Introduction
“The last poem I’ll read this evening is a group. The group is called ‘The Speed of Darkness’,” the twentieth-century American poet Muriel Rukeyser prefaces during the fortieth-minute of her 1969 reading at Sir George Williams University (SGWU, now Concordia University), “they’re short poems, and I’ll just pause between poems. There should be numbers going up in back of me; one, two, three. I’ll just pause” (Rukeyser “Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969,” added emphasis). In this moment, Rukeyser details how she will read and delineate the stanzas involving the title poem of her most recently published book at the time, The Speed of Darkness. In her in-person reading, she will “just pause” between each part of the “group”—or, later in 1972, what she calls a “series” (Mitts 2015)—to separate the stanzas in “The Speed of Darkness.” However, in SpokenWeb’s audio recording of this reading, all visual components are obscured, which complicates listening to the spaces between each stanza in the group. What was “brought into relation with the other through juxtaposition” (Mitts 2015) in text now coalesces to give entirely new meaning to the full poem. And, when digitally annotated, Rukeyser’s “The Speed of Darkness” more clearly exhibits how these spaces involve a transformative meaning-making practice.
On Meaning, Duality, and Embodiment
The unique nature of “The Speed of Darkness” is highlighted most evidently in Rukeyser’s oral reading of the poem at SGWU. At this reading specifically, she relies on the in-person audience to visually recognize the pauses and her physical movements to represent the breaks between stanzas. When listening to the audio recording without annotation, there is merely silence or audience interruption (such as coughing) that accompanies this space. For this reason, what is a stanza in-text should be heard as hemistiches and the spaces as caesurae. For example, between minute 40:49 and 40:53 in the recording, there are four sections of silence—of space—which function as caesurae that separate each hemistich from the next: “Resurrection music, silence, and surf” and “no longer speaking” (Rukeyser The Speed of Darkness 228-9) (Figure 1).
Figure 1: First and second stanza of Rukeyser’s “The Speed of Darkness”
Moreover, the space that connects these two occurrences, while planned, takes an eerie presence. It’s forced and unnatural, which contributes significantly to the meaning that is communicated throughout the poem. These moments in the audio recording reaffirm a quality that Rukeyser finds in her own work: “doubleness” (Gander 296)—or what this project considers “duality”—which is a form of contrast that exists within poetics. The turn from “doubleness” to “duality” is to emphasize the dialogic relationship between these spaces which develops meaning. She states that there are “two kinds of poems: the poems of unverifiable facts…; and the other kind being the document, the poem that rests on material evidence” (Rukeyser “The Education of a Poet” 226)—and her poems encompass both. These felt, experienced dualistic spaces that are engaged in the audio recording are the subjects of analysis for this project.
When listening to “The Speed of Darkness” in SpokenWeb’s “Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969,” experiencing these hemistiches and caesurae involves “the practice of attending to audible words or sounds in order to make meaning of them” (Ceraso 102). This is what Steph Ceraso calls multimodal listening; a term which “encompasses both the semiotic and the bodied, sensory aspects of multimodal experiences” which are “significantly interconnected” (104). Thus, beyond reading these spaces in a physical copy of The Speed of Darkness, or attending Rukeyser’s reading in-person, listeners embrace a sonic experience of space which develops a new “reading” of each hemistich and caesura. In other words, the duality of audible spaces which any listener comes to embody is a practice of meaning making. For instance, this is represented in the former example which highlights the space between section one and section two of Rukeyser’s poem. The four seconds of silence after the word “surf” develops new meaning (in relation) to the next stanza: “no longer speaking / listening with the whole body / and with every drop of blood / overtaken by silence” (Rukeyser The Speed of Darkness 229) (Figure 1). This space is significant in that it balances a subjective-objective duality to generate meaning within “unverifiable facts” and “material evidence.”
Therefore, this project argues that the embodiment of audible spaces in “The Speed of Darkness” develops meaning through a duality which wrestles with linguistic boundaries. As the listener engages the auditory potentiality of these spaces, the silent spaces develop significance at the limits of language and meaning. The subject-object duality, then, functions to enforce this practice as Rukeyser attempts to connect both within her poem. To develop such an assertion, this project turns to a variety of scholarship that span rhetoric, sound studies, poetics, philosophy, and feminist studies. Discussed in such spaces will be multimodality, symbolism, the limits of language, and other concepts and ideas which are foundational to this project and future work.
Listening to Subjective-Objective Duality
In the words of Muriel Rukeyser, regarding the duality of her work, she states that there are “two kinds of poems: the poems of unverifiable facts, based in dreams, in sex, in everything that can be given to other people only through the skill and strength by which it is given; and the other kind being the document, the poem that rests on material evidence” (Rukeyser “The Education of a Poet” 226). As Rukeyser understands her work to exist at the convergence of these “kinds of poems,” her poetry comes to balance the subjective and objective tensions which encompass poetics. And, while this is present in her words, it is also powerfully situated at the bounds and outer limits of her poetry—in the silence and spaces, and the overlap between the two. Take, for instance, Figure 2; here, the fifth stanza in “The Speed of Darkness” is illustrated as it is in Rukeyser’s book and her reading at SGWU, and this is located during minute 42:34 in the audio recording. Even the spaces—which are to be understood as caesurae—take on new and transformative meaning as they are heard and embodied via SpokenWeb’s recording. As she exaggerates syllables and the length of pauses such as between “between” and “between,” this allows for such material evidence to forge unverifiable meaning while listening to the audio.
As this interpretation unfolds, the listener involves a practice of multimodal listening that produces meaning within such subjective-objective spaces. Integral to the work with spaces in Muriel Rukeyser’s poem, “The Speed of Darkness,” is the embodiment of sound via multimodal listening. This form of embodiment functions beyond “listening practices that depend on the ears exclusively” where “listeners’ primary goal is to hear and interpret audible sound” (Ceraso 105); the embodiment of dualistic spaces involves a holistic practice of listening which encompasses multiple senses. As one listens to the spaces in Rukeyser’s work, they are forced to listen with their entire body—as opposed to reading these spaces in written form. Spaces come to matter and, thus, mean, through the embodiment of subjective-objective duality which involves each hemistich and caesura. In this sense, the spaces which separate words exhibit lingustic possibilities that interrogate current listening paradigms. The ability for meaning to be made is a result of the subjective-objective, dualistic embodiment in Rukeyser’s poetry reading.
Figure 2: Fifth stanza of Rukeyser’s “The Speed of Darkness”
Making Meaning in Silent Spaces
Thus, central to the production of meaning in “The Speed of Darkness” is (1) dualistic subjective-objective characteristics and (2) embodiment of audible spaces, which both wrestle with(in) the restrictions of language. Mitts similarly asserts that “the silence between [the stanzas] is the kinesthetic background, the emergent signification which speaks through relation, or even lack of relation, between the words at either end of the space” (2015). When listening to the audio, it is clear that the silence in such spaces becomes significant. In another instance, at minute 43:40 in the audio, there is a space between the seventh and eighth stanza that is ‘interrupted’ by the cough of an audience member. While this isn’t directly associated with the poem itself, it is a facet of the “environmental aspects” (Ceraso 105) that emerges signification. In other words, the caesurae are not only breaks but inhabitable spaces where meaning is assigned and influenced according to its potentiality during the act of recording. This is not only because the spaces become when interrupted but, also, their significance is emphasized and transformed during that process. Thus, the digital annotation of these points function productively for two reasons. First, they urge listeners to reevaluate where, how, and when potential relations unfold—especially as they are embodied. And second, they recognize the subjective-objective points of engagement within the silent spaces, contributing to how listeners ascribe meaning.
An essential element of this project is its ability to note the dualistic spaces between stanzas—the caesurae that create hemistiches—which contribute meaning to Muriel Rukeyser’s poem, “The Speed of Darkness.” When listening to SpokenWeb’s audio recording, Rukeyser’s poem transforms from the aforementioned “group” or “series” to a single poem which is mediated by silence. These spaces become, potentially, stanza separators, where Rukeyser catches her breath, dramatic pausing, or a multiplicity of others. Rukeyser’s poetic work takes shape in the aforementioned listening experience, as (if) it is meant to be read aloud to truly and accurately communicate its meaning. In this sense, what the listener derives (and creates) from these dualistic spaces depends on the recognition of separative gaps, which is done via annotation.
Annotations as Openings
The annotations for “Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969” in SpokenWeb’s “Sir George Williams Poetry Series, 1966-1974” was accomplished by using AudiAnnotate, a project that “builds on the new IIIF standards for AV to address the gaps in engaging with audio by developing a solution to bring together free audio annotation tools and the Web as a standardized collaboration and presentation platform” (Clement et al. 2022). In prior versions of the project, the annotations required a manual shortening of the “Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969” audio recording to only include the poem “The Speed of Darkness.” To do this, a free and open-source digital audio editor, Audacity, was used to cut the .mp3 file. After which the audio recording was annotated according to what is identified as spaces between the stanzas in the text format of the poem. Moreover, the annotations also include an introduction by Muriel Rukeyser and the time at which she began to read each stanza. However, the final project includes the entire SpokenWeb recording to more fully contextualize the audience’s reactions, speaker remarks, and spaces in the title poem.
Annotating these spaces to highlight dualistic spaces allows for the user to listen according to the gaps in Rukeyser’s poetry, transforming the listening experience. Characterizing these spaces as such promotes active engagement with the audio recording and included poem. This practice offers a completely different way to read Rukeyser’s work, and especially her book, The Speed of Darkness. For example, work that has been conducted by Mitts, Gander, and Daw may all benefit from the annotation of Rukeyser’s poetry in audio form. When conducting analysis on poetry recordings that concern silence (Mitts 2015), “dual aspects of modern life” (Gander 288), or the “trans-corporeal landscape” of poetry” (Daw 218), scholars are able to illustrate their claims according to the audio or visual material in question. This opportunity opens a range of work that has yet to be done in various fields, across multiple disciplines. For example, sociolinguistic research may benefit from the annotation of speech patterns in audio-visual material that is extensive in length, time, or location. Or, annotations may be used to archive knowledge regarding cultural traditions performed in an audio or visual medium. The opportunity that digital annotation provides should not be restricted to academia, either. For instance, in the public sphere, annotation may be used to compile data from videos illustrating police violence during specific movements or over periods of time.
Conclusion
Therefore, while this project utilizes annotations to denote embodied dualistic spaces that produce meaning in Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Speed of Darkness,” it also serves as an opening for future scholarly work. The work done here is a template for the recognition and signification of meaning in spaces that have traditionally been ignored or overlooked. Thus, not only does this offer a re-evaluation of certain capabilities in poetics but, also, how audio-visual material is able to produce knowledge that benefits larger populations and greater communities.
That is shifting digital annotation from the margin to the center.
Works Cited
Ceraso, Steph. “(Re) Educating the senses: Multimodal listening, bodily learning, and the composition of sonic experiences.” College English 77.2 (2014): 102-123.
Clement, Tanya, Ben Brumfield, and Sara Brumfield. “The AudiAnnotate Project: Four Case Studies in Publishing Annotations for Audio and Video.” DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 16.2 (2022).
Daw, Sarah. “There is no out there”: trans-corporeality and process philosophy in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Speed of Darkness.” Feminist Modernist Studies 3.2 (2020): 217-233.
Gander, Catherine. “Facing the fact: word and image in Muriel Rukeyser’s’ Worlds Alongside’.” Journal of Narrative Theory 43.3 (2013): 288-328.
Mitts, Adam. “The Vocabulary of Silence: Voice and Disability in ‘The Speed of Darkness.’” The Muriel Rukeyser Living Archive, October 17, 2015. http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/2015/10/17/adam-mitts-the-vocabulary-of-silence-voice-and-disability-in-the-speed-of-darkness/.
Rukeyser, Muriel, and Jan Heller Levi. A Muriel Rukeyser Reader. Norton, 1996.
—. “Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969,” The Poetry Series, Sir George Williams University, 24 January 1969, SpokenWeb “Sir George Williams Poetry Series.”
—. “The Education of a Poet.” 1976. The Writer on her Work. Ed. Janet Sternberg. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000 217-30.