- Walter Hogan–Rukeyser’s “The Outer Banks” Posted in: Essays - 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… ...Continue Reading
- Adam Mitts: The Vocabulary of Silence: Voice and Disability in “The Speed of Darkness” Posted in: Essays - 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.… ...Continue Reading
- Assignment: Place, History, Voice Posted in: Essays - 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… ...Continue Reading
- Adam Mitts: The Book of the Dead–Rukeyser’s Map of America Posted in: Essays, Resources, Scholarship - 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… ...Continue Reading
- Charlotte Mandel: Muriel Rukeyser’s Rabbi Akiba Inheritance Posted in: Essays - By Charlotte Mandel Muriel Rukeyser’s poetry allows no canonical containment. She was born in New York Cityin 1913 and died in that city on Lincoln’s Birthday, 1980. Her lifetime encompasses both World Wars, the Great Depression, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War. “Whatever can come to a woman can come to me,” stated her poem “Waterlily Fire” in 1962 (Collected Poems 309). Her appetite for experience was omnivorous: Modernism came to her--as did Walt Whitman, Shakespeare, the Bible, Keats, the movies, Karl Marx, the daily violence in newspapers. Had H.D., Pound or Williams not preceded her, she nonetheless… ...Continue Reading
- Elisabeth Däumer: “Ajanta”–An Introduction Posted in: Essays - Part One: Although Rukeyser never visited the Indian Caves of Ajanta, her poem evokes the atmosphere of the caves and glimpses of their paintings in stunning imagery. Her knowledge of the man-made caves was indebted to a portfolio of large-scale reproductions of the paintings and an essay by the art historian Stella Kramrisch, whose idiosyncratic observations on the technique of the cave paintings inform both the content and technique of Rukeyser’s poem. Reflecting Rukeyser’s turn to non-western, specifically Asian art in search of new emotional and aesthetic resources in a time of war, the poem draws on autobiographical sources, obscurely related… ...Continue Reading
- Laura Passin: The Power of Suicide and the Refusal of Mythology–Sylvia Plath and Muriel Rukeyser Posted in: Essays, Scholarship - This essay is, in itself, evidence of a slight derangement in my scholarly life: I am obsessed with two lines by Muriel Rukeyser. I will explore the connections suggested by those lines and the complex ways Rukeyser grapples with gender, history, and mythology in her poetry. Those two lines are, in fact, a whole poem. Here it is: Not to Be Printed, Not to Be Said, Not to Be Thought I’d rather be Muriel than be dead and be Ariel. (Collected Poems 554) Ariel, of course, is the title of the posthumous book that made Sylvia Plath’s name as a… ...Continue Reading
- Dara Barnat: Finding Muriel Posted in: Essays, Scholarship - I did some thirty years of living before encountering the work of Muriel Rukeyser. I don’t remember the exact day when I came upon this subversive Jewish-American poet, but my affinity to her is so strong that I think of her as “Muriel,” as opposed to the more formal “Rukeyser.” She was a pioneering poet, as well as a key influence on such writers as Alice Walker, Adrienne Rich, Erica Jong, Sharon Olds, Denise Levertov, Gerald Stern, Marge Piercy, and Alicia Ostriker. Yet, owing to her gender (female), her political engagement (she was an outspoken socialist), her innovations in diction,… ...Continue Reading
- Elisabeth Däumer: A Muriel Rukeyser Website–Creating an Accessible Critical Tradition Posted in: Essays, Scholarship - Thoughts prepared for 1913 MLA Special Session: Muriel Rukeyser at One Hundred “There is no substitute for Critical Tradition: A continuum of understanding, early commenced,” Hugh Kenner observed, when he compared the reception of Eliot’s and Pound’s work. When The Waste Land appeared in 1922, readers responded immediately; the first generation of Canto readers, by contrast, were not yet born when the first cantos were published; the deferral in response created what Kenner described as the paradox of “an intensely topical poem [becoming] archaic without ever having been contemporary” (415). It may seem outlandish to begin a talk on Rukeyser… ...Continue Reading
- Elisabeth Däumer: Muriel Rukeyser’s Presumptions Posted in: Essays, Scholarship - Introduction to the Journal of Narrative Theory Special Issue on Muriel Rukeyser, 43.4 (Fall 2013): 247-257. Muriel Rukeyser was presumptuous. Her presumptions were multifold and risky. They involved contentious claims for poetry’s many “uses”—emotional, intellectual, and cultural; for its kinship with science, particularly “abstract science”; and for its value as “meeting place,” capable of linking not only different people, but also highly specialized disciplines and epistemologies in a common imaginative pursuit (Life of Poetry 103,159, 20).[1]For those of us coming to her work today, Rukeyser’s presumptions are a blessing. For one, she insisted on the necessity of audacity for the… ...Continue Reading
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