POETS Day! Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead

It’s a stormy afternoon where I’m writing from. Loud and creeping grey. Not the kind of rain you sing in. There’ll be no park strolling or quarry swimming today. Flashes through the window tempt the unwary with the notion that the workplace is more sanctuary than prison, but that’s a lie. These are the POETS Days that try men’s souls. Freedom is won. It’s an assertion. Step out the door. Face the elements. Start your weekend early. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Be Lieutenant Dan, but in homage to the mighty acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse?

***

This is the most audacious landscape. The gangster’s
stance with his gun smoking and out is not so
vicious as this commercial field, its hill of glass.
– Muriel Rukeyser, “The Book of the Dead: Alloy”

In 1930, Rinehart and Dennis contracted to build a tunnel through Gauley Mountain near Gauley Bridge, West Virginia for New Kanawha Power Company, a subsidiary of the Union Carbide and Carbon Company, to divert the New River towards a hydroelectric plant.

Of the five thousand men employed to work on the project, some twenty-nine hundred toiled underground in ten to fifteen hour shifts. The project, completion estimated at four years from ground break, was finished in eighteen months. The mountain was composed of remarkably pure silica, so in compliance with safety regulations only wet drilling, a process that cut down on breathable silica in the air, was strictly adhered to when inspectors were on site. The rest of the time they dry drilled.

The number used in the U.S. House of Representatives 1936 hearing on what would be known as the Hawks Nest Disaster was four hundred and seventy-six dead. That number was revised by the epidemiologist Martin Cherniack in 1986. He found that as many as seven hundred and sixty-four may have died. A later reckoning by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health in 2002 determined the death toll to be near one thousand. It is considered one of, if not the, worst industrial disaster in American history.

The story made the rounds of the smart set New York circles in 1935 and the next spring, shortly after the congressional hearings, twenty-three year old published poet Muriel Rukeyser and photographer Nancy Naumberg – I’m not sure who, if either, was in tow – drove from The Big Apple to West Virginia where they collected stories, made interviews, and visited sites. West Virginia native Catherine Venable Moore wrote about her time following the pair’s trail and piecing together evidence of what they found in the Fall 2016 Oxford American. From Moore’s recounting, heirlooms of loss remian.

The Disease

This is a lung disease. Silicate dust makes it.
The dust causing the growth of

This is the X-ray picture taken last April.
I would point out to you: these are the ribs;
this is the region of the breastbone;
this is the heart (a white wide shadow filled with blood).
In here of course is the swallowing tube, esophagus.
The windpipe. Spaces between the lungs.

Between the ribs?

Between the ribs. These are the collar bones.
Now, this lung’s mottled, beginning, in these areas.
You’d say a snowstorm had struck the fellow’s lungs.

About alike, that side and this side, top and bottom.
The first stage in this period in this case.

Let us have the second.

Come to the window again. Here is the heart.
More numerous nodules, thicker, see, in the upper
lobes.
You will notice the increase : here, streaked fibrous
tissue –

Indicating?

That indicates the progress in ten month’s time.
And now, this year – short breathing, solid scars
even over the ribs, thick on both sides.
Blood vessels shut. Model conglomeration.

What stage?

Third stage. Each time I place my pencil point:
There and there and there, there, there.

“It is growing worse every day. At night
“I get up to catch my breath. If I remained
“flat on my back I believe I would die.”

It gradually chokes off the air cells in the lungs?
I am trying to say it the best I can.
That is what happens, isn’t it?
A choking-off in the air cells?

Yes.
There is difficulty in breathing.
Yes.
And a painful cough?
Yes.

Does silicosis cause death?

Yes, sir.

 

The Charge of the Light Brigade was a poem before it was written. Defiant bravery. Against all odds. Dashing and daring set to a TA-tum-Tump, TA-tum-Tump of galloping horses blazing “Half a league, half a league/Half a league onward.”

The death toll from that bit of military history, at least on the British side, was one hundred and fifty-six with one hundred and twenty-two wounded. It’s not my intent to compare tragedies. An empty chair at the dinner table is an empty chair at the dinner table, but dressing matters in popular memory and congressional hearing medical testimony and drawn out suffering made worse by acceptance cries for different treatment than martial bravado.

Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead is a collection of twenty poems capturing aspects of the Hawks Nest Disaster. She frequently changes format, quotes testimony, quotes the titular referenced Egyptian Book of the Dead, imagines free and blank verse dialogues. Often, she directs the reader’s vision.

“Power” is a tour, a continuous steady-cam shot through the hydroelectric plant.

The stairs. Descend.
“They said I built the floor like the tiles of a bank.
I wanted the men who work here to be happy.”
Light laughing on steel, the gay, the tall sun
given away; mottled; snow comes in clouds;
the iron steps go down as roads go down.

“The Dam” is similar with stream of conscious-like urgency following the water’s path.

Water celebrates, yielding continually
sheeted and fast in its overfall
slips down the rock, evades the pillars
building its colonnades, repairs
in stream and standing wave
retains its seaward green

To me, her most interesting method of directing the reader’s view is through mention of a camera. In “The Road,” the introductory poem to The Book of the Dead, she writes,

Now the photographer unpacks the camera and case
surveying the deep country, follows discovery
viewing on groundglass an inverted image.

Drinking water was the color of milk. A frequent image recalled by witnesses in several articles I read about the disaster is of men walking out of the tunnel so covered in silica dust that it was impossible to tell black man from white man. They were ghosts, covered in glass. We’re asked to look through the glass, both through the dust coating everything and through the stature granting camera lens, to see the lives beneath the tragedy.

I like that she calls the image “inverted.” These poems should be read as a collection. As excerpts they flounder. Read “Statement: Philippa Allen” alone and you see:

and it looks like copied testimony neither composed to the sequence of the musical phrase or to the metronome (Sorry for the snipped jpeg but the editing software won’t let my true reproduction indentions stand.) It looks like indented prose aping stanza variations because that’s what it is. But it is so with a point. Alone it seems to be avant garde pretention; found art. That’s not right in this case. Rukeyser’s subject matter doesn’t gallop or come pre Ta-tum-Tump, but it is just as emotionally aboil as the Light Brigade so she presents it as it is and fashions it to fit the expectations of what a poem looks like. Where a poet fits subject to form, say an ideal with a turn of thought to a sonnet or a rustic’s obsession to a villanelle,  she inverts and fits the appearance of appropriate form to subject; inverts. She is showing that this is human tragedy on a scale worthy of poetry, saying “This is not prose.” It’s effective, interspersed as it is with traditional and contemporary forms.

Glass is recuring. Also recurring is the former cornfield, the burial site chosen by the undertaker, paid fifty-five dollars per body to inter on his mother’s property, and looming destination of those doomed by diagnosis. From “The Cornfield”:

Think of your gardens. But here is corn to keep.
Marked pointed sticks to name the crop beneath.
Sowing is over, harvest is coming ripe.

“George Robinson: Blues” speaks of another of the many resting places:

The hill makes breathing slow, slow breathing after you
row the river,
and the graveyard’s on a hill, cold in the springtime blow,
the graveyard’s up on high, and the town is down below.

It seems the most commonly excerpted poem from the collection is “Absalom,” the story of from a woman’s point of view of the loss of her three sons (“They called it pneumonia at first.”) and the soon to come loss of her husband (“He has it, according to the doctor.”) Interspersed with her litanies of struggles and deceased friends and neighbors are quotations from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

Along with the opening poem, “The Road” which takes the reader “past the junction, the fork, the suburban station, / well-travelled six-lane highway planned for safety” and into the West Virginia deep country, and “Absalom,” the final poem, the titular “Book of the Dead,” stands as column to the collection. The finale is a call to action, to metaphorically do the work of the Egyptian book’s spells and help the dead find new life.

Carry abroad the urgent need, the scene,
to photograph and to extend the voice,
to speak this meaning.

It’s powerful and effective writing, but to me the soul of the work can be found in “Juanita Tinsley.” She lives fixed in the aftermath. Rukeyser quotes a member of the community organization that took it upon itself to urge legislation and try to meet the needs of their fellows as best they could in “Praise of the Committee” explaining that the deaths were not due to a contagion; that it must be work related as “Every man is ill. The women are not affected.” “Juanita Tinsley” shows how affected they are.

To me the enduring image of The Book of the Dead is of Juanita staring out the window as the sun sets. As the light outside dims in relation to the indoor lights her reflection grows more substantial. She is defined by the glass.

Juanita Tinsley
Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)

Even after the letter, there is work,
sweaters, the food, the shoes
and afternoon’s quick dark

draws on the windowpane
my face, shadowed hair,
the scattered papers fade.

Slow letters! I shall be
always – the stranger said
“To live stronger and free,

I know in America there are songs,
forgetful ballads to be sung,
but at home I see this wrong.

When I see my family house,
the gay gorge, the picture-books,
they raise the face of General Wise

aged by enemies, like faces
the stranger showed me in the town.
I saw that plain, and saw my place.

The scene of hope’s ahead; look, April,
and next month with a softer wind,
maybe they’ll rest upon their land,
and then maybe the happy song, and love,
a tall boy who was never in a tunnel.

West Virginia University Press put out a new edition of The Book of the Dead in 2018 with the Moore Oxford American piece linked above as introduction. It really should be read as a whole.