Annotating a Duality of Spaces in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Speed of Darkness
In 1969, American poet Muriel Rukeyser read a group of thirteen poems entitled “The Speed of Darkness” at Sir George Williams University. I argue in this project that digitally-annotating Rukeyser’s reading of the spaces between each stanza in this poem facilitates a new, sonic reading of the poem, one which is shaped through the practice of listening to “doubleness” in “The Speed of Darkness.”
Introduction
“The poem I’ll read this evening is a group. The group is called ‘The Speed of Darkness’” (Rukeyser “Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969). Here, Muriel Rukeyser, twentieth-century American poet, prefaces her reading of the poem sequence that forms the title of her most recent collection of poetry, The Speed of Darkness. At around the fortieth-minute of this reading at Sir George Williams University (SGWU, now Concordia University), she states that this is a collection of “short poems” and that she’ll “just pause between poems.” She jokes that “there should be numbers going up in back of me; one, two, three,” and the audience laughs. But “I’ll just pause,” she responds (Rukeyser “Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969). I argue in this project that digitally-annotating Rukeyser’s reading of these spaces facilitates a new, sonic reading of the poem, one which is shaped through the practice of listening to “doubleness” in ‘The Speed of Darkness’.
In this moment, Rukeyser details how she will read and delineate between stanzas in the “group” of poems that make up ‘The Speed of Darkness’. In her in-person reading, she will “just pause” between each part of this “group”—or, later in 1972, what she calls a “series” (Mitts 2015)—to note the gaps more easily identified in their visual, textual form. However, in SpokenWeb’s recording of her reading, any visual reference is left out, which further complicates the spaces between stanzas in this group of poems. What was visually “brought into relation with the other through juxtaposition” (Mitts 2015) becomes mixed up, confused, and complicated in the audio recording of Rukeyser’s reading.
Dreams in Doubleness
To listen to spaces in ‘The Speed of Darkness,’ instead of viewing them in their textual form, affirms a sense of “doubleness” that Rukeyser finds in her own poetry. She asserts that there are “two kinds of poems,” the first being “the document, the poem that rests on material evidence” (Rukeyser, “Education of a Poet,” 226). The material, in this sense, applies to the visual, physical form of a space that is represented in and as a blank space on a page which separates one stanza from the next. In contrast to this are “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” (Rukeyser, “Education of a Poet, 226). The audio recording of her reading these spaces lacks the material document of a visual space, practicing the unverifiability of listening to the in-betweens of not only dialogue but poetics.
Figure 1: Fifth stanza of Rukeyser’s “The Speed of Darkness”
Take for example the fifth stanza in ‘The Speed of Darkness’ as it is illustrated in Figure 1, which is similar to how it would be depicted in Rukeyser’s book—this stanza is located at minute 42:34 in SpokenWeb’s audio recording. In visual form, these spaces are material, recognizable. However, in her sonic reading of these spaces, they take on new meaning through their unverifiable, unlocatable, and immaterial nature within an audio recording. In other words, the spaces both within and separating stanzas are complicated in their sonic form. This is represented in Rukeyser’s exaggeration of syllables and the length of pauses that separate “between” and “between”—this delivery solidifies the “doubleness” of Rukeyser’s poetry, which opens up moments for new readings and ways of interpreting her poetry. Spaces, in her recorded reading, communicate the more subjective and dream-like meaning that is sometimes obfuscated in visual form. In this recording of Rukeyser’s reading, listening is an engagement with the “skill” and “strength” of the spaces which re-make new interpretations of “The Speed of Darkness.”
Annotating Spaces
Annotating these spaces promotes not only the recognition of “doubleness” that Rukeyser finds in her own poetry but, also, where dreams and the material meet in the process of listening to audio recordings. The annotations for “Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969” in SpokenWeb’s “Sir George Williams Poetry Series, 1966-1974” was accomplished by using AVAnnotate, 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 this 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 visual 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.
Digitally-annotating thirteen spaces in “The Speed of Darkness” opens up opportunities for new readings that use the unverifiability of listening and materiality of visual form for engaging differently with Rukeyser’s work. The moments emerging after her plan to “just pause” between stanzas embody the “everything” that can possibly be given to the other through the “skill and strength” of spaces. While listening with each of these thirteen annotations, attention should be paid to how they impact the practice of listening to the recording, disrupt or inform interpretations of the poem, and illuminate different senses of doubleness found within, between, and across each stanza.
Works Cited
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).
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. “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.
| Time | Annotation | Layer |
|---|---|---|
| 40:49 - 40:52 | Space 1 | Spaces |
| 41:09 - 41:12 | Space 2 | Spaces |
| 41:35 - 41:39 | Space 3 | Spaces |
| 42:33 - 42:35 | Space 4 | Spaces |
| 42:59 - 43:03 | Space 5 | Spaces |
| 43:18 - 43:21 | Space 6 | Spaces |
| 43:39 - 43:42 | Space 7 | Spaces |
| 43:53 - 43:57 | Space 8 | Spaces |
| 44:05 - 44:08 | Space 9 | Spaces |
| 44:35 - 44:39 | Space 10 | Spaces |
| 44:54 - 44:58 | Space 11 | Spaces |
| 45:39 - 45:42 | Space 12 | Spaces |
| 46:08 - 46:10 | Space 13 | Spaces |
| 6:55 - 7:34 | Reads "Song" | Rukeyser reading |
| 7:55 | Reads "In Our Time" | Rukeyser reading |
| 9:31 | Reads "The Poem as Mask" | Rukeyser reading |
| 11:12 - 11:41 | Reads "Air" | Rukeyser reading |
| 11:51 - 13:54 | Reads "Poem" | Rukeyser reading |
| 14:08 - 14:44 | Reads "Anemone" | Rukeyser reading |
| 14:55 - 17:16 | Reads "For My Son" | Rukeyser reading |
| 17:35 - 19:12 | Reads "Orgy" | Rukeyser reading |
| 19:49 - 21:17 | Reads "Bunk Johnson Blowing" | Rukeyser reading |
| 21:30 - 22:53 | Reads "Endless" | Rukeyser reading |
| 23:59 - 25:53 | Reads "Clues" | Rukeyser reading |
| 26:24 - 28:29 | Reads "Elegies in Joy" | Rukeyser reading |
| 33:36 - 34:29 | Reads "A Broken Jar" (by Octavio Paz) | Rukeyser reading |
| 35:01 - 35:44 | Reads "Martin Luther King" | Rukeyser reading |
| 37:30 - 38:22 | Reads "Next" | Rukeyser reading |
| 38:35 - 40:00 | Reads "Voices" | Rukeyser reading |
| 40:31 - 46:11 | Reads "The Speed of Darkness" | Rukeyser reading |
| 0:00 - 0:47 | Introduction | Introducer |
| 0:03 - 0:17 | She has published ten volumes of poetry, which include such books as The Green Wave, The Turning Wind, Beast and View, U.S. 1, Theory of Flight, Body of Waking, Waterlily Fire, and The speed of darkness, amongst others. | Introducer |
| 0:17 - 0:37 | She has published essays, a biography-- she's working on a biography now. She has published a novel called The Orgy. She has published translations of the Mexican Writer Octavio Paz, and the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelof. She has published a number of children's books. And, what else can I say? | Introducer |
| 0:38 - 0:47 | She is a New Yorker. She was born in New York, she lives in New York, and so forth. I now introduce Muriel Rukeyser. | Introducer |
| 46:39 - 46:51 | We wish to announce that the next reading will be by F.R. Scott, and that will be on February 14th--at the same time-- in the theater in the basement of this building. Thank you. | Introducer |
| 0:56 - 1:17 | Thank you. It sounds peculiar when it's said that way, you know. It just means that I've been writing poems all along, and that sometimes there's been some prose or something--film, prose, whatever it is-- | Rukeyser speaking |
| 1:21 - 1:43 | And they lie all the time about the poems, to us, you know, about all of our poems. They say it's something very odd and rare, and people who do it are very odd. If a man does it, he's sexually questionable; if a woman does it, she's sexually questionable | Rukeyser speaking |
| 1:45 - 1:50 | Besides, very few people do it. And it's all lies, you know. | Rukeyser speaking |
| 1:52 - 2:28 | There's a company in the United States that's made a fortune on the premise that everybody takes a snapshot at some time or other. And I would like to ask you--and this is apart from all critical standards, all criteria, all faculty and institutions, apart from any of that--I would like to ask a question: how many of you here has ever written a poem, would you put up your hands please? | Rukeyser speaking |
| 2:31 | Thank you. | Rukeyser speaking |
| 2:34 - 3:19 | I'm always nervous before I ask the question. I ask the question, now, in all rooms, no matter how few or many people there are, and if the universities would generally look around to see if the basketball team is there, but there's always the moment of silence, and looking around first. And then, generally, quite slowly, almost all the hands go up. Maybe four or five do not put up their hands. And if I wait around afterwards, and with any luck and favorable wins, the four or five people come up to me and will say something like: I was fifteen, it was a love poem, it stank. | Rukeyser speaking |
| 3:23 - 3:58 | The thing is, it's a human activity; we all do it. We lie about it, you know, and they lie about it to us. And, thanks now to the young, the poets, maybe, a few other people one could name together, maybe we don't lie so much-- so much as we used to. Maybe we don't lie about this anymore. | Rukeyser speaking |
| 3:58 | Maybe we don't lie about sex, maybe we don't lie about poetry. They seem to lie a great deal about politics instead. It seems to shift around. | Rukeyser speaking |
| 4:07 - 4:30 | But, there are these, and the fact is: we all write poems. It is something we do. We come to this part of experience: You get a very, very rainy evening; why do poeple come and listen to poems? Or you've got some marvelous summer night; why do people come and listen to poems? | Rukeyser speaking |
| 4:30 - 5:24 | It's partly out of curiosity and looking at the person and I go to see: What is that breathing behind, what is that heartbeat, the breathing goes against the heartbeat and these rhythms are set up, and the involuntary muscles and you see the person do it but beyond that, something is what we called shared--something is arrived at--we come to something with almost unmediated that is the poem among us, between us, there, we're reaching each other, you're giving me whatever silence you are giving me and it comes to me with great strength, your silence. | Rukeyser speaking |
| 5:26 | Somebody said "primadona," you know, or I'm going give this to the audience and the conductor cause that's what you think--you're going to get it from the audience. | Rukeyser speaking |
| 5:38 | That's where it comes from, in a funny way. | Rukeyser speaking |
| 5:47 - 6:14 | So, this mediation, it is not a description, it is not only the music and it, although certainly the reinforcement of sound-- the sound climbing up and finally reaching a place, the last word; the sound that begins with the first breathing, the breath of the title. | Rukeyser speaking |
| 6:16 - 6:50 | Keats' doing "Ode to a Nightingale." We hardly ever say "ode." Nobody says "nightingale." But Keats, having said that, never has to say it again. It's a bird. You find it in these things. But, from the beginning--from the first moment--that is, the first breath, the thing that is made as, suggestion, breath, what my life has been, whatever that is- what your lives have been. This is a very short one called "Song." | Rukeyser speaking |
| 8:15 - 9:25 | This is called "The Poem As Mask." It's for another poem--a big Orpheus poem that I wrote a long time ago--and it had the acting out. The acting out the women on the mountain after the murder, the pieces of the man scattered about the top of the mountain, the slow coming together of the pieces as God. And I realized, long after, when I came to this newest book, "Speed of Darkness", that this was a mask--that I did not want any more of this. You know how it is. It happens to undergraduates. Say, it happens to the thing that was just before, and you see girls acting very childish, and trading on it, and thinking they're still thirteen and able to influence their father. And it's been used up, used up. It's served its purpose back there, but it isn't that anymore. And these, phases of being, "The Poem As Mask," Orpheus. | Rukeyser speaking |
| 11:06 | Air | Rukeyser speaking |
| 11:46 | Poem | Rukeyser speaking |
| 14:03 | Anemone | Rukeyser speaking |
| 14:49 | For my son | Rukeyser speaking |
| 17:27 | This is called "Orgy" | Rukeyser speaking |
| 19:17 - 19:45 | This is called "Bunk Johnson Blowing." If you know the early jazz men--the New Orleans Jazz men--you'll know Bunk Johnson and his trumpet. This is years later in San Francisco. "Bunk Johnson Blowing" and the dedication is in memory of Lead Belly, and his house on 59th Street. That's New York. | Rukeyser speaking |
| 21:20 | This is one called "Endless." | Rukeyser speaking |
| 23:01 - 23:56 | This last one of the first group is called "Clues." It's a Canadian, a British Columbia poem. It-is- how it is among the Thompson River Indians, or how it was in the anthropological moment. Imagine that flash of moment before it was broken up by this civilization, and we have caught up to some of this, without know what the hell it was, what this is. We are full of body painting, tattooing, emblems painted on ourselves, this is further. "Clues". | Rukeyser speaking |
| 25:58 - 26:18 | Here's one piece of a long poem. It's the last of a group called "Elegies," which one hardly dares name anything anymore. It's called "Elegy in Joy," and it's just a beginning piece. I wanted to do it tonight this way; I've never cut it up. | Rukeyser speaking |
| 28:30 - 29:56 | I thought of that very much at the beginning of this month in Mexico, and yesterday when I heard a story. It's a story of what happened at Christmas time. I was in Mexico--I wonder whether you saw it--I heard of it yesterday in New York as a little three line story in the back page of the New York Times, saying that the largest underground bomb-test was about to be held in Nevada--in the States--and to that test, the day before, came five scientist, in Utah--in the States--to protest, to picket, to try to stop it. And another person who protested, was Howard Hughes, who owns most of Las Vegas at this point, and had his own reasons for protesting. These protests did not stop the testing. The test was made. It was the largest underground made yet. Do you know this story? There was a crack, a crack in the earth, big enough, they said, the way we talk, big enough for the Empire State Building. | Rukeyser speaking |
| 29:56 - 30:52 | There's a crack there, and deep under the crust there's a three foot crack of some kind, and the rocks are still falling, and they say there will be earthquakes in various parts, unpredictable parts of the world as a result of the shift of the under-crust. Now last night, before I came here, on TV, late news in New York, they said that there'd been a quake in the Fiji Islands. I have no idea what the relations between these things are,=. I give it to you simply; that something has happened to shift the under-crust, there will be unpredictable results. This is under the ground. The way we are bound to each other, we are all so bound to each other through the air, and the fall out has come over Canada. This is also a part of the story that I heard yesterday, and you, I can see by your nods, you know this part of the story. | Rukeyser speaking |
| 30:52 - 33:32 | People were saying one thing, and then the other, about why don't we do this, why don't they do that--part of the story is that maybe nothing will fall because the Russians also wish to make underground tests. It's part of the ways in which we are bound to each other. I'll give you that. In Mexico, we are bound under the ground, over the ground, in every way there is. In Mexico, though the stories of what really happened to the students in October, and the stories of people-- of many students --were killed and the police were among the crowd, and the police wore one white glove or tied a handkerchief around their right hand, and when the helicopters came over, these white hands were put up that said "don't shoot us, we're police.” Many students were shot, and they say in Mexico City that the bodies were incinerated, and no reports were made and no count was made. And these are the ways in which we are bound, too. And yes, I have been translating Octavio Paz, and Eikelof is another such poet, but Paz--the end of one of Octavio's poems--was printed on this issue of the University Student's Journal of the University of Mexico, with the account of September, October, November, December. And the poem ends like this in English. It's not as good, I warn you, these translations are a folly on a madness on a stupidity and at the same time one has to do it. As work to which one is driven, out of love and gratitude, and also out a motive not so noble as any of that. During the times in which one cannot write poems, it is wonderful to have something one cares about out in front of one, and work with it that way. And it's the thing, not spinning out of oneself in those times, but having something out in front. This is the end of the- of a great poem of Octavio Paz's called "A Broken Jar.” And jar, of course--water jar--is something quite different in Mexico. We say 'jar.’ 'jug.’ something like that. It isn't in the thing we use every day, in Mexico, it's every day; it's that kind of broken jar. | Rukeyser speaking |
| 34:37 | These are some poems, since my last book, and I don't know whether they are finished. They may be finished. The next book that these will be in will be called Breaking Open. This is a short one called "Martin Luther King." | Rukeyser speaking |
| 35:47 - 37:26 | This is a poem I found a long time ago-- you probably have found it in the same way. It's on the back of a one of the Goga water colours. It's a piece of poem without any heading, without any signature. I didn't know what it was, and it stopped me, and it stayed in me, and I tried to turn it into English, and I couldn't do it. And I finally found out what it was and I finally turned it into English. It's a poem by Charles Maurice, who is hardly read--you know him? No. He's one of those people around Gauguin, and I said well, 'you can't print anything like that, people,' and then "2001" was written and released, and "2001" has stargate, starbaby, the whole thing, and I put the name "Next" on this and I'm reading it to you partly for itself, but partly because one line of it is something I used in a poem I wrote when the same thing happened to many of us. The Olympics committee wrote to us and asked for poems, you know, for the games, or for the times of the games, or for something. And one wasn't exactly going to do that, but there was something that could be said, and so on. Anyway, this is the Maurice, and I've called it "Next". | Rukeyser speaking |
| 38:21 | And this poem, using one line of that was what I said to Mexico. It's called "Voices." | Rukeyser speaking |
| 40:01 | The last poem I'll read this evening is a group. The group is called "The Speed of Darkness." | Rukeyser speaking |
| 40:12 | They're short poems and I'll just pause between poems. There should be numbers doing up in back of me. One, two, three. I'll just pause. "The Speed of Darkness." | Rukeyser speaking |
| 0:47 - 0:54 | Audience applauding | Audience |
| 1:43 | Audience laughter | Audience |
| 2:28 | Audience laughter | Audience |
| 3:19 - 3:23 | Audience laughter | Audience |
| 4:05 | Audience laughter | Audience |
| 8:11 | Audience chuckles | Audience |
| 10:56 | Audience cough | Audience |
| 10:58 | Audience cough | Audience |
| 29:31 | Audience laughter | Audience |
| 46:12 - 46:37 | Audience applaudes | Audience |
| 46:52 - 51:25 | Audience speaks quietly as recording continues | Audience |