mthunter22, Author at The Muriel Rukeyser Living Archive

Throat of These Hours

Posted on June 6, 2013 by Marian Evans from The Speed of Darkness 13 My night awake staring at the broad rough jewel the copper roof across the way thinking of the poet yet unborn in this dark who will be the throat of these hours. No. Of those hours. Who will speak these days, if not I, if not you? Throat of These Hours is two plays, one for stage and one for radio. Both now in second draft, they have long-ago beginnings, when a lover gave me a photocopy of The Speed of Darkness. I don’t [...]

mthunter222013-06-06T23:55:34+00:00June 6, 2013|Ruke Blog|4 Comments

Alice Thomsen: In Defense of the Doctors

Presented at the 2013 Muriel Rukeyser Centenary Symposium, March 14-16, 2013, Eastern Michigan University The Book of the Dead explores the corruption of the body that echoes the corruption of the land as humans attempt to harness power and take control of the natural world. However, another corruption shows itself when we meet Dr. Goldwater, brought in to testify at the hearing. My first reading of the poem took place in a near void of knowledge regarding the Hawks Nest disaster, and I didn’t see that Dr. Goldwater is on the Union Carbide payroll, compensated for his testimony; all I [...]

mthunter222023-09-04T20:45:05+00:00March 13, 2013|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Alicia Ostriker: Learning to Breathe Under Water

Alicia Ostriker's Keynote Speech at the Muriel Rukeyser Centenary Symposium, March 16, 2013. There are... two kinds of reaching in poetry, one based on the document, the evidence itself; the other informed by the unverifiable fact, as in sex, dream, the parts of life in which we dive deep and sometimes—with strength of expression and skill and luck—reach that place where things are shared and we all recognize the secrets. (Jane Cooper, How shall we tell Each Other of the Poet, p. 6) Unverifiable fact...the parts of life where we dive deep. I cherish this quote, this image. For I [...]

mthunter222023-09-04T20:48:07+00:00March 13, 2013|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Waterlily Fire

Posted on February 5, 2013 by Joe Sacksteder Elisabeth Däumer’s post Context for Waterlily Fire rightly points out the theme of interrelatedness that runs through the Living Archive’s featured poem this month. When I first read "Waterlily Fire," I was struck even more by the idea of impermanence and change, which is the actual bridge (to use Rukeyser’s image) that might be relating everything together in this poem. As I wrote in the post Synecdoche, West Virginia, Rukeyser wants her readers to see a kinship between localized disasters, whether it’s the Spanish Civil War or an outbreak of silicosis, and [...]

mthunter222013-02-05T00:20:24+00:00February 5, 2013|Ruke Blog|0 Comments

The Brilliant Truth, Rukeyser vs. Oprah

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Joe Sacksteder Against all sage advice from my colleagues, I’m thinking about proposing a class. I want to call it “True Lies: Untruth in Nonfiction,” a creative writing class that explores the gray area that Elisabeth called attention to in my last post: the various ways that artists define truth. The first thing that comes to mind is James Frey’s Oprah-enraging “memoir,” A Million Little Pieces. What I’m more concerned with, though, is the unflinching, unapologetic notion of how we can make stuff up and claim that it’s somehow truer than what actually happened. [...]

mthunter222013-01-14T20:38:04+00:00January 14, 2013|Ruke Blog|1 Comment

Chelsea Lonsdale: The Poem as Meeting Place

Witness, Fear, and Conversation in the Poetry of Muriel Rukeyser By Chelsea Lonsdale If the poem is a meeting place, it cannot be dismantled into disciplines. It cannot be disassembled into individual parts that, on their own, are worth more or less than what is possible when they combine. Poetry is the meeting place in which all of the parts of one’s own self, as well as the many identities that come together in poems, are significantly greater than what they were alone: interplay. Rukeyser’s poetry emphasizes the interaction between parts, the complexities of relationships between people, action, and material. [...]

mthunter222019-07-12T18:55:37+00:00December 25, 2012|Essays, Resources, Scholarship|0 Comments

Synecdoche, Minnesota

Posted on December 14, 2012 by Joe Sacksteder My bio on the homepage for “Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive” states that I just completed a novel partly inspired by The Book of the Dead, and I wanted to use this post to relate how Rukeyser’s poetry has influenced my creative work. Back in undergrad at St. John’s University, I was lucky enough to be able to do volunteer work at the Minnesota Correctional Facility in St. Cloud, an institution with a very unique history. Most of my initial knowledge was word-of-mouth, and it disturbed me in a gut-level way that [...]

mthunter222012-12-14T23:39:04+00:00December 14, 2012|Ruke Blog|3 Comments

Dear The Objective Correlative,

Posted on December 1, 2012 by Joe Sacksteder I admit it: I don’t understand you. But it’s not that I haven’t tried. I Google your name to see what you’re up to these days. At faculty parties I have a few too many Two-Hearteds and then beg my colleagues to tell me if they’ve seen you recently. I consider editing your Wikipedia page, and it kills me to know that there are others who are far more qualified. I try to remember those days back in undergrad when we were so bold and carefree. Remember how we used to make [...]

mthunter222012-12-01T01:01:52+00:00December 1, 2012|Ruke Blog|1 Comment

mthunter22

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Muriel Rukeyser

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