Essays

Vivian Pollak and Alexandra Swanson–Charles Naginski Timeline

May 29, 1909: "Betzabel" (later Charles) Naginski is born in Cairo, Egypt, where there is a substantial community of East European Jewish immigrants who benefit from the comparative liberality of the Sultan's regime. His parents, Abraham and Nahema Naginsky, speak Yiddish at home. As a child, Betzabel studies piano with his father and begins composing at an early age. 1925: Abraham and Nahema Naginsky emigrate to the U. S. with their children, but Betzabel remains in Egypt, perhaps to finish his education. March 30, 1927: "Betzabel Naginsky," age seventeen, "an artist," emigrates to New York City from Alexandria, Egypt. He [...]

2023-09-04T21:10:38+00:00October 16, 2017|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Tim DeCelle–Lost in a City of Madness: Finding the Minotaur

“Deep in his labyrinth, shaking and going mad,” Rukeyser’s Minotaur stands in a maze, a “crooked city” (Collected Poems) whose apparent order masks a subterranean sphere of madness. We are brought into and through, again and again, the dead-ends and never-ending walls of confinement and isolation. By invoking the imagery of seclusion and despair, Rukeyser may well be directing us towards the ways that ideological systems impose order on madness, trapping citizens into a Minotaur-like existence. In “Letter to the Front,” Rukeyser notes that being Jewish in the twentieth century may involve “Full agonies: / Your evening deep in the [...]

2017-10-16T16:28:28+00:00October 16, 2017|Essays|0 Comments

Vivian Pollak–“The Minotaur” and the Trouble with Normal

In the fall of 2016, the same semester that Washington University hosted a presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, I began teaching a fifteen-person seminar organized around the theme "American Women Poets and the Trouble with Normal." There was a lot of energy and excitement on campus, and Chancellor Wrighton sent an e-mail to the Wash U community urging us to remember "our shared values of mutual respect, inclusion and the celebration of differing perspectives." In what may have been an excess of caution, I felt reluctant to express my views about the candidates to students, having been [...]

2018-12-28T03:02:41+00:00October 16, 2017|Essays|0 Comments

Helen Engelhardt: Muriel’s Gift–Rukeyser’s Poems on Jewish Themes

© Helen Engelhardt To be a Jew in the twentieth century Is to be offered a gift. So begins the most well-known and beloved of the poems written by Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), who was astonished when the Reform synagogue movement included it in their revised prayerbooks in the 1940s. “To Be a Jew” also appears under the heading, “Israel’s Mission” in the 1975 edition of Gates of Prayer. “One feels that one has been absorbed into the line,” Rukeyser said of its inclusion, “and it’s very good.” Except for “a Bible on a bookshelf [and] a ceremonial goblet handed down [...]

2016-02-05T16:29:07+00:00February 5, 2016|Essays|0 Comments

Walter Hogan–Rukeyser’s “The Outer Banks”

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

2018-12-27T22:38:45+00:00December 13, 2015|Essays|0 Comments

Adam Mitts: The Vocabulary of Silence: Voice and Disability in “The Speed of Darkness”

In 1964, the poet Muriel Rukeyser suffered a stroke. Four years later, in 1968, she published a poem called “The Speed of Darkness.” Over the years, this poem has been interpreted in a number of ways. A common interpretation is that the poem is about a woman finding her voice as a poet. The poem also links to a theme explored by Rukeyser in The Life of Poetry, which is how one writes poetry in a world that no longer values poetry, that, in Rukeyser’s thinking, actually fears poetry because poetry discloses areas of our selves we would rather ignore. [...]

2015-10-17T16:30:20+00:00October 17, 2015|Essays|0 Comments

Assignment: Place, History, Voice

By Joe Sacksteder Both the Honors College at Eastern Michigan University and our interdisciplinary Creative Writing Program put a lot of emphasis on community involvement. So, when I was given the privilege of teaching two honors sections this semester, I decided to design a writing assignment that would encourage student engagement with the community using Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead as a model. Although there was a lot of leeway, I listed four “field work” possibilities – service-based, community-based, research-based, and ekphrasis-based – and asked students to represent their experience via one or more pieces of non-fiction, poetry, or [...]

2015-10-17T16:30:04+00:00October 17, 2015|Essays|0 Comments

Adam Mitts: The Book of the Dead–Rukeyser’s Map of America

Muriel Rukeyser begins The Book of the Dead by writing, “These are roads to take when you think of your country,” explicitly linking geography and history to the poem’s central concern, the painful silicosis and death of hundreds of workers in West Virginia from 1932-1935. When Rukeyser writes that “these are roads to take when you think of your country” (italics mine), she is mining recent history to form a conceptual map of America. Rand McNally this isn’t. Rukeyser challenges to reimagine our atlas of the continent, taking in the blood-drenched soil of the continent while firmly keeping to the [...]

2021-02-11T15:11:10+00:00October 17, 2015|Essays, Resources, Scholarship|0 Comments
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