-making…Meredith has long since given up on writing poetry, and Tina is trying to discover her own voice through following the writings of Muriel and setting them to music.

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…

As this 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.

I think now of the film The Sixth Sense, and a documentary about the film. In terms of sound design, 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.

Chris’ second composition so far, for Then, is musically very different and will appear in a later post, with the other two scenes from the filmed reading. Then ends the play and shows how Muriel Rukeyser’s influence and the events of the play have transformed Tina’s life and work. On days when I fear that This Project Is Beyond Me, I listen to Chris’ version of Then and it helps renew my resolve.

Although the discussion with Rukeyser Symposium participants was brief, it was very helpful to me as I moved (I thought) into the third draft of the stage play. But throughout the research and writing processes so far, there have been surprises. And after that brief discussion and conversations with others, including those involved in the filming process, I decided to write Throat of These Hours as a radio play before I engaged with the stage play’s next draft. To make something very sound-oriented, simple and spacious, fifty-five minutes long, before moving back to the longer multi-sensory and complex stage play. My next post in a month’s time will be about this and other Muriel Rukeyser surprises. And some of the deep pleasures.

Selected Symposium clips

Reading from the stage play-in-progress: Tina and Meredith meet again

From The Speed of Darkness, composition/performance by Christine White

The Actors

Lorae Parry MNZM is one of New Zealand’s best-known playwrights, with five full-length published plays. One of them, Eugenia, has been performed in New Zealand, London, Sydney, and at the State University of New York (2012). She has co-written several other plays, including Sex Drive with Pinky Agnew. An award-winning actress and director, she has worked in theatre, television and radio and is legendary for her comedy performances as Prime Minister Helen Clark. Lorae recently returned from five years in London where she worked as a director and filmmaker and wrote and directed her most recent plays, Kate and Mrs Jones and Bloomsbury Women and the Wild Colonial Girl. She has an MA in Scriptwriting from the International Institute of Modern Letters.

Madeline McNamara has a Masters in Theatre Arts (Directing) from Toi Whakaari/ The New Zealand Drama School and Victoria University and is a performer, director, teacher and producer of original theatre work by women. She co-founded Magdalena Aotearoa, a network of women in contemporary theatre with Sally Rodwell in 1997 and was co-artistic director of the Magdalena Aotearoa International Festival of Women’s Performance (1999). Recent directing credits include At Circle’s End – A Drama about Death and Diversity (2011). She is co-artistic director of Acting Up Charitable Trust, an organisation that provides training and performance opportunities in the fields of theatre, film and music for people with learning disabilities. Currently, Madeline is an actor with Jo Randerson’s Barbarian Productions, developing Jo’s latest work White Elephant.

Throat of These Hours blog and brand new Facebook page.

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

Dear The Objective Correlative,

December 1, 2012 by mthunter22 1 Comment

Posted on December 1, 2012 by Joe Sacksteder

I admit it: I don’t understand you. But it’s not that I haven’t tried. I Google your name to see what you’re up to these days. At faculty parties I have a few too many Two-Hearteds and then beg my colleagues to tell me if they’ve seen you recently. I consider editing your Wikipedia page, and it kills me to know that there are others who are far more qualified. I try to remember those days back in undergrad when we were so bold and carefree. Remember how we used to make fun of Hamlet? And just when I thought I was getting over you, that I could forget you and move on with my life, there you were on the list of terms I was supposed to teach my Creative Writing 201 class. It was like seeing your name on a party guest list after so many years and knowing that I was the same confused, love-sick puppy I’d ever been.

In the past I admit I’ve tried to fit you into a tidy definition: one or more events or objects charged with metaphoric value that create a desired reaction or emotion from the reader and/or character. I’ve used Hemingway’s famous six word story (For sale: baby shoes, never worn.) to render you as a formula: potential baby + cuteness of Baby Jordans + baby didn’t happen + need of money = ☹ But we both know that you’re so much more than that. The problem is that there are other literary terms that seem so similar to you – montage, mimesis, even plain ol’ metaphor – and they’re so much easier to understand!

…

I’m sorry, the objective correlative. I was upset. I didn’t mean it. I know that you’re unique and that you’re worthy of every brain muscle I strain trying to comprehend your ambiguities. In the days leading up to that moment I’d have to introduce you to my Intro students, I was a nervous wreck. But then – bolt of lightning! – Shoshana Wechsler’s essay, “A Ma(t)ter of Fact and Vision: The Objectivity Question and Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead,” rescued me from a 48-hour web surfing bender:

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.

I paraded this quote triumphantly to the front of the classroom. Just as the workers’ deaths and even their bodies vanished behind the convenience of the electrical power their labor produced, so did the tunnel that killed them disappear under the river it rerouted. But halfway through my arrogant pontification, I realized that I was still confusing you with simpler phrasings, like “symbol for” or even “example of.”

Perhaps you are the reason why Rukeyser’s poems often have a list-like feel to them. I think that, when poets try to disrupt syntax so that their work doesn’t sound like lineated prose, the result is often something that sounds like the poetic version of a grocery list. And perhaps it is in the way the items in Rukeyser’s lists come together to brew new meaning that I can begin to understand you, the objective correlative. I think back to Rukeyser’s poem “Ann Burlak”:

The neighbor called in to nurse the baby of a spy,
the schoolboy washing off the painted word
“scab” on the front stoop, his mother watering flowers
pouring the milk-bottle of water from the ledge,
who stops in horror, seeing. The grandmother going
down to her cellar with a full clothes-basket,
turns at the shot, sees men running past brick,
smoke-spurt and fallen face.

Are you there behind the words, the objective correlative, whispering that the accumulation of these loaded images create the “field of faces” at Ann Burlak’s feet, the “system of looms in constellations whirred,” the “disasters dancing” that require the heroism of the labor organizer? I sense your presence in John Jay Chapman’s act of sticking his hand into fire in the poem “Chapman” (and in real life), but it’s not so “neat” as the submerged tunnel, and… and I have decided to stay in again tonight. But reminders of you are everywhere, and I wonder if there’s anyone who can mediate between us. Until then, you know where I’ll be; my office hours are on Tuesday and Wednesday, and I’ll be waiting for you.

Muriel Rukeyser, Zombie Necromancer

November 23, 2012 by mthunter22 Leave a Comment

Posted on November 23, 2012 by Joe Sacksteder

I don’t care for this new zombie renaissance. And I don’t mean that like I’m afraid of zombies or something. I just think that 1). it’s a default subject matter for horror writers, 2). all interesting scenarios and subject matters were long ago exhausted, and 3). our current fascination with the genre points to disturbing cultural predilections. So I was surprised when reading a new compilation put out by Butler University’s Pressgang Press, Monsters: A Collection of Literary Sightings, that my favorite story was Amiee Bender’s Among Us. Briefly, it starts as a story about a zombie that develops a taste for the decaying flesh of its fellow zombies rather than the flesh of the living. The thing that gives the story larger ramifications is how it “zooms out” to show other instants of financial, agricultural, and even domestic “cannibalism” in our society. In one of the vignettes, a salmon farm feeds bits of their own product to their product, and the meat from the salmon-fed-salmon becomes poisonous for humans to eat. Another vignette is a description of the scene from the film Being John Malkovich when said actor tumbles into his own subconscious, an example more recursive or ouroboric than cannibalistic.

Somehow, I thought of Rukeyser and the dead workers of the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster. In the poem “The Cornfield” from The Book of the Dead, Rukeyser veers us off the road that led us into the poem set in the opening poem, steers us across back roads–stopping once to ask for directions–to a field where workers who died from silicosis were buried “five at a time.” The burials were hasty and covert, as Rukeyser (through George Robinson) describes in this example:

I knew a man
who died at four in the morning at the camp.
At seven his wife took clothes to dress her dead
husband, and at the undertaker’s
they told her the husband was already buried.

If we haven’t yet understood that the bodies of the dead are fertilizing the corn that we eat, just as the work that killed them provides the electricity we mindlessly use, Rukeyser compares their meager, approximate grave markers (“wood stakes, charred at tip, / few scratched and named”) with the way we might mark the produce in our backyard plots:

Think of your gardens. But here is corn to keep.
Marked pointed sticks to name the crop beneath.
Sowing is over, harvest is coming ripe.

Of course the workers are morbidly presented as our crops here, but we could interpret the chilling idea of a harvest in a positive light as well, one in which the dead are resurrected to, in a way, avenge themselves against their wrongful deaths. As the dead beneath the field cry, “Earth, uncover my blood!” Rukeyser casts her act of poesis as that uncovering. Here, the poet is a noble take on the necromancer who raises and controls the dead.

This much I understood. But one of my students connected this zombie theme to the text Rukeyser selects from the Egyptian Book of the Dead for the poem “Absolom”: “I shall journey over the earth among the living.” Although I have always read this line in a hopeful light, the student pointed out a darker interpretation, that since these men know that they have silicosis blooming in their lungs, they’re basically dead already.

I try to get my students charged up over Rukeyser by describing The Book of the Dead as “a horror poem” (“Forced through this crucible,” I shudder dramatically, “a million men!”). I’m a huge proponent for eroding the wall between genre and literary, but usually I look to the McSweeney’s crowd or to books like Pressgang’s Monsters. I admit that I don’t often look to poetry for fresh takes on sci-fi, horror, westerns, fantasy, etc. But The Book of the Dead is not the only place Rukeyser indulges in imagery traditionally associated with the horror genre. Her Elegies (1949) are full of amputation, decay, and mutilation. In “River Elegy,” she writes:

The rich streets are full of empty coats parading,
and one adolescent protesting violin,
the slums full of their flayed and faceless bodies,
they shiver, they are working to buy their skin.
They are lost.

Of the ten elegies, she alone dates this most gruesome one, Summer 1940, as if telling the reader to root it in the context of World War II. We can specifically affix the “Half-faced, half-sexed… living dead” of this elegy to victims of war, but Rukeyser is vague enough about the identity of this city “built for the half-dead and half-alive” that we are free to interpret the place as anywhere and the cause to any number of mid-century (or half-century) evils. It’s difficult not to recall Eliot’s The Wasteland:

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

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.