A Muriel Rukeyser Reading Group

“‘The Way In’: Muriel Rukeyser, The Speed of Darkness,

and Poetry of the 1960s”

Wednesday, October 9, 12-1:30pm, Eastern Time Zone, at:

Zoom Link: https://wisconsin-edu.zoom.us/j/93519475200?pwd=UOzxhTPk9nqZWugotH7e3qCBDCp7O6.1

This first meeting of our new reading group is organized and facilitated by Trudi Witonsky and Craig Werner and focuses on Rukeyser’s 1968 collection of poems, The Speed of Darkness.

Written and published at a time of dizzying change, Muriel Rukeyser’s The Speed of Darkness has rarely been placed in conversation with the political and poetic upheavals of the mid/late 1960s.  In their introductory comments, Trudi and Craig approach the volume as part of a broader cultural movement to imagine, as Rukeyser phrases it in “Akiba,” “a new song,” to chart “the way in” to a new political poetics.  In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser defined the work of poetry in ways that took on new life in this era. As “an art that lives in time, expressing and evoking the moving relation between the individual consciousness and the world,” poetry increases our “capacity to make change in existing conditions.”  Rukeyser’s exploration of those possibilities places The Speed of Darkness in dialogue with the politically active poets of the Sixties, among them Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Bob Dylan, Denise Levertov, and Amiri Baraka.  Inviting viewers into a call-and-response conversation, Trudi and Craig then turn our attention to a set of poems–“Delta Poem,” “Poem,” “The Poem as Mask,” “Akiba”–that establish Rukeyser’s awareness of central “Sixties” concerns, including the war in Vietnam, civil rights, the emerging feminist movement, and economic exploitation.  The final segment of the meeting consists of a detailed reading of “The Outer Banks” as an underrecognized touchstone of late-Sixties poetry.

Trudi Witonsky is an associate professor in the Department of Literature, Writing, and Film at University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Her research focuses on the works of Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, and composition pedagogy. Trudi teaches both introductory composition to first year students and advanced American Literature to upper level majors. 

Craig Werner is Professor Emeritus of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Best known for his books on the relationship between music and history, Craig began his career as a literary critic writing essays on Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, Etheridge Knight, as well as Adrienne Rich: The Poet and Her Critics.  A member of the Nominating Committee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for twenty years, his books include A Change Is Gonna Come: Race, Music and the Soul of America; Higher Ground: Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield and the Rise & Fall of American Soul.  Rolling Stone chose We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War, which he co-wrote with Vietnam veteran Doug Bradley, its 2015 “Best Book of the Year.”   Craig spent the 1960s in the conservative stronghold of his military hometown of Colorado Springs, where he edited an underground newspaper and played in a rock band that frequently performed for audiences of soldiers going to or coming back from Vietnam.  He has recently completed a sweeping history of the 1960s, Chimes of Freedom: The Sixties that Made Our World.