Muriel Rukeyser

Muriel Rukeyser's "Book of the Dead" is a fascinating read because it challenges the lyrical form to bear more narrative and documentary material than usual. In some ways this really succeeds, but in other ways it seems to fail. The more prosaic sections are very flat indeed. Here's a sample from "The Doctors":

-State your education, Doctor, if you will.
Don't be modest about it; just tell about it.

High school Chicago 1899
Univ. of Illinois 1903
M.A. 1905, thesis on respiration
P & S Chicago 1908
2 years' hospital training;

I could go on, but it's painful to type such drudgery. This material has documentary interest (if slightly), but poetry (as we've come to expect) should be more concise, more evocative, more verbally or symbolically layered, and just plain more poetic. Although these are expectations that can be challenged on certain grounds, I wouldn't challenge them if "The Doctors" was used as an example text. More artistry, please.

Thankfully, Rukeyser also has a fine lyric voice, as can be seen in this section of "Juanita Tinsley":

Even after the letters, there is work,
sweaters, the food, the shoes
and afternoon's quick dark

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

Internal rhyme, assonance, and even metrical punctuations like the spondee "quick dark" all work together within a moving thematic mood. That "The Doctors" and "Juanita Tinsley" lie next to one another in the same poem is a marvel. I appreciate Rukeyser's social motive in taking on such powerful material to make an important social, cultural, and economic point, but the power of the poem sometimes falls short of the power of the material. Even William Carlos Williams's misguided use of documentary materials in "Paterson" is less unfortunate than Rukeyser's because his at least had the aesthetic value of making the reader wonder what it was doing there. That is, the reader's creative labor in reconciling the sharply juxtaposed material seems to me more valuable than piling on details in a largely unified work.