Muriel Rukeyser (1913-80)
Dear friends and readers,
I’ve chosen Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) for this week’s foremother poet because when I’ve come across any of her poems, I find them so just, humane, so lucid and appealing in tone, and this past couple of weeks, the world as depicted in the public media has been so demoralizing and (as it were) intent on harm; her perspective is wide-ranging and (while she does not give the personal details of her life in such a way as to differentiate herself from others) intimate, and explicitly politically aware. Personal generosity and strength align themselves as traits with knowing how hard life is. I haven’t presented her before because I don’t know that much personally about her (see “A life” in the comments) and find it difficult to present her poems in a blog because she uses spaces within lines between words and indents irregularly to make stanzas.
But it just seemed so wrong to set up a page for the women’s canon, and not have Rukeyser among the 20th century voices.
I begin with a direct seemingly personal statement I find visceral and then a stanzaic address capturing a general vision of stratified cities made out of indifference:
Effort at Speech Between Two People
Speak to me. Take my hand. What are you now?
I will tell you all. I will conceal nothing.
When I was three, a little child read a story about a
rabbit
who died, in the story, and I crawled under a chair:
a pink rabbit: &it was my birthday, and a candle
burnt a sore spot on my finger, and I was told to be
happy.Oh, grow to know me. I am not happy. I will
be open:
Now I am thinking of white sails against a sky like
music,
like glad horns blowing, and birds tilting, and an arm
about me.
There was one I loved, who wanted to live, sailing.Speak to me. Take my hand. What are you now?
When I was nine, I was fruitily sentimental,
fluid: and my widowed aunt played Chopin,
and I bent my head on the painted woodwork, and wept.
I want now to be close to you. I would
link the minutes of my days close, somehow, to your
days.I am not happy. I will be open.
I have liked lamps in evening corners, and quiet
poems.
There has been fear in my life. Sometimes I
speculate
On what a tragedy his life was, really.Take my hand. Fist my mind in your hand. What
are you now?
When I was fourteen, I had dreams of suicide,
and I stood a steep window, at sunset, hoping toward
death:
if the light had not melted clouds and plains to
beauty,
if light had not transformed that day, I would have
leapt,
I am unhappy. I am lonely. Speak to me.
I will be open. I think he never loved me:
he loved the bright beaches, the little lips of foam
that ride small waves, he loved the veer of gulls:
he said with a gay mouth: I love you. Grow to
know me.What are you now? If we could touch you another,
if these our separate entities could come to grips,
clenched like a Chinese puzzle . . .yesterday
I stood in a crowded street that was live with people,
and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone.
Everyone silent, moving. . . . Take my hand. Speak
to me
Diego Rivera (1886-1957), Frozen Assets (1930)
Ballad of Orange and Grape
After you finish your work
after you do your day
after you’re read your reading
after you’ve written your say —
you go down the street to the hot dog stand,
one block down and across the way.
On a blistering afternoon in East Harlem in the twentieth century.Most of the windows are boarded up,
the rats run out of a sack–
sticking out of the crummy garage
one shiny long Cadillac;
at the glass door of the drug-addiction center,
a man who’d like to break your back.
But here’s a brown woman with a little girl dressed in rose andpink, too.Frankfurters frankfurters sizzle on the steel
where the hot-dog-man leans —
nothing else on the counter
but the usual two machines,
the grape one, empty, and the orange one, empty,
I face him in between.
A black boy comes along, looks at the hot dogs, goes on walking.I watch the man as he stands and pours
in the familiar shape
bright purple in the one marked ORANGE
orange in the one marked GRAPE,
the grape drink in the machine marked ORANGE
and orange drink in the GRAPE.
Just the one word large and clear, unmistakable, on each machine.I ask him: How can we go on reading
and make sense out of what we read? —
How can they write and believe what they’re writing,
the young ones across the street,
while you go on pouring grape into ORANGE
and orange into the one marked GRAPE –?
(How are we going to believe what we read and we write and we hear and we say and we do?)He looks at the two machines and he smiles
and he shrugs and smiles and pours again.
It could be violence and nonviolence
it could be white and black women and men
it could be war and peace or any
binary system, love and hate, enemy, friend.
Yes and no, be and not be, what we do and what we don’t do.On a corner in East Harlem
garbage, reading, a deep smile, rape,
forgetfulness, a hot street of murder,
misery, withered hope,
a man keeps pouring grape into ORANGE
and orange into the one marked GRAPE,
pouring orange into GRAPE and grape into ORANGE forever.
Kathe Kollwitz 91867-1945), Woman with her Dead Child
A poem to a fellow greatw woman artist:
From “Kathe Kollwitz”
II.
Women, as gates, saying:
“The process is after all, like music:
like the development of a piece of music.
The fugues come back and
again and again
interweave.
A theme may seem to have been put aside,
but it keeps returning—
the same thing modulated,
somewhat changed in form.
Usually richer.
And it is very good that this is so.”
A woman pouring her opposites.
“After all there are happy things in life too.
Why do you show only the dark side?”
“I could not answer this. But I know–
in the beginning my impulse to know
the working life
had little to do with
pity or sympathy.
I simply felt that the life of the workers was beautiful.”
She said, “I am groping in the dark.”
She said, “When the door opens, of sensuality,
then you will understand it too. The struggle begins.
Never again to be free of it,
often you will feel it to be your enemy.
Sometimes
I you will almost suffocate,
such joy it brings.”
Saying of her husband:
“My wish I is to die after Karl.
I know no person who can love as he can,
with his whole soul.
Often this love has oppressed me;
I wanted to be free.
But often too it has made me I so terribly happy.”
She said : “We rowed over to Carrara at dawn,
climbed up to the marble quarries
and rowed back at night. The drops of water
fc!l like glittering stars
from our oars.”
She said: “As a matter of fact,
I believe
that bisexuality
is almost a necessary factor
in artistic production; at any rate,
the tinge of masculinity within me
helped me
in my work.”
She said : “The only technique I can still manage.
It’s hardly a technique at all, lithography.
In it
only the essentials count.”
A tight-lipped man in a restaurant last night
saying to me:
“Kollwitz? She’s too black-and-white.”
Ill
Held among wars, watching
all of them
all these people
weavers,
Carmagnole
Looking at
all of them
death, the children
patients in waiting-rooms
famine
the street
the corpse with the baby
floating, on the dark river
A woman seeing
the violent, inexorable
movement of nakedness
and the confession of No
the confession of great weakness, war,
all streaming to one son killed, Peter;
even the son left living; repeated,
the father, the mother; the grandson
another Peter killed in another war; firestorm;
dark, light, as two hands,
this pole and that pole as the gates.
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open ….
4 Song: The Calling-Up
Rumor, stir of ripeness
rising within this girl
sensual blossoming
of meaning, its light and form.
The birth-cry summoning
out of the male, the father
from the warm woman
a mother in response.
The word of death
calls up the fight with stone
wrestle with grief with time
from the material make
an art harder than bronze.
5 Self-Portrait
Month looking directly at you
eyes in their inwardness looking ,
directly at you
ha1f light half darkness
woman, strong, German, young artist
flows into
wide sensual mouth meditating
lookking right at you
eyes shadowed with brave hand
looking deep at you
flows into
wounded brave mouth
grieving and hooded eyes
alive, German, in her first War
flows into
strength of the worn face 2
a skein of lines
broods, flows into
mothers among the war graves
bent over death
facing the father
stubborn upon the field
flows into
the marks of her knowing_
Nie Wieder Krieg
repeated in the eyes
flows into
“Seedcorn must not be ground”
and the grooved cheek
lips drawn fine
the down-drawn grief
face of our age
flows into
Pieta, mother and
between her knees
life as her son in death
pouring from the sky of
one more war
flows into
face almost obliterated
hand over the mouth forever
hand over one eye now
the other great eye
closed (1971)
Each of the sections of the above poem are descriptions of Kollwitz’s art. I like the repetition of “flows into,” one era, one woman’s grief flowing into the next, the man standing there stubborn.
Rightly famous:
Poem
I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane.
The news would pour out of various devices
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.I lived in the first century of these wars.
*********************
Muriel Rukeyser’s life is told in a number of places on the Net, from wikipedia, to poetry sites and webpages devoted to her. Her poems are not about her personally, and when she tells of some personal private experience (“Night Feeding”) she generalizes as to include as many people in her revealed world as she can. I notice though she doesn’t stress it, most often her central victim fires are women (Mrs Walpurga); my favorite poems are often the medium length wide line spoken ones
Poem out of Childhood
I
Breathe in experience, breathe out poetry-
Not Angles, angels-and the magnificent past
shot deep illuminations into high-school.
I opened the door into the concert-hall
and a rush of triumphant violins answered me
while the syphilitic woman turned her mouldered face
intruding upon Brahms. Suddenly, in an accident
the girl’s brother was killed, but her father had just died:
she stood against the wall, leaning her cheek,
dumbly her arms fell, “What will become of me?” and
I went into the corridor for a drink of water.
These bandages of image wrap my head,
when I put my hand up I hardly feel the wounds.
We sat on the steps of the unrented house
raining blood down on Loeb and Leopold
creating again how they removed his glasses
and philosophically slit his throat.
They who manipulated and misused our youth
smearing those centuries upon our hands,
trapping us in a welter of dead names,
snuffing and shaking heads at patent truth.
We were ready to go the long descent with Virgil
the bough’s gold shade advancing forever with us,
entering the populated cold of drawing-rooms;
Sappho, with her drowned hair trailing along Greek waters,
weed binding it, a fillet of kelp enclosing
the temples’ ardent fruit-
Not Sappho, Sacco.
Rebellion, pioneered among our lives,
viewing from far-off many-branching deltas,
innumerable seas.
II
In adolescence I knew travelers
speakers digressing from the ink-pocked rooms,
bearing the unequivocal sunny word.
Prinzip’s year bore us: see us turning at breast
quietly while the air throbs over Sarajevo
after the mechanic laugh of that bullet.
How could they know what sinister knowledge finds
its way among the brain’s wet palpitance
what words would nudge and giggle at the spine
what murders dance?
These horrors have approached the growing child;
now that the factory is sealed-up brick
the kids throw stones, smashing the windows
membranes of uselessness in desolation.
We grew older quickly, watching the father shave
and the splatter of lather harden on the glass,
playing in sand-boxes to escape paralysis,
being victimized by fataller sly things.
“Oh, and you,” he said, scraping his jaw, “What will you be?”
“Maybe-something-like- Joan–of-Arc •.. ”
Allies Advance, we see,
Six Miles South to Soissons. And we beat the drums,
Watchsprings snap in the mind, uncoil, relax,
the leafy years all somber with foreign war.
How could we know what exposed guts resembled?
A wave, shocked to motion, babbles margins
from Asia to Far Rockaway, spiralling
among clocks in its four-dimensional circles.
Disturbed by war, we pedalled bicycles
breakneck down the decline, until the treads
conquered our speed, and pulled our feet behind them,
and pulled our heads.
We never knew the war, standing so small
looking at eye-level toward the puttees, searching
the picture-books for sceptres, pennants for truth;
see Galahad unaided by puberty.
Rat-tat a drum upon the armistice,
Kodak As You Go-photo: they danced late,
and we were a generation of grim children
leaning over the bedroom sills, watching
the music and the shoulders and how the war was over,
laughing until the blow on the mouth broke night
wide out from cover.
The child’s curls blow in a forgotten wind,
immortal ivy trembles on the wall:
the sun has crystallized these scenes, and tall
shadows remember time cannot rescind.
III
Organize the full results of that rich past,
open the windows-potent catalyst,
harsh theory of knowledge, running down the aisles,
crying out in the classrooms, March ravening on the plain,
inexorable sun and wind and natural thought.
Dialectically our youth unfolds:
the pale child walking to the river, passional
in ignorance, in loneliness, demanding
its habitations for the leaping dream, kissing
quick air, the vibrations of transient light,
not knowing substance or reserve, walking
in valvular air, each person in the street
conceived surrounded by his life and pain,
fixed against time, subtly by these impaled:
death and that shapeless war. Listening at dead doors,
our youth assumes a thousand differing fleshes
summoning fact from abandoned machines of trade,
knocking on the wall of the nailed-up power-plant,
telephoning hello, the deserted factory, ready
for the affirmative clap of truth
ricocheting from thought to thought among
the childhood, the gestures, the rigid travelers.
Emilio Longoni (1859–1932), Un gatto per amico (a cat for a friend) -1892
**********************
Rukeyser also identified as a Jewish poet and writer. Marilyn Hacker (also Jewish) Hacker wrote of the following two that they are “for Passover” and at the same time “for peoples’ liberation struggles today, as Rukeyser intended it.”
In this time of renewed terror and wrathful destruction of the vulnerable, powerless, poor in our world by the powerful, vicious, wealthy, Rukeyser calls out:
Lives
By Muriel Rukeyser
AKIBA
The Way Out
The night is covered with signs. The body and face of man,
with signs, and his journeys. Where the rock is split
and speaks to the water; the flame speaks to the cloud:
the red splatter, abstraction, on the door
speaks to the angel and the constellations.
The grains of sand on the sea floor speak at last to the noon.
And the loud hammering of the land behind
speaks ringing up the bones of our thighs, the hoofs,
we hear the hoofs over the seethe of the sea.All night down the centuries, have heard, music of passage.
Music of one child carried into the desert;
Firstborn forbidden by law of the pyramid.
Drawn through the water with the water-drawn people
Led by the water drawn man to the smoke mountain.
The voice of the world speaking, the world covered by signs,
The burning, the loving, the speaking, the opening.
Strong throat of sound from the smoking mountain.
Still flame, the spoken singing of a young child.
The meaning beginning to move, which is the song.Music of those who have walked out of slavery.
Into that journey where all things speak to all things
Refusing to accept the curse, and taking
For signs the signs of all things, the world, the body
Which is part of the soul, and speaks to the world,
All creation being created in one image, creation.
This is not the past walking into the future,
the walk is painful, into the present, the dance
not visible as dance until much later.
These dancers are discoverers of God.We knew we had all crossed over when we heard the song.
Out of a life of building lack on lack:
The slaves refusing slavery, escaping into faith:
An army who came to the ocean: the walkers
Who walked through the opposites, from I to opened Thou,
City and cleave of the sea. Those at flaming Nauvoo,
The ice on the great river: the escaping Negroes,
Swamp and wild city: the shivering children of Paris
And the glass black hearses: those on the Long March:
all those who together are the frontier, forehead of man.Where the wilderness enters, the world, the song of the world.
Akiba rescued, secretly, in the clothes of death
By his disciples carried from Jerusalem
in blackness journeying to find his journey
to whatever he was loving with his life.
The wilderness journey through which we move
Under the whirlwind truth into the new,
The only accurate. A cluster of lights at night:
faces before the pillar of fire. A child watching
while the sea breaks open. This night. The way in.Barbarian music, a new song.
Acknowledging opened water, possibility:
Open like a woman to this meaning.
In a time of building statues of the stars,
Valuing certain partial ferocious skills
While past us the chill and immense wilderness
Spreads its one-color wings until we know
Rock, water, flame, cloud, or the floor of the sea,
The world is a sign, a way of speaking. To find.
What shall we find? Energies, rhythms, journey.Ways to discover. The song of the way in.
The Witness
Who is the witness? What voice moves across time,
Speaks for the life and death as witness voice?
Moving to night on this city, this river, my winter street?He saw it, the one witness. Tonight the life as legend
Goes building a meeting for me in the veins of night
Adding its scenes and its songs. Here is the man transformed,The tall shepherd, the law, the false messiah, all;
You who come after me far from tonight finding
These lives that ask you always Who is the witness –Take from us acts of encounter we at night
Wake to attempt, as signs, seeds of beginning,
Given from darkness and remembering darkness,Take from our light given to you our meetings.
Time tells us men and women, tells us You
The witness, your moment covered with signs, your self.Tells us this moment, saying You are the meeting.
You are made of signs, your eyes and your song.
Your dance the dance, the walk into the present.All this we are and accept, being made of signs, speaking
To you, in time not yet born.
The witness is myself.
And you,
The signs, the journeys of the night, survive.
*Note [by Rukeyser]: These two “Lives” [the other is about Kaethe Kollwitz] are part of a sequence. Akiba is the Jewish shepherd-scholar of the first and second century, identified with the Song of Songs and with the insurrection against Hadrian’s Rome, led in A. D. 132 by Bar Cochba (Son of the Star). After this lightning war, Jerusalem captured, the Romans driven out of the south, Rome increased its military machine; by 135, the last defenses fell, Bar Cochba was killed, Akiba was tortured to death at the command of his friend, the Roman Rufus, and a harrow was drawn over the ground where Jerusalem had stood, leaving only a corner of wall. The story in my mother’s family is that we are descended from Akiba –— unverifiable, but a great gift to a child.
Notes about the poem, by Rabbi Arthur Waskow:
I think this is one of the great poems of the 20th century — surely the greatest American Jewish poem. I encourage that it be read during Passover (it begins with a celebration of the Exodus) and perhaps during the all-night Torah study for Shavuot, and I hope it will increasingly be understood as a sacred text rooted in Jewish tradition but reaching far beyond it to the whole of Humanity — which indeed it celebrates.
This version corrects what is clearly a scribal error in every printed copy of the poem I have seen. The line “More than the calf wants to suck, the cow wants to give suck” shows up in printed versions as “More than the calf wants to suck, the cow wants to give such.” This “such” is a vague and meaningless word — terrible poetry — and the line as printed here echoes a teaching of Talmud that is a metaphor for teachers wanting to teach more than students want to learn. I have urged editors of Rukeyser’s work to correct the error, but so far to no avail.
References in the poem that may be obscure to many readers today: “Nauvoo” was a town in Illinois where the early Mormon community settled until (1844) suffering violence at the hands of mobs and resettling in Salt Lake City. The “Long March” was the trek of the early Chinese Communist Party all across China to build a political base in Yenan province. “The shivering children of Paris” is probably about the creation of a workers’ commune in Paris in 1870, which governed itself by direct socialist democracy until it was brutally destroyed by the invading Prussian army.
Nicholas Poussin (1594-1665), Winter (ca 1660)
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
A life: from the Gale Thomson database: tova. “Muriel Rukeyser: Overview.” Gay & Lesbian Literature. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 1998
Muriel Rukeyser was a third generation Ashkanazi Jew born on Riverside Drive in Manhattan in 1913, the year before the start of World War I. Her parents were upwardly mobile and middle-class. Her mother was a bookkeeper from Yonkers, New York, and was related to the 1st century B.C.E. poet and scholar Akiba; her father was a Wisconsin born concrete salesman who later became a partner in a sand and gravel company. Despite growing up with maids, she related to the working-class and poor neighborhood children and those in gangs, much to her mother’s dismay. It was on the streets of Manhattan that Rukeyser first practiced her social analysis and gained a consciousness about the world.
Rukeyser always loved to read. Her parents loved music and opera. She attended private Jewish religious schools, though as a young child her family was not religious. Later when her mother took an interest in religion, she attended Synagogue weekly. She began writing poetry in high school. She attended Vassar college, where she was the literary editor of the leftist journal Student Review. She was forced to leave Vassar due to her father’s bankruptcy. Despite the educational opportunities her family gave her, she was, in her own words, “expected to grow up and become a golfer … a suburban professional’s wife.” Later in life, when her political leanings and activities grew more radical, her father disowned her.
Rukeyser left Vassar College in 1933. She traveled as a journalist to Alabama to report on the Scottsboro Case, where nine young Blacks were convicted of raping two white women, a ruling later overturned by the Supreme Court. While covering the case, she was arrested for talking to African American journalists; while in jail, she got Typhoid Fever, which effected her health throughout her life.
In 1935, when Rukeyser was 21 years old, she won the Yale Series of Younger Poets award for her first book of poetry, Theory of Flight. The first poem of that collection, “Poem Out of Childhood,” begins with the line “Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.” This was perhaps a symbol of what Rukeyser would do not only in this collection, but in all of her works. All that Rukeyser “breathed in”—the political and cultural events of an era, the arts, the sciences, her personal experiences as a woman, a Jew, a single mother, and an activist—is integrated within her poetry and other writings. In Theory of Flight, she tells of the start of World War I, the Scottsboro case in Alabama, and the influence of both art and science during the time she was writing. The book’s title came from a flight manual she used while studying flying at the Roosevelt Aviation School. There are also already signs of the breadth of genre and style that Rukeyser would use and combine in her works, such as poetry side- by-side journalistic writing and long almost epic pieces side-by-side short works.
In 1936, Rukeyser traveled to Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, to report on miners dying of the lung disease silicosis while building a hydroelectric plant. There was much evidence that the new Kanawha Power Company knew beforehand of the dangers of silica mining but expanded the project anyway. The experiences of Gauley Bridge are deeply and innovatively explored in Rukeyser’s long piece “The Book of the Dead,” contained in her second volume, U.S. 1. In A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, editor Jan Heller Levi states that the piece is “one of the most original and harrowing documents of American literature … [It] brings together documentary evidence (including testimony from congressional hearings, letters, interviews, even financial printouts from the Stock Exchange) and complex, intertwined poetic explorations to, in effect, develop a new definition of what a poem might be … [it is] an impassioned indictment of capitalist greed and a call for social justice.” In the journal Ploughshares, M.L. Rosenthal calls this piece a “mixture of modes [creating a] … memorable achievement in poetry dynamics.”
In 1936 Rukeyser also traveled to Spain to cover the anti-fascist Olympics; she arrived on the first day the civil war broke out and was evacuated to England. Her companion of the time, Otto Boch, was killed fighting the Spanish Loyalists. In 1939, Rukeyser published Turning Wind. Here she reflects on the issue of power swirling around her at the time of the Spanish Civil War and Hitler’s invasion of Poland. In her introduction, she states that “sources of power are obscured again, or vulgarized and locked out,” and how in this work, “Using mass material studies in symbolism, studies in individual lives, and the experience to which I have been open, I have hoped to indicate some of the valid sources of power that have come down to us.” It is here we first strongly see Rukeyser’s interest in biography, a form she would later radicalize. The last section of the book, called “Lives,” tells of five New Englanders—the painter Albert Pinkham Ryder, the writer John Jay Chapman, the labor organizer Ann Burlak, the composer Charles Ives, and the scientist Willard Gibbs.
In 1942, Rukeyser published a full length biography of Willard Gibbs, a physicist considered the “father” of thermodynamics. Willard Gibbs, however, is not just a biography, but contains poetry, history, science, politics, and culture, all in one. She places Gibbs within a broad context (“… this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future …”), bringing up issues of the slave trade and the civil war, the labor movement of the 18th century, and the visionary, artistic, and poetic contexts of science. In “Muriel Rukeyser’s Willard Gibbs,” David S. Barber states that “Central to her poetic aesthetic is the belief that poetry and science are equally valid ways of seeing the world, both needing the other in order to attain their greatest force … Since Gibb’s work relates to creativity in any field, the humanist, even the poet, can validly interpret his leading ideas and cultural significance.”
In the 1940s, Rukeyser moved to San Francisco, where she taught at the California Labor School. In 1942 Rukeyser published Beast in View; in 1944 Wake Island. In 1945, she married the painter Glynn Collins; the marriage was annulled 12 weeks later. Her son, William Laurie Rukeyser, was born on September 25, 1947, while she was single; she never revealed who fathered her son. In that same year, an anonymous wealthy woman who admired her work and struggles as a single mom donated to Rukeyser an annual stipend.
In 1948, Rukeyser published The Green Wave. Included in this work are translations of six poems by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz and nine “rari’s,” or love-chants, of the Marquesas by the nineteenth-century poet Mao Tetua, who according to Rukeyser “was a blind leper who could neither read nor write; he was so popular as a composer-poet that `natives gathered illegally every night outside the leprosarium to listen’ to these songs.” In 1949, Rukeyser wrote The Life of Poetry. The material in this work is mostly a collection of lectures Rukeyser presented on the meaning of poetry and why poetry is met with so much resistance in this culture. In the introduction to this work, Rukeyser states, “In this book, I have tried to track down the resistances to poetry, with every kind of `boredom’ and `impatience,’ the name-calling which says that poetry is `intellectual and obscure and confused and sexually suspect.’ How much of this is true, and how much can be traced to the corruption of consciousness?” Written years before phrases like “multi-culturalism,” within this book about poetry is a book about the great diversity in our culture, from jazz and the blues to Native American chants and the voices of women. Rukeyser writes not only about poets and writers, but musicians, scientists, sociologists, labor leaders, and political and spiritual leaders; people as diverse as Walt Whitman, Albert Einstein, Karen Horney, Gene Kelly, Bessie Smith, Emily Dickinson, and Buddha.
In 1954, Rukeyser forfeited her stipend when she began teaching at Sarah Lawrence College. Finances were more difficult to manage, especially as a single mother. Thus, Rukeyser took on some new areas such as children’s books and screenplays. Numbers of these projects did not work out, likely due to Rukeyser’s political activism. Throughout the 1950s, Rukeyser was investigated by several McCarthyist groups for her political activities. Nonetheless, during this period Rukeyser published two works of poetry, Selected Poems (1951), and Body of Waking (1958), a collection of poetry and prose called One Life (1957), based on the life of Wendell Willkie, the documentary film script “All The Way Home,” and her first Children’s Book Come Back, Paul (1955). When describing Body of Waking in The Muriel Rukeyser Reader, Jan Heller Levi talks of this work as the first with lesbian illusions, “More and more, we find poems that can be read as evocations of the power and possibility derived from loving another woman. `King’s Mountain’ and `Long Enough,’ for example, are richly suggestive lyrics of sexual and political wakening. [Rukeyser] may be writing of her emergence into a country where male fantasies no longer rule her.”
During the 1960s, Rukeyser completed The Orgy (1965), her “novel” about the lives of a few people in a small village in Ireland, the play “The Colors of the Day (in celebration of the Vassar Centennial)” (1961), two collaborative translations of the work of Octavio Paz and Gunnar Ekelöef, the children’s books I Go Out (1961) and Bubbles (1967), and three books of poetry, Waterlilly Fire: Poems 1935-1962 (1962), The Outer Banks (1967), and The Speed of Darkness (1968).
In 1964, at the age of 50, Rukeyser had her first stroke, which affected the right side of her brain and her speech. During this time, as she worked out re-learning language skills, she also began to have a clearer feminist vision. In The Journal of American Studies, David Seed calls Rukeyser’s The Speed of Light “an explicitly feminist rediscovery of language.” The Speed of Light greatly influenced the then new generation of young feminists. In “The Poem as Mask,” is found the well known line “No More Masks! No more mythologies!,” used frequently as a feminist rallying cry, and in 1973 as the title of a well-known women’s poetry anthology No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women, edited by Florence House and Ellen Bass (revised edition, 1993). Also found in The Speed of Light is Rukeyser’s well known “Käthe Kollwitz.” It is here we find the line, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” From this line came the title of the 1974 anthology The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, 1552-1950, edited by Louise Bernikow, with a preface by Rukeyser. Both of these poems have been quoted by many contemporary feminists and poets, such as Adrienne Rich, as well as found on numerous feminist posters and cards of the early 1970s. In the introduction to the 1981 anthology Lesbian Poetry: An Anthology, editor Elly Bulkin also speaks of Rukeyser’s The Speed of Light. After hearing that Rukeyser agreed to speak at a 1978 panel discussion of lesbians in literature, she reassessed Speed of Light in relationship to Rukeyser’s lesbianism: “the discovery [of her lesbianism] allowed me to understand for the first time that the opening poems … celebrate coming out.”
In 1967, Rukeyser resigned from teaching at Sarah Lawrence, but continued to teach poetry workshops around New York City, under the auspices of an organization she helped start, Poets and Writers Collaborative. Rukeyser’s activism continued throughout the 1970s. She was active in the anti-Vietnam war movement. She traveled with Denise Levertov and Jane Hart on an unofficial peace mission to Hanoi in 1972. Afterwards, she was arrested in Washington, D.C., at an anti-war demonstration. In 1975, after learning about the imprisoned South Korean poet and political activist, Kim Chi Ha, she traveled there to protest outside the prison gates of his cell. During this period, her health continued to fail, affected by her past typhoid fever, strokes, and a then diagnosed diabetes. In 1978, Rukeyser agreed to be a part of a Modern Literature Association panel on “Lesbians in Literature.” Her health, however, prevented her from attending. She died 12 February 1980.
Throughout her life, Rukeyser not only participated in the political and cultural happenings of the 1970s, but she also wrote of them. During the 1970s Rukeyser’s works included 29 Poems (1972), Breaking Open (1973), The Gates (1976), and The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (1978). She also wrote a prose book called The Traces of Thomas Hariot, the play Houdini (1973), and the children’s book Mazes (1970).
In The Gates, Rukeyser explores and explains the situation of South Korean political prisoner Kim Chi Ha. In “Opening `The Gates’: Muriel Rukeyser and the Poetry of Witness,” published in Women’s Studies, Michele S. Ware explains: “[Rukeyser’s] identification with the imprisoned poet takes on an increasingly personal dimension when she meets the poet’s family, and watches how Kim’s son is growing … In poem V, Rukeyser does what Denise Levertov so admired in her work: she `fuse[s] lyricism and overt social and political concern.'”
In Breaking Open, Rukeyser continues her feminist exploration and perspective. In the journal Perspectives on Contemporary Literature, Kathleen L. Nichols describes Rukeyser’s long poem “Searching/Not Searching,” as:
[S]uccessfully releas[ing] woman from the passive cycle of private identity by sending her out instead on a poetic journey, epic in scope, which takes her imaginatively through her personal and cultural past and present—though history, politics, art, literature, memory, and technology, as well as through Asia, Europe, and modern urban America. Through this journey, Rukeyser reveals woman as both active seeker and receptor of experience—an explorer of both the inner and outer worlds of herself and society—as she searches for feminine role models, new identities, and re-vitalized relationships which will transform both men and women, as well as the political future of the world order.
Additionally, Breaking Open contains a series of translated Eskimo poems, which Ruskeyser translated with the anthropologist Paul Radin.
Despite a large body of published literature and a number of awards, critical reception of Rukeyser has been, at best, mixed. She was often criticized for being what at the time was called a “she-poet,” for a strong poetic style and political convictions that would have been praised in a man, for being “self-indulgent,” and for not going along with the literary “fashion” and theory of the time, no less the “proper” political analysis, even of the left. As Adrienne Rich describes in the Kenyon Review:
In her lifetime she was sometimes the target of extraordinary hostility and ridicule, based on a critic’s failure to read her well or even try to understand her methods; often, during the forties and fifties especially, because she was too complicated and independent to follow any political `line,’ or because she would not trim her sails to a vogue of poetic irony and wit, an aesthetics of the private middle-class life, an idea of what a woman’s poetry should look like.
Nonetheless, there have always been those who have praised Rukeyser, even early in her career when the London Times Literary Supplement called her “one of America’s greatest poets.”
With the 1992 publication of Rukeyser’s Out of Silence: Selected Poems and the 1996 publication of A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, Rukeyser is being “rediscovered” and re-evaluated for her rightful place in literary, Jewish, feminist, political, cultural, and lesbian history. Still, we have a long way to go in paying proper homage to this great writer and activist. As Adrienne Rich states in Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends, Rukeyser was a “secular and deeply spiritual Jew, sexually independent woman, her work never fitted into the canon of Modernism, and has been largely unexplored by critics. American poetry of the past 60 years will be perceived very differently when Muriel Rukeyser is accorded her rightful place.”
See also
Barber, David S. “Finding Her Voice: Muriel Rukeyser’s Poetic Development.” Modern Poetry Studies XI, 1 and 2 (1982), 127-39.
Howe, Florence. “A Muriel Rukeyser Reader.” The Women’s Review of Books Nov. 1994:
Kertesz, Louise. The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser. Louisiana State UP, 1980.
Rukeyser, Muriel. The Life of Poetry. New York: Current Books, 1949.
Ware, Michele S. “Opening ‘The Gates’: Muriel Rukeyser and the poetry of witness.” Women’s Studies 22.3 (1993): 297
I am always amazed at what happens when I bring Rukeyser into the classroom. Her work makes things happen! “Effort at Speech” is such a curious poem. I often think that Rukeyser’s aesthetic is based on the belief that reading and writing are relational practices; they are not “easy.” We are called to attend to a poetic text the way are called to attend to each other — with an appreciation for difficulty. Thanks for posting these poems. Elisabeth
“Effort at Speech Between Two People” has long been one of the openings of my Autobiography of the Soul workshop. Yes. Yes. reading and writing are relational practices, and oh, they are not easy!
I know a guy, actually a rather prominent SF Bay Area journalist, who as a young man was one of Ruykeyser’s caretakers in her last year, who as a result, became a poet. He has rather amazing stories to tell about her. If your interested… Sharon
Sharon wanted to share some personal knowledge: Dennis Bernstein is the boy who care-took her. He was also a journalist who was inspired by her. He’s an important major personality very late in her life.
Great effort but the photo at the very beginning confuses me. That isn’t Rukeyser. Who is it then?
I thought it was Rukeyser. You see I’m no expert on her at all. Thank you for telling me this and I’ll look into it and change the photo.
That’s a good one of her!!!!
I just didn’t like the one I saw repeated over and over again on wikipedia and other sites. It was Rukeyser as “tough girl” somehow. Thanks for alerting me to my error.
Yes, that is a photograph of Muriel Rukeyser