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The Muriel Rukeyeser Living Archive
As a “Living Archive,” our website is designed to engender lively interdisciplinary conversations about this important twentieth-century poet. We include a rotating number of selected poems by Muriel Rukeyser. Published with permission of Bill Rukeyser, the poet’s son, these offer a representative sample of her voluminous and variegated body of work. The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, edited by Janet Kaufman and Anne Herzog and available from the University of Pittsburgh Press, remains the most comprehensive collection of Rukeyser’s poetry.
Please take a minute to acquaint yourself with the site. Also consider contributing responses–critical, pedagogical, or creative–to the website by contacting us here.
Featured Essay
What is a “Waterlily Fire”?
Rukeyser composed this five-part poem over the span of four years (1958-1962) in response to a fire at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, which destroyed two of Monet’s Waterlily panels. Beloved by New Yorkers, the paintings had been acquired just three years prior, during the Monet revival that seized Europe and the United States, and that inaugurated a radical revaluation of the painter’s late work previously rejected as formless and passé. Now these same paintings, among them the waterlilies that the aging Monet had painted, again and again, over the last three decades of his life, were celebrated for the freedom of their brushstroke and a luminescent openness credited with shaping the new way of “seeing” introduced by Abstract Expressionists.1
Both the acquisition of the paintings and their destruction, which provoked an outpouring of sympathy from people across the nation, was captured in two issues of Life Magazine.2 As an artist, New Yorker, and friend of a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, Richard Griffith, Rukeyser was deeply attuned to the poignant story of the paintings and their loss.3
Selected Works
Waterlily Fire
1 THE BURNING
Girl grown woman fire mother of fire
I go to the stone street turning to fire. Voices
Go screaming Fire to the green glass wall.
And there where my youth flies blazing into fire
The dance of sane and insane images, noon
Of seasons and days. Noontime of my one hour.
Saw down the bright noon street the crooked faces
Among the tall daylight in the city of change.
The scene has walls stone glass all my gone life
One wall a web through which the moment walks
And I am open, and the opened hour
The world as water-garden lying behind it.
In a city of stone, necessity of fountains,
Forced water fallen on glass, men with their axes.
An arm of flame reaches from water-green glass,
Behind the wall I know waterlilies
Drinking their light, transforming light and our
eyes
Skythrown under water, clouds under those flowers,
Walls standing on all things stand in a city noon
Who will not believe a waterlily fire.
Whatever can happen in a city of stone,
Whatever can come to a wall can come to this wall.