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Rukeyser

Rukeyser’s indentations

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Posted on May 15, 2012 by Elisabeth Däumer

So, I am curious, why are the lines indented the way they are in Rukeyser’s poem “For My Son”? What is the difference between:

You come from poets, kings, bankrupts, preachers,
attempted bankrupts, builders of cities, salesmen,
the great rabbis, the kings of Ireland, failed drygoods
storekeepers, beautiful women of the songs,
great horsemen, tyrannical fathers at the shore of ocean,
the western mothers lookng west beyond from their
windows,
the families escaping over the sea hurriedly and by night–
the roundtowers of the Celtic violet sunset,
the diseased, the radiant, fliers, men thrown out of town,
the man bribed by his cousins to stay out of town,
teachers, the cantor on Friday evening, the lurid
newspapers,
strong women gracefully holding relationship, the Jewish girl
going to parochial school, the boys racing their iceboats
on the Lakes,
the woman still before the diamond in the velvet window,
saying “Wonder of nature.”

and:

You come from poets, kings, bankrupts, preachers,
attempted bankrupts, builders of cities, salesmen,
the great rabbis, the kings of Ireland, failed drygoods
storekeepers, beautiful women of the songs,
great horsemen, tyrannical fathers at the shore of ocean,
the western mothers lookng west beyond from their
windows,
the families escaping over the sea hurriedly and by night–
the roundtowers of the Celtic violet sunset,
the diseased, the radiant, fliers, men thrown out of town,
the man bribed by his cousins to stay out of town,
teachers, the cantor on Friday evening, the lurid
newspapers,
strong women gracefully holding relationship, the Jewish girl
going to parochial school, the boys racing their iceboats
on the Lakes,
the woman still before the diamond in the velvet window,
saying “Wonder of nature.”

The first thing that I notice is that the indented version of the poem (Ruk’s version) suggests the flow of the poem over time. This is one long sentence, one list of ancestors and their identities, professions, deeds. Since the lines don’t all begin “justified” on the left, the indentations suggest the heterogeneity, even quirkiness of this list, and somehow, for me at least, a sense of time and space–perhaps even generations.

“Space on the page,” Rukeyser wrote in The Life of Poetry, “can provide roughly for a relationship in emphasis through the eye’s discernment of pattern” (117).

The white space at the beginning of lines does not, I think, function as a pause; instead it compels the eyes to move right, and to keep moving with the flow of the indented lines. In addition, many of the lines are enjambed, further compelling eye and ear to move with the sense from one line to the next.

But what do you think? To what extent does indentation function as “punctuation” in this poem? And how is it a “physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge” (The Life of Poetry, 117). And how do we, as readers, acknowledge these “body-rhythms”?

How to read Rukeyser?

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Posted on May 15, 2012 by Elisabeth Däumer

It seems right to begin this blog on the new Rukeyser website by exploring the different ways of reading that Rukeyser’s poetry invites or compels us to engage in.

This semester, I am guiding an independent study on Rukeyser with Chelsea Lonsdale, a student who will join EMU’s graduate program in Written Communication in the fall (2012) and who is currently completing an undergraduate thesis on craft–the “craft” of composition and “craft” if I understand her correctly in general.
So part of what we’ll do together is to “read” individual poems by Rukeyser; in fact, since Chelsea expressed her dissatisfaction with the practice of “close reading,” as defined and practiced by the New Critics, we are trying to figure out what reading Rukeyser’s poems “closely” might imply–and how else to read her poems, with an emphasis on “closely.”

Does it mean, for instance, that we assume the poem as “fixed” object? and if not, if, for instance, we think, like Rukeyser herself did, of poetry as a process, an event, a meeting place, what does that mean for our attention to the formal elements of her poems–line breaks, line indentations, punctuation. Should we treat them as “fixed” as “fluid” as subject to change or intervention by the reader?

If, as Rukeyser affirmed in The Life of Poetry,”Punctuation is biological and it is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge,” then, it seems to me, we need to pay close attention, not only to how she uses, but, equally importantly, to how she conceives of “punctuation” in her poetry:

…punctuation in poetry needs several inventions. Not least of all, we need a measured rest. Space on the page, as E.E. Cummings uses it, can provide roughly for a relationship in emphasis through the eye’s discernment of pattern; but we need a system of pauses which will be related to the time-pattern of the poem. I suggest a method of signs equivalating the metric foot and long and short rests within that unit. For spoken poetry, for poems approaching song, and indeed for the reading of any of these–since we are never without the reflection of sound which exists when we imagine words–a code of pauses would be valuable.