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Savage Coast

Eulàlia Busquets, Returning to Savage Coast

May 8, 2020 by Elisabeth Daumer Leave a Comment

View of Montcada

In September 2019, the Catalan publishing house :Rata_ released Muriel Rukeyser’s posthumously published novel Savage Coast, translated into Spanish by Milo J. Krmpotić and into Catalan by me. This is a first step to making the North American poet known in a country where she spent five transformative days, in July 1936. She came there to write an article about the alternative Olympic Games in Barcelona but ended up writing a novel instead. The games never took place, there was a military coup, the people’s revolutionary response broke out, and the confrontation was the beginning of a three-year civil war. I first discovered her and some of her writings in 2000, when I was doing research on women, literature, and the Spanish Civil War at the University of Kingston upon Hull (UK). At that time, her book The Life of Poetry made me realize the importance of making poetry accessible to everyone and its power of transforming human consciousness.

In Spain, and especially in Catalonia, we still have a long way to go to acknowledge Muriel Rukeyser as an activist, a radical poet, and a feminist woman. When she died on February 12, 1980, she did not leave us; we still do not know her enough and she should really exist among us, especially now. Since she has a lot to give us, we must go to her, bring her in, return to her work and make it germinate within our present historical moment. Muriel Rukeyser has not been discovered and valued to the extent she should have been. She has been occupying a space of silence as many other women authors have, in the US, in Spain, and in other countries. Not only was there an extended and organized persecution of leftists, communists, Jews, and free thinkers during the interwar period and after the Second World War (a period in which Spain experienced the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, the Second Republic, the civil war, and four decades of Franco’s dictatorship), but there have always been prejudices against women authors and their work. Like other women who had been silenced and considered incapable of producing enduring works of art, Muriel Rukeyser needs to be rediscovered now, her literary work must be published again, translated into other languages and read if we want to understand our past from perspectives that have been forbidden and obscured to us.

During the last two years, we have seen a lot of social and political dissent in Catalonia. A popular peaceful revolution 1 has taken place, but it is being repressed by means of a legal and judicial system that menaces some rights we had taken for granted, such as the rights of assembly, public protest, and free speech. At stake is the viability of a strong and developed democracy. We are talking about defending civil rights. The price being paid for political dissent is prison, exile, and huge economic penalties. Long shadows, like those of cypresses, originating in the repressive right-wing military rule of the past, are now obscuring our lives and liberties and adopting legal forms. What is going on in Catalonia now should matter to European citizens and to the people of the whole world. It is a question of fundamental human rights. Nevertheless, there is a silence and a postmodern2 distortion of the meaning of words, such as coup, democracy, and rebellion that hides the reality of what is happening.

It is from this space and time of language manipulation, silence, and negation that Rukeyser’s transformative voice can speak to us to “split open” and reveal the actual truth of a woman’s, and a country’s, life, unveiling the gear mechanism of the time we live in, uncovering those structures that exclude and marginalize people and ideas that criticize, destabilize, or endanger the status quo of ruling politics, literary canons, and social ideologies. Confrontation, opposition, difference . . . they all seem inevitable, but are we going to fight them with war, exclusion, persecution, and exile? All that is oppressed and repressed can at any tensional moment explode and bloom. Art and creativity, specifically poetry, can become a powerful, peaceful, and joyful arm against injustice, exclusion, and pain. This is what I learned when I discovered Muriel Rukeyser as a poet, a social and political activist and an engaged woman of her time.

My interest for her grew slowly and steadily throughout more than a decade. In 2013 the Feminist Press published Rukeyser’s documentary, biographical, and experimental novel, Savage Coast. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein recovered the manuscript of the “lost,” unfinished novel in the Library of Congress, edited and prepared it for its first publication. 3 After reading the novel, I realized that there was a gap in our social, historical, and literary construction of the Spanish Civil War. Our cultural archetypes of revolutionary fighters in the civil war are mainly those of armed men holding an active role. By contrast, Savage Coast offers a different vision of revolutionary activity, penned by a feminist poet who fought ardently throughout her life by means of her poetic work produced after witnessing, not only fights, barricades, and shootings, but everyday scenes, the role of women and the common people during the war, and the strength and hope for social change of those who gave their lives as voluntary soldiers and members of the International Brigades in the Popular Front. Her novel, together with other writings of hers about the civil war, brings an enriching and unique perspective of the conflict, which deconstructs dominant masculine visions of it, most of them focused on the military contest and the death and repression imposed afterwards.

Savage Coast portrays the personal experience and transformation of a young woman, Helen, who like Muriel was in Moncada and Barcelona from the 18th to the 24th of July 1936. Rukeyser’s novel narrates the time when the people’s revolutionary response to the military coup had just begun, that is, before the fight became a war and before it was called a civil war. Soon after, in the Fall of 1936, Rukeyser explored this deeply personal and private experience, as well as its communal and public reverberations, in her first and only novel. Its subsequent rejection by her publisher, Pascal Covici, is most likely due, as Rowena Kennedy-Epstein explains in her introduction to the novel, to its experimental and sexual nature, e.g. its poetic and symbolic narration of a free sexual relationship, its focus on a young woman who did not fit feminine standards of the time, its politically unsettling topic, and its experimental writing style. In the course of the novel’s voyage from darkness toward light, Helen evolves from a confused tourist, who cannot speak the language of the country, to a mature woman who is no longer scared and takes on the responsibility of telling others what she believes and what she has witnessed in Spain. In the first chapters the author focuses on the common people. Helen travels to Barcelona in the third class of an express train that gets stuck in the town of Moncada for three days, where a general strike has just been called. Everyday events, such as washing and finding something to eat or a place to sleep, the conversation with country women, taking care of others, the train passengers’ difficulties to understand what really happens in the country as they wonder how to continue their trip to Barcelona when the train is stuck, are as important as the internal discourse of the main female character, the surrealist narration of dreams, the poetic and symbolic depiction of a sexual encounter in a train compartment, the dialogues among train passengers and athletes, a publicity board, the lyrics of a jazz song or a speech broadcast on the radio. We constantly realize that the situation is dangerous: there are car horns blasting one-two-three, groups of young armed men on open trucks or breaking into houses to seek and destroy religious objects; there is shooting, the persecution of a fascist who runs up a hill, the execution of five military chiefs. On a hot luminous day, volunteers who are parading with the Olympics get ready to embark for the Aragon front, and the French Olympic team takes its leave by ship among raised fists and the singing of “The Internationale.” Time expands and dizzily speeds, or it slows down as the train does. Scenes pass by like those on a film.

The novel Savage Coast is unique, experimental, poetic, a jewel that opens a window to the past and which Rowena Kennedy-Epstein’s superb and clarifying introduction makes present and more understandable and enriching for readers. After reading the novel, I immediately wanted to translate it into Catalan. The task took me eighteen months. This is my first literary translation and, in a way, I also “split open” by engaging in this project. I wanted my people to know about Muriel Rukeyser and understand her vision because it can help us face the present convulsive moments in our country. In the novel there is a feeling of uncertainty that fades as events and actions take place. The open ending does not talk about the war, but about taking responsibility, fighting for what you believe, and hoping for a better future that can be constructed through our collective action.

While translating the novel, I visited Moncada several times and contacted two local historians, Josep Bacardit Sanllehí and Ricard Ramos Jiménez, who published the only history book that explains with detail the civil war in this town: 940 dies. La Guerra Civil a Montcada i Reixac.4 Thanks to their cooperation I was able to compare the historical events that appear in Savage Coast with the historical facts. There is no doubt that the novel has a real and precise setting and context and that it has a true documentary spirit. With the text in mind, I was able to recognize the streets, visualize the cafés like the Worker’s Café and the Fonda España, which have since disappeared, or the ABI Café that retains its ancient atmosphere. There is the train station, the so called Estació de França; the Town Hall with its original facade, its inner balcony and the two sets of stairs. The Church of Saint Engracia has since been demolished after an explosion; only some of its stones, placed near the riverbank, remain. The Ignasi Iglesias School, where the athletes and passengers slept, has also vanished, but Mr. Ramos found a photograph of it. All descriptions of the people and places in the novel were based on Muriel’s experience and memories. Moreover, she kept her traveling notes in a little diary where she wrote down the special moments that she lived through in Moncada and Barcelona. These notes provided the initial structure for her novel. Although the local historians recovered and scanned all the council documents that had not been destroyed after the war was lost, the letter signed by some of the train passengers and given to the ruling political committee, together with the money collected to help the villagers, was never found. Mr. Bacardi and Mr. Ramos helped me to interpret Muriel’s map of Moncada, 5 the one that she drew and that indicates the important settings for the action in the first chapters of the novel.

Muriel Rukeyser’s hand-drawn map of Moncada (Library of Congress)

It is an exact map with an outline of the mountains of Moncada and its two electricity towers. The name “Louis” and the arrow next to it signal the way to a local pension called Hostal Les Tres Línies. Its name refers to the three railway lines that pass by Moncada, including the one that connects the city of Barcelona with Portbou, at the French border. Les Tres Línies had a bar, a restaurant with a little garden, a cinema and rooms where the athletes were welcomed. The expenses were paid by the Olympic Committee at that time. Les Tres Línies was run by Louis Amoignon, a French man, and it remained open until nearly the seventies.

Hostal Les Tres Línies (publicity) run by Louis Amoignon
França Train Station- Moncada- 1925-30 (With thanks to Ricard Ramos)
Ignasi Iglesies School (With thanks to Ricard Ramos)
Montiu Street  
Main Street, Fonda España and bus stop in 1936

With the help of all this comparative data, the two historians and I tried to revive those days Muriel lived in Moncada and, surprisingly, they told me that there still exists a record of the nearly one hundred athletes and passengers of the express train in Moncada. The train stopped on the 18th July 1936 at about 8:30 in the morning, when the general strike was declared, and the revolution started. All of this is in a personal diary of Jacint López Herrero. He was a Moncada citizen who was just thirteen years old at that time. I reproduce and translate a fragment here below. His diary is the only remaining historical record of the events that took place in Moncada referring to the train in which Muriel and the athletes were travelling:

A group of armed people were walking along the Main street, and one of them was saying:

– The express train going to Barcelona has stopped at the Estació de França, the head of the station says that he doesn’t allow it to depart, and he has communicated that this train will be detained until new orders.

– Damned! And who are all those people that nobody understands what they say?

– They say, speaking Spanish poorly, that they go to the Popular Games of Barcelona, that they are all athletes.

– No way, no way -Murcia, a well-known fascist, said- somebody must tell them that they cannot take any photographs, if you see anyone who wants to take one, turn off their cameras and hang them back on their shoulders.

– Listen! They are asking where they can have something to eat, because they are very hungry.

– Well, then… take them to the Main street. Bakeries must be open as well as butcheries, and they can buy whatever they want; and if you see Vicenç, tell him to make you a voucher in case they do not have money, because we are also hungry.

The platforms of the station were full of young people, getting on and off the train, speaking different languages; this scene reminded me of the passage in the Bible that refers to the Tower of Babel.

Next day, J. López refers in her diary to Albert Ubach’s testimony, a vacationer in Moncada when the train remained stuck in the same place:

The athletes were paying with the currency of their countries, because the Hispano Colonial Bank on Main street was closed. Due to this circumstance the shopkeepers of Moncada were making good profits, while others, who did not know the exchange value of the currency, were losing money. The Fonda España had a lot of work serving meals to such a multitude. It can be said that the shopkeepers and the restaurant made the big bucks.

My historical research in Moncada helped me resurrect, feel, and understand what Muriel Rukeyser had experienced in Catalonia during the first days of the civil war outbreak. Helen never visited the Costa Brava, the coast that provides the novel’s title. In a similar way, Muriel never returned to Moncada or Barcelona, although in the mid-sixties she drove to the Spanish border, but did not cross it, choosing to stay on the French side. Somehow, I think that Savage Coast tells us about the things that could have been possible but that ultimately did not happen. “Everybody knows who won the war,” she says in the first chapter of the novel she kept revising. This does not mean they do not exist. They continue to exist potentially as they can occur in the future and we must go on fighting to make them happen. This is the message she held on to as she left Spain on the ship Ciudad de Ibiza and accepted the responsibility to tell what she had seen the day she “was born” in Spain. My goal, from now on, is to make her experience and literature available to the Spanish and the Catalan people. Muriel Rukeyser has a lot to give, and her poetry and work should be translated into our languages. Her son, William Rukeyser, whom I thank very much for helping me during my translation and research task, told me that she would have been proud to see that Savage Coast can now be read by my people. May her poetry transform our spirit, heart, and mind and may we, one day soon, live in the freedom she believed in.

Columbus Street

Moncada Town Hall

España Square (Barcelona) with the building and its clock tower that served as the
Olimpiada Hotel

To cite this article in MLA, 8th edition: Eulàlia Busquets, “Returning to Savage Coast,” Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive, http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/2020/05/08/eulalia-busquets-returning-to-savage-coast/.

Author Bio: I was born in December 1966 with wide-open almond eyes, impressed by the colors and the rough Montsant territory. Of a humble origin, I was a playful kid who grew up among nature, books, and cinema, and I adored going to school. At the age of five I already wanted to be a feminist, a rebel, and free. These ideals were embodied by the Catalan writer and translator Maria Teresa Vernet Real, my grandmother’s close friend. Forged by the stories that my parents told me about the Spanish Civil War, I wondered about death before I could understand it. An initiatory trip around the world at eighteen introduced me to adulthood. At the beginning of the new millenium I obtained my degree in English Philology at the Rovira i Virgili University (Tarragona- Spain) and an MA on Women and Literature in the English Language from the University of Kingston Upon Hull (UK). In 2019 I completed my first literary translation to present the activist and poet Muriel Rukeyser, whom I want to rescue for our history and culture from a women’s point of view. I work for public schools as an English teacher because I like learning. Words have saved me because they originate in silence. With them I look and with my eyes I speak. I love literature and life.



Filed Under: Essays, Scholarship Tagged With: Barcelonia, Catalonia, Moncada, Savage Coast, Spanish Civil War

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

Filed Under: Ruke Blog Tagged With: Barcelona, civil war, Clive Bush, Muriel Rukeyser, poetry in crisis, Queen's University Belfast, Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, Savage Coast, Seamus Heaney, The Life of Poetry, The Orgy, The Troubles, William Rukeyser

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