Spaces and Dreams in Muriel Rukeyser's "The Speed of Darkness"

The announcer introduces Rukeyser.

She has published ten volumes of poetry, which include such books as The Green Wave, The Turning Wind, Beast and View, U.S. 1, Theory of Flight, Body of Waking, Waterlily Fire, and The speed of darkness, amongst others.

She has published essays, a biography--she's working on a biography now. She has published a novel called The Orgy. She has published translations of the Mexican Writer Octavio Paz, and the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelof. She has published a number of children's books. And, what else can I say?

She is a New Yorker. She was born in New York, she lives in New York, and so forth. I now introduce Muriel Rukeyser.

The audience applaudes.

Thank you. It sounds peculiar when it's said that way, you know. It just means that I've been writing poems all along, and that sometimes there's been some prose or something--film, prose, whatever it is--

And they lie all the time about the poems, to us, you know, about all of our poems. They say it's something very odd and rare, and people who do it are very odd. If a man does it, he's sexually questionable; if a woman does it, she's sexually questionable.

Rukeyser's focus on the lies of poetry and "if a man does it, he's sexually questionable; if a woman does it, she's sexually questionable," is informed by her own queerness and how she uses silence to create new forms of speech. In the context of her later poem, "The Speed of Darkness," spaces between stanzas are not empty but embody this queerness as they employ silence to refuse conventional poetic forms. Too, these silences further reenforce the "questionable" nature sexuality made present in her poetry, demonstrating Rukeyser's resistance to the import of spoken word.

The audience laughs.

Besides, very few people do it. And it's all lies, you know.

There's a company in the United States that's made a fortune on the premise that everybody takes a snapshot at some time or other. And I would like to ask you--and this is apart from all critical standards, all criteria, all faculty and institutions, apart from any of that--I would like to ask a question: how many of you here has ever written a poem, would you put up your hands please?

The audience laughs.

Thank you.

I'm always nervous before I ask the question. I ask the question, now, in all rooms, no matter how few or many people there are, and if the universities would generally look around to see if the basketball team is there, but there's always the moment of silence, and looking around first. And then, generally, quite slowly, almost all the hands go up. Maybe four or five do not put up their hands. And if I wait around afterwards, and with any luck and favorable wins, the four or five people come up to me and will say something like: I was fifteen, it was a love poem, it stank.

The audience laughs.

The thing is, it's a human activity; we all do it. We lie about it, you know, and they lie about it to us. And, thanks now to the young, the poets, maybe, a few other people one could name together, maybe we don't lie so much--so much as we used to. Maybe we don't lie about this anymore.

Rukeyser's repeated discussion of lies and lying--such as her call to not lie about the humanity activity with which poetry is concerned--is embedded with what she feels is forced into silence. Her poetry foregrounds the human activity unsaid in lies by using silence as a container for speaking and audibly revealing new moments for speech and rhetorical action.

Maybe we don't lie about sex, maybe we don't lie about poetry. They seem to lie a great deal about politics instead. It seems to shift around.

The audience laughs.

But, there are these, and the fact is: we all write poems. It is something we do. We come to this part of experience: You get a very, very rainy evening; why do poeple come and listen to poems? Or you've got some marvelous summer night; why do people come and listen to poems?

It's partly out of curiosity and looking at the person and I go to see: What is that breathing behind, what is that heartbeat, the breathing goes against the heartbeat and these rhythms are set up, and the involuntary muscles and you see the person do it but beyond that, something is what we called shared--something is arrived at--we come to something with almost unmediated that is the poem among us, between us, there, we're reaching each other, you're giving me whatever silence you are giving me and it comes to me with great strength, your silence.

Rukeyser speaks to the shared experience of poetry and silence, saying that "you're giving me whatever silence you are giving me and it comes to me with great strength, your silence." In this evocative moment, she locates silences as a relational activity that gains force and meaning in the shared experience of betweenness and other-than-spoken word. Too, the listening-audience creates these silences; the listener "gives" silence meaning through presence and attention.

Somebody said "primadonna," you know, or I'm going give this to the audience and the conductor cause that's what you think--you're going to get it from the audience.

That's where it comes from, in a funny way.

So, this mediation, it is not a description, it is not only the music and it, although certainly the reinforcement of sound--the sound climbing up and finally reaching a place, the last word; the sound that begins with the first breathing, the breath of the title.

Keats doing "Ode to a Nightingale." We hardly ever say "ode." Nobody says "nightingale." But Keats, having said that, never has to say it again. It's a bird. You find it in these things. But, from the beginning--from the first moment--that is, the first breath, the thing that is made as, suggestion, breath, what my life has been, whatever that is- what your lives have been. This is a very short one called "Song."

Rukeyser reads her poem titled "Song."

A voice flew out of the river as morning flew out of the body of night, a voice sending out from the night of the sleeping. Morning: a voice in its own voice, naked, made of the whole body and the whole life. But without anything. Breath. Breath of the fire love. Smoke of the poems, voices.

This is another very short one. I wanted to start with these and see what happened. I call it "In Our Time." It's very--it's four lines.

Rukeyser reads her poem titled "In Our Time."

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

The audience rustles and coughs.

This is called "The Poem As Mask." It's for another poem--a big Orpheus poem that I wrote a long time ago--and it had the acting out. The acting out the women on the mountain after the murder, the pieces of the man scattered about the top of the mountain, the slow coming together of the pieces as God. And I realized, long after, when I came to this newest book, Speed of Darkness, that this was a mask--that I did not want any more of this. You know how it is. It happens to undergraduates. Say, it happens to the thing that was just before, and you see girls acting very childish, and trading on it, and thinking they're still thirteen and able to influence their father. And it's been used up, used up. It's served its purpose back there, but it isn't that anymore. And these, phases of being, "The Poem As Mask: Orpheus."

Rukeyser reads her poem titled "The Poem as Mask."

When I wrote of the women in their dances and wildness, it was a mask, on their mountain, god-hunting, singing, in orgy, it was a mask; when I wrote of the god, fragmented, exiled from himself, his life, the love gone down with song, it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from myself. There is no mountain, there is no god, there is memory of my torn life, myself split open in sleep, the rescued child beside me among the doctors, and a word of rescue from the great eyes. No more masks! No more mythologies! Now, for the first time, the god lifts his hand, the fragments join in me with their own music.

An audience member coughs.

An audience member coughs.

Rukeyser reads her poem titled "Air."

Flowers of air with lilac defining air; buildings of air with walls defining air; this May, people of air advance along the street; framed in their bodies, air, their eyes speaking to me, air in their mouths made into live meanings.

Rukeyser reads her poem titled "Poem."

I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane, the newspapers would arrive with their careless stories, the news would pour out of various devices. Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen. I would call my friends on other devices; they would be more or less mad for similar reasons. Slowly I would get to pen and paper, make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day I would be reminded of those men and women, brave, setting up signals across vast distances, considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values. As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened, we would try to imagine them, try to find each other, to construct peace, to make love, to reconcile waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other, ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means to reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves, to let go the means, to wake. I lived in the first century of these wars.

Rukeyser reads her poem titled "Anemone."

My eyes are closing, my eyes are opening. You are looking into me with your waking look. My mouth is closing, my mouth is opening. You are waiting with your red promises. My sex is closing, my sex is opening. You are singing and offering: the way in. My life is closing, my life is opening. You are here.

Rukeyser reads her poem titled "For My Son."

You come from poets, kings, bankrupts, preachers, attempted bankrupts, builders of cities, salesmen, the great rabbis, the kings of Ireland, failed drygoods storekeepers, beautiful women of the songs, great horsemen, tyrannical fathers at the shore of ocean, the western mothers looking west beyond from their windows, the families escaping over the sea hurriedly and by night– the roundtowers of the Celtic violet sunset, the diseased, the radiant, fliers, men thrown out of town, the man bribed by his cousins to stay out of town, teachers, the cantor on Friday evening, the lurid newspapers, strong women gracefully holding relationship, the Jewish girl going to parochial school, the boys racing their iceboats on the Lakes, the woman still before the diamond in the velvet window, saying “Wonder of nature.”

Like all men, you come from singers, the ghettoes, the famines, wars and refusal of wars, men who built villages that grew to our solar cities, students, revolutionists, the pouring of buildings, the market newspapers, a poor tailor in a darkening room, a wilderness man, the hero of mines, the astronomer, a white-faced woman hour on hour teaching piano and her crippled wrist, like all men, you have not seen your father’s face but he is known to you forever in song, the coast of the skies, in dream, wherever you find man playing his part as father, father among our light, among our darkness, and in your self made whole, whole with yourself and whole with others, the stars your ancestors.

There were three of them that night. They wanted it to happen in the first woman's room. The man called her; the phone rang high. Then she put fresh lipstick on. Pretty soon he rang the bell. She dreamed, she dreamed, she dreamed. She scarcely looked him in the face But gently took him to his place. And after that the bell, the bell. They looked each other in the eyes, A hot July it was that night, And he then slow took off his tie, And she then slow took off her scarf, The second one took off her scarf, And he then slow his heavy shoe, And she then slow took off her shoe, The other one took off her shoe, He then took off his other shoe, The second one, her other shoe, A hot July it was that night. And he then slow took off his belt, And she then slow took off her belt, The second one took off her belt.

Rukeyser reads her poem titled "Orgy."

This is called "Bunk Johnson Blowing." If you know the early jazz men--the New Orleans Jazz men--you'll know Bunk Johnson and his trumpet. This is years later in San Francisco. "Bunk Johnson Blowing" and the dedication is in memory of Lead Belly, and his house on 59th Street. That's New York.

Rukeyser reads her poem titled "Bunk Johnson Blowing."

They found him in the fields and pulled him back to music. Caddie said my teeth are gone. They bought him teeth. Bunk Johnson's trumpet on the California early-May evening, calling me to, breath of, up those stairs. Calling me to, look in to, the face of that trumpet. Experience, and past it his eyes. Jim and Rita beside me, we drank it. Jim has just come back from Sacramento, the houses made of piano boxes, the bar without a sign and the Mexicans drinking, we drink their trumpet music, and drank that black park beneath the willow trees. Bunk Johnson blowing all night out of that full moon. Two towered church. Rita listening to it. All night music said I'm supposed to despise them. Tears streaming down her face said don't tell my ancestors. We three slid down that San Francisco hill.

This is one called "Endless." Under the tall black sky you look out of your body lit by a white fire of the time between us, your body with its touch its weight smelling of new wood as on the day the news of battle reached us, falls beside the endless river flowing to the endless sea whose waves come to this shore a world away. Your body of new wood your eyes alive bark brown of tree trunks the leaves and flowers of trees, stars all caught in crown of trees, your life gone down, broken into endless earth no longer a world away but under my feet and everywhere I look down at the one earth under me, through to you and all the fallen, the broken, and their children born and unborn of the endless war.

Rukeyser reads her poem titled "Endless."

This last one of the first group is called "Clues." It's a Canadian, a British Columbia poem. How it is among the Thompson River Indians, or how it was in the anthropological moment. Imagine that flash of moment before it was broken up by this civilization, and we have caught up to some of this, without knowing what the hell it was, what this is. We are full of body painting, tattooing, emblems painted on ourselves, this is further. "Clues."

Rukeyser reads her poem titled "Clues."

How will you catch these clues at the moment of waking, take them, make them yours? Wake, do you, and light the lamp of sharpest whitest beam and write them down in the room of night on white— night opening and opening white paper under white light, write what streamed from you in darkness into you by dark? Indian Baptiste saying, We painted our dreams. We painted our dreams on our faces and bodies. We took them into us by painting them on ourselves. When we saw the water mystery of the lake after the bad dream, we painted the lines and masks, when the bear wounded me, I painted for healing. When we told in our dreams, in the colors of day red for earth, black for the opposite, rare green, white. Yellow. When I dreamed of weeping and dreamed of sorrow I painted my face with tears, with joy. Our ghost paintings and our dreams of war. The whole brow, the streak, the hands and sex, the breast. The spot of white, one hand black, one hand red. The morning star appearing over the hill. We took our dreams into our selves. We took our dreams into our bodies.

Indian Baptiste saying, We painted our dreams. We painted our dreams on our faces and bodies. We took them into us by painting them on ourselves. When we saw the water mystery of the lake after the bad dream, we painted the lines and masks, when the bear wounded me, I painted for healing. When we told in our dreams, in the colors of day red for earth, black for the opposite, rare green, white. Yellow. When I dreamed of weeping and dreamed of sorrow I painted my face with tears, with joy. Our ghost paintings and our dreams of war. The whole brow, the streak, the hands and sex, the breast. The spot of white, one hand black, one hand red. The morning star appearing over the hill. We took our dreams into ourselves. We took our dreams into our bodies.

Here's one piece of a long poem. It's the last of a group called "Elegies," which one hardly dares name anything anymore. It's called "Elegy in Joy," and it's just a beginning piece. I wanted to do it tonight this way; I've never cut it up.

Rukeyser reads her poem titled "Elegies in Joy."

Now green, now burning. I make a way for peace. After the green and long beyond my lake, among these fields of people, on these illuminated hills, gold, burnt gold, spilled gold, and shadowed blue, the light of enormous flame, the flowing, light of the sea, where all the lights and nights are reconciled. The sea at last, where all the waters lead. And all the wars to this peace. For the sea does not lie like the death you imagine; this sea is the real sea, here it is. This is the living. This peace is the face of the world, a fierce angel who in one lifetime lives fighting a lifetime, dying as we all die, becoming forever, the continual god.

Years of our time, this heart! The binding of the alone, bells of all loneliness binding our lands and our music, branches full of motion each opening its own flower, lands of songs, each speaking in his own voice. Praise in every grace among the old same war. Years of betrayal, million death breeding its weaknesses and hope, buried more deep more black than dream. Every elegy is the present: freedom eating our hearts, death and explosion, and the world unbegun. Now burning and unbegun, I sing earth with its war, and God the future, and the wish of man. Though you die, your war lives: the years fought it, fusing a deal world straight. We tell beginnings: for the flesh and the answer, or the look, the lake in the eye that knows, for the despair that flows down in widest rivers, cloud of home; and also the green tree of grace, all in the leaf, in the love that gives us ourselves. The word of nourishment passes through the women, soldiers and orchards rooted in constellations, white towers, eyes of children: saying in time of war. What shall we feed? I cannot say the end. Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed. This moment, this seed, this wave of the sea, this look, this instant of love. Years over wars and an imagining of peace. Or the expiation journey toward peace which is many wishes flaming together, fierce pure life, the many-living home. Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all new techniques for the healing of the wound, and the unknown world. One life, or the faring stars.

I thought of that very much at the beginning of this month in Mexico, and yesterday when I heard a story. It's a story of what happened at Christmas time. I was in Mexico--I wonder whether you saw it--I heard of it yesterday in New York as a little three line story in the back page of the New York Times, saying that the largest underground bomb-test was about to be held in Nevada--in the States--and to that test, the day before, came five scientists, in Utah--in the States--to protest, to picket, to try to stop it. And another person who protested, was Howard Hughes, who owns most of Las Vegas at this point, and had his own reasons for protesting. These protests did not stop the testing. The test was made. It was the largest underground made yet. Do you know this story? There was a crack, a crack in the earth, big enough, they said, the way we talk, big enough for the Empire State Building.

The audience laughs.

There's a crack there, and deep under the crust there's a three foot crack of some kind, and the rocks are still falling, and they say there will be earthquakes in various parts, unpredictable parts of the world as a result of the shift of the under-crust. Now last night, before I came here, on TV, late news in New York, they said that there'd been a quake in the Fiji Islands. I have no idea what the relations between these things are. I give it to you simply; that something has happened to shift the under-crust, there will be unpredictable results. This is under the ground. The way we are bound to each other, we are all so bound to each other through the air, and the fall out has come over Canada. This is also a part of the story that I heard yesterday, and you, I can see by your nods, you know this part of the story.

People were saying one thing, and then the other, about why don't we do this, why don't they do that--part of the story is that maybe nothing will fall because the Russians also wish to make underground tests. It's part of the ways in which we are bound to each other. I'll give you that. In Mexico, we are bound under the ground, over the ground, in every way there is. In Mexico, though the stories of what really happened to the students in October, and the stories of people--of many students--were killed and the police were among the crowd, and the police wore one white glove or tied a handkerchief around their right hand, and when the helicopters came over, these white hands were put up that said "don't shoot us, we're police.” Many students were shot, and they say in Mexico City that the bodies were incinerated, and no reports were made and no count was made. And these are the ways in which we are bound, too. And yes, I have been translating Octavio Paz, and Eikelof is another such poet, but Paz--the end of one of Octavio's poems--was printed on this issue of the University Student's Journal of the University of Mexico, with the account of September, October, November, December. And the poem ends like this in English. It's not as good, I warn you, these translations are a folly on a madness on a stupidity and at the same time one has to do it. As work to which one is driven, out of love and gratitude, and also out a motive not so noble as any of that. During the times in which one cannot write poems, it is wonderful to have something one cares about out in front of one, and work with it that way. And it's the thing, not spinning out of oneself in those times, but having something out in front. This is the end of a great poem of Octavio Paz's called "A Broken Jar.” And jar, of course--water jar--is something quite different in Mexico. We say "jar," "jug." Something like that. It isn't in the thing we use every day, in Mexico, it's every day; it's that kind of broken jar.

We have to dream further, all the way to the fountain. We have to row centuries upstream, further than infancy, further than the beginning, further than the baptizing waters, to throw down walls between person and person, to join anew that which is separated. Life and death are not worlds opposite; they are one single stalk with two twin flowers. We have to dig up the lost word to decipher the tattooing on night, and to look face to face at noon, and tear the mask away.

Rukeyser reads from "A Broken Jar."

These are some poems, since my last book, and I don't know whether they are finished. They may be finished. The next book that these will be in will be called Breaking Open. This is a short one called "Martin Luther King."

Rukeyser reads her poem titled "Martin Luther King."

Bleeding of the mountains, the noon bleeding, he is shot through the voice all things being broken. The moon returning in her blood looks down, grows white, loses color, and blazes and the near star gone. Voices of cities drumming in the moon bleeding of my right hand, my black voice bleeding.

This is a poem I found a long time ago--you probably have found it in the same way. It's on the back of a one of the Goga water colors. It's a piece of poem without any heading, without any signature. I didn't know what it was, and it stopped me, and it stayed in me, and I tried to turn it into English, and I couldn't do it. And I finally found out what it was and I finally turned it into English. It's a poem by Charles Morice, who is hardly read--you know him? No. He's one of those people around Gauguin, and I said well, "you can't print anything like that, people," and then "2001" was written and released, and "2001" has Stargate, Starbaby, the whole thing, and I put the name "Next" on this and I'm reading it to you partly for itself, but partly because one line of it is something I used in a poem I wrote when the same thing happened to many of us. The Olympics committee wrote to us and asked for poems, you know, for the games, or for the times of the games, or for something. And one wasn't exactly going to do that, but there was something that could be said, and so on. Anyway, this is the Morice, and I've called it "Next".

Rukeyser reads the poem titled "Next."

Come: you are the one chosen, by them, to serve them. Now, in the evening of L’Amour and La Mort. Come: you are the one chosen, by them, to love them. The child perceives and the cycles are fulfilled. Man’s dead. Dead never to be reborn. The islands and waters serve another lord, new, better. His eyes are the flowering of light. He is beautiful. The child smiles at him in his tears.

And this poem, using one line of that was what I sent to Mexico. It's called "Voices."

Rukeyser reads her poem titled "Voices."

Voices of all our voices, running past an imagined race. Pouring out of morning light, the pouring mists of Mil Cumbres. Out of the poured cities of our world. Out of the black voice of one child who sleeps in our poverty and is dreaming. The child perceives and the cycles are fulfilled. Cities being poured; and war-fire over the poor. Mist over the peak. One child in his voice, many voices. The suffering runs past the end of the racing, making us run the next race. The child sleeps. Lovers, students, this child, enter into our voices. Speak to the child. Now something else is waking: The look of the lover, the rebel and learning look, the look of the runner just beyond the tape, go into The child’s look at the world. In all its voices.

The last poem I'll read this evening is a group. The group is called "The Speed of Darkness."

They're short poems and I'll just pause between poems. There should be numbers doing up in back of me. One, two, three. I'll just pause. "The Speed of Darkness."

The audience laughs at Rukeyser's comment about slides going up behind her.

Rukeyser reads her poem titled "The Speed of Darkness."

Whoever despises the clitoris despises the penis. Whoever despises the penis despises the cunt. Whoever despises the cunt despises the life of the child. Resurrection, music, silence, and surf.

Rukeyser pauses between the first and second stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

No longer speaking. Listening with the whole body. And with every drop of blood. Overtaken by silence. But this same silence is become speech, with the speed of darkness.

Rukeyser pauses between the second and third stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Stillness during war, the lake. The unmoving spruces. Glints over the water. Faces, voices. You are far away. A tree that trembles. I am the tree that trembles and trembles.

Rukeyser pauses between the third and fourth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

After the lifting of the mist, after the lift of the heavy rains, the sky stands clear and the cries of the city risen in day. I remember the buildings are space walled, to let space be used for living. I mind this room is space this drinking glass is space whose boundary of glass let’s me give you drink and space to drink your hand, my hand being space containing skies and constellations. Your face carries the reaches of air. I know I am space my words are air.

Rukeyser pauses between the fourth and fifth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Between between, the man, act exact. Woman, in curve senses in their maze, frail orbits, green tries, games of stars, shape of the body speaking its evidence.

Rukeyser pauses between the fifth and sixth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

I look across at the real, vulnerable, involved, naked; devoted to the present of all I care for. The world of its history leading to this moment.

Rukeyser pauses between the sixth and seventh stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Life the announcer. I assure you there are many ways to have a child. I bastard mother promise you there are many ways to be born. They all come forth in their own grace.

Rukeyser pauses between the seventh and eigth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Ends of the earth join tonight with blazing stars upon their meeting. These sons, these sons fall burning into Asia.

Rukeyser pauses between the eighth and ninth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Time comes into it. Say it. Say it. The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

Rukeyser pauses between the ninth and tenth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Lying, blazing beside me, you rear beautifully and up--your thinking face--erotic body reaching in all its colors and lights--your erotic face colored and lit--not colored body-and-face but now entire colors, lights. The world thinking and reaching.

Rukeyser pauses between the tenth and eleventh stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

The river flows past the city. Water goes down to tomorrow making its children. I hear their unborn voices. I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.

Rukeyser pauses between the eleventh and twelfth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Big-boned man young and of my dream. Struggles to get the live bird out of his throat. I am he am I? Dreaming? I am the bird am I? I am the throat? A bird with a curved beak. It could slit anything, the throat-bird. Drawn up slowly. The curved blades, not large. Bird emerges, wet, being born. Begins to sing.

Rukeyser pauses between the twelfth and thirteenth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

My night awake staring at the broad rough jewel, the copper roof across the way, thinking of the poet yet unborn in this dark who will be the throat of these hours. No. Of those hours. Who will speak these days, if not I, if not you?

Rukeyser pauses after the thirteenth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Thank you very much.

The audience applaudes.

We wish to announce that the next reading will be by F.R. Scott, and that will be on February 14th--at the same time-- in the theater in the basement of this building. Thank you.

The audience speaks quietly as recording continues.