Muriel Rukeyser's novel Savage Coast has recently been released by Feminist Press.
Muriel Rukeyser Symposium March 2013
http://MurielRukeyser.EMUenglish.org/wp-content/uploads/slideshow-gallery/Bill Rukeyser et al.jpg
Photos from the Muriel Rukeyser Symposium
by Alex Mandrila
Penn Sound PoemTalk on "Ballad of Orange and Grape"
http://MurielRukeyser.EMUenglish.org/wp-content/uploads/slideshow-gallery/Muriel Rukeyser reading Ballad of Orange and Grape
A 30-min. discussion of Muriel Rukeyser's poem with Amy Kind, Mytili Jagannathan, and David Abel, organized and introduced by the founder of PennSound and PoemTalk, Al Filreis.
Read Helen Engelhardt's essay on the Jewish dimensions of Rukeyser's work
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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 are meant to provide 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.
Rukeyser News
Big News! West Virginia University Press will issue Muriel Rukeyser’s iconic The Book of the Dead as a free-standing volume. The book, so Bill Rukeyser tells us, “will get as close as possible to realizing the 80-year old vision of both MR and [photographer] Nancy Naumburg that Book of the Dead be published as a photo/poetry work.” The press plans to include three of the surviving Naumburg photos of Gauley Bridge along with a sketch of the area that MR drew in 36. In order to facilitate publication of the poem, we have taken down its digital copy on our website, including, unfortunately, the marvelous annotated copy prepared by former webassistant Adam Mitts, who is now pursuing a PhD at SUNY-Buffalo. Fortunately, Adam also wrote an essay on the poem, “The Book of the Dead–Rukeyser’s Map of America,” available right here, on our website. In addition, Textual Practice will devote an upcoming Special Issue to The Life of Poetry, edited by Catherine Gander.
New to our team last fall was is Arica Frisbey. She served as our web assistant and student blogger, with an aim to provide a millennial perspective on Rukeyser and her work. Have a look at her blog on Muriel Rukeyser’s Poetic Responses to Sylvia Plath.
Our featured poem this Spring is Rukeyser’s “The Iris-Eaters,” published in her 1976 collection The Gates. Dedicated to musician and composer John Cage, the poem is also a tribute to Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings of Irises, specifically “Flower of Life II” (which we don’t have permission to display here).
Featured Poem
The Iris-Eaters
For John Cage
It was like everything else, like everything–
nothing at all like what they say it is.
The petals of iris were slightly cinnamon,
a smooth beard in the mouth
transforming to strong drink,
light violet turning purple in the throat
and flashed and went deep red
burning and burning.
Well, no, more an extreme warmth,
but we thought of burning,
we thought of poisons,
we thought of the closing of the throat
forever, of dying, of the end of song.
We were doing it, you understand,
for the first time.
You were the only one of us who knew
and you saved us, John,
with music, with a complex smile.
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