Minneapolis Convention Center | April 10, 2015

Episode 108: Neglected American Masters

(Jericho Brown, James Allen Hall, Yona Harvey, Paisley Rekdal, Richard Siken) This panel spotlights the poet's poet whom we did not encounter in our formal educations or who has slipped under the radar of anthologies or prizes, but whose work is undeniably masterful. Examples might be Gwendolyn Brooks, Muriel Rukeyser, Bob Kaufman, Laura Riding Jackson, Lorine Niedecker, Audre Lorde, and Robert Hayden, among others. The panel analyzes notions of poetic mastery, the politics of neglect, and the ways in which teaching is a kind of canon-making.

Published Date: December 16, 2015

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2015 A W P conference in Minneapolis. The recording features Jericho Brown, James Allen Hall, Jonah Harvey Paisley, rectal, and Richard Siken. You'll now hear James Allen Hall provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:33):

If I could first ask you all to please turn these things off, all of your boop bop beep beep things, that would be good. Thank you. That way we don't have any disruptions. So this panel sort of came together and has a history I think at a W P that perhaps Professor Rectal might want to talk about a little bit. You're always on this panel. Well, I'm glad that this panel always happens. We are talking about figures who are masterful from whom we can learn something about our craft, but also the shape of neglect and the ways that we can heal neglect as writers and teachers and people who produce discourse as well as poems. What I would like to do is to introduce our panelists and then they will address you in alphabetical order. Jericho Brown to my left is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Speaker 2 (00:01:36):

Yeah, well, his poems have appeared in the New Republic, the New Yorker, anything new, the Best American Poetry. His first book pleased New Issues 2008, won the American Book Award and his second book, the New Testament Copper Canyon won the Ains Field Wolf Book Award just recently and was named one of the best books of the year by Library Journal Cold Front in the Academy of American Poets and anyone with Eyes. He is an associate professor in English and Creative Writing at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Yona Harvey to my right is the author of the Poetry Collection Hemming the Water Winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Claremont Graduate University. She is an assistant professor of English and Fabulosity at the University of Pittsburgh. Paisley Rectal is the author of a book of essays The Night my mother Met Bruce Lee, I recommend it to all of you as well as to my students all the time.

Speaker 2 (00:02:38):

A hybrid genre of photo text memoir that combines poetry, fiction, nonfiction and photography entitled, intimate, and four books of poetry, A Crash of Rhinos, six Girls Without Pants, the Invention of the Kaleidoscope and Animal Eye, which was a finalist for the 2013 Kingsley Tufts Prize, the Balcones Prize and winner of the Wilco Prize from the University of North Texas. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an N e A Fellowship, two Pushkar Prizes of Fulbright Fellowship and various state Arts Council awards. Her newest book, imaginary Vessels is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2016, so we can look forward to that. Richard Syken at the end here is the author of Crush, which was the 2004 winner of this little prize called the Yale Series of Younger Poets. His second book War of the Foxes is just out from Copper Canyon Press. He is the recipient of an N E A fellowship and two Arizona Commissions of the Arts Grants. Siken is an editor at S Spark Press. I will now turn the podium over to Jericho Brown.

Speaker 3 (00:03:57):

Thank you. Thank you so much, James. Thank you for this idea and for inviting me to participate in it and it's really an honor to be on this panel with these poets whose work I admire so deeply and so greatly. I gave a handout. I don't know if everyone got it. I brought maybe 50. We might be above 50, so if you can get next to a person who has a handout, if you don't have one, everybody doesn't stink. You don't have to be afraid. I know y'all are writers, so that's your excuse for pretending social anxiety, but it would be of use to me because I'll refer to it in the second half of what I'm going to say and I don't want you looking like I don't know what he's talking about and I don't care because we don't want to keep people neglected and I gave the handout out also because I wanted you to have these poems because my hope is that you will take these poems with you elsewhere and make use of them, post them and teach 'em and do things because I'm, I'm in love with them. I'm not sort of in love with them, so I guess I'll start running my mouth

Speaker 3 (00:04:56):

A couple of weeks ago in what I am sure was an act of irony. The poem A day administered by poets.org featured a piece that made me laugh out loud when I opened my email, the title A minor poet,

Speaker 3 (00:05:16):

The poet Steven Vincent Benet. I didn't finish the poem that day. Too many obvious adjectives and too many unnecessary modifiers for my taste. Being reminded of Benets existence did make me think about my plans for this panel. Though a minor poet was first collected in Benets early, if not first full length book Young Adventure for which he won the 1917 Yale Prize before it was a few years later changed to the Yale Younger Prize. I imagine the poem was a kind of self-conscious testimony from a poet who was only 20 years old and unsure of his future as a writer. After this acclaim though, he would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his book length poem, John Brown's body, and to become the judge for the Yale Younger selecting first books by poets including Paul Engle, Muriel Rucker and Margaret Walker. He was elected a fellow to the Academy of Arts and Sciences and a second Pulitzer posthumously in 1944.

Speaker 3 (00:06:30):

He had died less than a year before this announcement. I'm not sure what this list of commendations meant for a poet of Benets time, especially since they were all much newer recognitions and therefore maybe not as prestigious as they would come to be considered a few decades later. To be completely honest, I'm not at all sure what we collectively think of these honors today that we being the men and women in this very room who are writers on the ground, obsessed with every keystroke and not with pats on the back from the right hands as a descendant of black people and in so many ways of the black arts movement, my own ambivalence about mainstream modes of acknowledgement always comes in the form of the way I'm supposed to feel versus the way I feel versus the way Kmu Sala and Mona Lisa Salo might feel about me versus authentic gratitude versus the fact that Phyllis Wheatley can join Dickinson and Whitman in saying she never won a prize.

Speaker 3 (00:07:49):

Given all of this though, I'd like to think that Benet met his death with the assurance that people loved his work and it would continue to be read widely for lifetimes to come. I hope everyone in this room dies with such assurance whether or not it turns out to be true. In Bennet's case, it doesn't seem to have manifested. Certainly he must not have imagined my black queer ass giving cruel and haughty glance at his minor poet. As a matter of fact, this is the first time I've ever caught myself saying his name to other writers, and I'm 100% sure I've never heard another writer say his name To me, it seems that Benet died in the shadow of too many modernist greats. We'd rather read whether or not we understand their fragmentation, they're subversive use of form or their heavy use of illusion. I say all of that to say that I'm worried I might be here for the wrong reasons. People have had the nerve to ask me in public interviews how it feels to not be considered for this or that prize and how it feels to be a finalist who walks out of the ceremony holding nothing but the printed program. I've been asked enough to have an answer at the ready and here it is.

Speaker 3 (00:09:27):

Poetry is not about how many prizes you win and it's not even about how many people buy your books. Poetry is about how much space any one poem holds in any human heart. That is the answer, but I know it can sound a little too good to be true still, if that is my answer. Is there really any such thing as a neglected American master? If I know that besides the Bible, one of the biggest influences for my second book, the New Testament, was Bob Kaufman's Golden Sardine. What then are my motives for trying to get more people to read and teach and know and learn the work of Bob Kaufman? Hasn't he done the work he needs to do in my individual human heart if I know that my work exists because his work exists and if I know that his work helps me to better see this world in ways distorted enough for me to see it real or am I talking about Kaufman today because I don't really believe my answer?

Speaker 3 (00:10:46):

Do I actually and more subconsciously think of him as a doomed figure, a figure always in need of saving and if I do, do I think of him this way because he was black, because he was born in the South, because he was Buddhist, because he chose to be a performer of his work who often refused to write the words down for an establishment that to this very day respects the written word over the spoken word because he took a 10 year vow of silence beginning with the assassination of President Kenny and ending with US troops finally pulling out of the Vietnam War. Do I wish he was less righteous and more vocal during these years of intensity in American history? Do I call Kaufman neglected because I blame him for being exactly who he meant to be of Kaufman's intentions for himself? Harriet Mullen said he very deliberately chose a marginal life rather than having marginality imposed on him, Kaufman declared and dedicated himself to what I call the antithesis of a literary career and Kenzie's first memory of Kaufman seems an example of this marginal antithesis Keesey says I can remember.

Speaker 3 (00:12:23):

I can remember driving down to North Beach with my folks and seeing Bob Kaufman out there on the street. He had little pieces of band-aid tape all over his face about two inches wide and little smaller ones like two inches long, and all of them made into crosses. He would come up to the cars and he was babbling poetry into these cars. He came up to the car I was writing in with my parents and started jabbering this stuff into the car. I knew that this was exceptional use of the human voice and the human mind.

Speaker 3 (00:13:01):

The terror that his poems incite in me is real, but sometimes eclipsed by the terror of what I know of the poet. Yes, he lost England's Guinness poetry award to Elliot. Yes, he appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson a few times in the early seventies. Yes, he coined the term beatnik and was a co-founding editor of Beatitude Magazine, which I always wonder if I should say Beatitude magazine, yes, to what I know his poems have done in my human heart. Still, I am fool enough to ask myself if there seems little place other than the occasional ironic poem, a day feature for what came of the literary life led by Stephen Vincent Benet, then how can we ever do anything other than neglect the work that came out of the life of the purposefully and pathetically marginal Bob Kaufman and ultimately aren't? My questions about Kaufman really just questions that come from my own ego.

Speaker 3 (00:14:18):

Questions asked by a younger poet who has had recognition enough to share this panel with these brilliant poets are my worries about Kaufman. One of my greatest influences really just coverups from my worries about myself and my own death. Kaufman is often forgotten as the important figure he was to the beat generation because he was black. He's often forgotten as a black poet during the black arts movement because he was so decidedly a proponent of the beat generation and maybe this leads to what I love most about his poems. Kauffman's work could easily be called psychedelic because of his use of surreal imagery. For example, in a terror is more certain, I confess to all the crimes committed in the month of April, but not to save my own neck, which is adjustable and telescopes into any size noose or in Michelangelo, the elder in one ear a spider spins its web of eyes in the other a crooked chirps all night. This is what we often hear about Kaufman's poetry, this and its improvisational nature, a quality of playful humor that makes it seem as if the poems write themselves as lyrics to a score of jazz playing in Kaufman's head. For example, in October 5th, 1963, arriving back in San Francisco to be greeted by a blacklist and eviction, I am writing these lines to the responsible non-people. One thing is certain I am not white. Thank God for that. It makes everything else bearable. So funny.

Speaker 3 (00:16:28):

The loneliness of the long distance runner is due to the onlyness of the long distance runner. That uniqueness that is the long distance runners alone and only he is the loneliness of the long distance. Runner is the only reason for the long distance runner's existence. Short distance runners run. They finish neither first nor last they finish. That is all that can be said about them. Nothing can be said for them and ordinary. That is their closest proximity to the truly unique men die as all men come to know sooner or later. At any rate, either way, men die on that. All men can depend. Kaufman's surreal nature and improvisational genius are enough to make him a poet to love, but for me, he's an American master because these are only tools he uses in poems meant to make present a persona who falls through the cracks of identity that America forces upon all of us.

Speaker 3 (00:17:40):

This is what I miss in the poetry of Stephen Vincent Benet. This is what I want from the poetry of Jericho Brown. Trouble is that Bob Kaufman is an American master because he's neglected. Kaufman's iconoclastic nature is his greatest gift as it becomes the basis for a speaker caught in dire circumstances at the beginnings and endings of almost every one of his poems. A terror is more certain begins a terror is more certain than all the rare, desirable, popular songs I know and ends Who wants to be a poet? If you fuck on TV and all those cowboys watching Michelangelo, the elder begins, I live alone like pith in a tree and ends, I would die for poetry. Slight alterations begins. I climb a red thread to an unseen existence and ends the floor is a plate. The floor is a pallet of surprise watching me eat the calendar and October 5th, 1963, which I've already quoted the beginning of ends, it comes before and after every beat. You hear it in between its sound is Bob Kaufman poet. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (00:19:42):

I would only fuck on TV if cowboys were watching.

Speaker 4 (00:19:47):

No, it's cool. Keep going.

Speaker 2 (00:19:49):

No, you're fine. It's good. Something happened to Gwendolyn Brooks. Tony Cade Bombar wrote in the New York Times book review something most certainly in evidence in the Mecca and subsequent works, a new movement and energy, intensity, richness, power of statement, and a new stripped lean compressed style, A change of style prompted by a change of mind. This was after she attended the second Black Writers Conference at Fisk University in 1967. By that time she'd published with Harper and Roe all of her books, including the first one, A street in Bronzeville, which led to a Guggenheim. Her second book, Annie Allen, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 19 59, 19 50 rather. In 1969, she was nominated for a national book award for In the Mecca, which was the last book she published with Harper and Roe. Afterwards, Brooks left Harper and began publishing with broadside press one of several new publishing houses with the purpose of promoting black writers. Brooks told an interviewer that she was interested in joining a house that was giving a platform to young black poets people that the larger publishers wouldn't accept. In another interview, Brooks said, my aim is to write poems that will somehow successfully call all black people.

Speaker 2 (00:21:19):

I set out in this talk to understand why it is that I finished my ba, my M f A and my PhD only knowing one poem by Gwendolyn Brooks. That is not to say that I did not encounter other poets of color, but I can't remember a single time after high school that I was taught a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks and I took a lot of classes. Y'all did that mean she had nothing to teach me? Did that mean I was no better than Wallace Stevens, who upon seeing a photograph of Brooks among portraits of past national book award judges remarked to his other judges who's the coon apparently in the story relayed by the biographer Joan Richardson, when Stevens noticed the reaction to his words, which was I think the reaction in that room that we've just had, he repeated it. I know you don't like to hear a lady called a coon, but who is it?

Speaker 2 (00:22:24):

This was at the 1952 National Book Awards luncheon. Brooks had won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry the year prior. There's no fucking way. He didn't know who she was. He didn't win a Pulitzer Prize until 1955, so the first time I studied Wallace Stevens, I didn't like him. Impenetrable dry, hyper cerebral like most Libras, I'm a Libra too. I remember a creative writing class in which we were given his 13 ways of looking at a blackbird. I remember a creative writing class which assigned an imitation of anecdote of the jar. I remember a creative writing class in which the professor lectured on man with a blue guitar. I remember being assigned him and both my advanced degree programs as well as my undergrad program. Finally, I got it. Stevens was a poet with a capital white. No program ever introduced me to the poet who as Elizabeth Alexander has said, combines tensile strength of the line with strange diction that could belong to no one else and sophisticated musical ability that can rhyme Banshee gets with vinaigrette. Isn't that amazing? Elizabeth Alexander writes of discovering Gwendolyn Brooks, if such wild and unexpected curiosities were possible in her language, then anything might be possible for me.

Speaker 2 (00:24:04):

Brooks' mastery is of the line tensile strength. I just wanted to say that again and its ability to modulate tone and syntax. I have a little handout, I'm just going to refer to it a little bit. Abortions will not let you forget. Brooks writes to begin her poem, the Mother and Her first book, A Street in Bronzeville. It's an unforgettable poem, one of sophisticated music that governs an even more sophisticated use of tone and line. If you look at the end is that really long last line that exhausts all of your breath and then that one word on the next line. As you're taking a breath, you take in all As that mother does. It leads us into a huge quiet and it's that interplay between the long and the short line at the end, which creates echo and subverts our expectations. Clearly this is a poet with much to teach us with much to emulate and yet preparing for this panel, I looked at descriptions of courses offered at Harvard for the past 10 years.

Speaker 2 (00:25:08):

Brooks was found in descriptions for modern American poetry, a course which also included Stevens and in contemporary African-American literature. Stevens was found in classes that bore his very name, Stevens and Pound, Stevens Pla and Lowell and the graduate seminar just Stevens other classes that listed him Poetry in America, a fascinating class called Ode Elegy epigram fragment song, A course on the art of the essay and a class in advanced poetry writing which did not in its description include a single poet of color. Perhaps the inclusion of Stevens is just because was Stevens's chief critics and proponents taught until recently at Harvard, so perhaps it's just the spirit of a pedagogue over the curriculum, but I found the same to be true. Of course, descriptions at Yale, duke, Dartmouth, Stanford and uc. Berkeley went a little west coast there. Brooks was present in African-American literature classes, but her name did not seem to be called in the other classes.

Speaker 2 (00:26:16):

If her name is not written on the roster, if it is not called can she be said to be absent? Then I decided to pull off my shelves, a great number of books on poetry, a few anthologies of poetry and about 30 essay compilations on the art and craft that we love. I've said that Brooks is as anthologized as Stevens, though Stevens often has slightly more pages, 20 for instance in the modern poetry anthology as opposed to 13 for Brooks. But true amazement lay in looking at the indices of the books of essays that have supplemented and indeed been my education, I found two essays dedicated solely to Brooks, one by Carl Phillips, Gwendolyn Brooks as a metaphysical poet and coined the realm I recommended to you and one by Elizabeth Alexander both in separate books. Over and over again though I found Poets Touch stoning Wallace Stevens looking at a recent and good anthology of essays on line breaks.

Speaker 2 (00:27:17):

For instance, I saw that Brooks is mentioned by three poets total in that book, one in the introduction. Stevens is mentioned by seven in sound and form in modern poetry. Stevens has 20 pages of reprints and analysis. Brooks is not mentioned at all. Actually the only poet of color in that book is Langston Hughes who has one reprinted poem, the Flexible Lyric, one of my favorites. Stevens has two poems discussed Brooks Zero. The same is true for Steven Dobbins. Best words, best Order, and Stanley Plum Lee's argument and song, Mary Ru's recent book, madness Rack and Honey, which I love list Stevens in. Its selected biography but not Brooks. Mark Strand's 100 great poems of the 20th century includes Stevens but not Brooks. Gwendolyn Brooks never appeared in a single volume of the best American poetry, nor did she edit that series from the time it first appeared in 1988 until her death in 2000.

Speaker 2 (00:28:18):

Only in places like the Poet's companion edited by Kim SIO and Dorian Luxe and in by herself women reclaim poetry. Do you see the results reversed? Steven's not mentioned Brooks well-represented. I love that book by the way, by herself. Women reclaimed poetry. It's an excellent craft anthology over the years, this conference in fact has seen an avalanche of panels and presentations that have centered on Stevens. Though there are a few Brooks panels like the one yesterday, it isn't the same steady stream. I have endeavored to outline the ways in which neglect happens in classrooms, in essays, on our art, in anthologies at conferences. All of this forms and informs the force of the educational cannon that has relegated Ms. Brooks to one relatively early poem and though it is a masterful poem, we real cool would not be the representative I'd pick of her poems.

Speaker 2 (00:29:16):

There are poems like her sonnet sequence, gay chaps at the bar or her infirm that we need, especially in this moment. Brooks teaches us how to write with history to organize through form that which is unspeakable. I turned my final attention to the Boy died in my alley, a poem I have given many a student in the wake of Mike Brown's murder in Ferguson and Tamir Rice's murder in Cleveland. There's so much to teach in that poem, the way that the shots I hear and shots I hear prefigure the red floor of my alley, which becomes a special speech to me at the end of the poem. It teaches me how to be at once both stranger and more precise in my descriptions. Stretch strain at the end of the poem is so heartbreaking because it physicalizes the straining for salvation and yet calls back to the future fall and it also prefigures the red floor, the strain that becomes stain in what is for Brooks a kind of echo so obvious she may not make it in order for it to haunt and inhabit the poem The Boy died in my alley teaches me that point of view can be manipulated in order to bring the world outside our door.

Speaker 2 (00:30:28):

The boy who died into the personal, into my alley. Gwendolyn Brooks is an American master whose neglect has been at the hands of classrooms, poets and writers who have punished her for turning her back on mainstream publication and seeking a black audience as if that black audience isn't also a part of what we mean when we say American poetry. She shows us that poetry is a special speech that can, as she says in the closing line of the first sauna at gay chaps of the bar, holler down the lions in this air. Thank you.

Speaker 5 (00:31:21):

Hello. Hi. I'm going to talk a little bit about Sterling Brown. Last spring. Jericho and I were on a panel together and at one point he said something like, poets need to stop apologizing for being poets, and at the time I was like, Hmm, what does he mean by that? And I've been thinking on it and thinking on it and that's how I came to want to talk about Sterling Brown. Okay, I was first introduced to Sterling Brown's poetry as an undergraduate student at Howard University. I was enrolled in a required course, blacks in the Arts, which as you might imagine covered quite a bit of territory, dance, theater, fine arts, literature, music. It seemed like everything and also over a long period of time from slave narratives to the then present.

Speaker 5 (00:32:24):

The class was team taught by two professors in the College of Fine Arts and the two women typically stood at the front of a large auditorium, not quite as large as this, and enriched the day's by sharing recordings on an old record player. So that was a while back. The recording I recall most vividly is the one of Brown's booming voice reciting his poem, old Limb Hearing the poet voice for the first time was an experience very much like the one Sterling Stuckey describes in his introduction to the collected poems of Sterling a Brown, which Michael S. Harper selected as a national poetry series winner in 1980.

Speaker 5 (00:33:18):

It was a weekend in the summer of 62 at a resort near Detroit just on the other side of the Canadian border. We were listening to a recording being amplified throughout the grounds of poets reading their words. Just standing at that early hour on a Sunday morning would've been under most circumstances and achievement, but this time I was startled upright and determined to get to the record player to discover whose voice it was. I wondered then and later how a Williams College, Phi Beta Kappa, a Harvard man, a college professor, an imminent writer, could have a voice with so much of earth and sky and sunlight and dark clouds about it, a voice unafraid and instrument blues tinged.

Speaker 5 (00:34:15):

Of course, I was listening from the backseat of a university auditorium rather than a resort, but brown's blues tinged instrument firmly fixed itself and my imagination though my blues education was just budding at that time. I could already hear the winks nods and repetitions of that music. What strikes me now is the fact that I can't recall under which art my professors had housed Brown's poetry. Had we been discussing the blues as strictly music or had we been discussing literature and poetry informed by the blues? The exact answer is not really the point to me. It's the idea that Brown's intellectual and creative work were so intricately tied to the blues. The two could not be separated. I love the blues. I love Jazz. Brown once said, and I'm not going to give them up writing about Brown's work. Many years later, the late poet and scholar Lorenzo Thomas observed that every poet must confront a serious problem. How to reconcile one's private preoccupations with the need to make poetry that is both accessible and useful to others. A failure in this area does not of course prevent the production of these poems. Indeed, some poems like many of Ts Elliots may be records of this struggle.

Speaker 5 (00:35:59):

Thomas goes on to note that Elliot cringed before a weighty passed, but that brown enamored with the blues and the African-American vernacular, tradition, perceived and originality and creativity to be mastered and practiced in an even more original manner. And I suspect this is why when we revisit reviews and scholarship about Brown's work, words like innovative and experimental tend to crop up. Brown also had a really sharp sense of humor, which is evident in his lectures, essays and critical reviews. He's got a really great one called Imitation of Life Once a Pancake, I mean it's like it'll have you in stitches. It's so good. Brown was on a mission to analyze and dispel stereotypes about African-Americans and the Blues format was one of his best tools As a poet, I'm drawn to Brown's variations of the form, which Lorenzo Thomas describes beautifully in his essay, authenticity and Elevation, Sterling Brown's Theory of the Blues.

Speaker 5 (00:37:14):

You can hear that innovation in the witnessing, cataloging and echoes of old limb, and I'm going to read that poem. There's a great recording of Sterling Brown that's the Smithsonian Institution released. You should hear that too. I can't read it as well as he does, but I'm going to take this moment to read it to you. I talked to limb and old limb said they weigh the cotton, they store the corn. We only good enough to work the rows. They run the commissary, they keep the books. We got to be grateful for being cheated. Whipper snapper clerks call us out of our name. We got to say Mr, to Spindling boys. They make our figures turn Somerset. We buck in the middle say, thank you, sir. They don't come by ones, they don't come by twos, they come by tens. They got the judges, they got the lawyers, they got the jury roles, they got the law.

Speaker 5 (00:38:30):

They don't come by ones. They got the sheriffs, they got the deputies. They don't come by twos. They got the shotguns, they got the rope. We get the justice in the end and they come by tins their fists stay closed, their eyes look straight, our hands stay open, our eyes must fall. They don't come by ones. They got the manhood, they got the courage. They don't come by twos. We got to slink around, hang tailed hounds. They burn us when we dogs, they burn us when we men, they come by tens. I had a buddy, six foot of a man muscled up perfect game to the heart. They don't come by. Ones outworked and out fought any man or two men. They don't come by twos. He spoke out of turn at the commissary. They gave him a day to get out the county. He didn't take it. He said, come and get me. They came and got him and they came by tens. He stayed in the county. He lays there dead. They don't come by ones. They don't come by twos, but they come by tens. That's a great point. Sorry.

Speaker 5 (00:40:02):

So that brings me finally to the notion of neglect and indebtedness. Not that long before Lorenzo Thomas passed away, he was on an a w P panel that was actually devoted to Sterling Brown's work and implementing it in the DC public schools and after that panel he was so patient and kind and he worked with me to let me get my hands on that curriculum and see that work that they were doing. So I really want to plug him and his book and make sure that you read his essays and also acknowledge Joanne Gavin's work, Steven Henderson and Mark Sanders for their attention to Brown's work over the years. I guess in Brown's case I feel the work is there but we need to be reminded of it and to share it and to teach it. Just as recently as yesterday I ran into Ahma Jamal Johnson and Brian Gilmore, who is also working on what I know is going to be a really great lecture about the reception of Sterling Brown's 1932 book The Southern Road.

Speaker 5 (00:41:19):

And I don't know if, don't tell him that I'm giving this away, but he talks about how there's this a really great review in the New York Times of the Southern Road and then there's a not so great one by Poetry Magazine. And so he's comparing that that's going to be so good. He's going to deliver that in DC anyway, to some of us. Sterling Brown has always been a part of the discussion, but even Sterling Stucky in the introduction to Brown's collected works noted that in 1962, even though Brown was and had been a professor at Howard University for several years, he wasn't sure that the Negro literati at Howard, Howard and other schools had any real sense of why Brown and his work were so important. So I hope as a result of this panel, some of you might explore the rich body of his work and especially those recordings and teach them if you want anything. If you need anything you can ask me. I have it all. Thank you.

Speaker 6 (00:42:41):

So I'm going to be talking about the Book of the Dead by Muriel Rukeyser. What's interesting to me is I'm listening to these fabulous talks is how much the issue of blackness actually figures into loss and or recuperation mostly loss. Those of you out there, most of you probably know about muy reiser and it's probably amusing for me to sort of talk about her as a neglected master, especially since the Book of the Dead, perhaps as a poem, it's come roaring back to life in the last several years, and I'm going to be talking about sort of the reasons both good and bad that it disappeared critically for a while and the reasons mostly good and somewhat interesting that it's come back. At the time she was writing the work that would become the Book of the Dead, which was published in US one in 1938.

Speaker 6 (00:43:31):

You have to remember that T SS Elliot was the reigning figure in poetry and by reigning I mean just that was the guy everyone had to wrestle with. And Rook Reiser was one of these novice poets at the time who was wrestling with this influence. You also have to remember that at that time she had her feet in two different art worlds. One was the world of poetry and the other one was the world of what was then becoming documentary filmmaking. She herself started out as a journalist and as a filmmaker and when she went down to Gly Bridge down to investigate the Hawk's Nest mining disaster, that's the capacity in which she was working and itself, documentary film was a term in development. At the point directors and audiences were seeing film primarily as a narrative format, but they started to realize that of course as with photography, it was possible to capture reality.

Speaker 6 (00:44:29):

And interestingly at that time there was a big shift in film over in England, John g Gron and the documentary film movement were sort of working on these films that would later be terms documentary films. And over in America we had Robert Flaherty's Romanticized Nanook of the North, which itself was based on Edward Sheriff Curtis's very doomed docudrama in the land of the headhunters. I dare you to go watch that. I start my talk on Ru heiser today with both Elliot and documentary filmmaking because I think they are to some extent two of the main reasons for the book of the Dead's neglect and it's recent recuperation Heiser herself. As I said, you can't really sort of say she's neglected in some respects. Winner of the Yale Younger Poets Awards noted biographer, author of more than 12 books of poetry with two collected poems, two collected volumes out in print.

Speaker 6 (00:45:23):

Hers is a name that probably most of us here are very familiar with. My own personal experience though is that she's a name that we're familiar with but we're largely maybe not teaching. I certainly never was given any of her poems in all of my years in the classroom. Most people don't seem to be teaching her or talking about her from conversations in conferences like this, but if there is one, it is the Book of the Dead. For those of you guys who don't know about the Hawks Nest mining disaster, it took place in the early thirties. It was one of the nation's worst industrial disasters and it remains that way in which a primarily African-American workforce contracted silicosis through inhaling rock dust that was contained in the silica dust while they were constructing a new hydroelectric power plant, it started getting national attention because Time Magazine and Newsweek were saying, Hey, does anyone know about this?

Speaker 6 (00:46:16):

Silicosis for those who dunno is a disease. I had to look this up, that infects the lungs and gradually causes the cells of the body to digest themselves. The black workers, most of them were black, who basically contracted this disease, were given $400 as remuneration for their suffering. White workers were given a thousand, what a shock, right? By the late 1930s, so many news reports had trickled out about this disaster, and so poets and filmmakers were starting to go down and start to record the events. And when R Kaiser went down, she went down as a journalist primarily and she created this epic poem, the Book of the Dead. Some of you may have read it, maybe most of you have read it, and it is incredible. It contains ballads, witness statements, doctor statements, NASDAQ quotes, congressional testimony, the language of maps or guidebooks, personal monologues and blues songs.

Speaker 6 (00:47:13):

It is a long pro workers' rights collage work sequence in the tradition of both the modernist and the social realist writers of the 1920s. And it also takes its name from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, from whose lyrics she constantly sort of cribs and quotes. What you might not know, as I said, was that she came down as a photographer and if you read the poems, the camera takes a really central place in the text and it's fascinating to see how it works. So for instance, golly bridge is the first example of this, and I'm just going to read a couple of sections from it. Camera at the crossing sees the city, a street of wooden walls and empty windows. The doors shut handle endless in the empty street and the deserted negro standing on the corner, the man on the street and the camera eye, he leaves the doctor's office slam door doom, any town looks like this one glass, wood and naked eye.

Speaker 6 (00:48:14):

The movie house closed for the afternoon frames, posters, and the Negro watches it grow in the gray air eyes of the tourist house, the eyes of the negro looking down the track, hotel men and hotel cafeteria camera. This poem and other poems in that sequence is filled with images of reflective glass, shop windows, eyes and acts of looking all images shot explicitly either from a camera's point of view or interestingly, the point of view of the African-American man on the corner. Ru Keiser's rhetoric here is primarily visual, the poem as well as others in the sequence attempt to create a direct stripped down technical and objective gaze in this language. And if this is a poem meant to document tragedy, then the cameras, and it's not the poet's point of view, but the camera's point of view suggests the greatest possibility for objectivity, as does the gaze of the deserted negro, the ultimate witness to this tragedy that primarily claimed black lives.

Speaker 6 (00:49:14):

And in this poem is in others. In the Book of the Dead, the black gaze is the camera's gaze and that's really important. It's the black gaze that matters. And if race is in part one of the things that is looked at in the poem, it is also the thing that looks back at us. So she explicitly frames this as the most objective gaze is the black gaze, which is I think a very unusual move to make in a poem, certainly that time and even now. So what does all this have to do with neglect? For me, Reiser is a fascinating case study in the cyclical values. I think at work in our notions of mastery and excellence. When the Book of the Dead finds and creates language that matches her essentially documentary impulse, I think this poem is superb and it utilizes the modernist strategies at work at that time of multivocal, collage, fragmentation, and even early images in ways that are specific to her project.

Speaker 6 (00:50:09):

And in that I think it fulfills its impulse to create a panopticon through which to see and record events and through seeing to allow the reader to become part of a maybe passive, but certainly a part of a protest against a modern civilization built on the backs of mostly black exploited workers. Defense is sight. She writes, widen the lens and see standing over the land myths of identity, new signals, processes. And yet I've taught this poem numbers of times and what also strikes me about this is that that documentary language clashes very deeply and sadly not always convincingly with other kind of high modernist language At times, she sort of starts to slide into a kind of Elliot like minstrel sea. This is a poem that's filled with also figurative and myth laced language that also seems to be called from the wasteland, in particular Elliot's section, the burial of the dead.

Speaker 6 (00:51:08):

And that is to me, the crippling force behind the poem requires hers response to Elliot's mythic framework is revisionist. It deflates his invocation of cyclical vegetation myths often, and yet her preoccupation with these very myths, her play upon Elliot's high modernist fantasy, I believe perverts the cycle's original impulse and makes it sound occasionally a little derivative. I'm going to read some sections from the poem that I think kind of show that a little bit. This is from her sequences opening poem, the Road Pastor, tall City's influence outside its body traffic. Penumbral crowds are centers removed and strong fighting for good reason. The roads will take you into your own country. Gay blank rich faces wishing to add history to ballrooms tradition to the first T. The land is fierce here, steep braced against snow. She starts to slide into a kind of V language that culminates, I think in the sequences final poem, and it's the weakest one.

Speaker 6 (00:52:12):

In a way. The Book of the Dead and which Ruhi stripped down language swells suddenly and moves into a very highly symbolic register, reminiscent not only of Elliot but HD's. These walls do not fall. Here's another section, live Oak, the hanging moss, a world of desert, the dead, the lava, and the extreme arisen fountains of life. The flourished land peopled with watercourse to California and the colored sea sums of frontiers and unmade borders of acts and poems. The brilliant scene between the seas and standing. This fact and this disease, our times confirm us all in the museum life. Centuries of ambition yielded at last a fertilizing image. The Carthaginian stone, meaning a tall woman carries in her two hands. The book and cradled dove on her two thighs wings folded from the waist crossed to her feet, a pointed human crown as in Elliott's poem, the modern city is a source of degeneration and decay, and reiser often turns to private mythic or foam medieval symbolism.

Speaker 6 (00:53:23):

T again of the burial of the dead. Throughout her poem, the rose, the castle, and the spear, she writes, in one section or later, will the corpse you planted last year begin to sprout? Her poem is filled with stilted images, sometimes I should say, of a pastoral landscape perverted by or changed to images of decay amid cycles of death and rebirth. The landscape itself devolves over the course of the sequence into a modernist hell that brings only death to those who that inhabit it. Interestingly, also, the scene in which all of this takes place, her long sequence is April the cruelest month. So when we talk about the reasons I think that the Book of the Dead was neglected for a period of time, I think there are really good and bad reasons for that. And it's sort of interestingly, ironically flipped. I think when it was first published, it received a lot of acclaim and partly because of the echoes of Elliot that people found sort of reassuring and a mark of high culture.

Speaker 6 (00:54:22):

Now, however, I think it's flipped. It's not the mark of Elliot that makes it really quite the astonishing poem. It's her own language. It's that documentary impulse behind the poem. But there's another thing I think at work that goes unacknowledged or maybe should has been acknowledged. And that's the political scene of American culture itself. I dunno how many of you felt in your workshops that politics was not to enter a poem upon pain of death, but I was one of that generation in which if you brought something up as unseemly as race or politics or anything that could be seen as racial politics or politics at all, that was just the worst thing ever. Thanks Michigan. It took me years to unlearn that, but there's a really strong reason, there's a historical reason that that happened. And you have to think about, if you look at the 20th century in American poetry and you look at what was coming out in the teens, the twenties and thirties, you would be shocked to see how many of the popular voices were, especially with the social realist writers under Mike Gold and the proletarian poets, Tilly Olsson, HT Zang, all these people who are writing these very firebrand kind of lyrics, people communism at that time wasn't necessarily a popular stance, but it was a viable political stance.

Speaker 6 (00:55:37):

And then World War ii, the end of World War ii, anti-communist fervor, a real sort of that slides into the Eisenhower era, we get this Cold War politics that sort of settles into an over American culture in which people see publicly artists, actors, politicians, people that they can admire and look up to being hauled before national courts and questioned as to their loyalty. And I don't think it's a surprise then to imagine that American poetry kind of goes a little underground. It's not as if they erase the political because at the time that the Eisenhower and Cold War politics are really taking hold of poetry, we still have the confessionals and the beats writing, and a lot of them are writing extraordinarily open lyrics about this. But I would argue that the American mainstream poetry and the conservative college classroom turned to poetry that masked its political rhetoric in highly figurative language.

Speaker 6 (00:56:31):

And if you want evidence of that, just read the Pulitzer Prize winners I think for about two decades and read the work of Unterberg. And if you compare some of that work with some of the writing that's coming out in the 1920s, which you'll find is that it's not that the politics themselves have changed dramatically, it's the rhetoric that cloaks those political sentiments. And you move from something that is extraordinarily direct, extraordinarily open about its political ambitions to something that moves into these highly private symbolic kinds of registers. Symbolist registers, ruck heiser, I think fell victim to this. R Heiser started out her career speaking on and writing on issues ranging from the Scotsboro case, feminism, and later on, American Gresham in Vietnam, she was very vocally active and I think it was this vocal activism that earned her the ire of both the left and the right in the us.

Speaker 6 (00:57:27):

And there were feminist writings briefly got her some more attention in the 1970s. I think the general mode of what was considered and promoted as good poetry and American classrooms and rewarded with the major literary prizes largely shied away from the kind of solid onic and often firebrand rhetoric that would've characterized her early work and certainly the work of the writers that were really influencing her. So we could sort of say that all of this, the turning away in general in American cultural life from discussions of avert politics in art, I think also took this wind out of the sails of some of her later writing with the result that by the late eighties and all through the nineties, it would not be uncommon for, like I said, my writing workshop or a classroom openly to a shoe political writing. And Rick, he's Book of the Dead, become one of those poems that slowly sinks from view.

Speaker 6 (00:58:20):

So these are a couple of the things that I think are at play with her and neglect. And what's interesting is I think the recuperation largely comes from the fact that there are so many different groups of people now interested in what we would consider documentary poetic practice. And it spans across the conceptual groups, experimental avant-garde, to even narrative poetry groups. Now there's a number of us that are working in this kind of practice. I always hate the idea that poems, if they do not speak to the current climate, must have the happy luck of responding to another's to be preserved because that's one hell of a hope to held out. But again, I think we are all aware of the ways in which say someone like Elizabeth Bishop, her stock has risen, fallen, risen, fallen, risen again. And I think that really does speak more to us than it does to Elizabeth Bishop.

Speaker 6 (00:59:14):

I would not necessarily say that Rukeyser is going to become another Elizabeth Bishop. I think that it would be simplistic to dismiss our neglect of certain writers out of hand as just generational narcissism. Unless it means something to me now, it has absolutely no value. I think there are good reasons that we could consider the flaws, and I think it's important to consider the flaws of a neglected master as well, because one question might be when we ask this question about what is originality? What is it that makes something survive? We have to be able and be willing to be honest about what is it that makes a poem fail. I find failure more interesting than success in that sense. I would also say that I think we are at a great time where if we think about maybe we only discover what speaks to our current aesthetic.

Speaker 6 (01:00:05):

We are living in a moment in which one might say that there is no current aesthetic. There is no US poetry and publishing opportunities for poetry have exploded. I don't know about you, but it is impossible to track all of the different things that are going on, all the different times. And I think that that's actually exciting and it means the possibility for the recuperation, the rediscovery of more and more poets out there. Because of course, if the primary impulse is to find people like us back through history to trace our own lineage, then the more us there are, the more neglected masters we will find. So in that sense, I think we might see Ru Kaiser's, the Book of the Dead and its Cycle of Death and a rebirth that she wrote about applies not only to the life of her poetic sequence, but possibly to the work of many more poets to come. Thank you.

Speaker 7 (01:01:04):

Hi. I don't teach and my critical language is weak, so I'm coming at this from another way. Also, I am selfish in vain.

Speaker 7 (01:01:19):

So of course it was about me and who did I neglect? And I thought that was an interesting question because I made my own cannon as we all make our own cannons. And I guess it's okay to drop a poet out of your cannon if your poet doesn't work for you, but why do you drop a poet out of your cannon that really works for you? And that's where my head was when I came to this. I don't know who I am. I've never known who I am. I write to try and find out who I am. And when I nail it down, I move on and I'm someone else. It has some unfortunate implications for my friends. Not knowing who I am has some unfortunate implications for how I present myself and the politics of that. 10 years ago, I published a book that was very, very gay.

Speaker 7 (01:02:14):

This year I published a book that's very, very straight and I don't know what to do about that. I'm having trouble locating myself. Last time I was on a panel, it was about the overlap between being gay and being Jewish. And now I'm not addressing either of those. So I wanted to think when I was successful about locating myself. When I was in graduate school, it seemed that there was this dichotomy between being confessional or being a language poet. And I was really excited about language poetry because it was electric and pyrotechnic and doing some really interesting things, but I also had things to say. But when I said them, they sounded nostalgic and sappy limited. And I came across Leslie Scallop Pino, who somehow managed to put the lyric I the first person singular in the mix of language poetry. And this was really exciti


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