In 1938 Muriel Rukeyser said in a radio interview, “The actual world, not some fantastic structure that has nothing to do with reality, must provide the material for modern poetry . . . .” She had just published her second collection, U.S. 1., and was talking about “The Book of the Dead,” a long poem that explores the suit brought against Union Carbide by miners and the families of miners who became ill from silicosis after working in a tunnel under conditions Union Carbide clearly knew to be unsafe. The poem incorporates congressional reports; interviews that Rukeyser, then a young journalist, conducted with survivors and the family members of miners who died; and other public documents concerning the mining disaster. When the radio interviewer compared the poem to Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology, Rukeyser countered, “What I have done is to use a contemporary statistical method.” She is referring not just to the inclusion in the poem of stock reports and salary information but also to her use of testimony from Congressional Subcommittee and community hearings in poems “spoken” by community members. In other words, Rukeyser makes use of the documentary form in her poem as a way to bring “the actual world” into her poem.

In the 1930’s documentary photography and the social documentary film were genres vigorously inventing themselves in America. A team of photographers, including Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and others, was hired by the Farm Security Administration to photograph scenes from the Depression—images of poverty and the results of drought and poor working conditions—as a justification for New Deal relief programs. Leftist filmmakers made short documentaries of labor disputes and strikes, breadlines and the lives of longshoremen. In Documentary Expression and Thirties America, William Stott says, “We understand a historical document intellectually, but we understand a human document emotionally.” Or, as Marvin Bell says in his poem “Cable News Night,”

If you want to know how it was,
make the siren into the shape of a man
or woman.

If the FSA photographs brought the shape of a man or woman, starkly and movingly, into focus, it was in the immediate service of propaganda: to engage the emotions in order to change the law. And the agenda of leftist documentary shorts such as “Workers on the Waterfront” was, to quote Prairie Miller, to “become solidifying agents of political education, aiming to inform, to build morale, to agitate.” But what of a photograph or a film that aspired at once to reality and to art? For “a young art” is what, in 1949, in The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser calls the social documentary of the 30’s, looking back fondly and with admiration: “They were not tricks, the documentary methods . . . . They were functions of real information in real art.” Then she offers this criticism:

The flaw was this: that, working with a set of durable principles, the small groups making documentary films allowed themselves the luxury of feeling that the principles alone would hold. They did not go on creating.

Real information in real art. How to bring art into interaction with reality without diminishing either the art or the reality? How can art document a moment in time, or make use, as Rukeyser claims to do, of a “contemporary statistical method”?

My family has regular arguments about whether or not you can believe statistics—any statistics—you hear on the news or in a tabloid or the New York Times or the Arizona Republic or out of the mouth of a politician. And yet “fact” means something pretty plain: “the quality of existing or being real.” “Something known to exist or to have happened.” Of her “Migrant Mother,” 1936 photograph of Florence Owens Thompson, a pea-picker working in California during the Great Depression, Dorothea Lange wrote, “I did not ask her name or her history. . . . I did not approach the tents and shelters of other stranded pea-pickers. It was not necessary; I knew I had recorded the essence of my assignment.” Recorded, she writes—to record, to provide permanent evidence about past events. Is the careworn face of that migrant worker, thirty-two-year-old pea-picker Florence Owens Thompson, a fact, or has it been transformed by lights and darks, by framing, by a slight retouching of the woman’s hand, into evidence, or beyond evidence into . . . something else? Does its lasting quality make it art? Does its artistry make it more or less real?

“Art is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way to affect the senses or the emotion” (en.wikipedia.org.wiki/Art).

“ART is a proprietary image file format used mostly by the America Online (AOL) client software” (en.wikipedia.org.wiki/Art).

“. . . art is the third album from the Australian rock band, Regurgitator, released in 1999” (en.wikipedia.org.wiki/Art).

Muriel Rukeyser, what would you think of letting Wikipedia have the final word? Is fact in art a fabrication, or a new creation, half-fact, half-poet? If we begin with the facts, can we even begin to comprehend them? Marvin Bell’s “Cable” poem concludes, “We are such minds as have no mind to / linger, though we slow down at the scene.” Can a poem act as human siren whose mouthings arrest the moment? The reader?

I’d like to consider these questions by looking at one section of Muriel Rukeyser’s Book of the Dead, and Khaled Mattawa’s “On the Difficulty of Documentation,” a poem on Palestinian refugee camps from his 2010 collection Tocqueville. I’m interested in how each poem addresses, departs from, makes free of, and/or somehow responds to an “actual world,” to some of its facts that most trouble and alarm and baffle.

By 1935, an unagreed-upon number of miners had succumbed to silicosis after working on the digging of a tunnel for a hydroelectric power plant at Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. The historical marker at the West Virginia site, replacing an older one that celebrated the “vast water power” generated by the New River Canyon, notes “109 admitted deaths,” and adds, “Congressional hearing placed toll at 476 for 1930-35.” Martin Cherniak, author of a book-length study of the disaster, puts the number (an estimation) at 764. Estimated figures from other sources range from 700 to over 1,000 deaths. In “Absalom,” one the testimony poems of The Book of the Dead, a mother speaks of some of these victims, in particular of the death of her youngest son. The title of the section takes its name from the second book of Samuel, not from the details of Absalom’s hapless power struggles with his father but from the father’s moving expression of grief at Absalom’s death: “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!” Yet Rukeyser’s “Absalom” begins as a plain-spoken monologue. The speech is clearly addressed to a listener, but the listener is not acknowledged, and so the premise is that there is nothing between us and the mother, just as, in some documentary films, the interviewer stays off-camera. The poem begins here:

I first discovered what was killing these men.
I had three sons who worked with their father in the tunnel:
Cecil, aged 23, Owen, aged 21, Shirley, aged 17.

This is the prose-not-poetry voice of Emma Jones, one of the community members who testified before the House Subcommittee about the progression of the disease in her husband and sons. Her recital is stark; if her voice itself were a film, the film would be grainy, in black and white. She describes in plain, unlyrical detail the work her sons and husband did in the mine,

                         not steady work,
for the mines were not going much of the time.
A power Co. foreman learned that we made home brew,
he formed the habit of dropping in evenings to drink,
persuading the boys and my husband—
give up their jobs and take this other work.
It would pay them better.

In effect, we’re overhearing an interview; the voice seems authentic and almost laconic. She then turns back to son number three: “Shirley was my youngest son; the boy. / He went into the tunnel.” Fact. He went into the tunnel. No qualification, no lament. Real information, yes. But—real art? Then an utterly different voice interrupts the mother’s tearless recital:

My heart    my mother    my heart    my mother
My heart    my coming into being.

This italicized passage and the three other italicized passages later in the poem are slightly altered excerpts from the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, a kind of how-to manual on passage to and through the afterlife, a book of instructions, hymns and spells. The voice seems to speak as the dead son, speaks in counterpoint to the plainness, honesty and directness of the mother’s voice, speaks as a lyrical distillation of her unvoiced sorrow. The illusion of documentary is deliberately broken, the plain-spoken juxtaposed with the heightened articulation of human sorrow.

At first the mother’s voice seems unchanged by the second voice. She goes on speaking as if the interruption had not occurred: for her it has not occurred: “My husband is not able to work. / He has it, according to the doctor.” Yet she holds her own; if the parallelism of the Egyptian passage has an accumulating power, her voice at its plainest moments has a devastating precision: “I saw the dust in the bottom of the tub.” For me, her voice at such points resembles that of a speaker in one of the old ballads, of which Gordon Gerould gives this now-classic definition:

A ballad is a folk-song that tells a story with stress on the crucial situation, tells it by letting the action unfold itself in event and speech, and tells it objectively with little comment or intrusion of personal bias.

In old ballads, much of the emotion and emphasis is imparted by way of small “facts”—the pathos of the condemned Mary Hamilton’s ascent to the gallows swells when “the heel came aff her shee” (shoe); the drowned sons of “The Wife at Usher’s Well” return from paradise for one last night at home wearing hats made of birch; the son speaking in “Lord Randall” reveals without comment that he has just eaten “eels fried in a pan” by which (he doesn’t say this) we discover his lover has poisoned him. The mother’s blunt reference to “dust at the bottom of the tub” has the same potency and pathos, and so does the litany of names, also a balladic technique:

There was Shirley, and Cecil, Jeffrey and Oren,
Raymond Johnson, Clev and Oscar Anders . . .

And yet, as the Egyptian voice comes in, and in again, with its formality of diction and its stately rhetoric, as here—

My heart is mine in the place of hearts,
They gave me back my heart, it lies in me.

and here—

I have gained mastery over my heart
I have gained mastery over my two hands
I have gained mastery over the waters
I have gained mastery over the river.

—the mother’s voice too begins to be transformed, as here, in its momentary rising from listing to statement:

the towns of Glen Ferris, Alloy, where the white rock lies,
six miles away; Vanetta, Gauley Bridge,
Gamoca, Lockwood, the gullies,
the whole valley is witness.

Something of the lyrical quality of the “mastery” passage seems to have made possible the mother’s poetic reflection that “here the white rock lies,” and with the line “the whole valley is witness,” the mother turns away from factual narrative to make a statement by which her utterance rises, if only for a moment, to eloquent commentary. As for the “Egyptian” passage quoted above, the irony that the son has died as a direct result of human attempts to gain mastery over the waters doesn’t diminish the beauty and yearning of the Egyptian text in its expression of a belief that the soul may be released from its helplessness and suffering. The son’s voice comes in one final time:

I open out a way, they have covered my sky with crystal—

another irony residing here, in the crystal-like quality of the tunnel’s deadly silicone—

I come forth by day, I am born a second time,
I force a way through, and I know the gate
I shall journey over the earth among the living.

The rebirth whose original context (in the Egyptian Book of the Dead) is the Field of Reeds in the afterlife becomes another kind of rebirth in the mother’s last words, which end the poem:

He shall not be diminished, never; I shall give a mouth to my son.

The simplicity of “He went into the tunnel” gives way to the formality (“I shall”) and the heightened diction (“diminished”) of the second voice. Rukeyser has the mother say “mouth” rather than “voice,” a choice both more practical (to speak one needs a mouth) and more heartbreaking (the son no longer possesses a mouth) and certainly more lyrical and more emotionally charged than “voice.” The metaphor articulates what the fact—the dust at the bottom of the tub—could not. The poem begins with the power of simple testimony and it ends not in lament—“O my son Absalom, my son, my son”—but, to borrow Rich’s phrase, in the “will to change”: the decision to speak for, to be a mouth, not the mouth of the river or the tunnel, to be the living mouth of the son. Evidence is an essential part of the mother’s power as witness, but her metaphorical utterance is the place where private grief finds its public expression in a powerful emotional appeal. An appeal heard not by congressman or the lawyers for Union Carbide but by us, though I can’t explain or calculate or generate reliable statistics for exactly who that is.

Real information in real art. Here, just for a little perspective, and maybe for the sheer force of its agenda, is another attempt to talk of the Gauley Bridge tragedy. It appeared in 1935 in People’s Press, a radical labor newspaper in Detroit:

Their only gravestones [are] cornstalks waving in the wind, their shrouds [are] the overalls in which they died, 169 tunnel workers killed at Gauley Bridge were tossed into trenches in this field at Summerville, W. Va., to rot. As they keeled over in the death tunnel, one at a time or several in a day, choked to death by silicosis, they were hauled 40 miles to Summerville and dumped into the grave the same day. No identification, no coffins. The company paid the undertaker $50 a piece to bury them. A wife who came tearfully to claim the remains of her loved one was quietly driven away. There was no way in which his body could be found. They were all victims of America’s worst industrial disaster. Then government officials, newspapers and others conspired to keep this story from the public knowing that soon the witnesses would all be dead. The 26 foremen are already dead. In Gauley Bridge, Town of the Living Dead, men once strong and hearty waste away while loved ones grimly await their death.

Of course this is purple prose. In the guise of letting the story “tell” itself, the writer breathes outrage into the language: how else can we feel but outraged to read of this town, whose citizens, having emerged from the “death tunnel,” have been “tossed into trenches . . . to rot,” have “keeled over,” been “choked to death," or, if still dying, are the “Living Dead,” whose survivors bear witness “tearfully”? You can find the article I’m quoting from in the archives of the Department of Labor, in Box 59, Jan.-April 1936—or you can, with a little trouble, find it online. To be stored in the memory as well as the heart—to last, rather than to cause immediate action—is not its intention.

Real information in real art? Here is a description of a refugee camp from the CBC News website called “Anatomy of a refugee camp”:

Camps are usually located on the edges of towns or cities in a secure area, away from the border, war zones and landmines. The camp should be set up on sloped terrain that provides natural drainage. It should also be away from breeding sites of insects that can carry disease.

It’s clean and plain, this description. Its intention, to impart information. It takes no position. It doesn’t aspire to art, though Khaled Mattawa might easily have inserted the passage into any one of the poems of Tocqueville, a collection Yusef Komunyakaa describes as “a collage of lyrical inferences.” Mattawa brings together material from a hodgepodge of sources, including (of course) the Internet, the Qur’an, Walt Whitman and Adrienne Rich and Robert Hass, Tocqueville’s Democracy, Vijay Prashad’s The Karma of Black Folks, and . . . I’ll stop there, though the list goes fascinatingly on. And here are just a few of the many figures who make their appearance (brief or recurring) in the book: John Yoo, Saddam Hussein, Anna Nicole Smith, a nameless 24-year-old unemployed man from Somali, Shakespeare’s Caliban, Viet Dinh, James Brown. And the list of humans sirens on.

The poem I’m going to look at, “On the Difficulty of Documentation,” addresses, from its title on, the problem that Rukeyser brings up in her criticism of the documentary film—how to navigate between principle, information and art. The poem begins,

The village women carry the moon on their heads.

Each carrying a piece.

Or each carrying her own moon,
the jugs of white stoneware in Myrtle Winter’s photo.

The scene, which we assume is a direct description of something actual, turns out in line four to be a description of a photograph. A—document? A piece of art? Is the poem about Myrtle Winter’s thirty years of photographs documenting Palestinian refugee camps? Is it about the camps themselves? About the act of writing about them, or about the act of writing about photographs about them? Myrtle Winter, writes Sally Bland,

arrived in Jerusalem in 1951, as a photographer for “Life” magazine. She was so affected by what she saw in the Palestinian refugee camps that she soon quit her job and became Director of UNRWA’s Information Center. For 30 years she photographed the tragedy and the daily lives of the refugees, as well as training new photographers and compiling a photo archive.

In I Would Have Smiled: Photographing the Palestinian Refugee Experience, more than a hundred of her photographs have been collected and paired with responses by various essayists and artists (including Mattawa). In the preface, Widar Kaward says of Winter’s photographs, “They were intended to document moments in human history when the whole world turned a blind eye to fellow and equal human beings. It was the world’s denial of this tragedy that Myrtle wanted to capture.” These descriptions make reference to documentation, archiving, and the intention of eliciting a social and political response. What Mattawa takes on in his poem, starting with the title and his own imagistic impression of one of the photographs, is the means and the difficulty, complexity, and maybe even the questionability of the means by which art addresses such things.

But let me go back for a minute to the poem’s opening lines. Am I off, is my ear faulty, that I hear the echo of Randall Jarrell?—

The saris go by me from the embassies.

Cloth from the moon. Cloth from another planet.
They look back at the leopard like the leopard.

Jarrell’s poem, “The Woman at the Washington Zoo,” is about “otherness,” from the point of view of a woman longing for otherness, longing to trade in her office-wear for sari-cloth, for skin the “sunlight dyes.” I don’t know whether Mattawa is consciously alluding to Jarrell here, whether Jarrell’s rhythms and image were called up irresistibly by the Winter photo, but, intentional or not, for me the Jarrell poem has a palimpsest-like presence in the opening of this poem: women who pass, distant, intent on their business, wholly unaware of being observed by the distant observer, are ghosted behind women wearing “headscarves radiating against twilight. / Each a planet then, rejoining a galaxy on the run” while the observer is twice-removed, first, from the women themselves, and last, from the scene in a photograph. If Jarrell’s poem focuses on the speaker’s yearning for change, for some way to step out of her body, out of her own predictable situation, Mattawa’s poem stops short at the distance itself:

I recall: Such people have no time for beauty.
I recall: Beauty is one of the great conversation stoppers of all time.

The poem, in other words, turns back on itself, questioning any assumption that the lives of others, especially these others enduring hardship and poverty without comment or lament, offer any sort of revelation or escape for an audience. Selfhood, for the moment, just doesn’t exist as an issue. This art “in quest and question of itself” asks what the poet is up to in this act of artful observation. “Evidence,” Mattawa says, “is plentiful that the twilight these women walk is a betrayal”:

The child whose skin is a crumbled sack around the muscles of his legs
     and buttocks.

Look at how his mother’s beauty is fleeting.

Beauty as a value having already been called into question, so is evidence as a value, or at least the nature of evidence: the documentary quality of the word is in contrast immediately with, yes, the beauty of a phrase like “the twilight these women walk.” And, to backtrack a few lines, I must not neglect to mention that Mattawa has added to his “evidence” another kind of “document”—an excerpt from sixteenth-century English lyric poet Thomas Wyatt, introduced by another line describing the women in Winter’s photograph:

See how light spills into their dark robes—

     In thin array after a pleasant guise,
     When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall.

He even includes the poet’s name in parentheses at the end of that last line. The Wyatt poem, “They Flee From Me,” is a poem employing and then reversing a conventional hunting metaphor representing the male seduction of a female. Mattawa cleverly picks up the word “flee” (“They flee from me that sometime did me seek”) for use in a sadder context in the line, “Look at how his mother’s beauty is fleeing.” The women carrying stoneware jugs on their heads are juxtaposed with Wyatt’s gentlewoman whose “loose gown from her shoulders did fall”—the Palestinian refugees are not thinking of love or seduction, they are not thinking of beauty even as “their beauty is fleeing.” Then—and maybe at this point I should begin calling this poem a collage—Mattawa juxtaposes the careworn faces of the refugee women (“Look at the faces that evoke an age-old deferral”) with a passage from a political poem by Bertolt Brecht, twentieth-century German poet and playwright:

Alas, we
     who wished to lay the
     foundations of kindness
could not ourselves be kind. . . .

But, you, when at last it
     comes to pass . . .

do not judge us too harshly. (Brecht)

This passage is followed by a line that is an amalgam of Wyatt and Brecht: “Do not judge us for this strange fashion of forsaking (Wyatt) because / what beauty does is almost a crime (Brecht).” The names in parentheses (and, too, the voluminous endnotes for this and many of the poems in the book) scream, “these are quotations! Take notice!” This is a poem in question not merely of itself but of poetry. The most famous lines from the Brecht poem (“To Posterity”) are not quoted here but are clearly in the mind of the poet: “Ah, what an age it is / When to speak of trees is almost a crime / For it is a kind of silence about injustice!” The argument about/against/in question of lyric poetry is engaged not merely in this poem but throughout Tocqueville (though Mattawa himself has written lyric poetry). The poem turns again to photography, first in question of its morality “and what the photographer’s eyes take from them must be a kind of theft too—”—and then, in defiance of the question, back to the photos of the refugee camp, images that are surreal rather than documentary:

into refugee tents weighed down with thirst

toward children whose shaved heads gleam and men whose faces
     are horoscopes of dejection?

And what of that look, and the all too human?

How can art honorably/accurately break “a kind of silence about injustice”? Mattawa neither answers the question nor allows it to keep him silent: he expresses skepticism about the ethics of photography; he transforms Winter’s documentary photographs into images that could have come from Merwin’s 1967 The Lice (“horoscopes of dejection”); he twists Wyatt’s lyrical poetry so that it comments on its own enterprise; he brings Wyatt and Brecht and their aesthetics into uncomfortable dialogue, himself confessing to a yearning (a weakness? a loyalty?) for beauty:

To be enthralled

     and fain know what she hath deserved (Wyatt)

     the squalor that makes the brow grow stern
     the just anger that turns a voice harsh (Brecht)

Enthrallment? Just anger? The women go on doing what they are doing, the speaker narrating—

And I recall how
     They flee from me, gentle tame and meek
          how they range
     Busily seeking with continuous change (Wyatt)

Who gets the last word—Wyatt? The poet (who has rearranged and edited Wyatt)? The self-consciousness of parenthesis? The women themselves flee the seducer, the photograph, the poet, who himself goes on, he too “busily seeking with continuous change.” That is as good a description as any for Mattawa’s serpentine and energetic progress through the poem, through “the difficulty of documentation.”

How does the actual world come into the actual poem, and what is lost in the translation? Can a poem be a siren articulating some truth of the moment? Or must it be, as Reginald Gibbons has described the New Critical definition, “an instance of graceful tension in which paradox was set in amber, so to speak, rather than lived?” A passage from Louise Kertesz’s The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser gets as close as anyone to articulating the paradox:

The scientist Jacob Bronowski stood in the pond at Auschwitz for television viewers in the 1970’s and picked up a fistful of sludge, explaining that into that pond were flushed the ashes of four million people. He urged his audience to adopt the humble attitude of the atomic scientists who were discovering, ironically, just as Nazism was flourishing, that no certainty is possible, that no dogmatism is justified. What is important, said, Bronowski, holding his fistful of sludge, is “that we touch human beings.” Rukeyser’s theory of poetry is essentially that it is a touching . . . .

Both Rukeyser and Mattawa explore the distances between subject and poem, fact and art, documentary remove and passionate human response. “If you want to know how it was,” says Marvin Bell, “make the siren into the shape of a man / or woman.” Both Rukeyser and Mattawa acknowledge the distances between us and those sirens, and they listen. “Take my hand,” says Muriel Rukeyser in another one of her poems. “Speak to me.”

An earlier version of this essay was delivered as a lecture at Vermont College of Fine Arts in January 2011.