Elisabeth Daumer

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” (Rukeyser 43). This image breaks up the sanctity of what was otherwise described. Rukeyser views this brash documentation by another person, someone wielding a camera, as a dishonor to the festival and people who inhabit County Kerry. The fact that this other person is the typical sort of American tourist only adds to the shame she feels about being from such a culture. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over the course of her career Rukeyser was consistently interested in the ocean as a space of possibilities. For instance, her first book of poems, Theory of Flight (1935), begins with overlapping references to drowned Sappho, Sacco (an Italian-American anarchist executed in 1927), and “Rebellion pioneered among our lives, / viewing from far-off many-branching deltas, / innumerable seas.”¹Muriel Rukeyser, “Poem Out of Childhood,” Theory of Flight (1968). Other poems in which Rukeyser engages with the ocean as a space of possibilities include “Child and Mother” (1935), “Ryder” (1939), “Sea Mercy” (1944), Elegies (1949), “On the Death of Her Mother” (1958), “The Birth of Venus” (1958), “The Outer Banks” (1968), “Searching/ Not Searching” (1973), “After Melville” (1973), and “Islands” (1976). While Rukeyser’s fascination with water, its changes of phase and discursive uses, have drawn critical attention, ²See, for instance, Gerd Hurm’s “Water and ‘the Land’s Disease’: Poetics and Politics of Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Book of the Dead’” (Space in America: Theory, History, Culture, edited by Klaus Benesch and Kerstin Schmidt, Brill Academic Publishers, 2005, pp.193-208), Trudi Witonsky’s “’A Language of Water’: Back and Forth with Adrienne Rich and Muriel Rukeyser” (Women’s Studies, vol. 37, no. 4, 2008, pp. 337-366), and Elisabeth Däumer’s “Context for ‘Waterlily Fire’” on this website. her specific interest in the ocean has remained largely underexplored. Catherine Gander attends to Rukeyser’s representations of the ocean in the poem “Ryder,” ³Catherine Gander, “Muriel Rukeyser, America, and the ‘Melville Revival.’” Journal of American Studies, vol. 44, no. 4, 2010, pp. 759-775. but it is poet Alicia Ostriker’s Keynote Speech at the 2013 Rukeyser Centenary Symposium that goes the furthest in considering the ocean in Rukeyser’s work. Describing her experience of reading Rukeyser’s poems, Ostriker declares, “I begin to read and am immediately in danger of drowning. The writing is not merely fluid, it is oceanic. It cannot be paraphrased. . . . But it is beneath the surface that the meanings wait for me.” This experience of learning to breathe underwater is palpable elsewhere in Rukeyser’s poetry. Some of Rukeyser’s most interesting work occurs underwater, as in her poem “Anemone,” included in her 1968 The Speed of Darkness, a book that addresses such varied topics as orgies, lesbianism, motherhood, and suicide, and is widely considered “the first great Second Wave feminist work of poetry.”⁴Peter Middleton, “Science and The New American Poetry.” The New American Poetry: Fifty Years Later, edited by John R. Woznicki, Lehigh University Press, 2013, p. 173.

An overtly erotic poem, “Anemone” draws connections between the opening and closing of eyes, mouth, sex, and life.

Anemone

My eyes are closing, my eyes are opening.
You are looking into me with your waking look.

My mouth is closing, my mouth is opening.
You are waiting with your red promises.

My sex is closing, my sex is opening.
You are singing and offering : the way in.

My life is closing, my life is opening.
You are here.

The recursive motility of the anemone serves as metaphor for the speaker’s body, alternating between moments of opening and closing, creating an at-times internal and at-times external space in which contained, container, and environment intermingle. While the organism represented in the poem has presumably human organs like eyes, mouth, and sex (sea anemones have photoreceptors, but no eyes, a single opening that functions as both mouth and anus, and they may be gendered or hermaphroditic, reproducing both sexually and asexually),⁵Vicki Martin, “Photoreceptors of Cnidarians.” Canadian Journal of Zoology, vol. 80, no.10, 2002, pp. 1703-1722; Ekaterina S. Bocharova, “Reproductive Biology and Genetic Diversity of the Sea Anemone Aulactinia stella (Verrill, 1864),” Hydrobiologia, no. 759, 2015, pp. 27–38. these organs, in their alternating opening and closing states, function as spaces of connection between speaker and the addressed “you.” This intermingling of individual and environment, speaker and reader, troubles distinctions of the internal and external, undermining individual boundaries in favor of a shared space of fluid exchange. This becomes even more salient when we consider the addressed “you” of the poem as potentially being anyone, including the reader, introducing the possibility of a radically open understanding of the relationship between speaker and addressee. What is created is a space that is both personal and social, reminiscent of the second wave feminist mantra, “the personal is political.”

The imagery and emotion of “Anemone” is interesting for being recursive, but not cyclical. Through the hard stop of periods at the end of each line, and the white space between stanzas, the poem enacts a recurring opening and closing of meanings. Yet each stanza, while similar to the others, also differs in important ways, progressing toward an ultimate intermingling of selves in the poem’s final line “You are here,” in which “You” overlap and are entangled with the body of the speaker. I’m reminded here of the concept of tidalectics, first put forth by the poet Kamau Brathwaite in ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey, expanded upon by theorists such as Paul Naylor and Elizabeth DeLoughery, and most recently inspiring an anthology.⁶Kamau Brathwaite, ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey. We Press, 1999; Elizabeth Deloughery, Routes and Roots. University of Hawai’i Press, 2007; Paul Naylor, Poetic Investigations: Singing the Holes in History. Northwestern University Press, 1999; Tidalectics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science, edited by Stefanie Hessler, The MIT Press, 2018. Challenging dialectical structures, tidalectics emphasizes the fluid mobility of the ocean as a force of developing recursive movements. Describing tidalectics, Bill Aschroft declares that

the movement of the tides is not exactly cyclical, but ebbing and flowing. Although the ocean appears to be engaged in an endless repetition of the same back and forth movement at every moment, the tide is, in fact, never exactly the same nor does it retreat or return to the same spot of “origin.”⁷Bill Ashcroft, Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures. Routledge, 2017, p. 156.

Similarly, Rukeyser’s poem does not return to the same starting point, but rather proceeds through back and forth movements that enact overall change.

The concept of tidalectics is helpful for interpreting Rukeyser’s metaphorical usage of a creature inhabiting tidal zones. The anatomy of the anemone has evolved to take advantage of tidal motions, and as Maurice Merleau-Ponty points out in his gloss of Jakob von Uexküll’s work, “the sea anemone has a movement whose rhythm remains regulated by the rhythm of the tides, even if it lives in a still-water aquarium.”⁸ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from Collège de France. Northwestern University Press, 2003, p. 170. Rukeyser’s evocation of the anemone, its opening and closing, and its progression, which is not a synthesis but an evolving mixture between internal and external, evokes the anemone’s life sustaining relationship with this tidal force. My usage of tidalectics here also extends beyond its original uses of evoking islands’ interconnections with the ocean and other locations. Rather, my usage of tidalectics implicates the ebbing and flowing entanglement of bodies, both with their surroundings, and with other bodies. Rukeyser’s “Anemone” begins with closing and opening eyes and progresses to the increasingly tactile organs of mouth and sex, presenting embodiment as an experience of sensuality and desire shared with others. If, as poet Alicia Ostriker claims, “To read Rukeyser is to learn to breathe underwater,” then this is what I think she means.