Annotations for Voice: Speaking

There will be one poem read in my 1969 voice, and then I'll read something from the book following that. We're going to go from the beginning to the end but we're certainly not going to read all of them.

And I should say, by way of introduction, that the first part of these poems--it's in two sections, the book--were written in Bloomington, Indiana, when I was a young woman, married at that point, trying to figure out who I was. And studying comparative literature at the university there. And translating the first book of prose poems by the French poet Francis Ponge, and they're all poems about things, objects. It's called Le Parti pris des choses (On the Side of Things). And it taught me a lot about language. The second part of the book was written in Napa Valley, California, where I was teaching part-time in a highschool there and suffering a great deal as a result of that.

My then-husband was doing a practicum in clinical psych at the Napa State Hospital.

I was trying to figure out language, how to move in language. Language had become, thanks to the American poet Dee Alexander a very alive thing to me. Dee was a linguist, and he taught me a lot about the textures of language, how to think of language not in terms of how it relates to a thing--which Ponge certainly did not do--but how it relates to itself, musically, and in terms of meaning.

So these poems are all experimental in that sense.

In Bloomington we were living in Pigeon Hill which was a very poor part of town. It was the only part of town that as graduate students we could afford to live in.

Lynne was a little girl who lived across the street in a house that only had a dirt floor. The house was eventually torn down, and this was a poem for her and her curiosity about typing. I don't think she'd ever seen anyone type before.

Okay, so two more from this period.

Actually, I think these are . . . yeah ok. I'm just going to read one.

Ok, great.

You never know, when you're preparing for a reading, you feel like reading one poem and then when you get up there, you feel like reading another.

I'm just going to read the first part of another poem, "From Whose Dark." This is from the second part of the book, written in California.

Okay I'll just read one. This is a short one.

Well, that was . . .

I'm going to read a couple of poems in Beast Language which are actually from the early '60s and not the '50s, and then we're going to take a break—ten minutes or so.

That's Chaucer actually.

It makes a nice introduction. 

I was always afraid to recite this other one. Although I knew it by heart, I was afraid to recite it because I thought I might not be able to stop.

It's very mantric. And I thought I'd be giving a reading and they'll carry me away at the end. I'll still be going Grahhr! Grahhr!

So, recently I was in one of John Lilly's isolation tanks and I thought, what a perfect time to do this thing I've always been afraid to do.

What difference would it make here? So I did, and I did know it by heart, but I think I'll read it here anyway.

The announcer introduces Rukeyser.

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--that spills into the poem, that feeds into the poems.

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.

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

Thank you very much.