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Elisabeth Daumer

First Elegy: Rotten Lake

January 15, 2021 by Elisabeth Daumer Leave a Comment

Originally published in A Turning Wind (1939)

As I went down to Rotten Lake I remembered
the wrecked season, haunted by plans of salvage,
snow, the closed door, footsteps and resurrections,
machinery of sorrow.

The warm grass gave to the feet and the stilltide water
was floor of evening and magnetic light and
reflection of wish, the black-haired beast with my eyes
walking beside me.

The green and yellow lights, the street of water standing
point to the image of that house whose destruction
I weep when I weep you. My door (no), poems, rest,
(don’t say it!) untamable need.

*

When you have left the river you are a little way
nearer the lake; but I leave many times.
Parents parried my past;the present was poverty,
the future depended on my unfinished spirit.
There were no misgivings because there was no choice,
only regret for waste, and the wild knowledge:
growth and sorrow and discovery.

When you have left the river you proceed alone;
all love is likely to be illicit; and few
friends to command the soul;they are too feeble.
Rejecting the subtle and contemplative minds
as being too thin in the bone;and the gross thighs
and unevocative hands fail also. But the poet
and his wife, those who say Survive, remain;
and those two who were with me on the ship
leading me to the sum of the years, in Spain.

When you have left the river you will hear the war.
In the mountains, with tourists, in the insanest groves
the sound of kill, the precious face of peace.
And the sad frightened child, continual minor,
returns, nearer whole circle, O and nearer
all that was loved, the lake, the naked river,
what must be crossed and cut out of your heart,
what must be stood beside and straightly seen.

*

As I went down to Rotten Lake I remembered
how the one crime is need. The man lifting the loaf
with hunger as motive can offer no alibi, is
always condemned.

These are the lines at the employment bureau
and the tense students at their examinations;
needing makes clumsy and robs them of their wish,
in one fast gesture

plants on them failure of the imagination;
and lovers who lower their bodies into the chair
gently and sternly as if the flesh had been wounded,
never can conquer.

Their need is too great, their vulnerable bodies
rigidly joined will snap, turn love away,
fear parts them, they lose their hands and voices, never
get used to the world.

Walking at night, they are asked Are you your best friend’s
best friend? and must say No, not yet, they are
love’s vulnerable, and they go down to Rotten Lake
hoping for wonders.

Dare it arrive, the day when weakness ends?
When the insistence is strong, the wish converted?
I prophesy the meeting by the water
of these desires.

I know what this is, I have known the waking
when every night ended in one cliff-dream
of faces drowned beneath the porous rock
brushed by the sea;

suffered the change : deprived erotic dreams
to images of that small house where peace
walked room to room and always with one face
telling her stories,

and needed that, past loss, past fever, and the
attractive enemy who in my bed
touches all night the body of my sleep,
improves my summer

with madness, impossible loss, and the dead music
of altered promise, a room torn up by the roots,
the desert that crosses from the door to the wall,
continual bleeding,

and all the time that will which cancels enmity,
seeks its own Easter, arrives at the water-barrier;
must face it now, biting the lakeside ground;
looks for its double,

the twin that must be met again, changeling need,
blazing in color somewhere, flying yellow
into the forest with its lucid edict:
take to the world,

this is the honor of your flesh, the offering
of strangers, the faces of cities, honor of all your wish.
I say in my own voice. These prophecies
may all come true,

out of the beaten season. I look in Rotten Lake
wait for the flame reflection, seeing only
the free beast flickering black along my side
animal of my need,

and cry I want! I want! rising among the world
to gain my converted wish, the amazing desire
that keeps me alive, though the face be still, be still,
the slow dilated heart know nothing but lack,
now I begin again the private rising,
the ride to survival of that consuming bird
beating, up from dead lakes, ascents of fire.

Filed Under: Long Poetry, Writings Tagged With: Elegies

Modina Jackson, Activism and Shared Consciousness in Muriel Rukeyser’s “Breaking Open”

October 11, 2020 by Elisabeth Daumer Leave a Comment

“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.

Modina Jackson is a recent graduate at the University of Albany, SUNY, where she has earned a B.S. in English and Economics. She was the recipient of the English Department’s Arlene F. Steinberg 1971 Memorial Scholarship, awarded for her essays about Muriel Rukeyser and Claudia Rankine. She hopes to pursue law degree in the future, but for now is looking forward to the freedom of postgraduate life.

Filed Under: Essays, Scholarship

Sam Buczeksmith, The ‘C’ Word

September 9, 2020 by Elisabeth Daumer Leave a Comment

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/


Sam Buczeksmith is a playwright, author, and a sometimes poet. She is currently a student of Technical Theatre and is very excited to have her work be included in this portfolio. She hopes to go on and write more things and tell more stories

Filed Under: Essays, Scholarship

Final Project: The Lives of Muriel Rukeyser

September 7, 2020 by Elisabeth Daumer Leave a Comment

Professor Keenaghan

Fall 2019

Note: Course assignments are the product of extensive intellectual labor; sharing them with others is a significant act of generosity. Please acknowledge Eric Keenaghan’s assignment should you use it in your own teaching, research, and writing. To cite it: Eric Keenaghan. “Final Project: The Lives of Muriel Rukeyser.” Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive, http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/2020/09/07/aeng-awss-368-the-lives-of-muriel-rukeyser/

Final Project Specs and Instruction

OVERVIEW

The final project for our course provides an opportunity to develop a sustained engagement, in either an academic or creative form, with one primary literary text by Muriel Rukeyser. This is a culmination of our semester-long study of this one author, and you will have approximately four weeks to develop and hone your project and maximize your ability to meet my high expectations and your full potential. Approach every prewriting assignment and workshop as opportunities to make progress on your project and to share insights about your peers’ work.

Due to the tight deadlines and quick turnaround for all portions of the project, no extensions will be granted for any part. Late submissions of some prewriting assignments will not be accepted, which will mean automatic failure for that particular assignment (see below.) Apply yourself fully and submit your work on time.

For the final project, you cannot write critically about or engage creatively with the same primary text you wrote on for your midterm essay. If one does, one can earn no better than a “C” for both the proposal and the completed final project.

The list of possible primary literary texts by Rukeyser that you may choose from is below. Choose only one text. Note that a “sequence” denotes a titled suite of poems, some of which may also be titled, that Rukeyser saw as a single unit:

  1. One poem or sequence from Theory of Flight (1935) (in Collected Poems)
  2. Chapter from Savage Coast (1936) (PDF on Blackboard)
  3. The Book of the Dead (1938) (in Collected Poems or textbook)
  4. “Worlds Alongside” (1938) (PDF on Blackboard)
  5. One poem or sequence from U.S.1 (1938) (in Collected Poems)
  6. One poem or sequence from Beast in View (1944) (in Collected Poems)
  7. The Middle of the Air (1945) (link on Blackboard)
  8. The Life of Poetry (1949) (textbook): approach as creative nonfiction
  9. “A Pane of Glass” (1953) (PDF on Blackboard)
  10. Come Back, Paul (1955) (on reserve at UA Library)
  11. “Open System” from One Life (1957) (PDF on Blackboard)
  12. All the Way Home (1957) (link on Blackboard)
  13. One poem or sequence from Body of Waking (1958) (in Collected Poems)
  14. “Waterlily Fire” (sequence) (1962) (in Collected Poems)
  15. The Orgy (1965) (textbook)
  16. One poem or sequence from The Speed of Darkness (1968) (in Collected Poems)
  17. One poem or sequence from Breaking Open (1973) (in Collected Poems)
  18. “The Gates” (sequence) (1976) (in Collected Poems)

See the syllabus and check Blackboard’s announcements regularly for updates on ungraded process materials due for our in-class workshops. Graded prewriting specs described below.

PART I: PROPOSAL

Specs:

Length: 3 paragraphs (see below).

Weight: 10% of your course grade.

Submission and due date: Tuesday November 19. Bring a hardcopy to class. Late proposals will be docked one full letter grade (as in, “B” to “C”) per day late.

Formatting: Format your submission as specified on the syllabus under “Course Policies: Formatting and submitting written assignments” (pages 8-9).

Instructions and main objectives:

The final project has no prompts, and there are no constraints beyond the simple one that your final project must engage one of the primary texts specified above.

For the initial stage of your project’s development, you will submit a proposal that performs three critical moves, each in a separate paragraph.

Devote at least two hours to reflect on what you wish to do for this final project and review the materials that we have studied. Our class discussions may be a starting point, but I expect everyone to cultivate her own voice, explore her own interests, and demonstrate her original thinking. Do not just parrot what has been said in class: Take those discussions in a new and interesting direction. Start writing the proposal only after you have gathered your thoughts and reflected on your interests.

All students, but especially students working on creative projects, are invited to come see me during my regular office hours to discuss their projects in the early development stages, before or after the proposal stage. Note that if a topic or if a choice of creative project does not sound sufficiently promising, I may advise against pursuing that avenue.

No outside research is required for the proposal, but you could begin to conduct “research” by reading or re-reading the required and recommended sources from the syllabus related to your primary text. Throughout the project development process, use your reading journal as a consolidated spot to jot down ideas, take notes on secondary sources, work through your close readings of passages from your primary text.

When you draft the proposal, stick to the formula sketched out below. The working thesis you propose is especially important since you do not want to abandon your intuitions once you really start researching in depth the primary text by Rukeyser and/or the related historical moment.

Even creative projects involve research and have theses, or meaningful critical insights that the artist wants to convey about the researched problem. Expect your ideas to be finetuned as you proceed with your research and your writing or other creative activity. Thinking is an organic process: Not everything will be figured out immediately, nor should it be.

Paragraph #1 (problem statement): Narrate a “real world” problem or issue that frames your point of entry to thinking about the value of one assigned primary text and why general audiences would find it interesting or significant. In the Humanities, we approach problems of the conceptual variety, rather than the practical kind, since literature and other kinds of art and cultural forms cannot directly change

the world…only how we see and think about the world. That conceptual problem should be prompted by something in your chosen primary text by Rukeyser that is especially interesting to you, as a reader and a critical citizen.

Paragraph #2 (thesis statement): Develop a very brief interpretation of one or two key passages or moments from the primary text that informs your argument about how it specifically redresses the problem you have outlined above. Remember that a thesis ought to articulate how a literary text—in terms of both your story-based focus and your text-based focus (concept, trope, image, form/narration) compels audiences to rethink the conceptual problem. You should not use the literary text merely to illustrate or exemplify the problem that you are narrating. So, articulate the three basic questions that you should consider when developing any thesis— What (character, relationship, or theme) are you focusing on from the primary text? How (trope, image, concept, form/narration) does the author goes about representing the “What?” through her authorial, craft decisions? Why is that “How?” (or manner of representing the “What?”) an interesting and significant approach to the conceptual problem.

Paragraph #3 (plan of action): Detail how you plan to go about supporting your thesis.

What do you plan to research? For critical papers, what other portions of the primary text do you think are significant to consider closely in your analysis? For creative projects, what exactly are you planning to do, what medium or form will your project take (such as dramatic scene, short story, poetic sequence, memoir essay, short film, graphic narrative), and why is that form a strong way of critically commenting on Rukeyser’s address of the problem? For everyone, what questions do you have? NOTE THAT YOU CANNOT SWITCH FROM A CRITICAL TO A CREATIVE PROJECT AFTER THE PROPOSAL PHASE.

(But you can switch from a creative project to a critical one. Just be sure to tell me if you do.)

Grading rubric: Every proposal received by the deadline will receive a brief note with some suggestions and a grade. This prewriting assignment will be evaluated based on its thoughtfulness and state of completion, the general quality of the writing, and the potential for the planned project’s development into a sustained longer essay or creative project: A- to A is for Excellent work with strong potential and a strongly focused approach to the problem and the working thesis; B- to B+ for Good work that needs significant rethinking and focusing for the problem and/or thesis to more fully realize the project’s potential; C- to C+ for Average work that is underthought and messily presented and has limited potential for development into a longer researched paper or creative project; D- to D+ for Poor work that requires going back to the drawing board; and E for especially Poor proposals.

PART II: ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY AND PROBLEM STATEMENT

Specs:

Number of sources: 3 to 4 on-syllabus secondary sources (either required or recommended), plus the primary text. At least two sources must be designated as “Context” on the syllabus.

All of the secondary sources must be annotated (5-6 sentences each, see below).

Length of problem statement: 1-2 pages, using at least 1 context source.

Weight: 10% of course grade.

Submission and due date: Tuesday December 3. Bring a hardcopy to class. Late work will not be accepted.

Formatting: Format your submission as specified on the syllabus under “Course Policies: Formatting and submitting written assignments” (pages 8-9). Your bibliography must be in MLA or Chicago format. Consult the embedded links to the Purdue OWL website for more information about formatting.

Instructions and main objectives:

For this portion of the project development, you will start conducting “research” about the problem statement and/or the primary text you have selected by Muriel Rukeyser and/or the period of her career when she wrote that text.

All of your researched sources must be secondary sources—that is, they must be either informational or argumentative. In the Humanities, literary texts (poems, novels, stories, plays, films, etc.) are not secondary sources since we use them as the objects of our analysis.

No off-syllabus research is required. All of your secondary sources should be either required or recommended texts from the syllabus. At least two sources must be designated as required or recommended “Context” readings. (In other words, you cannot use only Rukeyser’s poetics or journalism texts, though you may use one or more in addition to the two argumentative context sources.)

For this annotated bibliography assignment, you are required to research more sources than you might ultimately use for the completed final project. I recommend rereading the sources you choose. Do not rely overly much on class notes or note from your initial reading of the source.

For the bibliography’s entries, use current MLA or Chicago format. Annotate each source’s main argument in 3-5 sentences. Your annotation must include a clear account of the problem that the author is responding to and their thesis, which clearly articulates the focus of the author’s analysis and why she argues that focus is an important way of addressing the problem. As you write these annotations, imagine that you are providing a good summary of each article or book chapter to a general audience, good enough so that they will walk away having a strong sense of what the source’s main argument is about even though they may not have read it. So, do not cherry-pick the bits useful for your paper or that you understand. Your annotations will be successful and correct only if you convey the main argument.

Additionally, write one final sentence for each entry that specifies which category you imagine this source falling into for your paper and why you believe this to be case: (a) argumentative (to be used substantially in your critical frame to help narrate your problem statement); (b)

referential (to supply reference information, data, or a definition); or (c) local support (you are likely to cite only one aspect of the source’s argument or analysis, either to explicate a point in your critical frame or to help advance your original close reading of the primary text).

You should include an entry in your bibliography for your primary text, but it does not need to be annotated.

Once you have completed your annotated bibliography, develop a good draft of your problem statement. Cite at least 1 context secondary source (i.e., a secondary source not written by Rukeyser) for this draft narration. It need not be a complete critical frame—that is, you may not yet get to include your thesis statement about the primary text. This problem statement is more a way to generate raw material to use towards deepening your thinking about the project rather than a way to amass pages toward the paper. So, it may be somewhat “drafty,” a little less revised—but it shouldn’t be ramshackle, rushed, careless, or thoughtless.

For creative projects, your problem statement ought to include a final project narrating how your project’s creative dimensions are seeking thematically and formally to critically engage or respond to Rukeyser’s original text. (For instance, if you’re planning on working on a sonnet sequence why is that form the best choice for responding to the problem that interests you in Rukeyser’s original text. You can’t just write a bunch of sonnets because you dig sonnets or like writing them. There has to be a critical reason for that decision, just as Rukeyser made conscious decisions about working in the particular media and literary forms she chose in order to respond to the various social and aesthetic problems engaged by her work.)

You will not receive extensive comments on this prewriting assignment, only margin comments and a grade.

NOTE: When developing your project, you may need or want to find other information beyond your academic research. Do not use open-source reference websites like Wikipedia. Instead, use reputable online reference websites, peer-reviewed academic websites, or other official agency or government websites. Such reference sources do not “count” as one of your secondary sources for either this bibliography or your completed project. However, if you reference any such source you still must cite them and include them in your final paper’s bibliography and/or in this bibliography, so as to avoid possible plagiarism.

Grading rubric

The rubric below pertains to the baseline grade. Generally, an assignment will earn a particular evaluation mark if it reflects a majority of the criteria described below for the corresponding grade bracket. Late work not accepted, and will automatically earn an “E.”

A- to A = Excellent quality. Has both components (problem statement and annotated bibliography). Strong writing. Excellent use of sources to establish a problem statement. MLA or Chicago format is correct or mostly correct in the problem statement and bibliography. Excellent annotations conveying each source’s problem, thesis, and main argument.

B- to B+ = Good quality. Has both components (problem statement and annotated

bibliography) and a very promising problem statement. Writing could be strengthened at syntactical level and/or in terms of maximizing coherence and giving weight to one secondary source. Problem statement and/or thesis statement needs more clarification. MLA or Chicago format for bibliography needs some correction. Annotations of sources’ main arguments need some clarification or strengthening.

C- to C+ = Average quality. May be about the same primary text as the midterm essay.

Has both components (problem statement and annotated bibliography)

and a promising critical frame with a problem statement and a thesis statement. Writing generally needs strengthening at syntactical level and/or in terms of maximizing coherence. MLA or Chicago format for bibliography needs correction. Annotations of sources’ main arguments need significant strengthening.

D- to D+ = Poor quality. May have written on the same primary text as the midterm essay.

Missing one component (problem statement or annotated bibliography). Needs significant strengthening in terms of writing, cohesion, and argumentation. Missing one or more secondary sources. MLA or Chicago format incorrect. Annotations poor or missing.

E = Failed to turn in assignment, poor quality in relationship to all assignment criteria, missing one required component (critical frame or annotated bibliography), missing one or more sources, or secondary sources are not annotated.

PART III: THE FINISHED FINAL PROJECT

Specs:

Page length (academic critical essays): 8-10 pages, plus a bibliography.

Page length (creative projects): Consult instructor for creative project’s length. All creative projects must also be accompanied by critical self-reflection essay (4-5 pages), plus a bibliography.

Number of sources: 2 to 3 on-syllabus secondary sources, plus your primary text. At least one secondary source must be designated on the syllabus as a required or recommended “Context” source. To avoid plagiarism, all additional reference sources must be cited.

Weight: 40% of the course grade.

Submission and due date: Upload your essay to Blackboard via the final project submission portal by Monday December 16 by 12:00 noon. Late submissions will not be accepted. Earlier submissions will be welcome, though. Save your document as a PDF or Word file, and title it with your last name and “ENG 368 Final” or “WSS 368 Final,” whichever applies to your registration. If the format of your creative project cannot be electronically submitted through Blackboard, consult me for submission instructions.

Formatting: Format your submission as specified on the syllabus under “Course Policies: Formatting and submitting written assignments” (pages 8-9). Your bibliography must be in MLA or Chicago format. Consult Purdue OWL for specifics.

NOTE: Your essay or creative project, bibliography, and (for creative projects) critical self- reflection that you submit with your final project must all be part of the same file. Do not submit multiple files. Your final bibliography does not need to be annotated.

Instructions and main objectives for academic critical essays:

This is the finished product of a month-long research and writing process, and it is the culmination of all our studies of Muriel Rukeyser throughout the semester. You want this essay to be your strongest possible work.

You must use 2 or 3 secondary sources, at least one of which must be a “Context” source from the syllabus. Most or all of these sources should come from your earlier annotated bibliography.

A good of rule of thumb is that about three-quarters of the total length of your essay will be devoted to your focused, streamlined and globally coherent analysis of the primary text. (For this paper, that is between 5 and 8 pages.) About one-quarter of your essay should be your researched critical frame. (For this paper, between 2 and 3 pages.) Your research ought not appear only in your critical frame. You should use some research locally in the body of your paper, so as to help develop and augment your analysis of the primary text by Rukeyser.

To realize your essay’s fullest potential, reserve 2 days for revision of the complete essay after you have fully drafted it. Try to take one day off between the time you complete your full draft and the time when you start revising.

Revision should entail more than copyediting or checking for “errors.” Instead, it is a matter of re-visioning how your essay communicates your ideas and ethically serves your readers.

Instructions and main objectives for creative projects:

Other than the form of your project, not much is different from the academic critical essay option. All students who choose the creative option must consult with me in advance, before or after the proposal phase, to establish the parameters for your specific project.

In addition to your completed project, you must include a brief researched critical self-reflection essay (4-5 pages) that investigates a problem in relationship to your chosen primary text by Rukeyser and then discusses how your creative project responds both to that problem and Rukeyser’s treatment of it. This portion of the assignment is like what writers call a “craft statement” and artists call an “artist’s statement,” in which they outline how their poetics critically respond to another text and/or issue. These statements help guide audiences’ understanding of both the aesthetic and critical dimensions of their original work.

Your self-reflection essay must use 2 or 3 secondary sources, at least one of which must be a “Context” source from the syllabus. Most or all of these sources should come from your earlier annotated bibliography.

About one-third of your self-reflection essay should be your researched critical frame which sets up your discussion of the problem and the primary text (1-2 pages). Approximately one-third of your critical self-reflection essay should be devoted to your focused, streamlined and globally coherent analysis of the primary text (1-2 pages). A little more than the last third should detail how your project thematically and formally responds to Rukeyser’s primary text (2-3 pages).

To realize your project’s full potential, reserve 2 days for revision after you have fully drafted it. Try to take one day off between the time you complete your full draft and the time when you start revising. Revision should entail more than copyediting or checking for “errors.” Instead, re- vision how your essay communicates your ideas and ethically serves your readers.

Grading rubric for final project:

The rubric below pertains to the baseline grade for your final project. The grade is based on the completed project, not previous process assignments (which are graded separately) nor improvement over the course of the project’s development. Generally, a project will earn a particular evaluation mark if it reflects a majority of the criteria described below for the corresponding grade bracket. For creative projects, the criteria described below apply to the critical self-reflection essay. In addition, I will evaluate your project based on its own merits and the degree to which it realizes the critique of or response to Rukeyser that you narrate in your self-reflection essay. Missing or late projects automatically fail. Brief comments and a grade will be emailed to you. Note: As previously announced, all students who completed a Response Paper will receive a step-grade bonus (as in “B” to “B+”) to the baseline grade for their Final Project.

A- to A = Excellent quality. Strong writing. Excellent use of sources to establish a problem statement and strong local use of sources, including in the essay’s body/analysis. Strong thesis statement with textual details from the primary text. MLA or Chicago format is correct or mostly correct in the essay and bibliography.

B- to B+ = Good quality. Good use of sources to establish a problem statement, but one or more sources could be streamlined to increase the critical frame’s coherence. Good use of local use of sources, including in the essay’s body/close reading, with possibly coherence issues. Writing could be strengthened at syntactical level. Problem statement and/or thesis statement needs more clarification. Analysis needs to focusing, and/or further development. Bibliography’s MLA or Chicago format needs correction.

C- to C+ = Average quality. May have written on the same primary text as the midterm essay. Missing one or more of the minimum number of required

secondary sources. Coherence in critical frame, especially with integration of sources, needs substantial improvement. Too much weight given to one or more critical sources. Writing generally needs strengthening at syntactical level and/or in terms of maximizing global coherence and cohesion within paragraphs. Thesis statement too disconnected from details about the primary text or unfocused. Primary text treated as an application for the research, rather than as adding to and potentially changing an ongoing critical conversation about Rukeyser and/or the problem. Analysis of Rukeyser primary text needs substantial development. MLA or Chicago format for bibliography and in-text citations needs correction.

D- to D+ = Poor quality. May have written on the same primary text as the midterm essay. Needs significant strengthening in terms of writing, cohesion, and argumentation through research. Missing two or more of the minimum number of required secondary sources. Weak thesis, incoherent or incohesive analysis of Rukeyser primary text. MLA or Chicago format incorrect for bibliography and in-text citation. Missing bibliography.

Missing self-reflection essay (for creative projects).

E = Failed to turn in assignment or poor quality in relationship to all assignment criteria, or any degree of plagiarism or another academic integrity violation.

I = Incomplete. Failed to turn in final project by deadline, but student has demonstrated commitment to the class, does not have excess absences, and has completed all previous course assignments on time. To complete the course, the student is responsible for submitting her work by the University’s mandated deadline. Failure to do so results in the “I” automatically becoming an “E.” Not all students are eligible for incompletes, and students in need of one need prior permission from the instructor before the final project deadline.

Note: Interested students who receive an “A-” or better on their projects are eligible to revise them for possible publication on the blog of the website Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive (edited by Professor Elisabeth Däumer, Eastern Michigan University). Publication would be contingent upon whether Professor Däumer’s earlier invitation still stands and each student’s successful completion of the revision by the deadline she provides me.

The authors of published projects, as well as all projects that receive a “B+” or better are urged to share their work publicly at the English Department’s annual Undergraduate Research and Writing Conference, to be hosted in April 2020 (exact date TBD).

Filed Under: Resources

Syllabus: Women Writers–The Lives of Muriel Rukeyser

September 7, 2020 by Elisabeth Daumer Leave a Comment

Professor Eric Keenaghan Fall 2019

Note: Syllabi are the product of extensive intellectual labor; sharing them with others is a significant act of generosity. Please acknowledge Eric Keenaghan’s syllabus should you use it in your own teaching, research, and writing.

Course Description

Twentieth-century artist Muriel Rukeyser (born 1913, died 1980) believed that the purpose of art was, as she wrote in The Life of Poetry (1949), to bring its creators and audiences “toward the most human.” She was always activist minded, though she tried to avoid categorical definitions of her politics and most aspects of her identity. The few identities she embraced were those of poet, woman, mother, and American. We will look at some criticism about Rukeyser and herassociates, but most of our studies will focus on her own writings and projects. A biography about Muriel Rukeyser does not yet exist. So we will approach her life through her work, in its various forms and phases. We will consider what it means to read a literary author biographically, as well as what it means to use literary and nonliterary writings to approach an activist and public intellectual, one who was infamously secretive about her private life.

Proceeding chronologically, we will study her poetry; her published treatise The Life of Poetry; excerpts from her published biographies of other historical figures; her translations; previously published but uncollected essays, photoessays, short fiction, journalism, and film scripts; previously unpublished but recently recovered drama; her published but long out-of-print children’s books; and—most probably—as of yet uncollected and not yet published items (like an unpublished verse-play, unpublished short essays, and unpublished lectures). We will study some of the issues of magazines in which Rukeyser’s work appeared, to get a sense of whom she was publishing alongside and which editors and poets championed her work. How might this large body of work—only a small bit of which we can read in one semester—provide us a fuller understanding of this author’s life and the changing historical contexts in which she was living? How might Rukeyser’s work help us formulate new understandings about the public and political responsibilities of American writers and artists, generally? How does she challenge our conceptions about the stability or flux of identity, vocation, and career? How should her unorthodox life and career force critics to reassess their presumptions and methodologies?

Course Objectives

  • To provide an introduction to the life of the progressive American literary author and activist Muriel Rukeyser, as surveyed through her work and related cultural histories about twentieth-century social and political history
  • To introduce students to strategies for critically reading innovative literary forms, both formally and in conversation with critical articles, historical accounts, and discourses and artifacts from the literary period
  • To develop students’ existing skills in critically engaging with primary literary texts, through creative and/or or analytical modes, and by using research of secondary sources (literary criticism, social and political history, poetics statements) to articulate their critical perspectives and interventions
  • To develop students’ consciousness of how literature and related arts have been and can be used as potentially transformational social discourses and practices
  • Cultivate an ethos of sharing one’s critical insights in classroom conversation and workshops in order to develop a community of learners, researchers, and creators

Textbooks

All required and recommended texts, listed below, are available for purchase or rental at the University Bookstore in the Campus Center. Some texts, indicated below with an asterisk (*), are available for 3-hour loan at the UA Library’s Reserve Desk. In addition, PDFs and online links to other readings are available through Blackboard. Some required out-of-print texts, not listed below, are available for 3-hour loan at the UA Library’s Reserve Desk. Consult the syllabus for all readings on UA Reserve and on Blackboard.

Required texts for purchase or rental:

  • (1) Muriel Rukeyser, The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (edited by Janet Kaufman and Anne Herzog) (University of Pittsburgh Press)
  • (2) Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (Paris Press)
  • (3) Muriel Rukeyser, The Orgy (Paris Press)
  • (4) Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps, Radicals in America (Cambridge University Press) Also required: A physical notebook or designated laptop folder to serve as your reading journal.

Recommended texts for purchase or rental:

(1) Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead (University of West Virginia Press)

Requirements and Assignments

Attendance and participation

Your active participation in class conversations is vital for a successful course, so participation and attendance factor into your final grade. Active participation includes answering questions, volunteering your insights and readings, and active listening (i.e., listening and note-taking), as well as cooperating in all workshop and working group activities. There are no extra credit assignments, neither to raise the participation grade nor to make up for an absence.

Required reading

Please come to class having completed the required reading. Some readings may be stylistically, conceptually, and even linguistically challenging, so allot sufficient time to finish them. If you are unprepared because you have not read and/or lack assigned reading materials, I may dismiss you and that dismissal will count as an absence.

Written and creative assignments

In order to pass the course, you must complete all required written and/or creative assignments.

Descriptions of required assignments, with grade weights

The percentage indicated reflects the portion of the course grade fulfilled by each assignment. Individual assignments’ grade rubrics will be supplied on their respective specs sheets (to be posted on Blackboard at least 2 weeks before the due date), except for class participation and response papers whose grade rubrics are detailed below.

  • Class attendance and participation (20%) (4 absences before penalty; automatic failure for course after 7 absences): Whether they are larger lecture formats or  smaller  seminar or workshop formats, all of my courses depend on  students’  active  participation and contributions to class discussions, as well as in breakout groups. So, attendance is required. There are no “excused”  absences,  except  in  cases  in  accordance with the University’s medical excuse policy (see below, under Course Policies) with appropriate, dated documentation (with specific dates). Anyone who misses more than 7 classes automatically fails this course because they would not have attended a reasonable number of class sessions (approximately three-quarters of the semester). Between 5 and 7 absences, one would lose 10 points per excessive day from the Attendance and Participation Grade (as in “B” to “C,” etc.).

A+ = excellent active and text-based participation in discussions, workshops, and breakout groups

A- to A = strong active and text-based participation in discussions, workshops, and breakout groups

B- to B+ = good and active listener, but tends to speak less in general class discussions though may be more verbal in workshops and breakout groups

C- to C+ = average to minimal participation in discussions, workshops, and/or disciplinary issues in class; perhaps periodically comes to class lacking assigned materials or sometimes underprepared

D- to D+ = often withdrawn and not participatory in both workshop and class; often lacking assigned materials and/or frequently underprepared

E = more than 7 absences and/or other disciplinary issues; also means failure for the course

  • Reading journal (Ungraded, daily) (0%): After you complete the assigned reading, spend 15-20 minutes taking notes in your reading journal. Base your responses on the prompts that I provide on Blackboard, which will go live at the end of the previous class. This informal writing assignment will guide you as start to explore your insights and process the material before you come to class. Bring your reading journal to class every day. All semester I will regularly call on people to share their ideas from their journals. If conversation stalls or is slow to start, I may call on you or assign a free write to help get your ideas flowing.
  • Response paper (2-3 pages, 10%): For this brief assignment, develop a more formalized version of a reading journal entry that you submit for a grade. There are no official prompts, but you may use the day’s study question as a prompt if you choose. Response papers are due on the last day that we read the text by Rukeyser about which you are writing. The syllabus notes for each day what texts are eligible topics for your response papers. You can choose to submit your response paper during any point of the semester except for the weeks indicated on the syllabus. I will ask at the start of each class who has prepared a response paper for that day. On those days, all writers will be class leaders and will be expected to participate actively, by sharing insights or asking questions. Response papers will be graded according to the rubric below:

A- to A = Excellent. Thoughtful, focused, well-written, text-based (i.e., refers to and cites specific details and/or passages from the primary text by

Rukeyser). The author briefly contextualizes their response in relationship to specifics from an assigned secondary text (history, literary criticism, etc.).

B- to B+ = Good. Thoughtful and text-based (i.e., refers to cites specific details and/or passages from the primary text by Rukeyser). However, needs a bit more focus, organization, and/or strengthening of writing. Contextual discussion may also need strengthening.

C- to C+ = Average. Thoughtful but a significant amount of additional focus, organization, and/or strengthening of writing needed. Context lacking. May need to address more specific details and/or passages from the primary text by Rukeyser.

D- to D+ = Poor. Writing and critical thought need significant strengthening.

Context lacking. Needs to address more specific details and/or passages from the primary text by Rukeyser.

E = Failing. Unacceptable work considering all criteria and/or essay not Submitted.

  • Midterm essay (5-6 pages, 20%): This assignment entails a critical response to a primary text by Muriel Rukeyser (i.e., listed as “literature” on the syllabus or her book-length poetics essay The Life of Poetry). Your may be developed as a critical analyse, as ordinarily are required for most English courses. Alternately, you may take a risk and develop a creative nonfiction essay, where you cultivate your own individual voice and prose style. Either form will be thesis-driven and will reference 1-2 secondary sources from the syllabus (i.e., listed on the syllabus as “context” or “poetics” readings), though critical and creative papers articulate and present theses, and make use of sources, in different kinds of ways. More details will be supplied about two weeks before the due date. Interested students who receive a “B+” or better on their projects are eligible to revise them for publication on the blog of the website Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive (edited by Professor Elisabeth Däumer, Eastern Michigan University).
  • Final project (3 parts, 50% total)—The final project will entail a critical or creative engagement with one of Muriel Rukeyser’s projects. This project may be approached as a further development and evolution of either the response paper or the midterm essay (but not both—i.e., if your midterm builds on the response paper, you must choose a new primary text by Rukeyser to respond to for the final project). Students interested in creative projects will be free to develop a project in whatever form they choose. Creative projects must be accompanied by a researched critical write-up establishing the problem statement and your project’s thesis, or how you are creatively seeking to change audiences’ understanding of that problem. The project will be researched (as all artists know, even creative projects must be researched!) and developed in stages over the last several weeks of the semester. Several classes will be designated as workshops to help you meet your target deadlines and to get feedback about your in-progress projects as you develop them. Interested students who receive an “A-” or “A” on their projects are eligible to revise them for publication on the website Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive (edited by Professor Elisabeth Däumer, Eastern Michigan University). The assignment’s major components are detailed below. Additional specs for all parts of this assignment will be provided on Blackboard later in the semester.
    • Proposal (3 paragraphs, 10%): For this initial stage, you will submit a preliminary proposal that performs three critical moves, each in a separate paragraph. Paragraph #1 (problem statement): Narrate a “real world” problem or issue that frames your point of entry to thinking about the value of one work by Muriel Rukeyser and why general audiences would find it interesting or significant. Paragraph #2 (thesis statement): Develop a very brief interpretation of one or two key passages or moments from the Rukeyser piece that informs your argument about how it specifically redresses the problem you have outlined above. Paragraph #3 (plan of action): Detail how you plan to go about supporting your thesis. What else do you plan to research? For critical papers, what other portions of the primary text do you think are significant to consider closely in your analysis? For creative projects, what exactly are you planning to do and why is it a way of commenting, critically, on Rukeyser’s address of the problem and what medium or form are you planning to work in? For everyone, what questions do you have? All students, but especially students working on creative projects, are encouraged to come see me during office hours to discuss their projects in the early development stages, before or after the proposal stage.
  • Finding and using sources worksheet (10%): This assignment requires you to find and assess three critical sources not on the syllabus about the Rukeyser, her primary text, and/or the issue you have chosen as the subject of your final project. You will find the sources from database searches, put the bibliographic information in MLA format, annotate in 3-4 sentences each source’s thesis and main argument, and note why you believe this source is good for either establishing a “critical frame” for your original reading of the poem or supplying a “local support” for a specific point you plan to make in your analysis.
    • Final project (varying formats and lengths, 30%): The finished product. Critical essays: 10-12 pages with 3-5 secondary sources, at least 1 of which must be from off-syllabus. Creative projects: A major project [confer with me before the proposal stage to agree on form and length], plus a 3- to 4-page critical write-up using 2 to 4 secondary sources, at least 1 of which must be from off-syllabus). Interested students who receive an “A-” or better on their projects are eligible to revise them for publication on the blog of the website Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive (edited by Professor Elisabeth Däumer, Eastern Michigan University). Published projects are urged to share their work publicly at the English Department’s annual Undergraduate Research and Writing Conference, to be hosted in April 2020 (exact date TBD).

CALENDAR OF READINGS AND ASSIGNMENTS

Each day’s assignments are divided into categories:

“Context” = Essays or book chapters that either are literary criticism (i.e., a critical essay written about a literary, social, political, or cultural issue) or a historical document (from the literary period studied).

“Poetics”= Secondary texts by Muriel Rukeyser that provides direct insight into her life, political views, and ideas about art. Includes essays, memoirs, journalism, and book reviews.

“Literature” = A primary text, usually by Muriel Rukeyser. These texts—including biographies, poems, short films, short stories, drama, and children’s books —will be the primary objects of our discussion. For each, the year of composition (“comp.”), publication (“pub.”), or production is listed on the syllabus.

“Writing assignment” = Due dates for graded writing assignments submitted. Note that response papers are due on the last day we are covering a specific primary text.

“Rec.” = Recommended for further study, but not required. I am likely to refer to these texts in my set-up lectures. They may be counted as on-syllabus sources for the midterm essay and the final project.

UNIT ONE: THE GREAT DEPRESSION THROUGH THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Week One—An Introduction to Muriel Rukeyser and the Politics of Life-Writing

No response papers accepted this week.

Tuesday August 27

Introduction to the course: Overview of syllabus and requirements.

Literature (poem): Muriel Rukeyser, “Effort at Speech Between Two People” (BB, projection)

Thursday August 29

Context (literary criticism): Adrienne Rich, “Muriel Rukeyser: Her Vision” (BB); Eric Keenaghan, from “Biocracy” (pp. 258-268 only) (DB/MLA)

Poetics (memoirs): Muriel Rukeyser, Statement for Under Forty (1944) (BB) and “The Education of a Poet” (comp. 1976; The Writer on Her Work, 1980) (BB)

Literature (poetry): Muriel Rukeyser, from Theory of Flight (1935) in CP: “Poem Out of Childhood” and “Three Sides of a Coin”

Rec. poetics (essay): Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (1949): Chapter 12

Week Two—Vassar College and Student Radicalism in the 1930s

Tuesday September 3

Response papers accepted on Rukeyser’s journalism (choose one essay).

Context (history): Robert Cohen, “Activist Impulses” (BB)

Poetics (journalism): Muriel Rukeyser, signed articles in Vassar Miscellany News (BB): “The Color of Coal Is Black” (1932) and “Students Fight for Free Speech at City College” (1932) (BB); “The Flown Arrow: The Aftermath of the Sacco and Vanzetti Case” (Housatonic, 1932) (BB)

Rec. context (history): Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps, Intro to Radicals in America

Thursday September 5

Response papers accepted on assigned poems from Theory of Flight.

Poetics (journalism): Muriel Rukeyser, “Modern Trends” (Vassar Miscellany News, 1932) (BB) Poetics (book review): Muriel Rukeyser, “With Leftward Glances” (rev. of John Wheelwright) (New Masses, 1934) (BB)

Literature (poetry) and context (archive): Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, “Social Poets Issue” edited by Horace Gregory May 1936 (BB): Read Muriel Rukeyser’s contributions and Gregory’s essay “Prologue as Epilogue” and William Phillips and Philip Rahv’s essay “Private Experience and Public Philosophy”

Literature (poetry): Muriel Rukeyser, from Theory of Flight (1935) in CP: “Metaphor to Action,” “Citation for Horace Gregory,” “Cats and a Cock,” and “The Blood Is Justified”

Rec. literature (poetry): John Wheelwright, “Questions and Answers” sequence (1932) (BB)

Week Three: Two Formative Experiences—Scottsboro and Spain

Response papers accepted on assigned poems from Theory of Flight.

Tuesday September 10

Context (history): Britt Haas, “The Scottsboro Boys” (BB)

Context (archive): F. Raymond Daniell, “Bailiffs Isolate Scottsboro Jury” and “‘Observers’ Leave Scottsboro Trial” (New York Times, 1933) (DB/New York Times)

Poetics (journalism): Muriel Rukeyser and Edward Sagarin, “The Decatur Incident” (New York Times, 1933) (DB/New York Times); “A Call to Action” (Student Review, 1933); “Starting the Ball Rolling: The Student Conference on Negro Student Problems” (Student Review, 1933) (BB) “From Scottsboro to Decatur” (Student Review, 1933) (BB)

Literature (poetry): Muriel Rukeyser, from Theory of Flight (1935) in CP: “Theory of Flight” sequence (pp. 21-48)

Thursday September 12

Response papers accepted on Savage Coast chapter or “Mediterranean”

Context (literary criticism): Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, “Whose Fires Would Not Stop” (MLA)

Poetics (journalism): Muriel Rukeyser, “Barcelona on the Barricades” (New Masses, 1936) (BB); “Barcelona 1936” (Life and Letters To-day, 1936) (BB)

Literature (fiction): Muriel Rukeyser, Savage Coast (excerpt) (comp. 1936; post. pub.) (BB) Literature (poetry): Muriel Rukeyser, from U.S. 1 (1938) in CP: “Mediterranean”

Rec. context (literary criticism): Cary Nelson, “Poetry Chorus: How Much for Spain?” (BB)

Rec. poetics (memoir): Muriel Rukeyser, “We Came for Games” (Esquire, 1974) (BB)

Week Four: The Politics of Solidarity and Documenting the Gauley Bridge Tragedy

Tuesday September 17

Response papers accepted on The Book of the Dead.

Context (literary criticism): John Lowney, “Buried History” (BB)

Literature (poetry): Muriel Rukeyser, from U.S. 1 (1938) in CP: “The Book of the Dead” sequence (pp. 73-111)

Rec. context (archive): US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Labor, transcripts of hearings related to Gauley Bridge (1936) (BB)

Rec. context (history): Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead (stand-alone edition): “Employees of Rinehart & Dennis Company and Camp Followers Who Died” (pp. 53-9)

Rec. poetics (book review): Muriel Rukeyser, “Long Step Ahead Taken by Gregory in New Epic Poem” (rev. of Horace Gregory) (Daily Worker, 1935) (BB)

Thursday September 19

Response papers accepted on “The Book of the Dead”

Context (literary criticism): Justin Parks, “Muriel Rukeyser’s Poetics of Extension and the Politics of Documentary Photography” (MLA)

Poetics (book review): Muriel Rukeyser, “We Aren’t Sure…We’re Wondering” (rev. of Archibald MacLeish) (The New Masses, 1938) (BB)

Literature (poetry): Muriel Rukeyser, from U.S. 1 (1938) in CP: Reread “The Road,” “Gauley Bridge,” and “The Book of the Dead” (poem)

Rec. context (archive): Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead (stand-alone edition): Nancy Naumberg, photographs of Gauley Bridge sites (pp. 5, 22, 25)

Rec. literature and photography: Walker Evans, select WPA photographs (c.1935-1936) (BB); James Agee, from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) (BB)

Week Five: Image and Imagination—Humanizing and Remembering Gauley Bridge

Tuesday September 24

Context (literary criticism): Catherine Gander, “The Poetics of the Photo-text” (ERES) Poetics (essay): Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (1949): Chapter 9

Literature (photoessay): Muriel Rukeyser (narrative) and others (photographs), “Worlds Alongside” (Coronet, 1939) (BB)

Literature (poetry): Muriel Rukeyser, from U.S. 1 (1938) in CP: Reread “Absalom,” “George Robinson: Blues,” “Power,” and “The Dam”

Thursday September 26

Response papers accepted on “Gauley Bridge.” Today we will review the midterm essay specs.

Context (history): David Davidson, “Depression America and the Rise of Social Documentary Film” (DB/JSTOR)

Literature (film treatment): Muriel Rukeyser, “Gauley Bridge: Four Episodes from a Scenario” (Films, 1940) (BB)

Rec. context (archive): Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead (stand-alone edition): Muriel Rukeyser, “Gauley Bridge & Environs” (drawing) (frontispiece)

Rec. context (literary criticism): Julius Lobo, “From ‘The Book of the Dead’ to ‘Gauley Bridge’” (DB/MLA)

Week Six: Poetry and Antifascist Propaganda during the Second World War

Tuesday October 1

Response papers accepted on The Life of Poetry or poems from Wake Island or Beast in View.

Context (history): Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps, Radicals in America: Chapter 1 Context (archive): Archibald MacLeish, “Words Are Not Enough” (The Nation, 1943) (DB/Points of View)

Context (archive): Office of War Information and other agencies, Propaganda posters including Norman Rockwell’s The Four Freedoms (Saturday Evening Post, 1943) (BB)

Poetics (journalism): Muriel Rukeyser, “Words and Images” (New Republic, 1943) (DB/Points of View)

Literature (creative nonfiction) and poetics: Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (1949): Introduction and Chapters 1 – 3

Literature (poetry): Muriel Rukeyser, Wake Island (1942) in CP; and from Beast in View (1944) in CP: “Letter to the Front” (sequence)

Recommended context (literary criticism): Eric Keenaghan, “The Life of Politics” (DB/MLA); Jeanne Perreault, “Egodocuments and the Ethics of Propaganda” (BB)

Rec. context (archive): Unsigned, “Miss Rukeyser Quitting O.W.I. Over ‘Policies’” (New York Herald Tribune, 1943) (BB)

Rec. poetics (essays): Muriel Rukeyser, “The Usable Truth” (Poetry, 1941) (DB/JSTOR); “The Fear of Poetry” (Twice a Year, 1941) (BB); “War and Poetry” (The War Poets, 1945) (BB)

Thursday October 3

Response papers accepted on The Life of Poetry or Elegies.

Poetics (essay): Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (1949): Chapters 4 – 6

Literature (poetry): Muriel Rukeyser, Elegies (comp. 1939-c.1945, pub. 1949) in CP: Focus on the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth Elegies

Rec. poetics (book review): Muriel Rukeyser, “Nearer to the Well-Spring” (rev. of Rainer Maria Rilke) (Kenyon Review, 1943) (DB/JSTOR)

Rec. literature (poetry): Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies (1923) (BB)

Week Seven: Putting a Fantastical Version of the War on Stage, as a Parlor Drama

NOTE: Muriel Rukeyser’s literary estate has granted us special permission to study Rukeyser’s unpublished play The Middle of the Air. To observe copyright restrictions, we will access it through a read-only link to a file-shared doc. The file cannot be downloaded or circulated.

Tuesday October 8

Response papers accepted on The Middle of the Air.

Context (literary criticism): Stefania Heim, “Muriel Rukeyser’s Experimental Feminine Poetics of War” (DB/MLA)

Poetics (essay): Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (1949): Chapter 8

Literature (play): Muriel Rukeyser, The Middle of the Air (1945) (BB): Editor’s note and Act 1 Literature (poem): Muriel Rukeyser, from Body of Waking (1958) in CP: “Hero Speech” (p.346)

Rec. poetics (book review): Muriel Rukeyser, “On Assignment” (rev. of several books about war aviation) (New Republic, 1943) (DB/Points of View)

Thursday October 10

Response papers accepted on The Middle of the Air.

Literature (play): Muriel Rukeyser, The Middle of the Air (1945) (BB): Act 2

Rec. context (literary criticism): Elisabeth Däumer, “Wanting More from Mr. Eliot” (DB/MLA); Lexi Rudnitsky, “Planes, Politics, and Protofeminist Poetics” (DB/MLA)

Week Eight: Midterms

Tuesday    October 15           

No class: Fall Break

Thursday  October 17          

Midterm Essay due. Creative nonfiction or critical analysis, 5-6pages. Bring your completed essays to my office (Humanities 343) by the end of our usual class period.

Week Nine: One World and One Life— Reimagining America’s Democratic Promise and Race Relations after the War

Tuesday October 22

Response papers accepted on assigned excerpt from One Life.

Context (history): Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps, Radicals in America: Chapter 2 Literature (verse biography): Muriel Rukeyser, “Open System” from One Life (1957) (BB) Rec. poetics (essay): Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (1949): Chapters 10, 11, and 13 Rec. context (literary history): Greg Barnhisel, “Freedom, Individualism, Modernism” (BB); Alan Wald, “The Antinomies of a Proletarian Avant-Garde” (BB)

Rec. context (archive): F.B.I., Surveillance file on Muriel Rukeyser (1939-1973) (BB); Wendell Willkie, “One World” (One World, 1943) (BB)

Rec. literature (poetry): Muriel Rukeyser, from Body of Waking (1958) in CP: poems in the final section (pp. 379-399)

Thursday October 24

Response papers accepted on All the Way Home.

Poetics (journalism): Muriel Rukeyser, “She Came to Us” (New Statesman, 1958) (BB) Literature (film): Muriel Rukeyser (script) and Lee Bobker (director), All the Way Home (1957) (BB)

Rec. literature (film): Muriel Rukeyser (script) and Irving Lerner (director), A Place to Live (1941) (BB)

Week Ten: Gender, Sexuality, and Single Motherhood during the Cold War

Tuesday October 29

Response papers accepted on “Waterlily Fire.”

Context (archive): Betty Friedan, “The Problem That Has No Name” (The Feminine Mystique,1963) (BB)

Context (history): Stephanie Coontz, “Demystifying The Feminine Mystique” (ERES) Poetics (essay): Muriel Rukeyser, “Many Keys” (comp. 1957, posthumously pub.) (BB)

Literature (poetry): Muriel Rukeyser, “Waterlily Fire” (long poem) Waterlily Fire (1962) in CP (pp. 405-410)

Rec. context (literary criticism): Eric Keenaghan “There Is No Glass Woman” (pub. with Rukeyser’s “Many Keys”) (BB)

Rec. context (paintings and art history): Claude Monet, Water Lilies tryptich (1914-1926) (BB); Ann Temkin and Nora Laurence, Claude Monet: Water Lilies (BB)

Rec. poetics (essay): Muriel Rukeyser, “Women of Words: A Prefatory Note” (The World Split Open, 1974) (BB)

Thursday October 31

Response papers accepted on “A Pane of Glass” or Come Back, Paul.

Literature (short story): Muriel Rukeyser, “A Pane of Glass” (Discovery, 1953) (BB) Literature (children’s book): Muriel Rukeyser, Come Back, Paul (1955) (Reserve)

Rec. poetics (book review): Muriel Rukeyser, “A Simple Theme” (rev. of Charlotte Marletto) (Poetry, 1949) (DB/JSTOR)

Rec. literature (photoessay): Muriel Rukeyser (narrative) and others (photographs), “Adventures of Children” (Coronet, 1939) (BB)

Rec. literature (children’s book): Muriel Rukeyser (story) and Minton Charles (photographs), Mazes (1970) (Reserve)

Rec. literature (poetry): Muriel Rukeyser, from Body of Waking (1958) in CP: “A Birth,” “Mother Garden’s Round,” “Night Feeding,” “The Return,” “Unborn Song,” “Children, the Sandbar, That Summer,” “The Birth of Venus”

Week Eleven: Looking Outside the U.S. and Reimagining Sexuality and the Emotional Life during the New Left Era

Tuesday November 5

Response papers accepted on The Orgy.

Context (history): Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps, Radicals in America: Chapter 3 Poetics (commentary): Muriel Rukeyser, “Not a Novel” (New York Review of Books, 1965) (BB) Literature (memoir): Muriel Rukeyser, The Orgy (1965): “Gathering Day”

Rec. context (literary criticism): Amy Hildreth Chen, “Context for The Orgy” (BB)

Thursday November 7

Response papers accepted on The Orgy.

Today we will review the specs for the final project and discuss how to develop a proposal. Literature (memoir): Muriel Rukeyser, The Orgy (1965): Finish book.

Week Twelve: The Vietnam Conflict, Amnesty, and the Unverifiable Truth

Tuesday November 12

Response papers accepted on one of the assigned poem sequences, either “The Speed of Darkness” or “Breaking Open.”

Context (history): Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps, Radicals in America: Chapter 4 Poetics (lecture/essay): Muriel Rukeyser, “Poetry and the Unverifiable Fact” (Scripps College Bulletin, 1968) (BB)

Literature (poetry): Muriel Rukeyser, from The Speed of Darkness (1968) in CP: “The Speed of Darkness” (sequence, pp. 463-468); and from Breaking Open (1973) in CP: “Breaking Open” (sequence, pp. 519-531)

Rec. context (archive): Barry Wallenstein, “Muriel Rukeyser and the Politics of Poetry” (Margins, 1975) (BB)

Rec. literature (poetry): Muriel Rukeyser, from The Speed of Darkness (1968) in CP: “The War Comes into My Room” and “Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars…)”; and from Breaking Open (1973) in CP: “Searching / Not Searching” (sequence), “Facing Sentencing,” and “Flying to Hanoi”

Thursday November 14

Response papers accepted on the poem sequence “The Gates.”

Poetics (journalism): Muriel Rukeyser, “Free: What Do It Mean?” (Washington Evening Star and Daily News, 1972) (BB)

Literature (poetry): Muriel Rukeyser, from The Gates (1976) in CP: “The Gates” (sequence, pp. 561-568)

Rec. context (history): Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps, Radicals in America: Chapter 5 Rec. context (archive): Smith Hempstone, “It’s All a Matter of Proportion” (Oakland Tribune, 1972) (BB)

Rec. poetics (interview): Interview with Anne Fremantle on literary censorship in Iran, Korea, and Ghana (WBAI, 1976) (BB)

Rec. literature (poetry): Kim Chi Ha, “Five Thieves” (1970) (BB)

Rec. context (film): Richard O. Moore (director), The Writer in America: Muriel Rukeyser (1977), includes Rukeyser’s complete reading of “The Gates” (BB)

Week Thirteen: Final Project, Part 1: Proposals and Starting Research

Tuesday  November 19        

Proposal for final project due in class today

Workshop on project development and research methods

Thursday  November 21      

Workshop on research. Bring in your research worksheet, plus copies of the on-syllabus texts you are planning to use.

(If you wish to meet with me on Tuesday Nov. 26, schedule an appointment with me before you leave class today.)

Week Fourteen: Final Project, Part 2: Project Development

Tuesday November 26       

No Class: Optional conferences

(Regular office hours cancelled: Scheduled conferences only.)

Thursday November 28       

No Class: Thanksgiving Recess

Week Fifteen: Final Project, Part 3: Workshop and Sharing Sessions

Tuesday  December 3           

Finding and using sources worksheet due in class today

In-class evaluations & workshop on your final projects

Thursday  December 5         

Sharing sessions on your in-progress projects

Final projects are due by Monday December 16 at 12:00 noon, via BB. Students are encouraged to submit before the deadline, if possible. If you are working on a creative project in another format or a medium that cannot be uploaded to Blackboard, please consult with me before the last day of class about submitting your work.

To cite this syllabus in MLA 8: Eric Keenaghan. “Syllabus: Women Writers–The Lives of Muriel Rukeyser.” Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive, http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/2020/09/07/syllabus-women-writers-the-lives-of-muriel-rukeyser/.

Filed Under: Resources, Scholarship Tagged With: The Lives of Muriel Rukeyser

Eric Keenaghan, Total Imaginative Response: Five Undergraduate Studies from “The Lives of Muriel Rukeyser”

September 5, 2020 by Elisabeth Daumer Leave a Comment

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.

     

Filed Under: Essays, Scholarship

Eulàlia Busquets, Returning to Savage Coast

May 8, 2020 by Elisabeth Daumer Leave a Comment

View of Montcada

In September 2019, the Catalan publishing house :Rata_ released Muriel Rukeyser’s posthumously published novel Savage Coast, translated into Spanish by Milo J. Krmpotić and into Catalan by me. This is a first step to making the North American poet known in a country where she spent five transformative days, in July 1936. She came there to write an article about the alternative Olympic Games in Barcelona but ended up writing a novel instead. The games never took place, there was a military coup, the people’s revolutionary response broke out, and the confrontation was the beginning of a three-year civil war. I first discovered her and some of her writings in 2000, when I was doing research on women, literature, and the Spanish Civil War at the University of Kingston upon Hull (UK). At that time, her book The Life of Poetry made me realize the importance of making poetry accessible to everyone and its power of transforming human consciousness.

In Spain, and especially in Catalonia, we still have a long way to go to acknowledge Muriel Rukeyser as an activist, a radical poet, and a feminist woman. When she died on February 12, 1980, she did not leave us; we still do not know her enough and she should really exist among us, especially now. Since she has a lot to give us, we must go to her, bring her in, return to her work and make it germinate within our present historical moment. Muriel Rukeyser has not been discovered and valued to the extent she should have been. She has been occupying a space of silence as many other women authors have, in the US, in Spain, and in other countries. Not only was there an extended and organized persecution of leftists, communists, Jews, and free thinkers during the interwar period and after the Second World War (a period in which Spain experienced the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, the Second Republic, the civil war, and four decades of Franco’s dictatorship), but there have always been prejudices against women authors and their work. Like other women who had been silenced and considered incapable of producing enduring works of art, Muriel Rukeyser needs to be rediscovered now, her literary work must be published again, translated into other languages and read if we want to understand our past from perspectives that have been forbidden and obscured to us.

During the last two years, we have seen a lot of social and political dissent in Catalonia. A popular peaceful revolution 1 has taken place, but it is being repressed by means of a legal and judicial system that menaces some rights we had taken for granted, such as the rights of assembly, public protest, and free speech. At stake is the viability of a strong and developed democracy. We are talking about defending civil rights. The price being paid for political dissent is prison, exile, and huge economic penalties. Long shadows, like those of cypresses, originating in the repressive right-wing military rule of the past, are now obscuring our lives and liberties and adopting legal forms. What is going on in Catalonia now should matter to European citizens and to the people of the whole world. It is a question of fundamental human rights. Nevertheless, there is a silence and a postmodern2 distortion of the meaning of words, such as coup, democracy, and rebellion that hides the reality of what is happening.

It is from this space and time of language manipulation, silence, and negation that Rukeyser’s transformative voice can speak to us to “split open” and reveal the actual truth of a woman’s, and a country’s, life, unveiling the gear mechanism of the time we live in, uncovering those structures that exclude and marginalize people and ideas that criticize, destabilize, or endanger the status quo of ruling politics, literary canons, and social ideologies. Confrontation, opposition, difference . . . they all seem inevitable, but are we going to fight them with war, exclusion, persecution, and exile? All that is oppressed and repressed can at any tensional moment explode and bloom. Art and creativity, specifically poetry, can become a powerful, peaceful, and joyful arm against injustice, exclusion, and pain. This is what I learned when I discovered Muriel Rukeyser as a poet, a social and political activist and an engaged woman of her time.

My interest for her grew slowly and steadily throughout more than a decade. In 2013 the Feminist Press published Rukeyser’s documentary, biographical, and experimental novel, Savage Coast. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein recovered the manuscript of the “lost,” unfinished novel in the Library of Congress, edited and prepared it for its first publication. 3 After reading the novel, I realized that there was a gap in our social, historical, and literary construction of the Spanish Civil War. Our cultural archetypes of revolutionary fighters in the civil war are mainly those of armed men holding an active role. By contrast, Savage Coast offers a different vision of revolutionary activity, penned by a feminist poet who fought ardently throughout her life by means of her poetic work produced after witnessing, not only fights, barricades, and shootings, but everyday scenes, the role of women and the common people during the war, and the strength and hope for social change of those who gave their lives as voluntary soldiers and members of the International Brigades in the Popular Front. Her novel, together with other writings of hers about the civil war, brings an enriching and unique perspective of the conflict, which deconstructs dominant masculine visions of it, most of them focused on the military contest and the death and repression imposed afterwards.

Savage Coast portrays the personal experience and transformation of a young woman, Helen, who like Muriel was in Moncada and Barcelona from the 18th to the 24th of July 1936. Rukeyser’s novel narrates the time when the people’s revolutionary response to the military coup had just begun, that is, before the fight became a war and before it was called a civil war. Soon after, in the Fall of 1936, Rukeyser explored this deeply personal and private experience, as well as its communal and public reverberations, in her first and only novel. Its subsequent rejection by her publisher, Pascal Covici, is most likely due, as Rowena Kennedy-Epstein explains in her introduction to the novel, to its experimental and sexual nature, e.g. its poetic and symbolic narration of a free sexual relationship, its focus on a young woman who did not fit feminine standards of the time, its politically unsettling topic, and its experimental writing style. In the course of the novel’s voyage from darkness toward light, Helen evolves from a confused tourist, who cannot speak the language of the country, to a mature woman who is no longer scared and takes on the responsibility of telling others what she believes and what she has witnessed in Spain. In the first chapters the author focuses on the common people. Helen travels to Barcelona in the third class of an express train that gets stuck in the town of Moncada for three days, where a general strike has just been called. Everyday events, such as washing and finding something to eat or a place to sleep, the conversation with country women, taking care of others, the train passengers’ difficulties to understand what really happens in the country as they wonder how to continue their trip to Barcelona when the train is stuck, are as important as the internal discourse of the main female character, the surrealist narration of dreams, the poetic and symbolic depiction of a sexual encounter in a train compartment, the dialogues among train passengers and athletes, a publicity board, the lyrics of a jazz song or a speech broadcast on the radio. We constantly realize that the situation is dangerous: there are car horns blasting one-two-three, groups of young armed men on open trucks or breaking into houses to seek and destroy religious objects; there is shooting, the persecution of a fascist who runs up a hill, the execution of five military chiefs. On a hot luminous day, volunteers who are parading with the Olympics get ready to embark for the Aragon front, and the French Olympic team takes its leave by ship among raised fists and the singing of “The Internationale.” Time expands and dizzily speeds, or it slows down as the train does. Scenes pass by like those on a film.

The novel Savage Coast is unique, experimental, poetic, a jewel that opens a window to the past and which Rowena Kennedy-Epstein’s superb and clarifying introduction makes present and more understandable and enriching for readers. After reading the novel, I immediately wanted to translate it into Catalan. The task took me eighteen months. This is my first literary translation and, in a way, I also “split open” by engaging in this project. I wanted my people to know about Muriel Rukeyser and understand her vision because it can help us face the present convulsive moments in our country. In the novel there is a feeling of uncertainty that fades as events and actions take place. The open ending does not talk about the war, but about taking responsibility, fighting for what you believe, and hoping for a better future that can be constructed through our collective action.

While translating the novel, I visited Moncada several times and contacted two local historians, Josep Bacardit Sanllehí and Ricard Ramos Jiménez, who published the only history book that explains with detail the civil war in this town: 940 dies. La Guerra Civil a Montcada i Reixac.4 Thanks to their cooperation I was able to compare the historical events that appear in Savage Coast with the historical facts. There is no doubt that the novel has a real and precise setting and context and that it has a true documentary spirit. With the text in mind, I was able to recognize the streets, visualize the cafés like the Worker’s Café and the Fonda España, which have since disappeared, or the ABI Café that retains its ancient atmosphere. There is the train station, the so called Estació de França; the Town Hall with its original facade, its inner balcony and the two sets of stairs. The Church of Saint Engracia has since been demolished after an explosion; only some of its stones, placed near the riverbank, remain. The Ignasi Iglesias School, where the athletes and passengers slept, has also vanished, but Mr. Ramos found a photograph of it. All descriptions of the people and places in the novel were based on Muriel’s experience and memories. Moreover, she kept her traveling notes in a little diary where she wrote down the special moments that she lived through in Moncada and Barcelona. These notes provided the initial structure for her novel. Although the local historians recovered and scanned all the council documents that had not been destroyed after the war was lost, the letter signed by some of the train passengers and given to the ruling political committee, together with the money collected to help the villagers, was never found. Mr. Bacardi and Mr. Ramos helped me to interpret Muriel’s map of Moncada, 5 the one that she drew and that indicates the important settings for the action in the first chapters of the novel.

Muriel Rukeyser’s hand-drawn map of Moncada (Library of Congress)

It is an exact map with an outline of the mountains of Moncada and its two electricity towers. The name “Louis” and the arrow next to it signal the way to a local pension called Hostal Les Tres Línies. Its name refers to the three railway lines that pass by Moncada, including the one that connects the city of Barcelona with Portbou, at the French border. Les Tres Línies had a bar, a restaurant with a little garden, a cinema and rooms where the athletes were welcomed. The expenses were paid by the Olympic Committee at that time. Les Tres Línies was run by Louis Amoignon, a French man, and it remained open until nearly the seventies.

Hostal Les Tres Línies (publicity) run by Louis Amoignon
França Train Station- Moncada- 1925-30 (With thanks to Ricard Ramos)
Ignasi Iglesies School (With thanks to Ricard Ramos)
Montiu Street  
Main Street, Fonda España and bus stop in 1936

With the help of all this comparative data, the two historians and I tried to revive those days Muriel lived in Moncada and, surprisingly, they told me that there still exists a record of the nearly one hundred athletes and passengers of the express train in Moncada. The train stopped on the 18th July 1936 at about 8:30 in the morning, when the general strike was declared, and the revolution started. All of this is in a personal diary of Jacint López Herrero. He was a Moncada citizen who was just thirteen years old at that time. I reproduce and translate a fragment here below. His diary is the only remaining historical record of the events that took place in Moncada referring to the train in which Muriel and the athletes were travelling:

A group of armed people were walking along the Main street, and one of them was saying:

– The express train going to Barcelona has stopped at the Estació de França, the head of the station says that he doesn’t allow it to depart, and he has communicated that this train will be detained until new orders.

– Damned! And who are all those people that nobody understands what they say?

– They say, speaking Spanish poorly, that they go to the Popular Games of Barcelona, that they are all athletes.

– No way, no way -Murcia, a well-known fascist, said- somebody must tell them that they cannot take any photographs, if you see anyone who wants to take one, turn off their cameras and hang them back on their shoulders.

– Listen! They are asking where they can have something to eat, because they are very hungry.

– Well, then… take them to the Main street. Bakeries must be open as well as butcheries, and they can buy whatever they want; and if you see Vicenç, tell him to make you a voucher in case they do not have money, because we are also hungry.

The platforms of the station were full of young people, getting on and off the train, speaking different languages; this scene reminded me of the passage in the Bible that refers to the Tower of Babel.

Next day, J. López refers in her diary to Albert Ubach’s testimony, a vacationer in Moncada when the train remained stuck in the same place:

The athletes were paying with the currency of their countries, because the Hispano Colonial Bank on Main street was closed. Due to this circumstance the shopkeepers of Moncada were making good profits, while others, who did not know the exchange value of the currency, were losing money. The Fonda España had a lot of work serving meals to such a multitude. It can be said that the shopkeepers and the restaurant made the big bucks.

My historical research in Moncada helped me resurrect, feel, and understand what Muriel Rukeyser had experienced in Catalonia during the first days of the civil war outbreak. Helen never visited the Costa Brava, the coast that provides the novel’s title. In a similar way, Muriel never returned to Moncada or Barcelona, although in the mid-sixties she drove to the Spanish border, but did not cross it, choosing to stay on the French side. Somehow, I think that Savage Coast tells us about the things that could have been possible but that ultimately did not happen. “Everybody knows who won the war,” she says in the first chapter of the novel she kept revising. This does not mean they do not exist. They continue to exist potentially as they can occur in the future and we must go on fighting to make them happen. This is the message she held on to as she left Spain on the ship Ciudad de Ibiza and accepted the responsibility to tell what she had seen the day she “was born” in Spain. My goal, from now on, is to make her experience and literature available to the Spanish and the Catalan people. Muriel Rukeyser has a lot to give, and her poetry and work should be translated into our languages. Her son, William Rukeyser, whom I thank very much for helping me during my translation and research task, told me that she would have been proud to see that Savage Coast can now be read by my people. May her poetry transform our spirit, heart, and mind and may we, one day soon, live in the freedom she believed in.

Columbus Street

Moncada Town Hall

España Square (Barcelona) with the building and its clock tower that served as the
Olimpiada Hotel

To cite this article in MLA, 8th edition: Eulàlia Busquets, “Returning to Savage Coast,” Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive, http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/2020/05/08/eulalia-busquets-returning-to-savage-coast/.

Author Bio: I was born in December 1966 with wide-open almond eyes, impressed by the colors and the rough Montsant territory. Of a humble origin, I was a playful kid who grew up among nature, books, and cinema, and I adored going to school. At the age of five I already wanted to be a feminist, a rebel, and free. These ideals were embodied by the Catalan writer and translator Maria Teresa Vernet Real, my grandmother’s close friend. Forged by the stories that my parents told me about the Spanish Civil War, I wondered about death before I could understand it. An initiatory trip around the world at eighteen introduced me to adulthood. At the beginning of the new millenium I obtained my degree in English Philology at the Rovira i Virgili University (Tarragona- Spain) and an MA on Women and Literature in the English Language from the University of Kingston Upon Hull (UK). In 2019 I completed my first literary translation to present the activist and poet Muriel Rukeyser, whom I want to rescue for our history and culture from a women’s point of view. I work for public schools as an English teacher because I like learning. Words have saved me because they originate in silence. With them I look and with my eyes I speak. I love literature and life.



Filed Under: Essays, Scholarship Tagged With: Barcelonia, Catalonia, Moncada, Savage Coast, Spanish Civil War

The Soul and Body of John Brown

December 29, 2019 by Elisabeth Daumer

Originally published in Beast in View (1944)

Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision!
Joel III : 14

His life is in the body of the living.
When they hanged him the first time, his image leaped
into the blackened air. His grave was the floating faces
of the crowd, and he refusing them release
rose open-eyed to autumn, a fanatic
beacon of fierceness leaping to meet them there,
match the white prophets of the storm,
the streaming meteors of the war.

Dreaming Ezekiel, threaten me alive!

Voices: Why don’t you rip up that guitar?
Or must we listen to those blistering strings?

The trial of heroes follows their execution. The striding
wind of nations with new rain, new lightning,
destroyed in magnificent noon shining straight down
the fiery pines. Brown wanted freedom. Could not himself be free
until more grace reached a corroded world. Our guilt his own.
Under the hooded century drops the trap—
There in October’s fruition-fire three
tall images of him, Brown as he stood on the ground,
Brown as he stood on sudden air, Brown
standing to our fatal topmost hills
faded through dying altitudes, and low
through faces living under the dregs of the air,
deprived childhood and thwarted youth and change:
fantastic sweetness gone to rags
and incorruptible anger blurred by age.

Compel the steps of lovers, watch them lie silvery
attractive in naked embrace over the brilliant gorge,
and open them to love: enlarge their welcome
to sharp-faced countrysides, vicious familiar windows
whose lopped-off worlds say I am promise, holding
stopgap slogans of a thin season’s offering,
false initials, blind address, dummy name—
enemies who reply in smiles; mild slavers; moderate whores.
There is another gorge to remember, where soldiers give
terrible answers of lechery after death.
Brown said at last, with a living look,
“I designed to have done the same thing
again on a larger scale.” Brown sees his tree
grow in the land to lead these mountains.
Not mountains, but men and women sleeping.

O my scene! My mother!
America who offers many births.

Over the tier of barriers, compel the connected steps
past the attacks of sympathy, past black capitals,
to arrive with horizon sharpness, marching
in quick embrace toward people
faltering among hills among the symptoms of ice,
small lights of the shifting winter, the rapid snow-blue stars.
This must be done by armies. Nothing is free.
Brown refuses to speak direct again,
“If I tell them the truth,
they will say I speak in symbols.”

White landscapes emphasize his nakedness
reflected in counties of naked who shiver at fires,
their backs to the hands that unroll worlds around them.
They go down the valleys. They shamble in the streets,
Blind to the sun-storming image in their eyes.
They dread the surface of their victim life,
lying helpless and savage in shade parks,
asking the towers only what beggars dare:
food, fire, water, and air.

Spring: the great hieroglyph : the mighty, whose first hour
collects the winter invalids, whose cloudless
pastures train swarms of mutable apple-trees
to blond delusions of light, the touch of whiter
more memorable breasts each evening, the resistant
male shoulders riding under sold terrible eyes.
The soldier-face persists, the victorious head
asks, kissing those breasts, more miracles—
Untarnished hair! Set them free! “Without the snap of a gun—”
More failures—but the season is a garden after sickness;
Then the song begins,
“The clearing of the sky
brings fulness to heroes—
Call Death out of the city
and ring the summer in.”

Whether they sleep alone. Whether they understand darkness
of mine or tunnel or store. Whether they lay branches
with skill to entice their visions out of fire.
Whether she lie awake, whether he walk in guilt
down padded corridors, leaving no fingerprints.
Whether he weaken searching for power in papers,
or shut out every fantasy but the fragile eyelid to
commemorate delight…
They believe in their dreams.

They more and more, secretly, tell their dreams.
They listen oftener for certain words, look deeper
in faces for features of one remembered image.
They almost forget the face. They cannot miss the look.
It waits until faces have gathered darkness,
and country guitars a wide and subtle music.
It rouses love. It has mastered its origin:
Death was its method. It will surpass its
furious birth when it is known again.

Dreaming Ezekiel, threaten me alive!

Greengrown with sun on it. All the living summer.
They tell their dreams on the cool hill reclining
after a twilight daytime painting machines on the sky,
the spite of tractors and the toothless cannon.
Slaves under factories deal out identical
gestures of reaching—cathedral-color-rose
resumes the bricks as the brick walls lean
away from the windows, blank in bellwavering air,
a slave’s mechanical cat’s-claw reaping sky.
The cities of horror are down. These are called born,
and Hungry Hill is a farm again.

I know your face, deepdrowned
prophet, and seablown eyes.

Darkflowing peoples. A tall tree, prophet, fallen,
your arms in their flesh laid on the mountains, all
your branches in the scattered valleys down.
Your boughs lie broken in channels of the land,
dim anniversaries written on many clouds.
There is no partial help. Lost in the face of a child,
lost in the factory repetitions, lost
on the steel plateaus, in a ghost distorted.
Calling More Life. In all the harm calling.
Pointing disaster of death and lifting up the bone,
heroic drug and the intoxication gone.

I see your mouth calling
before the words arrive.

Buzz of guitars repeat it in streamy
summernoon song, the whitelight of the meaning
changed to demand. More life, challenging
this hatred, this Hallelloo—risk it upon yourselves.
Free all the dangers of promise, clear the image
of freedom for the body of the world.
After the tree is fallen and has become the land,
when the hand in the earth declined rises and touches and
after the walls go down and all the faces turn,
the diamond shoals of eyes demanding life
deep in the prophet eyes, a wish to be again
threatened alive, in agonies of decision
part of our nation of our fanatic sun.

© Muriel Rukeyser

Filed Under: Poetry, Writings Tagged With: Beast in View, John Brown

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