Ruke Blog

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

June 15, 2012 by mthunter22 1 Comment

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 the biographer as on the life of the subject.” Her essay is a stellar example of the fruitfulnes (but also difficulty) of such self-reflexiveness when she admits to her profound unease, even it seems to me disappointment, with the course of Rukeyser’s life after the birth of her son in 1947:

I had described for myself the pattern of Muriel Rukeyser’s early life with the words “independent, active, and spontaneous” — the best “ingredients” for a narrative biography. But going on to assemble the rest of the lifeline, I found a very different pattern from that of the first 3 years: something more static, something more staid. I felt dismayed by this and for the first time, I found myself approaching Muriel and her life as an abstraction, as an exercise in biographical structuring, as a problem, rather than a phenomenon to be dealt with however and exactly as it appeared.

“After an early promising start as a political activist and poet of social protest,” Daniels concludes, “Muriel Rukeyser had taken on the ancient and familiar role, that of self-absorbed motherhood.”

Perhaps because I myself–a teacher, scholar, and mother fairly late in life–have wondered about the transformation motherhood has wrought in my own life, I found myself arrested and even disturbed by Daniels’ assertion. I, too, have sensed that Rukeyser’s work was deeply affected by the experience of motherhood, but (perhaps for self-serving reasons) I tend to put a more positive spin on that change. I wonder, for instance, if her enthusiasm for technology and its potentials waned after world war two, the atomic bombing of Japan, and the birth of her son. In her 1962 poem “Waterlily Fire,” Rukeyser appears to embrace pacifism and a commitment to the work of peace grounded in her appreciation for Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, and the archetypal role of women as the bearers and preservers of life. I tend to think of this transformation as a redirection, rather than abandonment, of earlier energies and commitments.

Still, I found myself troubled when Daniels points to the

immediate decline in literary output after the birth of [Rukeyser’s] son, the way in which she chose not to become involved in the San Francisco poetry renaissance which was underway during the time she lived there (she was too busy “pushing a baby carriage,” she later explained).

Although Daniels admits that her overwhelming sense of the “limitations in the second half of Rukeyser’s life … might in fact have something to do with my own limitations,” her perspective, so honestly put, arrives at insights that I find useful. For instance, she wonders about Rukeyser’s role in the 1960s in the civil rights and anti-war protests:

I began to feel that she had been sometimes used by those organizing such activities: an old warhouse trotted out for the occasion at the airings of pro-feminist or anti-Vietnam sentiments. She seemed to have fulfilled something more akin to a figurehead role during the last 15 years of her life than to the truly generative role she had taken on during her early career…

Certainly this insight helps explain why the apparent resurgence of interest in Rukeyser in the 1960s and 70s did not result in scholarship and critical discussions of her work, not even among feminist critics.

Daniels’ essay leaves me with a lot of questions, both about Rukeyser’s life choices and about the curiously unstable place of other women poets in American Literary History. Most of all, I find the honesty of Daniels reflections galvanizing. Daniels discontinued her biographical project–it will be interesting to find out why, but perhaps this essay offers a clue? Fortunately, somebody else, Jan Heller Levi, has taken on the task of writing a biography of Muriel Rukeyser. Last I heard, the biography will be published by Knopf, in 2013.

Rukeyser’s indentations

May 15, 2012 by mthunter22 Leave a Comment

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, men thrown out of town,
the man bribed by his cousins to stay out of town,
teachers, the cantor on Friday evening, the lurid
newspapers,
strong women gracefully holding relationship, the Jewish girl
going to parochial school, the boys racing their iceboats
on the Lakes,
the woman still before the diamond in the velvet window,
saying “Wonder of nature.”

and:

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, men thrown out of town,
the man bribed by his cousins to stay out of town,
teachers, the cantor on Friday evening, the lurid
newspapers,
strong women gracefully holding relationship, the Jewish girl
going to parochial school, the boys racing their iceboats
on the Lakes,
the woman still before the diamond in the velvet window,
saying “Wonder of nature.”

The first thing that I notice is that the indented version of the poem (Ruk’s version) suggests the flow of the poem over time. This is one long sentence, one list of ancestors and their identities, professions, deeds. Since the lines don’t all begin “justified” on the left, the indentations suggest the heterogeneity, even quirkiness of this list, and somehow, for me at least, a sense of time and space–perhaps even generations.

“Space on the page,” Rukeyser wrote in The Life of Poetry, “can provide roughly for a relationship in emphasis through the eye’s discernment of pattern” (117).

The white space at the beginning of lines does not, I think, function as a pause; instead it compels the eyes to move right, and to keep moving with the flow of the indented lines. In addition, many of the lines are enjambed, further compelling eye and ear to move with the sense from one line to the next.

But what do you think? To what extent does indentation function as “punctuation” in this poem? And how is it a “physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge” (The Life of Poetry, 117). And how do we, as readers, acknowledge these “body-rhythms”?

How to read Rukeyser?

May 15, 2012 by mthunter22 6 Comments

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 Rukeyser; in fact, since Chelsea expressed her dissatisfaction with the practice of “close reading,” as defined and practiced by the New Critics, we are trying to figure out what reading Rukeyser’s poems “closely” might imply–and how else to read her poems, with an emphasis on “closely.”

Does it mean, for instance, that we assume the poem as “fixed” object? and if not, if, for instance, we think, like Rukeyser herself did, of poetry as a process, an event, a meeting place, what does that mean for our attention to the formal elements of her poems–line breaks, line indentations, punctuation. Should we treat them as “fixed” as “fluid” as subject to change or intervention by the reader?

If, as Rukeyser affirmed in The Life of Poetry,”Punctuation is biological and it is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge,” then, it seems to me, we need to pay close attention, not only to how she uses, but, equally importantly, to how she conceives of “punctuation” in her poetry:

…punctuation in poetry needs several inventions. Not least of all, we need a measured rest. Space on the page, as E.E. Cummings uses it, can provide roughly for a relationship in emphasis through the eye’s discernment of pattern; but we need a system of pauses which will be related to the time-pattern of the poem. I suggest a method of signs equivalating the metric foot and long and short rests within that unit. For spoken poetry, for poems approaching song, and indeed for the reading of any of these–since we are never without the reflection of sound which exists when we imagine words–a code of pauses would be valuable.