WFHB

Born in poverty in rural Vermont, the Pennsylvania politician, Thaddeus Stevens, was among the first to see the Civil War as an opportunity for a second American revolution—a chance to remake the country as a true democracy which meant equal suffrage for all and more importantly the necessity of being a landowner.

One of the foremost abolitionists in Congress in the years leading up to the war, he was a leader of the young Republican Party’s radical wing, fighting for anti-slavery and anti-racist policies long before party colleagues like Abraham Lincoln endorsed them.

During the Reconstruction era following the Civil War, Stevens demanded equal civil and political rights for black Americans, rights eventually embodied in the 14th and 15th amendments. But while Stevens in many ways pushed his party, and public opinion, towards equality, his radical notion to confiscate all large plantation property and give it to the formerly enslaved, was a bridge too far for the United States of Private Property.

In what follows we point up the contradictions inherent in certain economic doctrines, particularly that of the yeoman farmer as the backbone of an egalitarian nations, and the assertion that industrialization was the key to economic prosperity - No one’s a freeholder who works in a factory. Our guest, Bruce Levine, happily sets the antebellum political and economic stage for us.

Our first segment might seem secondary to the program proper - but it seeks to place the discipline, practice, and publication of history in political context. Our example is the backlash to the 1960s and early 70s in the United States in which Bruce Levine plays a small but important part. Our focus is on the near universal acclaim (and promotion) of the book Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery by the economists Robert Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman published in 1974, and the almost immediate critique of the book by Herbert Gutman titled Slavery and the Numbers Game which highlights its myriad errors and false assumptions regarding empirical data.

GUEST

Bruce Levine is professor emeritus of history at the University of Illinois and the bestselling author of four books on the Civil War era, including The Fall of the House of Dixie and Confederate Emancipation and The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War. His new book, and our primary text for today’s conversation is Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice, published by Simon & Schuster.

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Thaddeus Stevens by Peter Carlson

The Radicalism of Thaddeus Stevens (book review)

Thaddeus Stevens review: the Radical Republican America should remember (book review)

The Urgency of a Third Reconstruction by Robert Greene

MUSIC - Charles Ives

Though Charles Ives was one of the great composers of the early 20th century, and his Concord Sonata is well known and highly regarded, it was as a pioneer in the insurance business that many of his own friends and family knew him.

"Variations on 'America'" performed by The Philadelphia Orchestra (Eugene Ormandy)

"Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Connecticut" performed by The Philadelphia Orchestra (E...

Today's show is a somewhat altered version of a program that first aired on November 3rd, 2015, called Tracking Subversives with the noted scholar of the "literary Left," Alan Wald. According to Wald, the aim of the literary radical is “to endow history with meaning.”

Wald has published a trilogy of books brought out by the University of North Carolina Press comprised of Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth Century Literary Left; Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade; and most recently, American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War.

Though hundreds of radicals are detailed in Wald’s books we’ll focus on just three: Communist Party polemicist Mike Gold, African American novelist Ann Petry, and radical poet Thomas McGrath.

The art ideals of the capitalistic world isolated each artist as in a solitary cell, there to brood and suffer silently and go mad. We artists of the people will not face Life and Eternity alone. We will face it among the people.

-Mike Gold, "Towards a Proletarian Art"

Mike Gold was communist, a novelist, and literary critic. His semi-autobiographical novel Jews Without Money from 1930 was a bestseller. During the 30s and 40s Gold was considered the preeminent author and editor of U.S. proletarian literature.

Ann Petry was an American novelist who became the first Black woman writer with book sales topping a million copies for her novel The Street. But Wald declares The Narrows her masterpiece...on a level with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. In some ways she’s more typical of the literary left than Mike Gold, in the sense that her Communist identity was not public or known and is somewhat elusive.

Thomas McGrath was a celebrated American poet. McGrath produced a prolific array of titles, in several genres but he is best known for his long poem “Letter to an Imaginary Friend,” published in sections between 1957 and 1985 and as a single poem in 1997 by Copper Canyon Press. He was very open about his Communist politics and was actually quite dogmatic.

GUEST

Alan M. Wald is the Emeritus H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor of English Literature and American Culture at the University of Michigan. In addition to his Literary Left trilogy, he’s the author of several other books including Writing From the Left and The Responsibility of Intellectuals.

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Interchange – Out of a Brick Throat: How Poets and Poetry Matter

Interchange – Five Days in Spain: Muriel Rukeyser and the Revolutionary Muse

Interchange – The Unknown Knowns of Cultural Diplomacy

Interchange – Writing Red: Joshua Clover on Strikes and Riots

The Movie at the End of the World: Thomas McGrath (YouTube)

Writers on the Left, by Daniel Aaron, review in the Harvard Crimson, March 14, 1962.

Alan Wald (2011)

MUSIC

"Bella Ciao" performed by Savage Rose

(Original air date: May 19, 2020)

In the United States of the 1950s there was a struggle over the very idea of what it would mean to be an American. After World War II, an American could ride high on military power and new technologies. But the Cold War and Nuclear Anxiety undermined the very real economic prosperity being experienced by the growing numbers of the so-called “middle class.” Anxiety and Supremacy yielded a national double-consciousness: While the clarion called for progress, the bell tolled against difference. And along with a fear of homosexuality and communism, those so-called lavender and red menaces, there was a fear that an educated woman might destroy the Great American Family. I’m not sure what color feminism is.

One such “dangerous experiment” in women’s liberation was the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, a program that offered paid fellowships to women with a PhD or “the equivalent” in artistic achievement.

In her book, The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s, published by Knopf, Maggie Doherty, tells the story of how five women who received fellowships–poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, painter Barbara Swan, sculptor Mariana Pineda, and writer Tillie Olsen–formed deep bonds with one another that would inspire and sustain their most ambitious work. They called themselves “the Equivalents.”

The fulcrum of the book is Anne Sexton who shot to fame during her time at the Institute. Sexton believed she should be committed to home and hearth, husband and children, and yet everything about domesticity frustrated her ambitions. In her poem “Housewife,” she writes,

Some women marry houses.

It’s another kind of skin; it has a heart,

a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.

The walls are permanent and pink.

See how she sits on her knees all day,

faithfully washing herself down.

Men enter by force, drawn back like Jonah

into their fleshy mothers.

A woman is her mother.

That’s the main thing.

Sexton wanted to achieve literary greatness in what was (and is) demonstrably a man’s world. The Institute would give her what she needed to be a great poet: time and friendship; a room and community of her own.

We begin with the founder of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, Mary Ingraham Bunting, scientist, wife, and mother of four who perhaps assumed that her life was a useful model for women to replicate. But “the Equivalents,” especially Sexton and Tillie Olsen, radicalized the notion of what all kinds of women might want for a fulfilling life beyond the idealized family.

All of our music for the show comes from jazz pianist Jutta Hipp. Born in 1925 in Germany, Jutta Hipp studied painting and listened to jazz in secret, as it was not approved of by the Nazi authorities. After the war she became a touring pianist to support herself. She moved to New York in 1955 and played at the Hickory House in 1956 where she recorded two albums for Blue Note. A studio album with Zoot Sims followed in July of the same year and was her final recording. She dropped out of music, returned to painting, and worked as a seamstress for thirty-five years. She died in Queens in 2003.

GUEST

Maggie Doherty is a literary scholar, historian, and critic based at Harvard, where she earned her PhD in English and where she currently teaches writing, literature, and history. Her writing has appeared in many publications, including The New Republic, The New York Times, n+1, and The Nation. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

RELATED

Interchange – Fixing the Stars: Sylvia Plath at the Edge of Sight

Our opening song is “Stardust,” a song written by Indiana native Hoagy Carmichael and here performed by Dave Brubeck off the live album Jazz at Oberlin recorded in May of 1953.

In June of that same year Sylvia Plath would find herself in New York as an intern at Mademoiselle magazine. In August she would attempt to end her life by swallowing sleeping pills, hiding herself away in the crawlspace under her house in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She had already been the recipient of electroshock therapy.

Sylvia Plath matters in many ways: first as a poet, but also as a lens through which to see and critique her times and ours. Her life in the mid-20th century is chronicled as fully in her own words as it is by the biographers to come, by those who would solve the problem of her death, and by those who would see her death as the value proposition for her work.

Sylvia Plath died by suicide on February 11, 1963, at the age of thirty, and in doing so bequeathed the literary and academic world a separate entity, an industry even: a case to work on, a subject to investigate, a wound to bandage or make bleed again.

Plath suffered from depression and suicidal ideation from very early in her life. Her death is often all one knows about her - head in an oven, her two children in bed, probably awake. She took great pains to be sure they were not harmed and that they would be found and cared for on that day. One cannot read her work without casting an eye at every phrase as if it reveals the death to come.

We may read in Plath’s life a chapter in the history of psychiatry. And it is a tale of woe and misogyny - made most explicit in Plath’s one published novel, The Bell Jar. But there is no dearth of literature and reportage detailing the harrowing treatments on offer by this so-called scientific profession. During this period electroshock therapy was done as often by itinerant practitioners, “shock artists," as by established and regulated doctors. Our guest today stresses that Plath’s fear of institutionalization and more shock therapy in 1963 was surely one motivation for her final act.

Sylvia Plath worked with intense dedication to be heard in a world that often has no ears to hear women. But, Plath was a woman who wrote many times of her disdain for women, for being a woman, and in her journals she often wrote of the women who might be her competition. Of men, they were her peers and she would count their opinions and assistance as most relevant to her. And, we must see this, at least on one level, as pragmatic. Men did, and do, hold the cards and pull the strings.

GUEST

Heather Clark, a professor of contemporary poetry at the University of Huddersfield and author of the new biography, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, published by Knopf. She’s also the author of The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (Oxford, 2011).

POEMS read by Plath (musical bed)

"Lady Lazarus" ("Variants on a Theme of Thelonious Monk (Criss Cross) : Variant III," John Lewis Presents Jazz Abstractions)

"Mushrooms" ("The Oracle," Dave Holland Quartet, Extensions)

"The Applicant" ("Brötzmann," Peter Brötzmann, 3 Points and a Mountain)

RELATED

On Sylvia Plath’s Creative Breakthrough at the Yaddo Artists’ Colony by Heather Clark

'Only Did What Poetry Told Us to Do:' A Portrait of Sylvia Plath on Honeymoon With Ted Hughes by Heather Clark

"

Part One of "The Automation Ruse" aired on February 9th and featured author Jason E. Smith whose new book, Smart Machines and Service Work, is subtitled "Automation in an Age of Stagnation," and it’s that crisis of stagnation that propels us into today’s conversation with Aaron Benanav, a researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin and an economic historian whose new book is Automation and the Future of Work, published by Verso.

Benanav centers his work first on the slowing of growth and productivity and challenges what seems a universal assertion by economists - it’s the machines, stupid. To this Benanav says, nope, it’s a predictable scenario of global capitalist production - a glut of industrial capacity.

So, not the machines...and not likely to be the machines in the future either - tech advances when the economy is flush and capitalists will invest money in those innovations - in order to be able to fire labor when the economy slows down again. The capitalist economy is nothing if not a consistent cyclical abuser of the worker.

What, then, are the automation gurus on about? Well, the reality is that while machines aren’t pushing humans to the side it is still true that there is no work, or less work, more unemployment, and much more underemployment. The automation theorist thus scents opportunity. No work can be a good thing if our basic needs and services are met. Heck, maybe you will actually want to work without the economic coercion of starvation or exposure!

How can you eat well and be protected from the elements under a roof if you’re not working for a wage? The answer from all parties on the Right, Center, and Left appears to have one common element - a Universal Basic Income, or UBI. However, the details of a UBI are very different depending on which think tank fellow is leading your TED Talk.

Lucky for us, Aaron Benanav will help us identify the pitfalls of all of the above while also pointing the way to a future that has quite a bit to do with the utopian thinking of the past.

We begin today with why it’s important to challenge the economic narrative that the jobless present is the result of employing robots to do human work.

GUEST

Aaron Benanav, a researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin and economic historian. His new book is Automation and the Future of Work, published by Verso (2020).

RELATED

The Automation Ruse, Part One: Jason E. Smith on Economic Stagnation

Automation and the Future of Work - I (New Left Review)

Automation and the Future of Work - II (New Left Review)

A Low Demand For Labor by Aaron Benanav

Automation isn't wiping out jobs. It's that our engine of growth is winding down by Aaron Benanav

Revisiting the Meidner Plan by Peter Gowan and Mio Tastas Viktorsson

MUSIC

GoGo Penguin - Man Made Object (2016)

“All Res”

“Smarra”

“Weird Cat”

“Protest”

ID - “Initiate”

CREDITS

We open the show with “The Purest Kind of Guy,” performed by Paul Robeson, a song from Marc Blitzstein’s 1941 opera No For An Answer which concerns the life and fate of members of a social club of Greek-American waiters, hotel-workers, restaurant-workers, chefs, laundresses, chambermaids, taxi-drivers, who are out-of-work. In 1958, Blitzstein was subpoenaed to appear before the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), and in a closed session, admitted he once belonged to the Communist Party but then challenged the right of HUAC to question him at all and refused to name names or cooperate any further.

Paul Robeson was possibly the most widely known singer in the world at the height of his fame, and then the US Government systematically targeted him for reputation assassination and economic impoverishment.

Today we’ll hear an edited excerpt of Robeson as he testifies before a Senate committee in 1948 as regards the Subversive Activities Control Act co-sponsored by Richard Nixon and aimed at criminalizing membership in the Communist Party. It’s a kind of preview of Robeson’s appearance before HUAC in 1956. The committee insisted Robeson define the American Communist. He does just that and contrasts it with American Fascism.

We'll highlight Robeson singing ``Ballad for Americans,” originally titled "The Ballad for Uncle Sam.” It was written for Sing for Your Supper, a Federal Theatre Project production that opened on April 24, 1939. The House Un-American Activities Committee claimed the content of the FTP's productions were supporting racial integration between black and white Americans while also perpetuating an anti-capitalist communist agenda and cancelled funding for the project on June 30, 1939. The “Ballad of Uncle Sam” had been performed 60 times. On Sunday, November 5, 1939, on the 4:30 pm CBS radio show The Pursuit of Happiness, Paul Robeson sang “Ballad for Americans.”

We’ll also revisit our 2016 interview with scholar and author Gerald Horne who had just published a book with Pluto Press called Paul Robeson: the Artist as Revolutionary.

And we’ll end the program with a Paul Robeson anecdote from the great filmmaker Charles Burnett about his own American experience in a Watts barbershop in Los Angeles in the late 1960s.

But we begin today with graphic artist Sharon Rudahl whose new book is a graphic biography of Paul Robeson called Ballad of an American co-edited by Paul Buhle and Law Ware. It’s published by Rutgers University Press. Rudahl has worked often with Buhle, the great historian of the Left in America, on such edited compilations as The Wobblies, Bohemians, a Studs Terkel anthology Working, a graphic biography of Emma Goldman called Dangerous Woman, and a kind of hybrid biography of our 16th President called Lincoln for Beginners.

RELATED

Drawing lines between the past and present: An interview with Sharon Rudahl

When Paul Robeson Became a Star: From the First-Ever Graphic Biography of the American Icon

Paul Robeson's May 31, 1948 Senate testimony on the Mundt-Nixon Bill (YouTube)

The Mundt–Nixon Bill, formally the Subversive Activities Control Act

Interchange – Paul Robeson: The Most Dangerous Man In America (Gerald Horne)

In our previous conversation with Eileen Hunt Botting (April 2020) as the pandemic began to deceptively settle into our routines we focused on Mary Shelley’s post-apocalypse novel, The Last Man - a book which explored loss in its most extreme form in order to find a more humane way to live and love, and create art. Today, we turn once again to Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, that first and perhaps greatest fiction born out of tumult and generative anarchy of the French Revolution, the Rights of Man, and the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (and of vegetarianism) - - to explore the human power to create artificial life and the responsibility that must follow that creation.

What are the obligations of humanity to the artificial creatures we make? And what are the corresponding rights of those creatures, whether they are learning machines or genetically modified organisms?

In Artificial Life After Frankenstein, Eileen Hunt Botting puts Shelley and several classics of modern political science fiction into dialogue with contemporary political science and philosophy, in order to challenge some of the apocalyptic fears at the fore of twenty-first-century political thought on AI and genetic engineering.

Focusing on the prevailing myths that artificial forms of life will end the world, destroy nature, and extinguish love, Botting shows how Shelley modeled ways to break down and transform the meanings of apocalypse, nature, and love in the face of widespread and deep-seated fear about the power of technology and artifice to undermine the possibility of humanity, community, and life itself.

We’ll begin with the mad political scientists who created Mary Shelley, her biological parents, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, but also explore her intellectual inheritance from philosophers Jean-Jacque Rousseau and John Locke, and her “brothers” in the creation of new gods and monsters, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori. And from there we’ll explore the rights we have to love, companionship, and a life free from coercion, enforced servitude, neglect.

GUEST

Eileen Hunt Botting, Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, author of Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child and the new book Artificial Life after Frankenstein, both published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

RELATED

The Journey Through Sorrow: Mary Shelley’s Post-Apocalyptic Novel The Last Man (Interchange with Eileen Hunt Botting)

Frankenstein and the Rights of the Child by Eileen Hunt Botting

CRISPR bombshell: Chinese researcher claims to have created gene-edited twins

Why Frankenstein matters: Frontiers in science, technology and medicine by Audrey Shafer

Needing A Space For Us: On Social Rights with Kimberley Brownlee (Interchange)

MUSIC

Dave Holland, Life Cycle (1982)

"Inception"

"Discovery"

"Longing"

"Search"

"Resolution"

IDs

"Rune"

"Grapevine"

"Troubadour Tale"

"Morning Song"

We’ll open with “Powerhouse” performed here by Don Byron off of Bug Music from 1996. Composed by Raymond Scott in 1937, "Powerhouse" was featured in over 40 Warner Bros. cartoons and perhaps best known for its use in the 1946 Looney Tunes cartoon “Baby Bottleneck” which stars Daffy Duck and Porky Pig.

1946 is also the year the word, “automation,” is said to have been coined as workers in the Ford Motor Company made increasing use of a mechanized production line. Since then, scholars, journalists, and economists alike have projected the widespread and totalizing adoption of automation technologies across all sectors of the economy.

For nearly half a century, we have been bombarded with images of the future of automation. The “lights out” factories that manufacture goods without a hand from humans. Robots that care for the elderly.

These projections of the future of automation have not turned out to be as widespread as anticipated. The sectors of the economy that have adopted automation have seen minimal gains in productivity, while other sectors seem entirely immune to innovations in automation.

Why is this? We are in a crisis of stagnation. It can be seen in GDP growth, in labor productivity gains, in wage stagnation, in the rate of business investment since the turn of the century. Automation isn’t cheap, and businesses want to see sustained growth before spending money on fixed capital expenditures.

It’s not automation, then, that defines our era. It’s economic stagnation.

Corporations have responded to this crisis through a process called “cross-subsidization.” Corporations tend toward market monopolies, and in doing so they generate enough wealth to subsidize less lucrative parts of their business model. Facebook is free, but it is subsidized with advertisements. We can purchase goods from Amazon with a relatively small profit margin for the corporation itself, and yet the purchasing platform is subsidized by their web services platform.

Other companies rely on junk financing, cheap credit that keeps a company afloat but generates little to no profit. These barely-alive corporations are known as “zombie firms.”

The economic stagnation to which companies are responding has generated a novel arrangement of class conflict in the service sector.

Today, we’re told that as many as 85% of US workers labor in the service sector. If we usually think of “commodities” as distinct objects that are produced and then sold, the service sector complicates this equation. The service sector is characterized by the simultaneous production and consumption of commodities. Services can’t be quite so easily separated from the body of the person producing it as, say, a wooden chair that enters the marketplace at the behest of a furniture company. When you think of service work, think of the stylist who cuts your hair. Elementary school teachers. Bus drivers.

In his book Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation (published by Reaktion Books), Jason Smith argues against the claim that we are in the age of automation. We are, he argues, in a crisis of stagnation that fundamentally shapes the nature of class conflict. The outcomes of wage workers’ demands are inextricably tied to low productivity, and yet high productivity -- which is associated with more success demanding higher wages -- comes with greater exploitation of workers. Within the constraints of service work and stagnation, people across the world are organizing around their class interests. Lessons from the 2018 West Virginia teachers’ strike, the Gilet Jaunes movement in France, and graduate workers’ movements give us insight into what it means to get organized in our current moment: a crisis of stagnation....

Today’s show is a “repackaging” of a program from August 2015 about service sector workers and the future of unions with a focus on the question can there be a labor movement with any strength in the service sector? Perhaps that movement needs to find new forms of organization to stay relevant.

In the coming weeks we’ll feature two interviews about automation and labor in an economy where 80% of work is now in this so-called “service sector.”

This show from over five years ago is prelude but might as well have been produced yesterday - the federal minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour - it’s the same here in Indiana. States can set their own minimum wage - for example the state of Washington’s minimum wage is $13.50 while Georgia and Wyoming must be proud that theirs is $5.50 - and you can bet that many folks are actually happy about it, but they’re not workers.

Mid-twentieth-century union activism transformed manufacturing jobs from backbreaking, low-wage work into careers that allowed workers to buy homes and send their kids to college. Some union activists insist that there is no reason why service-sector workers cannot follow that same path.

Along with our guest, we'll also hear from Chalondias Smith, a home care worker and member of Service Employees International Union - SEIU HCII.

We’ll begin with a clip from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s April 3, 1968 speech to the striking Memphis Sanitation Workers--known as “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”--a speech that was delivered one day before his assassination.

GUEST

Fran Quigley is author of If We Can Win Here: The New Front Lines of the Labor Movement, and a clinical professor of law in the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis. He’s the Director of the Health and Human Rights Clinic, where students advocate for the rights of the poor, with a special focus on representing low-wage workers.

RELATED

The Battle of Indianapolis: Workers Win Gains Despite Right-to-Work Laws by Fran Quigley

Raising minimum wage is morally right by Fran Quigley

Seeing Through "Right-to-Work" Laws by Fran Quigley

The Strange Life of Work: Kathi Weeks (Interchange)

MUSIC

“Work Song” Charles Mingus

“Whistle While You Work” - Louis Armstrong, Disney Songs the Satchmo Way (1968)

“Go Get Organized” The Redskins, Neither Washington Nor Moscow (1986)

“Cleaning Windows” Van Morrison, Beautiful Vision (1982)

“Hard Worker” The Avett Brothers, Mignonette (2004)

ID music - “Heigh Ho” The Dave Brubeck Quartet, Dave Digs Disney (1957)

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Kade Young

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.