by Shelly Nixon, University of North Carolina at Asheville
download this essay: Personifying Tragedy
The power of the artist [is] to find and illuminate the profoundly human in the midst of chaos, and to produce art as a bulwark against the will to inhumanity. Arnold Rampersad
According to Muriel Rukeyser in her book The Life of Poetry, poetry itself is often described in an angry, degrading way. “The angry things that have been said about our poetry have also been said about our time. They are both ‘confused,’ ‘chaotic,’ ‘violent,’ ‘obscure’” (1996, 11). Indeed she meant this not only about the art of poetry itself, but also about the time in which she was writing. However, if poetry is art, and thus poets are artists, then these criticisms are in direct contrast with Rampersad’s view that artist’s job is to “produce art as a bulwark against the will to inhumanity,” and to “illuminate the profoundly human in the midst of chaos.” No two collections of poetry illustrate this concept better than Kyrie by Ellen Bryant Voigt and Kettle Bottom by Diane Gilliam Fisher. Indeed in both of these works, that which is profoundly human plays a central role in the midst of chaotic, inhumane circumstances.
Ellen Bryant Voigt
Voigt’s Kyrie is set during the Influenza Epidemic of 1918, and opens with a quotation from Alfred Crosby’s America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918: “Nothing else – no infection, no war, no famine – has ever killed so many in as short a period.” Arguably, the Influenza Epidemic of 1918 was a largely impersonal and chaotic episode in U.S. history, involving vast numbers of the American public. As such, it is difficult to completely comprehend the deeply personal effects of the loss of life. Voigt, however, brilliantly draws the reader directly into the lives of people experiencing this chaotic and terrifying time period.
In order to accomplish her goal of personalizing the Influenza Epidemic of 1918, Voigt employs several poetic techniques. Upon picking up Kyrie, the reader cannot help but immediately notice the title. Kyrie is from the Greek word for “O Lord,” and is the common name used for a prayer in the Christian liturgy. In addition, Kyrie is frequently used as a Gregorian chant form in the Roman Catholic tradition (Fortescue 1910). What is most interesting, however, is that the second part of the phrase is missing. During the Roman Mass, Kyrie is always followed by Eleison, translated to “Lord, have mercy” (Fortescue 1910). It is as if Voigt is pointing out that there was no mercy granted to the victims of the Influenza Epidemic. This title also has the effect of invoking the mood of a very personal prayer, serving to personalize the circumstances of the characters in the poems.
Using the title Kyrie is not the only reference to music, specifically song, that Voigt alludes to in her work. Indeed the poems themselves are arranged in sonnets, which comes from the Italian word for “little song.” This allusion to song is not accidental; Voigt herself is a formally trained pianist and sees a connection between language and music. “Generally in writing, if you loosen the rhythms by reducing the number of strong stresses, you move closer to speech; tighten them, and you move closer to song” (Cramer 1999, paragraph 27). Linking song to any event, tragic or not, is merely one method to personalize that event. Voigt also uses the word “songs” in at least one of her poems. Consisting of three stanzas, each beginning with a line containing the word “songs,” one poem specifically is written to invoke music and chanting (Voigt 1995, 45).
Sweet are the songs of bitterness and blame (first stanza, first line)
Sweet are the songs of envy and despair (second stanza, first line)
Sweet are the songs of wry exacted praise (third stanza, first line)
Voigt also works to personalize the Influenza Epidemic by writing her poems in narrative form, reminiscent not only of song but of chanting and prayer as well. Voigt writes from the perspective of several personas, most notably a country doctor and a soldier. The doctor is based upon an actual man and was the author’s window into history as her own father survived the Influenza Epidemic. “…it occurred to me that … my father’s circumstance – was multiplied thousands of times during the epidemic…” (Cramer 1999, paragraph 19). The soldier, Price, is another reoccurring character, writing to his fiancée, Mattie. Voigt uses Price specifically to communicate the irony and tragedy of war veterans returning home only to die of influenza. “Say he lived through one war but not the other” (Voigt 1995, p. 50). It is this individualizing of experiences that makes Voigt’s Kyrie so effective at illuminating the profoundly human side of the epidemic.
Voigt also employs the technique of assigning significance to everyday objects in order to emphasize the individual human experience. Though another of her poems is written in third person, the narrator of the poem communicates clearly through repeated metaphors and personification of the bed how much is truly lost in death (Voigt 1995, p. 19).
This is the double bed where she’d been born,
bed of her mother’s marriage and decline,
bed her sisters also ripened in,
bed that drew her husband to her side,
bed of her one child lost and five delivered,
bed indifferent to the many bodies,
bed around which all of them were gathered,
watery shapes in the shadows of the room,
and the bed frail abroad the violent ocean,
the frightened beasts so clumsy and pathetic,
heaving their wet breath against her neck,
she threw off the pile of quilts – white face like a moon –
and then entered straightaway into heaven.
It is nearly impossible to remain detached and prone to “the will to inhumanity” when faced with such poignant, personal detail.
Voigt also works to provide order and structure to a chaotic fearful time, a very human response to trauma and loss. She does this primarily through her use of a formal poetic form: the sonnet. A formal and intricate form, the sonnet serves to encompass the mass tragedy in a manageable and somewhat understandable context, providing the reader a tool to explain and give sense to the Influenza Epidemic. Voigt describes herself as a “formalist,” stating, “I don’t have much tolerance for disorder, and of course the world is full of disorder. But the impulse for order can’t really take its form in language until you have language. So I was very lucky to have music” (Cramer 1999, paragraph 4). As both Rukeyser and Rampersad stress, poetry is not obscure, violent, and chaotic. Rather poetry is an art form which, at its core, emphasizes humanness and attempts to order chaos, much in the same way music does. Voigt, too, confesses not only her love of formality but also of order. “…only after thirty years of making poems do I know that my love of music was love of pattern, of harmony and theory” (Cramer 1999, paragraph 7). It is no accident Voigt’s linking of music and poetry in Kyrie.
In her poetry collection Kettle Bottom, Diane Gilliam Fisher also employs several poetic techniques to personalize a massive human tragedy. In contrast to Voigt, Fisher’s topic is the West Virginia mine wars of 1920 – 1921. According to Fisher, these mine ward “grew out of decades of conflict” (2004, 1). Fisher symbolizes this long period of buildup with her title: Kettle Bottom. According to the Kentucky Mining Institute, a kettle bottom is “a smooth, rounded piece of rock, cylindrical in shape, which may drop out of the roof of a mine without warning. The origin of this feature is thought to be the remains of the stump of a tree that has been replaced by sediments so that the original form has been rather well preserved” (1996 – 2008). Much like the mine wars of 1920 – 1921, a kettle bottom takes a substantial amount of time to come into existence. Also like the mine wars, once a kettle bottom drops out of the roof of the mine, chaos and destruction is unstoppable; the sky is crashing down, and the end is near.
As does Voigt, Fisher also employs narrative poems written from the perspective of several personas. One reoccurring persona is that of the company school teacher, Catherine Terry. Though her voice, Fisher symbolizes the internal struggle of ideology versus material survival often inherent in those working for unethical companies. Clearly she is torn between her love of her students and her duties to her employer. An excerpt from Fisher’s poem entitled “Journal of Catherine Terry: 30 November 1920” illustrates this moral dilemma (2004, 41-42).
Merciless the men who got out
fighting rock to get back in.
The eyes of the women, merciless, watching
that mouth for what it would give back
or keep. Don’t look, I thought,
for I had never seen a man die –
and wasn’t Eurydice lost
on account of just such looking
down toward the underworld? But
their gaze was the only spell they had
to conjure faces out of that dark; it pulled
like a rope on a well bucket, it was a net
flung out between a black sky and a black sea
drawn back empty and flung again.
There was nothing else to do:
like Orpheus, I looked. (lines 22-37)
Her use of narrative persona poems vividly draws the reader into the narrator’s lives. It is compelling and unable to be ignored, much more effective than statistics and dry facts. “Fisher forces her readers to confront the painful realities of poverty, discrimination, brutality, and death. If we try to run, she is there like an angry miner, blocking our way with another poem, another haunting story” (Murphy 2005, paragraph 13).
Fisher also regularly assigns metaphorical meanings to everyday objects in order to individualize a larger historical context. One everyday object that Fisher chooses to emphasize in this way is the quilt in her poem “Pink Hollyhocks” (Fisher 2004, 37-38). Rather than reminisce about her shared life with her husband Harlan, the vast importance of their marriage, and the magnitude of her loss, the narrator instead ruminates in detail about her quilt. Thus the quilt is meant to represent all the love, time, and effort that has come before, not to mention the precious nature of every human life. In this way, the reader again is drawn into the psyches of the people living during and effected by this period in U.S. history. The persona of Harlan’s wife describes the quilt prior to Harlan’s death in the mine in the following lines:
Onliest pretty thing I had, that quilt. (line 5)
Not a old feedsack quilt, but a Wreath/of Hollyhocks (lines 6-7)
I quilted every inch, stitches no bigger/than a speck of meal. (lines 12-13)
This is in dramatic contrast to the way the quilt is portrayed after Harlan’s death.
The quilt was ruint. Big oily smudges (line 27)
I turned the quilt over on the bed/to keep them on me (lines 33-34).
Thus the quilt also serves as a metaphor for Harlan; both are irreparably ruined by the mine.
If Voigt’s poetry collection alludes repeatedly to the importance of song, chanting, and music as a way to humanize and make sense of large scale destruction, Fisher elevates written words in the same manner. Several of the poems are written in the form of letters, essays, book reports, and diary and journal entries. She also alludes to Greek and Roman myths as well as to Biblical stories in several poems. This emphasis on the written word not only serves to point out the importance of personal writing as a way to cope with grief and hardship, but it also promotes the message that education, specifically writing and reading, are crucial to human survival and development. Without written documentation, historical events become impersonal and obscure, and formal education focusing on conveying individual experience is a means of empowerment. It is no accident that Fisher begins Kettle Bottom with a quote by Rukeyser highlighting the importance of humanity versus landscape. “What do you want – a cliff over a city? A foreland, sloped to sea and overgrown with roses? These people live here” (Fisher 2004, 3).
One cannot deny that both periods in U.S. history explored by and Ellen Bryant Voigt Diane Gilliam Fisher, the Influenza Epidemic of 1918 and the West Virginia mine wars of 1920 – 1921, were chaotic. Yet as Rampersad states in his quote, both of these artists exercise the power of illuminating humanity in the midst of this chaos. By personalizing both of these tragedies, Fisher and Voigt do produce a bulwark against inhumanity. The reader is drawn deeply into the lives of the individuals living through these chaotic and difficult times; thus, the reader is unable to turn away from what is ultimately human about history. Poetry is thus a valid method for the study of history because it engages the reader and makes it personally meaningful.
References
Cramer, Steven. 1999. Song and Story: An Interview with Ellen Bryant Voigt. The Atlantic Monthly, (November 24), http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/voigt.htm (accessed November 28, 2008).
Fisher, Diane Gilliam. 2004. Kettle Bottom. Florence, Massachusetts: Perugia Press.
Fortescue, A. 1910. Kyrie Eleison. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08714a.htm (accessed November 28, 2008).
Kentucky Mining Institute. 1996-2008. Glossary of Mining Terms, http://www.coaleducation.org/glossary.htm (accessed November 28, 2008).
Murphy, Erin. 2005. Past “Dark Come Earlier Every Day”: Diane Gilliam Fisher’s Kettle Bottom. Valparaiso Poetry Review: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Vol. VI, No. 2, http://www.valpo.edu/vpr/murphyreviewfisher.html (accessed November 28, 2008).
Rukeyser, Muriel. 1996. The Life of Poetry. Ashfield, Massachusetts: Paris Press.
Voigt, Ellen Bryant. 1995. Kyrie: Poems. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
