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.

We’re listening to the Oscar Peterson Trio perform “Begone Dull Care,” the music composed for an experimental short animation film from 1949 wherein Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren painted colours, shapes, and transformations directly on to their filmstrip. The result is a vivid interpretation, in fluid lines and colour, of this jazz music. Peterson and Norman McLaren “worked together for four days developing the music. At times Peterson would play variations enabling McLaren to visualize colors and movements, and other times McLaren would describe specific music he wanted for a special effect.” [Valarie T. Richard’s Norman McLaren, Manipulator of Movement]

The rest of our music will feature Carmen McRae performing with The Dave Brubeck Quartet - the lyrics to these Brubeck compositions were composed by his wife Iola.

As I was thinking about the pieces I might bring together for today’s episode, beyond the guest interview, beyond the musical interludes, I began looking for audio of Rukeyser reading from her work, or commenting on poetry, talking about the life of poetry, the life of the poet, I first went to PennSound (PennSound is a poetry website and online archive that hosts free and downloadable recordings of poets reading their own work and is aa project of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania) and there found several pieces to use. One in particular I’ll highlight right now. This is “In Our Time” from The Speed of Darkness:

In our period, 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.

This short poem is used as an epigraph by poet Charles Bernstein in an essay from 1994 called “How Poetry Survives.” He writes that "the negative economy of poetry [that is, that poetry is published at a loss] is what makes it such a great asset for our culture in that it provides an alternative system of valuation to the bureaucratic professionalism of the academy and to the commercialism of the book industry and art world, not to mention the TV and movie industries." That bureaucratic professional is called "the middleman" by Muriel Rukeyser. Bernstein goes on to write that much of publishing exists not for economic profit but for cultural hegemony - what is published (and Bernstein notes, what is produced as entertainment), then, seeks to limit our ability to imagine our ways of being. This piece by Bernstein is “in the spirit” and nearly the letter of Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry.

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.