Write Your Hero - Maia, 17 — Muriel Rukeyser

Muriel Rukeyser was a real “poet of witness,” as coined by the poet Carolyn Forché. Rukeyser wrote The Book of the Dead in 1938 about the Hawk’s Nest disaster in West Virginia, and fought for workers’ rights through her poetry. 

The Hawk’s Nest disaster was one of the worst industrial mining disasters in American history, and it happened not far from where I live, but I never knew about it until I read Rukeyser.

Rukeyser was a Jewish woman writing poetry about the rural South in a way that’s honest about the area’s failures, as well as its love and grit. It was shocking and wonderful to find someone writing about my home who was also a Jewish woman like me. There are not many Jews in the rural Virginias, and there aren’t many writers who sing on the page like Muriel Rukeyser. She used her poetry to cast light on the injustices caused by corporate greed, and documented the harrowing deaths of miners due to silica. She championed the legal efforts of the miners, wrote down their doctor’s visits, their last words. Rukeyser was the voice of a small worker’s movement, the movement to right the wrongs of the Hawk’s Nest disaster. She did this by letting the miners speak for themselves, by treating docupoetics like serious journalism. 

The Book of the Dead is serious documentation, and yet still manages to be incredibly lyrical, experimental on the page, and, well, beautiful.

For the longest time, I wanted to leave my hometown, and the last thing I wanted to do was write about it. Rukeyser changed that for me, and I started writing about the dying train industry and the boarded-up stores, yes, but also the deer you can find on the mountains, the way the Appalachian Trail’s huge trees sway right before a storm. I want to document my town in all its complexities, in all its shifts and changes. The pandemic has already changed the face of my town, of what businesses turn their lights on, of how many people are sleeping on the street. Climate change has, too. Parks that never flooded now sit deep in water for days after it rained, and in the thick of summer, the only place cool enough to sit in outside is the top of a mountain, shaded by trees. Soon, the trees will not be cool enough to combat the temperatures, and then there will be nowhere to go. The home I knew last year, the home I could’ve documented then, has completely changed, and this will only accelerate with time.

Rukeyser maps out the roads and highways of West Virginia, navigating the mountains and valleys by car. Everything is connected to the land: the money, the injustices caused in the pursuit of that money, even the silica that kills the miners comes from the rock of the mountain itself. Rukeyser is a visitor to this place and this atrocity, and she never forgets that. These mountains are not hers. But what is a civic hero if not someone who could leave, and yet chooses to stay?

Before reading Rukeyser, I was having doubts about the role of poetry in our world today, of whether my poetry could have importance to anyone outside of myself. Was writing a purely narcissistic act? Was the empathy that writing builds real, or was it forgotten as soon as you closed the book? Discovering Rukeyser and docupoetics was discovering a way writing could be important, could be part of a real cause. Rukeyser interviewed the town of Gauley Bridge, West Virginia by digging up its injustices, its victims, and giving them pages and pages to document their stories, their coughing fits, the amount of times they woke up during the night.

It is my biggest hope to be like Rukeyser, to carry her conviction, her determination to reach justice for the miners of Hawk’s Nest. When I shut The Book of the Dead, I still felt my anger at the unethical, money-hungry mining corporation, the hurt of the sick and dying miners. It was then that I realized Rukeyser was heroic. She had carried her cause off the page. It was mine, now, mine to care for and yell about. I realized that I wanted to do that, I wanted to write like that, too, to be able to make people care. And that is the root of Rukeyser’s brilliance: to be heroic is to transmit care.