Muriel Rukeyser
* * *
“Poem”
(1968)
We are a people tending toward democracy at the level of hope,” Muriel Rukeyser wrote in her treatise The Life of Poetry (1949). But then she added this: “on another level, the economy of the nation, the empire of business within the republic, both include in their basic premise the concept of perpetual warfare.” Rukeyser understood the way that warfare has been interwoven into our history, and she opposed it with a notion of democratic possibility. She said, “To be against war is not enough, it is hardly a beginning . . . We are against war and the sources of war.”
Rukeyser spent much of her life opposing war and trying to imagine peace. She was concerned with root causes and democratic imperatives. Here is a poem that she wrote at the height of the Vietnam War:
Poem
I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other.
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.
* * *
I lived in the first century of these wars.
“Poem” is the work of a citizen-poet. It is written in free verse and pitched at the level of speech, not song. The poem is compressed into twenty lines, nineteen of them in a single stanza, one that breaks off on its own, freestanding. The title, “Poem,” is outwardly bland and generic but inwardly ambitious because it suggests that something can be made from words and crafted into a living entity. There is still hope in the making of art. The first sentence—a line unto itself—is part pronouncement, part lament: “I lived in the first century of world wars.” Rukeyser thus begins with the declaration that she is living inside a large and appalling history, a new era of global conflicts. It is an unprecedented time of killing, a nuclear world, the first century.
The second line immediately brings the poem down a notch by turning to something more daily: “Most mornings I would be more or less insane.” The writer and activist Michael True points out that the word “insane,” which lands with a jolt at the end of the line, is surprising in a way that the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky found characteristic of American poetry: “it violates the preconceived music of the meter with its linguistic content.”
Rukeyser’s poem is also surprising in the way that it is written using the modal verb “would,” the past-tense form of “will,” and thus talks about the past somewhat hypothetically, more or less as it happened nearly every day:
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
Rukeyser refers here to the negligent lies of officials and the almost offhanded complicity of newspapers, which once took the government at its word. She employs the word “devices” to suggest both pieces of electronic equipment and underlying schemes, ruses, and maneuvers. The Vietnam War was the first conflict delivered and sold to people through their television sets, experienced in living rooms and bars. She notes the omnipresence of the news underwritten by advertising, the secret business driving it. This is capitalism at work—devices selling products to people who have been turned into consumers. Rukeyser was writing in the mid-to-late sixties. She was eerily prescient in perceiving the power of devices, such as TV sets, as a means of selling things to strangers. But the word “unseen,” which lands at the end of the fifth line, will also come back to suggest poetic exchange. It will be reclaimed by the poet.
Rukeyser’s poem changes when it turns to the act of writing poetry itself: “Slowly I would get to pen and paper, / Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.” This is the structural turn in the poem—the recognition that the poet is a daily maker (the artist doesn’t stand apart) and the poem a made thing, a message sent out to strangers, those alive now, yet somehow “unseen,” and others yet “unborn.” The doubling of the prefix un-, which means “not,” takes on a positive energy here. The poem is a capsule sent out into the unknown, a gift freely given and taken.
“Poem” progresses through a hypothetical day, beginning in the morning and ending at night. Over its course an unlikely hopefulness sets in as the speaker remembers “those men and women / Brave, setting up signals across vast distances, / Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.” The poet emphasizes the adjective “Brave” by lifting it out of its normal position (“those brave men and women”), placing it after the nouns “men” and “women,” and using it to hold and then kick off a new line. The implication is that it takes courage to imagine a new and still-unarticulated way of life, to create values that have not yet been imagined.
As daylight darkens and night brightens, the poem moves from memory to imagination. It transforms the act of imagining into a communal exercise. Like Guillaume Apollinaire in “The Pretty Redhead” and Nâzım Hikmet in his manifesto “On Living,” Rukeyser shifts from the “I” (“I would be reminded”) to a “We” (“We would try to imagine them, try to find each other”). This social turn to the common work—what Adrienne Rich would call “the dream of a common language”—is an effort to build a better world. Rukeyser sets up what she elsewhere calls “exemplary lives” as models, figures like Pablo Neruda and Käthe Kollwitz, who connected art to social justice, who used it to link their personal lives to political subjects.
Rukeyser has tried to imagine them, she says,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves.
First of all, peace is not something that automatically comes to us, but something to be constructed, like a work of art. It is something made, like love. Rukeyser is unusual as a political poet because she is careful to locate the enemy within as well as outside herself. It’s true, she argues, that we need to become reconciled with one another, but we also need to reconcile our conscious and unconscious minds, “Waking with sleeping,” “Ourselves with ourselves.” She offers a fraught psychological recognition: we are all divided within; we need to unite with others and also make peace with ourselves. Rukeyser would return to this theme in later poems, such as “Waking This Morning,” where she characterizes herself as “a violent woman” who is trying to be “non-violent” one day at a time. She recognizes this as especially challenging because the days are often filled with violence.
There is great hopefulness in the ideal that “We would try by any means / To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves, / To let go the means, to wake.” This awakening means not just being well-informed and up to date, but also coming into a state of greater awareness, of fuller consciousness. She seems to anticipate the current notion of being woke—that is, fully alert to discrimination or injustice of any sort. For her, this meant going beyond the self. The final line stands alone, reverberating back through the poem, echoing and changing the beginning:
I lived in the first century of these wars.
/> Michael True finds a great reconciliation in this last line, a perennial optimism, which associates the violence within with the violence without, “peacemaking in the individual and peacemaking in the social order.” This has an appealing utopianism. But perhaps the last line also suggests that warfare is ongoing, that people will have to live through a second and third century of never-ending conflict. So far Rukeyser’s prediction has proved prescient—we are now living in that second century. But the dream too is inscribed into her poem: “We are a people tending toward democracy at the level of hope.”
Etheridge Knight
* * *
“The Idea of Ancestry”
(1968)
I’ve never been able to shake what Etheridge Knight said on the back cover of his first book, a thirty-two-page chapbook, Poems from Prison (Broadside Press, 1968): “I died in Korea from a shrapnel wound, and narcotics resurrected me. I died in 1960 from a prison sentence and poetry brought me back to life.” One might say that, in a roundabout way, his early life led him to enlist in the army and serve in the Korean War, which led him to narcotics, which forced him to the criminal side of the street, which landed him in prison, which finally led him to poetry. As the poet Terrance Hayes puts it, “Knight’s biography is a story of restless Americanness, African Americanness, and poetry. It has some Faulknerian family saga in it, some midcentury migration story, lots of masculine tragedy, lots of soul-of-the-artist lore.”
Knight started writing poetry in prison in order to transform his rage, which was killing him. His sentence was brutally unfair, and he was so furious that he could scarcely remember his first months in jail. He was transferred from one prison to another. Writing poetry literally became a way to save himself. Knight was already an expert at “toasts,” a Black vernacular form that prefigured rap and has its roots in the oral traditions of enslaved Africans. The poems are long improvised narratives about rough, rowdy, and fearless heroes, who all have what the folklorist Roger Abrahams deems the “amorality” of the trickster. Knight carried his trickster mentality and gift for the vernacular into his written verse, which he often recited from memory. His poems are decidedly literary, but he never lost his sense of street language. And his true underlying subject was always freedom.
Here is his iconic early poem “The Idea of Ancestry”:
The Idea of Ancestry
1
Taped to the wall of my cell are 47 pictures: 47 black
faces: my father, mother, grandmothers (1 dead), grand-
fathers (both dead), brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts,
cousins (1st & 2nd), nieces, and nephews. They stare
across the space at me sprawling on my bunk. I know
their dark eyes, they know mine. I know their style,
they know mine. I am all of them, they are all of me;
they are farmers, I am a thief, I am me, they are thee.
* * *
I have at one time or another been in love with my mother,
1 grandmother, 2 sisters, 2 aunts (1 went to the asylum),
and 5 cousins. I am now in love with a 7-yr-old niece
(she sends me letters written in large block print, and
her picture is the only one that smiles at me).
* * *
I have the same name as 1 grandfather, 3 cousins, 3 nephews,
and 1 uncle. The uncle disappeared when he was 15, just took
off and caught a freight (they say). He’s discussed each year
when the family has a reunion, he causes uneasiness in
the clan, he is an empty space. My father’s mother, who is 93
and who keeps the Family Bible with everybody’s birth dates
(and death dates) in it, always mentions him. There is no
place in her Bible for “whereabouts unknown.”
2
Each fall the graves of my grandfathers call me, the brown
hills and red gullies of mississippi send out their electric
messages, galvanizing my genes. Last yr / like a salmon quitting
the cold ocean-leaping and bucking up his birthstream / I
hitchhiked my way from LA with 16 caps in my packet and a
monkey on my back. And I almost kicked it with the kinfolks.
I walked barefooted in my grandmother’s backyard / I smelled the old
land and the woods / I sipped cornwhiskey from fruit jars with the men /
I flirted with the women / I had a ball till the caps ran out
and my habit came down. That night I looked at my grandmother
and split / my guts were screaming for junk / but I was almost
contented / I had almost caught up with me.
(The next day in Memphis I cracked a croaker’s crib for a fix.)
* * *
This yr there is a gray stone wall damming my stream, and when
the falling leaves stir my genes, I pace my cell or flop on my bunk
and stare at 47 black faces across the space. I am all of them,
they are all of me, I am me, they are thee, and I have no children
to float in the space between.
Knight said that he started making up the poem “The Idea of Ancestry” one time when he had been in solitary confinement for thirty or forty days. Called by a number rather than a name for five years, he had begun to forget who he was. Thus, he tried to reconnect to his roots, his extended family, by imagining forty-seven photographs taped to the wall of his cell. His sister Eunice Knight-Bowens, who did so much to keep his legacy alive, also confirmed that the poem wasn’t actually composed in a prison cell at the Indiana State Penitentiary in Terre Haute, where her brother was serving what would turn out to be an eight-year sentence for armed robbery, but rather in solitary confinement, where he couldn’t possibly have access to a trove of family photographs. But in his mind he was crossing a divide. By imagining that he could see the faces of relatives on the walls of the “hole,” he was seeking and establishing the connections that would wind him back to the world.
Knight’s poem consists of forty-two lines divided into two distinct parts. The first section, in long Whitmanesque lines, borders on prose and creates a feeling of spaciousness within confinement. We never lose sight of his physical imprisonment, but we also respond to the freedom of his imagination. This section begins with a catalog of his extended family, living and dead. The enjambment in the first line emphasizes that these are “47 black / faces.” Knight doesn’t have the opportunity for a face-to-face encounter, which the French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas views as the basis for human sociality, but he does seem “ordered and ordained” by his relationship to the faces in his family photographs. His African American heritage consoles him as he scrolls through the list. Notice the emphatic enjambment (“They stare / across the space at me sprawling on my bunk”) as he traverses the gulf, a kind of void, between his bunk and the wall. The rhythm builds off repetition, and the stanza intensifies:
I know
their dark eyes, they know mine. I know their style,
they know mine. I am all of them, they are all of me;
they are farmers, I am a thief, I am me, they are thee.
This refrain is a realization of identity and difference. Knight’s speaker asserts that he knows each and every one of the family members and they “know” him too; he is not just one but “all of them.” This is a statement of solidarity. At the same time, he has taken a path that separates him from them, a painful recognition expressed in four short sentences jammed together in the culminating line of the stanza: “they are farmers, I am a thief, I am me, they are thee.” The word “thee”—an archaic or dialect word for “you”—has a kind of biblical formality here, a definite feeling of otherness.
The feeling changes with the next stanza, which begins: “I have at one time or another been in love with my mother . . .” We normally reserve the idea of being in love for erotic attachments, but the speaker uses these words to cat
alog his affection for all the women in his family: his grandmother, who is mentioned five times in the poem, his two sisters and two aunts (including the one sent to an asylum, whose story is left untold), and five cousins. The list ends with his seven-year-old niece, who writes to him in a child’s hand. She is the only one he can imagine smiling at him, perhaps because of her innocence.
The next stanza turns to the men in the poet’s short ancestry. We learn that Etheridge Knight had the same name as one grandfather, three cousins, three nephews, and an uncle. The poem then becomes chattier, telling about an uncle who just took off and (supposedly) hopped a freight train. This is where we learn about the annual family reunion and the unknown uncle as an “empty space” there, a recognition that rebounds back to the speaker. He remembers how his ninety-three-year-old grandmother never forgets her lost young one. “There is no / place in her Bible for ‘whereabouts unknown.’” The line hovers at the word “no” before dropping down to “place,” and then the implacable coldness and impersonality of the phrase “whereabouts unknown” registers. The stanza ends with a feeling of being lost, with an underlying terror that the speaker too will someday become an empty space.
Notice how the punctuation radically changes in the second half of the poem. Memory speeds up, and Knight starts abbreviating words and jamming them together. He also starts using the slash as a punctuation mark. This presses activities together even as it separates him from others. Knight explained his signature style in an interview with Patricia L. Hill in 1978: “My lines, my form, everything is simply meant to approximate the spoken words. When I leave out periods, or use slash marks, or jam words together, or pull them apart, or leave a space, it’s simply meant to try to help the reader say . . . [the poem] the way I say it.” He is trying out a new mode of punctuation to notate the way the poem sounds to him.
100 Poems to Break Your Heart Page 18
