Trellis skeleton

The title of this post comes from a Muriel Rukeyser poem called "The Cruise," a wartime allegory (at least I hope it's an allegory; if not, it's a flop). I love how her poems sometimes surprise me with their surrealist and textural juxtaposition of words, and this is an example. I've probably already used up my quota of quoting Rukeyser in my own poems, but I think I may have to use this one for a "Woven Body" poem, which is my series of quirky little pseudo-sonnets that explore different facets of the body: how it works, how we think, how it looks, how it's built.

I stumbled across this poem while perusing the Collected Rukeyser in research for my dissertation proposal. I'm ridiculously happy today because I've hit upon an organizing structure that just might work for the dissertation, after days of spewing squidgy ideas onto a blank computer page. The poems of the Spanish Civil War on and off the Page, or something along those lines. I probably won't go much further in detailing the thesis idea both out of fear of boring my blog-world audience (just play along with the fantasy), and also out of paranoia that someone out there a desperate graduate student who just happens to specialize in the American poetry of the Spanish Civil War is going to steal my ideas. Mostly the former.

Now I just have to structure the whole thing into beautiful and coherent paragraphs. Or sentences. I'll settle for sentences.