On Wednesday, Sept. 23, poet, essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger delivered the Elizabeth Bishop Lecture, an annual event sponsored by Vassar College’s English Department that brings poets to campus to lecture or read their works. Weinberger spoke about the history of poetic activism and his practices as an essayist, before reading two of his works.
Weinberger began with an extended discussion of Vassar alumna Muriel Rukeyser ’34. A classmate of Elizabeth Bishop ’34, Rukeyser was a prolific writer and activist. Weinberger spoke of the political effect of her writing, noting how she, along with other writer-activists such as Alan Ginsberg, used poetry to humanize queer people in the public eye.
Weinberger spoke of how Rukeyser was surveilled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation because of her activism. Surveillance of Rukeyser began in 1942. As of two years prior to her death in 1980, resulted in a case file 118 pages long according to “Modernism on File,” a book covering the surveillance of writers and artists in part of the 20th century. Weinberger wondered aloud if there were any poets left in the United States worth monitoring.
After attending the lecture, Kerala Kim ’29 was most struck by how broad and varied Rukeyser’s creative life was.“When talking about different ideas of being an activist, and being an essay writer, and writing plays and screenplays and all of these different things while also being a poet, I think the idea that creativity isn’t a confined act is such an important takeaway,” Kim told The Miscellany News. Kim, who had never read Weinberger’s work before the lecture, walked away with one of his books in hand.
Weinberger told the audience that he spent so much time discussing Rukeyser, in part, because of the influence her work has had on his own. Considering how multifaceted her life and work was, the influence is apparent. “I thought it was terrific that he focused in on Muriel Rukeyser…who doesn’t get the attention she deserves,” Professor Emeritus of English Paul Kane told the Miscellany. “I think it’s an indication of what happens when you have writers who work in so many genres that they’re hard to pigeon-hole, and because they’re hard to pigeon-hole, they get overlooked,” Kane said.
Weinberger, like Rukeyser, is no stranger to poetic activism. In 2005, he wrote the essay “What I Heard About Iraq,” which attempted to display what he viewed as the hypocrisy of President George W. Bush’s administration during the war in Iraq. He did so by comparing contradictory quotes from top officials. The essay also highlights the perspectives of Iraqi citizens and United States soldiers at the time. Many of the soldier’s quotes attempt to justify the war, while the Iraqi citizens are incredulous at these justifications. He began writing the essay after Sept. 11 as simple news updates with public information to friends, believing the mass media’s coverage to be insufficiently critical of the war in Iraq, but his writing began to spread over email. “It was a great way to publish because the readers voted with their ‘forward’ or their ‘delete’ buttons,” Weinberger told the Miscellany.
Eventually, the essay reached The London Review of Books, before it was adapted across creative disciplines. “[It] turned into a hit play that ran in Los Angeles for nine months, and radio plays, dance installations. They had a worldwide reading of it in a hundred places,” Weinberger said.
“What I Heard About Iraq,” like many of Weinberger’s essays, does not adhere to the traditional essay form. Along with its use of juxtaposing quotes, there is also little to no commentary from the author. This lack of convention is a feature of his writing. At the Bishop lecture, he moved from discussing Rukeyser to the evolution of his atypical essay format. By age 30, he said, he wanted to apply what he had learned about poetry writing essays. He thought that the essay form was underexplored and largely unchained from its European roots, which prioritized things like the first-person perspective. The only limit he gave himself was to never make anything up. “Reality is strange enough,” he told the audience.
To conclude the talk, Weinberger read out two of his essay-poems. The first, entitled “Where the Kaluli Live,” began with representations of the soundscape of a Papua New Guinean forest, which included a reading of numerous bird calls written as “gubogubo” or “koo-halaideh” in the piece. The second piece, entitled “Abu al-Anbas’ Donkey,” was similarly genre-blending, beginning with nested frame narratives and ending with a poem written by an imagined donkey.