Discovering a New Epic

I had expected to read works like The Odyssey, Paradise Lost, and Beowolf in my Epic course this quarter.  What I did not expect was to learn about the more modern epics like Omeros, Loba, and The Waste Land.  Along with these "new" epics, I have stumbled onto Muriel Rukeyser's Book of the Dead.  It is an epic poem that illustrates the true story of the industrial disaster in West Virginia in 1927.  During the construction of the Hawk's Nest Tunnel in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, workers were asked to mine silica, but were not given masks to use for protection.  "There are no definitive statistics, but several sources agree that resulting fatalities probably totalled approximately 700 of the 2000 workers." (Statemaster.com/encyclopedia)

The epic poem, Book of the Dead, is a heart-breakingly powerful work of poetry that details the catastrophic event through different voices and forms (even including the accounts of the trial and other mining data).  The epic begins with the beautiful images of West Virginia in THE ROAD and WEST VIRGINIA:


"These are roads to take when you think of your country.
Select the mountains, follow rivers back,
travel the passes.  Touch West Virginia...


The simple mountains, sheer, dark-graded pine
in the sudden weather, wet outbreak of spring,
crosscut the snow, wind at the hill's shoulder."


Reading on, the tone changes as we witness the personal accounts of the miners, their wives, doctors, and the committee assigned to the case.  This account is from a miner, Mearl Blankenship:


"He stood against the stove
facing the fire - 
Little warmth, no words,
loud machines.


Voted relief,
wished money mailed,
quietly under the crashing:


'I wake up choking, and my wife
'rolls me over on my left side;
'then I'm asleep in the dream I always see:
'the tunnel choked
'the dark wall coughing dust."
(from MEARL BLANKENSHIP)


Rukeyser captured the images of these West Virginians by traveling to Gauley Bridge to investigate the incident of the recurring deaths of the miners working on the tunnel.  The Book of the Dead is included in several of her collections, but was first published in 1938 in U.S. 1.  


An excerpt taken from her last poem in the collection:


"You standing over gorges, surveyors and planners,
you workers and hope of countries, first among powers;
you who give peace and bodily repose...


These are our strength, who strike against history.
These whose corrupt cells owe their new styles of weakness
              to our diseases;


these carrying light for safety on their foreheads
descended deeper for richer faults of ore,
               drilling their death.


These touching radium and the luminous poison,
carried their death in their lips and with their warning
               glow in their graves.


These weave and their eyes water and rust away,
these stand at wheels until their brains corrode,
              these farm and starve,


all these men cry their doom across the world,
meeting avoidable death, fight against madness,
                find every war...


Carry abroad the urgent need, the scene,
to photograph and to extend the voice,
             to speak this meaning.


Voices to speak to us directly. As we move.
As we enrich, growing in larger motion,
              this word, this power.


Down coasts of taken countries, mastery,
discovery at one hand, and at the other
               frontiers and forests,


fanatic cruel legend at our back and 
speeding ahead the red and open west,
               and this our region,


desire, field, beginning.  Name and road,
communication to these many men,
as epilogue, seeds of unending love."


*For the Raleigh County, West Virginia miners