CLASSIFICATION
Swallow ID:
1274
Partner Institution:
Concordia University
Source Collection Label:
SGWU Reading Series-Concordia University Department of English fonds
Series:
The Poetry Series
Sub Series:
SGWU Reading Series-Concordia University Department of English fonds
ITEM DESCRIPTION
Title:
Muriel Rukeyser at Sir George Williams University, The Poetry Series, 24 January 1969
Title Source:
Cataloguer
Title Note:
"MURIEL RUKEYSER I006/SR162" written on sticker on the spine of the tape's box. "I006-11-162" written on sticker on the reel
Language:
English
Production Context:
Documentary recording
Genre:
Reading: Poetry
Identifiers:
[]
Rights
CREATORS
Name:
Rukeyser, Muriel
Dates:
1913-1980
Role:
"Author",
"Performer"
Notes:
New York poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser was born in New York City in 1913. She attended Vassar College from 1930 to 1932, working on college newspapers and magazines. She co-founded the Student Review, edited the literary journal Housaton and attended summer courses at Columbia University. Her first book of poems, Theory of Flight (Yale University Press), published in 1935, was influenced from her brief experience at the Roosevelt Aviation School. U.S. 1 (Covici, Friede) was published three years later in 1938, and she was sent by the literary journal Life and Letters Today to report on the athletic competition staged by workers’ sports clubs in Spain. Rukeyser subsequently published A Turning Wind (Viking Press) in 1939, Wake Island (Doubleday) in 1942, Beast in View (Doubleday) in 1944, The Green Wave (Doubleday) in 1948 and The poem as a mask: Orpheus (Unicorn Press) in 1949 (a long poem with drawings by Pablo Picasso). She received the Oscar Blumenthal Prize for Poetry in 1940, the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award in 1941, a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1942 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1943. She served as associate editor of Decision, a literary magazine edited by Klaus Mann. Muriel Rukeyser taught at Sarah Lawrence College in 1946, and the following year, she won the Levinson Prize for poetry. She published Body of Waking (Harper) in 1958, Waterlily Fire (Macmillan) in 1962, The speed of darkness (Random House) in 1968, Breaking Open (Random House) in 1973, The Gates (McGraw-Hill) in 1976 and finally Collected Poems (McGraw-Hill) in 1979. She translated the work of Mexican poet Octavio Paz and Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelof. Active in the protection of human rights, she was jailed in Washington, D.C, because of her protests of the Vietnam war. Between 1975 and 1976 she was president of PEN’s American Center, traveling to South Korea in defense of poet Kim Chi-Ha. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Rutgers University in 1961, a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies in 1963, the Shelley Memorial Award and the Copernicus Award for lifetime contribution to poetry in 1977. Muriel Rukeyser died in February 1980.
CONTRIBUTORS
MATERIAL DESCRIPTION
Recording Type:
Analogue
AV Type:
Audio
Material Designation:
Reel to Reel
Physical Composition:
Magnetic Tape
Extent:
1/4 inch
Playing Speed:
3 3/4 ips
Playback Mode:
Mono
Tape Brand:
Scotch
Sound Quality:
Good
DIGITAL FILE DESCRIPTION
File Path:
files.spokenweb.ca>concordia>sgw>audio>all_mp3
Duration:
00:51:24
Size:
123.4 MB
Content:
Introducer
00:00:00
...Introduction mention that she has published ten volumes of poetry which include such books as The Green Wave, The Turning Wind, Beast in View, U.S. 1, Theory of Flight, Body of Waking, Waterlily Fire, The Speed of Darkness, amongst others. She has published essays, 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 Ekelöf
, she has published a number of children's books and what else can I say? She's a New Yorker, she was born in New York
, she lives in New York, and so forth. I now introduce Muriel Rukeyser
.
Audience
00:00:40
Applause.
Muriel Rukeyser
00:00:49
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 poems 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, that 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 [audience laughter]. 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? [Audience laughter]. 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 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 15, it was a love poem, it stank. [Audience laughter]. But 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 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. There are these, and the fact is, we all write poems, it is something we do, we come to this part of experience, as you get a very rainy, rainy evening, why do people come and listen to poems? Or you've got some marvelous summer night, why do people come and listen to poems? Alright, 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 call 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 giving me whatever silence you are giving me and it comes to me with great strength, your silence. Somebody said prima donna, you know, or I'm going to give this to the audience and the conductor says 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--what your lives have been. This is a very short one called "Song".
Muriel Rukeyser
00:06:50
Reads "Song" [from Waterlily Fire and collected later in Collected Poems].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:07:36
This is another very short one, I wanted to start with these and see what happened. I called it "In Our Time", it's very--it's four lines.
Muriel Rukeyser
00:07:50
Reads "In Our Time" [from The Speed of Darkness].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:08:12
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 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 anymore of this. You know how it is--it happens to undergraduates, say, it happens to the thing that was just before, and you see these 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 served its purpose back there, but it isn't that anymore. And these, phases of being, "The Poem As Mask" for Orpheus.
Muriel Rukeyser
00:09:25
Reads "The Poem As Mask" [from The Speed of Darkness].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:10:42
Reads "Air" [from The Speed of Darkness].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:11:43
Reads "Poem" [from The Speed of Darkness].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:13:57
Reads "Anemone" [from The Speed of Darkness].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:14:46
Reads "For My Son" [from The Speed of Darkness].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:17:15
Reads "Orgy" [from The Speed of Darkness].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:19:14
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.
Muriel Rukeyser
00:19:45
Reads "Bunk Johnson Blowing" [from The Speed of Darkness].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:21:19
Reads "Endless" [from The Speed of Darkness].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:22:53
This last one of the first group is called "Clues", it's a Canadian, British Columbia
poem, is--how it is among the Thompson River
Indians, or how it was in the anthropological moment, that flash of moment before it was broken up by this civilization, and we have caught up to some of this, without know what the hell it was, what this is. We are full of body painting, tattooing, emblems painted on ourselves, this is further. "Clues".
Muriel Rukeyser
00:23:56
Reads "Clues" [from The Speed of Darkness].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:25:55
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 this is just a beginning piece, I wanted to do it tonight this way, I've never cut it up.
Muriel Rukeyser
00:26:17
Reads "Elegy in Joy" [from Elegies and collected later in Collected Poems].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:28:26
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 that the Empire State Building
. 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 Ekelof is another such poet, but Paz, the end of one of Octavio's poems, was printed on this issue of the University Students' 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 the, 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.
Muriel Rukeyser
00:33:33
Reads translation of "A Broken Jar" by Octavio Paz in English.
Muriel Rukeyser
00:34:35
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"
.
Muriel Rukeyser
00:34:56
Reads "Martin Luther King" [published later as “Martin Luther King, Malcolm X” in Breaking Open and collected in Collected Poems].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:35:45
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 Gauguin
watercolours, 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, now, 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".
Muriel Rukeyser
00:37:25
Reads "Next", an English translation of an unnamed poem by Charles Morice [published later in Breaking Open and collected in Collected Poems].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:38:19
And this poem, using one line of that was what I sent to Mexico, it's called "Voices".
Muriel Rukeyser
00:38:30
Reads "Voices" [published later in Breaking Open and collected in Collected Poems].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:40:00
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 going up in back of me, 1, 2, 3 [audience laughter]. I'll just pause. "The Speed of Darkness".
Muriel Rukeyser
00:40:27
Reads "The Speed of Darkness" from The Speed of Darkness.
Muriel Rukeyser
00:46:11
Thank you very much.
Audience
00:46:14
Applause.
Introducer
00:46:37
We wish to announce that the next reading will be by F.R. Scott
, and that will be on February 14, at the same time, in the theatre in the basement of this building. Thank you.
Unknown
00:46:58
Ambient Sound [voices].
END
00:51:24
Notes:
Muriel Rukeyser reads largely from her book The Speed of Darkness (Random House, 1968) as well as a few poems from Elegies (New Directions, 1949) and Waterlily Fire (Macmillan, 1962) and others published later in Breaking Open (Random House, 1973). Most of the poems read were also later collected in Collected Poems (McGraw-Hill, 1978).
00:00- Unknown Introducer introduces Muriel Rukeyser [INDEX: The Green Wave, The Turning Wind, Beast and View, U.S. 1, Theory of Flight, The speed of darkness]
00:49- Muriel Rukeyser introduces “Song” [INDEX: writing poetry, poet John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”]
06:50- Reads “Song”
07:36- Introduces “In Our Time”
07:50- Reads “In Our Time”
08:12- Introduces “The Poem as a Mask” [INDEX: Orpheus, Greek Myth, The speed of darkness]
09:25- Reads “The Poem as a Mask”
10:42- Reads “Air”
11:43- Reads “Poem”
13:57- Reads “Anemone”
14:46- Reads “For My Son”
17:15- Reads “Orgy”
19:14- Introduces “Bunk Johnson Blowing” [INDEX: Musician Bunk Johnson, San Francisco, Lead Belly, house on 59th Street in NYC]
19:45- Reads “Bunk Johnson Blowing”
21:19- Reads “Endless”
22:53- Introduces “Clues” [INDEX: Thompson River Indians (the Nlaka'pamux of Southern British Columbia)]
23:56- Reads “Clues”
25:55- Introduces “Elegy in Joy”
26:17- Reads “Elegy in Joy”
28:26- Introduces “A Broken Jar” [INDEX: Biggest underground bomb testing in Nevada, Student protest killings on October 2, 1968 in Mexico City, Poet Octavio Paz, Surrealist poet Gunnar Ekelof]
33:33- Reads “A Broken Jar”
34:35- Introduces “Martin Luther King” [INDEX: Breaking Open: Upcoming novel, poet Charles Maurice and artist Paul Gauguin, 2001: A Space Odyssey]
34:56- Reads “Martin Luther King”
35:45- Introduces “Next” [Howard Fink List: “Poem by C. Maurice”]
37:35- Reads “Next”
38:19- Introduces “Voices”
38:30- Reads “Voices”
40:00- Introduces “The speed of darkness”
40:27- Reads “The speed of darkness”
51:24.74- END OF RECORDING
Howard Fink List of Poems
“Muriel Rukeyser”
1/24/69
reel information
Content Type:
Sound Recording
Featured:
Yes
Title:
Muriel Rukeyser Tape Box - Back
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
Muriel Rukeyser Tape Box - Front
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
Muriel Rukeyser Tape Box - Spine
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
Muriel Rukeyser Tape Box - Reel
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Dates
Date:
1969 1 24
Type:
Performance Date
Source:
Previous researcher
LOCATION
Address:
1455, Boul de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Venue:
Uncertain, possibly Hall Building Art Gallery
Latitude:
45.4972758
Longitude:
-73.57893043
Notes:
Presenter annoucnes next reading to take place in basement theatre of the building, mostly likely referring to the Hall Building
CONTENT
Contents:
muriel_rukeyser_i006-11-162.mp3
Introducer
00:00:00
...Introduction mention that she has published ten volumes of poetry which include such books as The Green Wave, The Turning Wind, Beast in View, U.S. 1, Theory of Flight, Body of Waking, Waterlily Fire, The Speed of Darkness, amongst others. She has published essays, 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 Ekelöf
, she has published a number of children's books and what else can I say? She's a New Yorker, she was born in New York
, she lives in New York, and so forth. I now introduce Muriel Rukeyser
.
Audience
00:00:40
Applause.
Muriel Rukeyser
00:00:49
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 poems 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, that 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 [audience laughter]. 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? [Audience laughter]. 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 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 15, it was a love poem, it stank. [Audience laughter]. But 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 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. There are these, and the fact is, we all write poems, it is something we do, we come to this part of experience, as you get a very rainy, rainy evening, why do people come and listen to poems? Or you've got some marvelous summer night, why do people come and listen to poems? Alright, 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 call 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 giving me whatever silence you are giving me and it comes to me with great strength, your silence. Somebody said prima donna, you know, or I'm going to give this to the audience and the conductor says 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--what your lives have been. This is a very short one called "Song".
Muriel Rukeyser
00:06:50
Reads "Song" [from Waterlily Fire and collected later in Collected Poems].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:07:36
This is another very short one, I wanted to start with these and see what happened. I called it "In Our Time", it's very--it's four lines.
Muriel Rukeyser
00:07:50
Reads "In Our Time" [from The Speed of Darkness].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:08:12
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 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 anymore of this. You know how it is--it happens to undergraduates, say, it happens to the thing that was just before, and you see these 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 served its purpose back there, but it isn't that anymore. And these, phases of being, "The Poem As Mask" for Orpheus.
Muriel Rukeyser
00:09:25
Reads "The Poem As Mask" [from The Speed of Darkness].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:10:42
Reads "Air" [from The Speed of Darkness].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:11:43
Reads "Poem" [from The Speed of Darkness].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:13:57
Reads "Anemone" [from The Speed of Darkness].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:14:46
Reads "For My Son" [from The Speed of Darkness].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:17:15
Reads "Orgy" [from The Speed of Darkness].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:19:14
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.
Muriel Rukeyser
00:19:45
Reads "Bunk Johnson Blowing" [from The Speed of Darkness].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:21:19
Reads "Endless" [from The Speed of Darkness].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:22:53
This last one of the first group is called "Clues", it's a Canadian, British Columbia
poem, is--how it is among the Thompson River
Indians, or how it was in the anthropological moment, that flash of moment before it was broken up by this civilization, and we have caught up to some of this, without know what the hell it was, what this is. We are full of body painting, tattooing, emblems painted on ourselves, this is further. "Clues".
Muriel Rukeyser
00:23:56
Reads "Clues" [from The Speed of Darkness].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:25:55
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 this is just a beginning piece, I wanted to do it tonight this way, I've never cut it up.
Muriel Rukeyser
00:26:17
Reads "Elegy in Joy" [from Elegies and collected later in Collected Poems].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:28:26
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 that the Empire State Building
. 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 Ekelof is another such poet, but Paz, the end of one of Octavio's poems, was printed on this issue of the University Students' 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 the, 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.
Muriel Rukeyser
00:33:33
Reads translation of "A Broken Jar" by Octavio Paz in English.
Muriel Rukeyser
00:34:35
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"
.
Muriel Rukeyser
00:34:56
Reads "Martin Luther King" [published later as “Martin Luther King, Malcolm X” in Breaking Open and collected in Collected Poems].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:35:45
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 Gauguin
watercolours, 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, now, 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".
Muriel Rukeyser
00:37:25
Reads "Next", an English translation of an unnamed poem by Charles Morice [published later in Breaking Open and collected in Collected Poems].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:38:19
And this poem, using one line of that was what I sent to Mexico, it's called "Voices".
Muriel Rukeyser
00:38:30
Reads "Voices" [published later in Breaking Open and collected in Collected Poems].
Muriel Rukeyser
00:40:00
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 going up in back of me, 1, 2, 3 [audience laughter]. I'll just pause. "The Speed of Darkness".
Muriel Rukeyser
00:40:27
Reads "The Speed of Darkness" from The Speed of Darkness.
Muriel Rukeyser
00:46:11
Thank you very much.
Audience
00:46:14
Applause.
Introducer
00:46:37
We wish to announce that the next reading will be by F.R. Scott
, and that will be on February 14, at the same time, in the theatre in the basement of this building. Thank you.
Unknown
00:46:58
Ambient Sound [voices].
END
00:51:24
Notes:
Muriel Rukeyser reads largely from her book The Speed of Darkness (Random House, 1968) as well as a few poems from Elegies (New Directions, 1949) and Waterlily Fire (Macmillan, 1962) and others published later in Breaking Open (Random House, 1973). Most of the poems read were also later collected in Collected Poems (McGraw-Hill, 1978).
NOTES
Type:
General
Note:
Year-Specific Information:
The speed of darkness was published the previous year, in 1968. Muriel Rukeyser did a reading in 1969 at Vassar College.
Type:
General
Note:
Local Connections:
Muriel Rukeyser was an influential American poet and human rights activist. No other connections to Montreal or Sir George Williams University are known.
Type:
Cataloguer
Note:
Original transcript, research, introduction and edits by Celyn Harding-Jones
Additional research and edits by Ali Barillaro
Type:
Cataloguer
Note:
Reel-to-reel tape>CD>digital file
RELATED WORKS
Citation:
Rukeyser, Muriel. Breaking Open. New York: Random House, 1973.
Citation:
Rukeyser, Muriel. Elegies. New York: New Directions, 1949.
Citation:
Rukeyser, Muriel. The speed of darkness. New York: Random House, 1968.
Citation:
Rukeyser, Muriel. Waterlily Fire. New York: Macmillan, 1962.
Citation:
Rukeyser, Muriel. Collected Poems. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978.
Citation:
"Rukeyser, Muriel". The Oxford Companion to American Literature. James D. Hart (ed.), Phillip W. Leininger (rev). Oxford University Press 1995.
Citation:
“Rukeyser, Muriel, 1913-”. Literature Online Biography. H.W. Wilson Company.