The poem “Errata” in Elizabeth Willis’s 2006 collection Meteoric Flowers concludes: “for word, read world.” [1] Riffing on the form of the post-production list of a book’s printing errors (“isles for isle,” “bloated for boated”), Willis’s poem has been building to this totally simple and yet utterly foundational truth: everything around us is invoked, evoked, conjured by language. You read “word” in a poem and the world rises to meet it. Or, at least, this “recognition,” as Muriel Rukeyser calls it—our world in a word—is the dream of “poetic perception.” [2] “And if you come with your lives to meet what is here,” Rukeyser exhorts in a 1940 lecture, “you are the heroes of the poems, for there is the meeting-place.” [3]
        In Willis’s “Errata,” the world does not actually replace the word. This is not typesetting, where one tile must be removed before another can take its place. This is not even, truly, an erratum, where “word” is a mistake that should be corrected. Because “Errata” is a poem, the reader gets to hold on to “word” and “world,” gets not to let either go; gets, even, to hold on to all the possibilities for what word and world might have to do with each other across sonic, linguistic, scientific, political, cultural, and intimate realms—the implications of their connectedness. The poem lifts these words, their sounds, and their meanings up, shimmering, beside each other; it animates their active, ongoing relation. Returning to Rukeyser’s exhortation, we can see how the poem animates our relations to word and world, too.
        For a long time, I have wanted to write an essay that looks hard and with clarity at what Muriel Rukeyser knows and says about what poetry is, what it does, what good it is to us, what use. When Willis’s “Errata” puts into motion the relations between word, world, and reader, it does this as a poem. The activation of multiplicity in meaning, feeling, sense, and sound is a thing that poems do. Willis’s book pulls from science, printing practices, botanical history, and politics to set up the unsettling implications of her connections. But it is her holding of these realms within poetry that initiates the act of connecting and animates its significance. How? Why? I believe that Rukeyser knows.
        This essay strikes me in some moments as impossibly large and urgent, and in others as wispy, slight. I have worried over what can feel like the embarrassing simplicity, the unsettling straightforwardness of my questions. [4] I know that Rukeyser herself perceived the maddening and enticing tangle between the simplicity and complexity of our ideas and forms, and her own writing can sometimes zigzag between those modes. (“The necessary zigzag,” she writes in another context, “is the wrenching of the mind from the symbols to the objects and back again” [5]). To her, no form or mode or piece of writing was self-evident enough to resist interrogation, an interrogation she wrote explicitly into her works. “But what kind of a book is this?” she asks in the second line of The Orgy. [6] And on the first page of One Life, “With part of the book written, I began to speak of it to friends. ‘What kind of a book would you say it is?’ they would ask. That is still a hard question for me to answer.” [7]
        In the introduction to her “unrealized scientific photo-text collaboration” with the Modernist photographer Berenice Abbott, Rukeyser tells the story of a housepainter’s accidental encounter during a job with Abbott’s Super-Sight photographs of common objects. [8] Rukeyser describes the man’s disturbance about the fact he didn’t at first recognize what the images were. He asked, “Why didn’t I know what they were, when I first saw the apple and the walnut? They’re right in front of me, nothing is arty or faked; these are wonderful pictures. What’s the matter with me, that I didn’t see the things?” [9] The most direct possible presentation of a familiar object had become through that very directness complex. This fundamental, often overlooked, complexity was what Rukeyser strove across modes and means to get her audiences to perceive. [10]

        The first time I really read Muriel Rukeyser was in fall of 2007 in Ammiel Alcalay’s “Introduction to American Studies” course at the CUNY Graduate Center, where I was a PhD student. The texts Ammiel assigned as foundational to doctoral level interdisciplinary studies of this continent included the complete writings of William Apess, Amiri Baraka’s Blues People, and Look for Me in the Whirlwind, the collective autobiography of the Panther 21. Alongside these and one of the touchstones of the semester was Rukeyser’s 1942 biography of 19th century physical chemist, Willard Gibbs. Encountering Rukeyser like this meant that interdisciplinarity, extra-aesthetic stakes, political urgency, tactility, and a sense of human relationships began and remained primary to my developing sense of her poetics. Most course texts came to us as stacks of CDs with unwieldly scans of book after book from Ammiel’s own library, almost all out of print, many with scrawled and heartfelt inscriptions to him from writers. For Willard Gibbs, I bought a dusty jacket-less Doubleday first edition from some online vendor for less than $20, accidentally cracked the spine and watched a portrait of the stern-faced patriarch, Josiah Gibbs, flutter to the ground.
        It’s still in the heart of Gibbs that I see the trace of the thing that Rukeyser knows and that I find missing from most of our current conversations about poetry. She insists in her glorious introduction to the book, “On Presumption,” that she doesn’t only write the book as a poet (which some have read ungenerously as an excuse for flowery language and abstraction and a reason not to interrogate her juxtapositions), but that she writes it because she is a poet. It’s a legitimately surprising assertion. She writes a four hundred-plus-page trade biography about a theoretical scientist, renowned in his fields but unknown beyond those disciplines, a man not at all in the public eye—because she is a poet. But Rukeyser is steadfast. And Gibbs stays integral to her thinking across her career. In a 1972 craft interview with New York Quarterly, she responds to a question about her choice of biographical subjects saying, “The reason I think that I came to do Gibbs was that I needed a language of transformation. I needed a language of changing phase for the poem.” [11]
        Gibbs’s “Phase Rule” is a theory of the equilibrium of heterogenous substances that represents what happens when several substances in various states interact with each other—how they change each other and are changed themselves. Rukeyser calls it “an instrument whose parts are relationship.” [12] Illustrating it, she uses the example of salt sprinkled on ice: “Some of the ice dissolves, and some remains; some of the water evaporates, some remains.” The equation isn’t a resolution. It is an active and changing balance between new things that weren’t there before and things that have been there all along. Word and world. It offers, as Rukeyser articulates, “language for an underlying process.” [13]
        Rukeyser had been searching for such language for decades. In September 1931, as a 17-year-old student at Vassar College, she wrote an essay called “Multiplication in Literature” that strains with her efforts to articulate the ordinary magic by which a word can be made to mean in excess of its definition—that changing of phase, the work of poetry. [14] Naming it at that point the “multiplicative function,” she connects what she is tracking to “stream of consciousness” and “suggestiveness” in Modernist writers like Proust, Joyce, and Eliot. But she worries over the idea, insisting on a mathematical framework, on a shift from earlier “quantitative and metrical verse.” It’s a student essay, taking on both too much and too little, reaching to articulate something that might seem obvious. Rukeyser’s professor was skeptical for those very reasons, writing: “I think a phrase has run away with you here, + that you are making a fuss about something which users of language always know + have known.” But this call to common sense and self-evidence did not hinder her. As she would go on to do throughout her career, Rukeyser folded the criticism directly into her work. Her essay reaches toward a crescendo of significance with a profound and physical sense of its subject:

 

Very well, you say. But this is old; well-meaning, yes, we know, but old. No it is not. All of us know, of course, about the over-tones of words, the power they have over the contractions of the abdomen and constrictions of the throat. Yes, you say, and what are you prepared to give us – subtler workings of tissue, stronger movements of muscle and gland? Perhaps. Even that would be something. But such multiplication as I have pointed out here will allow richer interpretations of reality, finer conceptions of allegory, more manifold construeing [sic] of well-loaded passages. It may be that the answer to the howling we have set up about reality lies in the doubling and further increasing of word-values, and so of thought-values. 

In crystalline moments Rukeyser’s early essay speaks uncannily to the Willis poem I opened with: the potential answer lies in “the combining, the augmenting of ideas by their expansion in the word.”

Rukeyser needed a language of changing phase for the poem because existing language did not account for the complexity she saw hiding in plain sight. The movement and transformation possible in a poem, she argues in her 1968 lecture “Poetry and the Unverifiable Fact,” “cannot be diagrammed a-b-c-d, a movement going from one point to another to another.” [15] Poetic form is key, but an understanding of it as mere pattern or formula (“prey of the grammar book and the notating pencil”[16]) does not come close to articulating its possibility. She despairs in The Life of Poetry that “many readers think of form in poetry as a framework. It is not that.” [17] And she identifies roots of “the fear of poetry” in “teachers treating the mechanics of art with a fiendish reverence,” [18] and in readers ever after “dissecting poetry into ideas and things, and letting the life escape; or counting words as they might count the cells of a body.” [19] Their problem is “they are thinking in terms of static mechanics.”[20] Instead, the magic of poetic form is in its motion.

Gibbs helped her see and gave her permission to experiment with discovering what sort of model might help illuminate, not still, that motion.






Poems, too, are a “gathering-together of elements so that they move together according to a newly visible system.” [21] Those “elements” are rhythms and refrains, sounds and figures, words and images, artists and witnesses. And each newly visible system ​(for Rukeyser, “any portion of the universe which we choose to separate in thought, in order to consider it” [22]) a site of “linkage” and “collision” [23]; disparate words, ideas, forces, and lives held in relation, reaching not statis, but toward dynamic equilibrium. This complexity must neither be glossed over nor solved.

        Late in The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser inserts her own “but everybody knows this” moment, having internalized, it seems, the skeptical teacher. She confesses: “Everyone has always recognized, I began to say, that motion is inherent in poetry and music. Lucretius wrote, ‘moving the sleeping images of things toward the light,’ … and the phrase ‘current of thought’ is in the language. There are countless examples, in the poets’ and in conversation’s metaphor.” [24] But she returns to her conviction about what she is seeking (at once wispy, slight, and impossibly large and urgent) and insists: “But the meaning that this basic truth has for the laws of poetry has not pursued the knowledge of it.” [25] I shiver in recognition. Writing this back and forth between doubt and need, certainty and lack, Rukeyser’s prose animates one more register of the dynamism of her thought and subject—the depth of conversation I keep missing, still, today.
        Rukeyser struggles to provide concrete articulation of dynamic equilibrium in the close readings she does of poems. Reading the opening of Hart Crane’s posthumously published “The Broken Tower” (“The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn / Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell / Of a spent day – to wander the cathedral lawn / From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell”) she points out rhymes and assonance and alliteration but does so to show how the dense sounds travel through to the poem and create a web of relationships through a series of images. The music “drop[s]” unevenly (the rhymes are internal, almost syncopated) from “bell-rope” to “knell” to “hell” and the reader feels the emotional progression in the pit of their stomach. First—and here, again, is the struggle to articulate the complexity moving in plain sight—Rukeyser offers familiar language for this interaction of sound and sense in the poem, writing “‘dispatches’ and ‘dropped down’ tie both idea and music more tightly to the meaning.” Recognizing once again the seduction of static models, she quickly self-corrects: “One cannot say, of course, tie both idea and music more tightly to the meaning. The idea, the music, and the meaning are identified. Nothing here is ‘tied.’ The bonds are those of imaginative and musical relationship.” [26]
        This struggle to precisely name without limiting or making rigid the transformation and equilibrium put in motion via the multivalent tools of poetry (traditional as well as modern) is palpable in Rukeyser’s formulation, also in Life of Poetry, that “[i]n poetry, form and content, relation and function, reach and merge.” [27] Hers is so like Charles Olson’s more famous mid-century exclamation, quoting Robert Creeley’s insight, that “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT.” [28] But where for Olson / Creeley, the relationship is posited in one direction, Rukeyser insists it is multipronged. [29] Form comes out of content, but content also comes out of form. And it’s not just form and content: Relation and function merge as well. These come together and they “reach” too—beyond the poem, into other fields. Into the world.

        From the start, Rukeyser understood the work poetry does that she was struggling to articulate to be urgent. As a seventeen-year-old student she named the stakes of her investigation into poetic language, “the howling we have set up about reality.” [30] In her 1940 “Fear of Poetry” lecture, she grounds the significance of her subject in a “contemplation of the facts, too large, too violent to accept with reason.”[31] And in 1949, she situates the argument and undertaking of her Life of Poetry, her treatise on poetics, in “suffering” and “long war,” racism, sexism, the threat of the atom bomb. [32]
        The connection between these social realities and poetry is not tangential, meliorative, or flighty—as both critics and lovers of poetry have long worried. For Rukeyser, it lies precisely in the way poems gather elements so that they continue to move together according to newly visible systems. The way they offer up, all at once, “word,” “world,” “wor’d,” and “wor[l]d.” The way they hold—through linkage and collision—words, sounds, and images in dynamic equilibrium. In committing to the manifestation through abstraction of complex ideas, poetry offers a tangible approach to social realities. As Rukeyser writes in The Life of Poetry, “Now, when it is hard to hold for a moment the giant clusters of event and meaning that every day appear, it is time to remember this other kind of knowledge of love, which has forever been a way of reaching complexes of emotion and relationship…the attitude that perhaps might equip our imaginations to deal with our lives—the attitude of poetry.” [33] We must hold unceasing movement as gently and as firmly as a poem does. Or, as she puts it in her 1940 lecture, “Communication and Poetry,” “what poetry can do that many of the other forms cannot, or can do less directly, is to focus on that complexity.” [34]
        Of course, facing complexity and refusing resolution is not implicitly good, or even neutral. The dynamism of modern poetry is frequently, as Rukeyser shows us, born out of “the method of collision” [35]: the act of forcibly striking or dashing together, the violent encounter of one moving body with another. This is palpable in her 1939 poem “M-Day’s Child,” in which the sing-song music of the nursery rhyme links and escalates the parade of  horrors from “Drill-day’s child” who is “full of grace” to the devastating transformation at the piece’s close: “but the child that’s born on the Battle-day / is blithe and bonny and rotted away.” [36] It’s there, too, in her “Ninth Elegy. The Antagonists,” where “the agonies / lie down at last together face to face.” [37] Horrors and agonies and acts of violence are connected as well. Poetry’s equilibriums provide no solace from the world or its ugly truths.
        The discoveries Gibbs makes—his Phase Rule and theory of the equilibrium of heterogeneous substances—go on to be used in the airplane industry, the development of chemical empire, and “work in high explosives” among other dangerous, incendiary fields. [38] Toward the end of Willard Gibbs, Rukeyser uses the phrase “dynamic equilibrium” to describe the violent progress of the second world war, its horrors unfolding as her biography is published. [39] We must attend to these complexities, too, if we ever hope to find meaning (“you cannot put these things off,” Rukeyser reminds us in famous lines from The Life of Poetry). [40] From this vantage, the poem seems less like a well-wrought urn than like plans for the atom bomb. The changing of phase. An exchange of energy. Something with the potential to explode.

        The poem “Words” in John Keene’s 2021 collections Punks has a structure related to Elizabeth Willis’s “Errata” in that it foregrounds in a metatextual way the changing phases of poetic language, making the fact, mechanics, and movement of those relationships its subject. In three dense pages of questions—“When you said people did you mean punish?” “When you said thought did you mean terror?”—Keene demonstrates with insistence how violent meanings are hidden in ordinary language. [41] The framework of direct address (“When you said justice did you mean just us” [42]) reaches out to the reader with that inculpating second person, underscoring how these meanings are not arbitrarily or casually present but activated and kept active by people in relation. Keene’s lines hold up shimmering connections just as Willis’s do, spinning out the myriad points of contact between, for example, thought and terror. Here, though, the meaning is also animated by the exposure of intentions. The witness (as Rukeyser calls the reader) fully enters the equation.
        By the end of the poem Keene brings the gravity of his questions back to bear on the role of literature. He writes: “When you said fiction did you mean forget? / “When you said poetry did you mean passivity?” [43] And with this, there enter a flurry of arguments about the non-essentialness of literature, its removal from real-world concerns, its pretention and self-indulgence, its making nothing happen. As in each previous line, it is not clear how the speaker or poet might feel about the connections between fiction and forgetting, poetry and passivity. The poem doesn’t tell us how we should feel, either. The reader must hold the words, their echoes, and their implications in dynamic relation. What have they to do with each other? What remains and what is destroyed? What new states are created—now while we sit reading the poem?
        The final italicized line thrusts “Words” into the present tense. The first time I read the poem, I became aware of time only in that moment. I had to read back through the whole piece to confirm it was a shift, that there hadn’t been some earlier transformation I had glossed over unthinkingly. With the change of tense the line veers, too, into action, into possibility. “When you say art do you mean act?” And I cannot help hearing Rukeyser in this invitation that reaches beyond the work, the italicization like a typographical whisper.
        Writing about the genesis of this poem for The Academy of American Poets website, Keene comments “We have misvalued and disvalued the power of words and their social, political, and economic meanings and effects.” [44] Reading these words, I think, we have not been sufficiently attendant to the changing of phase, its activation, the complexity (its horrors and its possibility) hiding in plain sight. Keene’s poem—as Rukeyser shows us poems might do, should do—begins once more to put the pieces in motion; to open the possibility of a different balance, a different relation.
        What Rukeyser knows, then, is that if we “mean act,” if we mean to act, then we must make, read, activate, and question every “instrument whose parts are relationship.” [45] For poetry to work, we are going to have to keep coming with our lives to meet what is there.




See here for a complete list of notes and works cited.

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