Elisabeth Daumer

“Most demonstrators and marchers did not worry over fine points of strategy; they were simply ‘against the war’” (Bricks and Phelps 141). This sentiment of undirected defiance resonated with the radicalism that emerged in the 1960s protests of the Vietnam War. Even more pertinent, the same sentiments reverberate today. When I was first writing this essay, in the fall of 2019, there had been several protests in Hong Kong throughout the entire year. The citizens of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China (HKSAR) were fighting for their democracy, which had been infringed upon by the Chinese government. These protests, while growing in number, appeared to be unsuccessful and had become dangerous for university students. The students had been confined to their institutions for learning—places designated for free thought — and were subjected to tear gas bombings because of their opposition. But political demonstrations proliferated not only in Hong Kong at that time.

In fact, there were several civil rights protests in the United States that had been reimagined as if it were the 1960s. There were protests resisting the reemergence of anti-abortion attitudes coupled with near-total-bans on abortion legislations in the South and Midwest in hopes of revoking Roe v. Wade. There was an outcry by the Black and Hispanic communities to end police brutality and end the inhumane conditions of ICE detention centers at the US-Mexico border. While protesting became typical in 2019, the standard became embedded into U. S.’s norm in the summer of 2020 with over a two-month period of Black Lives Matter Movement protesting police brutality sparking a global demonstration.  Although these examples show that protesting has become a common way for citizens to express their frustrations with the current political regime, the process itself has become stagnant, rarely resulting in change. For example, from 2013 to 2019, three percent of police brutality cases were brought against police officers, and only one percent resulted in convictions (Vox as stated by mapping police violence).¹ Despite discussions and demonstrations on civil rights injustices by impactful leaders and movements such as Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as well as the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1960s, almost sixty years later, civil rights and bodily autonomy is still up for debate in Congress.² In this tumultuous era of global civil wars and mass protests, should we consider an alternate means of activism?

The answer does not reside in a neat box; however Muriel Rukeyser’s poem “Breaking Open” begins to unearth what it means to be an activist. We often try to condense our solution in the hopes of solving all facets of the problem, but the complexity that is found in many aspects of the issue does not allow for a simplified resolution. When the literary critic, Barry Wallenstein, refers to reading Muriel Rukeyser’s poems as “a way into conditions not reducible to the formulas of political arguments,” he is indicating that poetry does more than address a current political crisis. It is also creates a connection the audience feels when experiencing the author’s sentiments through his or her text (52).³    Rukeyser refers to this connection as “coming[s]-together,” which later becomes a motif in her poetry (“Poetry” 18).

The simply stated “coming-together” is hard to achieve in terms of political activism, though. Our failure stems from the lack of creative solutions and the narrow perspective that only validates our own opinion.⁴ In his article “Muriel Rukeyser and the Politics of Poetry,” Wallenstein argues that readers confuse poetry with the “social genesis,” or the socio-political problem that motivates an author to write, instead of thinking of the texts as standing alone devoid of current implications. He asserts the need for “objective intelligence,” for an unbiased perspective that allows for the sentiments of the text to hold and shake the reader’s convictions when analyzing poetry. Although protests and activism are not explicitly related to poetry, they are still comparable in the rigidity in keeping one’s own biases. Wallenstein insists that if a reader “watches for expressions that verify his own ideas, he is sidetracked to anticipate confirmation of [the] idea,” ignoring the poem itself and projecting their judgment on to the text. This approach to poetry does not enlarge the reader’s perspective, but narrows the application of the work, inhibiting change. Like poetry, traditional activism—defined by mass protesting—has led us into a confirmation bias. We believe we are making a difference without evidence of such preventing us from reflecting on new approaches that not only shake our own preconceived notions, but the perspective of the opposing party as well. Therefore, a creative solution is needed to transcend this problem.

Wallenstein’s idea of objective intelligence, which allows the relationship between the audience and the poem to prosper, is mirrored in Muriel Rukeyser’s belief in togetherness. Rukeyser posits that poetry is as natural and innate to humans as speech is to communication, an undertaking which she characterizes as a human activity. Her first Clark Lecture, “Poetry and the Unverifiable Fact” (1968), presents such human experience with a unique perspective. She compares the human experience to the repetition found in poetry. She claims the recurrences in our existence are “the parable that poetry actually is in our lives,” demonstrating how reiterations in poetry can assist us as we try to better understand ourselves (2). Rukeyser states that “the movement, the curve of emotion in a poem, is something deeply human,” thus relating the emotions induced by poetry as a part of the human experience (5). She acknowledges that the “curve of emotion” inspires a profound interrelatedness between those who have experienced the poem. The uniting force of the poem propagates the human experience, it is how we “come-together.” If we are able to replicate such an experience provided by reading a poem, then our everyday interactions will amount to a newly found form of activism.

To manifest this experience, we need to be vessels permitting the past access to the present through our interactions. Yet this is not an easy feat to complete.⁵ There is a sense of hopelessness that is situated in activism, which, at times, can overwhelm our senses. The emergence of angry activism suggests a passionate absorption of our ideals and our reluctance to change them. It results in a violent execution of our cause more than the goal of using our activism for what Wallenstein calls “social genesis.” The frustrations and hopelessness found in angry activism parallels Rukeyser’s idea of the “powerlessness of poetry” (“Poetry” 10). She defines the “powerlessness of poetry” as a constant; it is steady and unchanging. Similarly, the feelings experienced in angry activism produce stagnation. There is energy, but it lacks focus. Nevertheless, the curve of emotion is intrinsic, and becomes a linear relationship within the human experience.

Rukeyser uses the analogy of an infant crying to explain the complications that arise with the “powerlessness of poetry” and essentially our helplessness in times of crisis. In comparing ourselves to babies, we can begin to comprehend how our activism is powerless only when it lacks communication. Our all-encompassing emotions limit our expression of distress. Although a baby is weak, it is able to survive due to the power it has to evoke action in others (11). Rukeyser’s argument proposes that there is potential strength in such hopelessness. In using our ability to elicit passionate responses from others, we can transform traditional protest into activism that ensures change.

In the late 1960s, when Muriel Rukeyser was writing the poems in her book Breaking Open (1973), America’s political Left tried to revise its outlook on activism by encouraging inclusion and creating a diverse environment for change. In Radicals in America, Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps note how the Vietnam War (1955-1975) became a catalyst for transforming the New Left, thus spurring many radicalized movements, including women’s liberation, Black nationalism, and gay liberation (122). Rukeyser, who always considered herself a radical, a leftist, and an activist, was inspired by the diversification of the New Left while writing the title poem of her volume. “Breaking Open” speaks to the confusion and violence during the Vietnam War and the hopelessness of the continued disregard of the situation by the American people. In her poem, Rukeyser asserts that “the personal ‘unconscious’ is the personal history,” thus suggesting our thoughts and experiences in the past hold information that can be used to combat issues in the present (522). If we believe each person is a part of the history that we bring to the present with us, then the consciousness we share through the connectedness of history can allow for a new form of activism that transcends helplessness.

Before we can proceed to activism, what Wallenstein calls “social genesis” needs to be recognized. The beginning of “Breaking Open” establishes Rukeyser’s incentive for writing: the feeling of despair and helplessness generated by the Vietnam War, as well as a lack of empathy in the world that encourages disconnection. She recalls herself:

Walking in the elevator at Westbeth

Yelling in the empty stainless-steel

Room like the room of this tormented year.

Like the year

The metal nor absorbs nor reflects

My yelling.

My pulled face looks at me

From the steel walls. (“Breaking Open” 522)

Rukeyser’s helplessness is pervasive in this excerpt. The staccato-like rhythm of each line provides a languid reading that conveys her powerlessness as she walks into the elevator. There is no sense of urgency or purpose. Yet the frustrated yelling that comes soon after displaces the reader. The shift to an ecstatic state is disarming for her audience because Rukeyser physically expresses her vulnerability, which has only been implied thus far in the text. She juxtaposes the “empty stainless-steel” elevator to that of the “tormented year” to denote the lack of support for the Vietnam War and the impersonal responses of the U.S citizens to it. Nevertheless, the yelling is cathartic. The repetition of yelling in her poem offers a human experience, which enables Rukeyser to work out her thoughts and find her voice; she states, “my yelling.”  It is a moment of vulnerability, but it also evokes agency demonstrated by her “pulled face” looking back at her in the elevator. The reflection of her “pulled face” signifies determination and action, which are shown more fully in the following stanza about her trip to Washington, D.C.

Readers are on an emotional journey with Rukeyser in the elevator. The “curve of emotion,” as she calls it in “Poetry and the Unverifiable Fact,” is strong, creating a bond between the author and her audience. This bond permits a dialogue whereby the reader is included in Rukeyser’s narration:

Naked among the silence of my own time

and Zig Zag Zag that last letter

            of a secret or forgotten alphabet

shaped like our own last letter but it means

Something in our experience you do not know. (“Breaking Open” 521)

In the passage above, Rukeyser is being open about the helplessness that she feels and about the disregard Americans have for the suffering of the Vietnamese people. Rukeyser indicates that she is “naked among the silence,” suggesting her vulnerable side caused by the injustices displayed all over the world. Being bare is one of the most fragile human experiences, and Rukeyser candidly compares her emotions and her frail state of mind to “naked[ness].” She further conveys her weakness at that moment by stating that she is uncovered “among the silence,” which is indicative of the transparency of her fragility in the inaction of the world. The American people are “silent,” and Rukeyser considers their (and her) passivity a form of culpability.

            By comparing the Vietnamese alphabet to that of English letters, Rukeyser establishes a connection between the two cultures to encourage empathy on the part of Americans. The “Zig Zag Zag that last letter of a secret or forgotten alphabet” simulates the action of writing the letter “Z” in the English alphabet. The Vietnamese alphabet is similar to that of the English alphabet, a fact Rukeyser uses to show Americans their commonality with the Vietnamese and thus provoke interest in the cause of peace. This move begins the stages of empathy. However, the “last letter,” “Z,” is a “secret” because it is one of the four letters in the English alphabet not found in the Vietnamese alphabet.⁶ The “forgotten alphabet” denotes our stoppage, the termination of the recurrences that enable us to have a shared experience with each other.⁷  Rukeyser condemns Americans for the disruption in our connected consciousness with Vietnamese people through her statement, “Something in our experience you do not know.” In using the pronoun “you,” the statement becomes pointed and accusatory of the reader, but it also evokes action from them. 

Similar to the vulnerability of an infant’s cry, Rukeyser is able to use her fragility to evoke action within her community. This creates a sense of positivism, which she shares with those around her:

Looking out at the river

the city-flow seen as river

the flow seen as a flow of possibility

and I too to that sea. (“Breaking Open” 521)

Common to much of Rukeyser’s poetry, the motif of rivers arises to represent the fluidity in human interactions. Here, Rukeyser juxtaposes the natural exuberance of a river to the mechanical dynamics of city life when she states, “Looking out at the river / the city-flow seen as river.” In comparing these unlikely features of life, Rukeyser is bringing awareness to how the human experience mirrors nature, no matter how far removed we might be. It suggests that human life is governed by a sense of connection and implores the United States to adhere to this union. This belief motivates Rukeyser’s optimism, and now she is able to act against the Vietnam War. The lines “the flow seen as a flow of possibility / and I too to that sea” express her belief in shared human experiences. It gives her confidence that the American people will do what is necessary to address the injustices that surround them. 

For Rukeyser, the idea of the “unverifiable fact” is essential for her activism; it is the process that creates a shared experience. She defines it as the act of coming into the present, “to the moment in our own experience, unknown to each other, partly known” (“Poetry” 4). Rukeyser comprehends the knowledge each individual has obtained from the past. She understands how that information is carried with us to the current moment: It is presented through our interactions, thus transferring from one person to the next. In this transference is “the signs of the recognition in recurrence … in what is recognizable across the world, across race and life story, and the nature of beliefs” (4). This process of the unverifiable fact is in essence similar to “the cloud” in modern-day parlance, a shared experience of humans stored in the “same state of being” (5).

One subsection of Rukeyser’s poem begins “Written on the plane,” recorded in a note-like fashion (“Breaking Open” 522). This section narrates her thoughts about shared consciousness:

The conviction that what is meant by the unconscious is the same as what is meant by

history. The collective unconscious is the living history brought to the present in

consciousness, waking or sleeping. The personal “unconscious” is the personal history.

This is an identity. (“Breaking Open” 522)

History is not as grounded in facts for Muriel Rukeyser as many assume it is; instead, it is created from the collective subjectivity of each individual’s experience. In the first line, Rukeyser equates the “unconscious” with “what is meant by history,” a radical point of view that suggests the continuation of history and its effects as current. Rukeyser suggests there is no upper or lower bounds to history by comparing the past to a person’s unconscious. This rejects traditional thinking about history as a definite point that ends before the present begins. Hints of the unverifiable fact echo through her statement that the “collective unconscious is the living history brought to the present in consciousness.” This statement creates a new definition for history grounded in the collective “personal history,” thus suggesting an exchange can be made in the present to help build a better foundation for our future. 

One of Rukeyser’s many characteristics is her fondness of combining innovative thoughts with her activist work. Previously in her life, with the long poem The Book of the Dead (1938), she had used the form of documentary poetry to raise awareness about the many workers who contracted and died from silicosis. “Breaking Open” is no different, since it also uses thoughts on philosophy to reimagine the way we see activism. By approaching activism as a way of forming a shared consciousness, there is an individual responsibility placed on the readers of her poem. It does not suggest grand gestures, yet it still maintains the same urgency as a poem that serves as a direct call to action would. Wallenstein’s argument about the creation of the relationship between the poem and the audience’s open mind while experiencing a text lays the foundation for my understanding of Rukeyser’s unverifiable fact. For the transference to commence in the unverifiable fact there needs to be receptivity, a “naked[ness]” of all individuals. The opening scene of “Breaking Open” demonstrates that a lack of receptivity results in the continuing suffering of others. We cannot be passive in our activism, nor do we need to be angry. Rukeyser hopes for a balance between the two, where we as individuals can practice openness and vulnerability while fostering our own agency.

Works Cited

Brick, Howard and Christopher Phelps. “The Revolution Will Be Live, 1965-1973.” Radicals inAmerica: The U.S Left Since the Second World War. Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 121-72.

Bult, Laura. “A Timeline of 1,944 Black Americans Killed by Police.” Vox, Vox, 30 June 2020, www.vox.com/2020/6/30/21306843/black-police-killings.

Nash, Elizabeth, et al. “State Policy Trends at Mid-Year 2019: States Race to Ban or Protect Abortion.” Guttmacher Institute, 11 Nov. 2019, www.guttmacher.org/article/2019/07/state-policy-trends-mid-year-2019-states-race-ban-or-protect-abortion.

Truong, Donny. “Vietnamese Typography.” Alphabet Vietnamese Typography, 2018,vietnamesetypography.com/alphabet/.

Rukeyser, Muriel. “Breaking Open.” The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Edited by Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog with Jan Heller Levi. U of Pittsburgh P, 2005, pp. 521-29.             

—. “Poetry and the Unverifiable Fact.” The Clark Lectures. Scripps College, 1968, pp. 1-21.

Wallenstein, Barry. “Muriel Rukeyser and the Politics of Poetry.” Margins, nos. 24-26, 1975, pp. 52+. Independent Voices.

Perhaps I have become bitter. I have lived in the Palace now for three weeks, and I have begun to learn all of the Princess things. How to walk (apparently, I have been doing it wrong all of these years), how to talk, how to set flower arrangements, how to organize servants, how to organize a banquet, on and on…Still something feels off about all of it. My living here. I know some of the Maids scoff, Madame even found the idea pitiable to begin with. 

A servant becoming a Princess. I have heard them talk.

A Common orphan becoming a Princess.

            Well I am learning, and in the end, I think I will be a very good one. Yet, I know that it is only luck that brought me here. 

My first day in the Palace was not not eventful. That’s a double negative. Rummi, the librarian, says that one negative word placed next to another negative word gives both words a positive meaning. 

            I first arrived and Madame was immediately assigned to me. She is my teacher. On first meeting her, her face told me that she did not believe that I am fit to be a Princess; her mouth told me that she was going to teach me how to be one. 

            Perhaps, I was silly to expect my happily ever after to be a little less stressful. Or, at least a little less lonely. I don’t understand how I could be surrounded by so many people and yet still feel so alone. 

            The Palace is huge. I have never seen a place so big, or so empty. The rooms are vast enough to hold mountains. It is a wonder that people do not get lost in these rooms with their layered curtains and deep carpet. I feel as though it is all pink or red or blue. Everywhere I look, with gold accent. The colors stick to the walls like old porridge and do nothing to fill the empty spaces they hold in. Sometimes I would like to scream in these empty rooms. I would like to hear my voice echo off their walls, peeling wallpaper. Emptying them of loneliness, forcing it out. 

The rooms have few furniture pieces; Madame says it is all the style in Paris. 

            I miss my home, although it was not much of a home, it was more of a home than these empty corridors. There are servants. So many and scattered around the house at such frequency they often seem to blend in with the furniture. At least those that inhabit this house, the Royals, see them as such. 

They are scared to talk to me, and Madame insists it is improper. 

            The first thing Madame did was make me put on the most awful dress. Pink fabric draped over a giant bird cage that she locks around my waist. This I must wear to “look Royal.” I think it just looks foolish. She gives me shoes, the most awful shoes, they pinch my feet. I would have said something, but the Maids helping dress me kept complimenting me. 

“What a pretty Dress.”

“What a gorgeous figure.”

“And, such a pretty little face.”

I do not want to risk hurting their feelings. I feel that it is too close to when I have started this charade to present myself as anything but amiable. I do not want to insult the people who will become my new friends. 

I wear the dress. And the shoes. And after my etiquette lessons I put the shoes in my room and explore the Palace, creaking slightly in my bird cage. Madame catches me before I can go too far and says we must have lunch. Madame says that this is to be my routine every day; until I become more like that of a proper Princess, I am not to leave her sight. My only fear is that it is she who says when I am proper enough. 

It is funny though: I have gone the rest of my day without the shoes. 

⚭

Madame says I talk too loud; Madame says I shouldn’t talk to the Maids; Madame says I must learn to walk with a straight spine and wear a corset; Madame says that I should be visiting the Prince’s Bedroom frequently when he is here. 

Madame reminds me of my Stepmother: they are both utterly Confined by a Cage of expectations I will never fulfill. 

⚭

Rummi is tall. His hair is dark and has gray patches. His eyes are a beautiful green color. His skin is soft and brown. His clothes remind me of my friends in the village, yet they are made out of much finer fabrics.
            Rummi works in the Library and is a man of many contradictions. That is what he says about himself; I just say that he is my friend. 

He gives me the most wonderful books to read. Books about grain prices and how roads are made. He gives me books full of numbers and has started to teach me how to do math. His favorite are the poetry books, he has even added a few of his own to the Palace collection– without permission from the court, of course. So that will just be our secret.

Rummi makes this Palace seem smaller than it was before. 

We talk for hours after my lessons and I help him in the library. I believe he is a better teacher to me than Madame is. He tells me about the history of the Royal family. Who hates whom, and who won’t talk to whomever else. He has worked as the Royal librarian for thirty-three years, and he has taught almost all of the current family to read. Including Eric.  

It is Rummi who says I ought to keep patience; it is Rummi who assures me that these people will be my friends, eventually. 

⚭

            Madame is a very fine talker. It suits someone of her stature. Sometimes, I look at her and see that she could almost be pretty, if her face wasn’t so tightly pulled back into her bun of hair. Her hair has gone almost entirely silver except for a few stubborn dark spots that she seems most embarrassed by. Her skin is pale as winter snow, and wrinkled, aged, withering. I do not think that any Princess brought as the Prince’s bride would have suited Madame, no one so young could ever impress her. I am aware that I am young and naïve. 

            Curiously, she has embraced this character of hers, and refuses the thought that she is not all bad. I ask her about her husband, if she has any children. She seems reluctant to answer, as though she is horrified by such a thought. Perhaps the issue is not with my question but with sharing intimate details about herself with someone like me. 

⚭

            The garden is beautiful here. There are flowers of every kind. After lessons with Madame I have twenty minutes of free time when I may wander as I please. Often, I will go sit under the trees; it is Spring and there are all sorts of beautiful blossoms hanging from the branches. Some branches are so low they brush my head as I walk under them. Later, a brush against my head will cause small pink or white or purple petals to fall from the branches and rain on me. This thought makes me excited for the future, maybe it will be tolerable.

            When Eric is here, I will ask him to walk with me in the garden. I will ask him if our future will be tolerable. I will use my naivety to create conversation. 

On the way back to my room, I spotted a mouse. I had not talked to one in so long, I caught it by its tail and hid it behind my book to bring it back to my room with me. Madame does not seem to like mice, and therefore she must not know that I am communicating with one.

            I made the mouse a small nest out of a match box and cotton and placed it in it, so that she could be comfortable. I went through all the formalities of introductions. I told her that I would not call in the cat on her, but for some reason, she would not respond. 

            I took out one of the leftover tunics I had brought with me from home and tried to put it on her, but she bit my thumb and jumped off my dresser. I cannot figure out why. She scampered out my door and I have not seen her since. 

⚭

            Madame introduced me to a new Maid today, she is to replace a girl discharged due to a pregnancy. I curtsied during the introductions, but she looked at me strangely. 

            All today she avoided my eyes whenever we were in the same room together. I liked the other better, at least she didn’t make me feel so odd. Like I am missing something.

            Eric is back today. I have organized a banquet in his honor tonight, it is my duty as a Princess. It will be so much fun. There will be dancing, and food. So. Much. Food. At the first banquet I attended here there was so much food that I did not know how to control myself. I’m afraid I ate everything I could, Eric was terribly embarrassed at my behavior. 

            I have wheedled Madame to invite the common people as well, my friends from town. I know it will be just wonderful. Eric and I will dance and then walk in the garden under the stars.

⚭

            The Banquet was not fantastic. 

            Madame said she made a mistake in mailing the invitations to all of my friends and none of them received them. 

After dinner, all Eric wanted to do was go to bed. He insisted that I go with him. I know that I am his wife and that I must perform certain duties, however nobody ever conveyed exactly what those were. If they had, I would have rethought the idea of Marriage. The first time I ever had to, on the Honeymoon, I was positively frightened. I don’t think the world has ever thought about how odd it is that they tell us half our life that we should never do something and then the other half that we must. 

I tried to convince Eric to walk with me, he would not budge. He leaves in three days again. Perhaps he will walk with me before that. 

⚭

            Today, I asked the new Maid, she has still not told me her name, why she avoids me like I am Crazy. She insisted that she does not avoid me. I told her she does, whenever I enter a room she exits. She tells me that I am a Princess and that a Maid is not suitable to be in the same room with a Princess. I tell her that that is utter nonsense and from now on she and I are to be thought of as on the same level; I used to be a Maid, too. 

            That is when Madame came in and told her to get back to work. I have a feeling I know why she feels that she must avoid me.

⚭

            Rummi asked me where I was from today. We were examining maps and he showed me where he was from, across the ocean. I told him that I am from the town. An old broken-down manor. He did not seem phased by this, however I felt extremely uncomfortable at the thought of my origins in a way that I never have before. He noticed that I was uncomfortable; he is terribly empathetic, and I can never hide a feeling from him. Guessing my reason for feeling so, he told me that it was normal. That no Commoner has ever felt comfortable in the Palace. 

            Rummi is positive things will turn around soon: Either I will change, or the Palace will. 

⚭

 I am no longer allowed to converse with mice, instead I am watched as though I am a bird in a Cage, night and day.

I wish I was in a Zoo instead. There, at least, people might want to see me fly. 

Madame caught me speaking to a mouse the other day. She saw it and screamed. The guard caught it, and no amount of tears convinced him to release the poor thing. Poor Mouse.  

Madame says that I am Crazy and must stop talking to mice, and animals, and whatnot. She told me that I am no longer lonely, and if I keep it up, they would have to investigate if there is something seriously wrong with me. “Mice don’t talk.” Madame says that if I continue people will start to call me Crazy. 

I don’t know how to explain that everything within me feels alone, so terribly small. I don’t know how to explain that Mice do talk if you listen, and that they are fantastic listeners. They are better listeners than anyone in the Palace. 

I don’t know how to explain that there is something crawling up the inside of my throat and it causes tears every time I am forced to speak as a Princess and not allowed to speak as me. And that it cuts deeper every time I sacrifice another part of my personality to fit my role. I don’t know how to explain this to Madame, and I don’t think she would listen. She was out the door before I could start sobbing. And tears are all that came. 

I was Confined to my room due to a stomachache. 

I feel that I am alone all the world; there is enough pain in my throat to share with all the Kingdom. I do not know how much longer I can do this. 

⚭

            “Is there something wrong with her?”

            “Crazy.”

I overheard one of the Maids talking to another. Madame is right, I should make it a mission to not overhear others’ conversations. 

I have a feeling that I have come to the world slowly. It’s not that I grew up dumb, or that I was overly sheltered or underly so, but for some reason I think that the world didn’t take to me until very recently. I can think of no other reason as to why I feel so incredibly out of my depth in these conditions, as though I am drowning. 

 I suppose at some point I had to learn that not all Princes are charming and that talking to mice is for lonely people. If you feel the need to talk to somebody, you should talk to a Maid who can keep her mouth closed, not to mice. That is what Madame says. 

I look around the dinner table and wonder: Who are we outside of this? The rules are so strict here. You cannot breathe without following a royal code, all laid out for me by Madame. Your stomach must not protrude too much from beneath your breasts. You are only allowed one half second to exhale; any longer and it will become a sigh which is a social statement, and social statements are very rarely looked upon as polite. 

            I wonder the most about Eric, he is a very good husband, from what I have been told, and a very good Prince, as far as my unstudied eye can tell. He is always going off on Princely quests and the common people love him. Yet, he is so stiff. 

Not a day goes by when his spine is not as straight or taut as the petrified tree in my mother’s garden at home. When he comes home, he is tired and doesn’t wish to see me. It seems that the only place he can be himself is the bathtub.

 I wonder who he would have been if he had been allowed the freedom to explore himself as a young boy. Who he could’ve been if he hadn’t been born into the shoe of Princedom. If he had not been born Royal.

I think he would have been a sailor. He loves the sea; it is almost all he ever talks about. He has a sweet romance with the sea that grew under Confined land locked conditions. He never even saw the sea until he was sixteen years old. That is what Rummi tells me. 

What should I know what he sees, though? I have not seen him for well over eighteen days. 

⚭

            Today Rummi gave me a book about a Princess and a Beast. I did not like it. I did not think it was realistic. 

            Rummi says that I am merely going through growing pains, and everything will fall into place in time. I asked him how long it took him to adjust, but he didn’t answer me. He just looked away and began to talk about birds.

I don’t want to wait until I am adjusted. 

⚭

            I bled today. I have bled consistently every month since I was 12. I am to understand that it is normal, as I have cleaned plenty of bloody rags from my Stepmother and Sisters. I asked Madame if I may have a rag for the blood. She looked horrified that any such thing should come out of my mouth. 

The Maids around me began to comfort me immediately. They asked if I was terribly upset and if the Prince knew yet. I confessed that I didn’t understand why I would be upset, and they seemed to find that terribly funny. They thought my ignorance was very humorous. They told me that I bled because I was not pregnant. I did not ask why this was important, I was not trying to be humorous. 

            After dinner I went immediately to my room, my stomach hurt so and I have never had the pleasure of a comfortable bed to lie on before.

            It looks different on silk than on the wool I once had. It is deep and often in small clumps. The silk does not absorb so much, instead letting it ride on the surface, if you are not careful it could all slide off. 

On the yellow silk it is almost as though it could be smooth, the potential is there. All one must do is smooth it out. As though you could wash it enough you may be able to smooth it out. Make it silky, and flow. Red and yellow have never looked so beautiful, I must confess. 

            Madame came to me then, she entered without introduction as always. Some days I wonder if there has not been some mix up, that she is the true Princess after all and I am just a stand in. A project to stave off her boredom.

She sits me on the couch and takes the rag from my hand, wrapping it up carefully so that she is not touching my blood, too dark and Common for her. She tells me that I am never to ask for such a thing as a rag in public again. If I need one, I may write a note to her or a Maid and hand it to them discreetly. 

She tells me that she thinks I have not quite understood my role here yet. That as a Princess and a Wife it is my job to create heirs. That I should not let myself bleed again until I have had many children. I ask her, Why? 

She tells me that things are different now. 

She tells me that if I am not to embrace this role fully there is no way I could ever be a proper Princess or Wife to Eric. 

She tells me that I am lucky to be here, in a Palace. When I started off sleeping next to an old fireplace in a dusty, broken-down, cindery old house. She does not think I am Committed enough to be here. 

She tells me that I ought to be doing my best to make this work, as I am so lucky to be a part of the Royal family since I came from such a Common background. 

She stands, leaving my rag on the couch next to where she was sitting. I seem to not be able to look at anything else. It seems to me that the only real thing in the world is that yellow silk, and the blood on it. 

“It is also possible to send you back to your humble home, if it is seen as the best fit for the Palace as a whole. I’m sure the arrangements can be made for your Marriage to be dissolved if this is too much for you, Cinderella.”

She looks at me as though I am sickly, as though I am Crazy. She is expecting an answer, she is expecting me to beg to go home. She looks at me as though I am a stupid Commoner. 

I do the only thing I feel I can do, after taking so much from Madame. I rise, grabbing my rag, I look her in the eyes and hold out my rag to her.
            “Give this to the Maid on your way out, Madame. Goodnight.”

I turn from her and cross to my dresser, undoing my hair. I panic at the silence, but then I hear Madame exit. 

My Conviction has been made clear.

A critical self-reflection on “The ‘C’ Word”

The feeling of shame is present in everybody’s life, it has developed as an intrinsic part of our society’s system of control, a method to control the behavior of those who live in it. Whoever is in control of mainstream society controls what is perceived as shameful. For instance, in our modern day we consider periods, sex, homosexuality, to all have varying levels of shame attached to them.

 Stories are a way to examine the topic of shame, as they can bring up uncomfortable issues in manageable ways and are easier to discuss without causing people to take them too personally. Muriel Rukeyser was an author who could bring up touchy issues in a way that does not end with the alienation of the reader. Striking a balance of not causing feelings of shame yet addressing ‘shameful’ topics, Rukeyser’s style brings up these topics while remaining “emotionally neutral” (Wallenstein 53). In The Orgy (1965), Rukeyser visits County Kerry, Ireland on a research mission to observe the Puck festival on behalf of Paul Rotha, a filmmaker. She documents the visit with a stream of consciousness story, tinged with shame but ending with self-empowerment. Rukeyser begins by documenting her own shame and the shame of the native Irish people who accompany her on her three-day journey through Puck Fair.

Throughout the book, it is pointed out by those around her that Rukeyser plays the role of the ignorant American. In fact, she documents the word “ignorant” as a way she labels herself. Rukeyser initially wants to take advantage of being labeled “ignorant”: “I’d like to use my ignorance,” she writes (13). However, she does feel and react to the shame present in such a statement, as is evidence by her refusal to resemble a tourist. Rukeyser refuses to carry a camera, “I am not going to be an American woman carrying a camera” (7). She instead opts for a small notebook to record her experience.

As if to relay this feeling through an image, Rukeyser describes the crowd on Gathering Day, all staring in awe at the Puck Queen, who is crowning the great Goat. Well, everyone is focused on the main event “but one woman whose face was fastened sideways, staring across all the faces at someone with a camera” (43). This image breaks up the sanctity of what was otherwise described. Rukeyser views this brash documentation by another person, someone wielding a camera, as a dishonor to the festival and people who inhabit County Kerry. The fact that this other person is the typical sort of American tourist only adds to the shame she feels about being from such a culture. 

Her new Irish friends also add to this feeling of alienation that leads Rukeyser to take on the role of the passive narrator. Even what she calls the bathroom (“What is the matter with Americans, that they can’t say toilet?”) is picked apart by the locals she has aligned herself with (12). However, this aggression towards Rukeyser about her American nationality also shows the locals’ own weaknesses, since they are reluctant to invite Rukeyser into their festival. “I hate visitors to see it,” they tell her (13). And they seem to question Rukeyser’s motivations as a way to keep her away from the festivities because they are ashamed of their own culture as well. 

A good example of this hidden hostility: Rukeyser’s new friend Nicholas asks twice if Rukeyser would not come back to Glenbeigh with them at the end of the first night. “‘Surely not,’ he said, and the crowd for a moment pushed him back and away from me,” she remembers (47). Nicholas’s refusal to believe that she would like to stay at the festival longer created not only an emotional divide between them—later Rukeyser thinks to herself, “What an ass” (48)—but also, quite literally, a physical one. 

It is not until the third day of the festival, Scattering Day, and the final pages of The Orgy that Rukeyser first documents somebody directly addressing her by her name. “Muriel! Just a word…” (129). This change, writing herself by name, is indicative of the change in mood in the final pages of the book. As Rukeyser finds her own self-empowerment, she answers a question she has been pondering all along: Will she really be the one to bring a documentary camera to this transformative festival? Her answer is no, and with this Rukeyser begins to speak, making a joke about the usual American way. “Do it the—how shall I say?—the American way. Wish for it clear of rain and cold, no sheep, no petrol drums—wish for an air-conditioned tunnel” (132). She is able to laugh about the stereotypes associated with her nationality, and thus is able to continue her journey home proud of who she is, as an individual, and free of shame. 

In 1950, over ten years before The Orgy was published, the Walt Disney Studios was in its golden age and produced Cinderella. In modern America, most people know the story of Cinderella and have consumed some version of it. As a fairytale, “Cinderella” is in the public domain, both in terms of its copyright and in the sense that, once a fairytale has been accepted by a society, individuals start to feel personal ownership of the story. That is why there are hundreds of movies all with the same title, Cinderella, yet you could not say that all of these movies tell the same version of the story. 

 I have chosen Disney’s 1950 Cinderella, and the 2002 continuation Cinderella II to frame my creative response to The Orgy because it is a well-known fairytale. Although I was inspired by Rukeyser’s “emotionally neutral” writing style, I also wanted to create a story that was outright provocative, by drawing attention to shame and wrongdoings happening in the story itself. Since everyone can feel like they have ‘ownership’ over a fairytale, I thought that the most provocative way to get a response from readers would be to take a beloved fairytale and give it a title like “The ‘C’ Word,” and then use a Disney-style Princess to confront uncomfortable and shameful issues. I wanted to mimic the emotional response that Rukeyser often elicited and received, but I would be more direct. 

The movie Cinderella was released by Disney in post-World War II America and laid the foundation for Cinderella II, released in 2002. Cinderella provides a reflection of changes in American culture, especially in the image of American women. The world had begun to shift away from the steadfastness shown by WWII-era icons like Rosie the Riveter and moved towards a more frivolous ideal. As Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell has argued, this reflects cultural changes during the postwar moment. Much like many of Disney’s other movies, its version of the Cinderella story (Cinderella and Cinderella II) does not cover controversial issues in an outright way. Instead, it creates a world that is decidedly neutral, with no real “evil” present, and one where the character of Cinderella is not given any choice about her identity. 

The Orgy was published later, in a time that was tumultuous for the American Left. Student groups were becoming more popular, and the Civil Rights movement was well underway (Brick and Phelps 88-121). Rukeyser would have been aware of both the Civil Rights movement and the corresponding rise of 2nd wave Feminism happening at the time, and would have known these movements were potential audiences for her work. The Orgy covers many interesting and complex issues that also become controversial, and deal with the political/personal dynamic. The time in which Rukeyser was writing was a time when many people were just beginning to link the personal and political; and many still would have been wary of how activists like Rukeyser fused them together almost seamlessly (Brick and Phelps 118).

 Rukeyser’s writing style believes in the inherent connection of the personal to the political. Today we accept this link as an intrinsic fact, and we have become more accepting of previously taboo subjects; however, there are still topics that remain shameful. Shame is likely never to go away completely. Because shame functions as a way to control people’s behavior, there will never be a society that does not some forms of shame to police its values. We all experience variations of shame and embarrassment every day, and this is what will make Rukeyser’s The Orgy relevant far past its time. At its core, it is a story about finding and coming to terms with personal identity, both despite and through feeling ashamed.

So, I ask why do we let Cinderella off so easy? If she is going on her own journey of personal identity after she marries the Prince, why is it not just as messy and shame filled as Rukeyser’s own? The answer is that Cinderella’s journey probably is. We have just been consuming a sanitized version of this fairytale story. If Rukeyser had indeed taken photos on her journey to Puck Fair, that is what we would have seen as well with her story, a sanitized version that removes her shame. It is when we start to feel the story instead of just seeing it when the real transformation happens. 

In my version of the fairytale, inspired by Rukeyser’s story and relying on the events of Cinderella II the sequel to Disney’s Cinderella, Cinderella has been thrown into a strange environment with new customs and nobody she knows. She is in the midst of culture shock while trying to scramble to become the Princess and Wife that she is expected to be, a position she has never been prepared for in her life. My heroine is a Commoner wearing a Royal’s clothes, coming from an environment that drove her to the point of talking to mice and birds, as they were the only company she was allowed to keep. She has never had the luxury of having to think about her personal identity before, it has always been assumed of her. It is the difference between telling someone “You are a Maid” and instead asking them “Would you like to be a Princess?” 

In the end, Cinderella has the chance to decide what her identity is. Maybe we see this in the movie as well, but the experience of watching something happen, passively, versus actively engaging with and feeling the story is the difference between mindless entertainment and transformation. Fairytales are inherently personal, everyone has their own version of the story of “Cinderella”in their heads already, each tinged with their own personal perspective. Every fairytale, fable, and myth we are exposed to helps make us who we are. By making the story more about the personal and private experience of the character of Cinderella, I have created a world where the building blocks are already familiar. I have created a world where Cinderella can undergo a transformation, and so can the reader. Like what Rukeyser experiences at Puck Fair, such experience can bring us “Out of my old shame—” and “At last gave me / My woman’s name” (Orgy 135).

Works Cited

Brick, Howard, and Christopher Phelps. “A New Left, 1960-1964.” Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War. Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 88–121.

Chrisman-Campbell, Kimberly. “Cinderella: The Ultimate (Postwar) Makeover Story.” The Atlantic, 9 Mar. 2015. Web. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/03/cinderella-the-ultimate  postwar-makeover-story/387229/

Cinderella. Directed by Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske, Walt Disney Productions, 1950.

Cinderella II: Dreams Come True. Directed by John Kafka and Darrell Rooney, Walt Disney Company, 2002.

Rukeyser, Muriel. The Orgy: An Irish Journey of Passion and Transformation. 1965. Paris Press, 1997.

Wallenstein, Barry. “Muriel Rukeyser and the Politics of Poetry.” Margins, nos. 24-26, 1975, pp. 52+. Independent Voices.

To cite this creative and critical essay in MLA 8th edition: Buczeksmith, Sam. “The ‘C’ Word.” Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive, http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/2020/09/09/sam-buczeksmith-the-c-word/

I do and I do.
Life and this under-war.
Deep under protest, make.
For we are makers more. 

—Muriel Rukeyser, “Breaking Open” (Collected Poems 527)

How should one approach Muriel Rukeyser’s vast body of work and multifaceted life? My first inclination is through her role as poet,one of the few identity categories she embraced, uncritically, alongside those of “American,” “woman,” and, after the birth of her son in 1947, “mother.” But given pervasive misconceptions about poetry’s apolitical or antipolitical nature, and given the variety of forms Rukeyser explored over her long career, even that identity seems too limiting. Other forms of identificatory nomenclature that seem suitable—bisexual or lesbian or pansexual, Jew, feminist—actually are contestable.¹

Rukeyser’s own disidentification with political labels and sociological identity categories was more than reactionary antinomianism. Instead, her attitude was symptomatic of her own rejection of anything that might box her in, thereby cutting her off from other segments of humanity and diminishing her potential for future growth and empowerment, on her own terms. Critic Shira Wolosky, when examining Jewishness in Rukeyser’s work, insightfully notes that the poet’s work engages “mutual figuration,” whereby her “different identifications become figures for each other, standing for and also with or against each other” (202). Consequently, rather than write a poetry with a “closed, iconic, traditional lyric ‘I’” that suggests a unified ego, “Rukeyser’s selfhood is instead enacted as a multiple negotiation among a variety of mutually representative, contentious, constitutive parts of the self, each situated in concrete social, political histories” (Wolosky 203). So, perhaps a role like public intellectual, rather than any fixed identity, might be more applicable for studying Rukeyser. Teacher and educator, definitely fit. When developing a recent undergraduate course at the University of Albany, SUNY, devoted solely to Rukeyser’s life and career, I thought that activist made the most sense, at least for me.

Of course, this categorization is problematic, too. Even while a student at Vassar College, when she might be called a radical without controversy, Rukeyser found herself at odds with the American left’s partisan politics and ideologies. Very often, her marginalization outside, sometimes even exclusion from, organized radicalism was a product of the sexism that afflicted both American leftism and its literary arms. Rukeyser’s refusal to toe any party line remained a constant throughout her life, even as the nature of leftism evolved and she moved along its spectrum. At any given time, she was prone to adopt seemingly conflicting views. Much like Walt Whitman, Rukeyser was unapologetic about any self-contradiction. Her antifascism during the Second World War, for instance, caused her to enter into service producing propaganda for the federal government, the same government of which she had been critical during her student years, just a decade earlier. Her brief employment by the Office of War Information initiated the start of a particularly harsh period of vitriolic attacks by other activists and activist-poets that continued into the postwar years.²Her adversaries usually interpreted her tendency to seem at odds with herself or her previous positions as merely self-serving wishy-washiness. Rukeyser, in contrast, regarded it as a willingness to learn. First and foremost, she was a pragmatist, in William James’s sense of a flexible, experimental application of various practical measures for realizing philosophical ideals. Catherine Gander has wonderfully explored how Rukeyser’s adoption of a pragmatist emphasis on flexibility and adaptability informed her “commitment to the necessity of dynamic relation in an aesthetics of human meaning-making” (1217). Such a commitment to dynamism extended beyond the aesthetic realm, into the political. When it came to activism, for Rukeyser the most expeditious means of producing the most desired result, the realization and defense of socialist democratic first principles, were the best political means.

During the Cold War, like many other American artists who also were leftists, Rukeyser continued to pursue her idealist vision through her work. Activism did not fall entirely out of the picture, but she understood full well just how vulnerable she was. So, the pragmatic—different from “pragmatist”—dimensions of political praxis took a backseat to her writing. She was surveilled by J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation. In the 1950s, her editor at the major trade house Little Brown fell victim to an anticommunist character assassination, a major factor in why three of Rukeyser’s books in her four-book deal with that house never came to fruition. While a lecturer at Sarah Lawrence College, affluent Westchester County’s local anticommunist brigade specifically targeted her for supposedly corrupting young women. Luckily, that establishment’s president and board of trustees defended her.³During the politically tense period of the 1950s, Rukeyser worked assiduously in many different media—poetry, biography, translation, fiction, film, television, drama, children’s literature, ghostwriting for others. In her preface to Out of Silence, an edition of Rukeyser’s selected poems, Kate Daniels problematically misrepresents this decade as unproductive for the writer. Supposedly, the “labor-, time-, and energy-intensive project of childrearing” led to “the dramatic and immediate decrease in her literary production” (Daniels xiii). In actuality, though, Rukeyser was incredibly and unimaginably productive. She still wrote and published a lot of poetry, but most of her work from this period actually was in other forms, usually ones with more promise of remuneration. After all, she was supporting a child on her own. Though she needed the paycheck, Rukeyser still took risks with her cultural output during the 1950s. Much of what she did create was politically inflammatory, and she drew fire from hostile parties. Consequently, much of her work was suppressed by editors and publishers, sometimes because she was a queer woman and a leftist. A great deal of this material still hasn’t seen the light of day. At least not yet.

In the final decades of her life, the New Left had risen to prominence. Many belonging to this younger generation of revolutionaries and radicals embraced a kind of cultural leftism that seemed an outgrowth of and conversant with Rukeyser’s own longtime ideas. Activists and writers associated with women’s liberation and gay and lesbian liberation would turn to her as a foremother. But she was slow in acknowledging the strengths of their political positions. She warmed up to the feminist movement late. Even then she did so with reservations, despite her fierce defense of women’s autonomy and her sex positivity—which only became more pronounced with age. She greeted queer politics after Stonewall with even more suspicion. It is rumored that in 1978, nearly a decade after the start of gay and lesbian liberation, Rukeyser had accepted an invitation to join a lesbian reading at the Modern Language Association’s annual conference but had to cancel because of illness (Bulkin 884). Even if that rumored invitation and acceptance were confirmed (I myself haven’t yet found definitive proof), would she have claimed allegiance with the movement then? If her expressed ambivalence about women’s liberation in her address to the MLA’s Radical Caucus a few years earlier is any indication, when she sarcastically noted that her breasts were too big for bra-burning, she probably would not have (Rukeyser, Untitled address).

Rukeyser would be embraced by the antiwar movement of the late 1960s and the amnesty movement of the early 1970s. The presumption that she easily adopted a personal philosophy of “pacifism” must be qualified, though. In 1972, she was arrested for participating in a die-in in the hallway directly outside the US Senate’s chamber, as part of a protest organized by the antiwar organization Redress. For years afterward, she peppered notebooks and miscellaneous slips of paper with what became almost a mantra, about how her desire to be nonviolent resulted in a struggle because she was, as she openly admitted, a violent woman. “Waking This Morning,” the extraordinary opening poem of her volume Breaking Open (1973), begins with this theme: “Waking this morning, / a violent woman in the violent day, / Laughing.” Rukeyser goes on to trace her efforts to write “my touch poems: / […] to find you entire / alive moving among the anti-touch people.” The prospect of making that work moves her toward her final declaration, a valediction to her reader:

today once more
I will try to be non-violent
one more day
this morning, waking the world away
in the violent day. (Collected Poems 471)

Rukeyser’s verb “try” both relieves and unsettles me, for it amounts to her casual admission of an uncomfortable condition I feel so strongly, too. Unlike her, though, I often see my temper and all other manifestations of my violent character as personal flaws. Rukeyser is not embarrassed by her innate violence, though. She knows that in her world, as in ours, the possibility of being nonviolent is, to be blunt (and to not suppress the frequent verbal manifestations of this flaw of mine), fucking impossible. The idea that we can will even our own nonviolence, unproblematically and without incident, is laughable. Indeed, that’s why Rukeyser laughs at the poem’s start. It’s an image that brings to mind the feminist laugh of Hélène Cixous’s medusa, a near-contemporary Rukeyser herself probably would not have known. The poem’s world-shattering, possibly self-derisive guffaw comes from the same woman who recently had gone on an unofficial peace mission to Vietnam with a Senator’s wife (Jane Hart) and another poet (Denise Levertov). It emanates from the same woman who, since the Second World War, often wrote about what she called her “wish” for peace. We can wish for peace, but that doesn’t mean we are pacifists. Purist idealism will get us nowhere and nothing in this violent world we cannot extricate ourselves from. But we can keep trying to free ourselves, to make the wish real. There’s her pragmatism again, in her vision of the need for our unending experimentation with resistance to our own internalization of the war-state’s and its society’s violence. Making, creating, doing. These are the only means by which we’ll overcome ourselves. Or, as Rukeyser writes in the title poem of Breaking Open, which I cite in my epigraph, “I do and I do. / Life and this under-war” (Collected Poems 527).

When I developed my course on Muriel Rukeyser, I knew I wanted to present her to my students as this kind of woman, this kind of activist, one who is impossible to heroize but whose example begs to be admired. She was a political poet not in spite of her contradictions and difficulties and complexities, but instead because of them. Indeed, Rukeyser ought to serve as a model—not a cautionary tale—for those of us who now fancy ourselves leftist or progressive writers and students of the literary arts. For my course to do justice to all of her, I could not be uncritical, and my criticisms had to be transparent. Yet, I also had to cultivate my students’ strong admiration, tempered by their own healthy criticisms of her. I would guide my students through her work, in its various forms: documentarian poetry, lyric, essays and reviews, literary nonfiction, fiction, drama, film, children’s books, and biography. To augment the readily available body of Rukeyser’s poetry and her poetics treatise The Life of Poetry (1949), I would draw on my years of archival work, to bring to my students Rukeyser’s previously published journalism, essays, book reviews, and scripts, most of which are long out-of-print. I would approach Bill Rukeyser, the poet’s son and literary executor, about the prospect of teaching an edited and annotated version of his mother’s masterful, as-yet-unpublished antifascist verse-play The Middle of the Air (1944-1945). Alongside the “Many Keys” essay that I had only recently recovered, it would be the sole piece of still unpublished or suppressed work that my students would read. But there could have been so many other possibilities—plays, pieces of uncompleted biographies, essays, reviews, collaborations—still left unpublished and awaiting discovery by a new generation of readers! We would read these selections of Rukeyser’s multivalent output against the backdrop of the evolving history of US radical political culture. We would trace the evolution of her ideas and poetics, and we would test them against various leftist principles and movements during her lifetime and against our own senses of social justice today.

My course was offered in Fall 2019 as a 300-level elective, cross-listed in both English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Although it was before the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which has cast our lives into chaos as well as has called into question all certainties about how activism can be done (though the recent #BlackLivesMatter protests assure as that we assembly is still possible, and consequential), we were still in a pretty chaotic space at that time. The seeming eternity of the Trump Presidential administration’s regime of malfeasance, mismanagement, and hatred—as well as, more positively, the #MeToo movement and earlier #BlackLivesMatter resistance—often were points of reference both for my thinking about Rukeyser and for my students’ processing of the American sociopolitical climate during her lifetime. I called my course “The Lives of Muriel Rukeyser,” for she had many lives and lived through many periods, not just one. Approximately thirty students enrolled for the course. Only one even knew who Rukeyser was before we began; she had taken my modernist poetry course the semester before, where we had studied The Book of the Dead (1938). For everyone else, Rukeyser was an unknown quantity. Most students were taking the class because it fulfilled some requirement or other, some because they were curious about women’s literature, generally, and thought they would get a straightforward introduction to feminist literature. I had warned everyone from the outset: Rukeyser was a woman of many contradictions but also of deep convictions. By semester’s end, you’ll either love her or you’ll hate her. Thankfully, many—of course, not all—loved her.

The following portfolio models the work by five of those undergraduates who came to love Muriel Rukeyser because they devoted an entire course from their respective student careers to her. Or, perhaps better put, they are five students who loved at least one facet of her life and work. The work published here consists of revised versions of these students’ final projects for our class. They had two options for designing their projects. The first was to develop a critical essay, based on a rather open prompt and incorporating secondary sources that had been assigned as required or recommended reading. The alternative was to develop a creative project of their own, accompanied by a similarly researched but shorter critical self-reflection essay. Whether scholarly or creative, each option for this assignment amounted to a means of encouraging the students to make critical responses to Rukeyser’s work.

Responsiveness was the combined ethico-political and aesthetic core of Rukeyser’s literary work and sociopolitical convictions. One of her great political poetic sequences “Searching / Not Searching,” also from the aforementioned volume Breaking Open, is prefaced with a serious witticism from Rukeyser’s acquaintance and another poet to whom I’m committed, Robert Duncan. “Responsibility is to use the power to respond,” she quotes him as having said (Collected Poems 480). She had been writing about such “power to respond” for decades, most pointedly in her book-length treatise The Life of Poetry (1949). There, Rukeyser theorizes about all manner of responses, including a formulation I’m fond of quoting: “a poem invites a total response” (Life of Poetry 11). That response “is reached through the emotions” (11). Emotions are a complex matter for Rukeyser; suffice it to say here that they are the primary means for accessing one’s self. The old chestnut Know thyself was a misbegotten idea for her, as well as for Duncan, two writers deeply invested in the artist’s unconscious life. If knowing oneself is out of the question, then the most one can do is Work on thyself. Poetry, or any art, calls upon us, readers and writers alike, to do exactly that. “The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form,” Rukeyser writes toward the end of The Life of Poetry (181). “That this form has to do with the relationships of sounds, rhythms, imaginative beliefs does not isolate the process from any other creation. A total imaginative response is involved, and the first gestures of offering—even if the offering is never completed, and indeed even if the poem falls short” (181). When I asked my students at the end of the semester to respond to Rukeyser, I implicitly was asking each to make such a total imaginative response. I was asking them to work on themselves, to come to some sense of their individual and personal commitments to some principles or ideals of social justice, while they worked through, and responded to, Rukeyser’s work…which itself is the trace of her own process of working on herself. Unlike those who prize scholarship’s rationalism because of its intellectualist cultural capital, I value critical essays for being creative affairs, reflexive acts of self-creation. And as a poet, I also know that a creative project is always its own kind of critical essay, using the word essay in the sense of its French root, as signifying an adventure, a process, a trial or testing of oneself.

The students featured in this portfolio volunteered not only to share their work with you, the reader, but also to live longer with their initial projects. They have revised and expanded and transformed their writing beyond what they originally produced for our course. Thus, their work exemplifies what is possible when one engages and then reengages Rukeyser with one’s whole self to her precedent, in order to produce a total imaginative response. It’s significant that the five contributors who wanted to share their work with you identify as women. Gender is important here, and figures prominently in how they engaged with and responded to Rukeyser. But many other factors are important, too: Rukeyser’s Jewishness, her anti-imperialism and lifelong protest of white supremacy, her resolute faith in universal equity and humanity, her caring and empathy, her sex positivity, her desire for social transformation.

Two of the contributors have developed academic critical essays. Both of these essays are impressive undertakings, which do not just perform dry close readings of Rukeyser’s work. Instead, they are conceptual engagements with the poet’s core ideas about social justice and citizens’ empowerment, as read in her prose and in her poetry. Modina Jackson reads the poem “Breaking Open” (1973) in light of Rukeyser’s activism during the Vietnam Conflict. Chloe Ross meditates on how Rukeyser’s brand of Cold War-era feminism in “Many Keys” (1957, pub. 2018), a lost essay about women’s writing, offers a model for feminist collectivity predating second-wave liberal feminism of Betty Friedan that is necessary for us to reclaim today to reimagine the terms of solidarity and coalition, beyond identity politics.

The portfolio’s other contributors opted to respond to Rukeyser through different creative avenues. Sam Buczeksmith was inspired by Rukeyser’s challenge of the culture of shame in Puck Fair (1965), a book about an Irish centuries-old fertility celebration of the same name. In response, she wrote a short fiction updating the Cinderella fairytale to tackle how shame interferes with women’s autonomy and sexual freedom. Lily Pratt also has written a short fiction, a diaristic account by a young woman, imagined as the daughter of Anne, Rukeyser’s protagonist from the unpublished play The Middle of the Air (1944-1945), which the poet’s literary estate generously allowed me to share with my students. Lily’s narrator suffers the indignities and violence of a patriarchal, sexist culture, and we witness her consciousness being reshaped by those experiences and the public and activist discourse of our #MeToo moment. Vered Ornstein also was impressed by Rukeyser’s wartime play. However, she adopted The Middle of the Air’s dramatic form, not its content or themes, to create a speculative playlet that interrogates Rukeyser’s cultural Jewishness and her wartime stance in relation to Zionism. Vered comes to understand how the Holocaust prompted extraordinary responses from many American and European Jews about the question of Palestine, but she sees the poet’s wartime position as exposing the limits of Rukeyser’s anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist politics, as evinced in early poems like “The Blood Is Justified” (1935).

I will withstand the temptation to say more about these great total imaginative responses to Rukeyser. Each author’s work should speak for itself. Only then can these students introduce themselves to you as the strong, vibrant, and fiercely committed intellectuals and writers they are. Just as Rukeyser’s own literature attests to her process of self-construction and the many lives she had led, these authors’ writings bear the traces of the work they have done on themselves while making their total responses to this formidable predecessor activist and poet.

Works Cited

Bergman, David. “Ajanta and the Rukeyser Imbroglio.” American Literary History, vol. 22, no. 3, 2010, pp. 553-83. Project Muse.

Berkinow, Louise, editor. The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, 1552-1950. Vintage, 1974.

Brock, James. “The Perils of a ‘Poster Girl’: Muriel Rukeyser, Partisan Review, and Wake Island.” “How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?” The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser, edited by Anne F. Herzog and Janet E. Kaufman. St. Martin’s Press, 1999, pp. 254-63.

Bulkin, Elly. “‘A Whole New Poetry Beginning Here’: Teaching Lesbian Poetry.” College English, vol. 40, No. 8, 1979, pp. 874-88. JSTOR.

Daniels, Kate. “Preface: ‘In Order to Feel.’” Out of Silence: The Selected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Edited by Kate Daniels. Triquarterly Books, 1992, pp. ix-xvii.

Folsom, Merrill. “Sarah Lawrence Again Under Fire: Legion Renews Its Attack on College over Hiring ‘Leftist.’” New York Times, 14 Nov. 1958, p. 11. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Gander, Catherine. “Poetry as Embodied Experience: The Pragmatist Aesthetics of Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry.” Textual Practice, vol. 32, no. 7, 2018, pp. 1205-29. Taylor and Francis, DOI: 10.1080/0950236x.2018.1477259.

Keenaghan, Eric. “Biocracy: Reading Poetic Politics through the Traces of Muriel Rukeyser’s Life-Writing.” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 43, no. 3, 2013, pp. 258-87. ProjectMuse, DOI: 10.1353/jnt.2013.0014.

—. “There Is No Glass Woman: Muriel Rukeyser’s Lost Feminist Essay ‘Many Keys.’” Feminist Modernist Studies, vol. 1, nos. 1-2, 2018, pp. 186-204. Taylor and Francis, DOI:10.1080/24692921.2017.1368883.

Rukeyser, Muriel. The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Edited by Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog with Jan Heller Levi. U of Pittsburgh P, 2005.

—. The Life of Poetry. 1949. Paris Press, 1996.

—. Statement for “Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews.” Contemporary Jewish Record, vol. 7, no. 1, 1944, pp. 3-36. ProQuest.

—. “Statement of Miss Muriel Rukeyser.” Typescript, 17 Nov. 1958. Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Box II: 8. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

—. Untitled address to the Modern Language Association’s Radical Caucus. Typescript, undated [c. 1975]. Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Box I: 16. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Wolosky, Shira. “What Do Jews Stand For? Muriel Rukeyser’s Ethics of Identity.” NASHIM: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues, no. 19, 2000, pp. 199-226. EBSCO: Academi”c Search Complete.    

To cite this article in MLA, 8th edition: Eric Keenaghan. “Total Imaginative Response: Five Undergraduate Studies from ‘The Lives of Muriel Rukeyser.'” Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive, http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/2020/09/05/eric-keenaghan-total-imaginative-response-five-undergraduate-studies-from-the-lives-of-muriel-rukeyser/.

Eric Keenaghan is associate professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. He is the author of Queering Cold War Poetry (Ohio State University Press), and his essays on Muriel Rukeyser have appeared in Journal of Narrative Theory, Feminist Modernist Studies, and Textual Practice. Currently, he is editing a selection of Rukeyser’s uncollected and unpublished essays, lectures, stories, and scripts.