Chapter 2 - New Ways of Seeing

Summary

This chapter addresses Muriel Rukeyser’s Depression-era poetics in the context of documentary photography and claims that her poetics rejects the logic by which language became complicit with photography in rendering aestheticized and therefore consumable images of the modern world. Instead, Rukeyser’s poetics envisions a new, hybridized mode in which language, in this case that of the poem, exists in a critical tension with the photographic image. This chapter also argues that “extension,” a concept that relates Rukeyser’s work to commentaries by Lewis Mumford, Vannevar Bush, and Marshall McLuhan, among others, functions as a critical concept describing the process by which poetic language becomes a counterpoint to the public archive of images generated by emerging commercial media and a technocratic state. The final section examines the thematization of photography in “The Book of the Dead” to claim that Rukeyser’s epochal 1936 long poem, which documents a mining disaster in Depression-era West Virginia, scrutinizes the prerogatives of photographic seeing by rendering the photographic apparatus into a visible component of the industrialized rural landscape the poem surveys.