Sunday, August 12, 2007
Highway 1--Here and there
I started reading "US 1" in the Muriel Rukeyser book I bought here. It's a great anthology that includes a poem about workers afflicted with silconitis. Rukeyser investigated a case that happened in West Virginia in the 1930s. The poem incorporates excerpts from congressional hearings and stock quotes more brilliantly than I've been able to weave materials from daily life.
I was in awe at the way Rukeyser brings these different strands together. Standing alone, the transcripts and stock quotes are the banal products of modern life, but when dropped into a poetic context--the description of dying workers and lost dreams, the work becomes mirror and voice to the exploited--and to those who would seek change in our society.
This is the intellectual Highway 1 I travelled, with thoughts of the past, mountains and what it means to be an American in the most abstract and actual sense. But I also got gritty on Highway 1 here in Viet Nam.
I took a taxi down this road to teach at the ABB company which has its Viet Nam headquarters just outside the city. Highway 1 is the closest thing Viet Nam has to a freeway, and it is like the U.S. road system: a three lane highway with stoplights every few kilometers. But it is at the same time unlike any U.S. highway. It's three lanes of cars, motorbikes and bicycles all living in a benign chaos. The traffic here rages against American sensibility.
I was in awe at the way Rukeyser brings these different strands together. Standing alone, the transcripts and stock quotes are the banal products of modern life, but when dropped into a poetic context--the description of dying workers and lost dreams, the work becomes mirror and voice to the exploited--and to those who would seek change in our society.
This is the intellectual Highway 1 I travelled, with thoughts of the past, mountains and what it means to be an American in the most abstract and actual sense. But I also got gritty on Highway 1 here in Viet Nam.
I took a taxi down this road to teach at the ABB company which has its Viet Nam headquarters just outside the city. Highway 1 is the closest thing Viet Nam has to a freeway, and it is like the U.S. road system: a three lane highway with stoplights every few kilometers. But it is at the same time unlike any U.S. highway. It's three lanes of cars, motorbikes and bicycles all living in a benign chaos. The traffic here rages against American sensibility.
Labels: poetry, politics, Viet Nam and the West
