Muriel Rukeyser website

Waterlily Fire

Posted on February 5, 2013 by Joe Sacksteder Elisabeth Däumer’s post Context for Waterlily Fire rightly points out the theme of interrelatedness that runs through the Living Archive’s featured poem this month. When I first read "Waterlily Fire," I was struck even more by the idea of impermanence and change, which is the actual bridge (to use Rukeyser’s image) that might be relating everything together in this poem. As I wrote in the post Synecdoche, West Virginia, Rukeyser wants her readers to see a kinship between localized disasters, whether it’s the Spanish Civil War or an outbreak of silicosis, and [...]

2013-02-05T00:20:24+00:00February 5, 2013|Ruke Blog|0 Comments

Important Poetry

Posted on November 10, 2012 by Joe Sacksteder One good thing about the gym that I go to is that people are always leaving behind old issues of Harper’s and The New Yorker, allowing me to cancel both of my subscriptions in exchange for getting them like a month or two late. Last week somebody left behind the September 2012 issue of The Sun (score!), and a piece of non-fiction called "Ten Days in November" by Eric Anderson caught my eye. In the first of the ten days, Anderson is addressing an Intro to Poetry class: The worst thing you [...]

2012-11-10T01:54:39+00:00November 10, 2012|Ruke Blog|5 Comments

Why Muriel Rukeyser? Why a website just for her?

Posted on June 16, 2012 by Elisabeth Däumer Friends, colleagues, and students have asked me: Why Rukeyser? What's so special about her? Why create a Muriel Rukeyser website? Why make her the focus of an interdisciplinary online "meeting place"? I've been thinking how best to say this and have come up with four primary reasons: 1. Her poetry makes things happen--it has a peculiar type of energy which emerges when it's read in groups. 2. We still don't know how to read her work. We seem to figure out how to read some of her poems--for instance "Book of the [...]

2012-06-16T12:20:33+00:00June 16, 2012|Ruke Blog|4 Comments
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