Essays

In “Dream Drumming,” an interview with Pearl London from February 22, 1978, Muriel Rukeyser responds to the “processes of craft,” providing a provocative and telling explanation of what she felt was the most important aspect of poetry writing:

It’s very hard to talk about the rewriting that goes into [poems] because the major rewriting is likely to be in the matter of sound, the sound that is deep in the structure, almost a crystalline structure of sound in the poem. (28-29)

Sound is both pronounced and buried in Rukeyser’s poetry, initiating multiple conversations yet begging to be revealed. When reading Rukeyser, you somehow experience sound as if she is reading aloud to you even though you are reading to yourself, or hearing your own voice accept vibrations and tones. We encounter sound in three ways: the physical sensation of sound rising from air pressure and the vocal folds; the recognition of sound by sight when observing the contextual nature of words on the page through consonance and assonance; and the auricular—what is heard by the listener. However, I find something magical in Rukeyser’s transmission of sound whether hearing or reading aloud or to the self. In this essay I attempt to examine, as a reader, the provocative soundscape in two “Songs” by Muriel Rukeyser.

What is song? We understand song as a vocal music with or without accompaniment that our senses engage or disengage; song is a structure with rhythm, melody, dynamics and other elements promoting a call to performance: we listen, move, sing along (OED). We communicate; we use song to attract or entice. Sometimes “Song” is a poem by Muriel Rukeyser that crescendos and decrescendos not only in dynamics, but in the emotional and sexual rise and fall of the self, or the other.

In Beast in View (1944), “Song” is a gorgeous, intimate short poem of two ballad quatrains (abcb). Rukeyser’s use of the ballad quatrain does not necessarily follow its distinct four-stress and three stress lines, but does suggest and allude to the classic anonymity in narrative song (“Ballad”). Rukeyser’s opening line masterfully combines voiceless fricatives, sibilants, plosives, and liquids to create a sound texture that is at once sensual and otherworldly while conveying a soft emotional rumble:

The world is full of loss; bring, wind, my love

Let us examine these sounds more closely:

|Th|e wor|l|d is |f|u|ll| o|f| |l|o|ss|; |b|ring, wind, my |l| o |v| e,

The articulation of sound in the first line, and throughout the poem, conveys the soft, light movement of a lover’s hand surfacing the back while also creating a place; a structure that calls the receiver of the hand to attention. The narrator and her lover share a smooth flowing sound structure, a horizontal place; it is both concave and convex following the serpentine features of the feminine form. Although the sound image does not repeat in line two, stanza one, the iambic pentameter creates the rise and fall of the horizontal serpentine image while adding a textured rhythm. These figures lie together, facing the same direction. The narrator seems to be thinking, sharing these sounds and words telepathically: I want you to know. And with a delicate beauty Rukeyser imparts knowledge through physical contact; the lover’s hand is the “home… our meeting place, / And love whatever I shall touch and read / Within that face” (lines 2-4). In the third line Rukeyser employs “touch,” which ends with the digraph |ch|, a soft yet ear-catching ligature that blends with the conjunction “and” to connect our ear to the harder “read.”

The long-vowel sound, |ea| appearing at the end of the line creates a slight disruption or crescendo that quickly falls to a piano forte with “face.” This last combination of notes at the end of stanza one begins with the soft |f| followed by strong |a| and the sibilant |c|. Like any fine composer, Rukeyser orchestrates and conducts sound to distill the emotional impact of language. “Song” is a quiet yet sexually charged arrangement. Another song is of similar theme, but Rukeyser’s stanzaic structure and sound field transmits a different level of energy.

This second Rukeyser song is also a short, performative composition written twenty-two years later in her collection The Speed of Darkness (1968). “Song: Love in Whose Rich Honor” is a single fifteen-line stanza with extensions of interstitial end-space that supports the suggestively erratic nature of sound:

Love
in whose rich honor
I stand looking from my window
over the starved trees of a dry September
Love
deep and so far forbidden (lines 1-6)

If we look carefully at the first six lines, we see “Love” refrained and each note followed by a vast space or silence, forcing the reader and listener to pause or breathe at length, sustaining the plosive and fricative tones. The breath moves slowly to the second line which encapsulates a dedication to attention: “in whose rich honor / I stand.” Here, Rukeyser’s terms and force of “I” bring us to a vertical reach as the narrator’s eyes search from the “window / over the starved trees of a dry September.” If the narrator can see over the trees, she is standing above them, looking out from a high floor, perhaps lamenting the change of season—a season of the natural world and the sexual. The trees are “starved” because the leaves have fallen, there is no sun; the trees cannot produce glucose through the process of photosynthesis therefore sweetness has come to an end. Instead, love is “deep and so far forbidden.” Although line 6 suggests lamentation, Rukeyser moves away from the soft vowels of the first five lines to a strong long “ee” and much like in “Song” from Beast in View, she employs the conjunction “and” to connect the “ee” sound to the sibilant |s| and long |o|. The alliterative fricative softens and the line ends in pianissimo. The line, of course, does not end there. She begins line 7 with “is,” returning to sibilance “bringing me / a gift.” This song also acts, or brings, and instead of love refrained once more, the “gift” refrains as love is the gift “longed for so long.” The liquids in |l| onged and |l| ong with sibilant |s| in between is a deeply felt sexual arousal denoted by both sound and meaning. Longing is not just the heart and love, but a sexual yearning that is “forbidden” or perceived to be inaccessible. Rukeyser’s poem is deceivingly inaccessible as she carries out her composition with awkward and potentially intense rhythms and breaks. However, the upward and downward tiering of lines provokes like a musical scale and forces the instrumentalist to move from low to high and back again.

Rukeyser’s musical phrasing varies in length, but instead of the short lines pushing onto the next, the end-space gives the reader and speaker time to breath, accept, enjoy as the sexual energy emitted becomes animalistic: “a gift / to claw at my skin / to break open my eyes / the gift longed for so long.” Rukeyser moves away from a physical stirring to the onset of needing pleasure which translates into a “desperate ecstasy at last / death and madness.” The final two lines, I think, even more provocative than the narrator’s need for physical touch, are at once the highest point of the arrangement. The sibilance in “desperate ecstasy at last” is a hissing cry which quickly plummets to “death and madness.” The last line is the final orgasmic thrust–Rukeyser very quickly shifts from |s| to the plosive |d| to fricative |th| to the final hiss. In brevity, like a short instrumental movement, the poem ends with a final chord.

In my return to Pearl London’s 1978 interview with Rukeyser, the poet states,

I have, in my greed, … wanted modulation of sound changing, climbing as I think of it. On the page it’s going down the page, but somehow as one hears the poem, it’s climbing up and up until one reaches a kind of tonic sound, which is the last word in the poem for me. (29)

In Rukeyser’s “Song” and “Song: Love in Whose Rich Honor,” we see and hear the rich soundscape, the musical lines, and experience the fall and return of emotional and sexual longing. In Rukeyser’s words, “we take the imaginative experience through the eyes with a shadow of sound; if we hear it, we take it through the ears with a shadow of sight” (Life of Poetry, 29). Her use of sound–sibilance, consonance, assonance in both image and texture–in these two short compositions provocate with an honest, frank abandon leaving the reader and listener with a longing of her own; a last word for poet, reader, listener.

Works Cited

“Ballad.” Glossary of Poetic Terms. Poetry Foundation. Web.<https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/ballad> Accessed 14 Nov. 2017.

London, Pearl. “Dream Drumming.” Poetry in Person: Twenty-five Years of Conversation with America’s Poets, ed. By Alexander Neubauer. New York: Knopf, 2011.

Rukeyser, Muriel. “Song.” The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, ed. by Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog, Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2005, p. 215.

—–. “Song: Love in whose rich honor.” The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, ed. by Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog, Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2005, p. 422.

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

“song, n.1.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2017, www.oed.com/view/Entry/184578. Accessed 14 November 2017.

May 29, 1909: “Betzabel” (later Charles) Naginski is born in Cairo, Egypt, where there is a substantial community of East European Jewish immigrants who benefit from the comparative liberality of the Sultan’s regime. His parents, Abraham and Nahema Naginsky, speak Yiddish at home. As a child, Betzabel studies piano with his father and begins composing at an early age.

1925: Abraham and Nahema Naginsky emigrate to the U. S. with their children, but Betzabel remains in Egypt, perhaps to finish his education.

March 30, 1927: “Betzabel Naginsky,” age seventeen, “an artist,” emigrates to New York City from Alexandria, Egypt. He travels alone on the ship Roma, enters the U. S. at Providence, Rhode Island, before joining his parents and four siblings at 1242 Intervale Avenue in the Bronx.

1928: As Charles Naginski, “Betzabel” wins a fellowship to the Juilliard Graduate School. In coming years he impresses influential members of the modernist music community such as Rubin Goldmark and Roger Sessions.

1930: Census records describe the Naginsky family as living in the Bronx. “Abram” Naginsky’s occupation is listed as musician.

1933: Charles Naginsky completes his studies at Juilliard where, at the suggestion of the Dean, a fellow student, the vocalist George Newton, helps him with English grammar. In exchange, Naginsky accompanies Newton on the piano. Newton, a Princeton graduate, remembers Naginski as a “nice fellow” who came to a tragic end.

March 15, 1934: Charles Naginsky successfully petitions the court for citizenship. His race is listed as Hebrew. He signs the document as “Betzalel Naginsky.” His witnesses are Ruth Bluestone, a dancer, and Nathan Gold, a musician. He is living at 1061 Simpson Street in the Bronx and is unmarried. He attests to his loyalty to the U. S. Government and disavows any possible claim on his allegiance by the State of Russia or the Republic of Poland or His Majesty King Fuad of Egypt.

1936: Charles Naginski declines an invitation to Yaddo. In a letter to director Elizabeth Ames, he explains that he is the only one at home just then who can earn a living and that his younger sister has lost her WPA job. After hours, he works on a Sinfonetta commissioned by the League of Composers. From June 10 through August 5, he is composing at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

1937: Lincoln Kirstein commissions Charles Naginski to write The Minotaur for the American Ballet Caravan, a New England touring company. Naginski begins composing The Minotaur in late December and hopes that if all goes well it will be produced in April.

1938: On February 14, the openly gay composer David Diamond urges Naginski not to give in to resentment and depression. Diamond urges on him the solidarity of loneliness, explaining, “We are, you know, a Miss Lonelyhearts Club.” On May 19, the Columbia Broadcasting Company airs part of The Minotaur and on May 20, the New York Times announces Naginski as the winner of the prestigious Prix de Rome, a two-year fellowship with an annual stipend of $1400, plus free residence and studio and the opportunity to meet the foremost composers of Europe (see photo ). The jury consists of Rogers Sessions, Aaron Copland, Eric De Lamarter, and Philip James. In the summer, Naginski accepts an invitation to Yaddo, where he drinks too much and is desperately lonely (see photo). On September 15, he writes to Eleanor Clark, “Yaddo seems like a vast cemetery with a few mourners left behind.” His Rome fellowship begins on October 1, but he remains in the U. S. as long as possible because of Clark.

October 1938: Eleanor Clark breaks off their affair. He also receives a letter from composer Hunter Johnson warning him that the director of the Academy in Rome is a fascist and incompetent to boot. In response, Naginski describes himself as crushed.

January 1939: Naginski is in Rome when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax have a historic meeting with Mussolini. In a letter to Clark, Naginski describes himself as unconcerned but mentions not having heard from Muriel Rukeyser about their Houdini ballet. He worries that she may have lost interest in the project.

May 30, 1939: Rukeyser writes to Elizabeth Ames from Chicago on Coronet Magazine letterhead. She explains that she is in Chicago temporarily and mentions the Houdini ballet she is doing with Charles, which has a chance of being produced at Radio City Music Hall, she says. Naginski “sounds sad” but is probably hard at his work.

June 1939: While Italy tightens its laws against Jews, Naginski is in France, where he lives outside of Paris and on the Côte d’Azur, supported by the American Academy. Although he believes that the arts should have nothing to do with politics, he is disgusted with the “stinking” political situation.

July 2, 1939: In a letter to Clark, Naginski says he played the music to one of Muriel’s poems over and over the other day and was very moved by it but hasn’t had a word from her. He worries about his poor mother and the gang at home, says he can’t afford Eleanor’s expensive tastes, and wonders if she is coming to Paris to be with him.

1940: In January, he writes to Clark on an envelope postmarked Garrison, New York. He was hoping to have a drink with her in the city but she stood him up. In Garrison, he completes the music for “Boy with his Hair Cut Short.” His father, “Abram” Naginsky, is listed on the 1940 census as “on relief.”

Summer, 1940: At Tanglewood, Naginski studies with Paul Hindemith, who is known as a harsh taskmaster. On August 4, discouraged about his career and his personal life, Naginski drowns in the Housatonic River (Stockbridge Bowl). On August 6, he is buried from Park West Chapel in New York City.

1944: In February, Rukeyser submits the manuscript of Beast in View to Doubleday, Doran and departs for California. She dedicates “The Minotaur” to Naginski.

1958: Rukeyser publishes “Exile of Music” in Body of Waking and dedicates it to Naginski.

July 1973: Houdini: A Musical is produced by the Lenox Arts Center, with music by David Sheridan Spangler, who does not list it on his current CV. It receives a mixed review in The New York Times and closes after several performances. The reviewer claims that it is pointed and forceful in the first act, aimless and weak in the second.

2004: Houdini: A Musical is published by Paris Press. In the “Introduction,” Jan Freeman states that Rukeyser wrote it over decades but does not mention Naginski.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Diamond, David. Letter to Charles Naginski. In Letters of Composers: An Anthology, 1603-1945, 413-14. Edited by Gertrude Norman and Miriam Lubell Shrifte. New York: Knopf, 1946.

Hughes, Allen. “Stage: ‘Houdini’ in Lenox.” The New York Times, July 7, 1973, 10.

“Deep in his labyrinth, shaking and going mad,” Rukeyser’s Minotaur stands in a maze, a “crooked city” (Collected Poems) whose apparent order masks a subterranean sphere of madness. We are brought into and through, again and again, the dead-ends and never-ending walls of confinement and isolation. By invoking the imagery of seclusion and despair, Rukeyser may well be directing us towards the ways that ideological systems impose order on madness, trapping citizens into a Minotaur-like existence. In “Letter to the Front,” Rukeyser notes that being Jewish in the twentieth century may involve “Full agonies: / Your evening deep in the labyrinthine blood” (CP) and speaks of “the maze / Of compromise and grief” (CP) of war torn cities. These labyrinthine images highlight the irrationality that underlies totalitarian attempts at order and control. Rukeyser knew well the power of images to represent and challenge political forces. From 1942-43, she was a specialist in the Office of War and Information (OWI), helping to create posters for the allied cause. Though ultimately becoming disillusioned when the OWI seemed to her more interested in advertising than testing the images of war (Gander 33-34), her involvement reveals an appreciation for undermining power through both poetic and artistic imagery.

The historical setting of the Second World War situates my reading of the poem, showing how “The Minotaur” critiques Nazi architectural ideals and their ideological sentiments. In the poem, cities become maze-like sites of suffering and oppression, confining spaces where ghettos separate populations and bring about a condition of bare life. The Minotaur remains “deep in his labyrinth, shaking and going mad,” confined to a network of walls that allows no sheltered home and no rest for the “raving” beast. Writing about the architectural philosophy of the Third Reich, Johann Chapoutot notes, “[W]hat was truly specific to Nazi architecture was its crushing monumentality, which aimed to herd the people and overwhelm or stun the subjected masses,” thus disappearing the individual into “the greater whole of an organic totalitarian entity” (261). The Minotaur’s individualism becomes trapped within the labyrinthine walls. We are invited to find him in his maze, yet we must be “led circuitously about, / Calling to him and close and, losing the subtle thread, / Lose him again.” Our own exploration of his lair turns us into Minotaur-like figures, moving in circles, trapped by the walls of loneliness. In this regard, we can see how the apparent order of a city of walls becomes “crooked” and “roundabout,” entrapping all who enter and herding the masses down blind alleys, feeling “trapped, blinded, led.” We are drawn to the Minotaur; we want to find him, relieve his suffering, understand his pain, remove his loneliness and make him whole. This sympathetic impulse eradicates a herd mentality by seeing in the figure of the deformed creature a neighbor or friend, a glimpse of humanity deformed by the ugliness of violent ideology, a heart that is “lost, lost, trapped, blinded and led,” but still beating.

Bibliography

Chapoutot, Johann. Greeks, Romans, Germans: How the Nazis Usurped Europe’s Classical Past. Translated by Richard R. Nybakken. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016.

Gander, Catherine. Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013.

Rukeyser, Muriel. Beast in View. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1944.

In the fall of 2016, the same semester that Washington University hosted a presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, I began teaching a fifteen-person seminar organized around the theme “American Women Poets and the Trouble with Normal.” There was a lot of energy and excitement on campus, and Chancellor Wrighton sent an e-mail to the Wash U community urging us to remember “our shared values of mutual respect, inclusion and the celebration of differing perspectives.” In what may have been an excess of caution, I felt reluctant to express my views about the candidates to students, having been sensitized to this issue by members of my own family. But I wondered how the poets on my syllabus would have responded. I imagined Dickinson keeping her rebellious thoughts to herself; Marianne Moore handing out leaflets; Elizabeth Bishop having another drink and writing funny letters to her friends; Sylvia Plath indignant in her journal. Then there was Muriel Rukeyser: would she have decided that it was about time to drop out of college before she exploded?

Although “Effort at Speech between Two People” might have seemed the more obvious choice (it was published when Rukeyser was a precocious twenty-one), on the first day of class I handed out “The Minotaur” (published when Rukeyser was thirty) which, to my taste, is a more complex study of the trouble with normal. In any event, during the hour in which we parsed rhymes and admired the poet’s craft, it emerged that students were curious about the minotaur myth and I proposed to the graduate students in the class (there were five of them) that we both attend to the myth and engage in a historicizing project. Several weeks later, we had a meeting at my house and worked out a plan to write short essays by the end of the semester. We shared copies of Beast in View in which “Minotaur” was published in 1944. Although Eric Keenaghan alerted me to the fact that “Minotaur” is listed on the title page of the second lecture Rukeyser gave at Vassar in the fall of 1940, I tried unsuccessfully to locate an earlier publication in the journals listed in the acknowledgments to the published book such as Decision, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Life and Letters To-Day, and so on. I also conducted a general search that proved equally fruitless.¹ We proceeded, then, on the assumption that “Minotaur” was first published in Beast in 1944. We had a few more meetings (including a pizza party) before the students turned in their essays in December. I sent comments, and there were revisions.

Summing up our collective theme, Ana Quiring wrote, “While ‘The Minotaur’ centers itself on the epic and timeless, Rukeyser’s poem also bears meaning in a grounded historical setting. Its publication in Beast in View in 1944 places it in the context of war, and especially the fraught identity politics of World War II.” She suggested that “what the poem ‘stands for’ may be as multifarious as Rukeyser’s identity itself” and urged us to consider the poem’s special attention to “formulations of masculinity gone haywire.” Lisa Brune, too, was interested in emasculation and pointed to Ariadne’s association with “the thread, the clews of blood,” while Adeline Bauder saw the figure of the Minotaur as representing both antisemitism and the supposed animality of Jews in Nazi propaganda. Timothy DeCelle related the labyrinth to Nazi ideology and architecture and to racialized madness, explaining that “What appears as clarity is confusion.” Tim explained that “Rukeyser knew well the power of images to represent and challenge political forces” (see his revised essay ). Alexandra Swanson offered a reading of “The Minotaur” as a dramatic monologue spoken by Ariadne or as a political allegory in which Ariadne is the wife of a traumatized soldier. Alex became fascinated by the composer Charles Naginski, who is described in The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser as a friend whom Rukeyser may have met at the Yaddo Writer’s Colony (612n) and as “a classical composer with whom Rukeyser was friendly” (628n). The editors state that Naginski is “mentioned” in “The Minotaur” and the class was aware that Rukeyser dedicated “Minotaur” to him. To my delight, Alex enlisted the music division of the New York Public Library in her quest for information, which sent the score of Naginski’s Minotaur ballet. She and I began to construct a Naginski timeline, and once the semester ended I was able to visit the New York Public to examine unpublished archival sources. I also contacted the Beinecke Library at Yale which sent me scans of Naginski’s letters to Eleanor Clark, with whom he was head over heels in love.²

Rukeyser’s note to “The Minotaur” reads “To Charles Naginski who shortly before his death wrote the music for a ballet of the same name” (Beast in View 98). His memory seems to have haunted her, for in 1958 she dedicated “Exile of Music” to him as well, with a note reading simply “For Naginski.” She spares us the knowledge that Naginski died in August 1940 under tragic circumstances at age thirty-one, and of course her Minotaur is represented as immortal, although the figure in her “Exile of Music” sinks to a watery grave. Naginski lovers will be pleased to learn that

In the last bus last night that dead musician

Rode, I saw him riding, all his orchestras

Lost past belief and under Egypt plowed

By rusty knives, the noise-machines of grief.

 

Thunder of the senses died,

Stabbed in their singing by a sleepwalker.

You were the man in whose voices the green leaf

Of form was singing, the bird riding the cloud.

 

Minotaur underwater in the cedar lake,

Naginski, you are your own exile of music.

There were three roads going through that whole land:

The bird’s, the bed’s, or suicide.

 

He meant to drown his self. He drowned his life.

Silence lay down fanatically straight.

I am your exile, he sang from his dead mouth,

From the water-maze reaching out his hand and one green leaf.

“Fanatically straight”: is Rukeyser hinting to those in the know that Naginski was tormented by what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick defines as “homosexual panic”? Or, as seems more likely, is it silence that is fanatically straight, in which case Naginski becomes a queer victim of the homo/hetero divide. In any event, his friend Muriel was determined to keep his memory green and as it turns out, they were planning to collaborate on a ballet about the great escape artist Houdini, who is the antithesis of a minotaur, “trapped, blinded, led. Deserted at the middle of the maze.” In several archives, I found four references to this projected work.

On October 8, 1938, Naginski wrote to Elizabeth Ames, the director at Yaddo, “I saw Muriel Rukeyser–she has this idea of a ballet which I will work on–[Lincoln] Kirstein wants me to do another work for him.”³

On January 13, 1939, Naginski, recently arrived in Rome, wrote to Eleanor Clark: “Things with Muriel aren’t so bright. I haven’t had a word from her. I set one of her poems to music and it is very beautiful.”

On July 2, 1939, Naginski wrote Clark from Cap Martin, France, saying words to the effect that Muriel isn’t at all sure about doing the Houdini with him because of her fear that the music might overpower the dance. The letter is in French.

On May 30, 1939, Rukeyser wrote Elizabeth Ames, “The Houdini ballet, that I had been doing with Charles, has a chance of being produced at Radio City. You’ve probably been hearing from him from Paris. He sounds sad, but I suppose he is hard at his work.” Rukeyser was temporarily in Chicago working for Coronet Magazine.

“Exile of Music” offers three roads, or life choices, “the bird’s, the bed’s, or the suicide’s.” The bird, I take it, is a solitary lyricist, or lyric composer, and Naginski felt a strong affinity with poets. In addition to setting several Rukeyser poems to music, he worked with lyrics by Whitman, Dickinson, Edward Arlington Robinson, Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, Sara Teasdale, T. S. Eliot, and Blake, among others.⁴ The bed, I assume, is erotic love. In 1938, Naginski was conducting a torrid affair with Clark until mid-October, when she called it quits (this includes the time when Rukeyser and Naginski were both guests at Yaddo). Naginski tried to suppress his bitterness, but in a dramatic series of letters to her written from France in 1939 he describes himself as a beast, a potential murderer, and a madman, and I speculate that Clark’s failure to reciprocate his passion plunged him into the depths, although there were of course other elements at play in the tragic web of circumstances closing around him. In January 1939, for example, he comments that Chamberlain has just arrived in Italy to see Mussolini and, in a later letter, suggests that art should have nothing to do with politics, that it should function as a self-enclosed system. When he returned to the U. S. in the fall of 1940, he saw Eleanor again, and again she disappointed him. In a touching moment earlier on, he explains that he speaks through his music and can’t express himself adequately in words, yet, he claims, and I believe him, he has the soul of a poet. Naginski’s style is eloquent in both English and French. Most of his letters to Eleanor are in English, but French is his native language, the language he knew in Egypt when he was a boy. Reading his letters to Clark and to Ames, I came to admire him and his struggle to control the temper he describes to his ex-girl friend and the “nerves” he describes to Ames. Reading his correspondence with Clark and Ames, I felt that I would have enjoyed his company, even if, as he explained to Clark, he had a tendency at Yaddo and elsewhere to indulge a “monstrously selfish” heart.

Perhaps that’s a good place to leave it. With a charismatic composer, exiled from the world he deserved to inhabit, and a man of many parts who recognizes his own inadequacy. In that recognition, he differentiates himself sharply from Rukeyser’s minotaur, who does not have Naginski’s three choices–the bird, the bed, or the suicide. In a weak moment, Naginski chose the latter, but in both “The Minotaur” and “Exile of Music,” Rukeyser permits him to reclaim his humanity.⁵

NOTES

1. Eric Keenaghan e-mail to the author, January 12, 2017. “Minotaur” and “Leg in a Plaster Cast” are listed on the title page of the second Vassar lecture (“The Speed of the Image”). Kenneghan notes that Rukeyser dated very little of her work. There is a typescript of “The Minotaur” at the Berg Collection with several edits in ink by Rukeyser but no date. Thanks to Joshua McKeon, the librarian at the Berg who helped with this and other matters.
2. Clark was a 1934 Vassar graduate, a short story writer and aspiring novelist who worried about Rukeyser’s unpredictable comings and goings, her difficult relationship with her parents, and her health. In 1949, she applauded Rukeyser’s decision to have a child and remained affectionate toward her “darling Muriel” even if she no longer needed her “to touch.” Writing to the twenty-year old Vassar dropout in the spring of 1934, while her fast-off-the-mark friend was at Yaddo for the first time, the soon-to-be-graduated Clark complained about her unsatisfactory love life at Vassar, commenting, “There is no one here to touch except the faculty and they are cautious.” When Naginski began writing to Clark in 1937, she was in a sham marriage to Trotsky’s secretary Jan Frankel, a Jewish refugee from Czechoslovakia whom she met in Mexico. According to Mary McCarthy, Clark married to help Frankel immigrate to the U. S. (Intellectual Memoirs 74). For more on Clark, see Vassar Encyclopedia. In conversation, poet Mary Jo Bang suggested to me that Naginski was probably bisexual and looking to Clark to rescue him from the anxieties of a closeted gay life. Before reading his letters to Clark, I had assumed that he was primarily homosexual but have been unable to document that intuition. For more on elite American modernist musicians and gay male culture, see Hubbs.
3. Kirstein was the director of the American Ballet Caravan, a small touring company founded in 1937 to feature distinctively “American” works. See Duberman, chap. 16.
4. For a list of Naginski’s art songs, see “Guide to the Charles Naginski Collection.”
5. On Rukeyser’s “Minotaur” as exemplary, see Phillips, “I called the Minotaur an outsider before, but another way to see him is as the most truthful representation of human beings” (105).

Works Cited

Bauder, Adeline. “On(e) Beast in View: Antisemitism in Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Minotaur.'”

Brune, Lisa. “The Mythology of Betrayal in Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Minotaur.'”

DeCelle, Timothy. “Becoming Visible: Witnessing Ideology in Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Minotaur.'”

Duberman, Martin. The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein. New York: Knopf, 2007.

“Eleanor Clark.” Vassar Encyclopedia. [http://vcencyclopedia.vassar.edu/alumni/eleanor-clark.html ]

“Guide to the Charles Naginski Collection.” Archives, Music Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. JPB 85-68.

Hubbs, Nadine. The Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Modernists, American Music, and National Identity. UCAL 2004.

Kaufman, Janet E., and Herzog, Anne F., eds. The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.

McCarthy, Mary. Intellectual Memoirs: New York 1936-1938. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.

Naginski, Charles. “Boy with His Hair Cut Short.” Words by Muriel Rukeyser. Archives, Music Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Folder 2 JPB 00-40.

—–. Letters to Eleanor Clark. Eleanor Clark Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. YCAL MSS 315, Box 31, Folders 431-33.

—–. Letters to Elizabeth Ames. Yaddo Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. MssCol4795.

—–. The Minotaur: Ballet for Orchestra. Archives, Music Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Folder 15. JPB 00-40.

—–. “Seventh Avenue.” Words by Muriel Rukeyser. Archives, Music Division, New York Library for the Performing Arts. Folder 32. JPB 00-40.

Phillips, Carl. The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2014.

Quiring, Ana. “‘Trapped, Blinded, Led’: The Identity Politics of Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘Minotaur.’”

Rukeyser, Muriel. Beast in View. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1944.

—–. “Boy with His Hair Cut Short.” In U. S. 1 (New York: Covici Fried, 1938), 89-90.

—–. “Effort at Speech between Two People.” In Theory of Flight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935), 19-20.

—–. “Exile of Music.” In Body of Waking (New York: Harper, 1958), 22.

—–. Houdini: A Musical. Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 2002.

—–. Letter to Elizabeth Ames. Yaddo Records, Archives and Manuscript Division, New York Public Library, MssCol4795.

—–. “The Minotaur.” In Beast in View (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1944), 30.

—–. “The Minotaur.” Draft. Beast in View, Muriel Rukeyser Collection of Papers. Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library.

—–. “Seventh Avenue.” In A Turning Wind (New York: Viking, 1939), 70.

—–. “The Usable Truth.” Title page draft. Muriel Rukeyser Papers. Library of Congress. Part I, Box 43.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. 1990. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

Swanson, Alexandra. “Reinterpreting Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Minotaur’ Through Charles Naginski.”

Wrighton, Mark. Email to the Washington University Community, August 26, 2016.

Biographical Note: Vivian Pollak is Professor of English at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri. Her publications include Our Emily Dickinsons: American Women Poets and the Intimacies of Difference (2016), A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson (2004), The Erotic Whitman (2000), and Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender (1984).

© Helen Engelhardt

To be a Jew in the twentieth century
Is to be offered a gift.

So begins the most well-known and beloved of the poems written by Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), who was astonished when the Reform synagogue movement included it in their revised prayerbooks in the 1940s. “To Be a Jew” also appears under the heading, “Israel’s Mission” in the 1975 edition of Gates of Prayer. “One feels that one has been absorbed into the line,” Rukeyser said of its inclusion, “and it’s very good.”

Except for “a Bible on a bookshelf [and] a ceremonial goblet handed down from a great-grandfather who had been a cantor,” there wasn’t a trace of Jewish culture in her assimilated childhood home, Rukeyser wrote in “The Education of a Poet,” an essay published four years before her death: “no stories, no songs, no special food.” But “my mother… gave me a treasure that I believe has a great deal to do with the kind of poetry I think of as unverifiable fact. She told me we were descended from Akiba, the martyr who resisted the Romans in the 1st century and who was tortured to death after the Bar Kokhba rebellion was defeated. Akiba was flayed with iron rakes tearing his flesh until at the end he said, ‘I know that I have loved God with all my heart and all my soul, and now I know that I love him with all my life.’ Now this is an extraordinary gift to give a child.”

She eventually wrote a long poem in the 1960s about the revered Akiba, but twenty years before that, she wrote “To be A Jew” — a poem so familiar that many people believe it to be complete onto itself. It isn’t. “To Be a Jew” was originally published in 1944 in Rukeyser’s fourth book, Beast in View, as the seventh section of “Letter to the Front,” a ten-part sequence of poems, in which she responds as both a woman and a poet to the Spanish Civil War, and as a Jew to World War II, at a time when American war poets were largely ignoring the Holocaust. To restore “To be a Jew” to its proper place, to read it within its original context, is to receive the “gift” with enriched understanding.

Before going to Spain in 1936, Rukeyser had been politically outspoken enough to attract the attention of the FBI. She had traveled to Alabama five years earlier to cover the notorious “Scottsboro Boys” rape trial, and had been arrested there for fraternizing with black journalists. She wrote about her experiences in the Communist Daily Worker and New Masses, and she worked for the International Labor Defense, the legal arm of the Communist Party, which supplied the legal team defending the Scottsboro Boys. The FBI would gather information on Rukeyser for nearly thirty years until they closed her file in November, 1963, with the terse and accurate assessment, “no indication of subversive activities on her part since 1949.”

It was in Spain that she found her voice. Sent there on assignment by London Life and Letters in July, 1936 to cover the People’s Olympiad in Barcelona, which was to serve as an inter-national protest against the Olympics scheduled to take place in Nazi Berlin in early August, Rukeyser crossed the border on July 17th, the very day the Spanish Civil War began. The Spanish fascists under Francisco Franco had timed their coup to coincide with the opening day of the People’s Olympiad — which was cancelled as the elected government called a general strike and fought back.

Although Rukeyser had to leave after only five days, that brief visit changed her forever. In her most famous book, The Life of Poetry (1949), a man asks her as they sailed away from the Spanish coast: “And in all this — where is the place for poetry?” “I know some of it now,” she replies, “but it will take me a lifetime to find out.” She never ceased writing about Spain in essays, poetry, and a novel, The Savage Coast, which was rejected by her editor as “bad” for its modern impressionistic style in 1937 but recently rediscovered and edited by Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, and published by the Feminist Press in 2013.

Women and poets see the truth arrive.
Then it is acted out
The lives are lost, and all the newsboys shout.
…

All the strong agonized men
Wear the hard clothes of war,
Try to remember what they are fighting for.

But in dark weeping helpless moments of peace
Women and poets believe and resist forever

The fourth to sixth sections of the poem evoke her experiences in Spain:

Coming to Spain on the first day of the fighting,
Flame in the mountains, and the exotic soldiers,
I gave up ideas of strangeness, but now, keeping
All I profoundly hoped for, I saw fearing
Travelers and the unprepared and the fast-changing
Foothills. The train stopped in a silver country.

Suddenly, in section 7, “To be a Jew” enters the sequence. Why here, and why as a Petrarchan sonnet, a traditional form for a love poem? Rukeyser had completed her poems about Spain, but before turning her attention to the United States and the political and personal impact of World War II as it raged in Europe, she paused to write and insert a most peculiar love poem about the consequences of accepting the “gift” of being a Jew — at the very time when millions of people were being murdered for being Jewish.

There is a secret concealed in this poem. Muriel had not only fallen in love with Spain, but with Otto Boch, a German Communist athlete who had come to participate in the Games as a runner, but as soon as the Civil War began, immediately volunteered to fight alongside other exiled German athletes. They hastily formed the Thälmann Battalion of the International Brigades, named in honor of a Communist leader of Weimar Germany who had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1933 and was being held in solitary confinement. (Ernst Thälmann was eventually shot by Hitler’s order in 1944 in Buchenwald.) Rukeyser, sent home with all the other foreigners who could be neither warriors nor nurses, never saw Boch again; he was killed fighting the fascists in the last days of the Spanish Civil War.

“To be a Jew,” her love sonnet, is written for him. She is assuring her lover, who died on the battlefield, that she is engaged in the battle in her own way, accepting the gift, accepting a history of persecution, of mental torture and physical suffering, and drawing strength from her own traditions.

The concluding three sections of “Letter to the Front” take us to the United States. She names the names of pro-fascists in her country:

They are all here in this divided time:
Dies the inquisitor against the truth,
Wheeler, Nye, Pegler, Hearst, each with his crews,
McCormick, the Representatives whose crime
Is against history, the state, and love.

She celebrates the contributions of women, the “tellers of stories”:

One saw a peasant die.
One guarded a soldier through disease.
And one Saw all the women look at each other in hope.
And came back, saying, “All things must be known.”

…

You little children, come down out of your mothers
And tell us about peace…

She then concludes her ”Letter to the Front,”

offered in time of war,
As I now send you, for a beginning, praise.

In an essay published the same year as “Letter to the Front” and included in a feature, “Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews” (in The Contemporary Jewish Record, February, 1944), Rukeyser elaborated on her theme of Judaism as a gift, a guarantee “not only against fascism but all kinds of temptations to close the spirit… My themes and the use I have made of them depended on my life as a poet, as a woman, as an American and as a Jew… if the four come together in one person, each strengthens the other.”

Among the eleven essayists, Rukeyser was the only one insisting on the interdependence of her identities. She imagined the “angel of the century” singing to her the news that her “three lions of heritage” — woman, American, and Jew, standing respectively for “life, freedom, and memory” — were her guardians. They also represented three imperatives, Rukeyser said: to give, to create, and to fight. They alone allowed her to resist the evil of the age.

“If one is free,” she wrote, “freedom can extend to a certain degree into the past, and one may choose one’s ancestor, to go with their wishes and their fight.” Rukeyser did not have to choose, however, having probably inherited an ancestor who embodied much of what she believed in and connected her to study as a sacred obligation and to creating art inspired by social justice.

Her poem, “Akiba,” was commissioned by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and published in 1967 in American Judaism. Akiba’s is one of the two lives Rukeyser wrote about (the other is Käthe Kollwitz) in her 1968 collection, Speed of Darkness.

Like “Letter to the Front,” “Akiba” is a lengthy poem divided into sections, in this case five. “The Way Out” deals with the Exodus:

firstborn forbidden by law of the pyramid.
Drawn through the water with the water-drawn people
Led by the water drawn man to the smoke mountain.
The voice of the world speaking, the world covered by signs,
…

Music of those who have walked out of slavery.

“For the Song of Songs” celebrates Akiba’s radical insistence that this beautiful, erotic text — koshered by the Talmudic rabbis as expressing the love between God and Israel, though it never mentions God — be included in the Biblical canon.

“The Bonds” looks at Akiba’s mythical transformation from ignorant shepherd to brilliant scholar thanks to the generosity and courage of his wife, Rachel, who agrees to marry him only if he promises to study. Disinherited for her choice of a husband, she nevertheless encourages Akiba to keep his promise. He is away from her for twenty-four years (so says the medieval Avot de-Rabbi Natan), and returns a revered rabbi with a huge crowd of disciples.

In the landscape of the Word he stares, he has no word.
…
He is young. This is a shepherd who rages at learning,
Having no words. Looks past green grass and sees a woman.
She, Rachel, who is come to recognize.
In the huge wordless shepherd she finds Akiba
…
who can now come to his power and speak:
The need to give having found the need to become:

More than the calf wants to suck, the cow wants to give suck.

“Akiba Martyr” deals with his torture and execution at Roman hands for continuing to teach the Torah after the defeat of the Bar Kokhba uprising.

Does the old man in uprising speak for compromise?
In all but the last things. Not in the study itself.
For this religion is a system of knowledge;
Points may be one by one abandoned, but not the study.
Does he preach passion and non-violence?
Yes, and trees, crops, children honestly taught. He says:
Prepare yourselves for suffering.

The final section of “Akiba,” “The Witness,” brings together the Exodus, Akiba’s story, and Rukeyser’s own attitude to history.

You who come after me far from tonight finding
These lives that ask you always Who is the witness –
…
All this we are and accept, being made of signs, speaking

To you, in time not yet born.
The witness is myself.

And you,
The signs, the journeys of the night, survive.

Rukeyser wrote four other poems with Jewish themes, three about specific women. When familiar stories are retold from a woman’s perspective, the very act can be transgressive, since, until the Jewish feminist movement of the 1970s, men wrote nearly all midrashim. For a resolutely secular Jew like Muriel Rukeyser to compose midrashic poems was also quite unusual. Some Jewish religious feminists and poets rejected the practice in the belief that reinterpreting patriarchal texts still gave too much power to the patriarchy. Rukeyser, however, enjoyed the tension between the three components of her identity: woman, American and Jew. She embraced contradictions.

She included “Ms. Lot” in her last book, The Gates, published in 1976. The title slyly prepared the reader for her interpretation:

Well, if he treats me like a young girl still,
That father of mine, and here’s my sister
And we’re still traveling into the hills —
But everyone on the road knows he offered us
To the Strangers when all they wanted was men,
And the cloud of smoke still over the twin cities
And mother a salt lick the animals come to –

Miriam, the sister of Moses and Aaron, appears in Breaking Open in 1973, in the second section out of fourteen in “Searching/Not Searching.” She is a woman of power, a priestess leading the women with their timbrels, dancing, and singing. Their song follows the Biblical “Song of the Sea,” one of the oldest parts of the Torah. Rukeyser imagines Miriam continuing to sing her own song:

High above shores and times,
I sit on the shore
forever and ever.
Moses my brother
has crossed over
to milk, honey,
that holy land.
Building Jerusalem.
I sing forever
on the seashore.
I do remember
horseman and horses,
waves of passage poured into war,
all poured into journey
My unseen brothers
have gone over,
chariots
deep seas under.
I alone stand here
ankle-deep
and I sing, I sing,
until the lands sing to each other.

The Book of Judith, probably written by a Jew in the period of the Second Temple, was excluded from the Hebrew Bible. It is essentially a short, shocking novel about a widow who seduces and murders the Assyrian enemy of her people. Rukeyser’s “Judith,” in The Turning Wind (1939), is no longer the seducer-assassin of the military general who threatens her home and homeland, but “a dark woman/ [who] leaves the blond country with a backward look, adventures into the royal furious dark/ already spread from Kishinev to York.” From pogrom to massacre, from Russia to England, from the early 20th century to the 12th, Rukeyser’s “Judith” evokes the entire history of murderous anti-Semitism in Europe.

In her fourth Jewishly themed poem, “The Writer” (in Breaking Open, 1973), Rukeyser honors a contemporary teller of Jewish tales, Isaac Bashevis Singer:

His tears fell from his veins
They spoke for six million
From his veins all their blood.
He told his stories.
But no one spoke this language
Noone knew this music.

His music went into all people
Not knowing this language.
It ran through their bodies
And they began to take his words
Everyone the tears
Everyone the veins
But everyone said
No one spoke this language.

Rukeyser produced fourteen books of poems, from her first when she was 21, Theory of Flight (published as the winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1935), to her final collection, The Gates, in 1976, four years before her death at 66. She also wrote essays, children’s books, biographies, a novel, plays, and television scripts, and translated poetry from various languages into English. She taught at the California Labor School in the early 1940s and at Sarah Lawrence in the ’50s and ’60s, where she invited the custodial staff to attend her classes.

Her intimate life was as unconventional as her public one. During the years she lived in San Francisco, she decided to be a mother, and, ignoring all warnings that she would have to choose between writing and mothering, she became pregnant by a man whom she never saw again. Disinherited by her family, she raised her son alone.

Although her partner in a decades-long love relationship was her literary agent, Monica McCall, Rukeyser never wrote or spoke publicly about her bisexuality. Two years before her death, she accepted an invitation to participate in a Lesbian Poetry Reading at the conference of the Modern Language Association, a decision that suggests an intention to assume a more public lesbian identity — but she suffered a stroke prior and could not attend.

According to Anne F. Herzog, co-editor of The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, her work has been “enormously important to many feminist and lesbian readers [because] she has constantly [broken] silence around previously unwritten areas of female experience”:

sex, menstruation, breast-feeding, moth- er-daughter relationships, female aging… in her well-known tribute to Kathe Kollwitz, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?/ The world would split open” … Rukeyser is at her most eloquent, challenging women to break their self-imposed and socially encouraged silences. She herself declared that she was “unable to speak, in exile from myself” and spent her life-time as a writer “working out the vocabulary of silence.”

Until recently, however, Herzog observes, “Rukeyser was virtually unacknowledged as a primary influence on writers who emerged during the last thirty years of the 20th century in response to the women’s movement.”

For me as a college student in the late 1950s, Rukeyser was, as I wrote,

… the teacher I never had
The poet who wrote my poems before I thought of them.
… Midwife of the transfiguration

I had the privilege and pleasure of being in her presence three times and hearing her recite in her inimitable, musical voice: at a Sarah Lawrence seminar, at a 25-hour poetry marathon in protest of the Vietnam War at the St. Mark’s Church, and at a poetry evening in Cooper Union. “You stood alone in Cooper Union’s Great Hall,” I wrote afterwards,

On a Friday night in the early ’70s.
You called up to us The Ballad of the Orange and the Grape,
The Conjugation of the Paramecium, The Speed of Darkness.
You left the microphone and walked to the edge of the stage
To talk to us.
Said the man behind me, “She stands tall.”

In 1964, after the first of her series of strokes, she wrote the following on a scrap of paper:

Dedication

My songs are for you

And my silences.
We are one life.
We are many songs.

My songs are for you, Lovers, the unborn — For you, stranger
Now sing your songs.

Helen Engelhardt is the author of The Longest Night: A Personal History of Pan Am 103. The audio version of the book was an Audie Finalist for Original Work in 2010. Her poem, “Muriel: In Memoriam,” is published at jewishcurrents.org/muriel-memoriam-25226 and here on this website. She thanks Bill Rukeyser, the son of Muriel Rukeyser, for granting permission to publish extensive excerpts from his mother’s poetry in this essay, which was first published in Jewish Currents (2015) and is posted her with permission of Jewish Currents.

Muriel Rukeyser’s 1968 collection, The Speed of Darkness, begins with four dozen short poems, and concludes with several longer poems, of which “The Outer Banks” is the first. (It is followed by “Akiba,” “Käthe Kollwitz,” and the title poem, “The Speed of Darkness.”) “The Outer Banks” consists of 183 lines of free verse, gathered in twelve numbered sections which vary in length from a single line (section #3), to the 27 lines of section #9, the longest. In general, sections 9-12 are longer, and fuller, than the first eight sections of the poem.

The poem describes, celebrates, and meditates upon aspects of the Outer Banks, a 200-mile-long string of narrow barrier islands in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of North Carolina. The Outer Banks are notable for their pleasant climate, open sandy beaches, outstanding recreational opportunities, and seasonal hurricanes. The region has a colorful history, featuring pirates, shipwrecks, the mysteriously lost Roanoke colony, and the first powered air flight by the Wright Brothers in 1903. Rukeyser’s poem embraces all of these geographical features and historical episodes.

The reader of Rukeyser’s “The Outer Banks” is immediately struck by its splendid description of the geography and climate of that region. If one attends primarily to the poet’s vivid descriptions of the natural environment — while skimming over her references to humans, their artifacts, and their concerns — it is quite possible to enjoy the poem as an immersive experience in the sensual qualities of the sunbaked, wind and wave swept beaches. Rukeyser’s lyrical appreciation of the ruggedly beautiful setting is not unlike the evocations of the seacoast of his native Chile by Rukeyser’s contemporary, Pablo Neruda. And just as Neruda’s gift for lyrical verse is often harnessed to his Marxist political philosophy, so, too, are the poems of Muriel Rukeyser reliably concerned with social justice. It is the richly detailed natural setting of “The Outer Banks” that is untypical of Rukeyser’s verse.

Rukeyser’s “The Outer Banks” may seem something of an anomaly as a “nature” poem among poems with more direct things to say about political and social issues as well as about individual artists whose progressive attitudes have reshaped art and helped to reshape social and political attitudes. But “The Outer Banks” is not just a “nature” poem. In its treatment of the human history of the region and in its sense of the region as a margin where the seemingly impossible becomes possible, the poem touches on many of the themes common to the other poems in The Speed of Darkness and in Rukeyser’s whole body of work.¹

This observation by Martin Kich is from his 2005 essay in North Carolina Literary Review, which celebrates the Outer Banks by reprinting, with commentary, two poems devoted to the region, Rukeyser’s and one by W.D. Ehrhart. The poems are attractively presented, with photos, other graphic design enhancements, and sidebar commentary by Kich, including the quote above.²

Rukeyser’s poem is packed with vivid figures of speech. Like the poems of Octavio Paz, some of which Rukeyser translated, and those of Pablo Neruda, “The Outer Banks” includes many romantically extravagant images. Some are synesthetic, as in the line, “Sea-light flame on my voice” mixing visual, thermal, and auditory senses. Some are zoomorphic, e.g., “Sea has flown over us” treating the ocean as a bird. There are numerous anthropomorphisms, attributing human abilities to something inanimate: “Speak to it, says the light;” “And the sea, speaking across its lives;” “Voices of the sea;” and “And the sea, speaking across its lives.”

The sound imagery in this poem is unusual. There are perhaps a dozen references to auditory phenomena, but most of them are imagined, rather than being literally apprehended by the narrator, in the poem’s present tense. The words “speechless” and “speechlessness” occur several times. There is repeated concern for “lost voices,” and most references to human speech are set in opposition to the notion of silence or “speechlessness” — as if speaking were a difficult and exceptional undertaking. So, on these lovely, largely unpopulated beaches, where other poets might describe the cries of gulls or the crashing surf, Rukeyser is instead preoccupied with imagined human voices, mainly from the past, such as the voice of Wilbur Wright or those of civil rights protestors. When the poet does mention a natural sound, it is a metaphor for human speech: “bird-voiced discoverers.” As noted earlier, the sea is repeatedly described as “speaking,” but always in an abstract sense; the literal pounding of waves upon the shore is never described. This is, perhaps, one of Rukeyser’s departures from the usual devices of “nature poets,” who would typically describe the natural sounds of the place before, or while associating human concepts with those sounds.

There is no olfactory description in the poem, and but a single indirect reference to taste, “the ballad and original sweet grape / dark on the vines near Hatteras.” The very few evocations of the sense of touch are indirect, as here:

I walk out into the shoal water
and throw my leg over the wall of the boat

We are not told if the water is cold, or if the poet is barefoot and feels the sandy bottom with her toes, nor if the sea breeze caresses her face and arms. In short, the necessity of touch can be inferred, but is not described.

Much attention is paid to the interplay of sand and ocean. Earth is normally the most solid, heavy, and stable of the classical four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. However, the Outer Banks are notorious for their shifting sands and their precarious existence at the margin of the deep ocean. Daily tides and wind-driven ocean surges continuously reshape the slender barrier islands. Rukeyser observes that not only does water move ceaselessly over sand, but each of those elements also moves upon itself: avalanche-like, surface water moves over deeper waters, and surface sand moves upon deeper layers of sand.

Sea comes toward me across the sea.

The sand moves over the sand in waves

Flood over ocean, avalanche on the flat beach. Pouring.

The Banks are grounded not on solid earth, but upon a fluid medium — grains of sand – which also forms the floor of the surrounding seabed. Sand and water behave very much alike: “Sands have washed, sea has flown over us.” A man can be “walking toward me across the water,” just as he might walk on sand.

Rukeyser observes that the winds, clouds, and sunlight of the Banks add dynamism to what initially appears to be a monotonous landscape when she speaks of “sands from which colors and light pass” and of “the light moving across the sea.” The constant interplay of these elements is made possible by the extreme openness of the landscape. In the final two sections of the poem, openness is repeatedly stressed:

They are in me, in my speechless
life of barrier beach
As it lies open
to the night, out there.
…
There is no out there.
All is open.
Open water. Open I.
…
On the edge of the moment that is now the center
From the open sea.

To Martin Kich’s observation that the Outer Banks are “a margin where the seemingly impossible becomes possible,”³ we might add that, to Rukeyser, the spectacular openness of the barrier islands seems to suggest the necessity of openness to enable human social progress. Just as sand, sunlight, wind, and waves interpenetrate one another in marvelous and unexpected ways on the Banks, so can openness to variability and change be a liberating experience for humans.

Geographically, The Banks are not merely at the margin of the sea, they’re some miles off the mainland, a thin arc of sandspits and barrier islands rising from the sea, beyond Currituck Sound, Albemarle Sound, and Pamlico Sound. Thus precariously placed, they are far more open, on all sides, than the coastal margin of the mainland. It was here, on this improbable strip of land, that man first took flight; and here that Rukeyser found inspiration for one of her most effective, albeit underappreciated poems. Characteristically, Rukeyser stressed the social history (Native Americans, European exploration, slavery) and the history of technology (shipwrecks, airplane flight) of the region, weaving those human concerns into her verse. But, exceptionally among her longer poems, here the poet also immersed herself in details of the natural landscape as fully as would any “nature poet.” Rukeyser’s deep engagement with the physical geography of the Banks enabled her to craft a work in which the human and the natural are envisioned in a rare equilibrium, each illuminating the other.

1. Martin Kich, “’The Outer Banks:’ Poems of Muriel Rukeyser and W.D. Ehrhart.” NCLR: North Carolina Literary Review (2005): 31-37.
2. Aside from Kich’s article, there is little published commentary on the poem. Louise Kertesz briefly discusses “The Outer Banks” in The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State, 1980. 315-17), while Catherine Gander, in her recent monograph, Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: the Poetics of Connection (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), does not reference the poem at all. The poem receives only two glancing references in Kaufman and Herzog’s Gedenkschrift-like collection of tributes to Rukeyser, How shall we tell each other of the poet?: The life and writing of Muriel Rukeyser (New York : St. Martin’s Press, 1999). The poet herself composed some concise notes on “The Outer Banks,” which can be found in the Annotations section of The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, ed. Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), p. 624.
3. Kich, p. 32.

In 1964, the poet Muriel Rukeyser suffered a stroke. Four years later, in 1968, she published a poem called “The Speed of Darkness.” Over the years, this poem has been interpreted in a number of ways. A common interpretation is that the poem is about a woman finding her voice as a poet. The poem also links to a theme explored by Rukeyser in The Life of Poetry, which is how one writes poetry in a world that no longer values poetry, that, in Rukeyser’s thinking, actually fears poetry because poetry discloses areas of our selves we would rather ignore. In this paper, I wonder what happens to our interpretations of the poem if we read it from the perspective of Rukeyser’s disability, if we see the stroke as something more than a biographical fact current with the time of the poem’s composition, and instead see the stroke as the position from which the poet is writing, linking the stroke with the larger breakdown in communication and the struggle to find a voice with which the poem is concerned.

I am reading the influence of the stroke on the poem thematically, in the ways in which the poem is concerned with silence, speech and communication, but also formally, through the poem’s sometimes choppy, telegraphic sentences, its moments of broken syntax, in the gaps and caesuras in many of the poem’s lines, and finally, in the structure of the poem itself. “The Speed of Darkness” is actually not a single poem. In a reading in Warwick, England in 1972, Rukeyser calls it a series of poems, which suggests that the numbered sections of the poem function much in the same way as laisses in medieval French chansons, where stanzas are arranged paratactically so that each is independent of the other but brought into relation with the other through juxtaposition. This relates to a larger concern of Rukeyser’s work as a poet, which is how we might speak to each other across sometimes insurmountable gulfs and breakdowns in communication, especially during times of war and conflict. As Rukeyser says in “Waterlily Fire”: “I speak to you, you speak to me, is that fragile?” (Collected Poems 409). Rukeyser suggests that this fragility of speech, of communication between persons, is what will save us as a species. This fragility of speech can be seen as embodied in her struggles to speak after her stroke. To read “The Speed of Darkness” through Rukeyser’s lifelong themes is to focus on the precariousness of this relation, but also to pay attention to the gaps between the fragile moments of speech, asking whether these spaces of silence might have a deeper significance.
Silence has always been important in Rukeyser’s work. When writing “The Book of the Dead,” a poem about the Gauley tunnel disaster, the worst industrial disaster in US history, she imagines the mother of several dead miners saying “I shall give a mouth to my son” (Collected Poems 85). In a sense, this is what “The Book of the Dead” does, using interviews with survivors in conjunction with court documents to insure that voices which would otherwise be silenced by history are given a chance a speak. But silence also has a positive aspect in Rukeyser’s writing. In The Life of Poetry, she puts forward a theory of projective verse before Charles Olson, writing that “poetry…is intimately bound with the poet’s breathing,” going as far as to say that “punctuation is biological” (117). For Rukeyser, punctuation also includes the space on the page. There are anecdotes of her fighting with publishers who did not attend to the precise dimensions of her caesuras. In The Life of Poetry, she imagines “a system of pauses” or “a code of pauses” which might transcribe pauses in speech, writing that “the silences…are part of the sound” (116-17). I want to pause here to point out that silence, in this sentence, is plural, in the same way that the voices in Rukeyser’s often polyvocalic poems are plural, which suggests that these silences are not just a caesura in historical records in which individual voices are lost, as in “The Book of the Dead,” or relational silences in which individuals are not communicating with each other, but also the myriad silences in each individual body, which as Rukeyser reminds us, is the source of the poem (Life 79).

The word “silence” appears in three places in “The Speed of Darkness.” The first is a sentence fragment broken by two caesuras:

Resurrection music,silence,and surf.

The second contains the title of the poem:

No longer speaking
listening with the whole body
and with every drop of blood
overtaken by silence
but this same silence is become speech
with the speed of darkness.

Finally, there is the remarkable phrase: “I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.” This line suggests that this silence that becomes speech is not merely the absence of speech. If silence has its own vocabulary, and its own voice, one that we can hear if we “[listen] with the whole body,” then how are we to recognize the voice and the vocabulary of this silence? To read the line “this same silence is become speech” makes of silence a passive state, that of the patient slowly learning to speak again, but Rukeyser suggests a more active form of silence, one which is part of sound, and thought, and communication, as surely as space is part of the page. To answer this paradox, I will turn now to Carrie Noland’s work on gestures.

Noland’s book, Agency and Embodiment, in brief, deals with the question of how bodies assert agency when our movements are socially coded down to the minutest gesture. Drawing from a range of theoretical and scientific sources, Noland shows how movement and cognition engage in a feedback loop in which agency emerges from a dialectic between socially constructed gestures and resistances emerging from the movements themselves. For my purposes, I will focus on Noland’s attention to the intervals between socially meaningful gestures and how these reveal the kinesthetic background of the organism.

Noland explores these intervals in a work of video art by Bill Viola called “The Passions.” In this video, actors are asked to make certain facial expressions, but the video is slowed down to the point that these expressions are not privileged over the intervals between these expressions, which Noland says are “not inscriptions in the ‘library’ of our culture’s expressive habits” (75), but moments when the body “speaks in a language we can’t always translate” (66). Noland sees these intervals as something more than gaps between expressions but imbued with significance, calling them “movement material from which performances – and even cultural signifiers – can later be made” (72). Noland then turns to Daniel Stern’s work on infant development and how the first sensations experienced by infants are exploratory and yet to be overwritten by social significance. She compares these vitality affects in infants to Merleau-Ponty’s idea of a kinesthetic background of signals received from the body below the level of language. Noland writes that, “these briefly glimpsed movement possibilities are involved, however, in a signifying project…each one is, in Stern’s terms, an emergent signification” (79). Noland links these moments of emergent signification to the paleoanthropologist Leroi-Gourhan’s theory of tatonnement, or groping, by which early humans discovered the meaning of tools by exploiting the movement potential of the human body in an interface with objects in the environment. This groping, it seems, is how knowledge and consciousness are formed.
Returning to “The Speed of Darkness,” we can see how the entire poem is, as Rukeyser puts it, “thinking and reaching,” groping in its darkness to find its form and its words in stammers and silences. In this sense, the whole poem is, as Rukeyser writes, “the shape of the body speaking its evidence.” If we read the stanzas as gestures, or the words in the lines split by caesuras as gestures, then the silence between them is the kinesthetic background, the emergent signification which speaks through relation, or even lack of relation, between the words at either end of the space.

In another poem, “Resurrection of the Right Side,” explicitly addressing her stroke, Rukeyser directly links speech and gesture in the line: “I began to climb the mountain on my mouth / word by stammer, walk stammered / …with none of my own rhythms.” For a poet who, in The Life of Poetry, directly linked the rhythms of the body to the composition of the poem, this sense of “all rhythms gone” is a space which threatens to obliterate all of poetry. Yet even here, at this nadir of poetry, there is a sense that poetry can reemerge: “I go running in sleep / but waking stumble down corridors.” It is my contention that it is precisely this stumbling and stammering which allows the voice to emerge from the silence, not in opposition to the silence but in collaboration with it. I would argue that “The Speed of Darkness” is where Rukeyser learns to speak through silence and stammer, to use her temporary disability as a voice and as a tool for the recovery of her voice. From the kinesthetic background of her body’s silence, Rukeyser’s language in “The Speed of Darkness” gropes through this silence to produce a “resurrection music” which transforms silence from an absence of language to a space of possibility and emergent signification.
Listening to these silences, we can hear voices in the poems that emerge beyond the ability of words to speak for them. In the third section, the words say one thing – Rukeyser describes a pastoral scene during wartime, mentioning the “unmovable spruces,” before mentioning “a tree that trembles.” I am reminded of Noland quoting Stern when he says “the body is never doing nothing” (76). Rukeyser ends this section by saying “I am a tree that trembles and trembles,” which is to say, what appears unmoving, and unmovable, is actually always moving, that absence is not absence, that silence is not silence. Each gesture, each word, no matter how minute, contains the assertion of an entire agency, of an entire voice.

There are moments in the poem when the silence speaks implacable distances. During the same stanza, “faces, voices” is met by a gulf of silence from “you are far away,” suggesting a need of the poem’s speaker to speak to someone who can’t be reached. These caesuras are sometimes speaking of an abstract sort of distance, such as how the space between “between between” draws out the troubling meaning of that word, a meaning troubled further when it is followed by lines that evoke “the man” and “the woman,” situating gender as a space of distance and miscommunication. When the poem turns its attention to the war, at this point of time the Vietnam War, and Rukeyser writes “these sons these sons,” she shows how an implacable gulf of misunderstanding, of distinction, separates these sons through the separation of national identities. However, at times Rukeyser suggests that separation and individuation are not a fragmentation, but a way in which all things are different and particular and thus brought into relation. At another point in the poem, the gap between “say it” and “say it” echoes the language of speech therapy, but also functions as an insistence, leading to one of the poem’s most famous lines: “The universe is made of stories / not of atoms.” The particularity of things, of selves, of selves within the selves, of lines within stanzas, of words within lines – these things matter, and their relations and communications matter. Silence is not a breakdown in communication. The illness, the breakdown in communication, lies in not listening, in not hearing what the other says, when the slightest flinch, the sparsest word, is imbued with significance.
The most remarkable gesture in the poem is that of the poet trying to get “a live bird out of [her] throat.” This live bird of emerging speech is described by Rukeyser as having “a curved beak,” later becoming “curved blades” which could “slit anything.” The violence of this image, perhaps in reference to the difficulty of a patient undergoing speech therapy, might also reference the difficulty of communication across those boundaries that separate us as speaking subjects, whether of gender, race, class, or other experiences of embodiment and socialization. Yet despite the violence of this image of the “throat-bird,” Rukeyser sees the result of its “being born” as a necessary poetic and political project. The bird begins emerging from the throat of a young man in a dream, as Rukeyser asks in often asyntactic phrases, “I am he am I? / Dreaming? / I am the bird am I? / I am the throat?” Here we see the lyric subject transformed from the young poet of her dream, to the dream itself, to the blade-like throat-bird of poetry itself, and finally to the throat, the bodily source of all poetry and speech. Rukeyser’s hopeful message at the end of this sequence is to wonder about the future of communication, of who will be “the throat of those hours,” while empowering us in the present with the question, “Who will speak these days / if not I / if not you?” Despite the difficulties of speech, in both a physical and a figurative sense, “The Speed of Darkness” ultimately works through its silences to reaffirm the importance of each individual voice, yet Rukeyser’s poem also reaffirms the importance of each individual silence, to question what they might mean, what voice lies within them, whether we are listening closely enough.

Works cited:

Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (1996). Paris Press.

Muriel Rukeyser, “The Speed of Darkness” (1968), “Resurrection of the Right Side” (1976) and “Waterlily Fire” (1962). The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (2005), edited by Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog with Jan Heller Levi. University of Pittsburgh Press.

Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment (2009). Harvard University Press.