OK.
I wanted to talk a little bit about The Book of the Dead,
which, shortly, very briefly, is a story about industrial abuse.
I mentioned this to the class earlier today.
Miners in West Virginia died of silica inhalation.
The Union Carbide, may God never forgive them,
just basically never compensated them, let them die.
They knew this was going to happen in a sense.
And because many of these miners were Black, essentially
they figured they might as well just use them to death.
This is the 1930s.
And a young poet, Muriel Rukeyser,
wrote this poem, which is made up of 20 pieces.
And it is really--
in many ways it's a--
Eliot's "Waste Land" is an invocation of a spiritual
crisis perhaps coupled with a sense of almost a, I can't say
a sexual crisis, but the image is of fructify,
of impregnation-- or actually the reverse of it,
the images of impotence are really--
meaningless sex and impotence are very important moments
in there.
So in a sense, we've become a spiritually impotent society
is sort of what "The Waste Land" says
in a very dumbed-down version.
And in some ways--
so this is where we need spirituality.
To some degree, it's Christian spirituality.
But also Eliot is open to-- he ends
with a passage from the Hindu Upanishads,
from the Sanskrit Upanishads.
So it's not necessarily Christian spirituality,
which what was his choice in the end,
but spirituality in general.
In many of these same techniques with greater documentation,
with focus on there, if Eliot is working
with the mythological stories and not so much the lived
experiences, even though he has some document--
there there's a moment of a carbuncular guy,
a guy with lots of pimples having
a quickie with a young woman, and an Armenian raisin
dealer who was trying to preposition a young man.
So these are the things he steals
from the contemporary London.
But the rest is Cleopatra.
There is Tiresias.
Here we don't have much history.
We have the lived experiences.
So in essence, it's a democratization
of who the heroes or victims are.
But also, it is the emphasis on capitalist exploitation
of people.
And she brings many similar techniques
but puts them in a very realistic--
well, I would say maybe Marxist-inspired poetics.
And so it's a very--
it's highly experimental for its time,
remains challenging, but also it does
the work of telling us the tragedy that
happened to these miners.
And so you have a lot of sections are in tercets,
and they look beautiful, just seamless tercets.
Then you have a lot of uneven stanzas,
a lot of capitalization.
You have an interview format documentary.
You have a lot of passages that are in--
she can write very dense, modernist poetry,
but also there are passages in just people's normal speeches,
a mix of quatrains and tercets.
There's one passage-- because the silica is a source of glass
or being used in glass but also alloy in the making of it,
it was also used for X-rays.
It was right around the time--
I mean, essentially the thing that
killed these people was instrumental in actually
pinning the case on Union Carbide
because they needed X-rays of them.
And Union Carbide didn't want to pay for the X-rays.
They didn't want people to have X-rays to show that they
actually--
it wasn't just pneumonia or because these Black guys
hung out at night in the cold, it's
because they had something in them.
And so it is the use of this technology with some of that
silica involved-- or glass is--
she notices that irony.
She's also thinking about the camera,
and what the camera sees, and what it does,
and how it captures, and how it is benign and inclusive.
So she had these what you call "meta-poetic--" I don't know,
meta-visual, if you will, because she's thinking about
the act of seeing.
So not to overburden you with it,
but it is a great example of what a modern long poem does
in the variety of textual strategies it uses.
She has a stock quote in the middle of that part.
She has congressional hearings.
The senators are talking.
She has a bill, a congressional bill that's quoted.
Sometimes she has the prose language--
I mean, issue of speed is very important.
Obviously she has the prose language in there.
But then she feels like she has to speed it up,
and so she interrupts that text and somehow reverses it
for tonalities, for irony, for drama, et cetera.
So it is a great example of also the range
of things that can be done to poetry or to normal speech
to speed it up into be poetry.
So I highly recommend that you read it
as an example of a model of a long poem that has been
a point of reference for me.