Welcome to the Muriel Rukeyser Website.

• Muriel Rukeyser's Writings

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  Read Rukeyser's poetry, long poems, and prose excerpts by clicking here.

• Alicia Ostriker's Keynote Speech

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  Read Alicia Ostriker's keynote speech from the 2013 Rukeyser Symposium.

• Featured Prose

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  Muriel Rukeyser's novel Savage Coast has recently been released by Feminist Press.

• Muriel Rukeyser Symposium March 2013

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  Photos from the Muriel Rukeyser Symposium by Alex Mandrila

• Rukeyser Special Issue

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  JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory devotes its Fall issue to Muriel Rukeyser

• 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.

As a “Living Archive,” our website is designed to engender lively interdisciplinary conversations about this important twentieth-century poet. 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

Happy New Year! Our “Living Rukeyser Archive” is entering its fourth year. Over the past years, our bloggers have included Joe Sacksteder (now a PhD student at the University of Utah), Marian Evans, a writer and cultural activist living and working in New Zealand, Catherine Gander, Adam Mitts, and Laura Passin.  We have published critical essays by Dara Barnat, Charlotte Mandel, Chelsea Lonsdale, Alice Thomsen, Laura Passin, Elisabeth Daumer, Kelly Nadler, Kyle Evans, Trevor Snyder, Adam Mitts, and Alicia Ostriker.  We’ ve been lucky to receive wonderful creative contributions: Stephanie Strickland permitted us to post her poem “Striving All My Life”; Kellie Nadler, Ned Randolph, Victoria Emanuela Pozyczka produced sound remixes of Rukeyser poems.  In time for the new year, we have just published Helen Engelhardt’s “Muriel: In Memoriam.”

Featured Poetry 
Ajanta

THE JOURNEY

Came in my full youth to the midnight cave
Nerves ringing; and this thing I did alone.
Wanting my fullness and not a field of war,
For the world considered annihilation, a star
Called Wormwood rose and flickered, shattering
Bent light over the dead boiling up in the ground.
The biting yellow of their corrupted lives
Streaming to war, denying all our words.
Nothing was left among the tainted weather
But world-walking and shadowless Ajanta.
Hallucination and the metal laugh
In clouds, and the mountain-spectre riding storm.
Nothing was certain but a moment of peace,
A hollow behind the unbreakable waterfall.
All the way to the cave, the teeming forms of death,
And death, the price of the body, cheap as air.
I blessed my heart on the expiation journey
For it had never been unable to suffer.
When I met the man whose face looked like the future,
When I met the whore with the dying red hair
The child myself who is my murderer.
So came I between heaven and my grave,
Past the serene smile of the voyeur, to
This cave where the myth enters the heart again.

You will find the entire poem here

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