"We are against war and the sources of war. We are for poetry and the sources of poetry," says poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) in The Life of Poetry, a strange book of poetics published in 1949 that I return to again and again. Her big idea—that poetry is an active force as potent as the weaknesses that can lead to war—I continue to ponder. Americans fear poetry because they fear feeling. The work of poetry is the task of discovering and sharing how we feel and how we remember. As a practice of emotional literacy, poetry has the potential to overcome the failures of imagination and vision that afflict human relations. When I was in graduate school, mid-1980s, all of Rukeyser’s work was out of print, so we staged public readings of her poems and prose. My teacher and final project advisor, Sharon Olds, had come to poetry in mid-life, as a student in Rukeyser’s workshops. No doubt Rukeyser’s ideas informed her pedagogical practice and work and come to us as influence. One of my classmates, Jan Freeman, founded Paris Press to reprint The Life of Poetry. And the longer I write, the more I find myself working in the public and personal and blatant ways that Rukeyser worked herself, especially in her later years.
Yehuda Amichai in Late November
Do not write the poem of love in the night of love;
as you lie in the arms of your beloved, love!
Soon enough your passions will be done
and you will have nothing left but your love
of words for comfort. How it always happens:
the day he deploys, the soldier falls in love.
Americans write such boring poems because
your wars are so abstract, as are your loves.
If you want to become a poet, be a warrior
trained to crave neither praise nor love.
Dead for a decade, Yehuda still chides
from the workshop table. But look, my love,
violets bloom in this autumn ditch like advice
to trick time: let’s make language and love at once.
Memorial Day, 1972
In my Girl Scouts tam and dress, I stood before my parents
who seemed less pleased than I expected,
silently struggling, I now guess, to say the right thing.
Dad wondered aloud what his brother, working for peace
in a Vietnamese village just south of the DMZ,
would think of me, the young niece marching in uniform
between convertibles of gentlemen vets from the Great War,
the Good War, and Korea. I thought only of glittering
batons tossed by majorettes in bathing suits and boots,
purr of polished fire trucks, shine of tubas
and trombones blown by sweaty, stern-faced boys,
and the dignity my practiced, white-gloved wave
might bestow upon the heavy, hair-sprayed ladies
parked in lawn chairs along Race Street. Honoring
the dead doesn’t have to mean you’re for war,
I tried, veteran of fraternal conflict, desperate
for glamour, for anything outside that town. You decide,
Dad sighed, as if choice existed, as if a line
had not been set between us and the world
of warriors. Firm, wordless. That silence
I now hit, worn out by my own kid’s arguments.
At noon, a fire siren sounded the start
of that parade. My green dress and sash of badges
already hung slack in the closet.
About the Author
Julia Spicher Kasdorf is author of Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields, a documentary collaboration with Steven Rubin published in 2018 by Penn State Press. Her other books of poetry--Sleeping Preacher, Eve’s Striptease, and Poetry in America--have received the Agnus Lynch Starrett Prize, The Great Lakes Colleges Award for New Writing, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize. She teaches poetry writing at The Pennsylvania State University. With Steven Rubin, she is currently working on Home Place, a documentary project that involves listening to the experiences of farmers who live and work within 30 miles of her home in Bellefonte, PA.