Tag Archives: Muriel Rukeyser

Re-assessing

Another clear day; we finally got an inch or so of rain on Friday, which was much needed, and since then the temperature has cooled a little. This late in November, it finally feels like autumn. On my morning walk today, I was happy to see this handsome creature airing its wings in the sunshine. Our local turkey buzzards have been active lately. I’m fairly certain that the snag this one’s perched on is a green ash tree, clearly well-visited by woodpeckers.

My low mood seems to have abated, at least temporarily, and I wrote a few poems and revised a few others during the past three days. I’m trying to accept the fact that this year, we will see neither our son nor our daughter for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. So I’m trying to get creative about things to do that we might not have done if we were preparing for family celebrations. Yet we miss the concept of family celebrations. I guess that’s a socio-cultural thing, right? I may need to reassess what value “the holidays” have for me these days.

~

I have also kept myself busy re-assessing a chapbook manuscript I’ve worked on forever (it seems) and am now looking for the sort of small, independent publisher that might consider a hybrid poetry-journalistic/historical work influenced by Muriel Rukeyser‘s long-poem The Book of the Dead. My poem is about a Korean War veteran tried as a traitor upon his return to the USA, a man who was my friend David Dunn’s father. It has been a real creative challenge to figure out how to tell his story, and the resulting text is definitely “hybrid,” with footnotes, magazine articles, military court proceedings, letters, and poems. People who believe that poems simply flow from some internal inspiration would probably take issue with a poem-ish thing like this, but I keep feeling compelled to find a way to tell this man’s story. The unfairness of it, the long-term damage, the people who used him as a scapegoat, his short life (he died at his mother’s, age 39, discouraged and unwell from physical wounds that never healed, divorced, unable to overcome the dishonorable discharge that kept him from gainful employment). David kept losing his father over and over: to prison, to PTSD, to divorce, to death. It’s an all-too-common narrative, but each tale is also deeply and profoundly individual. Hence the need to write it.

Poetic naturalism

I have been reading poetry, as usual, and also non-fiction about various aspects that could be deemed scientific, such as Michael Pollan’s Changing Your Mind and physicist Sean Carroll‘s book The Big Picture. 

On my way to work, I posed (in my mind) an argument with Carroll about his use of the word “poetic” in his definition of poetic naturalism, which he defines thus:

Naturalism is a philosophy according to which there is only one world — the natural world, which exhibits unbroken patterns (the laws of nature), and which we can learn about through hypothesis testing and observation. In particular, there is no supernatural world — no gods, no spirits, no transcendent meanings.

I like to talk about a particular approach to naturalism, which can be thought of as Poetic. By that I mean to emphasize that, while there is only one world, there are many ways of talking about the world…

The poet Muriel Rukeyser once wrote, “The universe is made of stories, not atoms” … There is more to the world than what happens; there are the ways we make sense of it by telling its story… The world is just the world, unfolding according to the patterns of nature, free of any judgmental attributes. But these moral and ethical and aesthetic vocabularies can be perfectly useful ways of talking about the world … We just have to admit that judgments come from within ourselves.

Despite my doubts about his use of “poetic,”  it may be that Carroll’s term describes me; at any rate, his definition comes close to my own thinking about the world.

And hence, another draft for my poem-a-day challenge.

~

Brown leaves bouncing across Preston Lane
late afternoon, air currents swirling.

Road shoulder cradles raccoon carcass,
fur shudders, though body’s still, and sun

highlights the gray-white hairs as travelers
speed past. Chlorophyll greens local lawns

and ditches beside the creek, molecules moving,
nitrogen atoms taken up through root and rhizome.

Sudden, yellow, early–narcissus blooms near
the neighboring farmhouse–all of which

recommends itself as The World As It Is.
A reality for at least one universe,

even though there exist other possibilities
in the realm of Undiscovered.

daffodil photo Ann E. Michael