Lara Meintjes, “this word, this power”: Deixis and Muriel Rukeyser’s Poetics of Witness in The Book of the Dead

The first poem in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead is “The Road.” It describes not “the” road, but rather “these” roads. A plurality of roads knotted and weaving: a suburban road with “junction” and “fork” merges onto a “well-travelled six-lane highway planned for safety.” The description of this last six-lane conduit mimics the joining of roads and lanes in its stacked hyphenated words. The poet maps her readers away from their own neighborhood and into the broader world of what Rukeyser refers to as “your country,” thus establishing that there exists a world to which the reader belongs beyond their immediate surroundings.

While much work has been done on this poem, few critics have focused on the formal mechanisms underpinning the poem’s testimonial function. Scholars, beginning with Catherine Gander, have identified Rukeyser’s poem as a Deleuzian rhizome. Both poem and rhizome offer “a weedy tangle with multiple points of ingress and egress which can’t be flattened to any hierarchical schema.”[1] Despite this stated resistance to flattening, if interpreted as an image, this metaphor might resemble a map—a tangle of roads and rivers crossing the American continent hither and thither, manifesting innumerable points of connection.

Picking up on this suggestive map metaphor, Adam Mitts refers to The Book of the Dead as a “conceptual map of America” created by “mining recent history.” He argues that we “need to reorient our map of America to hers.”[2] Rukeyser, however, offers her reader not so much the bird’s-eye view of the traditional road map but rather a strikingly direct encounter with what was then recent history. Within this essay, I explore the formal techniques the poet uses to bridge the “conceptual map” which is by nature internal to the reader, and the sensation of physical presence that the poem creates. The impression of proximity is fundamental to the new readerly role that Rukeyser is intent on developing—the sense of being there that is active witnessing.

Gander’s 2013 book hints at this sense of place when she writes of Rukeyser’s poem as less “a text to be read, [than] as sight and site of cultural practice.” She further contends that Rukeyser “situate[es] herself and her reader within this site.”[3] The question for a formally inclined reader, then, is how? The poem’s historical and cultural interpretations emerge only once the reader is properly situated. In this regard, the poet provides not various points of entry,[4] but a single exceedingly specific one. The reader is drawn immediately into the poem series by its deictic first word, “these.”

The Oxford English Dictionary proffers “deictic,” quite simply, to describe that which is “demonstrative,” or “directly pointing out.” The three categories of deictics proposed by Charles J. Fillmore in his 1971 Santa Cruz Lectures on Deixis will be our guide as we move forward through our brief analysis of the poem. Fillmore explains that temporal deictics offer insight into when an event occurs: “now,” for example, creates a sense of immediacy. Directional, or spatial, deictics inform readers  about the relative location of the speaker; and social or pronominal deictics provide information about the person speaking and sometimes also about their addressee. I will focus, throughout this paper, on spatial deictics.

The category of spatial deictics is a key component of a larger concept I refer to as proprioceptive poetics. By this, I mean the formal manner in which a poet or poem imaginatively manipulates a reader’s sense of their own body in the world(s). These words (this, here, these, there and so on) create a bridge between the material world of the poem as it inhabits the reader’s “real” world and the imagined world within the fiction of the poem. They are, commonly, one source of the poem’s sense of encounter. Beyond the alliterative delight offered by “proprioceptive poetics,” I prefer this term to alternatives such as “haptic” or “kinesthetic” as proprioception is perceptual and occurs in the processing centers of the brain while kinesthesis refers more directly to muscles and motion. Haptics often include proprioception, but the term typically implies that which is tactile and thus physical. As a broader umbrella term, “haptic” also lacks the specificity of “proprioception.” Muriel Rukeyser’s use of deixis, insofar as it locates the reader on the road alongside her speaker, is an example of the poet’s embrace of and experimentation with proprioceptive poetics. Several further examples exist throughout the poem, but let’s begin with that road.

Despite the title of this opening poem using the more generic “the road,” Rukeyser’s deictic first word, “these,” assumes proximity: a shared space in which gesture might be seen and understood. This is not just any road, in the way the poet’s use of “the” risks generality, but rather “these” roads, the specific ones, the speaker instructs, “to take when you think of your country / and interested bring down the maps again.” Rukeyser’s “these,” her use of directional deixis, not only points and specifies (in the sense that these roads are distinguished from those roads) but also presumes proximity. If one can see which roads the speaker indicates toward, one is presumed to be in close proximity to the speaker. We are thus directed and transported in a manner that results in our sense of looking at the very same map.

Yet while we might look at the same map, we are not necessarily offered a single speaker or perspective. Rukeyser’s epic is a modernist cacophony of voices, delineated within the text itself by the stuttering and irregularly indented shapes of the very lines that make up the poems, and by her directional descriptions. These lines are roads on a map, but we are offered many guides, many perspectives, many starting points. This is no two-dimensional representation above which we might fly, but a guided tour of a deep scar on the very terrain she traverses.

By placing this poem series in a book entitled US 1, and then opening with “The Road,” Rukeyser maps, for her reader, not only the American landscape popularized by the Federal Writers’ Project Guides and by the burgeoning 1930s US road culture, but also what lies beneath the landscape. Landscape is a word of surfaces, of the singular gaze. Rukeyser builds a road map, but her destination is deep underground: in the class and racial politics that underlie America’s crisscrossed surface and in the labor politics so urgent in the poet’s era and so neglected in our own. The roads she shows her reader are pathways, but they are also scars, and the scenic site the poet directs us to (using both deictic directions and cinematic description) straddles the line between modern engineering marvel and monstrous national disaster.

In the final poem of the series, “The Book of the Dead,” Rukeyser’s speaker argues that “defense is sight” and instructs her reader to “widen the lens and see / standing over the land myths of identity.” Beneath this urging exists a simpler underlying prompt and one which Rukeyser herself took very seriously. In widening the lens to see, we are made witnesses. This witnessing, when paired with a request to “widen” our lens, extends beyond the singular perspective of the landscape as painted or photographed. Rukeyser’s text offers a multiplicity of perspectives. She transports her reader into her poem and thus into this place and time and then, using the lyric mode, she tells us not only what happened but what is happening, what continues to happen, and what we might miss if we focus only on our engineering marvels and our narrowed landscapes and our associated myths. The poet asks us to look there, to look here, and not just to look but to see.

Rukeyser resisted words like “reader” or “audience,” asserting that they seemed somehow “inadequate” and offering instead “witness” as it “includes the act of seeing or knowing by personal experience, as well as the act of giving evidence.”[5] In order to create a poetry of witness, Rukeyser must both transport her reader and direct their gaze. The pointing nature of deictics like “this” combined with the grounding nature of those such as “here” provides transport, proximity, and a directed gaze. It is this formal tool, the deictic, that offers and facilitates a sense of lyric encounter. Her background in film enables Rukeyser to draw on a range of supplementary techniques to deepen and color this encounter. The poet maps through description and the collective voice: creating less a landscape in its painted sense than a topography, a detailed representation of the terrain as it appears and as it is formed by processes below its surface. The poet combines painstaking archival research; oral histories collected from those affected and generously offered in voices alive on the page; and her own impressions communicated in cinematic vistas that travel ever inward to “this one-street town” that looks just like “any town.”

Her work’s titles tell us exactly where we are: “US 1,” “The Road,” “West Virginia,” “Gauley Bridge,” but Rukeyser doesn’t seek to regale us with tales of the American road. Rather, she wants us to bear witness. Thus, she cannot merely map the journey. She must provide her reader with directions—she must show us where to look. Rukeyser directs the reader’s gaze, our judgment, through her use of deixis.

The place Rukeyser maps, and to which she directs her reader, the place she points out, is Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. The event to which we bear witness is the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster, remembered as one of America’s worst industrial accidents.

The Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Project was an early 1930s engineering venture intended to divert water from the New River just outside of Ansted, West Virginia, via a three-mile corridor cut through a mountain to a hydroelectric facility near Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. Once the tunneling began, the company behind the project, Union Carbide, discovered that the mountain through which the men dug was composed, in places, of almost pure silica. At this stage, knowing they could use the silica to fuel the furnaces at their plant in nearby Alloy, West Virginia, they doubled the size of the tunnel. Running the drills dry, a practice that the company contracted to perform the excavation insisted upon, gets through the rock much faster but also results in clouds of silica dust. During the drilling process, tiny shards of glass fatally entered the lungs of the workers to whom neither masks nor safety equipment had been provided.

Deixis, enjambment, and first-person address are each skillfully wielded throughout the poem series, to create a poetics of witness, but never more so than in “The Disease.” In this poem, a doctor is interviewed (within the setting of a congressional hearing) about the various stages of silicosis. One voice asks questions, distant, academic even. Another responds, still professional, but clearly affected by the pathos of the situation in which he finds himself testifying.

A third voice emerges briefly, that of a man afflicted with silicosis. This voice is different: the poet represents it in quotes, abstracting it by one degree. And yet, as if to counter that abstraction, the man is the only one who speaks in first person. This is a person speaking candidly about the fatal condition that ravages the very lungs from which he draws breath to speak. The poet’s use of his words, both in their directly quoted style and in the context of the lyric present, seems (briefly) to revive the man and so we hear him speak. We bear witness to his terrible testimony. In her use of the deictic “I,” the first-person speaker, Rukeyser demonstrates the power of both direct testimony and of deixis. It is “I” that lends this testimony power, and “I” that brings the reader into the room where this long-ago testimony happens.

It is worth paying attention to Rukeyser’s use of enjambment as this man testifies. The poet does not break each sentence at a period, at its natural end. Rather she truncates them. Read the testimony of the man aloud, following the line breaks as the poet suggests them:

It is growing worse every day. At night
I get up to catch my breath. If I remained
flat on my back I believe I would die.

Rukeyser cuts off the lines in unexpected places so that the breath of the reader catches: causing unnatural breaks in voice, such as those which might be caused by shortness of breath. Further, truncated sentences ending before their time become somewhat akin to the truncated lives the poem series memorializes. The poet’s use of the deictic “I” in this section allows the victim’s testimony to live on, endlessly reporting on the cruelty, the crime, that was perpetrated during the excavation of the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel and doing so in the voice of the disaster’s own victims.

Three voices exist in this poem. We have heard from the victim, the man powerfully embodied within Rukeyser’s “I.” The poem’s two other voices, the doctor and the congressman, are distinguished only by indentation. One of the speakers fires rapid questions at the other, who responds carefully and ponderously. The doctor guides his listener through a series of three X-ray images depicting the progression of the disease in the witness’s chest. The silicosis-afflicted man is thus abstracted a second time, first by his position between quotation marks and then within this reporting mode—a dispassionate analysis of his very organs—his interior displayed for all the world to see. How invasive it must be to carry the evidence of your own murder inside you, your voice, the very breath that gives you life slowly choked off by the “murdering snow” the poet refers to early in her text as so “precious in the rock.”

The doctor’s testimony begins with long answers, eight lines uninterrupted, then five, three, four, two, then the victim’s testimony, then a string of one-word answers: “yes,” “yes,” “yes,” and finally “yes, sir.” The doctor’s voice, in a manner that seems to echo the victim’s, appears choked by this disease. However, in his case this word functions as it sounds—dis-ease. It is, perhaps, discomfort at the nature of his testimony and the inescapably fatal nature of this entirely avoidable disease that slowly constricts his deposition. The unequivocal nature of his final answer hangs starkly on the white page: “does silicosis cause death?” // “yes, sir.”

What is said and left unsaid is powerfully moving in this poem, but so is what is said but unseen. Rukeyser’s use of deixis emphasizes not just our role as witnesses but also the fundamental impossibility of witnessing a past event beyond the “event” provided formally by the structure of lyric poetry[6]. Actual time travel is, as yet, an impossibility. However, the lyric present when coupled with the deictic markers the poet provides creates a lyric event within which a reader experiences and thus witnesses this testimony imaginatively.

During the doctor’s testimony, he shows the scar tissue within the man’s lungs, marking it deictically as he (presumably) stabs at the X-ray image: “each time I place my pencil point: / there and there and there, there, there.” We know to what the doctor points, but we cannot possibly see it. We can only see [7] him pointing to the absence that the victim has, inevitably, by the moment of reading, become.

The map Rukeyser offers within “The Disease” is not one to a location but to a realization. The voice of the doctor speaks, he points repeatedly, and yet we simply cannot see.[8] It is our failure to witness in a simple visual manner that becomes so striking at this point in the poem. We confront not only the unfolding of this tragedy but also our own failure to stop it. And we see this failure emphasized through repetition: “there and there and there, there, there.” The gestural “there” repeated in a way that first approaches polysyndeton and then anaphora instead disperses into something akin to a soothing repetition. The “there, there” of a mother calming a child, but also the sound of a person reading a map: where did the event occur? “There, and there and there, there, there.” This is not an abstract disaster or act of God. Beyond that, this repetition highlights the frequency of these incidents: Hawk’s Nest does not stand alone. This happens there and there and there and indeed here too.

Rukeyser sought not simply a reader, but a witness. She defined this as one who sees or knows by experience. The poet creates this experience proprioceptively. Her poetry of witness relies on directional terms, stitches between her world and ours, to enable the impression of seeing that she must create if she is to make us feel. In Rukeyser’s understanding, “a poem invites you to feel. More than that: it invites you to respond. And better than that: a poem invites a total response.”[9] The poet’s proprioceptive poetics invite imaginative transport. If we suspend disbelief and submit to the poem’s physical cues we might experience the event in an almost bodily manner. This is an entirely new level of “widen[ing] the lens”. We don’t see, rather we encounter. We experience the event of the poem: this experience is what occasions a response.

Witness is not Rukeyser’s sole purpose. She sees a future for poetry beyond witness: within a world in which enough has been “done by then so that we [will] all be seen resisting things which have for them changed and fallen away—transitional.”[10] The manifestation of this future would require not just seeing but acting upon what we are shown. The task the poet assigns her reader through her documentary poetry is to see, to hear, to feel, and then to respond; to create positive change.

In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser provides some insight into her methods, writing, “the image, the word, the note—those are methods by which the imaginative experience is presented and received.”[11] What Rukeyser documents is the otherwise unimaginable. The role of the lookout point at Hawk’s Nest State Park is to focus the gaze on the vista, the landscape, the surface. The role of Rukeyser’s text is to focus the reader’s gaze on that which we are not shown by such “splendid” vistas. She shows us what lies beneath the landscape, and further than that, she shows us the absences in the record, the missed encounters. In her text, Rukeyser immortalizes the voices of many of those affected by this tragedy. She offers their testimony to fill the gaps in the record, and she points insistently at those very gaps. Rukeyser tells us that “the poetic image is not a static thing. It lives in time, as does the poem.”[12] It is through the poem that these voices live on.

Within The Book of the Dead, the doctor endlessly testifies to the fatality of silicosis and, by implication, to the futility of the many deaths Union Carbide and Rhinehart & Dennis callously caused. Within The Book of the Dead, the committee meets and meets and testifies and testifies. Within The Book of the Dead, Rukeyser endlessly embarks on this journey, traveling through the haunted landscape, gathering still living voices and memorializing those silenced: offering “name and road, / communication to these many men, / as epilogue.” And offering, to her reader, directions not only to this “audacious landscape” but to the very real stories we have buried beneath it.

***

A Note: As this piece evolved, I began to pay ever more attention to Rukeyser’s originality in showing how Deixis is fundamental to developing a new readerly role—the sense of being there that is active witnessing. This is currently part of a far larger project which studies proprioceptive poetics in the work of poets from Shakespeare and Donne through Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Rukeyser, Stevens, Bishop, Clampitt, and Walcott. I think Rukeyser’s cinematic eye is activated, in poetry, by deixis in a manner that allows the poet to move with great elegance and force between these two art forms. This inevitably contributes to long-standing debates about the line between visual and textual art forms which I hope to explore in later papers.

Notes 

[1] Gander, here elegantly paraphrased by Adam Mitts.

[2] Adam Mitts: The Book of the Dead–Rukeyser’s Map of America.

[3] Gander, Catherine. Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection. Edinburgh University Press, 2013, p. 201.

[4] Gander asserts that “the reader is provided with various points of entry into the landscape’s multiple historical and cultural meanings” (180).

[5] Rukeyser, Muriel. The Life of Poetry. 1949. Paris Press, 1996, p.175.

[6] I don’t intend to foreclose the possibility that other artistic media may offer different forms of the opportunity to bear witness. In a forthcoming project, I explore the geometric modes by which landscape painting similarly invites a viewer into the represented scene.

[7] And even then, using the mind’s eye rather than our physical eyes.

[8] We also, quite literally, cannot see the evidence as “most tunnel-related court documents were turned over to Rhinehart & Dennis [the contractors who managed the tunnel excavation] as part of the 1933 settlement deal” (Catherine Venerable Moore, “Introduction,” The Book of the Dead, West Virginia University Press, p. 18).

[9] Rukeyser, Muriel. The Life of Poetry. 1949. Paris Press, 1996, p. 11.

[10] ibid. p. 62.

[11] ibid. p. 39.

[12] ibid. p. 33.

To cite this article in MLA, 8th edition: Lara Meintjes, ” ‘this word, this power:’ Deixis and Muriel Rukeyser’s Poetics of Witness in The Book of the Dead.” Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive, https://murielrukeyser.org/2025/06/01/lara-meintjes-this-word-this-power-deixis-and-muriel-rukeysers-poetics-of-witness-in-the-book-of-the-dead/.

Bio: Lara Meintjes is a PhD candidate in English at UC Berkeley and a Bay Area artist. Her current research explores the sociability of lyric poetry using models found at the intersection of poetry and visual art. She seeks answers to questions of attention, immersion, and imagination within the formal aspects of poetry. Lara’s areas of particular interest include proprioception, vanishing points, deixis, lyric address, and the position of the reader in relation to the poem as material object and as scene of encounter.