Ruke Blog

Why Muriel Rukeyser? Why a website just for her?

Posted on June 16, 2012 by Elisabeth Däumer Friends, colleagues, and students have asked me: Why Rukeyser? What's so special about her? Why create a Muriel Rukeyser website? Why make her the focus of an interdisciplinary online "meeting place"? I've been thinking how best to say this and have come up with four primary reasons: 1. Her poetry makes things happen--it has a peculiar type of energy which emerges when it's read in groups. 2. We still don't know how to read her work. We seem to figure out how to read some of her poems--for instance "Book of the [...]

2012-06-16T12:20:33+00:00June 16, 2012|Ruke Blog|4 Comments

Thoughts on “Searching/Not Searching: Writing the Biography of Muriel Rukeyser”

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Elisabeth Däumer I just read Kate Daniels' piece "Searching/Not Searching: Writing the Biography of Muriel Rukeyser" (Poetry East 16-17, Spring/Summer 1985, pp. 70-93). It's a great essay! One of the most honest essays I have read about Muriel Rukeyser. Daniels reflects upon the curious desire to write the life of somebody else--what draws us to that task, what is it we are looking for, what do we see, what do we not see, and why. She asserts that "the biographical method is a self-reflexive one, depending as much on the character and experience of [...]

2012-06-15T12:38:42+00:00June 15, 2012|Ruke Blog|1 Comment

Rukeyser’s indentations

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Elisabeth Däumer So, I am curious, why are the lines indented the way they are in Rukeyser's poem "For My Son"? What is the difference between: You come from poets, kings, bankrupts, preachers, attempted bankrupts, builders of cities, salesmen, the great rabbis, the kings of Ireland, failed drygoods storekeepers, beautiful women of the songs, great horsemen, tyrannical fathers at the shore of ocean, the western mothers lookng west beyond from their windows, the families escaping over the sea hurriedly and by night-- the roundtowers of the Celtic violet sunset, the diseased, the radiant, fliers, [...]

2012-05-15T16:41:50+00:00May 15, 2012|Ruke Blog|0 Comments

How to read Rukeyser?

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Elisabeth Däumer It seems right to begin this blog on the new Rukeyser website by exploring the different ways of reading that Rukeyser's poetry invites or compels us to engage in. This semester, I am guiding an independent study on Rukeyser with Chelsea Lonsdale, a student who will join EMU's graduate program in Written Communication in the fall (2012) and who is currently completing an undergraduate thesis on craft--the "craft" of composition and "craft" if I understand her correctly in general. So part of what we'll do together is to "read" individual poems by [...]

2012-05-15T12:36:46+00:00May 15, 2012|Ruke Blog|6 Comments
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