American Samizdat: The Way of Poetry Is the Way of Antifascism.

Muriel Rukeyser

This heart, naked and knocking, going in clouds,
Smoke and a cry of light.
In pain, the voice of pain. The shadow of your cry.

~ Muriel Rukeyser

Poets are not necessarily antifascist. Poetry is antifascist. A poem is not necessarily antifascist. Poetry is antifascist.

“The poetic as a way of thinking and feeling — against the constrictions of conformity and the profit-motive.”

When I stopped writing screenplays at the start of the new millennium (seemed momentous timing), I said to some around me, If I’m not going to make any money from writing, I’m really not going to make any money – I’m going to write poetry.

In our time, they say there is free speech.
They say there is no penalty for poets,
There is no penalty for writing poems.
They say this. This is the penalty.

~ Muriel Rukeyser, “In Our Time” from The Speed of Darkness

From PRX, a non-profit media company specializing in audio journalism and storytelling.

Today we feature the radical work of Muriel Rukeyser, whose poetics treatise, The Life of Poetry, first published in 1949, can be called an anti-Fascist manifesto. We struggle at times to place Rukeyser inside our understanding of politics and poetry as she herself struggled to not be placed – like Thoreau, she did not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which she had not joined. But I think we can say that Muriel Rukeyser was a committed antifascist, which is not a party, it is a way. And the way of poetry, not just of poems, is the way of anti-fascism.

How to Be Anti-Fascist: Muriel Rukeyser and The Life of Poetry https://beta.prx.org/stories/355960 via @prx

Muriel Rukeyser wrote in many genres and forms and her books have won awards and been ignored, she has been praised and scorned often in the same breath and even by friends. She dared to write “unpoetically” – being among the first to write a kind of documentary verse with her best-known poem sequence “The Book of the Dead”; she transgressed by writing books about men and subjects that she had “no right to” according to the male experts in those fields; she wrote books that still confound us as readers today, like her verse biography of Wendell Willkie One Life. If nothing else Muriel Rukeyser was and is a challenge.

Many audio files of Rukeyser reading her work, from PennSound.

https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/linking-page/Rukeyser.php

Here, the "Ballad of Orange and Grape" serves as an example of Rukeyser rooting her poetry in the everyday life and demotic language of the streets to offer a profoundly commonplace representation of truth’s erasure – one that speaks perfectly to our Trumpian moment.

After you finish your work
after you do your day
after you've read your reading
after you've written your say –
you go down the street to the hot dog stand,
one block down and across the way.
On a blistering afternoon in East Harlem in the twentieth
    century.

Most of the windows are boarded up,
the rats run out of a sack –
sticking out of the crummy garage
one shiny long Cadillac;
at the glass door of the drug-addiction center,
a man who'd like to break your back.
But here's a brown woman with a little girl dressed in rose
    and pink, too.

Frankfurters frankfurters sizzle on the steel
where the hot-dog-man leans –
nothing else on the counter
but the usual two machines,
the grape one, empty, and the orange one, empty,
I face him in between.
A black boy comes along, looks at the hot dogs, goes on
    walking.

I watch the man as he stands and pours
in the familiar shape
bright purple in the one marked ORANGE
orange in the one marked GRAPE,
the grape drink in the machine marked ORANGE
and orange drink in the GRAPE.
Just the one word large and clear, unmistakeable, on each
    machine.

I ask him : How can we go on reading
and make sense out of what we read? –
How can they write and believe what they're writing,
the young ones across the street,
while you go on pouring grape in ORANGE
and orange into the one marked GRAPE –?
(How are we going to believe what we read and we write
    and we hear and we say and we do?)

He looks at the two machines and he smiles
and he shrugs and smiles and pours again.
It could be violence and nonviolence
it could be white and black          women and men
it could be war and peace or any
binary system, love and hate, enemy, friend.
Yes and no, be and not-be, what we do and what we don't
    do.

On a corner in East Harlem
garbage, reading, a deep smile, rape,
forgetfulness, a hot street of murder,
misery, withered hope,
a man keeps pouring grape into ORANGE
and orange into the one marked GRAPE,
pouring orange into GRAPE and grape into ORANGE forever.

~ From The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser.

In contrast, here is Rukeyser writing, deeply, movingly poetic language, in an untitled poem from that biography of Wendell Wilkie, One Life, also found in the Collected Poems. In its compassionate and celebratory cataloguing of American lives, there are echoes of Walt Whitman, and even – “Despised like you, criminal in intent; sunburnt, in love and splendid” – “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”

In your time, there have been those who spoke clearly
For the moment of lightning.
Were we all brave, but at different times?
Even raped open and split, even anonymous,
They spoke. They are not forgotten.
But they are. In late summer; forgot; caught at cross-purposes,
Interrupted in an hour of purity,
Their lives careening along in the fierce cities,
Through atrocious poverties and magnificence,
The unforgotten, the early gone forgot.
Late daytime, and nothing left to hide but an eye endowed
With the charred, guilty, gouged by war, the raging splendor;
Despised like you, criminal in intent; sunburnt, in love and
splendid;
This heart, naked and knocking, going in clouds,
Smoke and a cry of light.
In pain, the voice of pain. The shadow of your cry.
And never forget: you are magnificent beyond all colors.

More on the opposition of poetry to fascism next week.

Poetry is the lyric flight, in life, of felt human spirit, Trumpism the dead boot-stomp of the angry body to battle.

AJA

Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.

ajayadler.com