Essential Essays

by Adrienne Rich

  bride-sweet broke to the whole rapture?

  Hoover, Coolidge, Harding, Wilson

  hear the factories of human misery turning out commodities.

  For whom are the holy matins of the heart ringing?

  Noble men in the quiet of morning hear

  Indians singing the continent’s violent requiem.

  Harding, Wilson, Taft, Roosevelt,

  idiots fumbling at the bride’s door,

  hear the cries of men in meaningless debt and war.

  Where among these did the spirit reside

  that restores the land to productive order?

  McKinley, Cleveland, Harrison, Arthur,

  Garfield, Hayes, Grant, Johnson,

  dwell in the roots of the heart’s rancor.

  How sad “amid lanes and through old woods”

  echoes Whitman’s love for Lincoln!

  There is no continuity then. Only a few

  posts of the good remain. I too

  that am a nation sustain the damage

  where smokes of continual ravage

  obscure the flame.

  It is across great scars of wrong

  I reach toward the song of kindred men

  and strike again the naked string

  old Whitman sang from. Glorious mistake!

  that cried:

  “The theme is creative and has vista.”

  “He is the president of regulation.”*

  I see always the under side turning,

  fumes that injure the tender landscape.

  From which up break

  lilac blossoms of courage in daily act

  striving to meet a natural measure

  But the poem doesn’t end here. Duncan rejoins it with the classic myth, the task set Psyche by jealous Aphrodite, the sorting of millions of seeds:

  These are the old tasks.

  You’ve heard them before.

  They must be impossible. Psyche

  must despair, be brought to her

  insect instructor;

  must obey the counsels of the green reed;

  saved from suicide by a tower speaking,

  must follow to the letter

  freakish instructions.

  In the story the ants help. The old man at Pisa

  mixd in whose mind

  (to draw the sorts) are all seeds

  as a lone ant from a broken ant-hill

  had part restored by an insect, was

  upheld by a lizard . . .

  Ezra Pound at Pisa.

  Pound’s fascism-crazed mind; Whitman’s stroke. The old poets in their “glorious mistakes.” A mixed bag, the “freakish instructions” we take from the forerunners, certainly in the United States.

  West

  From east men push.

  The islands are blessd

  (cursed) that swim below the sun,

  man upon whom the sun has gone down!

  Finally, by a winding route, the poem ends like this:

  (An ode? Pindar’s art, the editors tell us, was not a statue but a mosaic, an accumulation of metaphor. But if he was archaic, not classic, a survival of obsolete mode, there may have been old voices in the survival that directed the heart. So, a line from a hymn came in a novel I was reading to help me. Psyche, poised to leap—and Pindar too, the editors write, goes too far, topples over—listened to a tower that said, Listen to Me! The oracle had said, Despair! The Gods themselves abhor his power. And then the virgin flower of the dark falls back flesh of our flesh from which everywhere. . . .

  the information flows

  that is yearning. A line of Pindar

  moves from the area of my lamp

  toward morning.

  In the dawn that is nowhere

  I have seen the willful children

  clockwise and counter-clockwise turning.

  I want to say a word about Duncan’s bitter litany of the names of American presidents. It’s catalyzed by Whitman’s elegy for Lincoln. Lincoln, who signed the Emancipation Proclamation with racist mental reservations, determined to hold together the Union at any cost, became and for many remains an iconic figure in American history, a marker of leadership and a marble monument, a democratic figure unlike the property- and slave-owning “founding fathers.” And a great rhetorician. Duncan isn’t enumerating the names of “Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower” et cetera in the simplistic search for a great man to whom a great poem might be written. He is calling up history as schoolchildren have learned it by rote, via the names and dates of presidents; but in visionary indignation, not the patriotism of the schoolroom.

  If we look to American poetry, as Duncan reminds us, Whitman’s elegy for Lincoln is unique as an artistically and emotionally memorable document. Yet “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” is an elegy, not a eulogy; the people of the United States, the mourners, are where the life continues and the social power resides.

  The landscape of language is—as Wittengenstein has it—like the oldest part of a city, original trails and cow paths interlacing as streets, a map determined not by preconceptions of urban order but by the intricate tracings of the human brain—and voice. A poem emerges as language, and the poems that most interest and engage me are poems in which several kinds of language impel you along a twisting path, as Duncan draws his from the aural and visual synthesis of a Greek myth toward his own leap of imagination. That myth (of betrayal, despair, rescue through insects and tutelary voices) leads by poetic synapse into the formative legend of the United States, the Western frontier, Duncan’s own relation to that legend and to his own tutelary voices—the aging poets Whitman and Pound in their unfaltering wrongness that has style / their variable truth, back and around through his indictment of the history underlying the false myths of the nation (I too / that am a nation sustain the damage) back into childhood and a final image of children playing in a ring clockwise and counter-clockwise turning. That image reappears in another Duncan poem, “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”: a children’s game / of ring a round the roses told. . . . That rhyme goes back to the Black Plague and the burning of the dead: Ashes, ashes, all fall down.

  Are these children simply caught in the circles of an old game, or are they a glimpse of something new?

  I return now to my dream into which Duncan’s poem came as intervention, interrupting the task of a lecture to be given, in which the sound of the first lines melted into the music of Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking.” I did not deliberately choose “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar” as an exemplary poem about which to build a lecture. To say that it came to me in a dream is merely to underscore the element of chance and associative method in poetry. It has certainly been exemplary for me, in its open lines marked by varying musics, its complex undertaking, its sense of history as profoundly personal. I have read it many times in my life, coming to it slowly with an increasing sense of the possibilities it offered: I have talked about it here as a poet who reads other poets for such possibilities, not in the effort to grasp and fix a poem but to attend to it intensely and with what, in a scientific context, has been called “a feeling for the organism.”14

  VI

  Poets are often asked how they start to write a poem, whether with an idea or a chosen form, or what? Once as a young neophyte and apprentice I thought that poems were like jewel boxes that contained, literally, ideas to be inscribed in given forms—this was my earliest training. By my mid-twenties I was breaking from that training. At the “margins of thought” flickered the question Who is it that goes there?—something, a brushing past of syllables, indecipherable perceptions, memories, musical phrases, plasmic sensations, not to be named but rather rendered in words, allowed to gather and configure themselves on the page, into a more deliberate act of making. I have experienced this process as active yet receptive, engaged even as it requires solitude, dialectical since it does not allow disconnection of self from world yet is psychologically intense: the state of
making poetry.

  This loosening of the bonds of linear thought, this psychological intensity, has been sought and chemically induced by many poets of the last two centuries, from Coleridge and Poe to Rimbaud to the Beats and most of my contemporaries and the poets of the 1960s and beyond. If the desired poetry has sometimes eluded its devotees, perhaps it’s because (as poet and translator Clayton Eshleman has reminded me) Rimbaud’s famous edict was for the rational derangement of all the senses, and many poets and would-be poets have followed it only partway.†

  Certainly the divided condition of mind/sensation, flesh/spirit, sense splintered from sense is inimical to poetry and to a larger poetics of relation. What’s also incompatible with such a poetics—with the nature of poetry itself—is the professional project of defining, labeling, categorizing, historicizing, ranking, instrumentalizing the poem. Yes, the history of the art is needed, along with other historical and material context; yes, engaged and astute social criticism is wanted; but the rush to theory, the use of the work of art simply as a springboard to intellectual acrobatics and intramural academic debates, the psychobiographizing of the imagination, has been a fever to colonize and commoditize, not unlike the fever to convert wilderness or desert or productive farmland into profitable real estate. It would subvert the agency and potency of poetry in the life of collective transformation.

  This agency of art in transformational social processes throughout the world is negatively reflected in the fear and hatred of art’s freedom by authoritarian, theocratic, and militaristic powers, including those that wear the alias of democracy, including those that wear the robes of the academy.

  I began with music: the sound of some lines from Duncan and Whitman. In more ways than one, poetry must recall us to our senses—our bodily sensual life and our sense of other and different human presences. The oceanic multiplicities of this art call us toward possibilities of relation still very much alive in a world where violent material power can speak only to and of itself, yet in which—in the words of the Salvadorean revolutionary poet Roque Dalton—“poetry, like bread is for everyone.”

  First given as the Clark Lecture at Trinity College, Cambridge, England, in 2002.

  “Poetics is the continuation of poetry by other means. Just as poetry is the continuation of politics by other means. . . . Some tactics of poetics include hyperbole (though personally I would never exaggerate), understatement, metonymy, evasion, paranoia, aphorism, assonance, cacophony, caesura, rime, mosaic, blurring. . . . Poetics makes explicit what is otherwise inexplicit and, perhaps more important, makes unexplicit what is otherwise explicit.” (Charles Bernstein, A Poetics [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992], p. 160.) To which it must be added that military occupation is the continuation of war by any means possible: humiliations, detentions without charges, searches and seizures, censorship, rape, demolition of homes, destruction of harvests, withholding of medical supplies, and so on.

  Charles Bernstein offers this commentary on Pound’s “freakish instructions”: “When Pound the great artist is excused for his politics, fascism has won. When Pound’s politics are used to categorically discredit the compositional methods of his poetry, fascism has won. When Pound’s poetry is exalted and his politics are dismissed as largely irrelevant to his achievement, fascism has won. When Pound’s politics are condemned, his poetry acknowledged or ignored in passing, but sanitized forms of his ideas prevail—the virtue of authority, property and the homestead (“family values”), the sanctity of the classics, the condemnation of the nonstandard in favor of the plain sense of the word and the divine right of the West (or East) to harness and bleed the rest of the world—fascism has won.”(Bernstein, p. 126.)

  Hans Magnus Enzensberger has observed that in Europe after the eighteenth century nothing definable as a poem could be written in praise of a ruler or statesman or national hero. Till then, court poetry, the eulogy for the prince or patron, was a common Western poetic genre, coming down from the Greek panegyric. He fixes this endpoint for German poetry in an 1809 poem by Heinrich von Kleist, in which it’s the God of History, not the dynast in question, who is invoked as the enduring power.

  Enzensberger maintains that poetry can no longer either praise or condemn a ruler; its power lies neither in the zone of bourgeois aesthetics that deny it all social efficacy nor in the realm of propaganda. Rather, it’s an imagination of the future. (H. M. Enzensberger, “Poetry and Politics,” in The Consciousness Industry: On Literature, Politics and the Media [New York: Seabury Press, 1974].)

  * Duncan is quoting from the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass, in which Whitman extols the futurity of American poetry: “Let the age and wars of other nations be chanted and their eras and characters be illustrated and that finish the verse. Not so the great psalm of the republic. Here the theme is creative and has vista. Here comes one among the wellbeloved stonecutters and plans with decision and science and sees the solid and beautiful forms of the future where there are now no solid forms.” Further on, Whitman continues: “The greatest poet . . . is not one of the chorus. . . . He does not stop for regulation . . . he is the president of regulation.” (Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and Prose [New York: Library of America, 1982], pp. 8, 10.)

  † Needless to say, a “derangement of the senses” in desire for another sexual being has induced poetry in every culture and in every kind of voice, from traditional (and unconventional) heterosexual love poems to the poetry of Sappho, Cavafy or Pasolini, of Whitman’s “Calamus,” of Muriel Rukeyser, Melvin Dixon, Judy Grahn, June Jordan, among others. And I would add to this an erotics located, not out-of-time, out-of-place, but in a landscape of circumstances suffered and resisted and countered with others, in mutual recognition and desire. An erotics beyond the couple, though aroused in the double body. Desire that enlarges the theater of desire. Once again, a poetics of relation. “In touch with the erotic,” wrote Audre Lorde, “I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.” And “. . . the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.” (Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider [Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1984] pp. 58, 54.)

  Arts of the Possible

  (2001)

  MURIEL RUKEYSER

  Her Vision (1993)

  To enter her work is to enter a life of tremendous scope, the consciousness of a woman who was a full actor and creator in her time. But in many ways Muriel Rukeyser was beyond her time—and seems, at the edge of the twenty-first century, to have grasped resources we are only now beginning to reach for: connections between history and the body, memory and politics, sexuality and public space, poetry and physical science, and much else. She spoke as a poet, first and foremost; but she spoke also as a thinking activist, biographer, traveler, explorer of her country’s psychic geography.

  It’s no exaggeration to say that in the work of Muriel Rukeyser we discover new and powerful perspectives on the culture of the United States in the twentieth century, “the first century of world wars,” as she called it. Her lifetime spanned two of them, along with the Spanish Civil War, the trial of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, the Depression, the New Deal, the Holocaust, the Cold War and McCarthy years, the Vietnam War, the renewal of radicalism in the 1960s, the women’s liberation movement of the late ’60s and ’70s, and, throughout, the movements of African-Americans and of working people for survival and dignity. All these informed her life and her art, as did other arts: film, painting, theater, the music of the blues and jazz, of classical orchestras, popular song. From a young age she seems to have understood herself as living in history—not as a static pattern but as a confluence of dynamic currents, always changing yet faithful to sources, a fluid process that is constantly shaping us and that we have the possibility of shaping.

  The critic Louis
e Kertesz, a close reader of Rukeyser and her context, notes that “no woman poet makes the successful fusion of personal and social themes in a modern prosody before Rukeyser.”1 She traces a North American white women’s tradition in Lola Ridge, Marya Zaturenska and Genevieve Taggard, all born at the end of the nineteenth century and all struggling to desentimentalize the personal lyric and to write from urban, revolutionary, and working-class experience. In her earliest published poetry, Rukeyser writes herself into the public events unfolding from the year of her birth, and into the public spaces of a great, expansive city. “The city rises in its light. Skeletons of buildings; the orange-peel cranes; highways put through; the race of skyscrapers. And you are part of this.”2

  Rukeyser grew up on Riverside Drive in an upwardly mobile Jewish family—her mother a bookkeeper from Yonkers who counted the poet-scholar-martyr Akiba among her legendary forebears, her father a concrete salesman from Wisconsin who became partner in a sand-and-gravel company. Both loved music and opera, but the house was sparsely supplied with books—“except in the servants’ rooms: what do you hear there? The Man with the Hoe, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. The little five-cent books . . . read and reread.”3 Rukeyser was sent to Ethical Culture schools and to Vassar, but her father’s financial difficulties forced her to leave college. “I was expected to grow up and become a golfer,” she recalled—a suburban matron. “There was no idea at that point of a girl growing up to write poems.” But she was writing poetry seriously by high school. She was also leading a secret life with the children in her neighborhood, playing in the basements and tunnels beneath the apartment buildings, and noting “the terrible, murderous differences between the ways people lived.”4

  Rukeyser was twenty-one when her Theory of Flight received the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Two crucial motifs of her life and work were already unmistakable: the book’s title suggests how early she embraced the realm of the technological and scientific imagination; and the opening “Poem out of Childhood” points to her lifelong project of knitting together personal experience with politics. “Knitting together” is the wrong phrase here; in her words, she simply did not allow them to be torn apart.