Mine Connections

For the last three summers, I've taught at Bryn Mawr College's summer program for high school girls, Writing for College. Each summer, we teach Diane Gilliam Fisher's beautiful Kettle Bottom, a personal favorite and a masterpiece in poetry. Fisher's poems tell the story of a West Virginia mine town through a diverse array of voices and dialects. She explores the perspectives of children, wives, and the miners themselves with dignity and seemingly simple poetics, but her collection of poems is far from simple. Every summer, I experience anew Fisher's gift for narrative that subtly but steadily pulls me into her concerns and characters, and I delight in facilitating students' experiences of it. The epigraph to her collection comes from Muriel Rukeyser:

What do you want--a cliff over a city?
A foreland, sloped to sea and overgrown with roses?
These people live here.

Saturday night I flipped through my first issue of American Poet, and I was drawn in to Marilyn Hacker's essay on H.D., Gwendolyn Brooks, and Muriel Rukeyser, "Three American Women Poets in the First Century of World Wars." At the end of the essay, as is the case in all of American Poet's essays, there is a poem by each of the featured poets (including the author herself). The Brooks poem, "the rites for Cousin Vit," is probably my favorite poem of hers, and the Rukeyser, "Gauley Bridge," is my first true introduction to her poetry. I read it with a quality of attention that I wish I brought to more of my life. How removed she is through it, how cold many of her observations. Then, the final stanza, in which she asserts herself and simultaneously calls upon her readers to pay attention to their own reading of these descriptions. It is the same stanza quoted above. How appropriate that Fisher brings Rukeyser into her Kettle Bottom; the women share a concern in their poems for the devastation of mining towns, but even more remarkably, they share a gift for unraveling a reader's judgment of the places and people they evoke. We become a part of their poems when we give them our attention, which they skillfully command. I can't wait to find more Rukeyser to read.

On another note, The New Verse News has published another of my poems today, "Driving the Slow Way to Buxton, NC." There have been some interesting poems there of late; check them out.