Pedagogy

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.

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.

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?