Rebecca Seiferle wrote:
>This url is better and you can read other files, like Rukeyser's for instance, so
>strange, a list of her poems and where published followed by comments such as
>the odd "Other poems by this author indicate she could not have written
>anything except in a period of disordered economics." or a kind of unintended
>praise (the second clause anyway) "her poetry contains no appeals to the
>proletariat and her symbols of revolt are imaginative".
>
>http://foia.fbi.gov/famous.htm
>
>Best,
>
>Rebecca
>
>
Some of this is almost funny. It moves me back to a time in which I was
alive but was uncomprehending. I mean, how much does anyone understand
at age 8, unless their adopted last name is Meeropol? Lucille Ball,
dangerous agent of a foreign power, turned in by someone who admitted to
her own membership but who just had to take someone else with her: that
WAS the price, wasn't it?--talk to save your own career and ass and then
lie about someone else's? Humphrey Bogart, having to defend himself to
a slimebag like Ed Sullivan. What I remember? Fear. Plain and
simple. Nobody in my family I KNOW of carried the infamous membership
card, but they came from a place (Russia and/or Poland) and age when the
promise of Freedom here was suspected to be a veneer. The pogrom starts
with one, it goes to all. I DO remember my father, apolitical,
irreligious, and self-absorbed, nevertheless inveighing against the
"goddamn McCarthy." And there were the Rosenbergs--I am sure several
people in my family who as children witnessed pogroms in Russian towns
fully expected the black horsemen to come down on us all in the Bronx in
1953.
Rukeyser as dangerous...probably less dangerous than Mandelstam and
Akhmatova because less endangered. At least for a few moments America
took a poet seriously. The Russians, Cardenal, so many others...no, I
don't feel like being taken out and shot this week, thank you, or sent
to the prison camp in Jacques Itch, Louisiana, or Gitmo, but it would be
nice to have acknowledged the collective danger we can present. Thank
you, Sam Hamill.
And of course how could this topic end but with some chunka vanity,
something I wrote a long time ago about what it felt like to be a kid
back in 1953--mark it "Good start needs work":
PREHISTORIC LANDSCAPE WITH VENTRILOQUIST
As middle age has aligned past and present,
caught up at last with me and them,
the voices of my dead, their dream-parade,
once harsh, becomes a consort--
and because we now are in nearer rooms,
blend toward a music made softer
by remembrance.
Long gone, their voices live only within me.
They are my history,
mine alone to tell,
so none of it is wholly true.
For mine is a single voice, sounding through
memory, replaying, distorting:
producing from one self-schooled voice a repertoire
of sighs, cries, imprecations, and laughter
fed through memory's synthetizer
that makes legacies even of the half-remembered...
of how my parents put me to bed at Aunt Rosie's,
on the cot in her sewing room,
of how I heard through the door, slightly ajar,
those voices I hear now:
my mother and father, Aunt Rosie, Uncle Aaron,
Julius their son, Roz his wife--
from two rooms away, all going in and out of Yiddish,
arguing, shouting, swearing about McCarthy,
about the Rosenbergs who'd lived round the corner,
had children--poor little orphans--Kenny's age,
names that meant nothing but that made me cry
because of how Cousin Julius spoke them;
Finally of drifting off to sleep,
of being shook awake by my father in the moonlight,
seeing the old Singer treadle sewing machine
next to the bed, black-gleaming in the moonlight
a stack of dinosaur bones looming over me,
reassembled now in the timeless skeletal shadows
of the past.
April 29, 1993/rev. 7/6/03
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
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