Tag Archives: Muriel Rukeyser

POETS Day! “Against Romanticism” by Kingsley Amis

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

My son started school today, August 8. That’s absurdly early. Back in 2012 Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan tried to start a conversation about extending the school year by shortening summer vacation. There were arguments about students forgetting lessons between grades and valuable time wasted getting them back up to speed.

The conversation never went anywhere, but it wasn’t meant to. The Department of Education being a bureaucracy, the lack of pushback against an idea most didn’t take seriously meant no impediment to its inertia. So here we are.

I’m dying to say something snarky like “The more time kids are kept away from our public school system the better,” but I’m afraid, especially if I point to political speeches from both sides of the aisle over the course of decades lamenting the sorry state of education in America or mention unacceptable test scores impervious to decades of hand wringing to bolster my point, my friends with a wife/husband/son/daughter who’s a teacher might think I’m blaming a political party or theory of education or even a bloated nameless bureaucracy when really I’m saying that the entire decrepit mess is the fault of their wife/husband/son/daughter whose been trying to score Brownie points with that “I have to buy or sell (or whatever* it is she’s doing) art supplies with my own money,” sob story since We had a President who knew how to throw out an opening pitch.

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POETS Day! Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

It’s a stormy afternoon where I’m writing from. Loud and creeping grey. Not the kind of rain you sing in. There’ll be no park strolling or quarry swimming today. Flashes through the window tempt the unwary with the notion that the workplace is more sanctuary than prison, but that’s a lie. These are the POETS Days that try men’s souls. Freedom is won. It’s an assertion. Step out the door. Face the elements. Start your weekend early. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Be Lieutenant Dan, but in homage to the mighty acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse?

***

This is the most audacious landscape. The gangster’s
stance with his gun smoking and out is not so
vicious as this commercial field, its hill of glass.
– Muriel Rukeyser, “The Book of the Dead: Alloy”

In 1930, Rinehart and Dennis contracted to build a tunnel through Gauley Mountain near Gauley Bridge, West Virginia for New Kanawha Power Company, a subsidiary of the Union Carbide and Carbon Company, to divert the New River towards a hydroelectric plant.

Of the five thousand men employed to work on the project, some twenty-nine hundred toiled underground in ten to fifteen hour shifts. The project, completion estimated at four years from ground break, was finished in eighteen months. The mountain was composed of remarkably pure silica, so in compliance with safety regulations only wet drilling, a process that cut down on breathable silica in the air, was strictly adhered to when inspectors were on site. The rest of the time they dry drilled.

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