The Muriel Rukeyser Living Archive

Engendering lively interdisciplinary conversations about Muriel Rukeyser

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Rukeyser’s Difficulty–ALA Conference Session, Chicago, Illinois, May 26, 2022

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Thursday, May 26, 2022, 4:30–5:50pm, American Literature Association Conference, Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Illinois

Organized by: Jacqueline Campbell, Princeton University

Chair: Vivian Pollak, Washington University

  1. “The Promise of the Night-Flowering Worlds,” Trudi Witonsky, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
  2. “‘Not even the bones of what I want to say’: On Muriel Rukeyser and Frances Wickes,” Casey Miller, Eastern Michigan University
  3. “Race, Place, and the Politics of Compassion in Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Gates’,” Jacqueline Campbell, Princeton University

Panel Description

For decades, much of Muriel Rukeyser’s writing remained unpublished, unfinished, or lost in the archive. Thanks to the recovery work of scholars such as Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, Eric Keenaghan, and Catherine Gander we now know more than ever about Rukeyser’s work and life as well as the impact of misogyny and anti-communism on the reception of her work. More contemporary readers now recognize Rukeyser as a key political poet whose writing bears witness to the wars, crises, and social justice movements of the 20th century: the Great Depression, two world wars, the Scottsboro Trials, Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster, Spanish Civil War, feminism’s second wave, and the Vietnam War.

The more we know, however, the more remains to be explored. Far from offering clear testimonies of these landmark political events, Rukeyser’s poems are often obscure, allusive, long, and downright difficult. Her work may be easy to paraphrase, but it can also be delightfully and maddeningly hard to read. Taking these recent discoveries in Rukeyser Studies as a starting point, this panel explores the persistent mysteries surrounding Rukeyser’s life and work. What is it about Rukeyser that continues to beguile, intrigue, enchant, frustrate, and confound old and new generations of scholars? This panel features the work of scholars exploring the aesthetic, ethical, and historical complexities that animate Rukeyser’s career, asking, “What’s difficultabout Muriel Rukeyser?”

Trudi Witonsky, “The Promise of the Night-Flowering Worlds”

For this conference paper, I’d like to discuss “Dream Singing Elegy” (1944) in order to explore a couple of things that make Rukeyser’s writing difficult and yet relevant. At a foundational level, part of what makes reading Rukeyser hard is that she resists the categorizations we’ve been taught. Her work and perceptions can’t be adequately captured by any one disciplinary or political lens. She’s not just a 1930’s Marxist documentarian, a modernist, a feminist, a bisexual poet. She works in multiple genres, visual as well as literary, prose as well as poetry, and conditioned as we are by our own training and specializations, we have to decompartmentalize our own understandings in order to adequately appreciate what she’s doing. But Rukeyser’s resistance to closed borders and to reified categories is one reason her work remains relevant and still generates imaginative possibilities for understanding our lives and options.

The Elegies are particularly difficult with their abstractions, allusions, and processes that grapple with how to survive psychically in the horrifying context of World War II. In “Dream Elegy,” in addition to earlier influences on her work (Marxism, documentaries, modernism, and activism), Rukeyser takes inspiration from surrealism, the beginnings of the Spanish Civil War, her Jewish identity, anthropology and multicultural sources (the 1870s ghost dancing of the Klamath Tribes as reported in an academic chapter by anthropologist, Philleo Nash). For this presentation, I’d like to explore the nature of these influences (How does Rukeyser imagine psychic survival? Does the poem represent a kind of romanticizing primitivism? To what degree does she rely on Nash and was his assessment “accurate”? Does the poem make facile connections or does it represent something like what Ralph Ellison called “the Jazz impulse,” groping toward a more positive “meeting place”?). This presentation will explore the nature of the “charisma” of the influence, to use a term put forth by Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda, in light of both the World War II context and more recent anti-racist work. Rukeyser always understood herself as embedded in history, acted upon but also capable of efficacious action. Her interest in art that transcended the museum, that incorporated the body and emotional life as well as intellect, that spoke to political and aesthetic innovations, makes her a useful ancestor as we recenter our literary traditions (thinking about the impact of sexism, racism, class, and sexual orientation). How might this Elegy be valuable in our current historical moment, given current impasses, despair, and resignation?

Trudi Witonsky is an associate professor in the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. She formerly coordinated the First Year English program and currently teaches introductory composition as well as upper division American Literature courses. Her research interests include Muriel Rukeyser’s development in the 1930s, Adrienne Rich’s activism, multicultural literature, and pedagogy.

Casey Miller, “’Not even the bones of what I want to say’: On Muriel Rukeyser and Frances Wickes”

Muriel Rukeyser’s extensive archive has been a source of meaningful discovery for Rukeyser scholars. For every previously unpublished manuscript or illuminating connection, however, a new maze of fissures breaks open. Much like her poetry, Rukeyser’s sprawling archive feels expansive, infinite, packed with easter eggs and unanticipated cross-talk–difficult by scale alone. The boxes dedicated to Rukeyser’s relationship to Jungian psychologist Frances G. Wickes most thoroughly epitomize this ‘difficulty,’ where a decades-long relationship with implications at once intimate, clinical, intellectual, creative, and pecuniary manages stunning ambiguity considering the extensive variety of documents and mutual professional influence the two shared. The available correspondence at the Library of Congress offers a glimpse into what Clive Bush calls a “life-long friendship” in which Rukeyser and Wickes bond over shared interests in child development, Jungian symbolism, and–perhaps above all–the power of stories. However, the exact nature, extent, and timeline of their relationship is still a mystery. The archive introduces unanswered questions about the nature of Wickes and Rukeyser’s relationship–affectionate letters suggest a sexual or romantic dynamic, for example, and remarks from Rukeyser’s unfinished Wickes biography seem to confirm a period of clinical analytic work between them. Later, more fraught moments in their longstanding friendship, however, are recounted in excruciating detail. Committed to helping an aging Wickes with her memoirs and archives, Rukeyser toiled for years without compensation as Wickes wavered on unkept financial promises. Complicated questions around payment, finances, and transference rise up around Rukeyser’s documentation of their later professional relationship, and only increase in mystique against her poetry of the same era. I consider Body of Waking (1958) and its deeply psychoanalytic themes alongside The Life of Poetry, Elegies, and select other poems dedicated to Wickes against the history presented in the Rukeyser archive. Rukeyser references some psychoanalysts explicitly over the course of her life–we know from The Life of Poetry Rukeyser closely read Karen Horney and Otto Rank, found Jung’s ideas valuable for poetry, and directly appropriated and rearranged Anna Freud’s work in 1949’s Elegies–but her personal relationship, correspondences, and what I theorize as transference onto Frances Wickes penetrates a new dimension of our understanding of Rukeyser’s poetics and closes significant relational and emotional gaps in the current knowledge of Rukeyser’s biography and intimate relationships.

Casey Miller is an MA student in the Literature program at Eastern Michigan University. She is a graduate assistant for The Muriel Rukeyser Living Archive where she collaborates with Elisabeth Däumer on web updates, event planning, and educational resources. She is an instructor of first year writing at EMU, a recipient of the 2021 JNT Paul Bruss Scholarship, the Departmental Award for Outstanding Graduate Student, as well as a presenter at the Graduate Research Colloquium. She is currently also working on a theory of John Keats’ odes through the lens of disability theory and queer embodiment.

Jacqueline Campbell, “Race, Place, and the Politics of Compassion in Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Gates’”

Remembering Muriel Rukeyser in 1981, Denise Levertov praises the poet’s commitment to joining poetry with political action: “From her presence as a protestor at the Scottsboro trial in 1931, when she was eighteen, to the lone journey to Seoul which she undertook in 1975 in the (alas unsuccessful) attempt––using her prestige as president of PEN––to obtain the release from jail of Kim Chi Ha, the Korean poet and activist, Muriel acted on her beliefs, rather than assuming that the ability to verbalize them somehow exempted her from further responsibility.” For Rukeyser’s readers, this 1975 journey to Seoul stands as unexamined evidence of the poet’s lifelong desire to wed poetry with protest, to act on the beliefs written in her poems. No existing scholarship, however, examines the historical details of Rukeyser’s relationship with Kim Chi-ha, the dissident South Korean poet accused of violating anti-communist laws by the military dictatorship under Park Chung Hee.

Using archival research as well as recent studies in affect and emotion, I will attempt to reconstruct the historical narrative of Rukeyser’s protest against the imprisonment of Kim Chi-ha, asking how racial politics and the legacies of U.S. imperialism shaped American writers’ sympathetic responses to this crisis abroad. My paper looks at archival records of Rukeyser’s tenure as President of the PEN American Center as well as the correspondence, drafts, and interviews preceding the publication of “The Gates,” the 1976 poem documenting her experience in Seoul. This compositional history of a single key poem will place Rukeyser within the cultural and political milieu of the New Left and will explore the ambiguous politics of sympathy and compassion shaping how poets respond to the suffering of others. My paper argues that “The Gates” self-consciously documents the poet’s struggle to identify with a poet she never met and could not ultimately help. Though the poem’s final stanzas insist on overcoming racial and cultural difference, I will offer a model of reading that dwells in the difficulty that precedes that overcoming, exploring the uses of both protest and poetry. 

Jacqueline Campbell is a PhD candidate in English at Princeton University. Her dissertation, “Preparation for Action: The Poetry of Muriel Rukeyser,” explores the social function of poetry in the thought and writing of 20th century American poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser.

Jacqueline (Jackie; she/hers) is the organizer of this panel. She can be reached at jmc11@princeton.edu, jmc5564@gmail.com, or (610) 653-0321.

Vivian Pollak’s books include Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender, The Erotic Whitman, and Our Emily Dickinsons: American Women Poets and the Intimacies of Difference, which was nominated for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. In 2020, she published Muriel Rukeyser: The Contemporary Reviews, 1935-1980, an open access bibliography with electronic links when available. Her essay on “Walt Whitman and Muriel Rukeyser Among the Jews” is forthcoming in the Oxford Walt Whitman Handbook, and she is putting finishing touches on an essay for the Cambridge History of Queer American Literature, titled “Queer Mythologies from Whitman to Frost.” Vivian Pollak is professor emerita at Washington University in St. Louis and a former president of the Emily Dickinson International Society.

“What are all his escapes for?”: Making Sense of Muriel Rukeyser’s Houdini

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Dear Reader,

In what follows, I have tried to offer a careful reading of Muriel Rukeyser’s 1973 version of Houdini: A Musical, published by Paris Press in 2002. This is the version new audiences will soon encounter together during the four public Houdini events sponsored by the Eastern Michigan University Center for Jewish Studies and the English Department this spring. My goal was to strike at some of the play’s most central questions, to pick up on some of the ambiguities and ideas that might appeal to new and not-so-new readers alike. My own reading grew from the question Marco Bone asks in the play’s final scene: “What are all his escapes for?” We might also ask: What is art for?

At the end of this essay, you will find a few questions intended to spark conversation as well as a find from the archive. There must be many more questions I’m missing––I hope you’ll tell me about them.

Cheers, Jackie

*

Houdini is an odd play. Serious and silly, bawdy and surreal, this loosely biographical musical about the life of the great American escape artist seems to wink at its audience, asking us to join in on a joke we don’t always get. Over the course of two acts we watch Harry Houdini rise from poverty, find love, master his craft, and gain international acclaim. We see him break locks, escape trunks, evade death in a frozen river, and testify against fraudulent mediums in a congressional hearing. He exerts perfect control over his body and all his fears. Then, when Houdini appears at his most unstoppable, this self-made man suddenly dies, punched in the gut by a trio of medical students. When he speaks from beyond the grave in the play’s final lines, he commands the audience to liberate themselves, to “Open yourself, for we are locks / Open each other, we are keys”––right before making what might be an innuendo (“Touch yourself as I touch myself”). Is this a hero’s journey? A love story? A farce? 

Houdini is a story about art. It is an exploration of the role artists play in society, an examination of the artist’s power to change their audience and the conditions of our shared world––and the limits of that same power. I know that sounds like a bit of a stretch. Isn’t this a story about a magician? More importantly, isn’t this a story about self-liberation, a story that can inspire us to free our bodies, psyches, and imaginations? The answer is: Yes, Houdini is all of those things. But it’s essential to step back and ask why a magician might be qualified to teach us anything about how to live in the first place, and I want to suggest that the play is uniquely aware of that strange tension: the delightful and sometimes untenable absurdity of calling a showman an artist. Even if you can accept that Houdini is an artist and not just an entertainer, a more troubling possibility remains: the possibility that even artists can’t do much to change a world riddled with injustice and inequality. Houdini does it anyway.

What makes Houdini’s performances an enduring art––not just fleeting entertainment? We can begin by looking at the play’s ambiguous setting and time. Rukeyser’s final 1973 version of the play, published by Paris Press in 2002, includes the following notes: “The time is the legendary past of circuses, carnivals, and magic acts. Historically, the first quarter of the twentieth century, slides to the present time.” The real Erik Weisz was born in 1874 and died in 1926. If the “present time” denotes 1973, the year the play was staged by the Lenox Center for the Performing Arts, then it is clear that even “historical” time is not quite historical here. The world of Houdini is curiously devoid of the major events and crises of the 20th century: There are no World Wars, economic booms or busts, protests, or unrest. Even the congressional hearing in Act Two, Scene Three, which includes material taken directly from Houdini’s Testimony Hearing on House Resolution 8989, seems to float unhinged from the events of the day. While many contemporary readers remember Rukeyser as a Thirties documentarian, this play, completed toward the end of her life, is explicitly not a documentary about the life of Erik Weisz. Rather, Rukeyser sought to create a mythic, “legendary” world that could endure beyond Houdini’s lifetime and her own––even if the details are not entirely true. 

Freed from the confines of historical accuracy, the play strives to reveal some other kind of truth: a truth that only Houdini can show us. In the first scene, Houdini and Bess share their first date. They are walking along a Coney Island beach full of lovers, tourists, tricksters, and grifters when Houdini lets his future wife in on a secret: how to pick up needles with your eyelids. “You control your muscles,” he explains, “And you control your fear. Now you know all.” Suddenly Bess sees Harry as much more than a skilled entertainer:

          You could do anything.
          (The people on the beach are still for a moment.)
          Look––they’re stones, they’re statues of themselves. 
          You can see what they need.
          Look––we could have a mind-reading act.
          Harry––if you bend over me, they’ll think we’re kissing.
          Look––if you could stand up now and say to them:
          “My fear––look what I do with it!”

“Somebody like you,” she tells him, “you could lead them along.” What Bess sees in Houdini is not just the ability to stage a great act, but to “lead them along”: to teach audiences how to be human. Without Houdini the people on the beach are just “stones” and “statues of themselves.” They are not living––or at least not living in a meaningful way. Yet for Houdini the meaningful life is an autonomous one. Through the practice of intense personal discipline, through mastery over his own body and emotions, Houdini transforms his fear into power. He submits to no authority other than his own. Audiences, Bess believes, can learn to do the same. 

Yet the play also casts some deep doubt on the extent of Houdini’s powers. In Act One, Scene Three, Houdini performs his first big lock-breaking act: He opens all the locks in the “city jail,” ushers the prisoners out of their cells, then locks each man into a new one. Throughout the stunt, Houdini asks what kind of crime each man has committed. One prisoner answers, with an odd nonchalance: “Child-knifer… Cop-killer. Mass-rapist. Nothing much.” When the momentarily freed Fourth Prisoner asks Houdini “Can you get me out of here?” Houdini, “looking at him in despair,” only answers “No.” When the trick is done, Houdini turns to the prisoners and says, “Forgive me.” The jail scene ends with a song, “Hostility,” sung by the prisoners, who are divided into the “Black Prisoner,” the lead singer, and “Prisoners,” the ensemble. The “Black Prisoner” sings:

          The man who opened my prison door
          Has put me back in jail.
          No chance to plead my innocence,
          Or get out of here on bail.
          Someone showed me free,
          And drove me deeper in my misery.

These characters do not reappear in the play, and Houdini never again apologizes to anyone involved in his act. The jail scene marks a strange divergence in what is otherwise a story of triumph. Confronted with systemic racism and mass incarceration, Houdini’s powers of self-liberation seem to have reached a hard limit. Perhaps these are conditions of confinement that cannot be overcome. 

At the outset of Act Two, Scene Two, as Houdini prepares to take the stage, his assistant Marco Bone and his wife Bess sing his opening act, a song called “What the King Said”:

          Today your ambassador said in fun,
          “Things are tough in Washington––
          Let’s go see what Houdini has done.”
          With all the forms of American rape,
          We need a good all-purpose escape,  
          An all-purpose good economy escape…
          Every president and king
          Must be able to get out of everything… 

“What the King Said” may be a satire, but the song still raises the possibility that Houdini’s act is futile––and maybe even counterproductive. When viewed by people in positions of power, Houdini’s illusions are entertainment and escapism at best (“Things are tough in Washington–– / Let’s go see what Houdini has done”). At worst, they offer a lesson in how to deepen injustice and inequality (“Every president and king / Must be able to get out of everything.”). Lying, fraud, negligence: These are all forms of “escape,” too. The song’s second verse imagines a king speaking to “Houdini the Great,” saying, “You can have all your locks and clocks / As long as I’m in the royal box.” Just as the prisoners can’t use Houdini’s message of self-liberation to actually get out of their cells, so too are the “ambassadors” in Washington and the king in his court unchanged by the performance. For those in the lowest and the highest positions of power, life goes on just as before. Perhaps artists are only free to create so long as they make sure not to threaten the dominant power structure. 

Again and again, the play pushes against the limits of freedom, only to suddenly sweep those limits away, suggesting that anything is possible. We might wonder if the play truly believes its own message. Take, for example, Act One, Scene Four, when Houdini sings “Chains, Freedom, Keys,” the play’s most memorable expression of his belief: that freedom is accessible to everyone, everywhere. Moments before a shackled Houdini is lowered beneath the frozen surface of the East River, about to perform the most dangerous escape of the play, he sings: 

          There are chains––
          There is freedom––
          There are keys––
          And of these, chains are strong
          Freedom’s endless, keys are great
          And we
          Are the greatest of these,
          The greatest 
          Of these.

In the world of Houdini, individuals have the ability to free themselves from suffering––if not from the structural conditions of suffering (like being incarcerated or impoverished), than from the psychic ones (like feeling weak or afraid). No longer reliant on supernatural authorities like God or the spirits of the dead, and perhaps powerless to intervene in the workings of the state, individuals can essentially make the best of what they’ve got: their own bodies, minds, and emotions. This way of thinking might reflect the therapeutic language of self-help, the corporatized technospeak of self-optimization, or even the alienating consequences of capitalism itself. Yet Houdini’s claims about personal autonomy might also stake out a powerful bid for individual agency in a world that would otherwise render its inhabitants completely powerless. The play’s persistent ambiguity won’t let us say for sure.

When Houdini’s claims cross over into the unbelievable, it’s often the wry assistant Marco Bone who plays the naysayer. After the second verse of “Chains, Freedom, Keys” concludes, “There are keys–– / And the greatest of these / Can free the world,” Bone cuts in with a skeptical accusation: “You’re telling them something they want to hear.” Why should anyone trust a promise of world liberation made by an entertainer, by someone who tells audiences “something they want to hear” and gets paid for it? We can read Bone’s skepticism as part of the play’s larger pattern in which claims about art’s power to transform society are constantly met with flashes of doubt and resistance. Yet this pattern is also marked by the swiftness––the sometimes baffling and even awkward speed––with which those doubts are cast aside. When Houdini replies, “I’m just doing it,” Bone is instantly convinced (“You’re saying it. With yourself!”) and the scene shifts to the news of Houdini’s mother’s death. The point is not to say that Houdini is inconsistent, but that the play’s constantly shifting tone forces its viewers to continually ask ourselves what we’re willing to believe. Can self-liberators really “free the world”? Are Houdini’s promises true, or are they just the rhetoric of the ultimate showman? And why does the play so playfully avoid answering its own questions? 

Houdini refuses to pin down the precise meaning of freedom or the function of art. Yet there is one thing the play might know for sure: That artworks, regardless of what they do or what they’re for, endure. In the play’s final scene, just before Houdini dies, he promises Bess, “I’ll come back to you. I’ll make a way. I’ll come back.” Here Marco Bone, the skeptic, makes his final interjection:

Read your newspaper. The law against fortune-tellers? Of course, it did not go through. Tell your fortune, ladies and gentlemen? What are all his escapes for? What did he make his stand for? Go further, you say? Does Houdini go further? Breaking out forever? 

Beatrice waits for a word from Harry.

Bone finally asks the play’s central question: “What are all his escapes for?” It’s important to note that this question comes in the midst of Houdini’s failure to enact tangible political change. Houdini’s efforts to pass “the law against fortune-tellers,” the crusade against false mediums that occupied the majority of Act Two, “did not go through.” Here the play reaches a tipping point: If we are to believe that Houdini’s “escapes” matter, that they will make an impact on society regardless of what’s written into the law, then he needs to achieve immortality through some other means. One way out of this conundrum is to prove that Houdini does in fact have supernatural powers. “Breaking out forever,” the escape from death, would be Houdini’s biggest stunt yet. Yet the fact that Houdini even raises the possibility of a ghostly return seems to contradict his entire life’s work. Why would he promise a supernatural intervention if he believed that spiritualists were frauds? 

As “Beatrice waits for a word from Harry,” the stage directions tell us that “something does come, a message in the form of a song.” Houdini then reappears on stage beside his wife and sings a fragment of an earlier song, “Let Me See, Let Me Feel”: “Let me see, Let me feel, / Let me know what is real, / Let me believe––” An ensemble of naysayers raise their final doubts: “If you believe that, you’ll believe anything. / It didn’t even sound like his voice.” Is this song sung by a ghostly voice, or is it just a memory in Bess’ mind? Did Houdini really escape death, “breaking out forever”? The stage goes dark. When Houdini emerges again, this time the stage directions make clear that he is about to break the fourth wall and address the audience directly: “Singing, crowing, laughing, a chaos of noise. HOUDINI steps out of the blackness to the point closest to the audience.” It is at this point in the play––the point when we are asked to believe the impossible––that Rukeyser subtly reminds us that we are watching a play. Erik Weisz was a man, but Harry Houdini was a character he played, and Houdini is a character in this play. He is on a stage. In front of an audience. If he is alive after death it is because the play itself is giving him life––or a particular view on a life, shaped by the vision of Muriel Rukeyser. Whenever the play is staged, they both, in a way, return. The play itself is the “actual magic.”

Perhaps what Rukeyser wants us to see is that the encounter with art––with music, poetry, theater––is very much like the supernatural. Perhaps artworks cast a spell so powerful we cannot fully know or explain how they work. We should certainly try. But just as we cannot know exactly why poems or songs or even musicals move us exactly the way they do, we also cannot predict what their effects in the world will be. The work of artists might be ignored or lost. These works might be co-opted and abused by the powerful, or they might offer consolation and inspiration for the powerless. They might change one person’s life or society at large––for better or for worse. The artist’s desire to create goes on regardless, but why? Houdini’s playfulness, irreverence, and sheer strangeness speak to the unanswerable nature of these questions. Rukeyser would have wanted us to keep asking them anyway.  

*

Questions to consider:

  1. How would you describe the experience of reading, hearing, and seeing Houdini? I have used words like “strange,” “surreal,” “inconsistent,” and “ambiguous,” but these are my responses and interpretations. Which words would you choose? 
  2. Houdini continually asks its audience to question what they are and are not willing to believe. Which moments in this play feel impossible to you? Do you find these moments intriguing, exciting, frustrating, confusing? Why? 
  3. What really happens in the play’s final scene? Does Houdini return? Whose voice does Bess hear? Why does it matter?
  4. At the end of this essay, I suggest that “the play itself is the ‘actual magic’.” But is art really magic? Or like magic? And what does “actual magic” really mean?
  5. Attached to this post you will find a letter Rukeyser sent to an unnamed recipient, likely Lyn Austin (Houdini’s Producer) and André Gregory, on August 1, 1973. After the initial production of Houdini in July 1973, Austin and Gregory requested that she rewrite the play’s second act in anticipation of an additional (though never staged) production in 1975. Here you can find Rukeyser’s notes on Act Two, including some uncertainties and possible revisions. How do these notes affect your understanding of the play? For example, why does the shift in music after “What the King Said” matter so much? Why are the “storm of light” and the “yellow curtain” called “big clues”? Why should the words “SELF-LIBERATOR” remain unsaid?

Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Library of Congress, Box II:13, Folder 11, Plays, Houdini, 1944-54, 1969-74, n.d. Posted with permission of William L Rukeyser.

Jackie Campbell is a PhD candidate in English at Princeton University. Her dissertation, Preparation for Action: The Poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, explores the social function of poetry in the thought and writing of 20th century poet and political activist Muriel Rukeyser. 

A Conversation about Muriel Rukeyser and Harry Houdini

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Between

Carolyn S. Stroebe, Ph.D., Licensed Psychologist (#PSY11564) in Berkeley & author of Muriel Rukeyser, Strength and Weakness.

And

Elisabeth Däumer, Professor of English and Women’s & Gender Studies and Administrator of  Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive at at Eastern Michigan University.

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-80)/ Harry Houdini (1874-1926)

Important Note: Passages taken from Dr. Stroebe’s book, Muriel Rukeyser, Strength and Weakness and from unpublished interviews or other material are in quotes and italicized. The primary interview featured here was with Muriel Rukeyser (and Professor Frank Barron) at a private home on Union Street in San Francisco, California, on the afternoon of 30 July 1979.

CS:  Professor Däumer, Elisabeth – Congratulations on producing Houdini!  And soon!

And thank you!

ED:  Yes, it’s happening! Thanks to a generous grant from Michigan Humanities–an affiliate of the National Endowment of the Humanities–as well as EMU’s Center for Jewish Studies (which means my colleague Marty Shichtman) and the English Department. (http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/locks-keys-freedom-muriel-rukeysers-houdini-and-the-public-role-of-poetry/)

CS:  I found the New York Times article announcing the first and only earlier production in 1973 starring a 30 year old Christopher Walken.  So this production of yours – a celebration as we near its 50th anniversary?  Half a century.

ED: Yes…we’re doing four staged readings of the play, or rather musical. And a virtual conversation, via zoom webinar, on Rukeyser and Houdini with two terrific speakers: Jan Freeman, who edited and published the play in 2002, and Stefania Heim who is the first to analyze the composition of the play.  They are going to be joined by Houdini expert Matthew Solomon, who has written on Houdini and the new magic of silent movies.

CS: That’s great!  Let me calendar all of those immediately!

ED: This webinar will take place at 11am on March 20 and should be of special interest to Rukeyser aficionados, since Houdini has garnered too little attention—so far! So we’re very excited and hope lots of people will attend the staged reading (we’re planning to live stream the first on March 20, 2pm) and the zoom webinar.

CS:  If it weren’t for my extreme Covid cautiousness I would fly out for the opening performance.  I have lots of questions for you about the play and what it suggests about Muriel. I am so grateful that we are an interdisciplinary team.  You are the Literature and Women’s & Gender Studies Professor and I, a Clinical/Personality Psychologist, albeit one blessed to have interviewed Muriel shortly before her death. And what we do we have in common?  We are both in love with Muriel!

ED: Carolyn,  since you are in such a unique position and of interdisciplinary status – could you introduce yourself a bit more – for example, how  did you come to interview Muriel Rukeyser?

CS: Muriel participated in a study of creative writers in 1958 at the University of California, Berkeley.  Professor Frank Barron, my mentor and dissertation chair in graduate school, in 1979, at UC Santa Cruz, was in charge of the files of these writers. Each student in Frank’s 1979 Graduate Personality Assessment Seminar chose a writer upon whom to focus.  Hearing Muriel’s name, I recalled a favorite poem written by her, so guess who I chose?

ED: Muriel, of course!

I’d love to know more about Barron and the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research in Berkeley.  Another time!

CS: Deal! I dedicated my 2021 book to the memory of Muriel and Frank – stars of creativity in both the 20th and 21st centuries.  Anyway, Muriel just happened to be visiting San Francisco in the summer of 1979 and Frank arranged for the two of us to interview her; that interview, the 1958 case files, and other material formed the basis of my Master of Science Thesis on route to the Ph.D.  Then, as you know, Muriel died in early 1980. I had been considering other topics for my doctoral dissertation, but it seemed timely to continue studying Muriel by interviewing people who knew her well, while they were still alive.  And so I did, mostly in New York City.  I recently published the 1982 dissertation – forty years later as an e-book and paperback – hard cover on the way! I was then a Personality Research Psychologist.  I didn’t  become a clinician until retraining years later.  Currently I am a Licensed Psychologist with three decades of experience – and I now come to the case of Muriel, much more prepared to understand this complicated woman; although as we’ve discussed, Muriel is a mystery to some degree, to everyone who encounters her.

ED:  Yes, she certainly is!  By the way, I tend to think of and refer to her as Muriel Rukeyser; I’ve noticed you refer to her as Muriel, relatively informally. 

CS: Hmm.…a thought-provoking observation!  I hadn’t even realized that, but it’s true. Thank you because I pride myself on having good professional boundaries and being polite, respectful and appropriate.  Let me think….

First, I may be wrong but it might be that Psychologists tend to be comparatively less formal, and certainly we were in Santa Cruz.  I addressed Professor Barron as Frank and he called me Carolyn.  By 1979, Muriel and Frank had known one another for over 20 years, so they were on a first-name basis.  There was no suggestion on anyone’s part to do otherwise. In fact, at the end of the afternoon, Muriel and Frank, and Muriel and I exchanged a hug and a kiss.  After Muriel died and I began doing interviews with family and close friends on very personal, psychological topics, this informal style continued. Actually, I ‘m now referring to Houdini as Harry; maybe informality in a Muriel context is as contagious as Omicron.

ED:  Thanks for this explanation. So, what do you see as the clearest connection between Houdini and Muriel and what’s your take on why she chose to write this play?

CS: Well, I think the most dominant theme you and I have discussed is Muriel’s and Houdini’s shared fascination: becoming captive with the challenge of escaping, combined with an eventual successful escape.  I know the topic came up when I asked Muriel about her “jail time” during my 1979 interview.  What do you think, Elisabeth?

ED: I think the idea of IMPRISONMENT is an important context – one that Houdini and Muriel had in common.  Muriel felt imprisoned in her home, family, even country. 

CS: Wow.  Even country…

ED: Here’s a line from “This House, This Country” written in 1935:  “I have left forever / house and maternal river / given up sitting in that private tomb / quitted that land   that house   that velvet room.”  

CS:  Tell me more about her feeling imprisoned in her country.

ED: Well, “land” could mean a number of things in this poem, but if we take it as referring to the United States of America, a country that Rukeyser also had fervently idealistic feelings toward, I think of her experiences as a left-leaning, rebellious, young, queer, and Jewish woman, eager to spread her wings, to challenge political and aesthetic orthodoxies, to find her vocation, her voice—and that’s what she did when she went to Spain in 1936.

CS: So Interesting.  And what of Muriel’s fascination with Houdini, the man? In psychological terms I believe she identified with him. It might easily have been the other way around but Harry was born first and died when Muriel was only 12!

CS & ED: (Laughter!!!!). 

CS: Yes, Harry died in 1926 –  but there was so much Houdini activity in the New York City in which Muriel grew up. And what a legend he created – that lasted through her lifetime.  

So, identification – in personality and poetry – what else about Muriel’s interest in Harry?

ED: She could have mentioned him in “Waterlily Fire,” with Gyp the Blood, perhaps—but she doesn’t! The first written evidence of Muriel’s interest in Houdini came in in 1939, in a poem entitled “Speech for the Assistant, from Houdini.” None of the lines from that poem show up in the play, but I think it points us to an important historical and emotional context for Rukeyser’s Houdini fixation–the rise of fascism, the persecution of European Jews and other people declared ‘subhuman’ for reasons of race, sexuality, religion.  So, in my mind, Rukeyser turned to Houdini as a Jew who overcame his impoverished immigrant background and became a celebrity, a superhero challenging institutional authority and fighting the forces of fascism. 

CS: I love that superhero image – subhuman to superhero.

ED:  You make me curious about the 70s context of Rukeyser’s interest in Houdini as well.

CS: Well… I’m looking at Louise Kertesz’s pathbreaking The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser, specifically at her chronology – and I see what surrounds the 1973 production of Houdini: Muriel had gone to jail for protesting in Washington DC in 1972  and published her book of poetry, Breaking Open, in 1973.  Two years later she traveled to protest imprisonment of Kim Chi-Ha in Korea.  And, then, of course there was Scottsboro back in 1933 – so throughout her life, this theme.  Elisabeth– Do we know when Muriel actually wrote Houdini?

ED: Archival evidence suggests that she worked on the play, on and off, for three decades.

CS: I guess the legend DID last a lifetime!

ED: The version that got published by Paris Press in 2002 is based on revisions she made after the Lenox production in 1973.  Allen Hughes, reviewing the performance on opening night for the New York Times found the musical “pointed and forceful in the first act, aimless and weak in the second.”

CS: Did she make many revisions and what kinds of  revisions did she make?

ED: That I don’t know yet—but I am eager to find out.  The archive will tell us!  Fortunately, we’ll have Stefania Heim and Jan Freeman as webinar speakers on March 20.  They’ll enlighten us!

CS:  Wonderful!  So . . . Related to the themes of imprisonment and breaking free in Muriel’s life and work and in the play . . . Shall I read some from my 1979 interview that involves these?

ED: Please do.

CS:  Ok.  I had asked Muriel to tell me about the experience of prison in Washington D.C. in 1972.  Here is her reply:

[Muriel] “…Well in the beginning it was a refusal to do anything else; the judge wanted me to pay instead of going to prison.  And I said that there wasn’t anything that money could do.  It wouldn’t say what I wanted to say, and that it would be better if I went to prison.  And I was handcuffed then, and taken across the street to the jail and put in with . . . a lot of women . . . Mostly a black jail, with black guards . . . And I came in under very favorable conditions, because I hadn’t been taken into jail the day that I appeared.  They weren’t ready for me.  And they hadn’t prepared the papers. So, they said to come back the next day.  And I went to the motel, and I stayed there.  I didn’t phone people, or anything.  Because I was supposed to be in jail.  And they had run a story on the front page of the STAR about me pulling some lines from the Scottsboro poem.  And it was that that saved me because that reached the jail before I got there.  And when I got there they asked me “Was (that?) you the poet?” . . . mostly negro women.  It was a jail for prowlers and for whoring.  Those were the main crimes.  And there were a few white women, two white women, mostly in jail for absconding with funds . . . and they tried to break me into the con game.  They said I’d be good.”

CS:      The three of us had a good laugh about this  – and then she continued…

            [Muriel]“…and I was flattered that they were willing to break me in.” 

CS:      And when asked if she had been in jail before Muriel responded:

            [Muriel} “That’s one of the questions that I can’t answer “yes” or “no” to, because I was arrested when I was nineteen at Scottsboro.  And there wasn’t any room in the jail because it was full of Scottsboro boys.  I wasn’t in jail but I should have been.”

CS:      So, Muriel seems to feel she deserved to go to jail and also to really have wanted to go to jail – and she seems to have welcomed the handcuffs as an honor . . . just as Houdini – in the play – according to Beatrice, in Act One/Scene Two, Harry … “LIKES BEING LOADED DOWN AND CONFINED. HE LIKES EVEN MORE TO BREAK OUT.”

            And as with Muriel and those who wanted to break her into the con game, Whitsun in the play wants to teach Beatrice to become a pick pocket. He says  “TO BE AT THE TENT FLAP WHILE THE CROWD IS COMING IN. SOMETIMES THERE’S QUITE A BIT OF CASH…”. And Epictetus suggests “WELL,THEY’VE GOT POCKETS–? LOVELY AND DEEP.”

ED: That’s marvelous! I love these passages from your interview! But the reference to Scottsboro is also perplexing.  I thought she contracted typhus while in jail! So, what are we to believe?

CS: Excellent question!  Remember I am a scientist. Psychological data is always tricky but exponentially so with our Muriel!  As one of my interviewees said “you could have chosen much easier characters to study . . . there are so many inconsistencies and contradictions in the things I am saying to you because that was the way she was . . . some things about her were impossible to explain.”  

Can you say more about Houdini and your changing view of his complexity that you have mentioned?

ED: The more I read about Houdini, the more complex he becomes—not just his relationships to his mother and Bess, and in Rukeyser’s play to his assistant (who I assume is pure invention on Muriel’s part)  but also his vendetta against spiritualism and his simultaneous promise to Bess that if he found a way through from death, he’d let her know (so she held annual séances for ten years after this death). I wonder if Muriel’s own complexity expresses itself through all the characters. She is both Houdini and Bess, perhaps? And Volonty? Perhaps Volonty is who she’d like to be? A high wire artist not constrained by gravity–a sort of female Houdini? Her name, in French–volonté–means “will,” “will power” or “persistence, and also “wish” or “desire.”

 CS: Thank you for hearing Muriel as at least three voices in the play.  In my 1979 interview with Muriel I brought up one of my favorite poems “Effort at Speech Between Two People.” I asked if it was intended to be a monologue or a dialogue. She answered ““Well I think they’re two real voices… but of course they’re both my voice.”  So here is Muriel making actual voices – three or more – in the writing of this play.

ED: Yes.  So, how do you see Muriel’s identification with Houdini?

CS: First, I use the term identification very loosely as a largely unconscious process when one associates oneself closely with another’s characteristics, profession, points-of-view and/or  behaviors. Beyond what we’ve already discussed – that both Muriel and Harry were European Jews, and escape artists, entertainers and illusionists, here are a few more commonalities. Both were leaders–organizers–presidents! Harry for the Society of American Magicians and Muriel for American P.E.N.  Curiously both were interested in aviation–in the early 20th century!  Hmm . . . I think of your earlier words about the high wire artist . . .

ED: Yes–Volonty –“not constrained by gravity.”

CS: That’s it!

ED:  It’s interesting to think of Rukeyser as an “escape artist” and an “illusionist.” Perhaps artists, by nature of their craft and passion, become experts at escape? In my mind Rukeyser wasn’t interested in escapes from reality—on the contrary, her art compels us to experience what’s real in a heightened, visceral, and imaginative way. Houdini’s escapes strike me as very down to earth—how to get out of handcuffs, a prison cell, a locked box, a milk can, a straight jacket. These are confines that the people who watched him recognized and perhaps identified with.  I know he was also an illusionist, but in her play Muriel seems more interested in his passion for first locking and then freeing himself.  And this makes me wonder—Rukeyser was often intrigued by the sorts of conventions that can lock us in, as women, above all marriage and motherhood.  She got out of her one marriage after only a few months, and she refused to be limited, in her creative life, by motherhood. That’s quite a feat!

CS: Indeed, Muriel was a superhero! Both Muriel and Harry strike me as strong, high energy people.  Neither fit society’s physical ideal as Muriel was heavy and Houdini was short for a man – but they certainly made up for these superficial qualities by being STRONG.  Harry was very fit and strong physically, as well as in character. And, of course, I see strength in multiple ways as central to Muriel: I titled the book Muriel Rukeyser, Strength and Weakness for a reason!

They were both STRONG: courageous, daring  and rarely if ever outwardly fearful, as well as persistent, persevering and determined — even stubborn.  And, Both were energetic: physically – active, engaged , alert– and energetic emotionally – as enthusiastic and deeply  passionate people. Both were independent – fierce individuals, very intelligent  and highly competent.

ED:  What about weakness?  I know you discuss weakness in Muriel – but how about Houdini?

CS:  A critical question, Elisabeth, for despite all these strengths, their weakness-in-common was their failing to realize they were not 100% superhero – but HUMAN.  Both neglected their health and this played a role in both of their deaths—which were early deaths —  Muriel at age 66 and Harry at 52.  According to some of my dissertation interviewees, Muriel had many health concerns which she ignored. She refused to do what her doctors advised and actually fired some who wanted her to do what she did not wish to do. For example, she failed to take proper care of her diabetes including refusing to take insulin. She would attend events and travel when it was ill advised.  One such occasion was “A day in honor of Muriel Rukeyser” at Sarah Lawrence: she attended when she should have been resting and collapsed at the end of the day and had to be hospitalized.   

ED:  I’ve heard about that and there was a similar situation for Houdini who could not complete his last performance.  I know he died of an appendicitis or its complications.

CS: Exactly. Peritonitis or an inflamed abdomen, secondary to a ruptured appendix.  Harry had developed excruciating pain but insisted on going “on with the show” and refused to see a doctor. When he finally did, he was diagnosed with an acute appendicitis and advised to have surgery immediately. Ignoring this,  he went on,  struggling, with a fever of 104 degrees. By the time the surgery was finally done, his appendix had ruptured and complications which killed him had arisen.

ED:  Since for both of them the body played such a crucial role, it’s puzzling that they did not ‘listen’ to it more . . .

CS:  Sadly so . . .

Returning to the lives of these strong – and weak characters, Elisabeth – could you say more about complexity?  Earlier you said you see Houdini as more complex, the more you learn.

ED: Perhaps a better word than complexity is contradictions.  By all accounts, Houdini was an incredible showman with a gigantic ego and given to hyperbole. He did not just re-invent himself when he morphed from Ehrich Weiss, a poor Hungarian Jewish immigrant, to Harry Houdini. He also invented stories about himself and his exploits—there’s a photo of him as a young man, which shows him with a whole barrage of athletic awards.  Only one of these awards was actually his own. You might say he was a liar. 

CS:  Hmmm . . . a complex relationship to the truth . . .

ED: At the same time, he was intent on exposing mediums and séances as fraud—regardless of the fact that he himself had worked as a medium, which is, of course, how he knew they were fraudulent. The full extent of these contradictions may not have been known when Rukeyser began working on Houdini—or they did not interest her. The contradiction in Houdini’s character that does interest her, very much, is his skill at getting himself out of tight places and his utter inability to break the hold on him of his father and, especially, his mother Cecilia.

CS: I didn’t know his father had a hold on him as well.  Maybe we can take this up in a Part II of this blog? 

        Now I would like to discuss our complicated Muriel.

ED:  Yes.

CS: On our Zooms, you and I look at one another and smile when we think of our woman of mystery, Muriel, and her complex and contrasting selves. Muriel could be a performer – even somewhat exhibitionistic–  but she could also be very shy and as if hiding. Muriel and Harry – both illusionists – making an audience believe in magic when there was none really. Making what was but natural look supernatural. The disappearing Elephant was an illusion created with mirrors.  Apparently, the locks on trunks had removeable hinges.

ED: This is a fascinating topic! Houdini insisted he did not have supernatural powers; and he sometimes revealed how he did some of his ‘illusions.’  He insisted that it was all a matter of knowing something about human perception.  I do think there’s something magical about art (and both MR and Houdini were artists), especially its ability to make the imaginary seem as, or even more, real than anything else.

CS: Interesting.

        Well both of them certainly knew how to draw attention to themselves. Let me read from my book:  “Muriel’s habit of and ability to shock and surprise people is the most unusual and mysterious feature in her behavioral repertoire. . . .” During the 1958 study, a psychologist who administered some psychological tests, suggested that Muriel “seeks to surprise people and throw them off balance.” 

        According to my interviewees who knew Muriel well, she would “set up shocking situations so she could sit back and watch the reactions” and “she enjoyed shocking . . . there was a kind of gleam in her eye when she did some of these things. . . .”

ED: Somehow that doesn’t surprise me. She was a modernist, after all! Modernist art sought to shock viewers out of their complacencies, whether ethical or aesthetic—or political!

CS: Oh . . . I see. 

        I have a few stories, circa early-mid 1970’s, about Muriel disappearing into a bathroom or back room in the middle of small dinner parties with another person – apparently for sex.  To add some historical perspective, I used the word “person” in my 1982 work, instead of woman, not wanting to “out” Muriel or her still living, more conservative partner as QUEER: back then, when QUEER was still considered literally queer.  However, two women disappearing for sex in the middle of a straight dinner party would have, unquestionably, been a shock – now nearly a half century ago.

ED:  And you are going to write more, are you not? Forty years later, now a clinical psychologist, about Muriel’s being queer?

CS: I hope to, yes. 

Oh, I wanted to add that Muriel’s surprises were also positive, and were used to make people feel special. During the interview, Frank and I believed she was telling us secrets; these were not  widely known but were not complete secrets either –or something she had not revealed to anyone else.  Apparently because we were psychologists, Muriel said to us “You’ve had the truth all along.  You’ve wanted the truth.”  She spoke of us to her partner who was there that day, as not ordinary, not from a magazine: we were different! Indeed, Frank and I felt very special when we left that afternoon!

ED: I am so intrigued by that. It seems she offered her stories like jewels–special, even intimate, gifts designed to make the recipient feel special and well disposed toward her.

CS:  Yes. 
Before we wrap up, I wanted to share a part in the play which I absolutely love. In Act Two, Scene One, Beatrice asks “What would happen If one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.”

And Harry, a true feminist, at least in Muriel’s play, suggests “It has. Now I’m going after it –all pieces.”

This is a man – although created by a woman – who gets it. And, I love the reappearance of what has become a well-known quote of Muriel’s. Did you know Hillary Clinton uses it in her post 2016 election book, What Happened? (on Page 146).

ED:  I had no idea, but I am not surprised. I think all of us can identify with it.  There is still so much we don’t say about our lives—perhaps don’t know how or don’t dare to say! It’s curious though, isn’t it, that this important comment comes from Bess, whose role in the play pales besides Harry’s—until that one moment, at the very end of Act One, where she let’s loose and gives him a piece of her mind—“What are you trying to do—God Jesus! Killing everything—And the goddamn fucking sun, what about the sunlight?  And me and me?” I look forward to delving into the play’s feminist and queer subtext a bit more in future conversations with you, and with Jan and Stefania—and the audience!

CS: I can’t wait!  And, a perfect note upon which to end.  Thanks so much, Elisabeth, for making this conversation – and this play – possible! 

Please cite this conversation and the quoted material as: Stroebe, Carolyn, and Elisabeth Däumer, “A Conversation about Muriel Rukeyser and Harry Houdini,” http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/2022/02/20/a-conversation-about-muriel-rukeyser-and-harry-houdini-between/.

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Celebrating Muriel Rukeyser’s 108th Birthday: A Collection of Readings

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Enjoy hearing–and viewing–various Muriel Rukeyser poems read, and in one case performed, in the 21st century to celebrate her 108th birthday on December 15, 2021. Submitted readings are from friends, scholars, and admirers of Rukeyser. Thank you to everyone who submitted a reading.

Dennis Bernstein reads and explains the opening of “The Gates.”
Eulalia Basquets reads “Long Past Moncada.”
Karley Misek reads “Powerplant.”
Robin Tremblay-McGaw reads “Poem White Page White Page Poem.”
Charlotte Mandel reads “To be a Jew in the Twentieth Century.”
Christina-Marie Sears performing “Beast in View”
David Villaverde reads “The Road”

Bill Rukeyser, Interviewed by Dennis Bernstein, February 16, 2021, KPFA Flashpoints

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Dennis: It’s a pleasure and an honor to welcome William L. Rukeyser, son of the late poet and biographer, Muriel Rukeyser, who we are honoring, studying, remembering, during this extended two-day webinar at Eastern Michigan University.  Eastern Michigan University is creating an archive for the great work of the biographer and poetry of Muriel Rukeyser.  And her son, William, has agreed to talk a little bit about his mom and what it’s like to grow up as the son of a great poet and a visionary. 

Dennis: So, welcome, William Rukeyser, to “Flashpoints”, and it is very good to have you with us.  And we should let people know that you are the William L. Rukeyser.  There is another William Rukeyser, who was very close to your mom, but we are glad to have you with us.  So, welcome.

Bill: Well, I’m glad to be here with you, Dennis.

Dennis: All right.  Well, why don’t we begin at the beginning.  Tell us a little bit about how you came to understand that your mom was a poet, a famous poet, that a great many people cared about, many loved, and some weren’t crazy about.  Give us some background there.

Bill:  Yeah.  That’s absolutely true.  And obviously, as a kid, as a little kid, I first understood that books were incredibly important in her life, in our lives.  This was – when I was quite young, like three, four, before I understood her relationships with books, I saw them all around.  And I remember, shortly after we moved back to New York City, that we were in a small basement apartment, and it was small enough that she had to, very reluctantly, get rid of many of her books, simply to make space.  And I remember piles of books on the floor, when she was sorting them, and the fact that it was with a good deal of reluctance that she was selling them.  So, that was my first introduction. 

And then, in the next apartment, when we moved out of the basement and were on the first floor in a New York brownstone, what I remember is the huge table, worktable that she had, made out of a door on a couple of sawhorses, and the fact that she spent a lot of time writing.  And back then, a lot of her writing was done in longhand, with an old pen.  I’m not talking about a quill pen, dipping it in ink, but a fountain pen, which, even in the early ‘50s, was something that was going out of style.  But she used a fountain pen with a very distinctive color of ink that she would seek out at stationery stores.  And she would spend a lot of time, working, revising, crossing things out, trying to get the writing just right. 

As far as the fame, that was something that I understood much, much later.  And you have to understand that over the course of her career, she was kinda like Sergeant Pepper’s Band.  She kept going in and out of style.  And frankly, the early ‘50s were not a high point in terms of her public acceptance.  That really was much earlier, when she was in her early 20s.  For a few years, she was like a shooting star.  Then, styles of criticism, currents in politics, wending in other directions, and so, I understood that the writing was important.  I understood that there were vast disappointments in terms of her dealings with publishers. 

And later on, in the ’60s, in the late ‘60s into the ‘70s, as the Women’s Movement gained steam, her career ascended again, in terms of an appreciative audience.  But it was very, very cyclical.  It was something that she dealt with, and she got – like many poets, she wrote from an inner need.  She certainly didn’t write poetry to earn a living.

Dennis:  And talk a little bit about the way in which she considered herself.  You were – it was – she was a single-parent mom.  I’m wondering how that made its way into your life and how that impacted on her writing.

Bill:  Well, I think that the first thing to recognize is that, in the late ‘40s, in even a place like the Bay Area, being a single-parent mom was not a popular choice.  It was not a socially acceptable choice.  She told stories about life during her pregnancy and how very supportive friends of hers – and I’m not talking about people who disapproved of her choice to get pregnant and take it to term, I’m talking about people who were supportive – warned her about the challenges ahead, said, ‘You know, if you decide that this is not the choice for you, we will take care of your baby.  We will adopt your baby, if necessary.’  So, this was not a choice made at one, single time.  It was a choice that was repeatedly made. 

And she had a difficult delivery in Berkeley.  This was a time when mortality among mothers and babies was not unheard of.  It was certainly a lot more common back then, than it is now.  So, these were realities that she dealt with.  The financial realities, I think came as a bit of a shock to her.  And the long hours that a parent would have to put in, especially a single parent, in the years of cloth diapers and formula that you mixed by hand, I think that that was definitely a real challenge, more of a challenge than she had anticipated. 

Luckily, she had good friends in San Francisco, who helped with my upbringing and then, admirers who helped her financially.  And that made a huge difference to her and made a – obviously, an important difference in my life.

Dennis: How did – were you aware of perhaps how this might have affected not just her work but her relationships, say her relationships with her family and her parents?  Was this a part of it?  Did you, at a certain point, become aware of this as perhaps both a problem and an interesting situation? [laughs]

Bill:  Absolutely.  She came from a family which had been quite prosperous when she was young, that was hit by the crash of 1929 and some economic ups and downs that preceded that, in the construction business and the real estate business of New York City, which is what her father was involved in.  And if people take a look at her literary style or her politics or both and don’t know about her upbringing, it may come as quite a surprise, but her parents were both politically and culturally quite conservative.  She thought of them as very unsupportive, although in retrospect their choices of where to send her to school, their choices in terms of helping out at difficult points in her early life, may not support that view entirely.

Dennis:  You know, there’s a – I’m blanking on the name.  It has ‘Quarry’ in it, but the – in the first – in the first book of poems that won the Yale Younger Poets Series, there’s this incredible poem about her, with her father, at  —

Bill:  And her father, at a Long Island quarry, I believe you’re referring to [crosstalk]

Dennis:   — can you tell me the story of that?  Yes.

Bill:  Sure.  Her father, my grandfather, came from Milwaukee, and, like a lot of people in the late 19th century and very early 20th century, moved to New York to seek their fortune, if not their fame.  And he ran into an Italian immigrant, and between them, with some ideas of business and with a few resources, like a horse-drawn wagon and connections to quarrying men, got into the sand and gravel business and later expanded to get into the ready-mix concrete business.  And the company was Colonial Stone and Gravel.  And this was the time when New York was shooting skyward, and concrete was a very important part of the construction business. 

It was also a time of a lot of municipal projects.  And one of the business skills that these two guys had was knowing exactly who to bribe in the New York City government and how much it would take to keep them bribed.  And that led to all sorts of municipal contracts.  One of the benefits was that if you altered the mix of the ready-mix concrete, just a little bit, you could build on – you can bid on the same job three or five years later, because you’d assure the – yourself that the concrete would crumble during that time, and they would have to rebuild whatever street or dock you had bid on originally. 

So, in terms of money, things were very good for the Rukeyser family in the 19-teens and ‘20s.  A cousin of ours, who was the father of Louis Rukeyser and the – really, the Louis Rukeyser of American media in the 1930s, his name was Merryle Rukeyser, once said, ‘The only thing that surprised me about your grandfather was that he died in bed.’  His partner was, if not a made man, at least had a lot of associates in the Mob.  And so, the combination of knowing who to bribe, knowing enforcers if bribes didn’t work, made them very successful economically. 

One day, my grandfather went into work, and his partner said to him, ‘We’re buying you out.’  And it was not an offer.  It was not a question.  It was a statement, and he was smart enough to simply pick up the box that had been left on his desk, walk out of the office, and never look back.  Things could’ve ended up quite differently. 

But in any case, getting back to – that’s a long digression.  Getting back to your question about single parenthood and how it affected her relations with her family, not well.  She made up stories about why there wasn’t a father on the scene.  I don’t think that her parents believed her.  Things were quite frosty, for years.  And things were different with her younger sister, who – they had a quite interesting relationship.  They in some ways resembled each other, in some ways were quite different and quite competitive and chose different vectors in their lives. 

But what interested me and my cousin, my mother’s sister’s daughter, was the fact that my mother decided to get pregnant almost at the same time that her sister had her first child.  So, you know, in terms of whether this was sisterly competition or simply emulation, we couldn’t speculate on that.  But it was certainly a factor.  And her sister was on Manhattan, and when we moved to New York, they were much more important in each other’s lives than my grandparents were in my mother’s life.

Dennis: And you’re listening to an interview with William L. Rukeyser.  That’s the son of the late poet and biographer, Muriel Rukeyser.  He is a part of this beautiful webinar being organized at Eastern Michigan University.  And they are creating an archive to the late and great poet and biographer, Muriel Rukeyser, and this is a part of that honoring of her work.  Let me ask you this.  Did she consider herself a feminist, a political poet?  What was her response when people sort of wanted to – like myself, wanted that — for me, she was at first a political poet, an activist.  But how did she think about that, in terms of her own life?

Bill: Yeah.  And of course, you knew her in her last years.  Obviously, the Civil Rights experience was fresh in people’s minds.  The Vietnam War experience was very fresh as well.  So, I think, in a lot of ways, she was viewed through a political lens.  She had just been the head of the PEN American Center and in that role had gone to South Korea, because of a political prisoner, who was also a poet or a poet who was also a prisoner, because of his political writing.  And of course, she wrote about politics or politically related things during her entire career, some decades more so than others, and she was active politically. 

But in terms of how she thought of herself, she definitely resisted labels and resisted categorization.  And I think even more than she actually felt, she would verbally resist or downplay categorization.  Was she a feminist writer?  Clearly, she was a feminist writer.  Was she political?  Absolutely.  You know, she broke ground in terms of writing about personal life and sexuality, things that were startling in the ‘30s and ‘40s.  But she absolutely resisted categorization. 

And she also resisted what I think of as ‘office politics’, within the poetry world.  And she did so to such an extent that it probably cost her, in terms of the associations that a lot of creative people depend on, if not emotionally and intellectually, at least to get their careers on a smooth track.  Her career was not one that followed a smooth track.

Dennis: I remember I [laughs] – I asked her the question once, right after – I guess it was right after she came back from Korea, and she was working on “The Gates” or had just finished “The Gates”.  And I said, ‘Are you a political poet?’ [laughs] And she said something [laughs] I’m not sure I still understand.  She said, ‘Well, let me ask you this, Dennis.  When the athletes in 1968 raised their fists above their heads in the Black Power salute, were they athletes or political people?’ [laughs]

Bill: Yeah.  That – that sounds like a very typical answer from her.  I’m not surprised.

Dennis: Let me jump ahead a little bit here.  You mentioned the politics and the other things.  I wanna – a core at the center of her life was went down to join the Republicans and stand against the Fascists in Spain.  Did she ever talk about that to you?  What – from your perspective, what did that mean to her, that journey?

Bill: It was an incredibly important experience that stuck with her in her entire life.  And she actually had gone to Spain on assignment from an English magazine.  She was dispatched before the Civil War began, and the reason that she was sent to Barcelona was because this was the summer of ’36, when the Nazis were hosting the Olympics in Berlin.  And a number of countries, including this one, had talked about boycotting the Nazi Olympics.  Unfortunately, we did not, but a number of individual athletes, primarily Leftists, were not going to Berlin.  They went to join what was referred to as the Popular Olympiad in Barcelona, organized by the Catalan government that year. 

So, she was going to report on this Olympiad, which was gonna include athletics, cultural events, a number of things, which would be all over Barcelona that summer.  Well, the Popular Olympics never occurred, because the Fascists attempted a coup, which was resisted.  And that resulted in the Spanish Civil War.  So, she was actually in far Northern Catalonia, the day that the Civil War began.  She got to observe some of the initial combat in what was then the countryside, now really the suburbs of Barcelona.  She got stuck there with this train that had had its locomotive taken away from it for several days.  Finally, a Leftist group organized a convoy of trucks and took the passengers into Barcelona, and she got to observe the first days of the fighting there. 

And one story that she always told was going to the U.S. Consulate and asking for assistance, because, you know, that’s what the foreigners were doing.  The British people on the train went to the English Consulate, and they said, ‘Yeah.  There will be a Royal Navy ship to take you out.’  And she told the story of going to the U.S. Consulate, and the Consul there said, ‘Well, I can give you a Letter of Safe Conduct.’  And she said, you know, ‘Well, what does that do?’  And she wasn’t the only American asking for help.  It didn’t do anything.  ‘We’ll give you a piece of paper.’ 

And luckily, she had met some Belgians on the train, and they said, ‘Our government is chartering a ship.’  It was the “Ciudad de Ibiza”.  She never forgot the name of the ship.  The Belgians had chartered this Spanish ship.  They loaded all the Belgians who wanted to go.  There was still room.  She got on the “Ciudad de Ibiza”, and it went up the coast to the first French port north of the border.  The six or seven days that she was there, at the beginning of the war, incredibly important, a life-changing experience for her.  She wrote about it, a poem and a thinly disguised memoir, which was listed as a novel. 

But it remained an important turning point for her life.  It energized her politically.  She clearly saw the Spanish Civil War as a dress rehearsal for World War II, and she – you know, it remained a major event for her.  I can recall, in the early ‘60s, traveling with her.  She went to that little port in Southern France called Sette [sounds like] and visited places she had seen in 1936.  We drove down to the Spanish border.  She refused to go across.  It was still when Franco was ruling Spain. 

She was friends with Spanish exiles.  She collaborated on a book with an Austrian artist who fought in the Civil War.  She knew a number of people who had fought on the Republican side.  Coincidentally, one of my best friends in high school was the son of a minister from the Spanish Republican government, who went into exile in New York City.  So, it was clearly a defining point for her that she carried with her for her entire life.

Dennis: Is that where she met and became friends with Pablo Neruda, or was that later on?  Because this certainly was a part of his life as well.

Bill: No, I – I don’t believe so.  And I really would have to check the records.  I know that she was a great admirer of Neruda and wrote a poem about him.  I don’t know about their meeting.  I believe that there was a story about a conference, but not in Spain.  A lot of the people who went to Spain because of the Civil War, as a matter of fact, all of them who went because of the Civil War got there after she left.  The closest collaboration that I can remember was the Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, who was in Spain for the Republicans.  But they met in the Bay Area, during the ‘40s.

Dennis: We’re speaking with William Rukeyser.  We’re talking in the context of this wonderful webinar being produced by Eastern Michigan University, where many of the archives and some of the archival work of Muriel is being collected and honored.  And this is a part of that honoring.  I – let me – I remember, I was interviewing Muriel.  This was a promotion I was doing for Pacifica Radio, leading up to Muriel Rukeyser Day at Sarah Lawrence College.  And as a part of the promotion, I actually showed up [laughs] – I think she was staying with a friend of hers, Monica McCall, up on the Upper East Side.  And —

Bill: Yeah.  Who was – who was actually her – both her literary agent and her partner for almost 30 years.

Dennis: — 30 years [laughs].  Yeah [laughs].  It seemed [laughs] like – and I remember the – you know, she had been using enlarged copies of her books, because she was having trouble with her eyes.  But somehow, the books weren’t around.  So, she sent me to the shelf, and she said, ‘You wanna do a little reading?  Just grab whatever books you want.  Sit in front of me.’  I tied her microphone to a broom, which she loved [laughs].  She said, ‘Invent!  I love when we invent!’  I didn’t have a microphone, so I’m just holding the broom up, with the microphone.  And I mention this because it was just before her collected poems were coming out, and she came to the poem, “Neruda the Wine”. 

Bill: Yes.

Dennis: And she read the – she read the poem about Neruda, and she comes to the end, and she’s looking for more poem, and she turns the pages, and she says to me [laughs], she says, ‘I swear this poem was a lot longer.’  And me being naïve and sort of silly and not knowing what to say, I said, ‘Well, maybe’ – in a little, peepish voice, ‘Maybe, Muriel, you haven’t written – finished writing this poem.’  And she comes [laughs] alive.  She almost falls off her chair. 

She says, ‘That’s – that’s it!  I’ve been struggling.  Here I am, a woman, about to have her collected poems published, and I – I don’t know where to go next, because for me, collected poems were always by men and by dead [with emphasis] men.  And here I am, a woman about to have collected poems, and not knowing where that poem ends tells me where I should go and write next.  I’ve been having a struggle, saying, “What poem do I write next?  What one poem do I write next?”  And now [laughs], seeing this tells me where [laughs] I have to go.’

Bill: Yeah.  And of course, you knew her during a point that was very painful for her.  You know, she had her first stroke when she was only 50, and then, a – as you know, a series after that, in the next 15 years.  And it was – she made a remarkable comeback, after the first one.  It had affected her speech very badly.  And I can remember, I was in high school, she worked on recovering her speech, because she considered the oral presentation of poetry as an intrinsic part of what she did.  And so, she was very concerned about losing her ability, first of all to speak intelligibly, and second of all to speak and convey art and emotion.  So, she made a very thorough comeback from that.  But the later strokes really diminished her, and that fact angered and saddened her.

Dennis: I bet.  And anybody who goes and listens to the earlier work understands that she was clearly a visionary poet, but she was also an orator.  And the delivery of those poems and of her work and of her very complicated, extraordinarily exquisite work and imagery required an orator to carry it off.  Anybody who’s tried to read some of those poems, those earlier poems, those longer, more complicated poems, the “Ajanta” poems, knows that you have to [laughs] really have a lot going, to be able to deliver those poems publicly because of the exquisite nature of the writing.

Bill: Yeah.  That’s absolutely – and one thing I should mention was that she, like you, believed in the power of radio.  Back in the late ‘40s, when I was a toddler, she briefly had her own radio show on a local Bay Area station.  And it was somewhat experimental at the time.  She tried to combine poetry, talking about poetry, and music in ways that she felt the two things complemented and reinforced each other.  So, definitely, she did not think of poetry as being static or solely on the printed page.

Dennis: Bill, did she ever tell you the story – I don’t know [laughs] if she made this up or I’m [laughs] making it up.  But she told me a story about how she got fired or reprimanded for nudity on the radio?  Did you ever hear that one?

Bill: Well, tell me that, because I know that the – the show didn’t last as long as it might have, but —

Dennis: [laughs]

Bill: — I don’t know what happened to it.

Dennis: I think she was reading a D.H. Lawrence, very seductive story.  Which one was it?  “Son” or something like that, and the way I understood it, second, third hand, I think she told me this story, is that she just – you know, it – there was a very touching moment that was very seductive, and it got her in trouble with censors.  Nudity on the radio.

Bill: Well, I’m not surprised.  I mean, you know, one of the things about the ‘40s, especially after the end of the war, was that the U.S. took a sharp turn to the right, both politically and in terms of conformity.  And that was something that weighted very heavily on her, and of course, back then, the FCC was much more restrictive.  This was pre-Lenny Bruce, much more restrictive, in terms of what could be said on the air.  And on top of that, this station, KDFC, was brand-new.  It didn’t have a huge budget, and I don’t even know if they had a staff attorney.  So, yeah.  That does not surprise me.

Dennis:  All right.  I wanna – just one or two more questions.  I appreciate your patience.

Bill: Sure.

Dennis: And I’m sure everybody’s going to love hearing this.  It’s gonna mean a lot to the folks participating in this webinar.  I wanna ask you about the poem “Double Ode”. 

Bill: Yes.

Dennis: And if I remember correctly, it – the last verse ends – and she repeats it three times.  It’s on the page.  “Pay attention to what they tell you to forget.  Pay attention to what they tell you to forget.  Pay attention to what they tell you to forget.  Beware of the guardians.  There are no guardians.  It’s built into me.  Do I move toward form?  Do I use all my fear?”  I believe this poem was devoted to you and your wife.  What do you suppose she meant by that?  “Do I move toward form?  Do I use all my fear?”

Bill: Well, you know, I think that that is really reflective – clearly refined, but really reflective of things that she said my entire life as a kid and a teenager and into my 20s.  She was both very appreciative and very resentful of formal education and the gatekeepers of our society.  You know, she – she was able to see things from a variety of perspectives simultaneously.  And so, on one hand, she would advocate an absolutely freewheeling, be-your-own-person type of attitude, and at the same time, recognize the importance of intellectual discipline that you acquired from some of the same cultural gatekeepers that she distrusted. 

And let me just tell you one story that she may have told you, when you were interviewing her.  This was a childhood memory of hers, and it was from the Ethical Culture School in New York.  And that is one of the indications I take that her parents were really interested in her intellectual development, that they chose that school for her.  But in any case, the story goes that in one of her classes, there was one boy who was known for being a cut-up and a kid who would not take orders.  And so, one day, the teacher comes in and says, ‘Class, settle down.’  Little Danny or whatever his name was is being a cut-up, won’t settle down. 

The teacher speaks sharply to him.  Things escalate just surprisingly quickly, and all of a sudden, she grabs him by the collar and says, ‘You can’t do that.  I’m taking you down to the Principal’s office.’  Hauls him out of the room, he’s kicking and screaming.  She slams the door, two minutes later, comes back and says to the class, ‘Little Danny is going to be in a load of trouble, and the Principal is gonna be investigating this thoroughly.  I need each and every one of you to write down exactly what happened, so that I’ve got the evidence to present to the teacher – to the Principal.’ 

And so, they all do that, and she says, ‘Now I wanna – a few of you to read to me what you wrote.’  And so, she calls on a couple of different students.  They all saw the same thing, and they it down in different ways.  “Little Danny started the argument.”  “The teacher was mean to little Danny.”  “Little Danny hit the teacher.”  “The teacher hit little Danny.”  All these varying recollections, and so, the teacher goes, knocks on the door, little Danny comes in smiling.  The whole thing had been pre-rehearsed, and the teacher says, ‘We’re now gonna begin our study of the American Revolution, using firsthand original documents.’ 

And the point was, you can see – everybody can see the same thing and yet, they all see different things.  And this was a very important part of her outlook on life.  And maybe it wasn’t the little Danny incident that gave her this perspective, but it was certainly something that she referred to a lot.

Dennis: All right.  Well, we are gonna leave it right there for now.  We have been speaking with William L. Rukeyser in the context of this webinar at Eastern Michigan University, being sponsored by Professor Elizabeth Dalma [sounds like].  This is going to be an archive of some of the Muriel Rukeyser papers, sound, and some of the great works she’s done.  We thank you, Bill Rukeyser, if I can call you Bill —

Bill: Absolutely.

Dennis: — as we say goodbye, for making this beautiful contribution.  Anything else perhaps I forgot to ask, that you’d like to share with us, or —

Bill: No, I think that covers it very nicely.  And I’ll see you on Friday.

Dennis: — sounds good.  Looking forward to it.  Please be careful.  And we will see you soon.  Bye-bye, now.

Bill: Okay.  Take care.  Bye.

Mike:  All right.  Let me hit save.

“Every elegy is the present”: Listening to Muriel Rukeyser

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Posted by Katherine McLeod on February 12, 2021

On the night of January 24, 1969, Muriel Rukeyser read from Elegies at a reading that took place in Montreal, Canada. But she didn’t read all of Elegies. She only read “Elegy in Joy” and, before reading it, she commented on the fact that she had never “cut it up” but that she would that night: 

Here’s one piece of a long poem, it’s the last of a group called Elegies which one hardly dares name anything anymore. It’s called “Elegy in Joy” and this is just a beginning piece, I wanted to do it tonight this way, I’ve never cut it up. – Muriel Rukeyser

She then proceeds to read “Elegy in Joy,” and she ends the poem after the first section (which explains why, even though she says that it is “the last of a group called Elegies,” it is “just a beginning piece”). As a result of ending the poem where she does – due to having “cut it up” – the audience hears these lines as though they were the end of the poem:

Every elegy is the present: freedom eating our hearts,
death and explosion, and the world unbegun.

We too can hear Rukeyser reading these lines because this reading of Rukeyser’s was recorded, and it has been digitized as part of SpokenWeb. We’ll hear more about SpokenWeb shortly, but let’s start with the sound of Rukeyser reading “Elegy in Joy”:

Muriel Rukeyser introducing and reading “Elegy in Joy”
at the SGW Poetry Series, Montreal, on Jan 24, 1969

What was the occasion for Rukeyser’s reading and how was the recording archived? This blog post explains how we came to have this recording of “Elegy in Joy” and, as part of that explanation, I will tell you about the process that led to my “unarchiving” (Camlot and McLeod) of this recording through the making of ShortCuts (released monthly on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed). ShortCuts listens closely and carefully to short clips of audio from SpokenWeb’s audio collections. It launched in January 2020 (first as Audio of the Month) and it is produced by myself, Katherine McLeod, hosted by Hannah McGregor, and mixed and mastered by Stacey Copeland. When devising the concept of ShortCuts, I wanted the series to be informed  by the analogue techniques of cutting and splicing tape, but to consider how these ‘cuts’ work in the digital format of the podcast as literary criticism.

When making a ShortCuts minisode in November 2020, I selected a clip from this 1969 Rukeyser reading, not knowing that it would lead to a connection with Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive and not knowing that it contained a rare recording of “Elegy in Joy.” I was not coming to the recording as a Rukeyser scholar, but I was coming to the recording as a scholar writing a book on recordings of Canadian women poets on the radio and having published on poetry and performance – and I was captivated by Rukeyser’s performance during this reading. Rukeyser begins the reading with a long, somewhat improvised, reflection upon what the poetry reading is as an event: a moment in time, with the listener encountering the sound of the poem as the speaker speaks it, and hearing that sound fully and through the body. It was compelling to hear how Rukeyser then enacted this concept of the reading through her poetry, and to consider what this recording could teach us about archival listening. I ended up creating three minisodes devoted to Rukeyser’s 1969 reading, with the third being released during the same week as the symposium Revisiting Rukeyser’s Elegies. My hope is that these ShortCuts minisodes, along with the sharing of the recording itself and the story of how the recording came to be, contribute to your listening to Rukeyser, for this symposium and for the future. 

Sir George Williams University, The Poetry Series (1966-1974)

At Sir George Williams University, now Concordia University, in downtown Montreal, Canada, there was a poetry series held from 1966-1974 for which the recordings have now been digitized and made accessible by SpokenWeb. Here is the description of that series and audio collection: 

SGW POETRY READING SERIES

Between 1965 and 1974 members of the Sir George Williams University (SGWU, now Concordia University) English Department in Montreal hosted a series of poetry readings that was conceived as an ongoing encounter between local poets and the avant-garde poetics of some of the most important writers from the United States and the rest of Canada. Sponsored by “The Poetry Committee” of the Faculty of Arts and the SGWU English Department—and organized primarily by English professors Howard Fink, Stanton Hoffman, Wynn Francis, Irving Layton, Roy Kiyooka, and (from 1967-71) George Bowering—these readings involved more than sixty poets from across North America.

Known simply as “The Poetry Series”, audio recordings of these readings were made on Mylar 1 mil. tape using mobile reel-to-reel tape machines. The Concordia University Archives received a grant in 2007 that has allowed all 65 reels of tape (more than 100 hours of audio) to be digitized. So, this sound from an interesting period of transformation in Canadian poetics, and of self-scrutiny for Montreal poetry, represents a rich and useable archive for scholarly research. (“SGW Poetry Series”)

Over 60 poets read in the SGW Poetry Series, with a mix of American and Canadian poets: Margaret Atwood, Margaret Avison, Ted Berrigan, Earle Birney, bpNichol, Robin Blaser, bill bissett, George Bowering, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Maxine Gadd, Allen Ginsberg, Maria Gladys Hindmarch, Daryl Hine, Barbara Howes, Kenneth Koch, Roy Kiyooka, Irving Layton, Dorothy Livesay, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Daphne Marlatt, Jackson Mac Low, Al Purdy, Joe Rosenblatt, F.R. Scott, Charles Simic, Gary Snyder, Diane Wakoski, Phyllis Webb, James Wright, among many others, and – most pertinent to this blog post and as one of the 10 women to read in the series – Muriel Rukeyser. 

Rukeyser read at the SGW Poetry Series in downtown Montreal on January 24, 1969. That reading was recorded. The recording sat with all of the other recordings of the series until they were deposited into the university archives in the early 2000s and then were digitized and made accessible through SpokenWeb as literary audio recordings. 

The story of how these specific recordings came to be part of SpokenWeb and how they informed the valuing and conceptualizing of literary audio is best told by Jason Camlot, primary investigator of SpokenWeb as a SSHRC-funded partnership grant. You can read the story, as told by Camlot, in a transcribed conversation with Al Filreis and Steve Evans in “Beyond the Text: Literary Archives in the 21st Century” a piece that appears in an entire issue of Amodern devoted to the SGW Poetry Reading Series (Amodern 4, 2015). Or, you can listen to Camlot tell a similar version of this story to producers Cheryl Gladu and Katherine McLeod in the first episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast:

Jason Camlot tells the story of finding the SGW Poetry Series recordings for
“Ep. 1: Stories of SpokenWeb” (The SpokenWeb Podcast)

The story of finding the tapes of the SGW Poetry Series is part of the story of how the Rukeyser recording came to be here today. At the top of this blog post, you will see a photograph of the tape from 1969 that was digitized and made accessible in its entirety here, with comments between poems carefully transcribed by student research assistants. Making the tape accessible is one part of the story, and then listening to it is another. As a critical listening, Rukeyser’s reading in the SGW Poetry Series is examined at length in an attentive close-listening-as-article written by Jane Malcolm (and published in that previously mentioned issue of Amodern). I had not read Malcolm’s article when I first listened to the Rukeyser recording, but, having read it now, I agree with her that, on that January night, the reading provided a space for the poem to become a meeting place: “[T]he SGWU reading series presented Rukeyser with the ideal forum to create the ‘poetry of meeting-places’ she argued for in The Life of Poetry. From the moment Rukeyser asks the audience members (and recording auditors) to summon what we might call their inner poets, she works to destroy the illusion of hierarchy poetry readings tend to reinforce” (Malcolm). That dismantling of expectation is exactly what Rukeyser does at the start of this reading when she speaks at length about why we go to poetry readings – what are we going to listen to – and establishes a sense of shared community through the reading.

The way that Rukeyser began her 1969 reading in Montreal was what caught my attention while selecting an archival audio clip for ShortCuts, and I had to listen to this poet’s voice. Who was this voice? What was this voice? And how was this poet, Rukeyser, not only asking us to consider what a poetry reading can do but also how is she showing us what a recording of a poetry reading can do – then and now? These are the questions that I explore in three ShortCuts minisodes based on this recording.

What follows are transcribed excerpts from ShortCuts that aim to demonstrate how the minisodes have evolved through acts of listening to Rukeyser’s voice, and how connections through this listening have led to “Elegy in Joy.”

ShortCuts 2.2 The Poem Among Us

Welcome to ShortCuts – short stories about how literature sounds. Our ‘short cut’ this month is an archival recording that manages to transport us into the feeling of being at a live poetry reading. […] Poet Muriel Rukeyser puts it beautifully and inquisitively when she says that we go to poetry readings […] to experience something created in that space and and that time that we all share together: “something is what we call shared, something is arrived at – there.” […] Rukeyser’s opening statement [to her reading in 1969 in Montreal] helps us to understand what we are listening to when listening to an archival recording, one that is far removed from the event itself. Following Rukeyser’s line of thought, in archival listening, we listen to a recording of relationality unfolding, creating space for the poem to be among us, between us, there.

Listen to the full audio of this ShortCuts minisode here. 

ShortCuts 2.4 You Are Here

In [Rukeyser’s 1969] reading, there are poems in which one is acutely aware of being together, listening, even while listening to the recording apart. So how did her reading create that effect? Let’s listen to one more short cut from that same reading – a poem called “Anemone.” It’s one that not only exemplifies the creation of connection between the poet and audience but it’s also one that expresses the ecological attention of her story: the ways in which we are bound to each other through the earth and, in this case, through the ocean. […] Listen to how she creates a relationality through this poem. Listen to the breath that the poem creates. Listen with your body as the poem breathes in and out. It is breathing. Hear it forge a connection with the audience, and ask yourself what it would feel like to hear it in 1969, and what it feels like to hear it now […] “Anemone” [is] a poem that creates a space of listening that is, at once, oceanic and intimate, and a poem that says to the listener: “You are here.”

Listen to the full audio of this ShortCuts minisode here. 

ShortCuts 2.5 Connections

In this season of ShortCuts we’ve spent some time in a 1969 recording of poet Muriel Rukeyser, and we’re going to stay in that recording for this minisode, partly due to the depth of material within this single recording and partly as an opportunity to reflect upon what a minisode can do – through archival listening – to make connections. Rukeyser once said that poetry is “a meeting place” and this minisode suggests that, like poetry, a podcast is a meeting place. Listen to find out how we arrive at this meeting place through a recording of “Elegy in Joy” and listen again, now, to the words: “Every elegy is the present.”

Find this ShortCuts minisode here after its release on Feb 15, 2021.

Resources

Camlot, Jason. “The Sound of Canadian Modernisms: The Sir George Williams University Poetry Series, 1966-74.” Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 46 no. 3, 2012, p. 28-59.

Camlot, Jason and Katherine McLeod. “Introduction: Unarchiving the Literary Event.” CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019.

Camlot, Jason, Al Filreis, and Steve Evans. “Literary Archives in the 21st Century.” Amodern 4 (March 2015), https://amodern.net/article/beyond-text/.

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

Gladu, Cheryl and Katherine McLeod, producers. “Stories of SpokenWeb.” The SpokenWeb Podcast, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/stories-of-spokenweb/.

Malcolm, Jane. “The Poem Among Us, Between Us, There: Muriel Rukeyser’s Meta-Poetics and the Communal Soundscape.” Amodern 4 (March 2015), http://amodern.net/article/poem-among-us/.

McLeod, Katherine. “Connections.” ShortCuts 2.5 (Feburary 2021), https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/shortcuts/.

—. “The Poem Among Us.” ShortCuts 2.2 (November 2020), https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-poem-among-us/.

—. “You Are Here.” ShortCuts 2.4 (January 2021), https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/you-are-here/.

Mitchell, Christine. “Again the Air Conditioners: Finding Poetry in the Institutional Archive.” Amodern 4 (March 2015), https://amodern.net/article/again-air-conditioners/.

Rukeyser, Muriel. “Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969.” SpokenWeb, 24 January 1969, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/muriel-rukeyser-at-sgwu-1969/.

“SGW Poetry Series” SpokenWeb Montreal, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/.

SpokenWeb, https://spokenweb.ca/.

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Dr. Katherine McLeod (@kathmcleod) researches archives, performance, and poetry. She has co-edited the collection CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Jason Camlot, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). She is writing a monograph (under contract with Wilfrid Laurier University Press) that is a feminist listening to recordings of women poets reading on CBC Radio. She produces monthly audio content for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts as part of The SpokenWeb Podcast feed. She is the 2020-2021 Researcher-in-Residence at the Concordia University Library. http://katherinemcleod.ca/

Trudi Witonsky and Elisabeth Daumer: A Visit with Louise Kertesz–Pioneer of Rukeyser Studies

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When we told Louise she was a pioneer of Rukeyser Studies, she didn’t quite believe us. It took some time to convey to her just how influential her book, The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser, has been. Published in 1980, it has served as a touchstone for those of us who’d stumbled onto Rukeyser during our student days, and, wondering why no one had told or taught us about this remarkable poet, turned to Louise’s book, the first monograph devoted entirely to a serious discussion of Rukeyser’s sprawling oeuvre and its critical (mis)reception. After its publication, however, Louise disappeared from academic circles and became both the most consequential and least known of Rukeyser scholars.

We, two long-time Rukeyser aficionadas, were encouraged by Louise’s personable emails in response to our question about whether we could meet with her sometime.  A bit shy, we were reassured by her warmth and self-deprecating candor when she welcomed us in her new home in Grosse Pointe, a leafy suburb of Detroit, where she lives with her daughter Nina, grandson Dominic, and Leo, the dog.

Louise, Dominic, and Nina

Our expectations of Louise had been shaped by the correspondence we had read between Louise and Muriel (available at the Library of Congress archives). The determination and confidence that manifested in her first letter to Muriel Rukeyser, prepared us for someone impressively capable and slightly formidable.

“Dear Miss Rukeyser”

“Dear Miss Rukeyser,” the first letter begins. “While preparing a talk on contemporary women writers a few months ago, I was surprised to find no substantial study of your work, which I admire very much.” She commenced to compile a bibliography of reviews of Muriel’s work, and to read the limited number of critical works that mentioned the poetry. “Wading through some of this material which is helpful but far from satisfying, I have decided to write a book-length study of your work.”

She asks Muriel if there are any other projects like this under way, and explains her qualifications and situation: “I am a former college English teacher at home with two small children. I hold the Ph.D. (1970) from Illinois. Contemporary poetry by American women is my main interest, and I would like to devote my scholarly energies to demonstrating its vitality and importance and its rightful though neglected place in literary history.”

The task I am setting myself is a great one:  understanding the development of your work in its historical, political, and philosophical contexts and in a context of literary history in which the work of women poets is not slighted. I will learn a lot. I hope to teach it well.

How daunting a task! All of Muriel’s work? When one has two small children at home? In the pre-Internet era, lacking access to online journals, email, and sophisticated computers?

Louise editing her dissertation with Nina by her side

Subsequent letters to Muriel which included organized lists of questions and reports on progress further revealed Louise’s ability to analyze, organize, and to produce from almost nothing! There had been so little published on Muriel; Louise had been forced to rely on herself in completing this project.

In her living room, Louise had assembled her Rukeyser stash—copies of her many books of poems, articles, and reviews, and a folder of her own correspondence with the poet.  She began at the beginning—by reading to us from her first letter to Rukeyser. And then there were the bad reviews! Louise read to us from the ones that had most galvanized her – the sexist ones that commented on Rukeyser’s appearance, the dismissive ones where the reviewer seemed merely to list topics – “there are planes” – without engaging the work itself. This sense of entitled disdain, it became clear, had motivated the book, Louise’s defense.

We found ourselves jumping from topic to topic – there was so much to ask, so much to say, so much to connect!  At one point we asked about the number of times that Louise had met Muriel, and, in an offhand way, she mentioned that she had three tapes of  conversations with the poet. Tapes??!!  Cassettes, three of them, double-sided, not of very high quality, Louise explained, self-deprecatingly.  Money was tight at the time. A vigorous discussion of digitization possibilities commenced!

“Maybe there should be a category called Book”

And then there was more — the genres, how Louise had read Willard Gibbs, the difficulty of coming to understand thermodynamics, scientists’ reactions to the book,  the reception of The Traces of Thomas Hariot, and how, in the face of repeated questions about what these texts were, Muriel responded: “Maybe there should be a category called Book.”

During lunch preparations we talked about how each of us found her way to Rukeyser—or, more like it, how Rukeyser found us.  Always, it seems by coincidence or serendipity, never as part of a course, or required university reading, but circuitously, by way of a sudden encounter, a friend’s comment, another poet’s remark, or a book we happened to pick up. Louise remembers her friend from college, Mary Philbin, discovering and reciting from “The Ballad of Orange and Grape” with infectious delight.  

Eventually we asked what had happened–why she hadn’t pursued academia and teaching. How was it that she could write such a fine book and then leave? Louise had had an interview in the university English department where she was part-time teaching; she had brought her book, listed it on her CV.  But the all-male committee clearly hadn’t read it. They asked questions about sixteenth-century authors; she did her job talk on Richard Eberhart. The committee ignored the book. Only one person—Charles Baxter–approached her after the interview and said, with what she recognized as a smile of sympathy, ‘They just didn’t get it.”

“That’s what Muriel gave me, though . . . a sense of possibility when the way seems blocked.”

A practical person, she had to go on. She was going through a divorce, she had two young children, she found editorial work and eventually became a writer for Automotive News. “That’s what Muriel gave me, though,” she said, “a sense of possibility when the way seems blocked.” So she found herself traveling in the Midwest and South, covering United Auto Worker activities as well as the new Japanese auto plants. Later she became an editor, took on topics such as business insurance and healthcare, and finally, as an independent, took on copy editing (of scholarly books!) and ghostwriting. 

Repeatedly, throughout our lively conversation, Louise would halt and say—I haven’t talked like this in ages, with anyone! You both, she said looking at us, still belong to the “essay” generation. Having just moved from Chicago, she’s tried a couple of book groups for intellectual stimulation. She got blank stares at a reading group when she commented that she thought the writer under discussion needed a better editor: “‘Memories of the past’? What else are memories of?” A second group that stuck to searching out symbolism in “The Dead” wasn’t much more satisfying.  Louise feels she created a meaningful life for herself working with words– although she has regrets about not pursuing a profession in literature and teaching.

Trudi Witonsky and Louise Kertesz, August 1, 2019

And we began reading her poems together, marvelling at their continued–no!– renewed urgency.  Lamenting the lack of appreciation for “creative disorder” in contemporary U.S. politics, Louise read from Rukeyser’s ninth elegy, “The Antagonists,” in which she celebrates the creative power of conflict:

The forms of incompleteness in our land
pass from the eastern and western mountains where
the seas meet the dark islands, where the light
glitters white series on the snowlands, pours its wine
of lenient evening to the center. Green
on shadows of Indiana, level yellow miles . . .
The prairie emblems and the slopes of the sky
and desert stars enlarging in the frost
redeem us like our love and will not die.
All origins are here, and in this range
the changing spirit can make itself again,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
and form developing
American out of conflict. (qtd. Kertesz, Rukeyser’s Poetic Vision 215)

We read Rukeyser’s “The Ballad of Orange and Grape,” grappling with the persistent ambiguity of its meanings and the question it raises about teaching “the young ones”:

How can we go on reading
and make sense out of what we read? —
How can they write and believe what they’re writing,
the young ones across the street,
while you go on pouring grape into ORANGE
and orange into the one marked GRAPE —?
(How are we going to believe what we read and we write
 and we hear and we say and we do?). (Kaufman and Herzog, Collected Poems 492-93)

And, asked about Rukeyser’s time in Mexico, Louise read to us “A Charm for Cantinflas,” an homage to the Mexican comedian, actor, and filmmaker Maria Fortino Alfonso Moreno Reyes, known as “Cantinflas,” and to the power of dance, laughter, eros, art, ice cream, comedy, bourbon, and beer:


After the lights and after the rumba and after the bourbon
and after the beer
and after the drums and after the samba and after the
ice cream and not long after
failure, loss, despair, and loss and despair
There was the laughter and there was Cantinflas at last
and his polka
doing the bumps with a hot guitar

Louise repeated, with warm appreciation and wonder, Rukeyser’s final stanza, where

on this stage always the clown of our living
gives us our sunlight and our incantation
as sun does, laughing, shining, reciting dawn, noon, and down,
making all delight and healing all ills
like faraway words on jars, the labels in Protopapas’ window:
marshmallow, myrtle, peppermint, pumpkin, sesame, sesame, squills.

(Collected Poems 263-64)

What an offering of riches! We tasted the words and, as Rukeyser might say, became whole again. 

Finally one of us looked at a clock. Almost seven hours had passed as we talked, laughed, asked questions, petted Leo, had lunch, read and debated poetry together. There was still so much to discuss! We corralled Louise’s grandson, Dominic, on his way out the door, into taking photos of us.  He took three snaps in a mere second. (Did you finish already? He smiled, yes.) We said goodbye to Leo, and Louise walked us out. It was hard to leave, hard to say goodbye after such an exhilarating day. Hours later we exchanged emails – we were still coming down from it all. Even days later, our elation persists.

Elisabeth Daumer, Trudi Witonsky, and Louise Kertesz

We hope Louise will return to Rukeyser scholarship! We need her–especially now, when her insights and first-hand encounter with Rukeyser will prove invaluable for anyone taking on the daunting task of composing a biography of this twentieth-century maverick whose life, and work, defied compliance and “narrow success” for the adventure of uncharted roads and creative largesse.

The Power of Suicide: Muriel Rukeyser’s Poetic Responses to Sylvia Plath

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Posted on December 15, 2016 by Arica Frisbey

When it comes to Sylvia Plath and her death, the creative response from fellow poets is so very different. Ted Hughes, her estranged husband, wrote an entire book of poems in regards to her (Birthday Letters). Meanwhile, her friend/rival, Anne Sexton, composed a two paged elegy in her honor (“Sylvia’s Death”).

Then there is Muriel Rukeyser, a female poet who does not make an appearance in Plath’s journals (though Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich, who associated with and praised Rukeyser, did make it in), who wrote six lines between two poems, in concerns to Plath. These poems, which shall be discussed, are “Not to Printed, Not to be Said, Not to be Thought,” “The Power of Suicide.” Notably, she also wrote a poem called “Suicide Blues,”  where Rukeyser’s speaker is reminiscent of Plath, though it was published about twenty-two years before Plath’s suicide. Due to this, the poem will also be discussed in this context.

Rukeyser was a matriarch of many things–a son, poetry, feminism, and the list continues. Yet, many do not know her name, let alone her work. When asked, “Who is the most influential feminist poet of the 20th century?,” you do not get a chorus of “Rukeyser, of course!” The answer is Plath, almost always Plath (with a bit of Sexton, and Rich thrown in for good measure). I feel that Rukeyser recognized that lack of recognition: that despite a career of almost forty-five years, with over ten volumes of poetry, a novel, and countless other pieces, she was going unnoticed.

Was it perhaps because she was not quite as willing to impart personal feelings and details in her writing, like Plath? That she instead wrote of social and political issues and spoke out against a woman’s lower position in society, and thus did not fit a mold, whereas Plath was a superwoman–mother, career-woman, good looking and tragic, right down to her sometimes blond, sometimes brown hair, curled just so? Or was it because Plath defected to suicide, and Rukeyser was still alive? The answer is most likely a combination of all of the above, the amounts differing and equaling, but I feel that of the above options, Rukeyser felt that it was mostly the last. Why else would she have written “Not to be Printed, Not to be Said, Not to be Thought”?

She was aware that the poem’s opinion was unpopular–the title reflects that the topic is “not” proper. Yet, as always, Rukeyser continues her thought: “I’d rather be Muriel/than be dead and be Ariel”(Rukeyser, 2005, p. 554). It’s a bold thought, and a thought that could be seen as blasphemous, especially by the feminist movement, who had crowned Plath as their literary martyr, with her fierce, feminine voice (Passin). (This was back in the days when Ted Hughes was violently disliked and misunderstood for his part in Plath’s demise, to the point of feminist fans desecrating their figurehead’s grave to remove “Hughes” from her name.)

Yet, this was Rukeyser quietly calling out the worship and mythologizing of Plath. By using the name of Plath’s last collection to reference the late poet, Rukeyser is, in effect, using synecdoche (substituting a part for the whole) to reflect exactly what happened to Plath– her dissolution as a person, now simply a past personality. Plath was no longer there to set any record straight. She wasn’t available to coax any interpretation of her work–and so it had outgrown the person, and thus, personified the poet (Passin). This is a sentiment that has been expressed by other writers analyzing the work, one of the more recent being Laura Passin in her essay, “The Power of Suicide and the Refusal of Mythology–Sylvia Plath and Muriel Rukeyser,” published on this website.

The “Ariel sensation” would probably not have occurred if Plath had been alive to see the book’s publication. In a way, Rukeyser recognized this with her line “I’d rather be Muriel/than be dead…” (lines 1-2, “Not to be Printed…”). This line is a way to say that, because she is alive, Rukeyser can call the shots on how she is perceived. She can correct rumors, or coax perceptions, but all around she is responsible for how her work and her person is received and perceived. She is herself, and not what others have painted of her, based on a few facts and a collection of poems.

This is not to say that Rukeyser disdained Plath–rather, I think the lines were written with sympathy, and sadness, for both herself and Plath for their conundrum. This enigma is rooted in that Plath died young and did not see her massive success, whereas Rukeyser would experience only short bursts of massive success throughout her longer life.

Rukeyser, when it came to Plath, seemed to wish for a new way to remember her. She wrote a few poems- not anguished and apologetic (like Hughes) or wistful for the past (like Sexton)–but deeply mournful, like a grandmother who lost a grandbaby too soon to the world. Her poem, “The Power of Suicide” isn’t a rant, an extended “I’m sorry,” or a reminiscence. It reminds me most of a vision sparked by intuition–a mother senses something is amiss with a child before she disappears. It is that, as well as a vision of inspiration, an urging of muses to produce and write:

 

The potflower on the windowsill says to me

In words that are green-edged red leaves:

Flower             flower              flower              flower

Today for the sake of all the dead       Burst into flower.
(Rukeyser, 2005, p. 430)

 

If we read this poem as a memoriam to Plath, then we can also read it as Rukeyser taking on a crusade–it is as if Rukeyser declared that “Plath cannot write any more- but I will write to try to fill the void her words left.”

Rukeyser could have taken to writing after Plath’s death with the view of Plath as an enemy stealing the spotlight, but she did not because she could not. She recognized that they wrote on different topics–while Rukeyser wrote of love and work during the Spanish Civil War in her novel Savage Coast, Plath published an account of madness in an American Golden Girl via The Bell Jar. Their preferred pronouns even differed–Plath lived in a first-person singular world, Rukeyser in a first-person plural or a-third person world.

It is notable, however, to consider the poem, “Suicide Blues” (Rukeyser, 2005, p. 216). Based on the title alone, one may assume that Plath wrote it–but no, this is a Rukeyser work. However, she does seem to be speaking for Plath, echoing various sentiments and perhaps retelling the story of Plath’s death, despite the poem having appeared in 1941. She begins with the declaration “I want to speak in my voice!/I want to speak in my real voice!” (Lines One-Two, “Suicide Blues”).

This reminds me of Plath, both when she’s complaining about how her writing is only “lyrical sentimentality” (Plath, 2000, p. 38) and when she’s telling her mother that “these poems will make my name” (Plath, 1975, p. 468) because Plath’s main concern in both cases was her voice–the first was weak, and then it strengthened with Ariel. Then in lines four and five, Rukeyser seems to note Plath’s hesitation initially with adopting a harsh empowered voice: “I am not ready to go there./Not with my real voice.” (Lines four-five, “Suicide Blues”)

The “tall man” and “singing woman” in stanzas three and four could be read in two different ways. The man and woman could stand for other male and female poets with “his” and “her real voice” (line eight, and eleven, respectively). Or, specifically,  they could stand for Hughes (a tall man who had no problem being rugged with his words) and either Anne Sexton (whom Plath considered a literary rival and friend) or Assia Wevill, who wished to be recognized as a poet, but after Plath’s death became known as only Hughes’s mistress.

Then there is a shift in the fifth stanza, that could be the speaker, as Plath, simply speaking to the audience, or perhaps it is Rukeyser speaking to Plath: “Are you able to imagine truth?/Evil has conspired a world of death,/ An unreal voice.” If read as Rukeyser speaking to Plath, then this stanza is a warning that has arrived too late. It reads, to me, as a warning of what will happen to a real voice “in a world of death” (line thirteen)- it will be misread, and therefore, become “unreal” (line fourteen).

And thus, when this “death-world” again appears in stanza six, it is to help tell of the world’s perception of Plath’s death “in front of the little children” (line sixteen), taking notable details and pumping them up for effect. Because of this, we get Plath “burning” (line seventeen), with the remainder of the line, “out of the window” bringing to mind reports of Frieda and Nicholas’s cries being heard out on the street. There are enemies calling friends (line eighteen)–or in this case, the Hughes, who were the primary informers of Plath’s death to the rest of the family and friends, and often are perceived as the enemy after Plath died. And of course, “my legs went running around that building/ dancing to the suicide blues” (lines nineteen- twenty) recalls Plath’s downstairs neighbor’s memory of Plath pacing in the flat above him on the night she died.

As for the second to last stanza, the sea imagery reminds me of Plath’s works “Full Fathom Five” and “Lorelei,” as well as “The Earthenware Head” being conjured up via “and my severed head swam around that ship/ three times around and it wouldn’t go down” (Lines twenty- four and twenty-five). Notably, these are all poems from Plath’s first book, The Colossus, which only had a modest reception compared to Ariel, which is when Plath was spotlighted.

Now, the last stanza reflects Rukeyser’s other mentioned work, “The Power of Suicide,” with its quatrain  and the presence of flowers. However, in this instance, the flowers are not “for the sake of all the dead” (line four, “The Power of Suicide”). Now there is “too much life, my darling” (line twenty-six), evoking the grandmother image again at the use of pet-names; “too much life to kill” (line twenty-nine).

This line, I believe, sums up Rukeyser’s universal feeling among the poems. Yes, Plath was in part lost due to the Suicide Blonde myth. Yes, a great poet was lost before she could produce more, and another great poet is lost despite the production of more work. But, as Rukeyser asserts, there is “too much life to kill” in the voice of Sylvia Plath by the power vested to her by suicide, and Rukeyser seems more than proud to record memoriams and reminders of humanity for female poets, even for one who never met “Muriel, mother of everyone.”

Works Cited

Passin, Laura. “Laura Passin: The Power of Suicide and the Refusal of Mythology–Sylvia Plath and Muriel Rukeyser.” Muriel Rukeyser. Web. 5 Dec. 2015.

Plath, Sylvia, and Aurelia Schober Plath. Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950-1963. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. 468. Print.

_____. The Colossus. London: Faber and Faber, 1972. Print.

_____.  Ariel. London: Harper & Row, 1966.

_____. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Karen V. Kukil. New York: Anchor Books, 2000. Print.

Rukeyser, Muriel. The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Ed. Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog. Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 216, 430, 554. Print.