Archive for category: Reading

I have a modest goal to post something here each week, and this week–quite busy with other things–I thought I’d simply stick in a quote. But the book I picked up was Muriel Rukeyser‘s Out of Silence: Selected Poems, and it inspired me to try a little harder.

In February it was my pleasure to attend a 2-day virtual conference on Rukeyser’s work, reception, and influence.  I knew Rukeyser, previously, from a handful of anthologized poems and her splendid book, The Life of Poetry. I’m still processing all I heard there, reading and rereading her poems; I’ve just begun reading her novel, Savage Coast. (Until a panelist presented on it, I hadn’t known the novel existed.) I particularly enjoyed the presentation by her former student, Dennis J Bernstein, a poet and radio producer who documented Rukeyser in her final years. My friend and mentor, Professor Vivian Pollak, presented on the Elegies and their contemporary reception (often brutal, despite Rukeyser’s ground-breaking work).

Revisiting Rukeyser’s Elegies in Times Like These: Webinar The EMU English Department, in cooperation with the Center for Jewish Studies and the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, will livestream this the event for the EMU community. www.emich.edu

I wanted to share a passage from the preface to her poems:

She was never what is sometimes called a poet’s poet–the exquisite practitioner of craft capable of making other poets envy her sheer technical skill. She wrote for a far larger audience, seeking readers in ordinary people, as well as among those who understood the difficulties of modern poetry. “Writing is only another way of giving,” she believed, “a courtesy, if you will, and a form of love.” And so the search for the mot juste gave way to the larger goals she pursued in poetry: “the universe of emotional truth” and “an approach to the truth of feeling.” -Kate Daniels, “In Order to Feel” [Rukeyser’s words, in quotations, are from The Life of Poetry]

This strikes me as a manifesto for writing, something I need to post, and circle back and reread.

The featured photograph is by Imogen Cunningham.

“I really do sincerely feel that bewilderment is at the core of every great poem, and in order to be bewildered, you have to be able to wonder. You absolutely have to be permeable to wonder.” –Kaveh Akbar

In November I took a Hugo House class on “writing angry poems,” taught by the poet Sharon Bryan. One of my discoveries was that it is freaking hard for me to express anger. Feel it, yes; turn it loose in a poem: no. So I struggled. “This is like a poem about repressing anger,” was one of the comments I received. Another: “This poem doesn’t seem to be about anger, but maybe mild annoyance.”

One of Bryan’s recommendations was to read Deaf Republic: Poems, by Ilya Kamnisky. I dutifully ordered a copy and have been avoiding it ever since. This week, I read it. It could not have been more timely for me. In the 1960s people used to say, “the personal is political.” Over the last ten days, we have seen how true that still is.

Deaf Republic is profoundly personal. It struck me as being less a collection of poems than one poem, or a play-in-verse perhaps. Tracy K. Smith writes that what she finds here is “conscience, terror, silence, and rage made to coexist alongside moments of tenderness, piercing beauty, and emphatic lyricism.” Kaminsky’s story opens when a young, deaf boy is shot down by soldiers in an occupied town, and then it winds through the perspectives of other characters in the town, which is struck deaf by the violence, introducing a couple expecting a child, then Momma Galya, the puppeteer who rescues their infant. But the poems transcend their place of “otherness.” As Smith, who has served as the United States Poet Laureate, continues in her cover blurb: “It hurts to read these poems. It hurts to read them and find the world I belong to stricken by a contagion of silence.”

The first and the last poems stand apart from the rest, and address exactly that: meaning, us. Us as we  watch atrocities, then “pocket our phones” and go to the dentist.

We Lived Happily during the War

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house–

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth moth
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

This is always our charge. Let us write poems that capture the bewilderment and push through it and call out the truth.