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Trudi Witonsky, “Lecture by Mr. Eliot”: Some Context

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Published 7/20/2022

The Vassar Encyclopedia’s entry on Muriel Rukeyser contains part of a poem, originally published anonymously in the November 1933 issue of Con Spirito.  Highly critical of T.S. Eliot, “Lecture by Mr. Eliot” was identified as Rukeyser’s by Mary McCarthy, musing over the publication in her memoir, How I Grew: “The Scottsboro Boys. Yes, that sounds like Muriel and the reference would be to a reading by Eliot in Avery [Hall] during our senior year, when he gave us one of the early Possum poems” (260).  This remembrance might seem like slim evidence, without available confirmation from any of the magazine’s other founders (Elizabeth Bishop, Frani Blough, Eleanor and Eunice Clark, and Margaret Miller) (Hicok 84). However, recent discoveries of archival materials add to the case for authorship and clarify Rukeyser’s ultimately more expansive and nuanced assessment of the older poet.  

We know from Rukeyser’s diary that 1933 was a time of heightened interest in Eliot. As Elisabeth Däumer explains, he had just returned to the U.S. that year for “an ambitious tour of lectures — among them the Norton lectures at Harvard University, later published as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, and his infamous Page-Balfour lectures at the University of Virginia, published as After Strange Gods, in which he articulated an explicitly conservative Christian literary and cultural criticism, speculating about the corrosive influence of large groups of ‘free-thinking Jews'” (1181-2). Hallie Flanagan, hired to develop experimental theatre at Vassar and, later, director of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Theatre Project, was staging the first ever production of Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes, and had invited the poet. He came to see the performance on May 6th, and the next day read his poems. 

According to James Loucks, Eliot gave several talks in New York before that date, and we know from her diary that Rukeyser attended his lectures at the New School for Social Research and Columbia on April 20th and 21st, where he discussed Milton, Dante and Shakespeare (27).  Rukeyser had just returned from covering one of the Scottsboro Nine trials in Decatur, Alabama for the Student Review, the publication of the National Student League. There she was arrested for talking with black reporters and then jailed after it was discovered that she had posters in her suitcase advertising an April conference on “Negro Student Problems” at Columbia (Franz Boas Papers, American Philosophical Society).  Unfortunately, she also contracted typhoid. Though it has been generally supposed that she missed seeing the play at Vassar but did attend Eliot’s lecture there, a letter from her good friend Ruth Lehman queries, “Why weren’t you at Eliot?” The letter from Lehman has no date on it, but in the archive’s folder, there is an envelope that seems to accompany it dated April 28, 1933. According to Loucks, Eliot also spoke on the 27th at the New School (which is where Rukeyser heard him on the 20th) (27). Rukeyser’s diary for the 26th says, “Sick all day.” The 27th has no mention of Eliot but does mention “fever.” Subsequent entries from the 28th on also mention fever, pain, and fatigue. Then, in an entry for May 1st, Muriel wrote, “Passed out. Uptown” and on May 2nd, there is a note “Hospital/Typhoid” with a downward arrow drawn towards the date “June 1” which reads, “Resumed.” Entries after that continue to mention her fatigue, so one can assume it took some time to recuperate. Thus, it seems clear that she completely missed Eliot’s visit to Vassar.

Letter from Ruth Lehman to Muriel Rukeyser, circa April 28, 1938, with permission by Adam Lehman

In February, just months before the visit, Con Spirito, an alternative literary magazine, had been launched as a counter to the Vassar Review, which, as Eunice Clark explained, felt conservative and traditional. “We were a tiny part of a worldwide literary revolution stretching, in variegated forms, from Walt Whitman to Finnegans Wake, and we were feeling our oats to a point where the official literary magazine, The Vassar Review, looked to us like the Bastille. They didn’t print our avant-garde contributions and they altered our sentences to sound more like Matthew Arnold” (Jessup 17). A vehicle for ambitious young writers, Con Spirito “attempt[ed] to create a space of freedom for the imagination,” directly countered male-dominated literary tradition, and re-imagined modernism (Hicok 85).

By this time, however, Rukeyser had left the Vassar campus for both financial and personal reasons. The Depression was beginning to affect even wealthier students (Cohn 15), and, as a letter from President Henry Noble MacCracken to her father on June 10, 1932 explains, Rukeyser was experiencing a kind of restless dissatisfaction. MacCracken recommended a year off.  She spent part of that summer with the Clark sisters and Denise Dryden, launching the literary magazine Housatonic (Jessup 17), which came out with four issues. This experience must have informed the Clark sisters’ work with Con Spirito, and though Rukeyser was not on campus during the spring of 1933 when the plans for Con Spirito began (Jessup 17), a letter from Eleanor Clark solicits Rukeyser’s involvement of another sort.  On September 15, 1933, Clark wrote, “Dear Muriel, Please subscribe to Con Spirito. It’s going to be as good as ever we hope, which is much too good for college and so has to be supported from outside . . . Also SEND STUFF, [sic] as soon as possible. We are going to use outside stuff because there is no other way of keeping up previous standards and nothing lower is worth bothering. with. [sic]  It will be anonymous for an issue, maybe two; anyway until we can decide on definite policy. But you wont mind that will you? [sic] Get us anything else you can that you think we might use. I know that s difficult [sic], all things considered, but there might be some things in search of market that we could have without money.” 1

A later undated letter from Eleanor Clark, written on Vassar stationery, confirms Rukeyser’s authorship. She writes, “Dear Muriel, We have printed best lot of your poems. They look very nice. Do you want the copy back? We didn’t print St. Thomas :  criticism — not ‘synthesized’ enough – wordy perhaps. They are good words but the good places should have been allowed to stand more on their own – not so much reinforcement. Everybody liked woman + bird + Sunday – also Mr. Eliot, though I think that might have fitted the subject more sardonically (good word) if it had been chosen 2 too.”

The published poem depicts a collective loss of purpose at a moment of crisis: we “dither and amble and twitter at the brink of time.” As depicted here, Eliot lacks vision to create new possibilities from the resources of tradition:  “whispering fragments of a century/ sliding among a thousand ghosts of meaning,” later “collapsing in attempts to make an end / to his idea’s beginning.” Similar images later reappear in “Citation for Horace Gregory” (1935) where Eliot, “led us to the precipice / subtly and perfectly    ;     there striking an attitude / rigid and aging on the penultimate step, . . . ” (62).  But the criticism sharpens. Däumer elucidates how the poem, in labeling Eliot a “grinning Panfilo” connects his poetic ideals and politics with “the Spanish conquistador Panfilo’s known brutality in conquering Florida.” Initially, she explains, “This ironic comparison might seem strained unless we consider Eliot’s identification with precisely the conservative ideals of order, underwritten by Catholicism, that Rukeyser, a young radical, linked to the rise of fascism in Europe: ‘the rubber heels of statesmen . . . mirrored on a tiling'” (1182).

However, the poem’s target is not just the poet but his audience, including the speaker herself, indulging in elite solipsistic concerns: “The audience crumbles in cerebral whoredom, / devoted lustfully to a conceit’s expansion, / to an obscure line’s scansion.”  The target of the next line is unclear, though the sentiment is the same: “These Fantastics bow and nod, / homage to prosody as God.” It’s unclear who the Fantastics might be, and they reappear at the end of the poem, but an essay on “The Cultural Economy of Modernism” by Lawrence Rainey highlights the way early modernists like Ezra Pound appealed to elite patrons, by presenting “literary culture [as] a privatized medium of symbolic exchange for an exiguous aristocracy of sensibility, a court of intellect” (37).  At a private talk in March 1907 on the Provencal poet Daniel Arnaut, Pound described the poems as “good art as the high mass is good art,” and noted that they must be “approached as ritual” so that they could “make their revelations” (37).  In contrast, F.T. Marinetti, expounding on Futurism at this same time, rejected Pound’s sequestration of poetry, proclaiming, “Art is not a religion, not something to be worshipped with joined hands” and received great coverage in the press. Subsequently, Rainey explains how in resisting the popularization and commodification of art, Pound, Eliot and Joyce, as well as others, developed a new artistic economy that depended on investment in limited editions of literary texts, which clarifies why Rukeyser would critique this social and economic positioning of art.

Following up on the implications of these practices, the last section of the poem incorporates images from Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (“sand swarming on these bodies, songs forgotten”) and possibly Whitman (“the long sea shouting derisive in our ears”) to consider how we, the poet and audience, will be judged by future generations, how we make use of our experiences and our art, if “the secrets of the dead / their minds’ encumbrances all gone to mould” will continue to appeal to us with the same type of poems that “undid / the purse-strings of kings’ bounty, beauty-pandered.” The poem’s ending invokes an alternative vision of poetry’s purpose —  “Find for us these, our spirits from these sands arisen — physical work, united hands”; yet the closing lines mock this desire, traditional agendas constricting poetry’s potential for connection and action: “The Fantastics still converse and smirk / and finger in their pockets our prison keys.” By the time of Eliot’s reading, modernism’s system of patronage and investment had unraveled due to the Depression, which led to reliance on universities (Eliot’s tour was proof of that) and an “assen[t] [to modernism’s] canonization, so guaranteeing a new market of pliant students” (Rainey 62). Rukeyser’s fellow students were that captive audience, soon to be inculcated into New Criticism.

Though this particular poem excoriates Eliot, in fact, Rukeyser’s overall attitude toward the older poet, as Däumer explains in her essay, was more ambivalent. Other work that Rukeyser had published one year earlier exhibits a more complex attitude, and indeed, Alan Wald’s research indicates that many on the left were attracted to the work of T.S. Eliot in particular (193 -195), seeing potential in his defamiliarizing juxtaposition of high and low culture, among other things. Yet as was common with others on the Left in the 1930s, Rukeyser felt that Eliot’s inclination toward the past and his despair about contemporary issues, informed by his social and political conservatism, made him a problematic “ancestor” (Ellison 185).  In an ambitious article, “Modern Trends: American Poetry” written for the Vassar Miscellany News on May 21, 1932, she praises the work of Archibald MacLeish for his “bravery of comprehension” (2) and claims that Eliot’s early work was equally groundbreaking but constraining as well: “Prufrock, parts of The Waste Land, and Gerontion, with some of the shorter pieces, are summaries in exquisite and exact poetry of the pale inability of a frustrate season to feel adequacy in anything” (4). While she deplores Eliot’s politics, she voices hope for evolution of his vision and testifies to the significance of his artistic influence: “. . . [G]iven release from the loyalties which sterilize him, there may be more poetry of the breed of his broader and greater work. He has had a reaching power over the younger poets – in attitude as well as in form: and his ‘school of thought’ will probably leave an incisive print on our poetry” (4).  

In addition to her critiques of Eliot’s politics and pessimism, we might also understand Rukeyser’s critiques of Eliot to be critiques of her own social class. In a letter she wrote to New Masses, “You Will Not Use: A Bourgeois Document,” (1931), which is in the archives at the Berg Collection but seems not to have been sent, she explicitly expresses her own search for an ethical artistic position in terms of social class:  “I am speaking of the bourgeoisie, and especially of near-bourgeois youth, into which I was born. These people are a confused and rejected class. They are the youngsters who paint street-workers, because they are enchanted by the rhythm of a hammer-stroke – who write limping verses about ‘dawn’ and ‘the city’ and ‘the suffering multitudes.’” 3 We see this multi-targeted critique in one early poem, “Sheridan Square.” Not much discussed, it examines Eliot to wrestle with the issue of how to incorporate class concerns and literary modernism. It is part of a longer series called “Place Poems,” written, as Kate Daniels explains, “in 1930 while [Rukeyser] was a student at Vassar,” published in the school’s literary magazine in 1932, and in Poetry in 1933 (27-28). “Sheridan Square,” mocking in tone, has a complex target, critiquing Eliot, Rukeyser’s own milieu, and proletarian orthodoxy (the sing-song dismissal of Eliot suggests a too-simplistic view of his work, and Sheridan Square was an area known for speakers on soapboxes exhorting crowds).

          Mr. T.S. Eliot knows the potency of music,
          Mr. T.S. Eliot knows the impact of bright words –
          He has forgotten the caked hands, the muscle-banded shoulders,
          In loving sounds swift birds. (Collected Poems, 580-81).

The contrast between aesthetic work and physical labor echoes the putdown of “bourgeois” intellectual work in the writings of workerist critics who, like Mike Gold, promoted a romanticized virile image of a worker. But the poem then turns to critique those who, like the writers mentioned in Rukeyser’s letter to New Masses, feel superior to, yet clumsily objectify the working class:

          A bricklayer stands, and plunges into the subway.
          “Shall we use him as symbol? No,
          Let us be done with symbols, we who talk
          Over the healthy wood of the tables here, . . .  (580)

The poem’s end links both Eliot and Rukeyser’s upper-class generation in critique, resolving in favor of increased life-experience: “Mr. T.S. Eliot (whom we consider) would forget the desert, / Might forget his fears / Carrying a hod beside this man” (581).  In other words, if Eliot took on working class experience of building the city, he might feel a greater sense of accomplishment than in writing poems about the city as a wasteland. But the critique also extends to Rukeyser’s generation of poets and critics: 

          We might do better
          Than sit here mouthing opinions, by carrying a hod,
          Raising a made thing high instead of a sentence,
          Worshipping with this offering our literate god. (581)

This counterpart to Rukeyser’s letter mocks intellectual pretension not grounded in life experience. Though it sounds like a common anti-intellectual critique, I’d argue that it expresses her frustration with her own limitations at this moment, attempting to reconcile her valuation of lived experience and desire for a usable art, with an equally deep concern for poetic craft, complexity, and intellectual growth.4  The tone, used infrequently after her first collection of poetry, links this poem with others critiquing her own social class. 

By 1935 with “Poem Out of Childhood,” and 1938 with Book of the Dead, Rukeyser’s wrestling with Eliot’s influence and his inspiration takes on a different tone. Though still critical, in these poems, Rukeyser’s work engages his themes, musical phrasing, and techniques of “allusiveness, fragmentation, and mythic substructure” (Däumer 1182). As Däumer notes, later comments by Rukeyser on Eliot, “sugges[t] not rejection, but the high expectations of a fellow poet alive to Eliot’s prodigious accomplishments” (1182). In fact, both writers exhibit mutual “interest in poetry’s communicative power and the novel ways in which modern poetics call for the mental, emotional, and physiological participation of readers” (Däumer 1187).  However, the early poems illuminate Rukeyser’s own developmental journey, the nature of the disagreements, and how Rukeyser came to her expansive literary sympathies.

Works Cited

Cohn, Robert. When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America’s First Mass StudentMovement,1929-1941. Oxford UP, 1993.

Clark, Eleanor. Letter to Muriel Rukeyser. September 15, 1933. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library. Accessed June 23, 2019.

—. Letter to Muriel Rukeyser. N.d. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library. Accessed June 23, 2019.

Daniels, Kate. “A Note on the Place Poems.” Poetry East vol. 16-17, Summer 1985, pp. 27-28.

Däumer, Elisabeth. “‘Wanting More From Mr. Eliot’: Muriel Rukeyser, T.S. Eliot, and The Uses of Poetry.” Textual Practice, vol. 32, no. 7, 2018, pp. 1181-1203.

Ellison, Ralph. “The World and the Jug.” The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, edited by John F. Callahan. Modern Library, 1995, pp. 155-188.

Jessup, Eunice. “Memoirs of Literatae and Socialists 1929-33,” Vassar Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 2, Winter 1979, pp. 16-17.

Hikok, Bethany. Degrees of Freedom: American Women Poets and the Women’s College, 1905-1955. Bucknell UP, 2008.

Lehman, Ruth. Letter to Muriel Rukeyser. April 28, 1933. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library. Accessed June 23, 2019.

Loucks, James. “The Exile’s Return: Fragments of a T.S. Eliot Chronology.” ANQ, vol. 9, no. 2, Spring 1996, pp. 16-39.

MacCracken, Henry Noble. Letter to Louis Rukeyser. 10, June 1932. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. The New York Public Library. Accessed June 23, 2019.

McCarthy, Mary. How I Grew. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987.

Rainey, Lawrence. “The Cultural Economy of Modernism.” The Cambridge Companion to Modernism edited by Michael Levenson. Cambridge UP, 1999, pp. 33-69.

Rukeyser, Muriel.  Diary. Box 1, Folder 1. Muriel Rukeyser Papers, 1844-1986. Manuscript. Library of Congress. Washington D. C. Accessed November 15, 2015.

—. Letter publicizing conference at Columbia on “Negro Student Problems.” March 20, 1933. Franz Boas Papers. American Philosophical Society. https://diglib.amphilsoc.org/islandora/object/text%3A104885#page/1/mode/1up Boas Papers. American Philosophical Society. Philadelphia, PA.

—. Letter: “You Will Not Use: A Bourgeois Document.” N.d. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library. Accessed June 23, 2019.   

Wald, Alan. Exiles From A Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. Chapel Hill: U of NC P, 2002.

Witonsky, Trudi. “‘Something Like Bringing the Entire Life’: Muriel Rukeyser’s Personal, Poetic and Social Development in the 1930s,” Women’s Studies, vol. 50, no. 4, June 2021.

To cite this article in MLA, 8th edition: Trudi Witonsky. “‘Lecture by T. S. Eliot: Some Context.” Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive, http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/2022/07/11/trudi-witonsky-lecture-by-mr-eliot-some-context/.

Bio: Trudi Witonsky is Associate Professor of English in the Literature and Languages Department at University of Wisconsin-Whitewater where she teaches courses in 20th-Century American Literature, African American literature, and First Year English. She has recently published an essay on Rukeyser’s early poetic development: “‘Something Like Bringing the Entire Life’: Muriel Rukeyser’s Personal, Poetic and Social Development in the 1930s,” Women’s Studies, vol. 50, no. 4, June 2021.

Elisabeth Däumer, Context for “Waterlily Fire”

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By Elisabeth Däumer, Eastern Michigan University
Published 2012/05/10

Rukeyser composed this five-part poem over the span of four years (1958-1962) in response to a fire at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, which destroyed two of Monet’s Waterlily paintings, one of them an 18-foot long panel attached to the wall in the second-floor gallery. “As the blaze spread, the wall caught on fire, and the painting was almost completely consumed” (Life Magazine 1958, p. 56).

Monet’s 18-foot long Waterlily Painting destroyed at the Museum of Modern Art on April 15, 1958

Beloved by New Yorkers, the paintings had been acquired just three years prior, during the Monet revival that seized Europe and the United States, and that inaugurated a radical revaluation of the painter’s late work previously rejected as formless and passé. Now these same paintings, among them the waterlilies that the aging Monet had painted, again and again, over the last three decades of his life, were celebrated for the freedom of their brushstroke and a luminescent openness credited with shaping the new way of “seeing” introduced by Abstract Expressionists.1

Partial View of Monet’s destroyed Waterlily Painting

Both the acquisition of the paintings and their destruction, which provoked an outpouring of sympathy from people across the nation, was captured in two issues of Life Magazine.2 As an artist, New Yorker, and friend of a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, Richard Griffith, Rukeyser was deeply attuned to the poignant story of the paintings and their loss.3

In the paintings’ dissolution of fixed forms, their attention to the changing movement of water and the play of color and light that constitutes their endless appeal, Rukeyser found a pictorial analogue to her own poetic search for a “language of water,” undergirded by a relational vision in which everything is connected in fluid, sometimes mysterious, ways.4 “Due to their openness,” as art critic Sagner-Düchtung explains, “Monet’s late paintings defined a new relationship” (59) both between nature and self and between viewer and work. In this new way of seeing, inspired by Monet’s effort to “represent the various phenomena of reality in their close interweaving with unknown reality” (29), clear demarcations between nature and self as much as between viewer and work are dissolved; the increasingly abstract and unfinished style of Monet’s late waterlily paintings creates an impression both of infinite openness and luminous unity between water, sky, flowers–a unity into which the viewer herself, deprived of the firm anchor of a stable perspective, is compelled to partake. Grasping for ways of describing the effect of Monet’s late impressionistic paintings, contemporary critics of his late work turned to Far Eastern Religions “in order to express forms of consciousness for which [they] could not find other words” (Monet and Japan 60).5 Although “Monet was no Buddhist,” art critics Virginia Sape and David Bromfield remind us, “he had been inspired by Japanese painting, whose very meaning lay in breaking down the boundaries between the self and nature” (60). That Rukeyser was deeply responsive to the painting’s implicit Bhuddist consciousness is apparent in her poem’s association of the waterlily with the lotus, the sacred flower of Buddhism, which in part of four of “Waterlily Fire” epitomizes not only enlightenment, but a dialogic ethics rooted in the non-coercive gift of language: “I speak to you . You speak to me.”6

Rukeyser’s poem brings her multiple identifications with Monet’s waterlily panels into play, immediately, when she depicts the destruction of the paintings as a life-altering event with inescapable ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual meanings: —“Noontime of my one hour”—through which “the moment walks” (CP 405-6). In addition, by relating the ravaging force of fire with the fragile beauty of the waterlily and its Asian counterpart, the lotus, the title’s surreal image of burning waterlilies is charged with the disturbing echoes of two recent historic traumas: the searing fire of the atom bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, designed to kill a people, whom President Truman, defending the atomic attack, dismissed as “savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic”; and, if more obliquely, the Shoah, the total fire that almost annihilated the Jewish people.7 In subsequent sections of the poem, the resonance of its central paradox, fusing beauty and destruction, East and West, nature and technology, women and men, extends to the terrifying specter of global nuclear disaster and the war in Vietnam.

Significantly, in Rukeyser’s panoramic poem, the eruptive fire at the museum serves as catalyst for a poetic meditation in extremis, less on the destructive violence of war than on the fragility of human boundaries, the primacy of relation, and on Rukeyser’s responsibilities as woman, poet, and activist. The poem’s movement from local event to global awareness, from female solidarity to an all encompassing humanism, and from a childhood steeped in the antagonistic history of Manhattan to an anti-nuclear protest, is accentuated by refrains of ever expanding consciousness, beginning with “whatever can come to a wall can come to this wall” in part one (CP 406), to “Whatever can come to a woman can come to me,” in part five (409); this feminist insight into our shared vulnerability as women leads to the speaker’s more expansive humanist recognition of universal relatedness, “Whatever can happen to anyone, can happen to me” (410): We are related passively, through our shared (if often denied) vulnerability to disaster and violation, but also actively, when in our willingness to embrace this recognition, we engage with each other in dialogue and communal action.

Despite her proverbial faith in language, Rukeyser never underestimated the tremendous effort required to fulfill its communicative potential, its promise of truth. “Speech between people,” as one of her early poems suggests, is an “effort,” and the fear of openness and self-revelation as strong as the longing for intimacy (CP 9). Nor does the consciousness of our existential interrelatedness facilitate the task of communicating across entrenched social and cultural divisions, whose long histories include the atrocities of racism and genocide. Thus in “Waterlily Fire,” Rukeyser’s explicit invocation of dialogue—“I speak to you. You speak to me. Is that fragile?”—becomes the subject of reflective inquiry (of a koan or puzzle) rather than solely a fact to be proclaimed, suggesting a sharpened awareness of the tenuousness of language and its stunted role in the wake of Cold War insistence on a starkly binary vision of human coexistence, according to which the demonized “other” can only be held in check by nuclear arms and compulsively erected barriers, both physical and mental.

Notes
1 See Michael Leja’s “The Monet Revival and New York School Abstraction” in Monet in the 20th Century, by Paul Hayes Tucker with George T.M. Shackelford and MaryAnne Stevens (London : Royal Academy of Arts; Boston: Museum of Fine Arts; New Haven: Published in association with Yale University Press, 1998), pp.98-108.2
2 “Old Master’s Modern Heirs,” Life December 2, 1957, pp. 94-99; “Fiery Peril in a Showcase of Modern Art, Life April 28, 1958, 53-56.
3 On the day of the fire, Rukeyser, as she recalls in the extensive footnote to “Waterlily Fire,” “was coming to keep an appointment with my friend the Curator of the Museum’s Film Library, Richard Griffith, to whom this poem is dedicated” (CP 621).
4 For a discussion of Rukeyser’s language of water see Trudi Witonsky’s essay “’A Language of Water’: Back and Forth with Adrienne Rich and Muriel Rukeyser” Women’s Studies 37 (2008): 337-366.
5 “A New and Strange Beauty. Monet and Japanese Art,” in Monet and Japan. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACT 2601, 2001, pp. 1-63.
6 Collected Poems of Rukeyser, ed. Janet Kaufman and Anne Herzog (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), p. 409. All further references to Rukeyser’s poetry will be marked in the text as CP.
7 Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, “1945, August 6, 10:45 a.m. The atom bomb.” A New Literary History of America, ed. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollers (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 2009), p. 781.

Susanna Ansorge, Rat Elegy–A Creative Response to Rukeyser’s Elegies

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Preface

Muriel Rukeyser’s Elegies challenges readers with an array of complicated literary devices and historical references as a way of digesting a thoroughly grueling time in world history, as she lived through it. Since the work isn’t reflecting on the past, but rather a historical present, Elegies stands as especially relevant for readers experiencing unprecedented times. Even as one of those readers, I still had a lot of difficulty interpreting Rukeyser’s ambitious collection. As that’s the case, I wanted to emulate her as a way of understanding the work. If I can at least reconstruct how these elegies were written, I might have an easier time reading them. However, when I went back to reread them closely, I realized how much I tried to take on and decided to emulate just two of the devices I noticed in Elegies, what I’m calling: modernist montage and idiosyncratic nouns.

Montage is a film technique where two scenes or sets of images are juxtaposed with one another in a swiftly moving sequence. This technique requires viewers (or readers) to forge a connection between radically disparate subjects. Modernist art rose to prominence after World War I and, narrowly speaking, was interested in cutting down to the bones of art as a way of processing the horror of the modern age. Hemingway’s work illustrates this movement fairly well. His stories use extremely simple vocabulary and lightly organized descriptions that leave readers with the challenge to try figuring out what’s going on, like being blindfolded while trying to distinguish grapes from eyeballs. Modernist art is disorienting and visceral, much like the times the artists were living in. Therefore, modernist montage is a technique where imagery is juxtaposed with the aim of exploring disorientation, where it comes from and what it can mean. This technique is prominent in all of Rukeyser’s elegies, but for the purposes of this essay, I’d like to look at an instance of montage in the first elegy, “River Elegy”:

Gaudy sadistic streets, dishonest avenues
where every face has bargained for its eyes.
And they come down to the river, driven down.
And all the faces fly out of my city.
The rich streets full of empty coats parading
and one adolescent protesting violin. (34)

In the first line, Rukeyser brings readers to a town that looks deplorable. It’s “gaudy,” so overdressed and in poor taste. Combined with “sadistic” and “dishonest,” the streets come into focus as blood splattered and broken. The kind of place full of dark alleyways. In the second line, the speaker confirms that this place is familiar with its sadism. “Every face” has had to prove its worth, in exchange for keeping basic abilities such as sight. The third line pulls readers out of the streets and near the riverbed. The frame fills with a crowd made of wounds and rags, “driven down” by desperation or by force. The fourth line confirms their evacuation out of, presumably, the speaker’s city. Then the fifth line immediately yanks readers back to the streets. The streets are rich with empty coats, instead of wealth. The city is war-torn, after all. The frame centers a river of fur, cloth, and military insignia as it “parades” through the “dishonest avenues.” The last line pushes the coats into the background while the foreground features a teen playing his violin’s heart out, seemingly the only resident left. With each line, the image never settles. In each line, Rukeyser hands another brimming photograph. And before readers can really inspect it, she places another one. For the sake of some continuity, I assumed all these images originated in the same city, but they could just as easily only share a day or an event or a central theme. Readers have no anchor. The stanza doesn’t follow the violin boy. He visits at the end and leaves right after. The stanza doesn’t perch us on an eagle, viewing it all from a distance. Instead, readers are practically drowning in the city’s blood. Readers aren’t told for a second where to look or what to look for. Rukeyser simply places another photograph. However, instead of revealing ramble soup, unpacking each image shows the theme as it forms in each reader’s mind. Readers may have no anchor, but they have the ocean. They can still feel the pulsing waves below the deck, catch their power, and move from there. This passage could be interpreted as the fear and chaos created when a city is bombed. This passage is concerned fully with the city’s citizens. Without a warning or a plan, everyone is taking what measures they can come up with. People run to the river. People gather their belongings, even if it’s just a coat. People try to make some merry out of the nightmare. The boy and his fiddle are described as “protesting,” perhaps that protest is a refusal to be afraid. Montage is formed from a longer uninterrupted film strip being cut up into smaller pieces that are then strung together. Perhaps these montages were created by fleshing out whole scenes and then cutting them down to a summary or a close examination of a few key segments. Therefore, montage works mainly by implications and within an unexplained greater context.

Part of the puzzle in Rukeyser’s Elegies is distinguishing what the historical context of each elegy is and in what unique way she is framing that context. Rather than simply borrowing from how people were discussing her times, she came at it from as new of an angle as she felt was useful. One of the ways she accomplished that new angle was by estranging certain nouns from their conventional use and re-using them in her own related but idiosyncratic context. For example in the fifth elegy “A Turning Wind,” Rukeyser writes, 

following charts of moving constellations.  
Charts of country of all visions, imperishable  
stars of our dreams : process, which having neither
             sorrow nor joy 
remains as promise, the embryo in the fire. (31)

As a noun, “chart” refers to a “sheet of information in the form of a table, graph, or diagram,” (Google). A “constellation” is a “group of stars in a recognizable pattern,” and a “vision” is either being able to see or to “think about or plan the future,” (Google). But within the context of this passage, how do those definitions help? Their conventional usages leave these nouns as static objects. Within the passage, the constellations are not just recognizable patterns, they’re moving. The other chart is “of country of all visions”, not simply the ability to see. So I asked myself, in what context would someone need living star charts and access to an array of predictions? Like a lot of questions Elegies raises, the answer lies in the historical present of the 1940s. During the 1940s, black southern Americans were mass migrating to the north, an event known as “The Second Great Migration.” The First Great Migration started in 1916 and surged until the 1970s as a response to the era of Jim Crow legislation following Reconstruction. Black Americans were finally given some legal rights during Reconstruction, but white Americans pushed back as violently as they could. This cruel push back resulted in the majority of black Americans moving up north, where there was less overt racism, hoping to get a fresh start and a stable life. “A Turning Wind” mourns the difficulty of the travel and of attempting to plant roots in a less explicitly racist part of a fundamentally racist country. This passage cited above uses charts to refer to specifically the kind of information people had to draw on to accomplish their journey. They had to gather as much advice as they could to avoid sun-down towns and the rebranded slave-patrol, aka the police. They had to rely on the stars to guide their grueling path. All that time and effort and pain was for the sake of the “imperishable stars of [their] dreams.” While the stars are aspirational, they act as a motivator, solely for the freedom they represent, for example the north star. Furthermore, the process itself is so long and arduous that it produces “neither sorrow nor joy,” only dogged persistence to preserve the “promise” of a better fairer life for themselves and especially their children. Their children who, if left in the south, might have been “embryo[s] in the fire.” Without knowing about America’s Great Migration, this passage might come off as garbled. Unprepared readers can parse only bits and pieces, which leads to a swiss-cheesed view of the subject. However, with knowledge of that context, the work and its nouns represent their subject from its rich insides, its struggles, beliefs, and hopes. That inside angle invoked so fully in “A Turning Wind” would have been, and still is, ignored by the majority of white Americans, who prefer to think of the travelers as parasitic. Rukeyser’s angle on black migrants considers their humanity not only in enduring cruelty, but as dreamers as well. In this elegy, they are people who are capable of the one divine human trait, the ability to hope, to envision a better future, and to act upon both, which reflects precisely who those migrants were then, and who migrants are today. They are people looking for a better home, for themselves and mostly for their children.

Traditional elegies focus on mourning. They accept loss by giving it space on the page. Rukeyser’s work mourns open wounds as they’re being made. She doesn’t simply cry out bitterly. She insists on giving her gruesome present not just a gravestone but a siren. Along with imitating her techniques, I hope to imitate the wounded center of her elegies. We live in a present that’s being eviscerated at all angles with aging knives, knives Rukeyser would have recognized. Rather than just mourn, to only hold pain, I hope to reveal the knives too and a spirit that’s willing to fight back.

Rat Elegy

Trash bags, blood, and rust seal my windowsill.
I forget exactly why but beyond the glass, there's eyes,
green, and metal, and blue, and red eyes,
searching for a reason to send hands.
I've cleaned my bathroom three times now.
Rust, yellow stains, some melting plastic.
Colors collect on my rags and they never wash out.
I live alone. I really didn't always.
Orange hands grip pens
When someone asks if his orange head could weep for the nurses,
his orange eyes flick left.
He's handing out pens.
There's blood in his teeth.

I'm hide with eyes, daring to stare into the glass
 again.
Trucks with human husks hum.
Cages sprayed with rash inducing poison that settles on brown skin (guaranteed™) sit.
Children asking about what a "judge" is a few hours before facing trial, alone.
Rainbows of tents bled for ransom.
Storms of maskless "model citizens" demanding their king be king.
Black body after black body smeared on the ground.
My mother keeps asking when I'm going to talk to her.
Oh, but didn't she tell me? "The economy needs air before anyone else."
Orange smug, orange hands folded.
Orange puppeteers pass another law.
He pulls the spotlight back to his
orange mouth asking human ears to drink bleach.
He's gold with teeth.
I'm hide with eyes. I have one question.
Did they burn Eden too?
When they stripped Eve, when they crowned Adam,
did they burn Eden too?
The ashes must have been worth so much.

***

Moon 1, They shuttered us.
Moon 2, I greeted and cleaned.
Moon 3, They sent us back.
Moon 4, They raised the limit until everyone swore they'd quit.
Moon 5, They took our carts. They left the fridge, and the desk.
Moon 6, We retrained everyone.
Moon 7, We trained everyone they sent in.
Moon 8, 192 orders in a day, every day.
Moon 9, 150 orders. The line snakes the store and
Moon 10, you can only beg for so long.
Moon 1, homeschool, again.
Moon 2, spring with the shutters on.
Moon 3, I'm sleeping in my summer dresses.
Moon 4, I'm parallel parking in the movie lot soon to be a walmart, something that will last.
Moon 5, Dad's buying burgers.
Moon 6, Dave made my lemon dress.
Moon 7, Dad's buying more burgers. I missed a meeting.
Moon 8, Memoirs, poems, old American tomes, and psych textbooks.
Moon 9, Memoirs, poems, old American tomes, and psych textbooks.
Moon 10, You can only beg for so long.
Moon 1, 41,446 died.
Moon 2, 192,301 died.
Moon 3, 134,972 died.
Moon 4, 133,785 died.
Moon 5, 160,765 died.
Moon 6, 175,519 died.
Moon 7, 164,002 died.
Moon 8, 181,193 died.
Moon 9, 272,338 died.
Moon 10, You can only beg for so long.
Moon 1, I'm arrogant.
Moon 2, I'm afraid of air.
Moon 3, I'm sorry.
Moon 4, How can I give this time to you?
Moon 5, I can't remember my face.
Moon 6, How can I possibly mourn you?
Moon 7, My headphones are my ears.
Moon 8, I'm sorry I spent it like that.
Moon 9, This box is my hide and this glass is my eyes.
Moon 10, You can only beg for so long.

***

Shouldn't you be crying?
Shouldn't you be screaming?
I swear I can hear you anyway.
I swear I know where the liquid on your skin came from.

I only closed my eyes.
I didn't stumble in here.
I didn't walk here.
Yet here I am, swimming, same as you.

I can't place this place.
I can't feel its edges, its defining features.
I'm swimming, same as you.

There should be a ledge, maybe.
Something to grip, maybe.
Maybe then, we'll remember how we got here.
Maybe then, we'll find a way to stay out.

Stay out.
Stay in a day where you don't need to remember this.
I'll work to seal it, until the work grinds my fingers down.

Works Cited

Google. “Chart Definition.”

https://www.google.com/search?q=chart+definition&oq=chart+def&aqs=chrome.0.0j69i57j0l8.2371j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 Accessed  1 Apr. 2021.

Google. “Constellation Definition.”

https://www.google.com/search?q=constellation+definition&ei=Lk9mYN_7DOXrtQa3_qOYDw&oq=constedefinition Accessed 1 Apr. 2021.

Google. “Vision Definition.”

https://www.google.com/search?q=vision+definition&ei=hlBmYJrNI8TLtQbEz6aQDw&oq=vision+definition Accessed 1 Apr. 2021.

Our World Data. “Daily New Confirmed Covid-19 Deaths.”

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..2020-03-31&country=~OWID_WRL&region=World&deathsMetric=true&interval=daily&hideControls=true&smoothing=0&pickerMetric=location&pickerSort=asc Accessed 4 Dec. 2020.

Rukeyser, Muriel. Elegies. New Directions. 1949.

To cite this creative response in MLA, 8th edition: Ansorge, Susanna. “Rat Elegy”–A Creative Response to Rukeyser’s Elegies. http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/2022/01/17/susanna-ansorge-rat-elegy–a-creative-response-to-rukeysers-elegies/

Joely Byron Fitch, The Marks of Her Knowing: On Muriel Rukeyser’s “Käthe Kollwitz”

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There’s a line in Muriel Rukeyser’s poem “Käthe Kollwitz” next to which I write: this, the center of everything. That line, from the five-part poem’s second section, reads: “A woman pouring her opposites.” The poem is better-known for a question that Rukeyser later asks, then immediately answers: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open” (Muriel Rukeyser Reader 214, part 3, lines 25-26). These might well be Rukeyser’s most-quoted lines; they appear in some form as countless epigraphs, as the title of at least two anthologies, and in the pages of works of various disciplines, not to mention the opening paragraphs of essays like this one. (In her essay “Learning to Breathe under Water,” Alicia Ostriker calls them “almost a mantra among women poets.”) It seems to me these lines are so repeatable because they successfully encapsulate a truth: that women have historically been prevented from telling the truth about their lives, and that acts of speaking that do tell truths about women’s lives “split open” the world in that they transform and potentially destabilize that tenuous construction we call “the world,” which has so often been a world authored by and for men. (“Most disturbing,” Ostriker also writes, “is the moment… when much of what we think we know about “women” and “poetry” is called into question.”1 ) It seems also that this “world split open” is a subtle and elusive thing, and that one of the questions these lines offer us is: what does (or would) it mean for the world to split open?

That’s quite a question, and in fact looking at these lines is taking me straight to some of my deepest, truest questions, ones with which I think Rukeyser’s work is intimately engaged: What is a truth? What is a woman? What, even, is a life—or what should it be? (Or might. Or could.) Of course these are and are not abstract questions. I don’t mean them rhetorically. I mean that what it means for a woman poet to tell the truth is still a fraught question, weighted with gendered expectations about who gets to tell what kind of truth, which truths can be universal and which merely personal. (Rukeyser, in response to being called a “she-poet” by a critic, said: “Anything I bring to this is because I am a woman… maybe, maybe, maybe that is what one can bring to life.”2) There are complicated layers of truth-telling to be found in “Käthe Kollwitz,” in which one woman (Rukeyser) tells something of the truth (a truth) about her life by looking at or with or through the life of another (Kollwitz).

Ruth Porritt’s 1999 essay “Unforgetting Eyes: Rukeyser Portraying Kollwitz’s Truth” argues a similar point; Porritt points out that the poem “raises questions about artistic truth and how writers represent the complicated lives of the women they honor” (163). I relate these questions to Ostriker’s claim that we can see women poets searching for identities “both personal and communal”; she writes that “women writers make poems for and from the lives of lost women, the insulted and injured of present and past history, the heroines, the writers and artists who are their spiritual sisters and ancestresses. And always the note is intimate” (Stealing the Language 191). (She quotes Rukeyser later in the same paragraph.) Ostriker’s for and from, as well as her designation of this kind of writing as a species of intimacy, resonate with Porritt’s suggestion that Rukeyser’s poem offers us not just a vision, but an ethics: “that the woman poet should not speak at others, nor for others, but with others to cocreate new truths” (164). 3

Not at, not for, but with: I repeat these words to myself, wanting to make them into something: a new illusion4, a new truth—or an old truth rediscovered, recycled, made new. Audre Lorde reminds us that “there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human… There are only new ways of making them felt.”5 I find something that feels new in “Käthe Kollwitz”—half a century after Rukeyser published The Speed of Darkness, in which it appeared, I feel surprised and recognized and maybe even subtly transformed by this poem of one woman imagining another, seeing another, “looking directly at you” (part 5, line 1).The poem—like many of the poet’s—is a long one in multiple sections, which shift through various modes to create something like a portrait of a woman in the midst of moving through her world, seeing and being seen from a variety of angles. It’s Rukeyser’s attempt, in poetry, to apprehend Kollwitz in as much of her complexity as possible. It might be described as a crystallized act of looking—which might also describe most poetry, or at least some of the poems I love the most. What I want to offer here is a reading that seeks to make visible the complexities of truth and representation I see in the poem, focusing on its formal qualities and tracking, where I can, the relations between Rukeyser’s lines and Kollwitz’s images (guided, at times, by Porritt’s and Gander’s works, which have already done significant work in that direction), striving throughout “to read by the light that [the poem itself] emits.”6 In that spirit, here’s how Rukeyser begins:

Held between wars
my lifetime
                        among wars, the big hands of the world of death
my lifetime
listens to yours.
       (part 1, lines 1-5)

These lines: they’re glowing. Life and death, the scope of the world and the different but equally unrepresentable scope of a single person’s subjectivity—it’s all, immediately, here. Though the stanza locates “my lifetime” as “held between wars,” the lineation also inverts this positioning: the line “among wars, the big hands of the world of death” is also held between two repetitions of “my lifetime.” That rhyme between “wars” and “yours” lends a sense of wholeness to these initial lines, such that both lifetimes are also held by the sound. We can understand “my lifetime” here to mean Rukeyser’s own, and “yours” to refer to Kollwitz’s, but I think it’s also notable that there’s no “I” here, only “my,” leaving some ambiguity around the question of who’s speaking and from where or when. In other words, it’s not an “I” who does the listening, but “my lifetime”—suggesting, to me, that this listening comes both from within and outside of a self.

The lines that follow draw on imagery from Kollwitz’s prints and drawings; we’re asked to look at ordinary people “in the street, in dailiness, / their lives showing / through their bodies” (lines 7-9). These “lives shown through bodies” draw attention to the processes by which we become visible, and to the ways in which we make meaning both of people and of images—in many of Kollwitz’s prints, bodies become allegory for their historical situations, even as they’re also singular, themselves. The only direct first-person statement in this first section is attributed to one of these “sufferers” (line 6), when Rukeyser describes “a look as of music / the revolutionary look / that says     I am in the world / to change the world” (lines 10-12). “My lifetime” (line 13), then, in its next repetition, is difficult to locate as Rukeyser’s specifically; it could equally belong to one of these anonymous subjects or to Kollwitz herself, as suggested by the lines that follow: “is to love to endure to suffer the music / to set its portrait / up as a sheet of the world” (lines 14-17). There’s a beautiful blurring of forms here—music and portraiture and poetry flow into one another, as do the images of the rest of this long stanza: religious and literary and natural references all appear before “death holding my lifetime between great hands / the hands of enduring life” (lines 21-22) brings us back to the image of the poem’s first lines.

I picture these “great hands” of death as the hands of a clock: an embodied image of passing time. I also attach these hands to a number of hands in Kollwitz’s images: the grave, haunting hand of a mourner atop a coffin in Memorial Sheet to Karl Liebknecht (1919); the skeletal, shadowy, ominous yet gentle hand in Call of Death (1934), resting on the old woman’s shoulder; the hands that link the figures of The Volunteers (1922); the hand that holds and guards the cluster of women and children of The Mothers (1921).7 Yet when the hands of death transform into (or reveal themselves to have always already also been) “the hands of enduring life,” the hands I can’t stop thinking of are those of a much earlier sketch, in pencil: the hands of Child’s Head in a Mother’s Hands (1900) are so visibly a mother’s, hands of care. In the isolated sketch, the child might be sleeping—but it’s only a study for the etching of the same year called The Downtrodden, which shows a family in mourning. This imagery prefigures the heart-wrenching series called Woman with Dead Child that Kollwitz would make three years later, just over a decade before she’d lose her own son, Peter, in World War I. In the prints, a mother holds a child’s body, curled around it like a shell. Her face seems almost to melt into the child; her hand is nearly as large as the child’s head. This hand, too, is the hand of death and the hand of life. It has a gravity I want to call unbearable, though I know that I don’t know what that would mean. I mean that I can feel someone’s heart breaking when I look at it.

Kollwitz, Head of Child in Mother’s Hands (1900) Leicester’s German Expressionist Collection

Where the poem’s first section engages with and invokes Kollwitz through imagery drawn from her works, the second brings Kollwitz into the poem more directly, as a voice speaking quotes in her own words.8 The Kollwitz that the poet creates for us here speaks variously: on form, on her subject matter, on love, on life. “Woman as gates” (part 2, line 1) is the phrase Rukeyser uses to introduce this voice, echoing the first section’s image world of lifetimes “held between” (part 1, lines 1; 21) and also speaking to the artist’s role as conduit for meaning. “The process,” Kollwitz—through Rukeyser—tells us, “is after all like music, / like the development of a piece of music. / The fugues come back and / again and again / interweave” (part 2, lines 1-6). Here, again, music becomes a metaphor to say something about artistic production. Rukeyser’s lineation centers the phrase “again and again,” highlighting the repetition and also moving the reader’s eye away from the groundedness of the left-hand margin, effectively weaving the text that comes back to the word “interweave.” In the following lines, Kollwitz clarifies her point: “A theme may seem to have been put aside, but it keeps returning— / the same thing modulated, / somewhat changed in form” (lines 7-10).

It’s easy to see how this applies to Kollwitz’s work; similar images and subjects appear and develop across the breadth of her career. This principle also tells us something about Rukeyser’s own work, and speaks directly to some themes I see appearing in this poem as well as in her earlier and later work: the role of art in a war-torn world; the difficulty and necessity of communication; the complicated relation between the categories ‘artist’ and ‘woman’; the presence of death in life; the interplay of other opposites. This kind of repetition is not stasis, but—as Kollwitz tells us—”modulation.” Repeated themes accrue meaning as they’re brought into new combinations, new connections. (I make the musician tell me again how fugues work; the point that seems to me to matter is that, as he tells it, what makes a fugue a fugue is that not just some but all of the pieces of melody are working with the same repeated themes. Rukeyser claimed she didn’t work with “unrelated elements” at all,9 which also strikes me as true, if enigmatic.)

There’s a time slip here, or a productive ambiguity, in that Kollwitz’s words are both “said” and “saying” (part 2, lines 23 and 1); in other words, Kollwitz’s voice speaks both from a past time in which she did say these words and from the continual present in which she addresses us through Rukeyser’s poem. The poet’s choice to let Kollwitz speak for herself makes sense in relation to Rukeyser’s work in documentary poetics and biography. Kollwitz’s language that Rukeyser chooses to repeat is wide-ranging in terms of subject, and its modes of address are also various—some of these words are clearly notes for herself, but others also include the voice of some interlocutor, as in lines 13-15, when someone—maybe an interviewer—asks: “After all there are happy things in life too. / Why do you show only the dark side?” The question is a familiar one, and speaks to the pressures on artists—women artists in particular, but also artists of other marginalized groups—to beautify suffering for an audience who might find a focus on real, lived struggles too much. (It also strikes me that “showing only the dark side” is a myopic reading of Kollwitz’s work, which seems to me to focus as much on connection and relation and resilience as it does “the dark side.”) Rukeyser quotes Kollwitz’s reply, or her reflection on how she replied: “I could not answer this. But I know— / in the beginning my impulse to know / the working life / had little to do with / pity or sympathy. / I simply felt / that the life of the workers was beautiful” (lines 16-22).

I love these lines for their willingness to find beauty in what’s overlooked or seen as merely ordinary, “in dailiness” (part 1, line 7), in what’s been excluded from the realm of what counts as art. I also suspect that Rukeyser’s choice to include this quote speaks to how she might have seen it relating to her own work: I imagine that she’d also had the question of “why you show only the dark side” leveled at her, maybe many times. The poet also quotes the artist saying “I am groping in the dark” (line 23), which resonates with Rukeyser’s willingness to remain in uncertainty even while asserting her own voice, to tangle with opposites without collapsing them into resolution.

Kollwitz’s statements quoted here about sensuality and her marriage, as well as her suggestion “that bisexuality / is almost      a necessary factor / in artistic production” (lines 46-48), bring to mind Ostriker’s observation that “to be a creative woman in a gender-polarized culture is to be a divided self” (Stealing the Language 60). In a culture in which the role of the artist has historically been gendered as male and primarily reserved for men to inhabit, it’s no surprise that Kollwitz found that what she called “the tinge of masculinity within me” (line 49) was a source of creative power. Of course it’s not completely clear what Kollwitz means by “bisexuality” here, as the end of the quote seems to refer to something more like what we might now call gender fluidity, and at any rate Kollwitz’s bisexuality is not exactly Rukeyser’s, which is not exactly mine. Still: a star in the margins. (Rukeyser loved women and men, and though she wasn’t outspoken about it, didn’t spend a lot of time claiming any particular orientation—a stance to which I also relate—the truth of this is there in the poems.)

Rukeyser ends this section with an anecdote of her own, in which a man comments: “Kollwitz? She’s too black-and-white” (line 57). This could be tongue-in-cheek—nearly all of Kollwitz’s work is, literally, in black-and-white—but also stands in for the kind of dismissals that Kollwitz’s work, as well as Rukeyser’s and that of other politically engaged women artists, was (and is) routinely subject. In an essay contextualizing Kollwitz’s art, Elizabeth Prelinger writes:

Because Kollwitz steadfastly adhered to a figurative style in the era of abstraction, because she was a woman in a field dominated by men, and because she depicted socially engaged subject matter when it was unfashionable, critics have focused on those issues and have rarely studied the ways in which the artist manipulated technique and solved formal problems.” (“Kollwitz Reconsidered” 13)

This statement seems to me uncannily also applicable to Rukeyser’s work; essay after essay describes resistances that her contemporaries found to her from multiple angles—too political for the New Criticism-influenced mode that was in fashion at the time, too formally experimental for others who prioritized art’s ability to be socially engaged.

Prelinger goes on to describe Kollwitz as “a virtuosic visual rhetorician who, in her best work, achieved a brilliant balance between subject and form” (13), a balance that I also see Rukeyser achieving even in this single poem. Its third section returns to shorter lines and an omniscient voice recalling that of the first section; we begin with the lines: “Held among wars, watching / all of them / all these people / weavers, / Carmagnole” (part 3, lines 1-5). “Weavers” and “Carmagnole” are both titles of Kollwitz pieces; the short lines here evoke looking through a series of images without settling on any single one. We’re asked repeatedly to pay attention to the artist in the act of seeing—Kollwitz is “watching,” “looking at,” “a woman seeing” (lines 1; 6; 14). The third, and longest, stanza here returns to events from Kollwitz’s biography, including Peter’s death, which was then echoed by her grandson’s—also Peter—in World War II. The lines grow longer here as events and images flow together: “another Peter killed in another war; firestorm; / dark, light, as two hands, / this pole and that pole as the gates” (lines 22-24).

These lines revisit and reimagine the hands of death from the first section, as well as that of “woman as gates” (part 2, line 1)—in both cases, the woman and in particular the woman artist becomes the location of transformation: the gate through which everyone enters the world, literally, but also the witness to life and death and the thresholds at which they meet. We return to that question: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” This line is far more powerful within its context; in thinking about the facts of Kollwitz’s life, the way it does map onto and was shaped by these wars, it’s easy to see how the force of those truths does “split open” the world. Still, this splitting is not necessarily violent, or not only violent. Rukeyser doesn’t punctuate the answering line, writing merely “The world would split open” (line 26), leaving the sentenced balanced between completeness and continuity.

The section that follows is surprisingly gentle, and it’s the one that puzzled me most on my first several readings of the poem. Where the first three sections were numbered, but untitled, this one announces itself as “Song : The Calling-up,” signaling it as differently lyric than the preceding words. I read this song as conjuring both artistic creation and motherhood, which it envisions as connected; it begins: “Rumor, stir of ripeness / rising within this girl / sensual blossoming / of meaning, its light and form” (lines 1-4). That turn at the end of the first stanza is my favorite moment in this section—it’s wonderful, I think, that the “sensual blossoming” is one “of meaning” (emphasis mine), making what’s “rising within this girl” legible as creativity or her own voice instead of or alongside sexuality. The second stanza’s “birth-cry” (line 5) reads as conception, considering the stanza ends with “the warm woman / a mother in response” (lines 7-8). The last stanza’s “word of death” echoes the earlier “world of death” (part 1, line 3), and if we read this section as a song framing Kollwitz’s early life, seems to also refer to her son’s death, following which she worked for years on a sculpture memorial for him— “from the material make / an art harder than bronze” (part 4, lines 11-12).

The poem’s last section, titled “Self-Portrait,” is where I find its real heart, and it’s where Rukeyser looks most closely at Kollwitz’s work. Looking, and the intimacy of looking, are central, as in these opening lines: “Mouth looking directly at you / eyes in their inwardness looking / directly at you / half light      half darkness” (part 5, lines 1-4). I’m fascinated by this opening, which suggests a connection between looking and speech from its “mouth looking,” and which continues one of the poem’s central threads of setting up an opposition or binary and then destabilizing that binary—light and darkness are separated, divided by that mid-line caesura, but eyes are also “looking / directly at you” even in “their inwardness”—the directness and immediacy of a gaze are not separate from an interiority’s degree of remove. The “you at whom Kollwitz looks is herself in creating a self-portrait, but also Rukeyser, and also the reader seeing both of these women through these words: layers of distance across which communication is still—as the poem shows us—possible.

Rukeyser moves through considerations of several of Kollwitz’s self-portraits here, using the repeated line “flows into” both to describe the qualities of line within the images and to shift between images—Kollwitz ages over the course of this section’s single long stanza.10 The woman “alive, German, in her first War / flows into / strength of the worn face / a skein of lines” (lines 14-17). Representational friction is a phrase used in scholarship about ekphrastic poetry to describe the tension between an image’s formal composition and representational capacity—I think of this here, where Kollwitz’s self-portrait is both an image that represents a person and a series of marks on paper, two-dimensional. That “skein of lines” reads as double to me, referring both to the lines of “the worn face” and the lines of the drawing, as does the later phrase “the marks of her knowing” (line 24)—each of which could also describe qualities of the poem itself.

As Rukeyser turns towards Kollwitz’s late work (“Seedcorn must not be ground,” in line 28, is the title—quoting Goethe—of her last lithograph), the presence of Kollwitz’s lost son returns via reference to her work titled Pietá, which engages the tradition of images of the mourning Madonna. Rukeyser describes: “mother and / between her knees / life as her son in death / pouring from the sky of / one more war” (lines 34-38), echoing the imagery of Woman with Dead Child, which Kollwitz made in the same year. In these lines, the way Kollwitz’s images flow into one another gives way to the connection between mother and child, and the way war destroys that connection—Kollwitz’s life is a microcosm of a web of loss. I think of Ostriker’s articulation “that our normal conception of self as rigidly bounded entity is a fiction” (Stealing the Language, p. 178), which she then sharpens: “in fact we are all interdependent permeable membranes continually penetrating and being penetrated by a world of others.” This interconnectivity is apparent in the way Rukeyser sees Kollwitz as the “face of our age” (line 32) and also as only herself, achingly specific, present and absent, disappearing before our eyes: “face almost obliterated / hand over the mouth forever / hand over one eye now / the other great eye / closed” (lines 40-45). I feel such tangible grief in these lines, in which the poem suddenly becomes an elegy—or maybe it was all along, but I didn’t really know it until that ending, in which the artist who we’ve been trying both to see and to see with must close her eyes.

“Self-portrait, Hand at Forehead” (Courtesy of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI)

Rukeyser, or her speaker, has a less-immediate presence in this stanza, and yet she’s also everywhere. I can imagine her staring at Kollwitz’s self-portraits for minutes turning into hours, turning to other images, coming back again and again to the same face, looking directly at Kollwitz looking herself in the eyes. (I want, of course, to look over her shoulder, or stand next to her in some gallery, for her to be pointing at the lines, saying this flows into that, showing me what she means, to see her seeing in real time. In museums I always want to look at the faces of whoever I’m with more than I want to look at the works themselves, which might serve as a kind of poetics—if one I’m not sure I’d endorse, even though or probably because it’s mine.)

In a diary entry, Kollwitz asks: “That which I have always said previously: the content could be the form—where have I succeeded at that? Where is the new form for the new content of these last years?”11This inseparability of form and content, and openness to reimagining form as the content of a life changes, are also visible in Rukeyser’s work, and “Käthe Kollwitz” shows the poet finding the language to represent another person as both vibrantly present and essentially unknowable. The poem is rich for analysis, full of connections and references and interwoven themes, but what I really want to communicate here is something of my feeling while reading it, suddenly more aware of myself as a woman looking at a woman looking at a woman looking at the world: these layers of life and time and meaning that can be teased out, guessed-at, but never quite untangled. I am still learning what it might mean to trust my own opposites, to “use all my fears.”12 In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser asks: “How do we use feeling? How do we use truth?” Rukeyser’s and Kollwitz’s bodies of work each offer many possibilities in these entwined directions. I turn towards these women, to what I can apprehend of their lifetimes—trying to remain open, in eyes and in I, to look, to listen.

Works Cited
Coooper, Jane. “And Everything a Witness of the Buried Life.” Herzog and Kaufman, pp. 3-14.
Gander, Catherine. Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection. Edinburg University Press, 2013.
Herzog, Anne. “Art of the World: Muriel Rukeyser’s Poetry of Witness.” Bridges, Fall 2002, pp. 26-31.
Herzog, Anne F. and Janet E. Kaufman, eds. How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet? St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1984; 2007.
Loy, Mina. The Last Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger Conover. The Jargon Society, 1982.
Ostriker, Alicia. “Learning to Breathe under Water.” Poetry Foundation, June 12, 2013.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70011/learning-to-breathe-under-water
—. Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America. Beacon Press, 1986.
Porritt, Ruth. “’Unforgetting Eyes’: Rukeyser Portraying Kollwitz’s Truth.” Herzog and Kaufman, pp.163-183.
Prelinger, Elizabeth, editor. Käthe Kollwitz. Yale University Press, 1992.
Rukeyser, Muriel. A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, ed. Jan Heller Levi. Norton, 1994.
—. The Life of Poetry. Paris Press, 1996.

Joely Fitch lives in Moscow, ID, where she’s an MFA candidate at the University of Idaho and the associate poetry editor for Fugue. Some of her recent poems and essays appear in The Shore, Voicemail Poems, and Dilettante Army. 



Trudi Witonsky, Introducing Louise Kertesz, Friday February 19, 2021

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I’m thrilled to introduce Louise Kertesz to you. I first came to read Muriel Rukeyser through Adrienne Rich’s poetry, and you get used to reading one sensibility, even as it evolves and breaks and innovates. But when you start reading someone new, someone as complicated as Rukeyser, it’s bewildering at first, and you need a guide. So, as many of you have done, I turned to Louise’s 1980 monograph, The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser, where as I read, I could see  the patterns of the themes and images and processes come into coherent shape. Louise had had to rely mostly on the book reviews, because there was so little scholarship available at the time, and her discussions of eras and deft placement of Rukeyser among ancestors was immensely clarifying. Several qualities stood out.  The determined assertion of the worth and uniqueness of  Muriel Rukeyser’s work and vision. The disentangling of assumptions, often sexist. Here are some examples. Early on, Louise notes that

Rukeyser, . . . though reviewers have labeled her a ‘pythoness’ and a ‘sybil’ because she emphasizes the deep insights poetry affords us into reality, does not write as a visionary of Crane’s type. . .  . (8)

Or, she mentions how “Rukeyser is assumed to have been influenced by Auden, to have taken her philosophical, political, and artistic cues from him and his group.” Then she proceeds to demolish that case, comparing Auden to Rukeyser. She observes that his

early poems are not at all like the poems in Theory of Flight. Nor is the verse in his plays, burlesques, and travel book like Rukeyser’s poetry in her second volume, U.S. 1.  Auden’s first work was not a grappling with the emerging self in the context of a society in turmoil about which he cared intensely and specifically. Auden said, “Before 1930, I never opened a newspaper.” That would have made him twenty-four by the time he presumably opened a newspaper on a fairly regular basis. But by the time she was twenty-four Rukeyser had already tried to cover the Scottsboro trials for a student newspaper, and contracted typhoid in an Alabama jail, given streetcorner speeches in New York, made her investigative journey to Gauley, WV, and studied congressional reports of the miners’ deaths there for her long poem in US 1, and witnessed the first fighting of the Spanish Civil War. (50)

You get the idea of how Louise was able to rectify slipshod judgments and articulate new terms and contexts for understanding Rukeyser’s work, as, Rukeyser, a visionary ahead of her time, suffered even from her supporters’ judgments.

What also makes Louise’s work so admirable, is that she did it all on her own, without benefit of others’ shared interest, without the internet, so that to find a source meant to physically travel to the library or to the archive or to contact an individual by mail. In an era of typewriters this meant a different kind of writing process.

As I was reading the monograph, I started to wonder where Louise was, and I searched online. When I couldn’t find her at any universities, she became something of a mystery herself. I started imagining her from her prose. Fiercely intelligent, logical, able to synthesize and contextualize in such a clear way, firmly making the case for the seriousness of Rukeyser’s work. Louise seemed to have disappeared herself. Every now and then, I would try another search, and finally, I happened to see her name on Linked In. I wrote and asked – are you THE Louise Kertesz who wrote the book on Muriel?

Later, with Elisabeth, we found out what Louise had been doing for all those years. She had had interviews in academia, but the male committees had not recognized the worth of Louise’s or Rukeyser’s work. A practical person, Louise had to go on. Divorcing, with two young children to support, she found editorial work and eventually became a writer for Automotive News, traveling in the Midwest and South, covering United Auto Worker activities as well as new Japanese plants. Later she became an editor on topics such as business insurance and healthcare, and finally, as an independent, took on copy editing (of scholarly books!) and ghostwriting. 

When we met, Louise hadn’t realized what an impact her book had had. How for almost all of us it was the first gateway into understanding Muriel’s poetry, the only full-length study, a needed foundation for the current efflorescence of ideas and angles and connections.

So you can understand how deeply satisfying it is now, to at least begin to try to give Louise her due, to introduce her to all of you, who can appreciate what she has done and how remarkable it is.

Louise Kertesz, “My Untamable Need”: Reading Rukeyser’s Elegies in Light of Some of Her Later Poems

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I wonder how many have come upon Rukeyser’s work – as I did —surprised that we’d not heard very much about her.

In the early 1970s, I was a new PhD in English, reasonably acquainted with the work of despairing, self-destructive, suicidal poets (most of them men), whom critics and English courses focused on: Robert Lowell, Dylan Thomas, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Hart Crane, Theodore Roethke.

The writing in this canon was undeniably brilliant. But after Berryman’s suicide in 1972 by jumping off a bridge, Lowell wrote a dispirited response: “Yet really we had the same life,/the generic one/our generation offered.”

(Way) back then, two women were also recognized in this bleak pantheon: Sylvia Plath, who gassed herself in an oven (with her children in the next room) and Anne Sexton, who asphyxiated herself in her garage. As I recall, Sexton and Plath, who each won a Pulitzer (Plath posthumously) and a National Book Award for their “confessional” poetry, were often mentioned in the media. Lowell, who also won a Pulitzer and a National Book award, was the dean of this confessional school of poetry.

Interestingly, the work of Rukeyser’s exact contemporary and great friend of Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, characterized by critics as “restrained,” “objective,” and having “an air of serenity,” — the antithesis of the confessional school — had also been recognized with a Pulitzer and a National Book Award.

By the 1970s, Rukeyser had been publishing for decades and had won awards, but no Pulitzer or National Book Award. News of those prizes often appeared in local newspapers and conferred on a poet’s work a seal of peer approval, inviting a national if not an even wider readership. They could make Plath and Sexton, for example, almost household names, in the mystique of celebrity suicides. (In fact, the latest of several books about Plath since her death was treated in the lead review of the New York Times Book Review under the heading “Star Power.”)

In the 1970s, Muriel Rukeyser was not a household name. Nor had I ever encountered her work in an English course. She published a poem about Sylvia Plath in 1976, a pithy, ironic take on Plath’s renown and perhaps on all poets whose popularity often stems from readers’ morbid fascination with accounts of self-destruction:

            NOT TO BE PRINTED

           NOT TO BE SAID

           NOT TO BE THOUGHT

           I’d rather be Muriel

                       than be dead and be Ariel.

Of course, Ariel is Plath’s poetry collection published posthumously in 1965. It is also its title poem, in which Plath identifies with an exhilarating spirit that may be liberating from social norms but is fundamentally “suicidal,” pulling irresistibly toward self-annihilation

Muriel is nowhere so not-Ariel as in the Elegies, which resist the downward pull of despair, despite the horrors of war and the agonies of personal loss.

I’m grateful for this webinar because through the Elegies I’m rediscovering an aspect of her work, an “untamable need” (her phrase from the First Elegy) that I feel is central to an understanding of her work.  I’m struck by her naked, unabashed expression of need, of desire, (not least that of the flesh, the body) beginning in the First Elegy: “I want, I want.” Decades later, in “A Song of Another Tribe,” published in Waterlily Fire in 1962, she writes—sounding very much like William Blake:

                       Guilt   said the bony man

                       Do you feel guilt

                       At your desires?

                      No     I said     my guilt comes when

                       My desires find no way.

(Rukeyser was a large woman, so it’s telling this dialog is with a “bony man.”)

As Elisabeth Daumer points out in her description of this webinar, “I want” is Rukeyser’s unrestrained cry for the ideals she saw defeated in Spain, and against “the advance of fascism, the devastations of World War II, and the Shoah.” It is also her cry for wholeness in the face of personal losses and emotional pain.

In his poem “September 1, 1939” Auden also laments the failure of the liberal ideals of the thirties. But his stance is ironic: he sees those ideals as merely “the clever hopes . . . of a low dishonest decade.”

By contrast, in 1949, Rukeyser’s passionate cry is for the embodiment of those ideals, which she sees not as “clever hopes” but as humankind’s salvation. In the first two Elegies, she’s madwith the wanting of a better world, “the amazing desire/ that keeps me alive,” the tortured imagery straining to express that desire (“a room torn up by the roots”). Imagination must lead us, she declares in the First Elegy, while “failure of the imagination” is rampant. Yet she dares “prophesy the meeting by the water/of these desires.” “Now I begin again the private rising,/the ride to survival of that consuming bird/beating, up from dead lakes, ascents of fire.”

As they progress, each of the first nine Elegies moves through states of confusion, doubt, and pain. But each resolves into a vision or a wish or the potential for wholeness, clarity, peace, love. This progress — and the phrasing of wanting, needing, wishing — can be seen in many of her poems, written at each stage of her life. From “Waking This Morning,” published in 1973:

                                          I want strong peace,

                           and delight,

                       the wild good.

                       I want to make my touch poems:

                       to find my morning, to find you entire

                       alive moving among the anti-touch people.

From a poem published in 1968, “Word of Mouth,” in which she remembers “that morning/when all things fell open and I went into Spain”:

                     I need to go into

                                               this country

            of love and

            . . .

                      I need this country

                                                of love and death

they begin to rouse.

                        They wake.

I believe this is what distinguishes Rukeyser from the poets of Lowell’s generation and their spiritual heirs. In an interview, Rukeyser once said to me, “I hope always to deal with the potential as as real as any other part of life.” She said her approach is a question of “the amount of faith and validity you allow for the potential in life.”

In “Poem,” published in 1962. She is still “mad,” “insane” with wanting. And her belief is still that the imagination must lead us.

            I lived in the first century of world wars.

            Most mornings I would be more or less insane,

            The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,

            The news would pour out of various devices

            Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.

            I would call my friends on other devices;

            They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.

            Slowly I would get to pen and paper,

            Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.

            In the day I would be reminded of those men and women

            Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,

            Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

            As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,

            We would try to imagine them, try to find each other.

            To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile

            Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,

            Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means

            To reach the limit of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,

            To let go the means, to wake.

            I lived in the first century of these wars.

In the Second Elegy, “Age of Magicians,” she’s clearly on the side of the prophets (remember, she actually prophesied in the First Elegy). She extols the prophets for seeing the world as it is (“the world with all its signatures visible”), lit by the imagination rather than by the vision of magicians “worshipping a darkness/with gongs and lurid guns, the colors of force.”

We are responsible for the sorry state of the world—“all this is because of you”—because “[you] never inquired into these meanings.” As a result, “armies of magicians [fill] the streets.” But “all this is avenged by you.” You, reader, with the burning light of your imagination, can resist the magicians and see the world as it can be:

            Your index light, your voice the voice,

            .  .  .

                   Now be

            Seer son of Sight, Hearer, of Ear, at last.

The poem “It Is There,” published in 1973, presents a vision of a peaceful world, “the human place.” What has enabled this world filled with music and children at their games, where the magicians of the Elegies don’t hold sway? Certainly not “a long tradition of rest.”

            Meditation, yes; but within a tension

            Of long resistance to all invasion, all seduction of hate.

            Generations of holding to resistance; and within this resistance

            Fluid change that can respond, that can show the children

            A long future of finding, of responsibility; change within

            Change and tension of sharing consciousness

            Village to city, city to village, person to person entire.

            With unchanging cockcrow and unchanging endurance

            Under the

                                    skies of war.       

This poem could have been written about our times, our polarized country. What will enable us to move toward “the human place” is a “long resistance to all invasion, all seduction of hate.” Generations have resisted and must continue to resist the magicians’ darkness, affirming responsiveness and sharing consciousness, person to person. Rukeyser’s cry of “I want” has led her and her like-minded friends to hold on to and live by their ideals, to resist.

In the Third Elegy, “The Fear of Form,” Rukeyser rejects a sentimental, a copycat, a witwork art ruled by a “tyranny of method,” unable to either truly reflect or give voice to our complex age. The artist must find “new combinations,” as opposed to the products of a “chorus of bootblacks, printers, collectors of shit.”

The title could be read as “The Fear of Seeking Your Own Form.”

In this Elegy, published in 1949, we recognize the many references throughout her poems to the importance of finding a poetic formthat is organic, growing out of her experience, her emotional life, indeed out of her body and its need. Such a form would illuminate her world, making “the world with all its signatures visible.”

 Published in 1976, “Poem  White Page  White Page  Poem” embodies her poetic method. Here is how her poems have been taking form throughout her life, pulsing from her body and lighting her understanding:

            Poem  white page   white page   poem

            something is streaming out of a body in waves

            something is beginning from the fingertips

            they are starting to declare for my whole life

            all the despair and the making music

            something like wave after wave

            that breaks on a beach

            something like bringing the entire life

            to this moment

            the small waves bringing themselves to white paper

            something like light stands up and is alive

And in “Double Ode,” also published in 1976, she writes:

            Moving toward new form I am—

            carry again

            all the old gifts and wars.

            Black parental mysteries

            groan and mingle in the night.

            Something will be born of this.

            .  .  .

            [t] here is no guardian, it is all built into me.

            Do I move toward form, do I use all my fears?

By fearlessly moving toward one’s own form we can save ourselves and our country, which is afflicted with a mindless comfort, as she writes in “Body of Waking,” published in 1958.

            Ruddy we are, strong we are, and insane.

            . . .

            We eat very well. We keep the pictures on.

            . . .

            We are careful to flush the toilet. Of course we take exercise.

But we are not doomed to this sleepwalking—if we seek our genuine form, inspired by seekers who came before us:

            The force that split the spirit could found a city

            That held the split could shine the light of science.

            This rigid energy could still break and run dancing

            Over the rockies and smokies of all lives.

            . . .

           Seeking as we began to grow, and resting without distrust,

            We moved toward a requirement still unknown.

            We spoke of the heroes, the generous ones, who gave their meanings . . .

Readers of poetry in the 1950s would surely have recognized the rhythm of Rukeyser’s line, “The force that split the spirit could found a city,” as echoing lines that made Dylan Thomas famous. The notoriously self-destructive poet died in a New York hospital in 1953 at age 39 following a drinking bout. Here is Thomas:

            The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

            Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

            Is my destroyer.

            And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose

            My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

Hear Rukeyser again:

           The force that split the spirit could found a city

           That held the split could shine the light of science.

Thomas’s poem dwells on —even celebrates—the force that propels all life to its destruction, to death.  It’s a paean to entropy! Rukeyser’s vision, expressed in that recognizable rhythm, is instead progressive, embracing the challenges of the present and moving with hope in potential —to a future where the energy of seeking, the desire to find resolution, may in fact find a new form, “a requirement still unknown.”

But in acknowledging potential, Rukeyser does not minimize suffering. Both the Fourth Elegy, “The Refugees” and Eighth Elegy, “Children’s Elegy” sing the suffering of the thousands of refugee children of the Spanish war and of World War II.

Some of those children were also forced to fight in Spain. These children soldiers, 17-year-olds, uprooted from their families, were completely untrained for fighting. They had to bring their own clothes, even shoes, some fighting in their espadrilles. Many died of typhoid.

Hear Rukeyser:

            Cut.  Frozen and cut.  Off at the ankle.  Off at the hip.

                              Off at the knee.  Cut off.

            Crossing the mountains many died of cold.

Because for Rukeyser the political has always been personal, she identifies with the hurt children in these elegies. The refugee child is also Muriel as well as the artist seeking an authentic voice for her times.

            And the child sitting alone planning her hope:

            I want to write for my race. But what race will you speak.

            being American? I want to write for the living.

(Again, it’s her “I want. I want.”)

But the artist seeking that authentic voice is not welcome: “Many are cast out, become artists at rejection.”

            . . . in the countries of the mind, Cut off at the knee. Cut off at the

                        armpit. Cut off at the throat.

Muriel is the rejected child, the refugee, the artist, cut off from her parents and family, from her fellow revolutionaries in Spain and from the dominant literary scene in the US, where her poem “Wake Island” was derided in a 1943 review titled “Grandeur and Misery of a Poster Girl.”

It is her refugee status that binds her to the refugee children of wars—the culture wars and the wars on battlefields.

“Desdichada,” published in 1973, affirms her personal connection to all child refugees, to rejected children and rejected artists, and her consequent turn to acknowledging every human being:

            For that you never acknowledged me, I acknowledge

            the spring’s yellow detail, the every drop of rain. . .

            . . .

            Disinherited, annulled, finally disacknowledged

            and all of my own asking.  I keep that wild dimension

            of life and making and the spasm

            upon my mouth as I say this word of acknowledge

            to you forever.  Ewig.

            . . .

                                                   Then I do take you,

            but far under consciousness, knowing                                             

            that under under flows a river wanting

            the other

            . . .

            to let this child find, to let men and women find,

            knowing the seeds in us all.  They do say Find.

“More Clues,” also published in 1973, traces her sense of abandonment to her childhood:

            Mother, because you never spoke to me

            I go my life, do I, searching in women’s faces

            the lost word, a word in the shape of a breast?

            Father, because both of you never touched me

            do I search for men building space on space?

            There was no touch, both my hands bandaged close.

            I come from that, but I come far, to touch to word. 

Muriel survives, as do the refugee children and poets who trust in the word, in potential.

From the Fourth Elegy:

            A line of shadowy children issues, surf issues it,

            sickness boiled in their flesh, but they are whole,

            insular strength surrounds them, hunger feeds them strong,

           the ripened sun finds them, they are the first of the world,

           free of the ferryman Nostalgia, who stares at the backward shore.

           Growing free of the old in their slow growth of death. . . .

The Eighth Elegy, “Children’s Elegy,” while continuing to detail the agonies of refugees, is also hopeful. The child recognizes that “the darkness. . .comes out of the person.” The child fights this darkness:

            The shadow in us sings, “Stand out of the light!”

            But I live, I live, I travel in the sun.

The sense of abandonment of the children in this Elegy is harrowing, as is the poet’s identification with the suffering children:

            War means to me, sings a small skeleton,

            only the separation

            mother no good and gone,

            taken away in lines of fire and foam.

           . . .                                                                                                                    

            “I search to learn the way out of childhood;

            I need to fight.  I wish, I wish for home.”

(Again, her need, her wish, her desire.)

The children “were broken off from love:/However long we were loved, it was not long enough.” It is not only the children of these wartimes. It is also the poet.

            I see it pass before me in parade,

            my entire life as a procession of images

            . . .

And she claims her life: “I begin to have what happened to me.” She claims it with love.

            I wanted to die. The masked and the alone

            seemed the whole world, and all the gods at war,

            and all the people dead and depraved. Today

            the constellation and the music!  Love.

She finally urges herself and her readers to find themselves in creative openness to the world and its meanings:

            You who seeking yourself arrive at these lines,

            look once, and you see the world,

            look twice and you see yourself,

            And all the children moving in their change,

            To have what has happened, the pattern and the shock;

            and all of them walk out of their childhood,

            give to you one blue look.

This is the meaning of the lines in the Fourth Elegy: “It is the children’s voyage must be done/before the refugees come home again.” In Rukeyser’s vision, to reach personal and artistic maturity one must reclaim the child’s urgent, instinctive desire for growth.

It is in the Fifth Elegy, “A Turning Wind,” that the child and the poet voyage, roaming the country in search of that America she wants to give voice to. Remember the Fourth Elegy:

           I want to write for my race. But what race will you speak,

           being American? I want to write for the living.  

Now, from the Fifth Elegy she is

           knowing the shape of the country. Knowing the midway travels

           of migrant fanatics, living that life, up with the dawn and

           moving as long as the light lasts, and when the sun is falling

                       to wait, still standing;

           and when the black has come, at last lie down, too tired to

           turn to each other, feeling only the land’s demand under them.

The poet sings the unique shape of America, “torn off from sympathy with the past and planted,/a primitive streak prefiguring the west, an ideal/which had to be modified for stability, to make it work.”

Following the form of the country, she is also describing her own journey, where apparently she once prayed to be relieved of her strong desire:

            years of nightwalking in stranger cities, relost and unnamed,

            recurrent familiar rooms, furnished only with nightmare,

            recurrent loves, the glass eye of unreal ambition

            . . .

            churches where you betray yourself, pray ended desire,

            white wooden houses of village squares. Always one gesture:

                        rejecting of backdrops.

She is on a plane, a seeker of the meanings in the scenes she gazes down upon:

            The tilted cities of America, fields of metal,

            The seamless wheatfields, the current of cities running

                        below our wings

            promise that knowledge of systems which may bless.

            May permit knowledge of self. . .

            this hope of travel, to find the place again,

            rest in the triumph of the reconceived,

            lie down again together face to face.

In “Searching/Not Searching,” published more than forty years later, in 1973, she avows she has been a lifelong seeker:

           What kind of woman goes searching and searching?

           Among the furrows of dark April, along the sea-beach,

           in the faces of children, in what they could not tell;

           in the pages of centuries—

           for what man? for what magic?

           In corridors under the earth, in castles of the North,

           among the blackened miners, among the old

           I have gone searching

           . . .

           finding and finding in glimpses

What she wants, in searching, is

            to discover, to live at the edge of things,

           to fall out of routine into invention

           and recognize at the other edge of ocean

           a new kind of man    a new kind of woman

           walking toward me into the little surf.

           This is the next me   and the next child

           daybreak in continual creation.

           . . .

           And in us our need, the traces of the future,

           the egg and its becoming.

The Sixth Elegy, River Elegy, dated Summer 1940, presents images in which we recognize the  totalitarian forces building momentum in Europe.It is “Hell’s entropy at work and torment general.” But the poet fights the entropy of chaos and despair. It’s the imagination, again, that can light the way. It’s our screaming and broken crying against the waste of human cruelty. It’s the heart’s strong desire which, paradoxically in defeat, is “sure” and “magnificent.”

            Terror, war, terror, black blood and wasted love.

            The most terrible country, in the heads of men.

            This is the war imagination made;

            It must be strong enough to make a peace.

            . . .

            There is no solution. There is no happiness.

            Only the range must be taken, a way be found to use

            The inmost frenzy and the outer doom.

            . . .

                                        Century screaming for

            The flowing, the life, the intellectual leap

            of waters over a world grown old and wild,

            a broken crying for seasonal change until

            O God my love the waste become

            the sure magnificent music of the defeated heart.

In the Seventh Elegy, Dream-Singing Elegy, she can imagine the world achieving transformation through the strong desire and common dream of humankind. “I want” is here imagined as “We want,” as the poem embodies indigenous rituals of dance and singing.

            In the summer, dreaming was common to all of us,

            the drumbeat hope, the bursting heart of wish,

            music to bind us as the visions streamed

            and midnight brightened to belief.

            In the morning we told our dreams.

            They all were the same dream.

The images reach a crescendo of hope – “Brothers in dream. . .beaten and beaten and rising from defeat. . .love and child and brother/living, resisting, and the world one world/dreaming together.”

But before the Hallelujah of the last Elegy — in Joy  — Rukeyser writes the Ninth, The Antagonists, where she is conflicted in herself, “a gallery of lives/fighting within me, and all unreconciled,” mirroring the conflicts in the country: “our ancestors, all antagonists:/ Slave and Conquistador,” “our America of contradictions.” But it is the path we must travel as a nation: “form developing/American out of conflict.”

There is an urge to unity among all our oppositions:

            We are bound by the deepest feuds to unity.

            To make the connections and be born again,

            Create the creative, that will love the world.

            . . .

           Love must imagine the world.

                                               The wish of love

           moving upon the body of love describes

           closing of conflict, repeats the sacred ways

           in which the spirit dances and survives.

           .  .  .

           Today we are bound, for freedom binds us—we

           live out the conflict of our time, until

            Love, finding all the antagonists in the dance,

            moved by its moods and given to its grace,

            resolves the doom

                        And the deliverance.

In “Despisals,” published more than 20 years later, in 1973, Rukeyser again voices her desire for unity, recalling “the gallery of lives/fighting within me” of the Ninth Elegy, but in language much more common and startling:

            In the human cities, never again to

            despise the backside of the city, the ghetto

            . . .

            You are the city

She enumerates the targets of our usual antagonisms, oppositions, and despisals: Jews (“that is, ourselves”), blacks, homosexuals, the clitoris, the useful shit, the asshole. (Where in poetry can be found lines of such plain, raw speech as these?)

“You are this,” she writes.

            Never to despise in myself what I have been taught

            to despise.   Not to despise the other.

            Not to despise the it.     To make this relation

            with the it  :  to know that I am it.

Finally, in the Tenth Elegy, Elegy in Joy, she exults in the vision of reconciliation and peace that she has earned by facing and imagining beyond the horrors she and the world have lived through.

“Now, green now burning, I make a way for peace.” The poet is the maker of this vision. 

Repeating phrases from earlier Elegies, “in the triumph of the reconceived” we can “lie down at last together face to face.”

“Many wishes flaming together” have brought us to this place. But the work is just beginning.

The word of nourishment passes through the women.

            .  .  .

            Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings.

            Not all things are blest, but the

           seeds of all things are blest.

           The blessing is in the seed.

In 1973, in the simple poem “Wherever,” from Breaking Open, she reprises her themes from the Tenth Elegy: the poet, with faith in potential, is maker and seeder of a future of justice and peace.

            Wherever

            we walk

            we will make

            Wherever

            we protest

            we will go planting

            Make poems

            seed grass

            feed a child growing

            Whatever we stand against

            We will stand feeding and seeding

            Wherever

            I walk

            I will make

Chloe Ross, The Natural and the Imposed: The Presence of Barriers in Muriel Rukeyser’s “Waterlily Fire”

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Fire is as much a tool and a representation of rebirth as it is a force of destruction. Water can represent the same, but also a freedom and a fear of the unknown. After all, who really knows what lurks under dark waters? Nothing in Muriel Rukeyser’s poem sequence “Waterlily Fire,” composed over the span of four years beginning in 1958 and published in 1962, exists in singularity, and the complex relationship she creates between fire and water is testament to that. Rukeyser presents her audience with a piece that opposes male artificiality with female nature, addressing the issue of women’s enforced isolation and fractured identities, the conquering of this oppression, and the breaking of natural and imposed barriers throughout the poem.

In “Waterlily Fire,” Rukeyser describes a fire that was at once more than reality and more than metaphor. Rukeyser bore witness to the aftermath of the fire that ravaged the Museum of Modern Art and one of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies paintings (1914-1926). She was meeting with her friend Richard Griffith, curator of the museum’s film library, whom she calls “Dick” in the sequence’s opening section, “The Burning” (CP 406). Beyond this actual event and biographical fact, Rukeyser describes a metamorphosis. The sequence begins with a description of the fire and of a city that the fire is at once destroying and transforming. Change, after all, often comes with a destruction of what preceded it. Rukeyser homes in on the idea of losing youth and being visited by an awakening, which appears to be a sexual one. Water lilies, a symbol of purity, burnt the day Rukeyser witnessed their remnants, and her poems also burned with youth, naivety, and innocence.

The sequence ends with the line, “I speak to you / You speak to me,” which implies a sort of dialogue intended to be created by the poems (410). This dialogue, created by a woman, aligns with Rukeyser’s idea of muses. In “Many Keys,” a “lost” feminist essay she composed in 1957, which has recently been recovered, edited, and published with an introduction by Eric Keenaghan, Rukeyser characterizes women as muses for men rather than being their own muses. The woman “is a listener who answers, traditionally, as Muse, evoker; who answers, sometimes, as artist, and breaks that barrier” but who when writing poetry “does not turn to a muse” (Rukeyser, “Many Keys” 195). Rukeyser breaks tradition and convention by initiating instead of responding, and she suggests that women, through their being their own muses, gain autonomy and the power to put forth their own narratives. When they are simply the muses of men, their very being is oppressed and the truth of who they are is hidden. Rukeyser’s work gives the audience her own truth, a truth riddled with independence, revolution, and desire. In “Waterlily Fire”—more specifically, in the first two sections of the poem— Rukeyser discusses women as their own oppressors and liberators. She expresses this duality through their presence as both fire and water, their isolation as an island but also their ability to build bridges, and their existence as both pure water lilies as well as humans who experience desire and are objects to desire. These are natural, elemental barriers that women can find as much strength in as they can find weakness. The imposed barriers come in the form of guards, which draw out fear instead of strength.

Because this message is based on layers of duality, it seems that the existence of natural barriers implies that all other barriers can only exist in the sense of being unnatural and must be abolished instead of amended. These unnatural, external barriers exist and are addressed in “Many Keys” because the essay expresses the necessity that women have their own voices. Women must integrate themselves into their writings not only because it is what they know but also because they need to take back narratives that have been controlled by external factors for much too long. By creating their own narratives, they remove themselves from false narratives and create the bridges that are described in “Waterlily Fire.” In the second poem of the sequence, “The Island,” Rukeyser evolves from “I was the island with no bridges” to “I am a city with bridges and tunnels” (406). Rukeyser makes the fracturing of women’s identities apparent by showing how they are fractured within themselves as well as by outside forces that inflict limitations and rules upon them. But through this device, Rukeyser also makes clear that the mending of their identities through the formation of connections with others is a natural thing.

These connections do not imply one shared identity, though. Women may fight together against a shared oppression, but every woman has the individual struggle of accepting and becoming herself. In one stanza, Rukeyser moves from the idea of the acceptance of oneself to a description of “blossoms like sex pink, dense pink, rose, pink, red” (407). Before the poem ends, this image transforms into “Lilies of all my life on fire” (408). Becoming whole means realizing one’s humanity, and humans have desires. If we are to have a discussion of the societal fracturing of women’s identities, it would be an injustice to ignore the over-sexualization of women and the stigmatization of overtly sexual women. The poem mends this fracture by presenting the purity and the sexuality of women as natural, both essential to who a woman is. Once this fact is accepted, as Rukeyser writes, “I walk past the guards into my city of change” (408). Rukeyser walks past imposed internal barriers and external oppressors at once, becoming a woman who is capable of owning her own identity and building bridges.

These guards featured in the last line of “The Island” are the physical manifestations of the unnatural entities in the first two poems. In the sequence’s opening poem, “The Burning,” Rukeyser writes, “I pass guards, finding the center of my fear” (406). The guards, as mentioned above, are then present in the line that ends the second section, “I walk past the guards into my city of change” (408). They stand out in the poem, breaking away from natural things (i.e., fire, water, earth, human desire) and presenting the audience with what is presumably only a few men. These men only pose a threat if the people walking by them fear them. This fear is not a natural, automatic fear, but instead one that is taught. Guards police what a person does, ensuring that consequences are enforced for stepping outside of boundaries. This strictness, this fear, is something that is created and something that is oppressive, and Rukeyser shows a woman breaking the expected pattern of complacency, instead fighting to reinstate the natural as ruling. Another thing to note is how Rukeyser’s presentation of the imposed barrier implies that the guards are men, even though their gender has not been explicitly stated.

If the male imposition of control and barriers is unnatural, then the womanly show of power is elemental. Men, the guards, can create a limited amount of fear when they are given a woman’s permission to do so, but what can a woman create? What can she destroy? The second line of “The Burning” begins, “I go to the stone street turning to fire” (405). In the first line of “The Island,” the narrator claims she was “Born of this river and this rock island” (406). This contrast of fire and water shows the natural strength of women, and it also shows women as contradictory forces of nature who can oppress themselves. Both quotes mention an origin of a stone or rock, thus showing something stable that the strength is rooted in; but one passage shows a beginning of water and the latter shows a turning point of fire. Rock can withstand both fire and water, so women’s core is protected, but their two natures are at constant odds with each other. Fire and water are opposites. A woman’s identity is fractured because she will always be at risk of putting out her own fire. However, there is also a strength that can be found in the ability to nurture opposing forces within oneself. The guards had their own perceived strength, but this woman has the potential for both destruction and liberation. Beyond herself, her water and her fire can be used not only to oppose other women but also to create a collective identity: Fire may put out water, but the fires of two women combined is much stronger than the fire of one alone. It also seems curious that Rukeyser allows women to reclaim fire, as it has been known in history as an oppressive force that afflicts women, be it the seventeenth-century Salem witch trials or the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911. The presentation of a fractured woman also opens the avenue to a stronger collective identity.

Stephanie Coontz shows another side of the importance of solidarity between women in “Demystifying the Feminine Mystique,” a chapter of her book A Strange Stirring. She shows Betty Friedan, a woman quite often credited with spurring second wave feminism with her classic book The Feminist Mystique (1963), as a woman who strategically isolated herself from other women, thus fracturing her own beliefs in order to focus purely on the white middle class. This was apparent through her distancing herself from the French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, acknowledging her only through a “brief reference” that “minimized the tremendous debt Friedan and her book owed” to Beauvoir (Coontz 143). This was because Simone de Beauvoir’s political beliefs and her belief in intersectional equality did not align with the objectives of Friedan’s intended audience. Instead of building bridges, Friedan found it necessary to burn them. This example truly emblematizes Rukeyser’s ideas of the isolation and fractured identities that affected women because it shows that Friedan distanced herself from what the audience she was appealing to would find undesirable, hence the isolation. It also shows her breaking away from part of what she based her entire feminist theory on, thus showing a fracturing within herself as well as between other women.

Friedan created a collective identity, but an exclusive one. She had the privilege to be truly selective when building her bridges, as she existed within the realm of majority as a middle-class white woman, and thus brought to life Rukeyser’s idea of a woman as an island. Though this brings to light the isolation Rukeyser spoke of in her poem, it also brings into question the inclusivity of Rukeyser’s metaphors: Who exactly had the power in “Waterlily Fire”? Friedan built bridges, but selectively and strategically, as both a show of strength and weakness. Her strength is found through exclusion and the bridges she did create are as limiting as they are liberating.

Beyond the necessity of the fracturing, Coontz’s observation about Friedan shows how women are pitted against each other. If this state coincides with the need of patriarchal societies, does it mean that this fracturing is unnatural and imposed? Socially imposed identity-based boundaries are meant to create a collective identity, yet they create an intersectionality that actually pits women against each other. Women are islands and they are not taught to build bridges, hence their isolation from each other. This exemplifies the confusion of the natural and the unnatural Rukeyser’s islands reference in her poetic sequence. Women are either islands and isolated, discovering their own strength through making connections and building bridges, or they find their strength through prescribing to what is normal, each finding strength in a man as opposed to the poem’s vision of the elemental strength a woman is able to tap into.

Fighting imposed barriers means creating a collective identity despite the isolation that is often expected of women. Rukeyser, in her essay “Many Keys,” mentions how isolation and fracturing of identities occurs when women are expected to be muses. Coontz, in “Demystifying the Feminine Mystique,” describes a purposeful and strategic fracturing and isolation because Friedan, for her book to be popular, could only show a part of who she was. In Rukeyser’s poem, the physical barriers, apart from the guards, and isolation come from how she presents women as islands. As I noted earlier, one stanza from “Waterlily Fire” suggests the liberation of making connections, but what of the oppression women were liberated from? After Rukeyser finds such liberation, one later line in the section “The Island” asserts, “Whatever can come to a city can come to this city” (“Waterlily Fire” 407). The poem goes on to compare the city to a man, going from “changing like a man changing” to “I love this man” (407). This movement raises questions about the root of the narrator’s freedom and how free she actually is. After all, is the city not her? Is it not her island? Because if her freedom stems from manliness as opposed to a liberation of women, she has not been freed at all. Her identity is not mended, her isolation from her own identity is still more than present.

Rukeyser, within both her poem and her essay, exemplifies the power of autonomy. To have the ability to embrace and express oneself is to have the ability to exist complexly, as both fire and water, as both author and muse, and to overcome the static barriers that stand in the way of improvement. Beyond that, she also emphasizes the importance of connections. By writing, women connect with their audiences and establish credibility with them. By building bridges as Rukeyser does in “Waterlily Fire,” women are not only able to overcome their own isolation but also to guard against those who are able to infringe upon their land. Having only a bridge to connect to others, after all, means you have great power over who is able to enter your island.

Even the title of the sequence “Waterlily Fire” puts emphasis on the paradoxical nature of what can be described as either the weakness or the strength found within a woman and within womanhood. Though describing a literal fire, the title also leads to a presentation of water and fire, two things that naturally oppose each other but in combination represent women in the poem. If a woman is both water and fire, then she has not only the capability to be her own oppressor but also the capability to be both the oppressor and the liberator of other women. This is simply because, within herself, she would only have two opposite forces that work against each other. In conjunction with another woman, fire or water can be made twice as powerful.

All of this combines to create the shared but fractured identity of a woman. She is taught to be the victim but forced to be her own liberator. She is fire, water, island, bridges, isolated, connected. The elemental is not just natural but also tied to human nature. Rukeyser presents women as sexual beings, as beings who crave and find intimacy and connections. They are fire, destructive and full of desire, and water, salvific and fluid. They are complex beings with a depth that is hidden behind external impositions and identities that fracture under the pressure of societal expectations. When stripped to the barest of meaning, these texts by Rukeyser and Coontz point to how women can be anything, and they most certainly can be more than just muses or complacent figures. Sometimes, this requires concessions like the ones that Friedan had to make. Sometimes, it is difficult to break past the imposed barriers and even harder to break past the natural ones and learn to control the fire and water within oneself. Women’s identities are fractured and isolated by society, and it takes a tremendous amount of strength to fight that.

Rukeyser, in “Waterlily Fire,” starts a conversation that prompts a response in the line that she uses to end this sequence: “I speak to you / you speak to me” (410). The conversation that Rukeyser started is still a conversation today. The fracturing and isolation have changed form, as it did when Friedan found a limited amount of strength in them, but that condition is still present and often ignored. The often-toxic dichotomy between the sexes is treated as though it is natural, but Rukeyser shows this conflict in a different light. She shows it as an unnatural, imposed state that can always be beaten out by what is natural, what is elemental, because nature will always overtake the limitations imposed on women by men. The presence of some natural barriers implies that all others are unnatural, and unnaturalness tends to have the connotation of bad. A woman’s identity is often portrayed not only by how she presents herself but also by how other people perceive her. This fact is seen in the media today, as women are often automatically deemed the liar in any situation where they make accusations against men. Ultimately, in her poem “Waterlily Fire,” Rukeyser moves beyond what can be seen in her essay “Many Keys” and in Coontz’s “Demystifying the Feminine Mystique” by creating a world where a woman’s strength can be derived from more than divisiveness and by creating the start of a conversation that is hopeful for more than a metaphorical liberation.

Works Cited

Coontz, Stephanie. “Demystifying the Feminine Mystique.” A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. Basic Books, 2011, pp. 139-65.

Keenaghan, Eric. “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 Online DOI:10.1080/24692921.2017.1368883.

Rukeyser, Muriel. “Many Keys,” edited by Eric Keenaghan. Feminist Modernist Studies, vol. 1, nos. 1-2, 2018, pp. 186-204, Taylor and Francis Online, doi:10.1080/24692921.2017.1368883.

Rukeyser, Muriel. “Waterlily Fire.” 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. 405-10.


Chloe Ross has recently graduated from the University at Albany, SUNY, with majors in English and History and a minor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

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

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“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.