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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 Blog Post
“What are all his escapes for?”: Making Sense of Muriel Rukeyser’s Houdini
Houdini is an odd play. Serious and silly, bawdy and surreal, this loosely biographical musical about the life of the great American escape artist seems to wink at its audience, asking us to join in on a joke we don’t always get. Over the course of two acts we watch Harry Houdini rise from poverty, find love, master his craft, and gain international acclaim. We see him break locks, escape trunks, evade death in a frozen river, and testify against fraudulent mediums in a congressional hearing. He exerts perfect control over his body and all his fears. Then, when Houdini appears at his most unstoppable, this self-made man suddenly dies, punched in the gut by a trio of medical students. When he speaks from beyond the grave in the play’s final lines, he commands the audience to liberate themselves, to “Open yourself, for we are locks / Open each other, we are keys”––right before making what might be an innuendo (“Touch yourself as I touch myself”). Is this a hero’s journey? A love story? A farce?
Houdini is a story about art. It is an exploration of the role artists play in society, an examination of the artist’s power to change their audience and the conditions of our shared world––and the limits of that same power. I know that sounds like a bit of a stretch. Isn’t this a story about a magician? More importantly, isn’t this a story about self-liberation, a story that can inspire us to free our bodies, psyches, and imaginations? The answer is: Yes, Houdini is all of those things. But it’s essential to step back and ask why a magician might be qualified to teach us anything about how to live in the first place, and I want to suggest that the play is uniquely aware of that strange tension: the delightful and sometimes untenable absurdity of calling a showman an artist. Even if you can accept that Houdini is an artist and not just an entertainer, a more troubling possibility remains: the possibility that even artists can’t do much to change a world riddled with injustice and inequality. Houdini does it anyway.
What makes Houdini’s performances an enduring art––not just fleeting entertainment? We can begin by looking at the play’s ambiguous setting and time.
Selected Work
I Make My Magic Published in Houdini (2002) I make my magic
Of forgotten things
Night and nightmare and the midnight wings
Of childhood butterflies—
And the darkness, the straining dark
Underwater and under sleep—
Night and a heartbreak try to keep
Myself, until before my eyes
The morning sunlight pours
And I am clear of all the chains
And the magic now that rains
Down around me is
A sunlight magic,
I come to a sunlight magic,
Yours.
