Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection by Catherine Gander

257 Pages·2013·3.742 MB·English

by  Catherine Gander

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MURIEL R MURIEL

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The Poetics of Connection The Poetics of Connection
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Cover image: Seacoast in Moonlight, 1890, Albert Pinkham
Ryder, the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
Catherine Gander
Cover design: Michael Chatfield ISBN 978–0–7486–7053–6
WANTED BY END OF JUNE (IF POSS!!)
Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary
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For Dad
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Muriel Rukeyser and
Documentary
The Poetics of Connection
Catherine Gander
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© Catherine Gander, 2013
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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ISBN 978 0 7486 7053 6 (hardback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 7054 3 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 0 7486 7055 0 (epub)
ISBN 978 0 7486 7056 7 (Amazon ebook)
The right of Catherine Gander
to be identifi ed as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
1 Introduction 1
2 The Photo-text 23
3 The Lives 73
4 Documentary and the Emergence of American Studies 121
5 Landscape, Navigation and Cartography 167
6 Conclusion 208
Appendix: illustrations 215
Sources Cited 228
Index 244
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Acknowledgements
For the production of this book, I am warmly grateful to my parents,
for their unending support and love, Alan Marshall, for his kindness
and his criticism, Clive Bush, for introducing me to an old friend of his,
Shamoon Zamir, for his insightful suggestions, numerous friends and
colleagues, who have helped me in more ways than space permits me to
list, and to Andrew Cummins, for his boundless belief.
Parts of Chapters 3 and 5 have previously been published in differ-
ent form. Extracts from ‘Muriel Rukeyser, America, and the “Melville
Revival” ’, Journal of American Studies 44:4 (2010), © Cambridge
University Press 2011, are reprinted with permission; extracts from ‘The
Senses of Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead’, European Journal
of American Culture 30:3 (2011) © Intellect Ltd, are reprinted with
permission.
Extended extracts from The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser,
copyright © 2005 by Muriel Rukeyser, Janet. E. Kaufman and Anne
F. Herzog, are reprinted by permission of ICM. I extend special thanks
to Vianny Cruz for her help and Bill Rukeyser for his kind support and
assistance. Other extracts from Muriel Rukeyser’s works are quoted and
reprinted from: I Go Out, © 1961 by Muriel Rukeyser and Leonard
Kessler; The Life of Poetry, 1st edition © 1949 by Muriel Rukeyser,
© 1996 by William Rukeyser; Mazes, © 1970 by Muriel Rukeyser and
Milton Charles; One Life © 1957 by Muriel Rukeyser; The Speed of
Darkness © 1968 by Muriel Rukeyser; The Traces of Thomas Hariot
© 1970, 1971 by Muriel Rukeyser; Willard Gibbs: American Genius
© 1942 by Muriel Rukeyser, reprinted by permission of William L.
Rukeyser.
Quotations from the Rukeyser–Boas Papers appear courtesy of the
American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia; quotations from materials
held at the Library of Congress appear courtesy of the Muriel Rukeyser
Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington DC.
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Acknowledgements vii
Extracts from ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ by Walter Benjamin are
from Refl ections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz © 1978 by
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, reprinted by permission of the publisher;
extracts from Another Way of Telling © 1982 by John Berger and
Jean Mohr; extracts from The Shaping of American Anthropology,
1883–1911: A Franz Boas Reader, ed. George Stocking Jr, Basic Books,
1974; extracts from ‘On Creating a Usable Past’ by Van Wyck Brooks,
in Van Wyck Brooks, The Early Years, copyright 1968, 1993 by Claire
Sprague; extracts from On Intersubjectivity and Cultural Creativity by
Martin Buber, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt © 1992 by The University of Chicago,
reprinted by permission of the publisher; extracts from The Writings of
Martin Buber, ed. Will Herberg © 1956 by Meridian Books; extracts
from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria © J. M. Dent &
Sons Ltd, 1965, 1975; extracts from A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (Continuum,
2004), reprinted by permission of the publisher; extracts from Film
Form: Essays in Film Theory by Sergei Eisenstein, ed. and trans. Jay
Leyda © 1977 by Jay Leyda; extracts from The Film Sense by Sergei
Eisenstein, trans. and ed. Jay Leyda, Faber & Faber, 1943; extracts from
Our America by Waldo Frank, Boni & Liveright, 1919; extracts from On
Native Grounds by Alfred Kazin, Jonathan Cape, 1943; extracts from
The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser by Louise Kertesz © by Louisiana
State University Press, reprinted by permission of the publisher; extracts
from The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz, Northwestern University
Press, 1988, reprinted by permission of the publisher; extracts from
Totality and Infi nity by Emmanuel Levinas, translated by Alphonso
Lingis © 1969 Duquesne University Press, reprinted by permission of
the publisher; extracts and images from Land of the Free by Archibald
MacLeish, Da Capo, 1938, reprinted by permission of Springer Verlag;
extracts from Moby Dick or The Whale by Herman Melville, copyright
© Northwestern University Press and The Newbury Library, 1988,
reprinted by permission of the publisher; extracts from Picture Theory
by W. J. T. Mitchell © 1994 by The University of Chicago, reprinted by
permission of the publisher; extracts from Ryder [1847–1917]: A Study
of Appreciation by Frederic Newlin Price, New York: William Edwin
Rudge, 1932; extracts from Time and Narrative, vol. 3 by Paul Ricœur,
translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, © 1988 by The
University of Chicago, reprinted by permission of the publisher; extracts
from The Port of New York by Paul Rosenfeld © The University of
Illinois Press, reprinted by permission of the publisher; extracts from In
the American Grain © 1933 by William Carlos Williams, reprinted by
permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
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viii Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary
Image permissions are gratefully acknowledged: all Farm Security
Administration (FSA) photographs are reprinted by permission of the
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA / OWI
Collection; ‘Gitane’ © 1933 The Estate of Erwin Blumenfeld, reprinted
by permission of Nadia Blumenfeld on behalf of Henry Blumenfeld;
‘Rest in the Peace of His hands’, grave relief by Käthe Kollwitz, © 2012
by Susanna Forrest, reprinted with permission and special thanks; page
images of The Land of the Free, Da Capo, 1938, reprinted by permission
of Springer Verlag. Despite extensive researches, the copyright holder of
Coronet magazine (defunct in 1971) was not located. Every effort has
been made to establish copyright before publication; however, the pub-
lisher would be pleased to be contacted if any errors or omissions exist.
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Chapter 1
Introduction
Muriel Rukeyser – poet, biographer, novelist and playwright – remains
surprisingly neglected by scholars of American literature and culture.
Although a handful of scholars (whose important scholarship will be
referred to in the course of this book) are helping to initiate a recovery
of her work, Rukeyser is too often omitted from academic reading lists,
library bookshelves and poetry anthologies. My reason for writing this
book was principally to address this lack and to help instigate a proper
reclamation of Rukeyser’s writing, situating her fi rmly in the canon of
essential twentieth-century American poets and acknowledging her role
as a critical cultural fi gure of her age.
Hailed by the poet and critical essayist Kenneth Rexroth as ‘by far the
best poet of her exact generation’, Rukeyser (1913–80) was born in New
York City to Jewish parents, Lawrence and Myra Lyons Rukeyser.1 She
lived and worked in America for the duration of her life, either in New
York or California, and began writing in earnest in the 1930s, publish-
ing her fi rst book of poetry, Theory of Flight, in 1935. Throughout her
life, Rukeyser wrote with the conviction that there are
two kinds of poems: the poems of unverifi able facts, based in dreams, in sex,
in everything that can be given to other people only through the skill and
strength by which it is given; and the other kind being the document, the
poem that rests on material evidence.2
This inherent ‘doubleness’ in her work, as Rukeyser termed it, allowed
her poetry to become the ‘meeting-place’ of ostensibly opposed dis-
courses, disciplines and modalities. For Rukeyser, who admitted to
being ‘deeply concerned with the evidence of the world’, the ‘facts’ of
human existence were to be ‘reported’ via the confl uence of subjective
and objective, ‘artistic’ and ‘scientifi c’ ways of experiencing reality.3 The
concern of this book is to argue that her work was shaped particularly
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