(Jen Benka, Jan Freeman, D (Dennis) Nurkse, Renée Olander, Tim Seibles) This panel of five poets explores and discusses approaches to teaching poetry using Muriel Rukeyser's 1949 classic The Life of Poetry as a foundational text. Dimensions of our discussion include attending to the fear of poetry, writing, and reading poetry in times of political conflict, and the practical uses of poetry. As teachers, publishers, and practitioners of poetry, we address how to incorporate The Life of Poetry—including its radical assertions and wide-ranging interrogation of public life—into workshops and other courses.

Published Date: October 28, 2015

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2015 A W P conference in Minneapolis. The recording features Jen Benca, Jan Freeman, d nci, Renee Olander, and Tim Siebels. You will now hear Renee Olander provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:32):

It's my distinct pleasure to welcome you here this morning to our panel teaching Muriel er and the Life of Poetry. Very briefly, I will introduce our panelists, each of whom is Googleable, and you have, I hope, little programs. So I won't say much in the interest of focusing our limited time on teaching Mi Rukeyser and the life of poetry. In order of appear, we are Tim Siebels, a longtime teacher at both college and high school levels. Author of a number of books of poems, including most recently Fast Animal, a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. Jen Benca, who is author most recently of Pinco and Executive Director of the Academy of American Poets, Jan Freeman, founder of Paris Press, which reprinted in 1996, the classic the Life of Poetry and keeps it in print. It's for sale, I must say, at the Paris Press booth at the book fair.

Speaker 2 (01:31):

She's also author of Simon Says, which was nominated for a national book Critic Circle Award. And Dee NCI who teaches at Sarah Lawrence, has taught at Rikers Island, is a Guggenheim Award winner, and whose most recent book is a Knight in Brooklyn. He's also a recent recipient of the literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which is an award that Muriel Rick Kaiser herself was honored by, and he also teaches at Sarah Lawrence, where Muriel Rick Kaiser taught for a number of years. And I'm Renee Olander. I've taught at all grade levels and now teach at Old Dominion University. And my most recent chatbook is a few spells.

Speaker 2 (02:16):

I just want to tell you again, beautiful Muriel, mother of everyone, how I cherish your words as much as the memory of your good faith. That's a quotation from a letter that Anne Sexton wrote to Muriel er in 1967. How did one of the 20th century's most prolific and widely read, admired and criticized poets, biographer, social commentators, and political activists fall off the radar and become almost completely forgotten by the late 20th century like Safo, the archaic Greek poet and teacher known chiefly through fragments and the more contemporary example of Zo O'Neal Hurston, who was the most published American black woman writer at the time of her death. Muriel Rickey died with much of her work out of print as an English major at a women's college in the 1980s. Shortly after Rickey's death, I never heard her name, not until taking a graduate course called women writers did I encounter Rickey's late poem myth, the tip of the Titanic iceberg of her literary production as Adrian Rich noted in her fore to a Muriel ER reader.

Speaker 2 (03:26):

Though the life of poetry had been published in 1949, the year I was a student, no one in the literary world of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I was a student, spoke of it as an important resource why for her radical left leanings. Among other reasons, Ruey struck nerves. She broke silences about privilege, race, gender, and class. She took very seriously overlooked writers like Genevieve Tagard and radical artists like Paul Robeson. As a younger woman, she was disowned by her father for embracing communism and civil rights. She later bore a son out of wedlock and raised him as a single mother, and her opus includes frank poems about childbirth and breastfeeding during her lifetime. In writing years, Rukeyser observed World War. I first known as both the Great War and the Last War and the Spanish American War, world War ii, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War.

Speaker 2 (04:24):

She was deeply concerned about the impacts of violence. Her 1968 book, speed of Darkness has a poem called Poem and it opens with the line. I lived in the first century of World wars and closes. I lived in the first century of these wars, which the 21st century has of course confirmed Ru Keiser's engagement with the world and with social and aesthetic values was brilliantly filtered and made manifest through her colossal work, the life of poetry. When it first appeared in 1949, it received mostly positive reviews, but was not incorporated into the canon or most university reading lists. By the time the Muriel Rukeyser reader appeared in 1994, its editor declared that of all the works of Rucker that have slipped out of print, perhaps the greatest loss to us has been the life of poetry. What a surprise. Then in 1996, wandering a book fair at a w p to happen upon the Paris press table and Jan Freeman and find that she had founded that press.

Speaker 2 (05:30):

In order to bring out the life of poetry, I bought a copy, went home and dove in. Voila. Immediately I encountered a profound resource to aid and inform my teaching as a longtime teacher, not only of students of literature and writing, but as a teacher trainer, I had repeatedly encountered what Rick Kaiser astutely calls the fear of poetry and the resistances to poetry. In fact, for 10 years I led poetry, pedagogy, seminars for licensed K 12 language arts teachers. I found that these teachers in particular were almost universally afraid of teaching poetry. For instance, I gave pre and post tests to teachers. And for instance, the first question was to fill in the blank, the thought of teaching poetry makes me feel. The last year that I did this, I had 17 licensed language arts teachers in the room and 10 of the 17 said specifically nervous, apprehensive, uncertain, anxious, horrified, uneasy, very uneasy.

Speaker 2 (06:41):

Like I have to do a lot of research and frustrated that you can't nail it down. So I would talk with these teachers about their fears, and I discovered again that Rick Kaiser was right on not only in identifying poetry as the most despised of arts, but also identifying why. And the teachers that I talked with were specifically concerned about the raw emotions that poetry would provoke in their students and how they would then manage their classrooms when this raw stuff came up. So what I found was that the Ruey book not only helped me understand these fears, but also because as Eileen Miles said, in a review of the 1996 edition, it's an immensely quotable book, wonderful soundbites. So you can bring to teachers some of her thoughts just as a little soundbite. For instance, the angry things that have been said about our poetry have also been said about our time.

Speaker 2 (07:44):

They are both confused, chaotic, violent, and obscure. So I've had really the great honor and pleasure of helping teachers learn how they can use poetry and manage their own fears. And after a few hours of seminars with teachers, I have found that when I do a post-test and ask them to fill in the same blank, now some of them will say still slightly anxious or uneasy. So I will just say that in talking with Jan Freeman about my work with teachers and helping them gain a level of comfort and working knowledge with the uncertainty of poetry and what it might provoke, that gave us the idea for this panel here today. And I'm very pleased that we have practitioners and teachers here. And so without further ado, I will turn it over to Tim Siebels.

Speaker 3 (08:51):

Real pleasure to be here. Love me Uriel Ru Kaiser. I wanted to start with a quote. Renee had mentioned how quotable she is, and indeed it is true in this quote I especially liked. I was going to talk a little bit about what she says about the fear of poetry, which Renee touched upon. And I think in part the fear of poetry is about fear of feeling and the fear of full engagement. And in my haste, I left my own text, but I can borrow from Jan's. Art is not a world, but a knowing of the world. Art prepares us. Art is practiced by the artist and the audience. It is not a means to an end unless that end is the total imaginative experience. That experience will have meaning it will apply to your life and it is more than likely to lead you to thought or action.

Speaker 3 (09:48):

That is you are likely to want to go further into the world, further into yourself toward further experience. And I was writing as I was thinking about this, I was thinking that so much of the daily buzz surrounding us, tv, email, chitchat, radio, newspapers, magazines mostly barricade us from our loneliness, our loss of spirit, our mortality as well as from our beauty, our mystery, and our buried passions. I think also how many of us willingly look at the layers of sickness that sit beneath so many bad actions in this society? And to me, this is what poetry wants to do. I think generally speaking, poetry won't stand for that kind of numbness or that kind of disconnection. As Ru Kaiser points out, and I'll read another quote momentarily, poetry wants to remind us of our exact lives to bring us into full contact with ourselves, other people and the world at large.

Speaker 3 (10:57):

And I think about that idea both in terms of my own life as a writer and as a person, but also in terms of the lives of our fellow citizens and especially our students. I mean because our students are just people. They just happen to be in our classrooms. And so many of the anxieties that Ru Kaiser talks about are full blown in our students. Even the students that come to take writing workshops for example, even though they think they want to be poets in many cases, they're not sure what that means exactly. And so we oblige them or I try to oblige 'em to become more fully engaged in their lives. And that for me is the source or a source at least of poetry. And of course it often met with a certain kind of anxiety and students want to rhyme. They want to rhyme above all.

Speaker 3 (11:54):

And I'm thinking your rhyming is good if you know what you're doing with meter, but generally what you're doing is avoiding actually saying anything. You're trying to find rhymes. That's what you're doing. You're not really writing poems anyway, so in part I think about Root Kai read. I've both used the text in the classes, but also more than that, I use the text as a way of sharpening my own sense of pedagogy about how I might approach my students with it. Because those of us who love poetry, and I imagine that's everybody in this room, both of those of us, I love poetry. Well, we're not thinking about that. Other people might be afraid of poetry or might not know what to do with poems, be they our peers, our colleagues or our students. We make certain assumptions about reality because we've already fallen in love with poems. But what Ruka does is it reminds us to some extent that we are not the average person in our society, that in fact we represent a kind of stepping out of the mainstream of thinking and being. And so anyway, I wanted to read a poem by angel Nazis or Nafis, I think she says her name. It's from a book that I recommend highly called Black Girl Mansion. Black girl mansion. This should wake us up. The title of this poem is When I realize I'm wearing my girlfriend's ex-girlfriend's panties.

Speaker 3 (13:27):

Praise now the fabric for protecting who it can praise the purposeful silver needle and the threads along arm praise. Now the path and the ex-girlfriend and any mouth that has known my loves impeccable salt, incredible, incredible gravity. You lead me here every time to the water to drink. You lead me here to this open space, to two-step with beloved ghosts, a past that is to a garden. Do not unw a single blade of grass for the house craves each brick, the war, every bullet. This is my gift. This is the circumstance of loving to see another's name written so plainly to see too what my body will perform in another woman's panties, my own curious blood, a single jewel, a red eye winking.

Speaker 3 (14:37):

And I think about this, the real specificity of that poem. It's certainly about sexuality, but it's also about the complexity of loving and moving between loves and so on and so forth. And I think given that so much of what we do in our daily lives obliges us to throw a kind of large blanket over what goes on that poetry says no, these are the details, these are the exact specific things that make up the moments of our lives. And to me that's the thing. That's what many times people are afraid of. I wrote, I think in this in large part is what many of our fellow citizens and our students fear to use a trope from the original matrix. Many have found a simple, somewhat mindless way with the blue pill and poetry is the red pill. Poetry wants us awake intellectually and emotionally.

Speaker 3 (15:36):

Poems want us to know how deep the rabbit hole goes. And so when I think about the fear of poems and how it pervades not only the society we live in but also the classroom, I think about Root Ka a lot because she's given me a ground from which to begin to approach my students with a kind of sensitivity to their anxiety that I don't think I had originally. I think I just assumed you walk into a classroom to be a poet or you walk into a literature classroom. If you're an English major, then of course you love poetry. Of course you're already involved. But with Ruka you see pretty simply that that may or may not be the case. A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually, but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling. And I think about this too, that when we look at children, for example, when they're developing early on, before they know the rules, right?

Speaker 3 (16:36):

Kids cry over little things, you took my lollipop away or I don't get to watch my TV show and they just go into wild fits. But bit by bit we learn how to manage feeling and what poetry wants of us I think is to drop the guard and to take our hands off the wheel and to allow ourselves to feel the full force of our emotions. And I think that scares people. It may scare us too, even as writers probably all of you have had moments as writers when you're doing something you think, damn, this shit's got me by the throat. And I think it happens to our students and I think it happens to our fellows in society. They get nervous about feeling for real, and I asked this in relation to Ru Kaiser's, what would it be like to live in a world where people really lived by what they felt? What would it be like to say to be really inside your guts most of the time instead of once in a while to really say this is outrageous. Would we tolerate war? Would we tolerate racism? Would we tolerate domestic violence? Would we tolerate half the shit that comes along with a capitalistic imperative? Would we tolerate it? And I think that's what makes root Kaiser important and also subversive. It makes us rethink our entire relationship to life and what we're doing here and why we're poets and what it means. Thank you.

Speaker 4 (18:05):

Hi everyone. I'm very happy to be here today to talk about one of my favorite books, Muriel Rukeyser is the Life of Poetry, which I just want to thank Jan Freeman for bringing back into print truly a heroic rescue. Thank you Jan,

Speaker 4 (18:28):

And I do hope that you, what's your booth number 3 0 5. Please stop by 3 0 5 and get a copy of this book if you don't have it. At the Academy of American Poets, we provide resources to and are particularly concerned with supporting K 12 teachers. And so I want to speak for a little bit from that perspective. I'm often asked by reporters, especially in April during National poetry month, why should poetry be taught in schools? The fact is there are tens of compelling cases to be made for why poetry belongs in classrooms everywhere, which range from the scientific to the spiritual. Reading. Poems enhances analytical skills because poems demand that you ask questions. Why did the poet choose that word? Regions of the brain linked to memory show more activity while reading poetry. Writing poems help students express themselves and find their voice, which is empowering and build self-confidence.

Speaker 4 (19:26):

Reading and writing poems develops literacy skills. To do either requires you focus on vocabulary and effective language with an awareness and an attentiveness to its music and rhythm. Poetry provides an opportunity to engage with art that is accessible to produce pen, paper, keyboard, or not. Even just last week I had the privilege of being at a meeting with high school poets, including the national student poets, poetry out loud winners and slam champs from cities across the us. When these young people were asked what poetry meant to them, they answered by saying things like, it's how I make sense of the dark places, or it's a gift that is taking me where I need to go. Or when I read poems, sometimes I find one that feels like me and it's almost like a biological reaction. Muriel writes, choose your poet here or rather do not choose, but remember what happened to you when you came to your poem?

Speaker 4 (20:26):

Any poem whose truth overcame all inertia in you at that moment so that your slow mortality took its proper place and before it, the light of a new awareness was not something new, but something you recognized. The first time I read the life of poetry, I felt found. I fell in love, I fell rage. I fell towards something like the possibility of saying the question isn't. Why should poetry be taught in the schools? The real question is why isn't it? The answer to this is as simple as it is, complicated poetry exists largely in the gift economy and our public education system today is pitched toward the global economy and teaching young people science and math so that they will be competitive in the 21st century workforce. Because technology is only science and math, right? As Muriel writes, the impoverishment of imagination affects our society and our culture deeply and becoming an expert in something allows us to feel very little.

Speaker 4 (21:29):

In fact, writing skills and literacy are one of the greatest preventers of poverty and innovation which drives an economy, requires creativity. It's exactly because poetry is poetry that it is not taught and it is exactly because poetry is poetry that it should be taught because as Muriel says, the tendency toward the most human is the tendency of poetic meaning because if we fear poetry, it is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality and nature, as she says, or as she quotes Robert Frost from the whole goddamn machine. Part four of the book is titled The Life of Poetry, and I'd like to read just the first two pages of the chapter titled The Rare Union Poetry and Science.

Speaker 4 (22:16):

In Time of the Crises of the Spirit, we are all aware of our need, our need for each other and our need for ourselves. We call up our fullness, we turn and act. We begin to be aware of correspondences, of the acknowledgement in us, of necessity and of the lands and poetry. Among all this, where is there a place for poetry? If poetry as it comes to us through action were all we had, it would be very much for the dense and crucial moments spoken under the stress of realization full bodied and compelling in their imagery, arrive with music, with our many kinds of theater and in the great prose, if we had these only we would be open to the same influences, however diluted and implied for these ways in which poetry reaches past. The barriers set up by our culture reaching toward those who refuse in it essential presence are various many meaning and certainly in this period more acceptable.

Speaker 4 (23:19):

They stand in the same relation to poetry as applied science to pure science. If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day for there would be an intolerable hunger and from that need from the relationships within ourselves and among ourselves as we went on living and from every other expression of man's nature, poetry would be, I cannot say here, invented or poetry would be derived as research science would be derived if the energies we now begin to know reduced us to a few people rubbing into life a little fire. However, there is this poetry, there is this science. The farther along we go in each, the more clearly the relationship may be perceived, the more prodigal, the gifts, the definitions of Western culture have classically separated these two disciplines. When Darwin wrote of Humboldt that he displayed the rare union between poetry and science, he set the man in a line of heroes of that meeting place, a line which includes lucious and gata and Leonardo, but which for the last century has been obscured in the critical structure which insists that the forms of imagination are not only separate but exclusive.

Speaker 4 (24:35):

The scientist has suffered before the general impoverishment of imagination in some of the same ways as the poet, the worker in applied science and the inventor might be thought of as the town crackpots, but there was always the reservation of an audience like children lined up before a holiday conjurer waiting to be shown. The theoretical scientists like the poet could never show his audience they lacked language and in another way, so did he. Unless the law could be translated into an image, it kept the pure scientist in a position remote from his society. He would be called abstract, obscure. He would be a freak of intellect even to members of his house. The explosion of a bomb ended that period. The function of science was declared loudly enough for the unborn to hear. The testing on the bombing range proved one series of devoted researchers, Hiroshima Nagasaki acted out others only the human meanings were left to explore the power of life. That dramatizing of poetry in a shock of enunciation can never take place for poetry is at every instance concerned with meaning. The poet of the kind of poetry for which I hope knows that consciousness and creation are linked and cannot be postponed. The scientist of the science I hope for knows that too and more than this recognition is shared even in our flawed reality. The Union Darwin named is true.

Speaker 4 (26:09):

Both science and poetry require discovery, both suffer from people not trusting what they don't understand or can't see. Both require the security of self to feel something that isn't prescribed and then the bomb science kills and the killing is numbing. War Aids nine 11 war poetry today as it did when Muriel wrote, the essays in the life of poetry exists in the context of our working hard not to think about context. Do you feel them? All the lives we're losing, all the lives we've lost. Poetry is a usable truth. Muriel says, we wish to be told in the most memorable way what we have been meaning all along. And the material of poetry is the way we feel and remember Rucker's, the life of poetry is an argument for why poetry should be taught from the resistance of poetry to its sources of uses, sources and uses to how it is a living art that we need so deeply. If it didn't exist, it would be invented. Read it and deliver it to principals and other educators. Share it with your students, read it and remember the life of poetry needs you.

Speaker 5 (27:40):

That was wonderful. Thank you to Renee for organizing this wonderful occasion. I am interested today in talking about the connections that RHI brings up in the life of poetry, connections between images and words and dreams and feelings and sound. As Renee mentioned, I founded Paris Press only to publish one book and that was a very long time ago and I

Speaker 5 (28:14):

Was just like all of you sitting out here, I was a writer, I'm a poet, and I happened to go to a program that Poets House sponsored when they first started back in the late eighties, and it was a program about ruck heiser and there were very different kinds of poets who were speaking about ruck heiser in this little classroom in a public school in a high school. Nina Cassian was there and Philippine was there and Galway Canal was there, Sharon Olds and to Deco and everyone spoke about the life of poetry and I knew Muriel's poems. I had discovered them when I was a college student, not because they were taught, they were never taught at any of the schools that I attended, but because my boyfriend gave me the collected poems in college and then my father gave me the collected poems when I was home for a vacation.

Speaker 5 (29:15):

I loved her poetry of the body, which was why I came to this event that poet's house was having. After learning about the life of poetry, I thought, okay, this is a book that I have to find and read. And I was living in New York then and I discovered that it had been stolen from all the public libraries in New York City and I couldn't find it anywhere. It had been out of Prince since 1974. As Renee said, all of Ru Kaiser's work went out of print at the time of her death with the exception of only one book. Interestingly, her biography of Willard Gibbs, the physicist that has always remained in print, but everything else disappeared. I had no dreams of being a publisher. Having supported myself as an editor and worked in publishing, I knew that that was a pretty insane thing to do.

Speaker 5 (30:07):

But after four years of looking for the life of poetry, I found it. I read it, I read it again, and it was the most inspiring book that I had ever read and the most affirming book as a poet. It was the only time I experienced the sense of not being an oddball outsider. Ruck Heiser says that if you feel deeply, that's a good thing, that in order to be a sensate and compassionate person, you need to live with the arts and with poetry in your daily life. That's not a weird thing to do. That's a necessary thing to do for our whole culture. And so I decided to help to bring the life of poetry back into print. Paris Press had first originated in 1993 with Adrian Denberg founding Paris Press, and we talked about she needed some help and I told her I would help her with the understanding that she published the life of poetry.

Speaker 5 (31:17):

And after she did the press for a couple of years, she folded it. It was not a moneymaking venture, and I then decided to do what I had promised myself I would not do, which was to start a new version of Paris press a nonprofit, but it had only one goal and it was only to publish this one book and I have not stopped talking about it since as many of you or some of you sitting in here, no. What I think is really important at this point is that the life of poetry, which covers many, many subjects as Jen was just talking about, and as Renee mentioned as well, she talks about mathematics, she talks about film, she talks about science, she talks about architecture, she talks about dance and Native American chants and she talks about the blues and jazz and everything is connected and everything is connected to poetry, and I believe that this is a book that can be used in the secondary, well actually K through 12 for all teachers to help teachers battle as Renee was talking about their fear of and feel comfortable teaching poetry, but also to integrate poetry into all different disciplines in the classroom.

Speaker 5 (32:48):

So we are working on a teacher's guide that I was hoping would be finished by today, but Renee is helping to write it and there will be a sample from it on our website. If any of you put your email address on this book that's been passed around, I will send you a link to a sampler of the guide and it's going to be a study guide and it will also be a teacher's guide to help use this book in teaching all disciplines in the classroom. So at the end of the life of poetry as an example of how you can use this, it's just delicious. There's the section of memoir. She has autobiographical writing that's very different from the earlier sections in the book, and she describes being in elementary school. She discovered, she says there are living poets and now the poems that you have been making ever since the beginning have their sense.

Speaker 5 (33:51):

They can be shown. Now I can say I, although in the unguarded moments in the questioning, the you is the one asked, I show the best poems of my 10th year in a little notebook to my teacher, there is a picture of a Buddha under the glass of her desk. She calls us to quiet by ringing a gong shaped like a dark bowl. When I come to school with red eyes, she speaks to me very kindly. She has a scuffle with D, the bad boy of the class. She cuffs him, she who is contained and gentle and she leads him out howling. She comes back, write what you saw. She said, we do write and no two accounts agree that was staged. She says, after we read our reports, now we will begin our study of the American Revolution. These are the sources we will use.

Speaker 5 (34:59):

Now that, I mean that just completely covers me with goosebumps. This is a way to help to teach students of any age, including college students and university students to help teach and talk about history and all the social sciences and what's happening in our world today. It's so simple and so meaningful. She talks about Willard Gibbs. Gibbs's family tried to prevent the publication of her biography of Willard Gibbs because she a Jew and a woman and how dare she write a biography about this important scientist, but Ru Kaiser and Yale won and the book was obviously published in the life approach. He says, truth is according to Gibbs, not a stream that flows from a source but an agreement of components in a poem. These components are not the words or images, but the relations between the words and images. Truth is in accord that actually makes the whole simpler than its parts as he was fond of saying.

Speaker 5 (36:17):

Then she goes on to talk more about Willard Gibbs, but that she connects poetry with science, the creation, the process of science, the process of mathematics, and the process of creating a poem, the process of creating dance, which she discusses the process of creating film, the linking of images in film like the IT linking of images and feeling in poetry is just every time I open this book, I just am odd and it's new and I can't even count the number of times that I've read it. This time I started reading it from the back, which I often do with books, and so I started talking about the back of the book to the front of the book, and I don't want to speak too long. She speaks at one point about Ma Rainey and Vassie Smith and having thought a lot about what's been happening racially, the incredible racist situations in our country today.

Speaker 5 (37:24):

She speaks about the experience of basically Rainey becoming so deathly sick and being sent away from a hospital to another hospital, and in the process of the racism of forcing her to leave the first hospital, she dies in the second. She then talks about how these experiences, she says she bled to death after the frantic ride and the waiting for her turn at the second hospital in the full possession of there, and she's talking about Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, their triumph and their song, their powers realized these singers in a moment are surrounded by the doorless walls of an ambivalent society. What an extraordinary phrase that continues to describe our culture today. When a door is made and the outnumbered eyes shine from behind the wall, the song is proved. We have seen it as we and dread away from that hospital to a courtroom in San Francisco or to that day before the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.

Speaker 5 (38:43):

When Marian Anderson denied a hall, sang human realization in the open air. The poetry is in these songs, not only the art songs, but the spirituals and the blues. So in this book she speaks about how poetry is inside of everything as well as the similarities between poetry and all of these various disciplines. Because I think I'm going on too long, I will just end with her poem. Islands. Oh, for God's sakes, they are connected underneath. They look at each other across the glittering sea. Some keep a low profile, some are cliffs. The bathers think islands are separate like them and of course they are not. Thank you very much.

Speaker 6 (39:51):

Thank you very much for being here. It's great to be on this stellar panel. Sharon Olds once asked the question, is poetry the powerless thing it is in our culture or is it one of the strongest forces on earth? And you can see some of both of the sides of that question where you see this poet's work reaching people, bringing its way back into print against great obstacles, and you see all of us being brought together by work that had been in some ways really censors. I'm going to speak to some of that, to the political opposition she faced. My role is to speak about Muriel briefly and I think I will finish with some poems by students from what they call alternative populations, and maybe we'll flip this a little bit and talk about not just how we bring poetry to prisoners, but how prisoners bring poetry to us.

Speaker 6 (41:07):

Starting with Muriel, I knew her, it's exaggeration to say I knew her. I met her. Adrian Rich called her the great integrator. My meeting was an example because I was a tiny little kid. I mean a young poet, a small poet. I was writing poetry, but in my recollection, I was sort of barely out of my teens. I met Muriel at a reading, typical poetry reading, not too many people there. She wanted to work on a collaboration of Vietnamese poetry. She had the poems in French. She wanted a French speaker to collaborate with her. My mom was French. I'm very fluent in French at the time I was driving a forklift. I had no M F A, I actually still don't. And she said, well, Dennis, you speak French. You've been reading Nu Herbert. Let's collaborate. And this is the I am a moron section of this presentation.

Speaker 6 (42:16):

I was really too shy, too intimidated. I couldn't really believe that this was serious and yet was. That was my knowledge of her. She taught at Sarah Lawrence where I teach now and where there was a little bit of a conclave of really important feminist writers. Grace Paley, Jane Cooper, whose name should really be in the air. An important poet who wrote the introduction died in a little bit of obscurity in my opinion. Margaret Nar taught there. June Jordan passed through. There is a biography of Miel Ru Kaiser that's available and it's by the US government, the Federal Bureau of Investigation,

Speaker 6 (43:14):

And it's lengthy and our taxes paid for this. It's a little bit troubling when you look at this document. It really provides no evidence of any reason why this person should be under surveillance whatsoever. This document should provide some incrimination. Were there any kind of incrimination? The document stresses that she attended, dance academies, she attended anti-war demonstrations. It's extensive. When she was a very young writer, John Edgar Hoover was writing personal letters to her employers about her. Again, you wonder why this is in the file. She's quoted as not wanting to talk about communism. In fact, specifically she's quoted as saying she would just as soon have a free market economy provided that labor had equal power as capital in her writing. She's critical and somewhat surprisingly critical of socialist realist poetry. The communist inspired poetry of the 1930s. She says it tends to self pity and over identifying with people you have no right to identify with, and yet she is targeted. I would like to read you maybe a few things. There's one quote in this file where they say she's a brilliant young writer. She by now has been under surveillance for years. This would be a typical line. She has been averaging about five guests a week, and these people are not people of fashion, but people plainly dressed and seem to be people of good solid American stock. That's your tax money at work.

Speaker 6 (45:24):

When she enters Sarah Lawrence College in 1958, she taught there until 1969, I believe. She is branded as a red and attacked by the American Legion and also attacked personally by the House on American Activities Committee is almost too troubling to go into this, frankly. I mean, they say that Sarah Lawrence is a girl's seminary, and then they say that Sarah Lawrence is populated by dangerous atheists. It would be funny except that this is what happens with women artists in this culture. They're either trivial or extremely dangerous. You're given that, and here you're given those two things in one paragraph.

Speaker 6 (46:22):

Let me conclude this section with a mention of Muriel Rucker's criminal record, f b i files the above-mentioned current biography contained information which reflected that during March, 1943, Rucker drove south with two friends to report the Scottsboro trial. The article reflects that when the police discovered them talking to Negro reporters and found in their possession some calls to a Negro student conference at Columbia University, they were held for inciting the Negroes to insurrection but were released. The troubling thing about this is that in an earlier version of the document, earlier version of the files, it said she had no criminal record. So as we advanced into the fifties, this action of speaking to African-Americans at Scotsboro became retroactively criminalized by your government.

Speaker 6 (47:31):

Grace Paley said of Muriel rocker that she was doubly wounded by the political men in her life and by the literary elite. And here you really see a triple wounding. What does it do to a young sensitive artist to be constantly under surveillance to not, she must've been aware of it at some point. You know what I mean? That her best friends were part of this in terms of her democracy, her way of breaking down barriers. And since I don't have much time left, I'm going to conclude with some poetry. First of all, some political poetry by children, teenagers, inner city teenagers, prisoners, maybe a couple minutes, and then a few lines of Muriel. Here's a political poem by a child. It's called, it's in the voice of a rose. It's called Rose. And the poem goes, A drunk gave me to his wife so he could beat her again tonight. He stole my soul as a child talking in the voice of a rose. And perhaps it's not what we expect. It's a political poem. It makes us responsible for the situation we're hearing about. Here's a poem by a child who has been talked to by a bunch of bureaucrats and told, you need to write poetry because you'll get better college board scores.

Speaker 6 (49:10):

It's maybe a young teenager. He writes, A black bird trapped among doves longs for a darker day.

Speaker 6 (49:23):

I saw this kid write a poem, young inner city, African-American teenager in Topeka, Kansas came to me and said, nobody's ever going to hear from me. But I wrote a great poem. Her poem was as I'm just about average, but no two mirrors show the same me and a final poem by a child. I was sent to teach in Dyer Heights, Brooklyn in a residency. And they told me the honors class is gone. There's nobody here but the special ed kids. So go home. And I asked to teach the special ed kids, and it's sort of like watching God create the universe. You watch a young child, well, it's not that young. Let's say a sixth grader. Write this poem to the Phoenix. I know how you rise from the ashes. I do it every day. What amazes is that you can remain on fire.

Speaker 6 (50:34):

I'm amazed that Muriel could remain on fire. So I'm going to conclude with just a few lines of her poetry. Nothing was certain, but a moment of peace. A hollow behind the unbreakable waterfall all the way to the cave. The teeming forms of death and death, the price of the body, cheap as air. I blessed my heart on the expiation journey for it had never been unable to suffer when I met the man whose face looked like the future. When I met the whore with the dying red hair, the child myself, who is my murderer. So came I between heaven and my grave passed the serene smile of the voir to this cave where the myth enters the heart. Again, thank you.

Speaker 2 (51:39):

At one point in the life of poetry, Ru Kaiser observes for the last time here, I wish to say that we will not be saved by poetry, but poetry is the type of creation in which we may live and which will save us. I have to say that a couple of weeks ago I hosted a guest at Old Dominion University where I work Sima Reza, who is here and who runs Arts Intervention Programs at Walter Reed Military Complex and Fort Belvoir military hospital with veterans who are required to participate in this program as a matter of health. And we started talking about the life of poetry. I asked her if she had heard of it, and we began talking about this panel and the tremendous resource. This book has been for me. I mean, it opens in times of crisis. We summon up our strength this morning right before the panel, Dennis and I were out talking in the lobby and Sima came up to us and she said, this book saved my life. So I just want to say I so appreciate all of your attention. Thank you all and please do go to Paris press booth. There are also bumper stickers. You can have a Muriel r Heiser bumper sticker. Thank you very much.

Speaker 7 (53:19):

Thank you for tuning into the A W P podcast series. For other podcasts. Please visit our website@www.awriter.org.