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The Muriel Rukeyser 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
The Marks of her Knowing: On Muriel Rukeyser’s “Käthe Kollwitz.”
There’s a line in Muriel Rukeyser’s poem “Käthe Kollwitz” next to which I write: this, the center of everything. That line, from the five-part poem’s second section, reads: “A woman pouring her opposites.” The poem is better-known for a question that Rukeyser later asks, then immediately answers: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open” (Muriel Rukeyser Reader 214, part 3, lines 25-26). These might well be Rukeyser’s most-quoted lines; they appear in some form as countless epigraphs, as the title of at least two anthologies, and in the pages of works of various disciplines, not to mention the opening paragraphs of essays like this one. (In her essay “Learning to Breathe under Water,” Alicia Ostriker calls them “almost a mantra among women poets.”) It seems to me these lines are so repeatable because they successfully encapsulate a truth: that women have historically been prevented from telling the truth about their lives, and that acts of speaking that do tell truths about women’s lives “split open” the world in that they transform and potentially destabilize that tenuous construction we call “the world,” which has so often been a world authored by and for men. (“Most disturbing,” Ostriker also writes, “is the moment… when much of what we think we know about “women” and “poetry” is called into question.”1 ) It seems also that this “world split open” is a subtle and elusive thing, and that one of the questions these lines offer us is: what does (or would) it mean for the world to split open? Continue reading
Self-Portrait, Hand at Forehead, Courtesy of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI
Selected Work
Käthe Kollwitz
1
Held between wars
my lifetime
among wars, the big hands of the world of death
my lifetime
listens to yours.
The faces of the sufferers
in the street, in dailiness,
their lives showing
through their bodies
a look as of music
the revolutionary look
that says I am in the world
to change the world
my lifetime
is to love to endure to suffer the music
to set its portrait
up as a sheet of the world
the most moving the most alive
Easter and bone
and Faust walking among flowers of the world
and the child alive within the living woman, music of man,
and death holding my lifetime between great hands
the hands of enduring life
that suffers the gifts and madness of full life, on earth, in our time,
and through my life, through my eyes, through my arms and hands
may give the face of this music in portrait waiting for
the unknown person
held in the two hands, you.